I am not one to let herself fall.
The hearse is gone from view now.
I head back into the embalming room to put away the curling rods and hair ribbons and all the other traces of a little girl gone too soon.
CHAPTER 51
Evelyn
My days at the asylum are all the same, and yet not the same. The other second-year residents and I sit in on sessions with the patients and meetings with the families; we make rounds with Dr. Bellfield and other doctors; we study the current case records, read the archived files, write reports, send correspondence, and also observe the nurses and orderlies as they go about the daily care of people whose illnesses range from moderate melancholy to full-blown madness. And yet no two patients are exactly alike, even the ones who have the same malady; hence no two days are exactly alike.
I completed my university studies in three years instead of four, and Fairview is close enough to home to hop on a streetcar to get to. When I applied for this residency, Dr. Bellfield was interested in me because I had been the first woman from the university to come his way, and he chose me for my insights into the female brain, as he put it. He keeps me busier than the other residents—there are four others, all male—but I don’t mind. On nights when I’ve stayed past the last streetcar, I sleep on a cot in the doctors’ lounge.
I don’t mind the long hours, nor the added responsibilities Dr. Bellfield sometimes heaps on me. I really do want to find a way to help people like Sybil Reese. It is too late for her, but there will be more like her down the road. And someone must find a way to help people like Sybil. Someone must.
Dr. Bellfield asked me specifically to weigh in on Sybil Reese’s case, but he also asked me a few days after that to peruse the file of that girl who tried to hang herself. He told me after rounds to read the girl’s medical history, analyze her symptoms, visit with her, and recommend to him a course of action that I could adequately defend in front of him and the other doctors.
So a few days after Conrad Reese was given the sad, official news, and after I’d stopped in the solarium to say hello to Sybil—I’d decided I would find the time to say hello to her every day, even if it seems she cannot hear me—I pulled the girl’s file and sat down to read it.
There wasn’t much there. Her name is Ursula Novak. She is fifteen, barely, and apparently has no family. She’d been working as a kitchen maid for a wealthy Philadelphia couple when the housekeeper discovered her in the cellar, swinging by the neck from a rope poorly slung across a floor joist. The butler had cut her down and then telephoned for help. She was still alive. Ursula’s employers had taken pity on her and insisted on paying her medical bills at the hospital and then sending her here instead of the state asylum on the east side—the one that gives me nightmares.
Ursula has no history of hysteria or depression or mental illness. She’d been working for the family without incident since she quit school at fourteen. This attempt on her life had apparently been her first. She was otherwise healthy. Strong lungs, clear skin and eyes, good hearing and sight. She exhibits no tremors or fits, nor does she seem to suffer from delusions or hallucinations or moments of lost time. At the hospital and on her admittance here to Fairview, she had refused to give an answer as to why she had tried to kill herself other than that she was tired of living. When asked whether she would try again if released, she had simply answered, “Probably.” As to next of kin, she had answered, “None.”
That to me was the most telling of Ursula’s symptoms. She’s an orphan. At one time she’d had parents, but now she does not. Her parents are both dead and she is only fifteen. I lost my mother at nearly the same age, so I knew how devastating the loss of one’s mother could be. I still had Papa, though. And my sisters and Alex. Perhaps Ursula had lost her parents in a terrible accident that she’d unfortunately witnessed. Or perhaps they had been victims of the flu and she’d been bearing at an orphanage the awful weight of their absence before taking a job as a kitchen maid.
Whatever the true details were, I believed I had this grain of truth to begin talking with her: that she was alone and sad, and unable to cope any longer with either state of being.
• • •
Ursula is sitting in a corner of the women’s dayroom, in a chair by a stretch of windows that runs the length of the back wall. Other patients of various ages are reading or playing cards or resting or wandering aimlessly about in conversations with the voices they hear in their heads. Sybil Reese is sitting at a table with three other women involved in a beading lesson. Beads and a length of string lie before Sybil, but she is staring out the same long set of windows as Ursula, though on the other side of the room.
I walk to an empty chair next to Ursula. As I sit down, she looks up at me. Dark circles rim her deep brown eyes. She looks wan, and I wonder if she is sleeping at all. Or perhaps sleeping too much. Her hair is chocolate brown like her eyes and she is petite and pretty. The bruising on her neck is now a circlet of mottled browns and yellows.
“Hello, Ursula,” I say cheerfully. “May I talk to you for a bit?”
She shrugs and turns her attention back to the window.
“My name is Miss Bright. I am in my residency here. I’ll be a doctor soon enough, though.” I laugh lightly, wanting so very much to ease the somber mood she is projecting.
She looks back at me, slight suspicion in her tired eyes. “What kind of doctor are you?”
“I’m finishing up a course of study in psychiatry.”
“I didn’t know there were lady doctors like that.”
“There are more of us now than there used to be. I think that’s a good thing. Don’t you?”
Ursula’s reaction to my statement is unreadable. She doesn’t say a word.
