Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (15 page)

“Of what?”

“Proof that lives are being lived.” I whispered, “I have a life within myself, an inward life that can’t be expressed. It’s sad that it can’t be expressed. Maybe one of the saddest things I can think of right now. And you’re saying that everyone has these lives, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I think we do. Ways of perceiving, a life experience that is unique to that individual.”

“I don’t know how everybody walks around just like normal,
”
I said,
“
as if everything is not beautiful and hideous and dangerous. I used to know laundry steam. I knew how it billowed. I was caged then like I am now.”

“We’re here to help.”

“I forgot to say that I like the putting green and the solarium and the little salt spoons. I do,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Well, I’ll pass along your gratitude.”

“My mother wore powder that smelled like a field of flowers! She would wring out a sponge and the water made its way down my back.”

Dr. Wolff was staring beyond me now. He took a quick breath and sat back. He pressed tears from his eyes, rubbing them into his sideburns. He jotted a note, something diligent and
professional. I decided that Dr. Wolff had a very full inner life as inner lives went. Maybe he was a fellow sufferer, pained by the glory in the everyday, affected by simple, ugly, gorgeous, glowing details of life.

He whispered, “Harriet, by God. I swear the right opera could kill you.”

“What was that?” I asked. I wanted to hear it again. I wanted to see the soft workings of his lips saying my name.

But it was something he wasn’t supposed to utter aloud. “Sorry,” he said. “Let’s go on.”

I hid the fact that I was thriving. If I got too healthy, where would I go? My mother was gone, and all I had was the click of billiard balls, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the nurses’ white skirts gliding on air—and Wolff himself.

Of course, there was deep madness at Sheppard Pratt—two escapes while I was there: one drowned in a nearby pond and the other swallowed bichloride of mercury tablets purchased at a drugstore. This madness only made it all the more clear that I wanted to live—and I did want to, fiercely.

I missed Eppitt—the weight of his body under the Duck Porch. I was losing faith that I’d ever see him again. He was eighteen too. Perhaps he’d enlisted or was drafted and was finally home again—but changed forever. Would they let him serve? Had he outgrown his wheeze? Did he die a soldier? Was he struck down by the Spanish flu, like my mother, and did he bleed to death? And if he did bleed out, did that make him think of me, the bleeder, in the end? Dead, alive, in love with someone else? Did he ever think of me?

My origami crane letters to him tucked into my mattress springs had nowhere to go.

In my sessions with Wolff, I sometimes went silent. I pretended to have tics. I tried on Eppitt’s habit of compressing words. One time I said “doomy” instead of “dark” and “gloomy.” I corrected myself, but then kept doing it purposefully. I picked at the waistband of my dress, and whenever I coughed, I stared at my hands.

I could tell Wolff anything. I explained the Owl and the Good Wheel and even my heated moments under the Duck Porch with Eppitt.

Dr. Wolff nodded serenely, a slow singular bob of his head. He smiled sometimes too, and he jotted.

Sometimes he would make a small comment, like “You must have loved your mother very much.”

And this simple fact, said aloud, made my body feel like it was suddenly filled with air and light. “Yes,” I would say, suddenly crying. “Yes, I did.”

In April of 1919, when I’d been at Sheppard Pratt for six months, Dr. Wolff told me that it was time for me to go home.

“I don’t have a home.”

“We have people in the community prepared to take in our patients. Mrs. Oblatt runs a quiet boarding house. Some of the girls work in the mills. She provides breakfast and dinner.”

I tried to think of two words that I could smear together as Eppitt would to express how I felt, but none came. I picked at my waistband, coughed into my hands, then looked at my palms and, for the first time, knew what I was looking for: blood, death. “I can’t go.”

“You need to be out in the world, Harriet.”

“The world doesn’t need me.”

“It doesn’t need any of us. We need it. I wish you didn’t have to, but you’re ready. You’re well, Harriet. You are.”

“It’s crazy what can pass for not crazy these days,” I said.

He handed me a piece of paper with the address of Mrs. Oblatt’s boarding house. “Your father’s been informed and has paid Mrs. Oblatt for the first three months.”

I folded the piece of paper, the way I folded all of Eppitt’s unsent letters—a long neck, a beak, wings.

