Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (14 page)

D
espite my greatest fears, this institution would prove the opposite of the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children. Having shed the word “asylum” from its name, it was the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. There was light Swedish massage, billiards, bowling, a nine-hole golf course, tennis, concerts. The staff, it was rumored, hired semiprofessional baseball players so they could beat the other local teams—the YMCA, police, firemen.

The problem was that I was guilt-stricken. If I hadn’t been returned to my mother, would she have ever gone out? Do shut-ins die of contagion? No, they don’t. But because of me, my mother was out in the world again and died. The Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children had been right about me all along. I was “a disturbing element,” “vicious and immoral.” I was unable to be saved from “crime or a life of degradation.” I was certain that I was a murderess, that I had killed my mother.

I told no one.

When I think of myself at eighteen at Sheppard Pratt, as it was known, I think of
us.
I was raised as an
us,
after all, a
they—
the feeble-minded, mere refuse, a societal problem to be dealt with. Ours were lives of domesticated sheep. We were herded into rows. We sang in unison if we sang at all. We were so unaccustomed to being singled out and addressed that we had to be reminded to speak when spoken to. We kept our eyes on the shirt in front of us. When guards said “you,” we thought they meant “all of you.” The individual
you
was so rare that there was no time for an
I
to take hold. I didn’t have a self. Eppitt confirmed my existence, and I confirmed his, and we touched each other—lustful proof.

Likewise, for four years my mother and I existed because we
both
existed. When she was gone, I was stripped to something elemental and foreign to myself. I looked in mirrors and didn’t recognize my own face—pale and slack, with a bloat to my eyes, which wanted to drift.

At Sheppard Pratt, we were all psychiatric patients, each of us suffering, but doing so together allowed us to shift our burdens a little, each taking some weight on our backs. Beautiful and deranged ghosts—we haunted not the place but our own bodies. I was mourning, of course. And for a while I allowed myself to shuffle along with the others, their current buoying me. I was part of them. The nurses, in long white gowns with white bibs and white nurse’s hats, floated. The male attendants wore all white too. Down a long dark corridor they glowed.

I was put in Norris Cottage. Cottages, cottages, like my childhood returned. But Norris held only four patients and our attendants. Dr. Brush said that small numbers were good for us. My father, I assume, was paying a pretty penny for this—blood money. I didn’t care. There was one woman whose family built her a house on the grounds, Poe Cottage; it was tidy, with a duckboard walkway that led to the front steps. I never saw her. I heard later that she lived there
until her death—a full forty years. Norris Cottage was large, stone, ivied. The three other patients were quiet. One was a teacher, one a wife and mother of two who’d tried to kill herself with pills meant to treat gout, and one was just a few years older than I was. This last one didn’t have a husband or work. I feared her most of all.

When my skirt was returned, the pact with my mother was still there in its pocket. I thought of hiding it in my bedside table, but it wasn’t safe enough there. Instead, I fitted it between my mattress and the web of wiring under my bed.

We were observed each morning from seven to seven thirty. Then there was bathing, dressing, eating until eight thirty. Food arrived on beautiful china with a silver teapot, linen napkin, and tray covering, a bowl of sugar cubes, a pepper shaker, a tiny bowl of salt with a miniature spoon. I loved the miniature spoon and lightly salted all of my food, but ate little and only sipped the tea.

Then we were to write letters. I had no one, and so I wrote to Eppitt. I wrote the way the others wrote. Niceties. But I folded the letters like origami cranes, the way my mother had taught me, and, because Eppitt would have outgrown the Maryland School, I had no address for him, so I hid the origami cranes up my sleeves and tucked them into the underside of my mattress, along with the pact.

