Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

  “Well, I wasn’t very responsive.”

  “To what?”

  “You know what.”

  “So you were worried. We all knew that. He didn’t expect you to propose to him while you were in the hospital.”

  Sherry was silent.

  “You’ve never been a pessimist before.”

  “I’ve never had to deal with a long-term relationship before. Or the possibility of cancer.”

  Sherry put dots in the circle for eyes and drew a mouth. “Everything seems different when you throw another person into the equation. I guess it was Brian and the way everything went with his family over Memorial Day. It just seemed too good to be true.”

  “You’ve never felt sorry for yourself either.”

  Sherry turned in her seat and looked at him.

  “Is that what you think I’m doing, Mr. Brigham?”

  “You tell me. Over Memorial Day you were blind and now you’re not. Don’t you think that’s something to be thankful for?”

  “And who’s to say I’m not thankful? But what if the cesium lodged a tumor in my spine? I don’t want to be a burden to anyone else for the rest of my life.”

  “You know, I don’t get you. You love Brian. I know you do. You’ve gotten your sight back! Good things are happening.” Brigham looked at her oddly. “I think you’re underestimating Brian Metcalf. That you’re cheating him of a chance to make his own decision about you.”

  “Right now, this minute, today, I’m focusing on Thomas J. Monahan. I want to know what happened to me in the hospital when I took his hand. I need to know why it happened.”

  “Why does it matter so much?”

  “I can see because of Tom Monahan,” she said emphatically. “I can see because he suffered some cerebral malady of his own. Because something put him in that mental hospital and I picked it up in the transfer of information from his brain to my own. Can’t you see that’s a possibility? I mean, look how I acted in that room, the strange words I was uttering. It was just different, Mr. Brigham.”

  “Sherry, you’ve been hearing for years that your eyes and memory could suddenly be restored. And you were seeing lights and shadows long before you took that test.”

  “Lights, not sight, and you and Dr. Salix don’t seem to appreciate that I know the difference. It was an optical migraine, like the doctor’s said before, nothing else. Nothing significant was happening to me before Monahan’s corpse came along.”

  Sherry shifted in her seat. She felt frustrated, but it wasn’t clear at whom.

  “Yes, the doctors have been warning me something could change since I was five. The slightest head injury, a sinus infection, almost anything could affect my brain, they said. I was told I could lose the remainder of my memory or maybe instead I’d regain everything I’d lost before the accident. Truth be told, it’s easy to say all that stuff when you don’t have a clue what’s going to happen. It’s like weather people and psychics—if you throw enough predictions out there, sooner or later one of them has to come true. I’ve been through a lot of emotional trauma in my life, not as much as some, to be sure, but enough to know my own mind. To know that I regained my sight because I was lying on that table next to Thomas J. Monahan.”

  He cracked his window an inch, mostly because he didn’t know what else to do.

  “It just seems important now,” Sherry said. “To find out what happened in that examination room.”

  “And not to communicate with Brian.”

  “Did you know Brian was engaged once before?” Sherry sat upright, looking straight out the windshield.

  Brigham turned to look at her and shook his head. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t.”

  “They were living together in Norfolk. She was the daughter of his first commanding officer. The wedding was to take place a month after his discharge from the navy.”

  “What happened?” Brigham asked.

  “Pancreatic cancer. She was twenty-six and died eighty-one days after she was diagnosed.”

  Brigham didn’t say anything.

  “I was happy at the Metcalfs’ home in Boston. You remember Allison, his sister, who was caught in that storm on Mount McKinley last year. The one we helped save?”

  He nodded.

  “We ended up talking a lot after Brian and I started dating. We were getting so close she was beginning to feel like a sister to me. By the time we met again at the family reunion, she said her father and mother were already whispering about a fall wedding, my wedding, Mr. Brigham. We shared a lot about our lives. She told me all about Brian and how he had turned down a lucrative job with the State Department after his fiancée died. How he had his father pull strings to get him reinstated in the navy, and that he chose to be stationed in the Middle East for another four years.”

