The Children on the Hill(7)
“I don’t think I feel a heartbeat,” Eric said.
Vi nodded, carefully placed her hands on the sides of its chest.
“Is he dead?”
“Maybe not forever,” Vi said. The rabbit was warm under her hands. She could feel it breathing, twitching a little. But she wanted Eric to believe. To believe that she had the power to save it. “We can bring him back.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure he’s dead?” Eric asked, rocking back and forth, looking smaller than ever.
“Of course I’m sure,” Vi snapped. “Now, stand back.”
He bit his lip and started to cry again. She looked at him, guilt washing over her. How could she be so cruel? What kind of sister was she?
She turned back to the rabbit and placed the wires attached to the battery on either side of its chest.
“Wake up,” she said. “Come back to us.”
As if on cue, the rabbit lifted its head, gave a little hop forward.
“It’s alive,” Vi said.
Eric gave a squeal of delight and threw his arms around her, hugging her tight. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew you could do it.”
The front door opened with a creak and a thump.
Then the sound of footsteps in the front hall, coming their way.
“Old Mac,” Eric whispered, eyes wide and frantic.
The Helping Hand of God: The True Story of the Hillside Inn By Julia Tetreault, Dark Passages Press, 1980
In the 1970s, the Hillside Inn was widely considered one of the best private psychiatric institutions in New England.
Located on fifty acres atop a forested hill in the small town of Fayeville, Vermont, it housed no more than twenty patients at a time in an environment more like a country estate than a hospital.
The grounds of the Hillside Inn held five buildings. The director’s residence was a white wooden Greek Revival structure with a large front porch supported by carved wooden columns. The stables, which hadn’t held horses for fifty years, had been renovated into a large arts and crafts area for the patients, complete with a pottery studio and kiln. Next to the stables was the freshly painted red barn, home to maintenance and groundskeeping equipment, as well as the van the Inn used to transport residents on therapeutic field trips. The carriage house had been converted to an apartment where the office manager lived. And then there was the Inn itself: a hulking two-story building of yellow brick with large shuttered windows and a steeply angled gray slate roof. South of the Inn, a large garden allowed patients to work outside in good weather, helping grow a significant portion of the produce used in the dining room. The staff believed strongly in the curative powers of fresh air, sunshine, and a good day’s work.
The Inn was built in 1863 as a hospital for Civil War soldiers being shipped home from field hospitals with missing limbs, infections, typhoid fever. In the early 1900s, it had served as a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients where the afflicted were treated with rest and fresh Vermont air. The grounds were beautifully landscaped. The building itself was on the National Register of Historic Places.
With a holistic, humanistic approach, the Inn helped patients “discover who they truly were, heal all parts of themselves, and realize their true human potential” through a carefully curated program of individual therapy, group therapy, meditation, arts and crafts, exercise, music, and gardening. Patients working in the pottery studio produced pieces (mugs, bowls, plates, and vases) sold in local craft galleries and markets. Pottery bearing the Inn’s signature mossy-green glaze and the Hillside Inn stamp at the bottom can be found in homes all over New England and is prized by collectors.
The Inn treated the wealthy, but also took in those who could not pay, as well as patients deemed “lost causes” at other facilities. Its therapeutic approach, thought of as radical at the time, seemed to work. The majority of patients who stayed at the Inn not only improved, but learned skills that helped them thrive in the outside world.
Doctors and directors from other facilities all over the country visited the Hillside Inn to see it for themselves. Articles were written on the Inn’s innovative approach and rate of success.
To outsiders, the staff at the Inn were pioneers. It was a place of miracles, giving hope to those who had long ago lost it.
The woman behind these miracles was the Inn’s director, Dr. Helen Hildreth. Dr. Hildreth had been at the Inn for nearly thirty years and had been director for fifteen. Short in stature and well past the age of traditional retirement by the late 1970s, she was a true pioneer in the field of psychiatry.
“We must always remember,” she wrote in an article for the American Journal of Psychiatry, “that we are not treating the illness. We are treating the individual. It is our role, as doctors, to see beyond the symptoms and view our patients holistically. Above all else, we must ask ourselves, ‘What is this individual’s greatest potential, and how can I help him or her achieve it?’?”
Lizzy
August 19, 2019
FOUR A.M. AND I sprang up to a sitting position in bed, the sheets damp with sweat, listening to the noises of the swamp. Something had woken me. I’d caught the tail end of a strange sound—a wailing sort of groan—that jerked me away from sleep, foggy-headed and unsure what was real and what was still dream.
I’d had another nightmare. Another dream about her.