Blue Asylum (9 page)

They were halfway through a checkers game when they noticed a scuffle on the beach. A man wearing a frock coat and a stovepipe hat was standing frozen on the sand. Iris recognized him as Mr. Sinclair, the man whose feet were too heavy.

A guard shouted at him.

“Move! Move!”

But the man just kept shaking his head.

“I said move!”

“The poor man,” Iris said. She stared at the guard. Something about his body language and harsh directives reminded her of someone else. She narrowed her eyes as the clues moved through her body and connected to a memory of the plantation. Clyde Sender. The overseer. He began to take shape in her mind, red-faced and stout. She blinked him away.

Just then the guard swore loudly and pushed Mr. Sinclair in the back. He fell flat, his hat falling off and rolling in the sand.

Ambrose stiffened and rose.

“Where are you going?” Iris asked, but he had already started toward the men. Something was different about his posture. A straightening of the shoulders. A coiling tension in the body. A deliberate stride. Ambrose approached them and helped Mr. Sinclair to his feet, brushed the sand off his coat, and retrieved his hat, handing it to him as the guard kept shouting imprecations at both men. Ambrose turned and said something to the guard that Iris could not discern, but it made the guard furious and he shouted, “Who are you to tell me how to act?”

Onlookers appeared out of nowhere—patients, fishermen, nurses, other guards. All of them drawn by the salty boiled-crab smell of rising tensions. Iris even spotted Wendell, watching from behind a tree.

The other guard moved closer to Ambrose and took a swing. Ambrose ducked and punched the guard in the stomach as the entire island gasped. Then the two of them were rolling in the sand, the guards shouting encouragement at their comrade and the patients screaming, “Get him, Ambrose! Get him!” Mr. Sinclair stood frozen in mid-battle, clutching his stovepipe hat.

Iris leaped from the checkers table and darted forward, desperate for a better view, just as she saw a squat, plump woman, who she imagined was Wendell’s mother, come flying from the direction of the cottage, still in her dressing gown, to join Wendell behind the palm tree.

The flying punches liberated the mad. It was joyful as a church, this fight, joyful as a picnic, a choir, the Fourth of July, a fox hunt, sex—everything denied them on this island. They screamed like children. They were free, and these precious things denied them—curiosity, fair play, righteous anger—released themselves with alacrity. From out of nowhere, Lydia Helms Truman threw herself on the guard’s back and clung there like a kitten as he swore and tried to buck her off.

A sudden hush came over the scene and the crowd parted as Dr. Cowell dragged his long shadow over the cobblestones and then the sand. “Stop it!” he said in a voice whose authority stopped the fight dead, and the guards came to themselves and separated the brawlers. Ambrose’s eye was starting to swell. The guard had a split lip that dripped blood on his shirt. Lydia Helms Truman’s dress was ripped.

“What is the meaning of this?” Dr. Cowell demanded. “Are you animals? Well, are you?” Dr. Cowell’s wife wrenched herself free from behind the palm tree and fled in the direction of the cottage, Wendell right behind her. The doctor watched them, lips pursed, before turning to the fighters, who were trying to catch their breath. “I thought better of you. Better of you both.”

Mr. Sinclair, who had remained motionless throughout the battle, pointed at the guard. “He started it.”

“I don’t care who started it,” the doctor rejoined. “Everyone go about your business!” He addressed the guard. “You are dismissed from your employment here!”

“But, sir—”

“You heard me.” He looked at the other guards, who were hovering about with guilty expressions. “Put him on the next boat. And this man . . .” He nodded at Ambrose. “Take him to his room.”

“How about me?” Lydia asked, but Dr. Cowell had turned on his heel and started walking back to the asylum. The fight was over. There was nothing left but the humidity and the returning birds and the reluctant movement of scattering spectators and a man whose feet wouldn’t move.

