Blue Asylum (2 page)

Eleanor Beacon, who was from a prominent Irish family in Baltimore, suffered from an uncontrollable and persistent imagining of the pains and sorrows of every creature on the Earth. She would not eat breakfast, as the slab of bacon was once a pig who cringed at a falling ax, and the eggs evoked a vision of the crestfallen hen, her future chicks stolen right out from under her. At night Eleanor imagined kittens calling to her from the bottom of imaginary wells; dolphins performing tricks in solitary waters with no one to clap; orphaned fawns, stepped-upon ants; birds that crashed into windows, turtles left on their backs by merciless children. Dr. Henry Cowell, head psychiatrist at the Sanibel Asylum, had worked with her patiently and had made considerable progress. But now she was back on the subject of that patient horse she used to see in Baltimore, pulling a carriage full of rowdy tourists in the heat of the summer.

Dr. Cowell was no stranger to the madness of women. In fact, he specialized in their treatment. But now he was growing tired of lunacy in general and Eleanor Beacon in particular.

He sat behind his desk and fondled the gold pocket watch that hung from his waist. Ten minutes left. Ten minutes of arguing that the natural world was a wound whose scab could not help but be broken. Jellyfish evaporated on the beach, dogs died under the porch, hermit crabs ate crustaceans and themselves were eaten by raccoons, which themselves might fall prey to an osprey. The circle of life was not a mad killer. It simply was round.

“The horse was doing its job,” he said. “Horses have roles, just like people. Men have roles. And so do women. You have a role, Mrs. Beacon. Your role is back home at your husband’s side.”

“My husband is cruel. He kills spiders that are minding their own business.”

A knock at the door. A nurse entered. “Dr. Cowell, the boat with the new patient is approaching the dock.”

Dr. Cowell was grateful for the interruption. He nodded to the nurse, his signal to lead the patient away, even though the session was not quite over.

“The tourists were fat,” Eleanor insisted, as she rose from the chair, clutching her handkerchief. “That poor, poor horse.”

“Roles, Mrs. Beacon,” he said. He turned toward the window, loosening his cravat as the door closed. This time of morning the sunlight was perfect for clarity but not steep enough to make him squint. His office was situated on the second story of the asylum, just above the foyer. The spiral staircase leading up to it lent the perfect sense of grandeur and dignity that should accompany any audience with him. He could gaze out the window, as he did now, at madness on the ground level—so much more tolerable from above, lunatics sunning themselves in the courtyard or collecting shells on the beach under the watchful eyes of the guards.

His son, Wendell, and the black chef fished side by side, knee-deep in the blue water. The doctor himself was too impatient to fish, too easily burned by the sun, too tempting for mosquitoes and the biting midges that plagued him when the winds calmed. And yet he felt a stab of envy, watching the two of them, their rapport obvious by their postures and how closely they stood. He wished he could be a chef, he thought, as a wave of self-pity washed over him. How simple and predictable a job that was. The equation of salt to meat never varied; there were no surprises or screams or delusions involved in the thickening of custard or the steepening of broth.

Trained in his native England and influenced by the benevolent reformists of the York Asylum, the doctor was accustomed to establishing a rapport with a patient and then calmly building a case against their lunacy, guiding them back to their senses by dint of logic and persuasion. He dazzled himself with his own arguments, taking as his greatest satisfaction those moments when he could see the rational part of a lunatic, hidden so far, reveal itself in his office. He then nurtured that part, fostered it, treated it like the chef treated his precious castor bean plants. And only in the most desperate cases did he employ the application of cold water to startle patients from their madness. It was not punishment. It was merely a somatic incentive that, when judiciously applied, could be very effective. It didn’t hurt them—no, there was never a mark on the lunatics. Their screams, he cautioned the staff, were not screams of pain, but merely the sound put off by their sudden leap of progress, like a puff of steam from a locomotive engine as it takes its maiden voyage to the west.