Within days, I was standing in the lobby awaiting a taxi.

Dr. Wolff was there to see me go. “One day,” he said, “a few years from now, I want you to come back and see me. I want to know about the wonderful life you’ve made.”

But I shook my head. “I won’t come back. I need the world,” I said.

“You,” he said. “Harriet Wolf.” He sighed. “The world might just need you after all. I think you’re destined for…”

“What?”

“Great things, Harriet. Truly great things.”

Of course I didn’t believe him.

The origami cranes I decided to leave behind so that at least some small part of me would remain. I imagined them pinched by the bedsprings, flightless and trembling.

Mrs. Oblatt was squat and powerful. She moved like a wrestler. And when she was still, she sat in an armchair and did needlepoint ferociously. The living room was so densely packed with
needlepoint it was muffled. The rest of the house was loud, the women boisterous. Mrs. Oblatt ignored the noise. She was a childless widow, and during the long years that slipped by while I lived in her house, I watched her fade—hearing loss, light dementia, a palsy in her frenetic needlepoint.

She appreciated that I didn’t complain. (When raised in an institution, you know better than to complain.) Occasionally there would be another boarder who, like me, was institutional in nature, posture, and bearing. We recognized each other. We wouldn’t say our hellos to each other. A nod would do. We knew, without saying a word.

The shower pipes cried out, and my room smelled of pee in every corner. But much to my surprise, I started to prefer being on my own.

Most of the women worked in cotton mills, which were plentiful. But I found work shelving books. One afternoon I wandered into a library, which, like Sheppard Pratt, was a gift from businessman Enoch Pratt. It had airy ceilings, monstrous stacks of books. It seemed as if God Himself were a clipster and this library his paste book. Holy. As broad and lit up as a cathedral! Unlike Mrs. Oblatt’s house, which needed the muffling of needlepoint, the library was hushed. The dust motes idled. The workers behind the checkout desk opened the wings of the books, piled them on their spines, and stamped them, like they were tagging birds.

That first day I wandered in, I asked if they had an opening. A woman at the desk shuttled me to an office where I met the head librarian. He had angular shoulders, a droopy chin, and a flat pat of hair.

Though I had no formal education, I told him I was learned, and quoted poetry from the library at Sheppard Pratt—without mentioning the asylum, of course.

He told me that one of their shelvers had just perished. “Perished.” I loved the word. It didn’t sound like death at all. The Spanish flu was still going strong, but libraries were trying to keep their doors open to the public during limited hours despite the potential danger. “Are you sure you want the job?” he asked.

“I’m not afraid of dying,” I told him. I had been born dead, after all, but was still here. “If you live long enough, you’ve already perished a little. Maybe life is a bit-by-bit death.”

“Very poetic,” he said, and I got the job.

I was alone during the days. I walked the stacks, ordered and reordered. My mind started alphabetizing all that I saw, even the women in Mrs. Oblatt’s house: Bartlett, Dresden, Inger, Martin. I avoided them as much as possible. They trilled about blouses, hats, hairdos—all foreign to me. Sometimes I tried to listen but heard only high-pitched squeaks. The conversation always returned to men—piggish, foul with desire, cursed by their hulking stature, their coursing arousal, their unruly pricks—and yet these same women groused endlessly that these sops had abandoned them. Those were the ones living at Mrs. Oblatt’s for the most part, the abandoned ones.

I avoided the bawdy talk. I took my meals in my room, alone.

Plus, I missed men: Eppitt Clapp, who I hoped wasn’t a dead soldier; Dr. George Wolff; even old Dr. Brumus and the guards, like Mr. Gillup. I didn’t miss my father, of course. But surprisingly, he sent letters. They were short and dry. Mainly, he wanted to have dinner together. He wanted to talk. He missed my mother. I looked like her, you know, and I decided that this was probably all he wanted, some link to her. At first, I responded only by asking for my books of clippings. These never arrived. And so, soon enough, I stopped responding at all.

The epidemic was fading. The hotel hospitals became hotels again. The bankers’ masks disappeared, as did the placards on people’s houses. Life returned. But my mother was still gone. Maybe Sheppard Pratt had been a distraction more than a cure. For all my thriving there, I now felt like someone robbed blind. Sometimes I felt limbless, headless. I looked out and the world changed scenery before my eyes, motorized and modernized; the world steamed on without me.

