Blue Asylum (6 page)

“I told you, I’m not crazy.”

“My father thinks you are, and so you must be.”

“Your father is wrong.”

He looked somber. “My father is never wrong.”

That night she found a shell on her windowsill. The color of a peach. Perfectly smooth. She wondered how long he’d searched the tides to find it. She held it in her hand, up to the moonlight that came through the window and left the shadows of the bars across the stone floor.

Some people stay forever.

The next day, as she milled around the courtyard with the others, the sharp gazes of nurses and guards taking away the feeling of leisure, she saw Ambrose sitting at the checkerboard table. Looking at him now, so calm and contemplative, hands at rest, face shaded by his hat, it was hard to believe the madman he’d been just a few nights before, screaming and calling for the doctor and wrestling the guards. She surprised herself by walking up and sitting down across from him. He looked at her, and she caught a glimpse of something in his eyes she recognized. Some tiny thing swirling in that young infinity that makes a human life. A thought, or memory. It had no shape or color, and yet instantly it registered. The ghost of kinship.

“You’re Mr. Weller.”

He stood awkwardly, removing his hat to reveal a mass of black, uncombed hair. “How did you know?”

“I was informed by an acquaintance, who later swallowed my ring.”

He stared at her, then chuckled. “She swallowed your ring?”

“Yes. The same night you—”

He stopped laughing. “Yes. That night. I’ve taken my meals in my room since then. Dr. Cowell believes I’m ready to try open dining again.” He fiddled with a checker piece. “I’m very sorry if I frightened you.”

“No harm done.” She put out her hand. “I’m Iris Dunleavy.”

She studied his face as they shook. He had the look of a man who had just risen from a sickbed, all pale and tangle-haired, razor stubble thick on his cheeks.

He noticed her looking and touched his face. “I’m sorry I haven’t shaved. They won’t let . . . I’m not supposed to . . .”

“You look fine.” A grasshopper materialized out of nowhere, briefly alit on a stacked pair of red checkers, then bounced away, vanishing as fast as it had appeared. She liked watching the grasshopper come and go. The universe pulped into that simple moment.

“Were you in the war?” she asked.

“Yes, I fought in the Stonewall Brigade . . .” His voice trailed off, and Iris almost apologized for raising the subject. “But Dr. Cowell says I mustn’t dwell on it. Instead, I’m supposed to think of the color blue. Sometimes it fails me. But I’m growing stronger, day by day.”

The whole idea seemed stupid to her. But she said nothing. He was so fragile, and she did not want to disparage anything he believed in, even a color.

“Dr. Cowell says you have to be the master of your own remembering,” he said.

“That sounds like something he’d say,” she said, trying to keep her voice neutral. Master of her own remembering. And yet the doctor did not believe her memory. It was copper next to her husband’s gold.

When she had first arrived at Bethel, Robert didn’t show her the main house first, or the slave quarters, or the gardens, or the seemingly endless field of tobacco that stretched into the distance. Instead he took her to a small fenced area near a copse of cedar trees. He opened the gate and ushered her inside, where nearly two dozen tombstones were arranged, each with its own inscription. The stones were of the finest granite, the landscaping immaculate. The shadows of a perfect texture. The ground smooth and clean of leaves. This was where the generations of his family had been laid to rest. He took her hand and led her to a space by the back fence, where a cherry tree stood. A blanket of pale blossoms covered the two graves under the branches. She leaned in, read the names on the headstones: Lucille Dunleavy. James Robert Dunleavy.

He stood between the two graves, put his arm around Iris. “Mother, Father,” he whispered. “Here she is.”

At first, she imagined the slaves were happy. They sang and laughed and chased each other around in the evenings on the way back from the field. It was only after a long span of time that she noticed their seething resentment. They did not work to help the farm flourish or to grow the tobacco. They worked because they were prisoners and had no choice. By the time she understood this, she was a prisoner too.

