The Children on the Hill(38)
Iris began to cry, her whole body lurching and rocking with sobs. She made a low moaning howl that was quiet at first but got louder.
“It’s okay,” Eric said. “It’s just a movie.”
She was rocking and howling in earnest now, and people in nearby cars were starting to look.
They were not supposed to be noticed. They were supposed to slip in and out of the movie like shadows. Three kids no one saw.
Vi put her arm around Iris, said, “Come on, shhh, it’s okay. Let’s go home. We’ll go home, it’s okay.”
Iris didn’t answer, just kept crying.
A man stepped toward them, a little unsteady. Vi couldn’t see his face because he was backlit by the screen playing the intermission clip with dancing popcorn and candy bars, by the bright floodlights that had come on around the snack bar.
“Your friend okay?” he asked. Vi could smell the beer on him.
“Yeah, she’s my sister. She’s fine. Just scared. Never seen a monster movie before,” Vi said.
Vi got on one side of her, Eric on the other, and they walked her back to the fence, murmuring comforting words, and slipped through. The credits rolled behind them, and people headed for the snack bar and playground for intermission.
The man called out, “Hey, where are you going?” He took a few staggering steps toward the fence, and put his hands on the links.
Vi’s heart was pounding as they got on their bikes and pedaled hard away from the drive-in, from the man still standing at the fence, watching them.
They pedaled hard and fast until they were on the dirt road, and then they had to get off and push, because the hill was too steep and Vi couldn’t do it with Iris on the seat of her bike.
Eric could have kept riding, but he dismounted too and walked alongside the girls, pushing his bike.
“It was a sad ending, wasn’t it?” Vi said to Iris as they trudged uphill.
Iris had stopped crying and howling.
“I’m sorry,” Vi said. “We should have warned you.”
“They burned up,” Iris said.
“That’s how it is in monster movies,” Eric explained. “The monster always dies.”
“Why?” Iris asked.
Vi wasn’t sure how to answer.
“Because they don’t belong,” Eric said, voice low.
And Iris started to cry again, not great howling sobs, but quietly, like a puppy snuffling. “It isn’t fair,” she said.
Vi held the handlebar of her bike with her right hand, and reached out for Iris’s hand with her left. Iris let her take it, and they walked like that in silence, all the way up the hill, the moonlight behind them stretching out their shadows, turning them all into monsters.
The Helping Hand of God: The True Story of the Hillside Inn By Julia Tetreault, Dark Passages Press, 1980
Helen Hildreth was married while still finishing her surgical residency. Her husband, John Patterson, was a young chemist whom she’d met in a lecture hall. After finishing his dissertation and completing his doctorate at the University of Vermont, he was offered a job at a pharmaceutical company in Philadelphia. The couple moved, and Helen found a position at Philadelphia General Hospital. She was the only female surgeon at the hospital—a groundbreaking role at the time.
There’s a photo of the two of them at a fund-raising dinner for the hospital, taken in 1934. They’re holding hands and he’s leaning into her, as if he’s just whispered something into her ear. She’s looking back at him with a smile that radiates trust and affection. I don’t know if love can be felt from a photograph taken almost fifty years ago, but it is impossible to look at this image and not conclude that Helen and John were very much in love.
A year and a half into their marriage, Helen gave birth to twins, two girls. Although by all accounts her pregnancy was unremarkable, tragically they were both stillborn, and doctors were unable to resuscitate them.
John was a thin man with a history of asthma who tired easily. After the loss of the twins, he seemed to have trouble getting out of bed.
His breathing worsened, and he began coughing blood.
Tuberculosis was suspected, but the cause was mitral valve stenosis, a narrowing of the mitral valve to the heart, likely from scarlet fever when he was a boy. His heart was enlarged and profoundly damaged by the time the diagnosis was made.
He was, quite literally, going to die of a broken heart.
He was dead within six months, making Helen a widow at thirty. According to letters written to her father, she blamed herself for the deaths of both of her daughters, and even more so for John’s death. “How could any competent physician miss such a diagnosis in someone with whom I spent so many hours, so many days?” she wrote. “There’s no excuse.”
She sold their house, gave notice at Philadelphia General, and spent the next ten months traveling in South America.
There are few surviving letters or journals from that time, but I was able to piece together that she spent the majority of her time in Peru and Colombia studying medicinal plants and shamanism. Though a disbeliever in the spirit world and all things supernatural, Helen took a keen interest in the role psychoactive plants played in healing the sick. The trip also, one would assume, sparked her interest in the role the mind and psyche played in overall health.
She returned to the States a changed person. She went back to using her maiden name and returned home to Vermont, where she’d grown up and attended medical school. She left surgery behind and began a residency in psychiatry.