A Madness So Discreet (2 page)

I
t was still dark outside when they were called to breakfast by the sound of Miss Marie walking the hall with her cowbell. Even though the clanging noise seemed to perforate her lips and bounce off her teeth while she dressed, Grace preferred Marie's method of waking the inmates as opposed to Croomes's; she was more likely to unlock the door and barge in, hoping to catch some infringement that she could punish.

Grace's nightshirt went over her head, a flimsy shift taking its place. There were no undergarments to bother with; she'd been stripped immediately after her admittance, her corset, chemise, and petticoat whisked from her bare skin to reveal the guilty bulge of her belly while she was given a bath, Croomes scrubbing unnecessarily hard over her tender abdomen.

The lye soap had left burn marks on her skin, some laced with the deep scratches from Croomes. They scabbed over while she lay crying that night, the last of her voice seeping out of her while the Grace Mae who had worn a red velvet dress hours before fell asleep to wake only as Grace. Her family name had been stripped from her along with her clothes. There would be no record of a person with the last name of Mae in Wayburne Lunatic Asylum of Boston. Her father wouldn't stand for it.

As her first days in the asylum had passed, she began to think of her body as a scab that served only to protect the tiny movements inside of her. Eventually she would be able to protect it no more; it would be forced into the world kicking and screaming, wanting nothing more than the protection and silence that the darkness had offered.

She understood babies now, and their reluctance to be born. Once hers was forced into the light and taken away, her body would be of no more use. She could only hope it would be allowed to slough off the world, unnoticed. Until then, she had only to wait.

Grace combed her light hair roughly with her fingers, catching the split ends in the ragged tips of her nails. Miss Marie gave a perfunctory tap on the door before unlocking it, taking one glance at her, and saying, “Well, you're one less I'll have to help dress, at least,” and moving on.

Mrs. Clay was in the hall, deftly working her dark hair into a bun
with the pin she was allowed to keep even though it was against the rules. Grace stepped over a writhing woman, well aware of her own untidy hair and what price Mrs. Clay paid for her small luxuries. To be an exemplary patient meant she was paraded about when the Board came to inspect the asylum, her hairpin a prize won at a carnival where she was the animal on display.

“Hello, dear.” Mrs. Clay smiled, the tiniest of lines around her mouth edging more deeply as she did. “I hope you slept well.”

Grace shook her head as Mrs. Clay tucked her hand inside of Grace's elbow to steer her toward the dining hall. Unperturbed by her walking partner's continued silence, Mrs. Clay kept on. “Come and have your food before there's none left for you or the babe.”

Food was a constant struggle. The kitchens provided only what they could afford for the day, regardless of how many mouths there were to feed. Many inmates never made it to the tables in time to see food but made the best of it with crumbs and scraps that fell to the floor. If not for the driving necessity of eating for two, Grace would've been happy to be a forgotten one who died quietly in her cell.

But for now her appetite was a pit, and she fed it with the abandon of the desperate. They made for the tables and the food piled there, the press of unwashed bodies on all sides of them breaking any pretense of a line. Mrs. Clay snatched two slices of bread, rolling one into a ball and hiding it in the folds of her skirts for Grace later.
Grace dove for her own piece, slapping away the filthy hands of the girl on her right, who hissed at her. She jammed the bread into her mouth, ignoring the threat.

Grace chewed as quickly as possible, grinding the heavy bread with her teeth and peeling it off the roof of her mouth with her tongue. Even without knives and forks, her training wouldn't allow her to stuff her fingers in her mouth. Across the table from her, Cracked Pat had no such compunctions. Fingers caked with food went into her mouth, along with fistfuls of her hair that she'd managed to pull free from her head. Grace turned away, her delicate stomach turning. Mrs. Clay followed with the concealed bread, and they retreated to a corner by a window rendered nearly opaque by streaks of bird droppings.

“Here then, eat up,” Mrs. Clay said, passing the bread tightly in her fist over to Grace. She leaned against the window and watched as Grace devoured it. “Whoever thought the idea of sitting while you ate your food would seem like a treat, eh?”

She was rewarded with a tiny smile, but Grace's thoughts slipped away again, to the days when sweet Alice's angelic face was what she saw across the table, not Cracked Pat's bleeding scalp.

“Fresh bruises on that one.” Mrs. Clay jerked her chin toward the door where a patient not much older than Grace was making her unsure way to the table. “Must be the new girl that was screaming about the spiders.”

Grace nodded but didn't turn her head to look.

Mrs. Clay reached out and touched her chin, pulling Grace's blue gaze to her own. “Have a care, girl. Show me you'll take an interest in something around you, bleak as it all may be. You can keep your words inside if you want, but I see your eyes looking far off and your arms crossed over your belly. They'll take it from you when it's born and after that I won't see you again even if I should get out of this place. I don't think my kind is welcome at your home address.”