“A prisoner?” Dr. Cowell said. “Why would you say that?” His long fingers intertwined. Any moment he was going to take the folded handkerchief out of his pocket, shake it out with a quick flourish, remove his glasses, and polish them. She had seen him twice and was already weary of his habits.

“He kept my family from seeing me. He intercepted my letters.”

“What makes you think so?”

“My father, especially, would not suddenly cease all correspondence with me. It made no sense.”

“Why didn’t you seek help from someone? The sheriff or the pastor of your church?”

“My husband was friendly with the sheriff. And he was an elder at the church.”

Dr. Cowell nodded, a gesture she had learned did not necessarily connote empathy or understanding. It was as though he were nodding in agreement with the thought he was about to present. “Your husband was an esteemed member of the community, active in the church, in good standing with the sheriff. Think about this with your rational mind. Does he sound like a criminal, Mrs. Dunleavy?”

She sighed. Nothing she told him mattered at all.

After the hour ended in silence and the woman was gone, the doctor put on his glasses and tried to go over his notes, but he was finding it increasingly difficult to read his tiny, neat handwriting. He had ordered some new glasses, but the war was preventing them from reaching him. His failing eyesight was just one of the things that annoyed him lately. Another was the bags under his eyes he saw now whenever he looked in the mirror. This island was taking his youth, little by little. Were he not trapped here, with the lunatics and his moody, attention-demanding wife and son, he’d have been able to remain a younger man.

A knock at the door. It was time for his last appointment, a man who was convinced his feet were too heavy, who often could be found frozen in mid-step in various places around the asylum. The hour passed swiftly, although the man took so long dragging his feet out of the office that the doctor was compelled to give him a gentle shove through the doorway.

It was the doctor’s habit to walk down to the beach just before sunset and watch the birds coming in to feed, and the sky turning deeper shades of blue. Now he was finally rid of his patients, at least for the time being, and could indulge in a few moments of contemplation before he was expected back at the cottage. He loosened his cravat as he walked toward the shore. His coat jacket flapped in the wind. Wind was good, for the midges, biting specks of torment, didn’t attack on windy days. The woman, though, was getting under his skin with her short answers and defiant posture. Such defiance would be an impediment to any sort of progress he could make with her.

Women, he decided, became unhappier the better they were treated. He pitied her husband and wondered what tricks of perception, what prayers, what gin had got him through daily life with her. He reached the water’s edge and let the toes of his shoes sink into the border of the wash. The water lapped at his feet. He tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and listened to the ocean rush of sound that reminds of tomorrow’s approach. It was a sound that bowed to no other, neither bell, nor cannonade, nor bugle, nor a man’s beating heart.

Under the moon the sand on the beach shone ghostly white. In the swamps, crocodile eyes shone red. A light breeze came through, just enough to take the fragrance of the spring flowers and make it sweep through everything like a collective wish.

It was a good night to be a boy.

Wendell, as was his custom, had slid out of his window once his parents were asleep. Now he lurched under starlight through the sand. He had designed and whittled out of thin board two enormous pawlike feet, spent two more weeks on the delicate task of whittling claws for them, then another two days figuring out the best way to tie them to his feet with leather laces. One of the claws had fallen off on a test walk, but the others were holding out. For once no thoughts of Penelope or his own insanity crowded his mind, for tonight it was filled only with the exhilaration of seeing his careful plan put into action.

He paused, turned, and looked back toward the asylum. All was quiet. No one had seen him, save for a hawk that swooped low, found the boy too big to carry off, and rose back into the sky. Wendell continued his awkward gait, lifting his feet carefully, pausing only to clear his claws of bracken.

He reached the edge of the chef’s prized castor bean patch. He smiled, set a single foot in, then another. Looked behind him to make sure the prints were registering in the celestial light. By day they would be even more impressive.

Ambrose looked up at her and smiled as she approached him. They had played checkers every day for a week, saying little, concentrating on the game. Several of the checker pieces were missing.

“What’s happened?” she asked.

“Well, I’m not making accusations, but Lydia Helms Truman was seen hovering nearby the checkers table yesterday, and this morning she was in the infirmary.”