From ten o’clock to one, we played games on the lawns, and did calisthenics while holding poles. I skirted the edges of badminton, volleyball, putting. On rainy days, in the casino, I watched people bowl on the two-lane alley and shoot billiards. We were set to work, but not stitching Duck Porch awnings. Here we made ornaments, stools, taborets. I sat before a loom. I didn’t actually do any of these things, but I didn’t have to. I was part of a group and, together, we managed. I see the patients now—golf clubs tucked under their arms and bowling balls cradled
to their chests, whispering to themselves, singing marching songs, tapping their own faces as if trying to remember something that will never return to them. Many of them prayed, a soft motion of the mouth. They picked at themselves. Some had scabs that wouldn’t heal. They cried openly and then would laugh with a sharp staccato.

At one o’clock we ate again. Then more baths—tonic baths, rain baths, and showers with forceful nozzles. We would be washed clean, if nothing else. The soul? No one knew how to fix it once broken, but its flimsy case could be managed.

We were walked back to Norris Cottage, where we rested. Then we were up. We walked the grounds. If people shifted to the solarium, I followed. Flowers bloomed there, even though it was turning cool. Exotic ferns, a tiled floor, a cane rocker, stained glass, all reminding me of the sunporch at home—the outdoors that could grow so green and steamy, and love, love, always the association. Eppitt in the laundry. My mother, a hothouse flower.

There were no newspapers; we needed a break from war and pestilence. I itched for the ink smeared on my fingers, the small scissors (my ivory-handled bird scissors had been left behind), and my tub of paste, the light-headedness of breathing it in deeply. But I walked the library stacks, my hand bumping along the rhythm of bindings. I liked the quiet dust of books.

We played cribbage and gin rummy, and fit together intricate puzzles. Dinner arrived at 6 p.m. We were observed again, clinically. Again, we were sent to the lawn for an hour, followed by fifteen minutes on the ward.

And then night.

Night was the hardest. We feared the dark. Grief—melancholia—tells the brain,
Too much, enough of this world.
The brain is ticking all day, keeping up with the noise and images of
daily life, but once you close your eyes at night, the brain lights the skull and asserts itself without the interruption of vision and sound. It’s stronger than you can imagine, the lit skull at work on its own. Its will is tougher and you’re tired. You must bend to it.

And what did it show me?

I don’t need to go over this—we all know loss. We know longing. I see Ruthie and Tilton filled with powerful longing. I’ve told you this, Eleanor, and you’ve responded sharply, “I’ll monitor their longing—thank you for the tip!” As if longing can be monitored.

The truth is, I felt dead and lost, but I didn’t stay dead. First of all, there was the world all around me. It’s insistent. When the lit skull works at night ranting about loss, there’s always day again. This fact is unrelenting. It’s the true insanity of life.

My food glittered with salt like a fresh snow. My letters puffed my shirtsleeves and were pinched by the bottom springs of my mattress—my aviary of origami cranes. They were trapped beneath my bed, but breeding. I had much to say.

And there was existence. I ran my hands across the clipped grass of the putting green, wet with dew. The bowling ball—a solid weight—I heaved it from myself again and again, to feel lightness, the thunder roll, the popping pins. A bath reminds your body that it has skin. I opened books, the creak of them, the smell. I let my eyes settle on words. My mouth moved. Words lifted from ink and became a taste and then an object held in the brain. John Donne, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge. My cheeks burned. The solarium breathed. The playing cards were slick; the puzzle pieces could be wedged into place, snug.

The Armistice was signed in November. We made banners, sang songs, ate tea cakes, and danced on the lawn. The archduke and his wife belonged to history now.

Slowly, I returned to this relentless world. And what did I find? Dr. Wolff. Two
f
’
s at the end of his name, no relation to me and my Wolfs, or to the various other Woolfs and wolves, for that matter.

His bow tie bobbed at his throat when he spoke, very gently. He had a ruddy complexion—a strong jaw, black hair, closely cropped. He had beautiful eyebrows, tilted with just the right amount of sympathy. His eyes were large and brown. He had full lips, a small nose. He was broad, and unlike Eppitt when I last saw him—behind the paned glass of King’s Cottage—Dr. Wolff was a grown man. His chest was powerful. He breathed beneath his thin white dress shirt as if his lungs and heart were giant pumping machinery. And I watched his hands—strong hands. He was jovial, with a quick smile, but he was also shy. He was thirty-two.

