The Silent Boy

Page 9

He tied the horses to the post in front of the building and told me he would not be long. If my feet got cold, he said, I should climb down and walk briskly until they warmed up. One good quick walk up and down the driveway, stamping hard with each step, would be a good treatment for cold feet. "Doctor Thatcher's prescription," he said to me, laughing.
Then he went up the granite steps, pulled the bell cord at the front door, which opened for him, and went inside.
I talked a bit to Jed and Dahlia, and I could see their ears flick back and forth, so I knew they were listening. Then I opened my library book and found the marker to show me where I had left off. It was a book I liked, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, but it was hard to turn the pages with my mittens on, and too cold to take them off. I couldn't concentrate and tried reading aloud. Chapter 6, where the little Wiggs girls have their hair ironed on the ironing board, was very funny; I had read it once already, and it made me laugh, so I read that part again, to the horses.
But it didn't seem very funny a second time. The horses didn't listen, and my feet were cold, so finally I set the book aside and climbed down from the buggy to follow Dr. Thatcher's prescription.
Stamp, stamp, stamp. I marched like a soldier, and the man in the gatehouse came to his door to look at me curiously, then disappeared again inside the small building's warmth. I followed the edges of the building's shadow as it fell across the ground. The roof outline had sharp turnings where chimneys extended high into the air; and on this chilly day there was smoke coming from them, which made a wavery flicker on the snow. I followed the chimney outlines on my march, turning corners sharply as I knew soldiers did.
Once around the whole outline with all its turnings, and my feet had warmed, just as Father had said. I marched down the side wall back toward where the buggy was waiting. Then, through the marching song that I was humming half-aloud, I heard a scream. It sounded like a woman, but it was hard to tell.
The gateman did not put his head out again, though I knew he must have heard it.
The person screamed a second time, and then a third. It seemed to come from high up, from one of the upper floors. The windows were all tightly closed, and I could see bars across them. But the sound pierced the outside air as if it had come straight through the thick stone walls of the Asylum. The horses tossed their heads and snorted, and I stood by them and patted their noses and told them not to be frightened. But I was frightened myself.
I thought to run up the front steps, where my father had gone, and to pull the bell cord as he had done, so that someone would come and let me go inside, where he was. But inside was the scream, as well, and I did not want to be nearer to it. I stood by the horses, stamping my feet still from habit, and did not know what to do.
Then the door opened, and my father came back to me. Now everything was silent again. Father was carrying his medical bag as he always did, and when he saw that I was stamping my feet, he smiled at me and said I was a good patient to follow his directions.
"I heard a sound, Father," I told him when we were safely trotting on the road, outside of the iron gate and the stone pillar with its terrible carved word.
"A sound?"
"Somebody screaming. I could hear it right through the walls."
"Yes," he said. "It was a woman. I didn't know that the sound would go right outside. I'm sorry, Katy, that it frightened you. Sometimes the Asylum patients feel a need to scream. I don't know why."
"Is someone hurting them?"
"No, no. They're well cared for. They just seem to be hurting inside their own heads."
"Can't you fix them? Isn't that why you came?"
He shook his head. "They called me because one of them had a bad stomachache. I can fix that, Katy. I've fixed tummyaches for you, haven't I, often enough?"
I nodded. "But the other can't be fixed? The inside-the-head part? The screaming part?"
"No. That can't be fixed."
"Do they all scream?"
Father held the reins in one hand and put his other arm around me. "You know, Katydid, there are one hundred and twenty-two patients in the Asylum right now. If they all screamed, we would hear it all the way on Orchard Street. It would blow our roof right off."
I knew he was trying to make me laugh. I didn't, though.
"Some of them never make a sound. They don't even move, those silent ones. They sit in the same position and stare into space, some of them for years," Father said. "Some walk back and forth, back and forth. One dances, all alone. Others sing, or talk."
"Or scream?"
"Or sometimes scream."
"Can't you give them medicine?" He sighed. "You know a strange thing, Katy? Sometimes they are better if they have a high fever. So some doctors are trying to figure out ways to push their temperature up, as if they had malaria, or pneumonia. They've tried giving them sulphur and oil. But I think it's too dangerous. I think there must be another way."
I realized that he was talking to me as if I were grown up.
"I want you to find the way," I said. "I want you to fix those people."
"Someone will, one day," he said. "Maybe not me. But someone."
He jiggled the reins to hurry the horses. Behind us, the Asylum grew small in the distance. I tried to think of another sound to bury the memory of the scream. Shoooda shoooda shoooda came to my mind. I rubbed my mittened hands in circles on my coat and thought of Jacob.
9. APRIL 1911
 