A side-wheeler came into view, churning blue water on its way to the dock. The new patient, Iris Dunleavy, was due to arrive this morning. The sun moved a tiny bit higher and shot a ray through the window. The doctor shielded his eyes, deep in thought, waiting as the ship docked and the woman came into sight. She was comely, to be sure, and dressed in the manner of a respectable woman.

A strange and special case. She was a plantation wife and, according to her husband, had started the marriage dutiful, obedient, and loving, but in the past two years had undergone a rapid transformation, becoming hostile and combative, and her acts of defiance culminated in an insult so deranged and spectacularly public as to cause the poor husband a terrible amount of shame. As it was, the man desperately wanted his wife back—or, at least, the wife he’d once known.

Dr. Cowell was well regarded for his success in calming the most hysterical of women. His paper on the relationship of female lunacy and the suffrage movement in America had attracted widespread critical acclaim and had led to his first American assignment as the assistant to the chief of psychiatry of Pennsylvania State Hospital for the Insane. Now he was his own man, on his own island, his fame such that Robert Dunleavy, the plantation man, had sought him out specifically to treat his wife and had been more than willing to pay the hefty fee for her housing and treatment in one of the most exclusive asylums in the United States.

He watched her walk down the plank, her hands tied in front of her. She kept her head high, and though he could not discern her expression, she carried herself with a certain air of defiance.

The doctor turned from the window. He’d seen many a woman enter this place, head high, convinced of her rightness. He’d had great success in putting them back on the path to clear thinking and normal relations with their communities. She would be no different.

Iris entered a large foyer with the guard, the sand her boots had collected crunching against the stone floor. She stared at the furnishings: the rosewood benches, the seashell-patterned wallpaper, the lush colors of the oil paintings in their gilt frames, the dangling chandelier, the white marble staircase that spiraled up to the second floor. She wondered how such style could be wasted on the deranged, then remembered that she was considered deranged herself.

A stout woman approached them. She was not wearing a nurse’s uniform but a simple alpaca dress and gaiters. She had the red, puffy cheeks of someone who used too much salt on her meat. A massive ring of keys was tied around her waist. Iris looked at the keys and recognized their authority. She had once worn her own ring of keys.

The woman looked Iris up and down, then nodded at the guard, who untied her hands. “I’m in charge of you,” she announced. “Follow me.” Her voice had a slight Irish brogue and not a modicum of warmth. She led her through an arched door into a great hallway, rooms on one side and a bank of windows on the other. Benches were set up against the walls. The hallway was nearly deserted save for an old woman in the near distance, who sat on a bench in widow’s weeds, her arms folded, rocking.

The woman with the keys glanced back at Iris. “I am the matron of this asylum,” she announced. “I have a lot of responsibility and I don’t have time for problems. You’ve entered the women’s ward. There are nineteen women here, and nineteen men in the ward opposite from us. Dr. Cowell believes in symmetry.”

Iris followed her without a word, all the while rehearsing to herself exactly what she’d say to her once they were alone. Bits of sand fell from her dress as she walked.

“You are never to go to the men’s ward under any circumstances,” the matron continued, “nor are you allowed to bring any man into yours. But Dr. Cowell believes that your life here should imitate, to the greatest extent possible, life in the world of the sane and balanced. So you are permitted to sit across from one another at the table when you have your meals, and you are allowed to engage in polite fellowship with them during your courtyard time. You may play cards or checkers, although you are not allowed to bet on the games, not even using shells as currency. And you will be supervised at all times.”

She swept a hand along the hallway. “All the corridors where our patients live are single-loaded, which is much more expensive than double-loaded, but the benefit is that the nurses are more able to supervise you, and the conditions are less crowded. Also, by having the rooms on only one side of the corridor, a nurse need never turn her back on a patient.”

When they reached the room at the end of the hallway, the matron paused and fiddled with her keys. She opened the door and ushered Iris inside to a tastefully arranged room, with a cottage bed, a dresser, a small desk with a mirrored gallery, and a straight-backed chair. A large pitcher of water sat on a washstand. A porcelain bowl was placed on the floor between the stand’s cabriole legs. The walls were painted Shaker blue.

