The Silent Boy (8 page)

It was only one week later that we heard the terrible, terrible news from New York. Peggy gasped and made a sound like "Oh!" when she heard at first, because her sister Nellie had been talking lately about New York, about going there to work and earn some money and maybe make her way into the pictures.

It was young girls like Nellie, and some even younger, who were working there and were caught in that terrible fire. From the eighth floor, the newspaper said, they jumped, some of them holding hands, their skirts and hair afire. Hundreds of them. Their bodies lay in heaps, smoldering, in the street. I thought of the smell of Father's clothes.

There was a list in our paper of all of them, the Mollys, Rosies, Annas, and even a Kate, my name, fourteen years old. Some of them weren't even identified; no one knew who they were.

One was only eleven, and her name was Mary.

In New York, thousands of people lined the streets in mourning for those working girls who wanted only to earn a better life for themselves. It
was raining, and the newspaper picture showed thousands of umbrellas; I wanted to be there, holding a black umbrella, with rain dripping from the edge, and to bow my head as they were carried past, to the cemetery.

I was filled with a feeling of frustration at having no way to mourn for them. Finally, when no one was around to see, I went into Mother's room, opened her bureau drawer, and looked carefully through all of her ironed, folded shirtwaists. I was looking for a label that said Triangle Shirtwaist Company. I would tear it, scribble on it with ink, punish it in every way I knew.

But I found none there. Mother's clothes had been made for her, most of them, by Miss Abbott.

Instead, I made up a little prayer for Mary Goldstein, age eleven, who had died that day. I said it every night for several weeks. "Dear Mary Goldstein, please be happy in heaven and don't be frightened or on fire ever again, and now you can fly instead of falling." I murmured it every night before I went to sleep, adding "Amen" at the conclusion, so that God knew it was a prayer even though it hadn't been addressed to him.

"Please take me, Father!"

It was Saturday afternoon, so there was no school. Peggy had gone to visit her parents. Jessie was being punished for some mischief and was not allowed to play, and Austin was visiting his cousins in Harrisburg. Mother was resting upstairs. I was very bored.

The buggy was waiting, and Father was looking through his medical bag to be sure he had what he might need. We were in his office, and I watched while he added a small bottle of a white powder
that he kept in the locked cabinet. The call summoning him had come just after lunch.

"You know I'm not a bother!"

He snapped the bag closed. "Of course you're not. Sometimes you're even a help, Katydid."

"Then may I come?"

"I won't be able to take you inside, Katy. It's not a patient's home, you know, where you can sit in the kitchen and wait. Not like the mill, where the men always thought it a fine thing that you were my helper. This is like a hospital."

"I won't mind. I can wait in the buggy. The horses will like me to do that. They get lonely waiting by themselves. And I'll take a book."

Father laughed. "All right. Let me just go tell your mother that you're coming along," he said.

And so, for the first time, an hour later, I found myself at the Asylum. I had seen it only at a distance before.

On the outskirts of town, the massive stone building was set in the center of expansive grounds surrounded by a wall with an iron gate. Carved deep into one of the stone pillars that formed the side of the gate were the letters that spelled Asylum, a word I could not have pronounced from sounding out the letters. Once, some time ago, when we drove past, Father had told me how to say it, and what it meant.

"I believe the dictionary would call it 'a place of protection, " he had said.

"But who needs to be protected?"

"People who are ill and can't take care of themselves."

"So it's a hospital, really," I said. "Yes. In a way."

"Jessie says it's for crazy people. She said imbeciles and lunatics and madmen."

Father smiled. "Those are just other words for people who are ill," he explained. "Ill in their minds. And at the Asylum, people take care of them."

"Jessie's afraid of it."

"No need," Father said.

"Jessie's afraid of bugs, too. I'm not." I felt quite smug.

But in truth, on this day, when the heavy gate was actually opened by the attendant in the gatehouse and Father drove the buggy inside the grounds, I did feel a little frightened. The building was so large—I counted five floors, and that was only in the central section; there were wings to the sides—and so silent.

Paths curved around the grounds, and benches dotted the landscape here and there, but on this late-March day no one was strolling or sitting outdoors. There was still leftover snow not yet
melted, and the air was chilly. Father had wrapped a blanket around me and made me wear my mittens.

He tied the horses to the post in front of the building and told me he would not be long. If my feet got cold, he said, I should climb down and walk briskly until they warmed up. One good quick walk up and down the driveway, stamping hard with each step, would be a good treatment for cold feet. "Doctor Thatcher's prescription," he said to me, laughing.

Then he went up the granite steps, pulled the bell cord at the front door, which opened for him, and went inside.

I talked a bit to Jed and Dahlia, and I could see their ears flick back and forth, so I knew they were listening. Then I opened my library book and found the marker to show me where I had left off. It was a book I liked,
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,
but it was hard to turn the pages with my mittens on, and too cold to take them off. I couldn't concentrate and tried reading aloud. Chapter 6, where the little Wiggs girls have their hair ironed on the ironing board, was very funny; I had read it once already, and it made me laugh, so I read that part again, to the horses.