Grace's eyebrows drew together.

“It's your hands that give you away,” Mrs. Clay said, taking one of Grace's in her own. “All smooth and lily-white, never done a lick of work in your life. I've got the calluses of twenty years at the plow, and every penny earned from it right into the husband's pocket once he shucked me in here.”

Grace pulled her hand back to rest on her stomach, and Mrs. Clay's mouth tightened. “You're not the first young woman of your class I've seen in here, heavy around the waist. However that child was got on you, your family will want you back once it's gone. You storing everything up on your insides won't do you no favors once you're past these walls. Find something outside to bring you back to the world, or you may end up here for good.”

Grace's eyes returned to the window, where a light morning rain began to seep through the layers of grime, allowing splashes of color from the outside world into the gray interior. Mrs. Clay sighed
heavily and rested a hand on her shoulder.

Kind as they were, Mrs. Clay's words were lost on Grace. She knew the baby would be born, and with its exit would come her reentry into the world she'd known. They would sew her back into her red velvet dress she'd arrived in. Her father's black lacquered carriage would gather her after hours, the rolling wheels taking her back home to her own room, her own bed. Her own terrors.

She had already decided she was never leaving.

“
W
ater treatment for you today?” Mrs. Clay asked, as they strolled arm in arm through the halls, stepping over inert bodies.

“For you today? For you today?” Cracked Pat kept pace alongside them, echoing Mrs. Clay's words. Grace nodded as Cracked Pat reached up and plucked at Grace's blond hair, which Mrs. Clay had neatly tucked into a bun using her pin.

“There's the little lady,” Croomes's voice bellowed down the stony hall, as she waddled toward them. “Keeping time with the farmer's wife, a fine pair of friends they are. I'm sure the two of you are plotting rather a nice picnic. Perhaps you'll go for an afternoon ride on your matching ponies afterward? In the meantime it's my clock you're on, and it says you're next for your treatment.” Croomes made a mock bow.

“I'll remind you that I am not a farmer's wife,” Mrs. Clay said, her voice cold.

“That a fact?” Croomes asked.

“It is,” Mrs. Clay said. “My husband divorced me soon after shuttling me in here. One word from him and the signature of a judge and I'm insane. My lands became his, the judge's sister his wife, my children now hers.”

“Sad story you got there,” Croomes said.

“I am not a farmer's wife. If you call me that again, they'll have good reason to put me in solitary and you'll be missing an eye.”

Croomes watched Mrs. Clay for a moment, her jaw grinding her teeth together. “I've got a fine list of things I'd like to call you. How about I try some of those?”

“I am not a farmer's wife,” Mrs. Clay repeated.

“All right then, get an idea stuck in there much, do you?” Croomes said. She gave Grace a push on the backside to move her along, but Grace noticed that she never turned her back on Mrs. Clay. Another small smile played on the edge of Grace's lips and she squelched it quickly. It was the little battles that got them through their days. All in preparation for the bigger ones to come.

To kill yourself in an asylum is a thing easily done.

Plenty who wished to stay alive found themselves dying of neglect, while those who prayed for death woke each morning to
the sun's rays filtered through greasy windows. Grace had thought through her options more than once; to slide beneath the freezing waters during a treatment while the attendant's back was turned or to simply cease eating.

But Grace had sat through many sermons by her father's side, heard about the perils of hell and the fiery brimstone that surely awaited her if she took her own life. She doubted that hell was hot and sulfuric. Instead, she imagined it was comfortable and smelled like her own bedroom. If fear kept her from ending herself, she'd be neatly deposited back between those sheets, as confining as any chains. An ethereal hell or the one she'd already lived through were her options. Croomes twisted Grace's wrist, bringing her thoughts back to the body she was stuck in for the moment.

“My, my, but you do walk pretty,” Croomes said. “Not a bone out of place on you. Forget balancing the book, I bet we could put a whole bookcase on your head, couldn't we? You look like a picture in one of them lady's magazines, except for that bit.” Croomes flicked Grace's pregnant belly as they turned the corner to the baths. “Nothing much ladylike about that, is there?”

Grace had buried the urge to speak so deeply that most words from others meant nothing, but Croomes's voice always crept through the safe fog she'd veiled her mind in, demanding to be heard. Grace set her jaw and went to a tub already half-filled with freezing water. Miss Marie was dumping buckets over another
patient, but moved to help Grace take off her shift.

Marie offered her a hand as she stepped over the porcelain rim, and Grace took it, leaning heavily on the girl's arm as she lowered herself into the frigid water. Though she'd forsaken sound, she couldn't stop her teeth from chattering.