“I’d like to try to help you, Ursula. I’m hoping we can chat about why you’re here. I want you to know you can trust me.”
She says nothing.
“Do you know why you’re here?”
Ursula closes and opens her eyes slowly and then nods once.
“Can you tell me why you wanted to harm yourself? Whatever the reason is, you can tell me. I won’t judge you. I promise. I just want to help you.”
“Help me do what?” she says with what seems equal parts curiosity and disinterest.
I put one of my hands over one of hers. “Help you move past this great sorrow in your life. Help you find a way to accept what happened to you but move past it and live your life.”
“Move past it?” she echoes.
“Yes.”
Ursula looks down at my hand on hers and says nothing.
“You might be thinking right now it’s too hard to do that, but if you—”
“I don’t want to move past it,” she says.
“Beg your pardon?”
She raises her head to look into my eyes. “I don’t want to move past it.”
I need a moment’s thought before I can continue. “Right now the pain you carry might be all that you have, and it’s probably scary to imagine having nothing at all, not even that, and I do understand that fear, but if you will just—”
“But I’m not afraid.”
I hadn’t expected this kind of response. I must attempt a different approach. If I can be allowed to see what she has suffered, perhaps I can convince her to trust me. “Ursula, can you tell me about your parents?”
“What about them?”
“Where are they?”
“They’re dead.”
“Can you tell me how they died?”
She inhales deeply as though to prepare to share with me something she hasn’t told anyone else in a long time. “My father died in a construction accident when I was a baby. My mother died from that flu.”
“I see. I’m so very sorry. My mother died from that flu, too,” I say gently.
For a second, Ursula stares at me in disbelief
that she and I could possibly have anything in common. But then she turns back to the window, and it’s as if a cloud has passed over her.
“So you must have been a young girl when your mother died,” I say. “Nine? Do I have that right?”
She says nothing.
“Any brothers or sisters?”
Nothing.
“Did your grandparents or other family take you in, Ursula?”
She blinks but does not answer.
“Do they know where you are?”
Ursula turns her head just a fraction so that she is now looking at Sybil Reese, sitting in her chair and staring out a window.
“Ursula, I really do think I can help you. But you must help me first. I need you to tell me if you have any family that we should know about. If they have hurt you or if you are afraid for them to know where you are, we don’t have to tell them you’re here. I promise you that. I just need to know if there is someone who can help us understand what you’ve been through.”
For a second I think Ursula is done talking with me today. This happens. A patient suffering from mental illness will just suddenly shut down like a machine with its power cut off.
But then Ursula nods toward Sybil Reese. “What’s wrong with her?”
I follow Ursula’s gaze. “She . . . That woman has a sickness that has greatly affected her mind.”
“A sickness? Like the flu?”
I shake my head. “No. It’s not something that you or anyone else can catch from her.”
“Is that what I have?”
“I don’t think so.” I say nothing else because I want Ursula to turn her attention back to me and she does.
“How do you know?” she asks.
“That woman has an illness here, in her brain.” I touch my head. “I think where you hurt is here.” And I place my hand over my heart.
Ursula studies me for a moment, contemplating my assessment, and I can see she is wondering how I can know this.
Then our attention is jointly commanded by movement just beyond us. Conrad Reese has arrived to visit his wife. He leans down to kiss Sybil’s forehead, and she exhibits no response at all to his tender touch. When he straightens and lifts his head, our eyes meet. Heat rises to my cheeks, and I don’t know why. I look away and turn back to Ursula.
Her gaze, however, is still tight on Sybil, as though she wishes she could trade places and be the woman in the room whose mind is so far gone she feels nothing anymore.
CHAPTER 52
Willa
Five years ago, if you needed rum to make punch at Christmastime, you just went to a store, bought some, and brought it home. I don’t remember what it was like for someone to buy rum because I was nine back then, and rum didn’t interest me in the least. I do remember the last day you could actually do that, though, because everybody was buying bottles of it—that and whiskey and Pabst Blue Ribbon and I don’t know what else—to hide away in their cellars because there wasn’t going to be any anymore. The next day it was illegal to make or sell or transport liquor. If you still had some in your house, you could drink it, but you weren’t going to be able to buy more and no one was allowed to make more. That last afternoon, Papa and Roland Sutcliff sat on our stoop with cigars and glasses of port—in front of all the world, as Dora Sutcliff described it—and talked about how the world was changing.
Dora, who was at our house and glaring through the glass at Papa and Mr. Sutcliff with her hands on her hips, told us girls that she was glad the temperance league got its way at last, and that those two men could puff and sip and commiserate all they wanted, but it was going to be a brighter day without all those inebriates ruining everything.
“What are inebriates?” I’d whispered to Evie.
She’d answered that they are people who drink too much. “And then they cause unbelievable trouble!” Dora had added.
“Like peeing in the street,” Maggie chimed in.
