The Ghosts of Heaven (15 page)

That made much sense to me. I have seen in my work before, in New York, how a patient might come to us relatively well, and yet how a few months in the hospital seemed almost to have dragged them down to the level of those for whom there truly is no hope. It seemed to me as if the very system designed to heal these poor souls was responsible for their demise.

Part of the “cure” here at Orient Point, a very large part, are these ideas that were Kirkbride's: the large, ennobling architecture, the ample light available in every ward, the modelling of normal society upon which the insane might copy and so build their road to recovery.

“Of course,” Doctor Phillips went on, “I hope I don't need to tell you that at no time should your daughter be allowed to talk to the patients, nor should she even witness the existence of some of them.”

He appraised me for a moment or two, until I stammered out, “No—no, of course not.”

“Look!” said Doctor Phillips.

He was standing by the window and I joined him.

There, we witnessed something quite touching.

A wagon arrived in front of the asylum. I recognized our driver from yesterday, and now his black mare had been joined by a piebald, for they were pulling a larger, low cart, upon which sat a group of children, and a solitary woman dressed in dark indigo. They seemed tiny, looking down as we were from seven floors up, but I could see two things about the children. Firstly, they were poorly dressed, very shabbily indeed, and secondly, each one held a large bunch of flowers.

When the carriages stopped, they climbed out and filed down the drive of the asylum in a solemn manner, away from the building, the woman in indigo following at some distance as if her presence was barely required.

“Orphans!” said Doctor Phillips, smiling. “From the orphanage at Greenport. They come to us once a month. All part of the care we provide here at Orient Point.”

The children turned through a gate in a neat hedge and now I saw their destination: a rather bleak-looking cemetery, just one part of the vast grounds here.

I must have looked mystified, because Doctor Phillips hunted round on his desk for a while, leafing through tidy piles of papers, until he found a newspaper cutting.

“Look,” he said. “We got ourselves a write-up.”

He handed me the paper as I watched the children begin to place their offerings on the graves, one flower for each.

My eyes still half on the children, I glanced at the cutting from the
Daily Suffolk Statesman
:

The little inmates of the orphans' home at Greenport, under the supervision of their matron, gathered a lot of wildflowers, and decorated the graves of the insane dead, who have been buried at the asylum cemetery. The deed was a worthy one, and to the little ones is given a great deal of credit for doing this act of mercy to the unfriended dead.

I gazed down at the orphans, dressed in their paupers' clothes, brown and gray, and I thought about Verity, dressed in the finest clothes I could find in New York, and that comparison made me feel uncomfortable, I admit.

I told myself how good a nation we are to have such institutions as state insane asylums and orphanages and inebriates homes, and how lucky these people who live in them are to have such a safety net. That's what I told myself, and yet I felt little better.

Doctor Phillips was smiling down at the children going about their duty, and then, with horror, I saw another join them. As if my thinking about her had conjured her up, there was Verity, at the edge of the cemetery, under a stooping tree, watching the orphans.

Doctor Phillips' warning about Verity rang in my ears, and I felt my cheeks start to burn with just the thought of shame if he saw her. I glanced at him, wondering what he would say if he caught sight of Verity roaming the grounds on her very first morning.

“Now,” said Doctor Phillips. “We should continue our interview. Perhaps a tour would be the thing.”

I readily agreed. He had not seen Verity and I was only too glad to get him away from that window.

As we turned away, I took one last look at my daughter and saw that she was not alone. She had been joined by a man. From my distant viewpoint I could see nothing about him, save that he was dressed in a gray suit, and was pointing at the orphans, gesturing as if explaining something to Verity.

Doctor Phillips was waiting for me, and I hurried after him.

 

Sunday, March 27—later

I was praying that Verity might have seen sense and returned to her room, or at least to have disappeared before Doctor Phillips or someone else caught her at large, as Doctor Phillips pulled a key from his jacket pocket.

Despite the grandeur of our accommodations, there are of course small reminders that this is not a hotel but an asylum; the most notable of these on our floor being the iron bars that seal us off from the six floors below, set into the landing just in front of that wonderful spiral staircase. Only three people have a key to the gate here: Doctor Phillips, the head warder, and now, myself.

As Doctor Phillips turned the key in the lock, invited me through, and locked the gate behind me, I wondered how it was that Verity had managed to escape our rooms. Looking back through the bars as we headed for the floors below, I saw the dumb waiter set into the wall of the corridor and I felt anger and disbelief, equally.

She couldn't have. But how else then had she got out, unless she'd convinced the head warder to let her out?

“The floors and wings of the asylum are carefully organized,” Doctor Phillips was saying, and I reminded myself that I have a new employer to impress.

I joined him at the door to the west wing of the sixth floor.

“The wings divide the sexes. In here, and the five floors beneath, are the women. The men are housed in the floors in the east. From here you can really see the benefit of the Kirkbride system. See how much light each corridor receives?”

That was obvious. Compared with the dark squalor of the hospital in New York, Orient Point is flooded with light. The idea is ingenious. Rather than just have two long wings stretching away from the central block of the asylum, each wing runs for no more than a hundred feet before turning ninety degrees and then immediately ninety degrees again back to its original direction. What this results in is therefore a series of staggered corridors, and each one has full-length windows at either end, through which the powerful light of Long Island Sound pours in. Seen from above, the asylum must seem like a formation of strange oblong geese in a V, and in the center, the glass cupola with the staircase winding down like a screw into the building.

“We arrange the patients by floors, according to the degree of their disturbances.”

Doctor Phillips peered through the glass doors of the women's wing of the sixth floor.

“These are our most docile customers,” he said. “Those with profound melancholia, for example. As you can see they are of outwardly normal appearance, and may have even survived in society for some time before their commitment here. Note how the wide corridors permit social interaction. All corridors are at least twelve feet wide. The main arteries are no less than sixteen.”

