Blue Asylum (14 page)

But the way she was looking at him now, the way she said his name twice,
Henry, Henry,
moved him, shook him, cracked him open, so that the moment of climax was a split-second opportunity to visit himself at an earlier age, when he was not alone. He said her name back in a rush of breath as his body relaxed against hers.

The expression left her face, replaced by a look of familiar concern that caused him to get up and find a handkerchief to put over the wet area of the mattress. In mid-step as he tiptoed back through the dead air of the broken spell he realized why the sight of a man’s white handkerchief always left him unaccountably depressed.

Mary, lover of chocolate and silk brocade, believer in the restorative powers of Peruvian bark, jalap, and laudanum, couldn’t sleep that night. Moonlight came in ribbons through the decorative holes in the curtains and streamed onto the sheet that covered her body and that of her husband, who slept beside her. Such a pretty color, that moonlight, somewhere between daffodil and cloud. An owl hooted outside the window. Its call seemed particularly urgent or sad tonight, but like the keening of the lunatics, its meaning was forever a mystery.

Her husband’s face was turned toward the wall. She placed her hand against his back so she could feel the expansion and contraction of his rib cage. Early in their marriage, they would both stir awake for mere moments before falling back into their dreams, and his hand would find hers under the covers and clasp it briefly. It had been years since he had held her hand during the night—or the day for that matter. Earlier, when they had made love, she had recaptured him for a second or two. He had probably mistaken her cry for orgasm, when it was more true to say that the sound came from the pleasure of the look he gave her. That sliver of the same unbridled fondness that used to follow her around in the early years. The sight of it there on his face was like the taste of laudanum. No, it was better. But like the laudanum, it wore off and left her craving more.

Iris shaded herself with her parasol as she and Ambrose walked parallel to the tide line, darting away when the surf frothed in too close to their feet and then returning to their path when it retreated. An invisible line existed somewhere ahead of them in the sand. If they were to cross that line, guards would materialize and they would be returned to the asylum. Still, they had learned to walk with the air of enfranchised civilians. Iris had been talking fondly of her father, and his prayers, so beautiful and earnest.

“My father is the wisest man I ever met,” she said. “It grieves me that he has no idea where I am, or what’s become of me. The doctor says that I can write him, but only if my letters are ‘rational.’ In other words, only if I take full blame for my predicament. I cannot do that. My father hates a lie.”

“Your father sounds like a man of character,” Ambrose remarked.

“Have you had contact with your family?” Iris asked, and immediately felt the tension of broaching a subject for the first time. He had spoken of his boyhood as a series of images and sensations with no mention of human contact. It was as though he’d been raised by a vortex of experiences instead of human beings. She found this quality of narrative a warning against intrusion and had thus far respected it.

“I have two older brothers. They both went to war before me. I do not know their whereabouts. And my mother died in childbirth. My father never spoke of it, but my aunt told me I came out of the womb in an unnatural position, and she succumbed from blood loss. I was told, again by my aunt, that she nursed me as she died. My brothers remembered her somewhat. They’d tell me little stories and I’d treasure them. She sat for one formal portrait with my father. I look quite a bit like her.”

“Did it make you sad,” she asked, “growing up without a mother?”

He stopped walking and considered this as saltwater froth ran up and covered the tips of his shoes. “I was more puzzled about it. And I felt a vague guilt, that it was my awkward birth that killed her.” He put his hands in his pockets. “But, you know, there was work to be done. We had to help our father run the farm. He didn’t believe in sadness. He believed in getting on with things. When my dog was kicked by a mule and died, he made me bury him, forbidding tears. ‘Don’t say goodbye,’ he said. ‘You will only look ridiculous, speaking to a carcass.’ That’s how he was.” Ambrose stared out at the water. “My father has never written me. He believes the correct way to return home from the war is in a coffin, on crutches, or in a victory parade. I came back ranting and raving, tied to a buckboard. I was put in the local hospital with the other veterans, but my screams kept them awake. So I was put in a jail cell. Handcuffed to the bars. Fed like a dog.”

