Blue Asylum (3 page)

Then one day at her father’s church, the miracle arrived. His name was Robert Dunleavy, and he owned a large plantation in Virginia. He had traveled to Winchester to visit his brother. Iris glanced over at him as she sang “Rock of Ages,” admiring his sideburns and his curly hair, but had not realized that she had been admired herself. Not until he sent word to her father that he wished to call on her.

He showed up at the front door, hat in hand, and they went for a walk through town, just the two of them, past the main square and the post office and the dry goods store—places Iris had known all her life but were now strange and new in his presence. He was exotic and surreal, an overload of color and music and light, akin to a circus that comes to town and pitches its tent right on your roof.

He talked about his plantation, Bethel, in a loving and respectful voice, as though Bethel was the name of his mother and not three hundred acres of choice Virginia land. She said very little, so intently was she listening to his tales. They returned home and Robert said goodbye and went back to Bethel and immediately began courting Iris’s father with earnest correspondence written on lined French stationery, with cursive letters made from a quill pen that never dripped. He spent a good amount of time talking about his plantation earnings per year, his faith (Methodist), his ambitions (political), honor and probity and character and kindness. Yes, he knew that Iris’s family was against slavery, and he was against it as well, but it was a necessary evil at the present moment, and he was looking forward to the day he would be able to free his slaves and pay them for their labor as sharecroppers.

In fact, he treated his slaves very well, new jersey clothes twice a year instead of once, a day off on Sunday and half a day on Saturday, a fireplace in half the slave cabins, and at Christmastime calico skirts for the women, tobacco for the men, and taffy for the children. What the plantation needed, what both he and his slaves needed, was the addition of a strong but loving woman. A woman like Iris, beautiful and pure of heart, humble, chaste, and kind.

Her father agonized over the dilemma. At night the sound of her mother’s voice replaced his prayers rising up through the gravity vent. “Don’t deny our daughter’s happiness for your own piety and your own politics. This man could give Iris a good life. He wants to marry her, make her the mistress of his plantation, the mother of his children. What else will she do? Grow old and alone under our roof?” Eventually his wife’s badgering won out against the milder, more contradictory and elusive counsel of God, and he gave his permission for Iris to marry Robert Dunleavy. And so it was that Iris fell in love, not so much with a man as with an exceedingly proper and literary courtship, one that left behind a stack of letters her father carefully bound with a length of cord and kept in the bottom drawer of his desk. She was also against slavery and found it both curious and terrible that one person could keep another in chains, but Robert did intend to one day free his slaves. He’d said it himself. And though she did hear the hesitation in her father’s voice when he gave his consent for her to marry the man, she chose to ignore it. She was leaving this place for a new and exciting life. Exotic sounds, exhilarating colors. She didn’t have to follow her mother’s story and her grandmother’s story like a fish follows the turns of a creek bed. She had been set free.

Iris was married in the spring of 1859, by her father, in her father’s church that was filled with neighbors and friends. She left town beside her new husband in an open-air coach. A similar coach would, five years later, take her to the port in Punta Rassa to be loaded onto the
Scottish Chief
with a hundred head of cattle. Two rides engineered by a persuasive and powerful man.

As soon as the matron left, Iris tried the door. It was locked. She tested the bars on the window. They were smooth under her hand and held fast. The sounds of a quiet beach came through the bars: the rattling of wind through the leaves of the coconut palms, the pounding of waves, a group of willets cooing the same sad song. How silly—how utterly insane, in fact—it seemed to her now that Winchester had bored her so, and she could not wait to leave it. Five years later, after all that had passed, she would have given anything to be able to go back to the town she thought she’d outgrown.

According to a folded note slid under her door, she was to meet with the psychiatrist, Dr. Cowell, at four in the afternoon. Surely he would release her, if she made a good case for herself.

She stripped down to her petticoats and chemise and bathed herself with water she poured into the porcelain bowl. She rummaged through her steamer trunk and put on a pleated dress, simple but elegant. Certainly not the garb of a madwoman. She combed her hair and retied the chignon. She stared at herself in the mirror. It was hard to believe that she was still intact. Skin still porcelain, cheekbones high and balanced, eyes calm, chestnut hair thick and healthy and neatly gathered. She could have been any other lovely, mannered woman.

