Blue Asylum (11 page)

“Oh, she is. She immediately signed the form requesting the water treatment for me as well. Then she limped off to get her ankle tended to. I saw one of the nurses tear the form into little pieces and put it in her pocket.”

An attendant appeared at the table.

“Doctor Cowell wants to see you in his office immediately,” she told Iris.

“But I haven’t had my breakfast.”

“Let the poor woman eat!” Lydia protested. “Think of all she’s been through!”

“Now, you calm down, Mrs. Truman,” said the attendant. “You are in enough trouble already. We’ll save breakfast for her.”

Iris rose from the table. As she started to follow the attendant, Lydia reached up and seized her wrist.

“Soul light,” she whispered.

“Soul light?”

“I know the fellow you play chess with likes to think of blue things to calm himself. Soul light is blue.”

***

The doctor seemed agitated. He did not offer her a seat in the usual manner but paced about the room. “Your continued defiance concerns me,” he began. “It is natural to be mistrusting, at first, of a different view besides your own—”

“You tortured me with freezing water, to the point of unconsciousness!” Iris cried. “Should I be grateful?”

“Stop saying that word! It was not torture!” He sat down in his chair and pressed his fingertips to his head. When he let his hands drop his expression had calmed. “Why are you standing?” he asked in a quieter tone. “Sit. Sit.”

She obeyed. The light was still muted outside the window, as were the cries of gulls. And the sky, a slate blue devoid of clouds.

He opened a file on his desk and began to read. “You absconded with your husband’s property, which led to a loss of many thousand dollars’ worth of—”

“People.”

“Slaves.”

“They—we—did not belong to him.”

He took off his glasses and began to clean them. “It is not my position or responsibility to judge the laws of a society. I am against slavery personally, but that has no bearing here. Let me ask you something. If you were so against slavery, did you not think of more appropriate venues to have your voice heard?”

“I am a woman, Doctor. I do not have a voice.”

He scrubbed at something on his glasses. Some spot that seemed to vex him. “Do you know the definition of insanity?” He started to put on his glasses, then rested them on the desk. He really did look weary. Exhausted, in fact. “It is a state of mind in which an excess of feeling—a hysteria if you will—causes a man or woman to fall out of step with their roles, their purpose, because without that purpose all of us are diminished. Sanity is the degree by which you serve your society, your community, and your household. I am of the opinion that with the right medicines, structure, counsel, and guidance, one can arrive upon, eventually, a cure. And a cure, in every sense, both is proved by and results in a reintegration.”

“You sought my punishment yesterday, not my cure.”

“I did not! My reasons were entirely benign!” He seemed desperate to be believed. “What I do is based not upon my whims, but on my theory. A theory that has gained much attention and admiration in your country . . .” His expression suddenly brightened. “I’ll show you!”

He removed a small key from the pocket of his vest and unlocked the middle drawer of his desk. He withdrew a measure of parchment paper, covered with print and held together by a metal clasp. “This is the paper I wrote on the relationship between female hysteria and the rise of the suffrage movement. There is a direct correlation between areas in the country of outspoken feminine resistance to social norms and the incidence of institutionalization.” He held up the manuscript. “This is my only copy, and I have never, ever allowed a patient to even glimpse it before. But I am entrusting it to you and all I ask is that you read it with an open mind.” He handed it to her. “I know there will be some words and phrases with which you will not be familiar and I will be glad to—”

She leaped from her chair and threw the paper out of the window. Like a white bird with dirty wings, it spiraled toward the courtyard as the doctor let out a sharp cry and rushed from the room.

He never touched the rail. He took the stairs two at a time and hurtled through the heavy doors of the asylum, whipping his head from right to left.

“Where is it?” he shouted.

“Where is what?” asked a nearby patient, an old man with a bent back and powder-blue eyes.

“My paper!”

“My paper!” shouted the old man. “My paper my paper my paper my paper!”

“Hush! It’s important!”

“HUSH! IT’S IMPORTANT!”

Just then the doctor saw his paper, his prize, his life. It had fallen into the small hands of Lydia Helms Truman, who was already nibbling delicately at a corner.

“No!” said the doctor, running toward her, his arms outstretched. “NO NO NO!”