  Sherry turned and looked at Brigham. “Do you understand now?”

  He nodded. “All I know is, he’s a good guy.”

  “Yes, he is, and that’s my point. What if my health doesn’t last?”

  “You think Brian Metcalf will leave you? You think he’s that shallow? He still thinks you’re blind, Sherry, and he’s already willing to take the leap.”

  “He didn’t discourage me when I told him I was going to New Mexico, but I know he didn’t approve. And I wouldn’t have liked it if it were the other way around, either. I would have wanted to have a conversation about it before he did anything like that. I knew about his fiancée then. I knew he’d lost someone before and I still got on that plane. I know he does the same thing every day, but I also know he would change his life if I only asked him to. I didn’t give him that chance. And now he has to be thinking what I’m thinking, that I might have cancer in a year or five or ten.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “Maybe I just wasn’t meant to be in a relationship. Maybe I should just wait and see how this works out. Just wait awhile.”

  “And see how far you can stretch Mr. Metcalf’s patience, so he gives up and you can blame it on providence. Blame it on him, even.”

  Sherry turned back away in her seat and looked out the window. Brigham kept his eyes on the road and his hands firmly on the wheel.

  Two signs announced the Village of Stockton. One said its name, the other its elevation of 3,300 feet. It was an old town built mainly in the Federalist style—lots of straight-line homes and commercial buildings, an abundance of brick and white columns.

  The streets were clean and lined with antique shops. There were numerous bed-and-breakfasts, a small franchise hotel, and dozens of boutique shops.

  “There’s a diner,” Brigham pointed, nosing the Land Rover into an angled parking space between two New York State police cars.

  Sherry saw what appeared to be a dozen sepia-colored photographs in the diner’s front window.

  “Look, Mr. Brigham,” she said. “The asylum.”

  They were dated and portrayed people wearing a diversity of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fashions. Staff members stood unsmiling in front of a massive brick building with an arch labeled NYS HOSPITAL FOR THE INSANE. The oldest of the pictures showed patients in starched uniforms, some looking down at their knees, others with chins jutting proudly toward the sky as nurses in large white caps and oval eyeglasses stood rigidly in ankle-length dresses.

  Brigham studied the pictures. “Civil War veterans, see, here?”

  He scanned others, ending up with a color photo of the entrance. The date on it was 1966. “Here, see the sign out front, that’s when it must have changed names.”

  “And Monahan was really here for almost sixty years?” she said in awe.

  Brigham shrugged. “No reason he couldn’t have been, I guess.”

  He put his finger to the glass. Veterans of the World Wars had gathered for a photograph. It was the Fourth of July, 1947. Brigham pointed out the distinctive uniforms. “This would have been before there was a veterans hospital in New York. Maybe Monahan was in World War Two, or more likely Korea, because of his age, and they cared for him here.”


  Brigham stepped to the door and pulled it open to the tinkle of a bell.

  The walls of the diner were canary yellow, the booths dark wood, old and smoothed by the touch of hundreds of thousands of hands. Hundreds more photos of the asylum and its residents and staff adorned the walls.

  “Coffee?” a pretty silver-haired woman asked as she leaned against the end of their booth.

  “Please,” they said, pushing their cups toward her.

  “Looks like your town grew up around the asylum?” Brigham’s eyes wandered along the walls.

  “Some people get the Taj Mahal, we get a loony bin.” The waitress shrugged. She was a very fit-looking woman in her mid-sixties, Sherry thought. She was wearing khaki shorts and running shoes, an apron over a cantaloupe orange polo shirt.

  “I take it you’re not from around here.” She winked at Brigham.

  Brigham shook his head and smiled. “Philadelphia.”

  Sherry looked at Brigham. Smiling! Is he flirting? she thought, astonished. The idea made her nearly giddy. Yes, he is, she thought. He really is flirting!