Iris studied the board. “I suppose it could be worse. We could have been playing chess.”

Ambrose burst out laughing and she flushed with pleasure. They kept smiling until their eyes lingered upon each other too long. Ambrose said, “Well, I suppose we’ll just have to play with fewer pieces.”

The red checkers were warm to the touch. She pushed one out into a square and waited. She’d often played checkers with her beloved father on the porch during her transition from tomboy to young woman. Ambrose himself had an ordinary, familiar way about him, so much that he could have grown up next door, and she felt comforted by his presence, as though the bucolic childhood she’d left behind so hurriedly had been handed back to her.

He stared at the board, still contemplating his move, as her eyes skirted the edge of the beach.

The boy, Wendell, was fishing in the surf with the chef. He turned and caught her eye, and their gazes locked for a moment. She had noticed him passing by when she and Ambrose played checkers. The expression on his face was not entirely approving. The boy went back to fishing.

The patients were allowed to swim once a week under close supervision. Wednesdays were reserved for the women, and Thursdays for the men. Iris stood at the ocean’s edge and let her cotton robe fall to the sand, revealing her two-piece suit—a bathing gown and pantaloons.

“Iris Dunleavy.” The Irish brogue was harsh and unloving. She turned, surprised to see the matron there, as she was sensitive to sunlight and rarely went outdoors. The matron squinted at her. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Iris blinked. “Doing? I’m swimming. Aren’t I allowed to swim?”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. Apparently you were silent during much of your session with Dr. Cowell. Too good to speak to him, are you, Mrs. Plantation Wife? Do you know what happens to defiant people here? They get the water treatment. Then they’re not so defiant anymore.”

Iris started to say something conciliatory, but the matron turned on her heel and stomped away. Iris hesitated, then turned and stepped into the frothing water. She had been to the beach, once, when she was seven years old. Despite the plenitude of ponds and rivers right around their hometown, her father had taken the family on a long trip all the way to the ocean for her baptism, a ritual repeated in his family for generations. Her father said a prayer as he lowered her head into the sea. She opened her eyes underwater and fish rushed by, in every color, it seemed, and in all directions; the sun was blurry overhead and her father’s prayer had flattened out on the surface and could not reach her. He pulled her out of the water and held her up so that she was as tall as he was. The next wave knocked them both down, and they came up laughing.

She liked the God she met that day. A playful, saltwater God. And this meeting, she knew, was the way her father planned it for her. Every father wants a daughter to meet the right God, and the right man. Perhaps her father had failed with both.

She waded in farther and let the water reach her chin, then took a deep lungful of air and sank down until her knees touched the sandy bottom. She opened her eyes. The very same fish she saw as a little girl swam by her, and time hadn’t erased a single color. They were all accounted for, silver, red, blue, and green. Bubbles escaped her mouth. Fernlike plants swayed back and forth. Time had vanished. It was bobbing on the surface where her father’s voice used to be. Other women had waded in, and their bathing gowns had floated up around them, giving them the appearance of jellyfish. Nothing could bother her here—no matrons, no doctors, no bells—and that thought appealed to her so much that she stayed down even as her lungs began to ache. Finally, when she could no longer hold her breath, she let it out in a spray of bubbles, swam up, and caught the sea between waves.

She thought of Ambrose later that night, as she lay in bed and listened to the night sounds. The younger man intrigued her. What was broken in him felt liberating. She had suffered under two controlling men—a husband and now a doctor—and the fact that he spent all of his effort trying to control his own demons was inviting. Her father would like him. She closed her eyes and just as she imagined Ambrose’s hand moving toward her father’s to shake in greeting, she heard her name. She raised herself up in bed to find the boy, Wendell, staring at her through the bars of the window. With his hair disheveled and moonlight shining down in his big eyes, he reminded her of a raccoon. Behind him the beach was quiet save for a lulling breeze.

“What is it, Wendell?”

“I have to speak with you; it’s important.”

She got up and put on a robe. She approached the window and rested her face against the cool bars.