The Cure for Dreaming(73)

THE LAMP-LIT HOSPITAL ON DARK AND HILLY CORNELL Street appeared to me as a regular brick-and-stone medical building—not a mausoleum or an undertaker’s parlor or anything else more funereal than an actual hospital. All the same, a helpless sense of panic gripped my chest when I jumped out of the carriage below the five-story structure. I felt I’d forgotten something, or I’d lost something, and my mind kept racing back to shaking Henry’s heavy shoulders as he lay there on the cold parquet floor. If only I’d moved a little faster to reach him, rustled him a little harder. If only I could have kept him from slipping out of reach.

I put my arm around Genevieve, and we climbed the steps to the hospital’s tall doorway beneath an archway of bricks, with Father following us.

Inside the lobby—a cold, wood-paneled room I remembered from my grandmother’s battle with pneumonia—the Eiderling, Underhill, and Yves ladies paced across a worn beige rug with their hands on their hips. The floral garden of their perfumes melded into the sticky smells of sweet medicine.

A nurse in a small white cap and an apron-covered dress peeked up from the front desk. “May I help you?”

Genevieve and I walked over to her, still attached to each other.

“You just admitted this girl’s brother, Henry Rhodes,” I said. “Or . . . Henri Reverie, as these ladies might have called him.”

“They didn’t call him anything.” The nurse craned her neck toward the pacing collection of ladies in ball gowns. “What is wrong with their voices?”

“This is all the result of a hypnotism show gone terribly wrong.”

“They’re hypnotized?”

“How is Henry?” asked Genevieve. “May we see him?”

The nurse shook her head. “Visiting hours already ended, I’m afraid.”

“Is he alive?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know how he is. I only filled out his paperwork . . . or what I could of it.” She glanced at the mute women again. “You’ll need to wait here in the lobby, and the doctors will speak to his sister when they have information to give.”

I turned and bumped straight into Father’s chest.

“Oh, I didn’t know you were there . . .”

“I don’t want to stay here with these . . . women,” he said under his breath with a sharp eye on Mrs. Underhill. “They’re probably plotting a way to murder me right now. We’re going home.”

“I can’t.”

“We took care of Miss Reverie. Now it’s time for you to leave.” He took me by the hand and jerked me away from Genevieve.

“Wait! I need to fix all the messes I’ve made.”

He hauled me toward the door.

“Father, please”—I pushed his fingers off mine—“stop! I need to take responsibility—”

“Do not test me any further tonight,” he said through gritted teeth, leaning toward me, “or I swear, I’ll—”

“You’ll what? What more can you possibly do?”

“Don’t you dare complain again about my choice to help you.”

“You hired someone to make me sick and helpless.”

“I spared the rod and spoiled the child, is what I did.”

“I’m ‘A Responsible Woman,’” I said, and the words echoed across the hospital’s walls and stopped the silenced ladies from pacing. “I’m the person who wrote that letter to Judge Acklen in Saturday’s paper, and I’m more of a suffragist now than when you first hired Henry to control me. You struck a match and lit a fire.”

Father’s chin quivered. “Well . . .” He fumbled for his handkerchief in his coat pocket. “It’s a damned good thing Mr. Reverie—or Rhodes, or whatever the hell his name is—it’s a damned good thing he might already be dead, because I would love more than anything to kill him right now.”

“No, you did this to me. You made me want to fight. And I bet you did this to Mother, too.”

“Women belong—”

I covered my ears. “I don’t want to hear any more of your theories about women. I want you to go home and live by yourself, because I’m done living with you and cooking for you and worrying about you drinking away your misery. If Henry is gone, then I’m taking Genevieve to San Francisco. If he’s able to take her himself, then I’m traveling to New York. My bags are already packed.”

“Olivia—”

“All is well.” I closed my eyes and kept my hands over my ears.

Father didn’t respond. When I raised my lashes, all I saw was an eight-year-old boy in a long evening coat and an oversized silk hat. He backed toward the hospital’s front entrance in shoes too big for his feet, his lips sputtering to find something more to say.

A tear slid down my cheek to my mouth.

“You and your mother deserve each other,” said the boy, and he slipped out the door—his most painful extraction yet.





round nine o’clock at night, Mr. Underhill, John, and two waiters from the party lugged in baskets full of leftover food. Mrs. Underhill greeted them with flailing arms and an attack of noiseless mouthed words.

“I don’t know what you’re saying, Margaret.” Mr. Underhill plunked down a bottle of wine on a small lobby table and squinted at his wife’s lips. “I know you’re upset we all laughed, but it was funny at the moment, dear.”