  Brigham’s wife had passed away many years ago, even before Sherry had moved to the house next door on the river. She’d never had an inkling that he thought about the opposite sex, but was that only because she was blind?

  “How many people actually live here?” Brigham asked.

  “Six hundred and seventy-eight as of this morning’s obituary.” She touched his arm. “I’m only kidding, but it’s something like that.”

  “And everyone works at the asylum.” Brigham nodded his head toward the pictures on the walls.

  “If they don’t now, they did at one time or another.”

  She smiled with her hand on her hip. “If you like breakfast, you’ll love our pancakes. We serve them all day.”

  “Betsy?” a voice called from across the room.

  “Whoops, be right back, dears.” She patted Brigham’s arm again and rushed away, scribbling numbers on a pad.

  “Dears?” Sherry repeated slowly.

  Brigham kept his eyes on his coffee. “Busy place,” he said without inflection.

  Sherry cocked her head. “Oh, let’s not stray off the subject.” She squinted at Brigham, with the slightest crook of a smile.

  Brigham was every bit as elegant and handsome as she’d imagined him before she could see. He was the man in the room who you knew had stature and history. She loved that, in spite of his military background, he let his white hair do a flip over his back collar.

  Brigham picked up a fork and began to turn it over in his fingers. “Subject?” he repeated.

  “Mr. Brigham,” Sherry said teasingly. “There is a whole other side of you.” She tried to look away, but her grin kept growing bigger. “Who knew?” she erupted at last.

  “That’s quite enough.” He leaned across the table, trying to keep his voice above a whisper. “She’s just a nice lady.” He shrugged with emphasis. “I like nice people, so what?”

  “You’re embarrassed,” she said, still grinning. “How cute.” The color of Brigham’s neck was rich and red as the port he liked to drink. “Okay, okay”—she held up her hand—“I’m done.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “So what are you having?”

  “Pancakes,” he growled, peeling off his reading glasses and stuffing them into his jacket pocket.

  “Me, too, then,” she said firmly.

  She took a deep breath and folded her hands. Looked around the room.

  “Let’s leave it alone for a while, all that other stuff about Brian, okay? Let’s just have fun today and tomorrow and see what life brings? Please?”

  Brigham looked into her eyes and nodded.

  “So what’s all the pink and blue stuff about?” Sherry picked up a container of sweeteners.

  “Don’t use them,” Brigham said sternly. “They just taste like sugar.”

  “She’s actually pretty cute,” Sherry said, nodding toward the waitress. “Seriously.”

  Brigham looked at her, waiting for a smirk and, when he saw none, nodded. “I guess.”

  “Maybe she worked there too.” Sherry’s mind was at work again. “The asylum.”

  Brigham shrugged. “Ask her.”

  “If you wish,” she said with a straight face.

  The woman rushed back to the booths, dropped change on one, a check on another. Then she returned to them. “One more hour and it’ll be dead until supper. You two know what you want?”

  “Pancakes,” Sherry said.

  Brigham nodded. “Same.”

  “You here to visit a relative?”

  “Just an acquaintance,” Sherry said.

  “I’m Betsy.” The waitress stuck out her hand to Sherry. When Brigham took it he nodded and said, “Garland.”

  “Great name,” Betsy said. “Juice, sausage, potatoes?”

  “No thanks, just water.”

  “You’ve worked at the asylum too?” Sherry asked.

  “Years ago, honey.”

  “Betsy!” someone yelled.

  “I’ll be back with more coffee in a minute.” She dashed to a customer at the door and then down the corridor to the open kitchen door.

  Betsy gave them directions to the hospital—hardly necessary with all the state’s new green luminescent signage. She’d suggested they drive to the summit of Mount Tamathy afterward. The state had carved out a road to the top of the mountain and made a lookout at the pinnacle. There were telescopes there and park benches to picnic on. One could see both Pennsylvania and the Delaware River Gorge from it. She also suggested they return for dinner. Friday night was the Stockton Diner’s catfish special.