I sat in a leather chair, fidgeted with a button at my wrist.

“So.” He looked at the chart on his desk. “Harriet, how are you?”

I’m a murderess,
I wanted to say, but instead I whispered, “I’m fine.”

“We hope you’re feeling better.”

“I have a lingering malaise, maybe.”

“Sometimes that can be a state of mind. What’s on your mind these days?” He leaned forward, one elbow on his desk. He was hunched slightly. My mother had wanted me to have good posture. “Stand tall,” she told me once at the Swinging Lantern. “You don’t need to hide anymore.”

“My father hasn’t delivered anything for me, has he?” I wanted my ivory-handled scissors, paste, and books of clippings.

“Just your clothes, which, by looking at you, appear to have arrived. Tell me something about yourself.”

“I like Chinese food,” I told him.

“That’s very nice,” he said.

“There’s a very good restaurant my mother and I went to on our birthdays.”

“That’s nice.”

“Well, there was a tragedy there too. The Lings’ niece drowned.”

“In the restaurant?” Dr. Wolff said. “How did she drown in a restaurant?”

“The usual way. Under water,” I explained. “There was a fishpond.”

“Is that what’s on your mind?”

Now it was. The Ling girl’s swirling hair, her limp body, the goldfish circling stupidly. “Death is part of life.” The guards repeated this banality at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children whenever one of us died. Some arrived so sickly that they lived only a few short weeks.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about death. You’re young and healthy.”

“The Ling girl was just four.” Afraid that I might cry, I stared at the ceiling.

“Why do you think you’re here?” Dr. Wolff asked.

“My mother died and I didn’t take it well. I loved her.” This caused a fit inside my chest. I didn’t have the energy for fits anymore, but these versions—maybe aftershocks—still existed in miniature. They didn’t last long, but they were internally violent.

“That kind of loss can be traumatic.”

“She broke a pact too.”

“And what was that?”

“For us to never separate again. But I don’t want to talk about death.”

“You’ve brought it up. Twice.”

“Have I?”

“The girl dying in the fishpond and your mother. Are the two linked?”

“It’s just that death can happen at any time. And then we would miss out on all of this.”

“All of what, Harriet?”

For the first time in my life, I was supposed to explain what it was like to exist. “Well, you know, Dr. Wolff, of course.”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “Not the way you do. Tell me.”

I had the doctor’s full attention, and was realizing that my way of existing was not necessarily everyone’s way of existing, and moreover, perhaps each of us had our own existence. This was overwhelming. Imagine Daisy at the convent school, after her gaping sleeve has caught fire in the chapel, how she whirls, aflame, knowing for the first time that she is locked inside herself.

“What, Harriet? What would we miss?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This!” I waved my hand around the room, meaning
Everything!

“List for me a few things that you would miss.”

And this was maybe the first, infinitesimal moment when I started to become a writer. This is the writer’s first job: to list what’s worth listing. “Well, the world is beautiful and ugly too, and sometimes it’s even beautiful when it’s ugly. Like the Ling girl—I can imagine her head surrounded by fat orange gliding fish. And there were these children I knew once, sickly, ill fit. They were stunted. They would never grow old. But they were aired on porches and sunned too. They were angels to me. They were warped. Some had twisted spines, uneven legs. Their faces were open—gaping—a face that’s more like a window than a face. Do you know what I mean?”

He nodded. “Go on.”

“And those are the ones you don’t expect to find beautiful. Then there are the ones you do expect to find beautiful. And there they are—hands, mouth.” I indicated his hands, his mouth.

He looked at me, and I stopped. “It’s okay,” he said. “Go on.”

“It’s just beauty, that’s all, like the view from my window. People moving on the lawn, the way trees sway, the way…It’s all beautiful.” I couldn’t stop speaking. “I kept things before I got here, clippings from newspapers. I want to keep it all. Proof.”