Two days later there came a hard rain. It blew in from the east in the afternoon and blanketed the island with marble-size water drops, pelting the sand, filling up the shells that had washed face-up toward the sun, driving the birds to the cover of the trees and the patients into the shelter of the asylum, bending the shrubs in the courtyard, and soaking a row of sheets on a line. A nervous cleaning woman ran out to get them, mumbling in fear as lightning creased the sky. She jerked the sheets down fast and ran back into the building, her shoes squishing in the wet sand. The thunder sounded like the bark of a thousand night herons. The rain pinged upon the slate roof; the wind tore through the leaves of the sabal palms, flattened the sea oats, and tangled up the vines of the morning glories.

By dusk the storm had passed, and the sun set orange and red in the peaceful sky. As night fell, frogs began to sing from every corner of the island. Not the least gust of wind could be found anywhere, and the moon’s edges were crisp and hot.

Iris’s windowsill remained wet. Water from the storm had run down the walls and pooled upon the marble floor, and the light from the half-moon followed down the walls to the pool of water and turned it silver on the top. Through the bars could be heard the far-off singing frogs and a closer, hushing sound. The ocean waves lapping at the shore. The storm had left the perfect tableau for a dream. Shiny and damp and wet with color. Iris slept on her cottage bed, on her side, her hands taking a prayer position, fingers twining, knees drawn up, the sheet pulled up to reveal her bare feet, dreaming of a white hen sitting in the middle of a pasture. It was a lazy creature, groggy in dream-light. Its lack of ambition felt peaceful to Iris and lulled her farther into sleep. She turned on the bed, scratching her bare leg with one bare toe.

A scraping sound interrupted the dream. The hen opened one eye, annoyed, and so did Iris. Another sound, and Iris’s other eye came open.

Wendell stood at the window, drawing a stick back and forth across the bars. Iris threw off her covers and fumbled for her robe. She rubbed her eyes sleepily as she approached the bars.

“Stop that.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t you sleep?”

He shrugged.

“I was having a perfectly ordinary dream and now those annoying frogs will keep me awake all night.”

He let the stick fall from his hand. “I heard something today. Something one nurse said to another, about the reason you are here.”

“I’m sure those nurses gossip all day about us.”

“Well, is it true?”

“Is what true?”

He put his face against the bars and lowered his voice as though someone might hear. A passing nurse, a calling frog.

“That you ran away with the slaves.”

The frogs were deafening now, as though the boy’s question had left them agitated. The bars were pressed so hard against his face they must, at this very moment, be leaving impressions in his skin. He stood motionless, waiting, as Iris considered her answer. This boy who seemed claimed by no one, and in this sense could be anyone’s son, perhaps had a mind clear enough to listen to her without judgment. He knew the asylum and, no doubt, the woods beyond it. Knew when the guards fell asleep on the job. Knew where the keys were kept.

“Yes. It’s true.”

“But why?”

“I’ll tell you the whole story. Not tonight, but soon, when I feel stronger. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

Wendell looked somber. His gaze went off somewhere, found something or someone. His fingers tightened on the bars. Slowly, he nodded.

The lamb tottered down the gangplank one day in early June, led by a rope. Halfway to the dock he planted his hooves and stood blinking in the morning light. From his fishing place by Wendell, the chef turned and let out a low whistle.

“They did it,” he murmured, his face reverent. “They got the lamb. Little fellow’s come all the way from Naples. Not Naples, Italy. Naples, Florida.”

Wendell studied the little creature. “What’s it for?”

“What do you mean, what’s it for?” the chef snorted. “It’s for lamb stew. Although that’s not much lamb to go around, is it?”

“It’s just a baby,” said Wendell.

“Ah, yes,” said the chef. “Just a baby.”

The lamb was imprisoned in an empty pigpen in the back, by the gardens, while the rumors of lamb stew swept the asylum. Later in the afternoon, Wendell went out to visit him. He was all alone, sleeping on the ground, which still stank of the excrement of pigs. Wendell crouched low, hooking his fingers on the wire of the fence and staring at the doomed creature. He whistled softly and the lamb woke up. Wendell continued whistling until he rose to his little feet and wobbled over to him. His eyes were dark brown, eyebrows expressive, white lashes longer than any woman’s. He had a slight, natural smile passed on from generations of pleasant-featured sheep. He was curious and trusting and had a lamblike ignorance of his impending fate. Wendell pressed his face to the mesh of the wire and the lamb touched his nose with his own.