After the fight, Iris retreated to the edge of the shore and walked along the sand, taking solace in the sight of her footprints alongside those of raccoons and dune mice that were never seen full-on, just barely glimpsed as they darted for cover. She was both roiled and calmed by the scene she’d witnessed. She had thought Ambrose was fragile and soft—his insides like those of a sparrow’s egg fallen from the nest. But no. This man had a warrior’s steadiness and righteousness. She had seen no lunatic today—only someone in the mood to stand up for the helpless. She wanted to take this quiet soldier, broken in so many mysterious places, resilient in so many others, and put him on the plantation. Put him between the weak and the strong, the innocent and the murderers. Put justice where no justice was served. Take him back there with her. Give that bully that is history a bleeding lip.

Ambrose gazed at the night sky through the bars, listening to the ticking of the Ingraham clock behind him. They hadn’t tied him to his bed. He had not descended into the chaos of screams or the grinning authority of a laudanum sleep. He was himself, his face still flushed from the fight hours before, which had been ferocious and had left him with a throbbing eye and a clean sense of fair play. They had fought like men. Not a patient and a guard. Two raw tempers and two pairs of fists. No, the fight had not brought him back to the horrors of war but to a simpler time that predated them, when a fistfight was a solution, and so was a plowed field, and so was a kiss. Now, as the shadows of the bars made stripes on the white sleeves of his shirt, he thought of a night shortly before he’d gone to war when Celia, the girl he was courting, decided any man so heroic as to take up the Southern cause deserved a parting gift, one given spontaneously in a field behind the church where the going-away dance was held.

Halfway between a huckleberry bush and a dogwood tree, two feet south of a limestone rill. Nothing but patches of ironweed and a single black-eyed Susan too early for the season, towering behind Celia’s head as they kissed, her hands rising up to help his fingers with hooks and buttons. So much lace, so much fabric. The bones of her corset. The silk of her pantaloons.

He fought to free her before she came to her senses. It was a race against the clock of propriety. Somewhere in the darkness his stern father was lighting an oil lamp and beginning a passage in the Bible, tracing it with creosote-blackened fingers. Farther away, armies settled in for the night, nursing wounds, drinking coffee as campfires burned, as banjos played and voices fed their singsong prayers to the stream of God’s mercies. Still farther away, Davis paced and Lincoln rubbed his temples.

But none of that mattered, for Ambrose was taking time to be awed by the sight of Celia’s bare white skin. Celia sighed and giggled, moaned and gasped, and they rocked against the ground, his coat under them both; her head slid closer to the stem of the black-eyed Susan as she closed her eyes and said his name in a broken way, half regretful, half defiant when she said it,
Ambrose, Ambrose
—his name achieved a crystal definition. In the distance they could hear the music of the dance where girls still shyly looked at boys. Her head reached the black-eyed Susan and bumped against it as they slid back and forth. The thick stalk broke and the weed fell by moonlight and Celia said
Ambrose
one more time and then it was over, a bookmark between his boyhood of sleeping in haystacks and hunting for catalpa worms and the ache of hard labor on his father’s farm, swearing at a mule with a handful of words that hated Sunday—and his incarnation as a soldier. Smoke of battlefield, suppuration of wounds, clouds of breath, snow, ice. Freezing nights on mountaintops. Air too thin for shouting. Wind too strong for fires. Ground too hard for graves. Toes and fingers turning black. Stirrups frozen to boots. Fingers to soup ladles. Urine to tree trunks, in the pattern of sunbursts.

Celia sent him to war with a tintype picture. Never wrote him. Married his friend. Left him with that memory that had been buried, previous to now, by all that necessary blue.

“You know that man is very ill,” said the doctor. Someone had given him a haircut, and he’d switched to linen suits in deference to the heat.

“What man?” Iris asked.

“Ambrose Weller. He’s very fragile.”

She felt a sudden rush of pride. “He didn’t look very fragile yesterday when he was punching that guard.”

“It does not escape me that he had never fought with anyone until he started playing checkers with you.”

“Ambrose was defending a patient who could not defend himself. His anger was justified.”

“He is a lunatic and his anger is uncollected and irrational, like all his other emotions.” The doctor seemed annoyed. His tone was less paternal today. He kept scratching one arm. “And I noticed you at the corner of the crowd, fascinated by the violence.”

“I noticed your wife and son behind a palm tree, also fascinated by the violence.”

The words moved his eyebrows into a stormy shape, and he seemed to be making a great effort to control himself. “I worry about your effect upon this man, and his effect upon you.”