“Right then, help her on into the tub. Let's see if we can find some scented soaps while we're at it,” Croomes said, crossing her arms. “'Course, Marie here would be wanting to make sure you get through everything safely. Did she tell you she's taking your baby?”

Grace's head jerked at the words and her wide eyes met Marie's, who flushed and turned to hiss at Croomes.

“What'd you have to go and do that for? No need to upset the girl.”

Croomes produced a half-smoked cigarette from her pocket, struck a match on the stool, and lit what was left of it. “You going to pour it over her head, or am I?”

“I will,” Marie said, fetching her bucket from the other tub, where the patient's head lolled to the side, lips blue. “Though I don't know as I see much of the point of it.”

“And where's your medical degree, I'll ask you? Heedson says it's too much heat in the brain that makes them crazy, and so we douse 'em.”

“If that's the case, this girl here should be talking normal as you or me right now. She's as cold as the dead.”

Croomes blew smoke out of her nose and watched as Marie
poured the first bucketful over Grace's head, the water loosening the pale bun and turning it into dark streaks that clung to her skin. “This one's as cold as the water she's sitting in, down past her bones and into her soul. Nothing wrong with her brain. It's her heart that's got no life in it.”

Grace sat, letting the water numb her skin and apathy numb her ears as Croomes rose from her stool. “I've got Cracked Pat to tend to. Never comes to her treatments without my special encouragement.”

“I'll finish here,” Marie said as Croomes walked past Grace's tub. “No need for you to trouble yourself.”

“No trouble,” Croomes said, digging her fingers into Grace's bun and pulling out the pin that held it in place, sending the loose hair cascading down her shoulders. “I'll make sure this gets to its rightful owner,” Croomes said, lifting a hank of Grace's dripping hair and grinding her cigarette out on the pale expanse of her neck.

Words boiled in Grace's stomach as she clenched down on the pain, her teeth grinding together to keep from rewarding Croomes's cruelty by crying out. Marie gasped but cut it short at a glare from Croomes. “Anybody hears about that, I'll know who did the talking, won't I?”

The only warmth left in Grace's body slid down her face in the form of tears, which Marie brushed away with her callused fingers once Croomes's footsteps had receded down the hall. “I'm sorry about that, miss, really I am. Way I look at it, most of you've got big enough problems without the likes of Croomes on your tails all the time.”

Marie fell silent, her gaze cutting to the door and the other, unconscious patient floating in her freezing water. “I'll just do one more bucket and leave off the rest, no one needs to know. Besides, a bit of the cold might feel good on that burn.”

The frigid water cascaded over Grace's features once more, the icy fingers digging into the singed pink flesh of her neck where Croomes had burned her. Numbness crept in, a heavy weight that began in her legs and moved up her torso. She rested her head against the rim of the tub, cramped muscles crying out as she did.

Marie pulled up a stool next to her and began running her fingers through Grace's hair to untangle the wet ends. “You do a fine enough job of keeping yourself clean,” she said. “But without no brush I'm sure it's difficult.”

Grace felt the slightest relaxation spreading through her shoulders as Marie finger combed her hair. “I'm sorry about the other thing too, miss,” she said after a while. “I don't think there's no reason to tell you I'll be the one taking your baby from you. Croomes did that just to satisfy the meanness in her.

“My Andrew—that's my husband, see—he's always been wanting a wee one and I . . . well, I guess there weren't such a thing in the cards for me. My own ma says we've not been married all that long, and you can't hurry nature, but I got this feeling inside of me that I can't shake. Like an emptiness where nothing's ever gonna grow. I tried to say so to my ma and she said I'd best keep that talk to myself if I don't want to end up in—”

Marie stopped short, her fingers pausing for a moment. “Well . . . I guess it's no secret that some of you are just as sane as me and maybe that works the other way around too, sometimes.”

Her fingers picked up their work, sliding freely through Grace's hair. “So when you came in here with your belly, I had a talk with Heedson and it was decided upon. I told my husband that our prayers had been answered, and he'd best be sleeping in another room for the time being just to be careful, and . . . I suppose it's a horrible thing, miss, but I've been padding my skirts so that my waist matches your own, and I'll be doing it right up until—”

Marie's words stopped and Grace stared forward, giving no indication that she'd heard any of it.

“Aye, well,” Marie said. “If you want to hate me for it, you can and that's your choice. I can't say as I feel like it's a good thing to do, but I promise I'll give your babe a good home, and it'll be loved as if it were my own.”

The numbness had spread to Grace's thighs and midsection, but she could still feel the kick inside of her. Slowly she reached up, entwining her freezing fingers with Marie's and bringing them down into the cold water. Marie gasped at the shock, but then Grace cupped the nurse's hand on the swell of her belly to feel a kick so strong it sent ripples to the sides of the tub.

They held hands under the water. Their cold fingers sheltered the tiny life, their combined tears the only heat in the room.