One day, overcome, I passed Mrs. Oblatt needle-pointing in a corner of the living room and walked out into the cold. Coatless, I went to a stationery shop and bought paste, scissors, and a new book of empty white pages. I started up my subscriptions again, as many as I could afford, newspapers and magazines that appeared, daily, weekly, monthly. I couldn’t partake in the world’s changes, but I could take note of them. “A waste!” Mrs. Oblatt called it. “Why would anyone want to read all of this nonsense?” Why? So the world could be reordered from nonsense to sense.

It was during this time that I read that Dr. Wolff had been shot. Murdered, in fact. He was killed at Sheppard Pratt by another doctor, a man that I’d seen only a few times, Dr. Ishida. The
Baltimore Sun
followed the case with its “Veil of Oriental Mystery,” as they put it. Dr. Ishida felt that Dr. Wolff had called him a spy and a traitor, and there was also the intimation that the honor of a woman was involved in the matter. Ishida shot Dr. Wolff while at work, and Wolff’s blood soaked into the carpet of the corridor as he gripped the leg of a cane chair. I dedicated one full book of clippings to the murder alone. The world hadn’t needed Wolff, but I had. His death made me retreat into myself even more deeply. The greed of death, of loss—it was proving insatiable.

In a frenzied way, I kept clippings of as many of the world’s oddities as I could—Ripley’s exhibit of shrunken heads from the upper Amazon, medieval chastity belts, a man at the Chicago World’s Fair who could swallow and regurgitate live mice. In came insulin, Yankee Stadium,
Eskimo Pies, airships! Out went the Barbary lion, the Amur tiger, the California grizzly—and so many humans. Genocides (Assyrians, Greeks), the Rosewood massacre, the Great Kanto Earthquake, death by giant hailstones.

What I mean to say is that years passed, slowly at first, but then they picked up speed. Seasons blurred by. It was humid and then suddenly the heat was wrung from the air and it was chilly and damp. Winters rushed into summer so fast that I would find myself shrugging off my winter coat, struck by the overbearing sun.

I was aware that this is one way a young woman becomes an old maid—afraid of her desire, afraid of her power. I lived amid my clippings. I hid my breasts and hips under baggy dresses and heavy coats. On the streets I clamped library books to my bosom and, chin to chest, muttered, “Excuse me, excuse me,” dipping and bowing like a criminal.

I worked in the shelves, read books beside the brightly lit windows. I looked up the works of Dr. Wolff, for example, as well as Dr. Brush, titles like “Hysterical Insanity,” “Insanity and Arrested Development,” “An Analysis of One Hundred Cases of Acute Melancholia.” I felt hysterical sometimes—that my development was arrested, that my melancholia was acute. As I moved through the dusty motes, I even diagnosed my own bleeding. Poring over medical texts, I found a Finnish doctor by the name of Erik Adolf von Willebrand, who attended the University of Helsinki, and writings about his interest in the case of a five-year-old girl, a pernicious bleeder.

What to do about it? Nothing. I actually had an easy case, according to von Willebrand’s research. My platelets’ clumsy efforts at adherence once injured, my inability to heal—these were metaphors not lost on me.

I collected survivors of the Spanish flu—Lillian Gish, Walt Disney, FDR, Woodrow Wilson, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary Pickford, Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe. I still blamed
myself for my mother’s death. The names of survivors were proof that if I’d been smarter or somehow better, more deserving, she could have survived too.

I lingered in poetry. Where else would incurables linger?

You’d think I would have spent these years reading novels to become the novelist I one day would. In fact, I’ve never cared for novelists. They don’t know how to be essential. They lack self-restraint. If you can’t evoke emotion—twist-tie one soul to another—in the density of a poem, then you don’t deserve to work in words. Novelists struck me as brutes, using words like nails, trying to hammer a story into place. Poets, on the other hand, let words use them. Poets are pure. They are like the jazz musician who doesn’t take a bow, but instead holds his saxophone above his head so that it can take the praise. I was receiving my own education.