As Bright as Heaven(73)
Alex is a few feet away from them, absently kicking a little red ball on the carpet, obviously bored. He will see me in a moment or two standing just beyond the open doors. When he does, he will run to me and beg for us to go now that Mr. Towlerton is here. Palmer will turn then and smile at me, and Willa will stop and pout. I’ll ask her if she wants to join us, and the frown will slip off her face as if it’s made of water.
But I wait for Alex to catch that glimpse of me. I want Willa to continue with “Moonlight and Roses” a few seconds more. I want to hear her sing how the smile of a long-ago love can still haunt your dreams.
CHAPTER 48
Evelyn
“I’m so very sorry,” Dr. Bellfield says, kindly but in a way that suggests he’s said this before to other people. He no doubt has.
The man to whom he speaks, Conrad Reese, slowly turns his head to look out the window. His wife, Sybil, only three years older than me, is sitting on a chaise in the garden just on the other side of the glass, unaware of the high fence fifty yards away, or that she’s wearing a bathrobe in the noonday sun, or that she’s at Fairview Hospital for the Insane rather than at home. The beauty of her physical body masks the invisible disease that has wrapped itself around her mind.
Sybil is Dr. Bellfield’s patient, but the diagnosis I make as a second-year resident, that she suffers from dementia praecox, a psychotic disorder that only gets worse, was confirmed by him. Her symptoms supported no other conclusion. Many months of erratic behavior, followed by delusions and hallucinations, followed by paranoia, followed by her current near-catatonic state, point to no other finding. I’ve seen this terrible malady before, not just in the pages of my textbooks but here at the asylum, where I’ve been working and studying as part of my residency.
The progression of Sybil’s illness is the only constant in her life. Her mind is like an onion whose layers are peeling off all by themselves. And just like there is no way to reattach an onion’s layers, there is no way to stop Sybil Reese from mentally disappearing.
This has been the most sobering fact I’ve learned in my residency. The mind, like any other part of the body, has crippling limitations.
“Is there nothing else you can try?” Conrad Reese says, now looking from Dr. Bellfield to me to the doctor again.
Dr. Bellfield reiterates that we’ve utilized every remedy we know: bathing therapies, sleep cures, barbiturates, hypnotics, alkaloids. No cure exists at present for dementia praecox. Sybil Reese is going mad, and there is no stopping it. Ours is the third hospital he has tried in his search to cure his wife.
“I’d like to see her,” Mr. Reese says a moment later, and there is something in his voice and manner that tells me he already knew that his wife would never return to him. I think maybe he has known this for a while but didn’t want to admit it.
Dr. Bellfield starts to clear his throat, preparing, no doubt, to tell Mr. Reese that his wife has stopped communicating. Sybil speaks to no one now, makes eye contact with no one, recognizes no one. But her husband has asked to see her, not have a conversation with her.
“Of course,” I tell him. “I can take you to her.”
Dr. Bellfield closes his mouth and nods in acquiescence.
I lead Mr. Reese out of the building and into the early-September sunshine. The lawns on the grounds are still lush, the hydrangeas are still in bloom, and the leaves on the sugar maples are still green. Hard to believe that in a month, everything will look different. And yet the hospital grounds blanketed in snow will be lovely in another way. Our hospital is a haven compared to the other asylum, on the east side of Philadelphia, where the patients are chained like criminals to their disease. There are no lawns or flowering shrubs or happy canaries in cages or interior walls papered in paisley prints. I could never work there. The east-side asylum is not a place in which to get well; it’s a place to be forgotten in. Here at Fairview, every attempt is made to cure. There, the objective is only containment.
There are other patients out on the lawn as we step outside. Most are sitting in chairs or on lounges. Some are strolling about with a nurse by their side. Were it not for the hospital gowns and bathrobes, they would all look like vacationers at a quiet hideaway. As we draw near to Sybil, a girl about Willa’s age—and stretched out on the same kind of chaise as Mr. Reese’s wife—raises her head to look at us. The girl arrived yesterday. A necklace of angry bruises across her throat reveals the method of her suicide attempt. The orderly who sits beside her is there to make sure she does not run headlong into the reflecting pool to drown herself or attempt to scale the wall and die jumping off it. But he is reading to her, I notice. He also looks up as we pass, and I smile at him. He’d likely been told he had to do nothing more than watch the young girl, and yet he’s reading aloud to her. He smiles back.
When we reach Sybil Reese, I lean over and touch her hand, gently. Were I to pull on her arm, she would rise willingly and follow me like a sleepwalker. “Sybil, you have a visitor,” I tell her. “Your husband is here.”
She blinks languidly but does not turn toward him.
Mr. Reese exhales heavily and then sits down on an empty chaise next to his wife. He takes her hand.
“Can she hear me?” he asks.
Medically there is nothing wrong with Sybil Reese’s ears. She can hear. But I know what Conrad Reese really wants to know is, will his wife understand anything he says?