The surf came crawling up. Ambrose didn’t move and neither did Iris. The warm water covered their shoes. A gust of wind made Iris hold on tight to the trembling staff of her parasol.

“Your father sent you here?” Iris asked.

Ambrose nodded. “He was not a rich man, but my great-grandfather made a fortune in steel in Canada, and my father used his inheritance to send me here. I suppose I should be thankful he provided me with the best care in the country. And I am. I just can’t wait for the day, Iris, when I walk back into town restored. My own man with my own mind. Everything in the past where it needs to be. Quiet like a dog in a grave. I’ll come back and I’ll look my father in the eye and I’ll shake his hand and I’ll say, ‘I’m home.’”

Iris had accustomed herself to the odd way Lydia Helms Truman ate a grapefruit, taking the precut sections, tossing them in her mouth, and throwing her head back. It reminded her a bit of a swan gulping a series of tiny pink frogs. And yet, she seemed to accomplish the action with a certain daintiness. Lydia had gone through exactly seven sections of grapefruit this way when she said out of nowhere, “You love him.”

Iris blinked at her, startled.

“Love who?”

Lydia dabbed at her lips with a white napkin and took a sip of her coffee. “The crazy soldier,” she said.

“He’s not crazy.”

Lydia smiled. “Look at your posture as you defend him. You straightened up indignantly. Your eyes narrowed. You’re already willing to go to war over an adjective. That’s love, my dear.”

“That’s ludicrous,” Iris said. “I’m married.”

Lydia could not quite set down her coffee in time to beat her laughter. It spilled on the tablecloth and spread out to the size of two quarters as Lydia’s peals of laughter continued. Her eyes watered. Her shoulders shook. “Yes, married,” she said. “So am I. Isn’t married life grand?”

Iris tapped at a boiled egg with the side of her spoon, hitting it too hard, leaving a savage gash in the shell, out of which the yolk protruded. She was not sure why Lydia was irritating her so. It was perhaps that
love,
spoken so boldly, was such a dangerous word. Hot enough to melt the key to freedom she’d been stealthily crafting. She set the egg down. “I do not love him. I simply find his companionship comforting, given my situation.”

Lydia gained control of the frantic hummingbird inside her that was her laughter. She dabbed at the corners of her eye with a napkin. “I see the way you look at him, and he looks at you. Don’t question love, Iris. It may have come to you in an inconvenient form, one that society finds scandalous, but it’s a gift from God. A reminder that this institution can’t interfere with natural processes, like laughter, prayer, a dream that comes to you in sleep. Or love. Do with it what you want, but know that it means God still sees you not as a lunatic but as His child.”

Iris later took a walk down the beach, as far as the guards would tolerate and then back again.
Love.
The word came out of nowhere, rattling her. She had never thought of her feelings for Ambrose as love. The desire to be with him, the lying in bed at night thinking of him, and even the occasional daydream of kissing him, or lying in his arms . . . she had simply let these feelings exist without naming them. And so that word
love
had flown at her out of nowhere, like an osprey come to steal an eagle’s fish.

A week later, after a night punctuated by intermittent rain and loggerhead turtles dragging themselves up the beach to lay their eggs, Mrs. Lydia Helms Truman was found dead in her room, half of a silk handkerchief hanging out of her mouth and the other half lodged so firmly down her throat it had to be extracted with a Nelaton probe. As the details of her passing raced around the asylum, Dr. Cowell unleashed a scathing rebuke upon the matron, who in turn reacted by instituting a reign of terror, screaming at nurses and patients alike.

Iris wept when she heard of the fate of the small, cheery, neatly coiffed woman, a unique individual ready to bite someone for justice or swallow a pebble for no reason at all. Sweet Lydia, forever denied the chance to return to the world from which she’d been taken.

“What did they do with Mrs. Truman?” she asked Wendell later that day, as they collected shells on the beach.

“They buried her out back. They’ve got a graveyard for the patients.”

“What if one of the staff died? Would they bury them there, too?”

Wendell toed a spot in the sand where the bubbles gave away the presence of a sand dollar. He dug for the sand dollar and held it up to the light before gently placing it down. “I suppose they would have to make another graveyard. Crazy people and regular people don’t get buried together.”