Wendell felt a huff of his warm breath.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, the chef had pulled down an old cookbook from the cabinet and had it open on the table. His eyes eagerly scanned the list of ingredients. It was all coming back to him now. He would make a salad too, using the soft inner leaves from the yucca plant. And didn’t he have some dried basil somewhere? He went about gathering the ingredients, whistling a song he’d learned from one of the Cuban fishermen who traded at the docks. Midafternoon he found his ax and sharpened the blade against a block of limestone, still whistling. He tested the blade along his thumb until he winced and then smiled. A crease in his thumb filled up with a hairline sliver of blood. He put on an apron and went out to the lamb’s pen with his ax.

He stopped. No. It could not be. The sweet saliva teasing his mouth all day suddenly evaporated.

The gate to the pen hung open.

The lamb was gone.

He stood there, mouth agape, the ax hanging useless by his side. This could not be. Pride. Joy. Anticipation. The chef had perfectly seasoned himself for dinner that night and he would not be denied. He ran back, sounding the alarm, and a hasty search party was convened, the chef and some of the kitchen staff and the gardeners and a few of the orderlies. They stampeded through the asylum grounds and into the forest, beating at the undergrowth with sticks, slapping at bugs, wary of crocodiles and snakes. Some of them called the lamb as if he were a dog, their voices high and desperate.

“Go with them,” Mary told the doctor.

“No, I’m not going to go stomping around in those woods and getting bites all over me. I’m a doctor. I have patients waiting for me.”

“I want that lamb!”

“They’ll find the lamb, Mary!”

Word spread around the asylum that the lamb was missing, and those who could understand the news did, and felt sorrow over the loss of the special dinner that would have made this night different from the others. Some of them had laid out their best clothes for dinner. Clothes they’d worn back in Charleston, or Boston, or Maine. Back when they were a husband or a father or a wife or a daughter or a dentist or a hunter or whatever they were before they were lunatics. The presence of the lamb had awakened their names. Now that the lamb was gone, that part of them was gone too. They went to their windows, stared at the sea. Felt themselves diminish back into what they had become.

Iris took her good dress and put it back in her trunk. It was trimmed with ribbon, too special to wear just any night in an insane asylum, but fairly appropriate for this night of lamb stew, and now because the lamb was missing, Ambrose would not be able to see her in that dress. She had wanted so badly to watch him look at her.

Ambrose himself had carefully shaved, or rather had begged an orderly to shave him, for he was still not allowed to handle a razor himself. Later he had asked the patient next door, a bit of a dandy, to borrow some bay rum to put in his hair. He had planned to wear his best shirt to dinner that night because the lamb had given him permission to look his very best for Iris. Now he rubbed his face and smelled the cool odor of bay rum filling up the room. The light was fading.

Lydia Helms Truman felt her eyes moistening. She had been looking forward to the lamb stew and was not planning to swallow it in the way she did buttons and marbles and pebbles and rings and coins, with a quick gulp and an arch of her throat. No, she had planned on savoring that lamb meat, hoarding it with the tongue before finally surrendering it to the gullet. Closing her eyes, taking her time. Spoonful by spoonful. Remembering lamb dinners around the table with her husband and children. Back when she belonged in that house. There, with her family. The taste of lamb had inextricably linked itself to her place at the table. Now, both were lost. She sighed, dabbed at her eyes delicately with a handkerchief, and looked around for something smooth and small.

The old woman whose husband was clear as day to her but invisible to others broke the news to him, taking his warm hand and explaining that though they would not have lamb for dinner that night, they still had each other. And though disappointed at first, he had nodded in agreement. They still had each other, and wasn’t their companionship as savory and spicy as the lamb would have been? And wasn’t their love a perpetual lamb that blinked itself awake each day? She had laughed and said, “You have a way with words, my love,” and had kissed his cheek and then gave him a lingering kiss on the lips. His hand moved up her back.