“Every detail of this room has been designed by Dr. Cowell. He picked out the dresser design himself, in New Orleans. And the walls are blue because Dr. Cowell believes this particular color calms the mind.”

A window faced the sea. It had no glass but was lined with bars. Iris stared out at the beach. The boy and the black man were gone. Only sea oats and calm water and circling gulls remained. The guard on the ship had treated her well. And even this woman, brusque though she was, did not speak to her as though she were mad. Perhaps they sensed she was different from the others? Iris turned from the window and kept her voice calm and steady.

“You seem like a kind and wise woman. And though your position here is one of authority over me, I would like to speak to you as one woman to another. There has been a mistake. I do not belong here. I am here simply for the act of defying my husband, who is a man of most indecent character.”

The matron pointed at the desk. “The patients want to move the desk over to the window. That is not its place.”

Iris took a step toward her, tried again. “I am sure that my family in Winchester has no idea what has happened to me, in the confusion of the war. If you could please contact my father, who is the minister of a Methodist—”

“Breakfast is at seven, dinner at one o’clock, supper at seven. Bells will announce all meals. If you are not on time, you will miss these meals.”

“Please! Listen to me—”

“We have china plates here. A bowling alley. A billiard room. An icehouse, five milk cows, Cornish game hens. A citrus grove and a vegetable garden. And despite the embargo, we still manage to provide sugar on occasion, as well as beef.”

Iris rushed to the woman and sank to her knees. All composure was gone now. She grasped at the hem of her dress, begging her to please listen, her tale spilling out in a crazy manner now. Any person entering the room would have seen a strict, stout woman standing with arms crossed, and a lunatic kneeling before her, wild-eyed, desperate, clingy, and hysterical.

The matron wrenched the hem of her dress free of Iris’s hands. “Get up, collect yourself, and show some gratitude. Your husband paid thousands of dollars to send you here. He must love you very much, although I can’t imagine why.”

Iris let go of her dress. She stood slowly. Felt herself harden inside as she glared at the woman. “Love me very much?” she asked. “On the contrary, my husband hates me. And I hate him. He is one of the most vile people on this planet.”

The matron fumbled with the keys at her waist.

“I have better things to do than listen to the rantings of a new lunatic.” She found the key she was looking for and glared at Iris. “Do you know what happens to the stubborn ones, the defiant ones? The ones like you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“They get the water treatment. It stimulates circulation to the brain. The lunatics scream and moan and beg as they are dragged away to the water treatment room. When they’re dragging you away, you won’t feel so proud.”

“What is the water treatment exactly?” Iris asked calmly, although her hands trembled.

The matron glanced at Iris’s hands, saw the fear revealed there, and smiled. “You’ll see,” she said, and left the room.

Had he ever loved her, even at the beginning? That question would never answer itself. It sat there like a fallen cake. Many suitors had come to her father’s house to see her, back in those days she was single and free of care, but she was bored with the local boys. So familiar, so dull. Her childhood had been magical, hours spent in ecstatic loneliness in the apple orchard, dreaming of foreign lands and wild adventures. Everything was new, down to birdsong and grass blades. By the time she had reached adulthood, the town around her was like a grandmother who had used up all her stories and now simply rocked on the porch. The same flowers, the same streets, year after year. She longed for someone more exotic. A prince, a pirate. Her lofty expectations worried her father, a humble man of God. “I was a local boy,” he told her. “And your mother was hesitant about accepting my marriage proposal. But she made a leap of faith in the direction of sincerity and has never regretted her choice. At least she has never told me, and I would be the first to know.”

“Try to have an open mind, Iris,” her mother counseled her. “I found your father just around the corner, and he turned out just fine.”

So Iris tried but still could not concentrate on the earnest young men who came to court her. She would leave her body and float above the house, rising up into the clouds until the voices of her suitors were as faint as distant birdsong. At night, she heard her father’s prayers for a suitable husband rising up through the gravity vent. And yet she could not will herself to fall in love. She had known every single young man in town since he was a boy, and there was nothing new about any of them.