Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

We know that the assignment of a plot was deemed a privilege because the patients had to apply for one and these applications were noted, and occasionally pasted, into the casebooks. To be granted a plot one had to be well into recovery, to have gone at least a month without incident, to have demonstrated the attainment of some skill — whether pillow-making, plain sewing or fancy work, shoe repair, clockwork or upholstery. Supplicants were also required to have eaten their meals without complaint and to have made a formal application in legible lettering. Those who were deemed suicidal were prohibited from applying because the gardens were outside the walls of the airing courts and beyond the gate that led to the infirmary. The farthest plot crested the top of a grassy rise that sloped down toward a shunting river, a river those in danger of self-harm were never allowed to see.

A list of the first group of recipients was drawn up a week before Herschel slipped out of the door, followed by Leeson and N. The Superintendent had announced that the names of those selected would be posted in the day rooms of the men’s and women’s wards. This was his first mistake: the public nature of the act, the assumption that the success of the few would inspire the many.

Alfred Hale was pretending to read a newspaper in a wingback chair when the men’s list arrived. The moment it was pegged up he moved toward it. Eliza Woodward was working on a sampler by the window. She stood when the Matron swished in, abandoning the last red stitch in the A of Amen .

Both their names were on the list.

That night, someone set fire to a curtain.

Thorpe, having underestimated the strain the weeks of rain and detention had been causing, was forced to conceive of a second reward, an event that would include everyone. A second list was drawn up, dividing the patients’ names into groups of eight, and it promised a late-summer outing. Posted next to the garden plot awards, this larger notice announced “A Carriage Ride and Walking Party!” in a female attendant’s best calligraphy, under which Herschel had been requested to sketch a stand of trees in fine weather. “To exotic gardens in a magnificent wood!” the poster read. “To observe strange and wonderful plant species!” Under this last line Herschel had inexplicably drawn a toad, but by the time Thorpe saw it, the squat creature could not be removed. Three dates for the outings followed; they would go in two omnibuses lent by a friend of the Superintendent’s, so that the only cost would be for drivers. The names of the staff members assigned to lead the parties were noted in block print, though some reassignments were demanded. To quell the dissent over the garden plot allotments even further, the Superintendent consented to allow the genders to mix.

Alfred Hale liked to refer to the Whitmore as a country house. He’d suffered from a blow to the head at the hands of a thief, and there were whole weeks during his confinement when he believed he was a guest at a grand estate; that he had been invited here to play the trombone with a renowned ensemble. Because of this he had a habit of entering every door as if it were the boundary between the outside world and a great hall: he doffed his hat constantly, looked searchingly for a doorman to take it, sought coat stands that did not exist. Once, he plopped his bowler on Noble’s head because the hall porter had the misfortune to be standing inside an entry. He behaved in a similar fashion when he returned to his ward at night, saying, “Good evening, it’s delightful to be here,” before engaging in a round of handshakes with those already turned in to their beds.

Hale was now assigned to a walking party that consisted of so many names he became unsure as to who they were and how, with so many bodies, their instruments might be delivered to the estate. He took Bream aside and went over the list, asking, “Is that the French horn player?” “Is that the violinist?” Bream walked away, shaking his head, and Hale shouted after him, “Will the instruments precede us or follow on?” He wrote to the Commissioners about the injustice of being separated, even briefly, from his cases, but the Commissioners failed to respond. He spent the intervening days considering which of his “fellow musicians” might be left off the omnibus in order to make room for his trombone. According to the billet posted over the card table, his walking party was to consist of himself, old man Greevy, Professor Wick, Charles Leeson, three women he could not place, and the one called Eliza Woodward whom he’d seen kiss Hopper at the summer ball. He’d watched them dance afterward, noting that she had fine-looking lips but absolutely no sense of rhythm. The poet had snickered watching them, said that she had a habit of pretending to strike herself with a knife through the heart, but that due to her anatomical ignorance she always thumped her closed fist against her collarbone. And so, thinking only of a seat for his trombone and his need to have it with him, Hale got it in his mind that after an evening meal, as soon as was feasible, he would lure Eliza out of the women’s half of the dining hall to relieve her of her misinformation.

Eliza Woodward’s casebook states that she had come to the Whitmore complaining of fatigue, an exhaustion that made the Whitmore’s usual constitutionals — the forced ingestion of meats, the rhubarb purgatives — feel like constant and torturous supplications when all she wanted to do was sleep. In late July of 1877 her casebook states, Does not seem to mind the rain , as if this were so anomalous it merited an attendant’s notation.

There had been a time when she was well, and muzzily Eliza knew this. There was still colour in her cheeks when, during a lesson in comportment in the wood-panelled sitting room, the Matron produced a looking glass.

“Who do you see?” the Matron cooed, smoothing Eliza’s hands so they did not grip each other so forcefully.

Eliza peered closely but she did not understand the question. Instead of answering she touched her neck with her fingers, the delicate cording of it visible to her for the first time. The ligatures were akin to the strings of an instrument, and Eliza thought, as she considered them, of the ones belonging to the idiot Herschel, how they must have been nicked or severed.

“I see a lovely young woman,” the Matron chirped. “Can you say her name?”

Eliza stared at the Matron. She did not know if she should say her Christian name, or her pet name, or the one her father had thrown at her.

“Eliza?” Her lip twitched. She wanted to get the answer right; if she did they wouldn’t take away her garden plot and when the rain stopped she would have an oval tag with her name on it above a bed of flowers.

“Well done,” the Matron said, and she moved with her looking glass across the sitting room toward Sallie Herring, the mirror’s refracted light cleaving the walls and ceiling. When the Matron sat down, Sallie stopped pulling at her hair, sliding away the tuffet of strands that were already nested on the bench beside her.

The night before Alfred Hale assaulted her, Eliza stole out of bed with a blanket and a pillow to lie down in the far corner of the women’s ward where there was space enough between the last cot and the wall to breathe. To help her sleep she sang a lullaby her sister, Julia, used to coddle her with: “Pussy, Pussy, where have you been today? In the meadow asleep in the hay.” When the widow in the cot beside her swatted her for singing, she prayed quietly for her sister and brother — whom she had loved, her father once said, to excess. When praying didn’t lull her she resorted, as she sometimes did, to whispering her own name. This was dangerous, because in the blackened room, the grey curtains blotting out even the moonlight, she could sometimes hear herself call back. The saying of her own name shifting from a query to a conversation; how in the gap between the pulse of saying it over and over again a transfer occurred, so that it was as if she were standing in her best dress on the far side of a seamless field, hearing someone at a distance — some lost version of herself — anxiously begging her home.