  Directions included a right at an intersection, past an Orvis store, a roadhouse called Grant’s Tavern, a tobacconist, a candle store, and several more B&Bs. Whole-timber summer cottages followed the road out of town. Dozens more were clustered on side streets amid some older moss-covered homes. A grassy park by a stream included a statue of a Union soldier and a World War II antiaircraft gun.

  “Are we going to come right out and ask about him or what?” Brigham wanted to know.

  “I don’t think they’ll let us stroll the grounds and question patients, but who knows? Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds,” Sherry said. “We’ll just think of it as a country hospital and play it by ear.”

  The main entrance was set between two enormous brick columns and a polished marble sign that read NEW YORK STATE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL. The road was short and the lawn on either side was groomed and lined with red flowers.

  Sherry made a noise, an involuntary exclamation at the beauty of the flowers and tree buds exploding into new leaves. Brigham heard it almost every day from her now. She was literally awestruck by the world and all that was in it.

  A hillside rose to meet formidable walls that disappeared into dense trees. The compound was like an old fort, ivy blotting out the brick and hundreds of feet of walls spiked with iron. The windows of four-story buildings behind it were barred, dark, and foreboding.

  “Scary enough?” Sherry ducked to look up over the dash as they approached the iron gates. “I can’t imagine going in here and knowing you’re not coming back out.”

  Brigham rolled down his window.

  A uniformed guard stepped from the sentry house. “Afternoon.”

  “Good afternoon, Officer. Hoping to visit a friend.”

  The officer handed Brigham two green passes on lanyards. “Stay on the road with green dots, keep your doors locked at all times, park only in visitor spaces in the lot in front of the main building. Leave cell phones, valuables, and cash in your car. Bags will be searched upon entering the facility.”

  Brigham pulled away, noticing people on the grounds. Some were obviously patients. They occupied park benches or sat on blankets on the ground. Staff wore orange polo shirts and khaki pants.

  “Doesn’t look too scary right here,” Sherry said.

  “I’m sure this is minimum security,” Brigham answered.

 
There were large green circles painted on the road. Side roads were marked well with DO NOT ENTER and large red circles painted every thirty or forty feet. Buildings sat farther back and they had interior security fencing around them; the fencing was topped with razor wire.

  “Doesn’t look like we’ll get to play it by ear very long,” Sherry said.

  “I’m thinking we won’t either.” Brigham pointed to a guard tower on one of the walls. There was a man sitting in it.

  They parked and emptied their pockets into the glove box between the seats.

  The entrance and parking area were separated from the rest of the grounds. Cameras followed their approach to the wide concrete steps.

  Doors opened automatically to the smell of disinfectant. There was a uniformed guard by a metal detector they had to pass; bags were not permitted.

  On the opposite side of the entrance was a long narrow sunroom filled with wicker rockers and potted plants, where white-haired men and women leaned to sleep or talk to their neighbors. Beyond the sunroom was a rotunda with plush chairs and ornate couches, potted trees that reached for the domed ceiling. A receptionist behind an exposed antique desk stood to greet them while a nicely dressed elderly couple said tearful good-byes to a young, expressionless woman. She was being admitted, Sherry thought.

  “We’re hoping to speak with someone who knew one of your residents,” Sherry said with unrehearsed honesty.

  “You’re a family member?” The woman smiled.

  Sherry shook her head. “I’m afraid I only became acquainted with your patient after he died.”

  The woman looked at Sherry oddly.

  “In the hospital,” Sherry stammered slightly. “In Philadelphia.”

  The woman continued to smile, appraising her.

  “He was transferred from here to a hospital. That’s where I met him.” Sherry held out the palms of her hands as she tried not to explain that he was dead before he got there. She continued to hold eye contact with the woman, whose smile never seemed to fatigue.

  “His name was Monahan, Thomas Joseph Monahan. He was in his late seventies.”

  Sherry watched the receptionist’s curious eyes, wondering what was so interesting about her that made the woman stare at her face.