But it didn't seem very funny a second time. The horses didn't listen, and my feet were cold, so finally I set the book aside and climbed down from
the buggy to follow Dr. Thatcher's prescription.

Stamp, stamp, stamp. I marched like a soldier, and the man in the gatehouse came to his door to look at me curiously, then disappeared again inside the small building's warmth. I followed the edges of the building's shadow as it fell across the ground. The roof outline had sharp turnings where chimneys extended high into the air; and on this chilly day there was smoke coming from them, which made a wavery flicker on the snow. I followed the chimney outlines on my march, turning corners sharply as I knew soldiers did.

Once around the whole outline with all its turnings, and my feet had warmed, just as Father had said. I marched down the side wall back toward where the buggy was waiting. Then, through the marching song that I was humming half-aloud, I heard a scream. It sounded like a woman, but it was hard to tell.

The gateman did not put his head out again, though I knew he must have heard it.

The person screamed a second time, and then a third. It seemed to come from high up, from one of the upper floors. The windows were all tightly closed, and I could see bars across them. But the sound pierced the outside air as if it had come straight through the thick stone walls of the Asylum. The horses tossed their heads and snorted, and I stood by them and patted their noses and
told them not to be frightened. But I was frightened myself.

I thought to run up the front steps, where my father had gone, and to pull the bell cord as he had done, so that someone would come and let me go inside, where he was. But inside was the scream, as well, and I did not want to be nearer to it. I stood by the horses, stamping my feet still from habit, and did not know what to do.

Then the door opened, and my father came back to me. Now everything was silent again. Father was carrying his medical bag as he always did, and when he saw that I was stamping my feet, he smiled at me and said I was a good patient to follow his directions.

"I heard a sound, Father," I told him when we were safely trotting on the road, outside of the iron gate and the stone pillar with its terrible carved word.

"A sound?"

"Somebody screaming. I could hear it right through the walls."

"Yes," he said. "It was a woman. I didn't know that the sound would go right outside. I'm sorry, Katy, that it frightened you. Sometimes the Asylum patients feel a need to scream. I don't know why."

"Is someone hurting them?"

"No, no. They're well cared for. They just seem
to be hurting inside their own heads."

"Can't you fix them? Isn't that why you came?"

He shook his head. "They called me because one of them had a bad stomachache. I can fix
that,
Katy. I've fixed tummyaches for you, haven't I, often enough?"

I nodded. "But the other can't be fixed? The inside-the-head part? The screaming part?"

"No. That can't be fixed."

"Do they
all
scream?"

Father held the reins in one hand and put his other arm around me. "You know, Katydid, there are one hundred and twenty-two patients in the Asylum right now. If they all screamed, we would hear it all the way on Orchard Street. It would blow our roof right off."

I knew he was trying to make me laugh. I didn't, though.

"Some of them never make a sound. They don't even move, those silent ones. They sit in the same position and stare into space, some of them for years," Father said. "Some walk back and forth, back and forth. One dances, all alone. Others sing, or talk."

"Or scream?"

"Or sometimes scream."

"Can't you give them medicine?" He sighed. "You know a strange thing, Katy? Sometimes they are better if they have a high
fever. So some doctors are trying to figure out ways to push their temperature up, as if they had malaria, or pneumonia. They've tried giving them sulphur and oil. But I think it's too dangerous. I think there must be another way."

I realized that he was talking to me as if I were grown up.

"I want you to find the way," I said. "I want you to fix those people."

"Someone will, one day," he said. "Maybe not me. But someone."

He jiggled the reins to hurry the horses. Behind us, the Asylum grew small in the distance. I tried to think of another sound to bury the memory of the scream.
Shoooda shoooda shoooda
came to my mind. I rubbed my mittened hands in circles on my coat and thought of Jacob.

Gram arrived from Cincinnati by train. She came every summer but this time it was earlier than usual; this time she came in April because of the baby. I had helped Peggy as she cleaned the big spare bedroom, the one with the pink-flowered wallpaper, that Gram always used on her visits. We laid the freshly starched and ironed bureau scarf on top of the tall bureau, and we set out the silver brush-and-comb set that Mother usually kept packed away in a drawer.

Miss Abbott had even put a new blue satin binding on the blanket for Gram's bed. I watched as
Peggy smoothed the crocheted coverlet over the blanket, and then we took a small pillow filled with pine needles and set it atop, for the lovely smell.

The curtains were freshly washed and starched and ironed. Naomi had baked an orange cake, and the house smelled of it. The brass knocker on the front door was polished. Everything seemed new and shiny, and it was in part, of course, for Gram, because she hadn't visited in a long time.

But I knew it was also for the baby. The baby would be coming very soon.

I went with Father in the buggy to meet the train, and there she was, wearing a hat and gloves as she stepped down with the conductor reaching up for her hand. The porter helped Father move her bags to the buggy, and I took Gram's hand and skipped beside her after she had distributed coins to all of those who had helped her on her journey. The conductor tipped his hat to her and said that he hoped she had a nice visit with her family.