A-Splendid-Ruin(61)

When they took me back to the ward, I could no longer feel any part of myself. They gave me a draught of chloral, which went to work quickly on my cramping, empty stomach. O’Rourke said, “Be good now, Kimble,” and I clutched those words as tightly as I could. Be good. Be good. Yes, I would be very, very good.





I did whatever was asked of me without argument. The days ran into each other. The cursed light burned all night long, but sleep could not come soon enough for me, and I welcomed the chloral, though I did not take it in the daytime because I was too afraid. I saw what the bored lunatics did to the women in drugged stupors. Picking at their hair, slapping them in a game of Who can slap them hard enough to make them shout? The nurses standing guard were lazy and pretended to be oblivious, but they took notes constantly, and when they were roused from their inertia, they had heavy hands and many weapons at their disposal. Long fingernails, leather straps, slaps. The corners of the metal beds were sharp. All of us had bruises.

The nurses rotated shifts throughout the wards, and so we knew them all, and we knew who were the kinder ones. Gould, Findley. O’Rourke sometimes, though none of them could be relied upon when Costa was there. After the asylum matron, Mrs. Donaghan, Costa was next in charge. Her poison infected them all to one degree or another, but the attitudes of the nurses originated from a more base instinct. In their eyes, we’d lost our humanity along with our minds. Those of us who could not be cajoled, corralled, or otherwise controlled were seen as animals. Whatever compassion the nurses once had was stripped away by the sheer relentlessness of our insanity.

Only ten days ago, I’d been living in luxury. My sheets had been soft and scented. My clothes fine, perfectly fitted. The food of the best quality. But it had all been a lie. Everything financed in anticipation of my inheritance, which was no doubt in the hands of my relatives now. I wondered if they’d already replaced the things they’d sold—the hall mirror, the angel worshipped by all its little fawns. Was my money even now furnishing all those empty rooms? I tried not to think of it. It only made everything worse.

I fell into the schedule dictated by the relentless and despised asylum bells. Each time I met with Dr. Scopes or Dr. Madison, I tried to act completely sane, but the strain made me seem otherwise, and I knew the doctors saw that too. It seemed a conundrum without a solution. I tried to be polite and pleasant, to not constantly harp on my family’s perfidy, because each time I did, the doctors only sighed and muttered variations of You must put such thoughts from your head. Each time, I believed the truth must matter. Each time, I left more desperate than before. Each time, my desperation threatened to drown me when they called a nurse to escort me back to the stinking ward.

Then, one morning at breakfast, Mrs. Donaghan, whom I hadn’t seen since I arrived, came to where I huddled over the grayest oatmeal imaginable—I had no idea how they got it such a foul color. “It’s a good day for you, Miss Kimble. You’ve been assigned.”

“Assigned to what?” I asked.

“To your regular ward. Come with me.”

I had thought the dormitory was my regular ward, but it was hard to imagine that any place could be worse, and so I did not argue. I followed Mrs. Donaghan up another flight of stairs to the third floor, another large room, but this time with only six beds. The nurse’s table at the door was unoccupied. The room still smelled of unwashed bodies—mine included; I had not bathed since the horror with the hoses—but it wasn’t so bad as the other. The curtains at the windows were open, allowing sunlight to spill across a scratched and worn wooden floor, illuminating dust and stray hairs. The view was still the brick wall, but here the top of the wall boasted a cast-iron railing with dark arrows pointing up to a gray sky. The hearth was guarded by a needlepointed fire screen of meticulously detailed pansies bursting with color. My hungry eyes devoured it.

The room was empty.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“This will be your bed.” Mrs. Donaghan took me to one against the far wall.

I looked cautiously around. Unlike the other ward, here there were bits of personality. Above one bed was pinned a collage of calling cards, above another a woven heart bedecked with dried flowers. Each had a rag rug beside it. Books and magazines were stacked neatly on tables.

“The schedule will be a bit different here,” Mrs. Donaghan informed me crisply. “Dr. Madison believes that some work will be beneficial to you.”

“Work,” I echoed, uncertain.

“It’s quite an honor, you know. It shows that he trusts you to be a good girl.”

I thought of what awaited me if I wasn’t. “I am good.”

Mrs. Donaghan smiled. “Now come with me.”

I followed her downstairs, to the laundry room I had glimpsed on my arrival. When Mrs. Donaghan opened the door, clouds of choking carbolic steam boiled out. Inside were large kettles and wringers, sweating women stirring and lifting and ironing.

I am good, I told myself, and I kept saying it when Mrs. Donaghan introduced me to the head laundress, and told me I was to stay here in this hot, wet place with the sting of soap in my nose, red faced and watery eyed as all the others. The laundress looked me up and down and harrumphed. “You look strong enough, and it don’t take much thinkin’.”

She gave me a full-length apron and a kerchief to tie back my hair. Then she set me to shaking out sheets and pillowcases, undergarments, skirts, and nightgowns to hang for drying. It was mindless, and though my shoulders and my back soon began to ache, it was better than the boredom and fear of the ward.