I joined him and looked through the glass.

I saw a group of three women standing at the far end of the first corridor, by the window. They were talking to each other and if not exactly chatting away as if at a temperance meeting, they would have indeed appeared nothing but normal on an urban street corner.

“The men are on this side,” Doctor Phillips said. “Would you like to meet one or two?”

I told him I would, and after he unlocked the door, we strolled along the corridor of the men's wing, until we arrived at a particular room.

He knocked and without waiting for a reply, we entered.

The room inside was cramped, but ample enough for a single bed, a chair and a washstand. A small man sat on the bed, and rose immediately as we entered.

“Jonathan,” said Doctor Phillips, and the man nodded. I could see at once that he was disturbed. He had extreme nervous reactions and yet was eager to please and answer all the questions that Doctor Phillips and I posed, albeit with one word answers, in general.

I thanked Jonathan for his time, and we left to continue our tour.

“You'll see how Jonathan, like all other patients on the sixth floor, wears his own clothes. Of course they all have to be tagged with their owner's names, but otherwise this enables these patients to feel a certain degree of normalcy.”

That was true, I thought:
normalcy
. Though that normalcy is somewhat of an illusion. Even on the sixth floor, I noted that Jonathan's door has no handle on the inside, and therefore can only be opened from without. Also, there are bars on his window.

“The same is true of patients on the fifth, fourth, and third floors. So the majority of patients here wear their own clothes, or if they have damaged or lost their own, we provide them with simple alternatives. See this lady here.”

We were at the third floor landing, and he pointed through the glass to a woman standing by the door, in a plain white dress with a pinafore. She had no hair on her head, none at all, and stood motionless, but for her hands which she wrung together endlessly.

“From here down, the final two floors, we house our most intractable patients.”

“Everything is well thought out,” I said.

“Of course it is,” said Doctor Phillips somewhat tersely, and I felt I ought to make amends.

“Things are nothing like this in New York,” I said. “It's very gratifying to see such grand aspirations.”

“Year after year, our society is producing an increasing number of lunatics,” he said. I winced slightly at the old-fashioned word. He seemed not to have noticed. “We grow embarrassed by them and seek to deal with them in ever new ways. So now we have moved out of the city, for the most part, to places such as these. With air, with land, with nature all around, with honest work for the patients to engage in. In our embarrassment, we give the
lunatics
new names. So, some years ago, the Orient Point Lunatic Asylum spent four hundred dollars on a new set of letters to be welded over the gate. Now we are an Insane Asylum. In the next decade no doubt we will have to spend six hundred dollars changing our name again.

“But it is all for the best, perhaps. Our ways are changing. Here we use new ideas and new methods and cast aside the grim medieval notions of the madhouse.”

He paused.

“The first floor.”

We had completed our circular descent down the floors and were now at ground level. From here, sounds of human voices floated down the wide, sunlit corridors. I could hear sobbing, and also the occasional cry and shout. I am used to these things, from my days in New York, but it is strange to hear these sounds in an environment that does not seem to match. Even the Kirkbride ideal has its extreme cases, I suppose. As if to emphasize that point, just as we made to leave, a naked man ran across the end of the hall, saw us, and ran out of sight again. I saw him for no more than a second or two, I suppose, but that was more than enough to see the dirt on him, and the wildness in his eyes.

“Shall we?” suggested Doctor Phillips, and we moved on, the noise of something or someone banging repeatedly dying away as we came to the outside.

*   *   *

The front of the buildings face south, and from here a wide lawn slopes away to the beginning of the gardens. I could see patients pruning hedges, weeding flower-beds, with warders supervising, dotted here and there, so distinct in their white uniforms.

I stole a look toward the gate behind which lay the cemetery, but I could see no sign of Verity underneath the tree.

“Our patients, those who are able to at least, take part in a variety of meaningful activities at Orient Point. They help with the grounds and ornamental beds. Our head gardener is a wonderful man who has infinite patience. Behind the main building is our farm. We keep livestock—sheep mostly, some goats and cows. We grow all our own vegetables, and have a fruit orchard, despite the perishing winds from the sound. The bulk of all this is done by the inmates here, with the lightest supervision possible by staff.”

We continued our walk, passing some single-story buildings to the flanks of the main one.

“We have carpentry workshops and metal shops. There are washing rooms and drying rooms. Rooms for ironing and rooms for baking. There is an infirmary, a mortuary. In short, we have everything here that a small town would have.”

“Even a cemetery,” I said.

“Just as you saw.”

“And a crematorium, too.”

“Just so. There is the question of choice, when it comes to these matters. There is also the question of money. Not every patient has relatives who are able to afford the cost of a burial. Cremation is a considerably cheaper option.”

Then, as we rounded the corner of the main building once more, Verity appeared.

She was standing talking to that man, the one in gray.

He looked up immediately as we approached, and smiled.

“You must be the new assistant superintendent,” he said, and held his hand out. He nodded to Doctor Phillips.

“Yes, I'm Doctor James,” I said, and shook his hand. “Doctor Phillips, may I present my daughter, Verity? Verity, this is Doctor Phillips. Say hello.”

Verity did us proud. She gave a little curtsy and said, “How do you do?” in the sweetest way that I swore Doctor Phillips could not possibly be angry either at her, or me.

“A pleasure to meet you, young lady,” said Doctor Phillips. He turned to the man in gray. “Charles.”

The man turned back to me.

“I'm so sorry, forgive me. I'm Charles Dexter.”

I nodded, offering him a smile, taking him to be one of the junior doctors who I had not yet met.

“A pleasure,” I said, and then we were joined by the head warder, a man called Solway whom I had met only briefly when we arrived.