“The idea being that crazy people aren’t good enough to be buried with the sane?”

Wendell looked uneasy. “I don’t know. I don’t make the rules.” He caught her look of annoyance and added, “But I would be buried in the same graveyard as you. That would be fine with me.”

Iris brushed the sand off the beaded periwinkle she had just discovered. “At the plantation where I used to live, the Dunleavy family graveyard was at one edge of the property, and the graveyard for slaves and pets was at the other end. If you were a Dunleavy, you were laid to rest among holly and gardenia bushes, with a pink granite tombstone. If you were a slave, you’d get a wooden cross and be laid to rest next to an Irish setter.” She stopped talking then, because those two graveyards were tied up with the story she couldn’t tell the boy, the part she’d had to skip because, as desperate for escape as she was, she didn’t want that story in his mind.

Over the past weeks she had released the details of her history to the boy a little at a time, earning his trust in the narrative. She felt she was making good progress. He liked her. She could tell that. And he was lonely. That was obvious, too. And though she did feel a certain guilt about luring this lonely boy whose accent belonged to no country in particular to be her coconspirator in her escape, she saw no other way.

She sat across the checkers table from Ambrose. She was thinking about Lydia again. She was pinioned in death, labeled mad for eternity. But Lydia had been so much more than that. Mad, perhaps. But more.

“What are you thinking about?” Ambrose asked.

“Lydia.”

“Oh,” said Ambrose. “I’m sorry.” He looked at her intently. She wasn’t sure what was going through his mind, but she liked the way he stared at her.

“Lydia Helms Truman told me last week I loved you,” she said, surprising herself. Immediately her cheeks burned. She had started something. She knew it. With great intention and in memory of Lydia, she had defiantly said the word, not to banish it but to offer it. It was reckless. She was married. But there was no ring on her finger. She’d removed it long ago, had flung it into an eternity of tobacco plants. It was plowed under now, part of the soil.

Ambrose leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. The kiss insisted upon itself, made the biggest shadow, called the loudest call. Held itself as king, according to natural law. He did not pull away, but kept kissing her until suddenly she felt a strong hand on her shoulder, wrenching her away from Ambrose.

“What do you two think you’re doing?” the guard shouted. “There is no kissing allowed between patients!”

He took Ambrose by the arm, pulled him from the checkers table, and led him away toward the doors of the asylum.

Ambrose looked back at Iris with steady eyes. No regret, no embarrassment. Nothing but the desire to do it again.

It was in him now, the kiss. He was too thrilled by it, too changed by it, to let it go. But could he have the kiss and the peace too? All during the war, his greatest terror had been to lose his faculties and end up like those wrecked creatures for whom things remained: birthmarks, the colors of their eyes, the way peaches altered their breath, a grimace or grin that recalled the way they used to be. The rest was the mush of pure stranger. Once, at a temporary hospital set up at an abandoned school for girls, he had volunteered to help the surgeons and had witnessed one of them pull a flattened bullet from a soldier’s head. The soldier lived, but he no longer knew what side of the war he was on, or how to button his shirt. His mother rode all the way from Asheville in a one-horse cart. No one had told her about the condition of her son, only that he was alive. She came into the room and saw him, froze for a moment, and then sat down on the edge of his bed, kissed his forehead, talked to him. She found the part of him that was still hers, adopted the rest, got him back into his clothes, and took him home. Ambrose was haunted by the memory, terrified of being that man who was never the same.

The doctor would surely tell him that the kiss was a threat to his sanity, that it would leave him vulnerable to the terrible visions that always threatened to overwhelm him at any given time, but for now he felt strangely free of the doctor’s judgment. In fact, he felt exhilarated, so much so that, as the guard led him down the hall, he welcomed the prospect of going to his room where he could be alone with the kiss and the memory of the woman who had welcomed it.

But the guard suddenly turned into the day room.

“Wait,” said Ambrose. “I don’t want to go in there. I want to go in my room.”

“Dr. Cowell thinks you need to spend some time around other men. And from what I just witnessed, I imagine he is right.”