Gram arrived from Cincinnati by train. She came every summer but this time it was earlier than usual; this time she came in April because of the baby. I had helped Peggy as she cleaned the big spare bedroom, the one with the pink-flowered wallpaper, that Gram always used on her visits. We laid the freshly starched and ironed bureau scarf on top of the tall bureau, and we set out the silver brush-and-comb set that Mother usually kept packed away in a drawer.
Miss Abbott had even put a new blue satin binding on the blanket for Gram's bed. I watched as Peggy smoothed the crocheted coverlet over the blanket, and then we took a small pillow filled with pine needles and set it atop, for the lovely smell.
The curtains were freshly washed and starched and ironed. Naomi had baked an orange cake, and the house smelled of it. The brass knocker on the front door was polished. Everything seemed new and shiny, and it was in part, of course, for Gram, because she hadn't visited in a long time.
But I knew it was also for the baby. The baby would be coming very soon.
I went with Father in the buggy to meet the train, and there she was, wearing a hat and gloves as she stepped down with the conductor reaching up for her hand. The porter helped Father move her bags to the buggy, and I took Gram's hand and skipped beside her after she had distributed coins to all of those who had helped her on her journey. The conductor tipped his hat to her and said that he hoped she had a nice visit with her family.
Of course she said how I had grown.
The train blew its whistle and began to move slowly from the station—ours was a very short stop, being such a small town—on its way to Philadelphia beyond. I saw faces in the windows of the cars, and though they had watched with interest as Gram left the train with all of her things, I could tell that now their thoughts were moving on to their own destinations and whatever families, jobs, and vacations lay ahead for each of them.
"That ' s new paint there, isn 't it, Katy?" Gram asked, pointing to a house on the corner. "I believe that house was gray on my last visit. And now look: it ' s sparkling white. Things change so when you've been away."
I nodded. "And, Gram," I told her, "there was a terrible fire at Schuyler ' s Mill. People were burned but no one died, Gram, because Father took care of them."
"The good Lord helped, I expect," Gram said.
"Maybe.But,Gram? Colloidal silver.That' s what the doctors used. And tannic acid."
I could see Father smiling as he tapped the horses gently with the buggy whip and steered them toward home. "Katy aims to be a doctor when she's grown," he explained to Gram.
"I never," Gram said. But she was smiling.
At home she hugged Mother, saying, "Caroline, Caroline," holding her carefully because of her size and the baby inside. "It won ' t be long, will it?"
Father took her coat and hat after Gram had carefully undone the hatpin that held it firmly on her gray hair. Peggy came from the kitchen, looking shy, and was introduced.
There were gifts: baby clothes, lovely things that Gram had embroidered herself; and for me, a book: Elsie Dinsmore. I had already read it from the library but didn't tell her that, and it was good to have it for my own, though in truth I didn't like the girl Elsie much. She seemed too good and had no spunk. Peggy thought the same; we had read it together.
Gram brought greetings from my mother's brother, Uncle James, and from Aunt Eleanor and the Cincinnati cousins. Gram lived at Uncle James's house, and I could tell that she didn't like Aunt Eleanor, though she was careful to say only nice things. There was always a little tone to her voice when she spoke of Eleanor, what a fine house she kept, and such a civic-minded woman.
Uncle James had been just a baby, and mymother only three years old, when my grandfather died. He took sick, she said, one morning, and was gone by nightfall, nothing anyone could do. For that reason Gram always wore a black ribbon around her neck, in mourning. The photograph we had of my grandfather showed him looking no more than a boy, though he was twenty-seven when he died. I wondered sometimes: if they were to meet in heaven, Gram and the young husband she still grieved for, might he still be that young boy and she a gray-haired lady with a mourning band around her neck, and a feathered hat held on by a pin? If so, I thought they would hardly have much to say to each other at all.
I loved Gram. She talked to me as if I were a grownup, and on earlier visits she had taught me card games (Naomi disapproved; her church thought playing cards were of the devil) using the playing cards that she always carried with her in her bag. She played something called patience, by herself, laying the cards out one by one on the table by the parlor windows.
When she went upstairs to freshen up, I followed along behind and took her down the hall to see the nursery with the baby clothes all waiting and the pink and white blanket Mother had knitted folded on the arm of the rocker.
"Mother and Father say they don't care, but I do hope for a boy," I confided to Gram.
"It ' s nice to have both," she said, nodding her head. "I remember being glad when James was born, to have a boy after a girl. But most of all, you hope for the baby to be healthy and strong."
"And not marked," I added. "Our grocery boy was marked on his face because his mother was frightened by something hideous and placed her hand just so." I showed her, with my hand to my chin.
Gram made a tsk-ing sound. "I ' m sure your mother has taken very good care of herself," she said, "and your baby will be perfect. Whoever told you that about the grocery boy? Not your father, certainly."
"Peggy did."
Gram smiled. "She ' s a country girl. But I ' m sure she's a great help to your mother."
"Oh, yes. Peggy works hard. And do you know what? Her sister ' s right next door. Do you remember my friend Austin Bishop, the boy with the pretty little sister named Laura Paisley? Peggy's sister Nell is a hired girl at the Bishops ."