Just before four o’clock, a pleasant-faced nurse knocked briefly and entered the room.

“Doctor Cowell will see you now,” she announced, and led Iris down the hallway and through the main building, up the winding stairs in the lobby and into another foyer, this one featuring a conversational sofa and a big window with a brocade curtain. The nurse gestured to the sofa and went back down the stairs, leaving Iris alone. Almost immediately, the door opened, and the doctor came out of his office. He was a tall, graceful man in a ditto suit. Dark eyes peered at her behind spectacles with wire frames. He wore a chin-strap beard that left his upper lip bare and thin. He had a long jaw line and heavy brows. A muted gray cravat was fastened around his neck. A gold watch swung like a pendulum from his waist.

She stood up to shake his hand.

“I’m Dr. Henry Cowell,” he said in a British accent. “And you are Iris Dunleavy.” He said her name with a certain confidence, as though Iris Dunleavy was a condition he was sure he could remedy. He ushered her into the office, swept a hand toward a balloon-backed chair, and took a seat behind his desk, where a clock with fleur-de-lis crowning showed the time as exactly four o’clock.

She sat down and smoothed her dress.

“Did you find your trip pleasant?” he asked.

She let out a short, bitter laugh. “I came down here on a blockade runner full of cattle.”

He spread his hands. “I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid we’re at the mercy of the Federal army. They are blocking so many of our ports. You would have had a shorter trip had you taken the new Florida Railroad, but they’ve blown up thirty miles of track.” He knit his fingers together, looking at her. “You live in Virginia and you are married to a plantation owner, Robert Dunleavy.”

“Yes.”

She moved her gaze to the window, looking out at the waves and the dunes and the coconut palms and the blue sky. She had something to say and it had to be delivered in her best voice. The one she’d used to say her marriage vows. That calm, that certain. “I am not a lunatic. I am the victim of a terrible campaign of outright slander by my own husband.”

The doctor nodded. “So you are not mad? Your husband is mad? Is that what you are telling me?”

“No, as far as I know his evil cannot take refuge in madness. He’ll stand before God one day naked of that excuse. He is simply a terrible man, a brutal slave owner, a liar, and a killer.” She tried to keep her voice steady. “I’ve been sent here as punishment.”

“No, there is no punishment within these walls, for you have done nothing wrong. You have simply become confused. Your sensibilities have given way to hysteria. My only desire is to help you return to your right mind.”

He paused, fooling with his watch and then looking at the desk clock as if to see if they were aligned. “My grandfather was a Quaker from Leeds. He helped build the York Asylum in 1796. You see, the Quakers are a compassionate people. They don’t like war, even a war fought for the soul. They believe in a gentler path to restoration. You can see their influence in your country. At Hudson River State Hospital, they offer sleigh rides. At McLean, plays and concerts. Pennsylvania Hospital has rowing facilities and a museum full of stuffed birds. The environment, you see, is part of the cure.”

“What is the water treatment?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Who told you about the water treatment?”

“The matron of the asylum.”

“That is nothing for you to worry about. It is rarely employed.”

“But what is it?”

He sighed. “It involves dousing the patient with ice-cold water for a period of time. Something about the temperature and pressure of the water seems to effect a strengthening of the rational mind.”

“It sounds like torture.”

“Some of the more hysterical patients call it that.” He seemed to choose his words carefully. “But it’s imagined pain. And besides, one could argue that insanity is itself unfathomably painful. It is, isn’t it?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I am not a lunatic. I no more belong here as a patient than you do, and if you contact my family in Winchester—”

“Your family will be contacted in due time, Mrs. Dunleavy. In the meantime, I have the sworn statement of a doctor, and the orders of a judge. And even if I did not, you would still be incarcerated purely on the basis of your actions. I’m not saying that you’ve done this deliberately, or maliciously, Mrs. Dunleavy. But you’ve embarrassed your husband. Humiliated him, here in such a pressing time, when the war is taking such a toll.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Mr. Dunleavy could have put you in Georgia’s state asylum, in Milledgeville. It would have been much less expensive. But it’s a terrible, degrading place. He cared enough about you to want for you the very best.”