“You are worried about the wrong man.”

That night she dreamed she was holding the baby, that pale and sweet-faced boy. The dream was heartbreaking in its lack of narrative. Whoever designed that dream—god or devil—knew the weight of a baby, knew the warmth. Knew how to break a heart with the realness of the moment—a bit of saliva on the lips, a tiny crust on an eyelash—so that when Iris woke up the next morning, her arms empty, she wept in the early light, and the flood of tears did not stop as she bathed and dressed. As she was making her bed, another tear fell and spread to the size of a dime. Just then, the door burst open and the matron swept in.

“What’s the matter, poor dear?” she asked. “You look like you have been crying. Do you have terrible troubles, Mrs. Dunleavy?”

Iris ducked her head and went on straightening the sheet. She wondered how many lunatic women, on the cusp of recovery, were sent back to their scrambled selves after the matron made sport of them. The matron seized the sheets from Iris’s hands and ripped them off the bed. “Your bed making is a disgrace. Make it again.” She crossed her arms, her breath whistling out her nostrils.

Iris moved carefully, measuring out the sheet so each side was perfectly aligned, fluffing the pillow just so, tucking in the bedspread with the greatest care. She fought back the tears, finished the bed, ran her hand across a single surviving wrinkle, smoothing it out flat. She stood back.

The matron looked at the bed, as perfectly made as any bed in history. She seized the bedspread and pulled it off. The pillow went flying and landed like a heavy bird near the nightstand.

“Make it again.”

Iris set back to work, hands trembling with anger, the urge to cry like a hard shoe pressed against her sternum. But she would rather die than have the matron claim responsibility for a single new tear. She finished the bed and the matron began to reach for the bedspread, then seemed to change her mind, perhaps tired of that particular game. She went around the room barking orders: “Straighten that picture. Dust that chair. Put your filthy shoes in the closet.” She pointed at the water pitcher. “The handle should face west, not east. Fix it.”

Iris did as she was told.

The matron looked her up and down, her pupils tiny black specks in the light. “You think you’re better than everyone, don’t you? You with your frilly dresses and your nice shoes. You’re nothing. Your husband doesn’t care for you. He sees you as you are: a faithless, selfish, pathetic woman who will grow old here. Old, and alone.”

Iris did not remember the span of time it took to pick up the pitcher of water and pour it over the matron’s head. One moment she was looking into those tiny pupils. A blink later, the matron’s hair was soaking wet, water was rushing down her dress, she had a shocked expression on her face, and she had sucked in such a gasp of air that her bosom had lifted. Iris couldn’t believe it. She glanced into the pitcher. Sure enough, it was empty. Something inside her had broken free and done the deed on its own. She knew she’d crossed a line and would pay dearly, so she allowed herself to live in the first few moments of the aftermath, there with the light pouring into her room, the steady dripping of water on the floor, the matron’s shocked and staring eyes.

Iris could not move. Leather straps held her arms and legs to a straight-backed chair. A group of female attendants had come into her room later that morning. She had been forced to put on a dressing gown and a special pair of white slippers, and then she’d been taken to a room she’d never seen before. Now she was alone inside it, waiting. Her bare legs shivered. Her lips felt cold to each other when they came together. A terrible knot of fear had formed in her stomach. The tile floor of the room sloped down in the center, where a drain had been built. A metal chute loomed above her head. She tried desperately to steady herself, loosen that knot of fear so she could breathe a little better. She tried to imagine that she was no longer in that room but in her own bedroom back in Winchester, and the drain in the floor was the gravity vent from which her father’s prayers rose.
Lord, let us remember that our trials become laughable in Your presence, let us laugh with You, Lord, laugh with joy over sorrows eaten by eternity, and all suffering and injustice left at the gates, for in the end there is nothing left but the elation of Your presence, when we are Your children come home . 
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Something hit her head. It was hard and cold, like a frozen pea. She looked up as another drop fell from the lip of the chute and hit her in the forehead with a distinctive thump. She moved her head down again, preferring the water on her crown rather than on her face. She tensed her body and forced herself to stare straight ahead at the knob on the locked door. In the door was a window. The window was empty.