As Bright as Heaven(78)

CHAPTER 51



Evelyn


My days at the asylum are all the same, and yet not the same. The other second-year residents and I sit in on sessions with the patients and meetings with the families; we make rounds with Dr. Bellfield and other doctors; we study the current case records, read the archived files, write reports, send correspondence, and also observe the nurses and orderlies as they go about the daily care of people whose illnesses range from moderate melancholy to full-blown madness. And yet no two patients are exactly alike, even the ones who have the same malady; hence no two days are exactly alike.

I completed my university studies in three years instead of four, and Fairview is close enough to home to hop on a streetcar to get to. When I applied for this residency, Dr. Bellfield was interested in me because I had been the first woman from the university to come his way, and he chose me for my insights into the female brain, as he put it. He keeps me busier than the other residents—there are four others, all male—but I don’t mind. On nights when I’ve stayed past the last streetcar, I sleep on a cot in the doctors’ lounge.

I don’t mind the long hours, nor the added responsibilities Dr. Bellfield sometimes heaps on me. I really do want to find a way to help people like Sybil Reese. It is too late for her, but there will be more like her down the road. And someone must find a way to help people like Sybil. Someone must.

Dr. Bellfield asked me specifically to weigh in on Sybil Reese’s case, but he also asked me a few days after that to peruse the file of that girl who tried to hang herself. He told me after rounds to read the girl’s medical history, analyze her symptoms, visit with her, and recommend to him a course of action that I could adequately defend in front of him and the other doctors.

So a few days after Conrad Reese was given the sad, official news, and after I’d stopped in the solarium to say hello to Sybil—I’d decided I would find the time to say hello to her every day, even if it seems she cannot hear me—I pulled the girl’s file and sat down to read it.

There wasn’t much there. Her name is Ursula Novak. She is fifteen, barely, and apparently has no family. She’d been working as a kitchen maid for a wealthy Philadelphia couple when the housekeeper discovered her in the cellar, swinging by the neck from a rope poorly slung across a floor joist. The butler had cut her down and then telephoned for help. She was still alive. Ursula’s employers had taken pity on her and insisted on paying her medical bills at the hospital and then sending her here instead of the state asylum on the east side—the one that gives me nightmares.

Ursula has no history of hysteria or depression or mental illness. She’d been working for the family without incident since she quit school at fourteen. This attempt on her life had apparently been her first. She was otherwise healthy. Strong lungs, clear skin and eyes, good hearing and sight. She exhibits no tremors or fits, nor does she seem to suffer from delusions or hallucinations or moments of lost time. At the hospital and on her admittance here to Fairview, she had refused to give an answer as to why she had tried to kill herself other than that she was tired of living. When asked whether she would try again if released, she had simply answered, “Probably.” As to next of kin, she had answered, “None.”

That to me was the most telling of Ursula’s symptoms. She’s an orphan. At one time she’d had parents, but now she does not. Her parents are both dead and she is only fifteen. I lost my mother at nearly the same age, so I knew how devastating the loss of one’s mother could be. I still had Papa, though. And my sisters and Alex. Perhaps Ursula had lost her parents in a terrible accident that she’d unfortunately witnessed. Or perhaps they had been victims of the flu and she’d been bearing at an orphanage the awful weight of their absence before taking a job as a kitchen maid.

Whatever the true details were, I believed I had this grain of truth to begin talking with her: that she was alone and sad, and unable to cope any longer with either state of being.

? ? ?



Ursula is sitting in a corner of the women’s dayroom, in a chair by a stretch of windows that runs the length of the back wall. Other patients of various ages are reading or playing cards or resting or wandering aimlessly about in conversations with the voices they hear in their heads. Sybil Reese is sitting at a table with three other women involved in a beading lesson. Beads and a length of string lie before Sybil, but she is staring out the same long set of windows as Ursula, though on the other side of the room.

I walk to an empty chair next to Ursula. As I sit down, she looks up at me. Dark circles rim her deep brown eyes. She looks wan, and I wonder if she is sleeping at all. Or perhaps sleeping too much. Her hair is chocolate brown like her eyes and she is petite and pretty. The bruising on her neck is now a circlet of mottled browns and yellows.

“Hello, Ursula,” I say cheerfully. “May I talk to you for a bit?”

She shrugs and turns her attention back to the window.

“My name is Miss Bright. I am in my residency here. I’ll be a doctor soon enough, though.” I laugh lightly, wanting so very much to ease the somber mood she is projecting.

She looks back at me, slight suspicion in her tired eyes. “What kind of doctor are you?”

“I’m finishing up a course of study in psychiatry.”

“I didn’t know there were lady doctors like that.”

“There are more of us now than there used to be. I think that’s a good thing. Don’t you?”