Iris felt her face growing hot. She had to reach this doctor. Make him understand and believe. She summoned all her self-control, loosened her fists into hands again, and told him the story . . . the abridged version, calm and steady until she reached the part about the baby, where her voice choked and she had to stop and compose herself. In doing so, she glanced at the doctor and saw what was in his eyes. He was a man who had already made up his mind and was now listening to her not to gain information, but to bide his time or silently prepare his benevolent riposte. She folded her arms. She would say no more. She could not protect the baby but she could protect his story from nonbelievers.

“Please,” he said. “Go on.”

“Why should I continue? Clearly you see no truth in it.”

“I believe that you see it to be truth.”

Someone knocked on the door, startling Iris. The doctor sighed. “Yes?” he called.

The door creaked open and a nurse peered inside. “Dr. Cowell, your wife needs to speak with you.”

He pressed his lips together. “Tell Mrs. Cowell I’m busy.”

“She says to tell you it’s very important.”

He took off his glasses and fiddled with the sliding temples. “Tell her,” he said in a measured voice, “that I am evaluating a patient and I do not wish to be disturbed.”

“But Dr. Cowell, she sounded quite—”

“Tell her!”

Iris jumped. His tone, up to now, had never varied from the calm and the palliative. The nurse beat a hasty retreat, slamming the door, then opening it again and closing it gently in nervous apology.

The doctor closed his eyes briefly and put his glasses back on. “You’ll have to excuse my wife. She’s been in quite a bad mood because the war has cut off her supply of French boots and India lace, not to mention her favorite cold cream, although the chef does make a fairly good approximation of it with almond oil and rosewater.”

Iris said nothing. His mind was already made up. His switching the subject to his wife’s sorrows over lace and cold cream only further proved how little regard he gave her story. She stared at the blueprint of the building on the wall, imagining windows without bars, doors without locks. If she could not convince him to let her go, she must take the burden to escape on her own shoulders.

“I promised your husband,” he said, “that I’m going to make you well again. And I am making you that same promise.”

“And what will the proof be that I’ve recovered?”

“When you’re well, you will understand the consequences of your actions and regret your misdeeds.”

“Never. I will never do that.”

Another knock. His lips tightened. “What
is
it?”

The door opened again, revealing the same nurse, whose voice now quavered as she spoke. “I’m so sorry, she still insists on seeing you right now.”

“I thought I told you to—”

“I did but she says it’s a matter of great urgency and you must come to the cottage right away.”

“All right! I’m coming! I’m coming! I’m coming!”

The Calusa Indians once lived on this island. Long-haired, fingernails like claws, frenzied dancers, avid fishermen, they lived among cacti, alligators, and century plants. Loved the shine of gold and silver. Believed in three souls: one in the eyes, one in the shadow a body cast, one in that red-faced, long-haired reflection rubbed across flat water. Sometimes a soul would escape a sick man, and the others would hunt that soul through the woods and bring it back, struggling, to the village. The white man could not defeat them with musket and sword, so they sent their diseases. Measles, typhoid. And smallpox. Red spots on the tongue, extending down the arms and legs. Terrible aches. Delirious fevers. The ceremonial mask, the fire dance, the prayer. All useless. What few survived fled to the Seminoles in the north, or to Cuba in the south. Their open-air huts rotted. Their language faded away. Only their middens were left—giant shell piles of their refuge.

Wendell had stood barefoot on these middens in heavy gusts of moonlight and imagined the savages, crazy with fever, crawling through the spartina grass of the sloughs. An old Cuban man who fished for sheepshead from the dock told Wendell the story, and the white boy who had no friends, whose accent was that of neither an English psychiatrist nor an Illinois fishwife but somewhere in between, took up the grudge as his own. The island had also driven him mad. Infected him like a virus.