She had Alex on her hip. He had only been two and he’d heard Evie say the word drink, so he started saying, “Grink! Grink peas! Grink peas!” And Maggie had to go get him some milk in a cup so he’d stop asking.
“My stars! It’s not just the peeing in the street,” Dora had continued. “They are putting their wives and children in the poorhouse. It’s a travesty of the worst kind.”
“Why do they drink too much?” I’d asked Evie, but it was Dora who answered.
“Because they are dirty dogs and scum!”
“But that’s not why they drink too much,” Evie said. She was in college then and she already knew pretty much everything about everything. “People who drink too much usually want to forget their problems. They want to escape some kind of pain or frustration or just the dissatisfaction of everyday life.”
“They create the problem!” Dora had said. “They are the orchestrators of the pain and frustration.”
“How does the drinking make them forget their problems?” I’d asked, very interested in Evie’s answer.
“It doesn’t really, lamb,” Evie said. “After the drink wears off, their problems are still there.”
“Except now they are worse, because they’ve put their wives and children in the poorhouse!” Dora said. “They are dirty dogs and scum.”
I didn’t care much for scum. But I have always liked dogs, even if they are dirty. I had gone outside then to sit with Papa and Roland Sutcliff as they drank their last glasses of port.
That was supposed to be the end of saloons and taverns and inebriates and peeing in the street, but it wasn’t the end of anything. I don’t read the newspaper much, but I see enough and I hear enough of the conversations between Papa and Roland Sutcliff and my teachers at school and the ladies at church to know there’s plenty of bootleg liquor in this city and thousands upon thousands of speakeasies. That’s what they call the saloons and taverns now. They call them that because you’re supposed to talk quietly about them when you’re out in public, and when inside them, too, so they can be kept secret from the law. A speakeasy is the only place where you can buy a drink now, and Dora says they are full of gangsters who control all the money and booze, and crooked cops and lawmakers who take bribes to look the other way. She says speakeasies are nothing short of the stoops of hell itself.
I don’t know if Dora is right about all that. She’s probably right about them being run by gangsters—who else but criminals can get ahold of something no one is supposed to have? She might even be right about there being policemen who take bribes not to arrest anybody. But that day with Howie wasn’t the first time I’d heard beautiful music coming out of that speakeasy’s grate. I’d heard it once before when Howie and I walked home that way so that he could buy me an ice cream at Spanky’s.
So a couple days after Howie and I ran from that grate, I decided I would leave school a few minutes early on my own. That piano had called to me, and I wanted to go back and answer it somehow.
• • •
I hover now at the grate, hoping and wishing and wanting the piano man to somehow know I am here and start playing. I don’t hear anything, though. I have no reason to be loitering here, and I know the longer I stay the more likely it is that someone might notice me and ask why I am here. There are fewer people walking about than there were the last time. Thankfully the vegetable lady is inside her store and not outside it. I decide that if someone does stop and ask, I will say I am waiting for a friend. I kind of feel like I am.
Please, please, I whisper in the direction of the grate. Just one little tune.
And then my wish comes true. I start to hear the notes of a song my mother used to sing to me. “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” The melody is faint, as though the vent is only partially open today. It is all I can do not to throw myself to the ground and pull up the grate so that I can fall into those notes and let them cover me. I close my eyes so that I can better concentrate on the mu
sic wafting up to meet my ears. I am only half aware that I’m singing the words just under my breath.
A hand is suddenly on my arm. The touch is gentle, but I startle anyway, nearly dropping the one schoolbook that I am holding—a volume of poems. I open my eyes, and there is the man in the suit who’d been smoking a cigar and leaning against the brick wall next to the grate the last time I was here. He wears a brown derby on his head today, and I decide he looks like he is made of sausages. He is big and round and has a crooked smile.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” he says. “You were the one singing here the other day, weren’t you?”
Despite his polite manner, I am too afraid to answer him. Is he a cop in street clothes? Will he haul me down to the police station for hanging about a speakeasy grate?
“It’s all right, missy. You’re in no trouble a-tall. In fact, we were hoping you’d come back this way.” His smile broadens. “My name’s Mr. Trout.”
“We?” I manage to say, my heart slamming in my chest. Why, oh why, hadn’t I waited for Howie? I look about for a clear way to dash past this roly-poly man and take off running.
“Yes, Albert and me. He heard you singing the other day when he was playing. Why, you’re a regular nightingale, missy. He told me to keep a lookout for you, and here you are!”
“Albert?” I say, unable to rein in my thoughts to come up with a better question.
“Yes.” The man nods toward the grate. “He’s our musical director, you might say. He lines up all the acts for our . . . club. He’d sure like to talk to you, Miss . . .”
“Adler.” Mama’s maiden name flies off my lips. I had no idea it had even been perched there. But I’m not afraid for my safety anymore. Mr. Trout said I sounded like a nightingale. Caution falls away as curiosity takes its place.
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