1906
M
ARY BET AND
Cattie Jordan slept in the Visiting Families wing the first night. Then, when the doctors said Cicero needed to stay on a few more days for a complete evaluation, they found a rooming house a few blocks away. The hospital was built a quarter century earlier to conform to the latest theories in treating the insane. It had a tall central portion, flanked by massive four-story wings—one for each sex, with milder cases housed on the upper floors. The many windows provided plenty of light, and the placement of air ducts allowed for health-promoting ventilation. In all, the redbrick building and its pediments and striped awnings and peaked cupolas, set amid peaceful parklike grounds, were more reminiscent of an elegant hotel than a hospital, and so Mary Bet had fewer misgivings about leaving her father than she had thought she might.
“It’s only for a few days,” she reassured him, as they were heading out.
“All right,” he said, “but you’ll come back tomorrow?” He studied her face, his own looking so much more lined and sagging and mottled than she had ever noticed.
She nodded and peered out the window so he couldn’t see her eyes. “You have a good view here,” she told him. “It looks like the lawn at Mount Jordan Springs, but bigger. There’s people walking on the path.” She watched as two men strolled along, followed by an attendant; one of the patients appeared to have his hands in a kind of muff. The trees were still bare, but there were some evergreens. She wondered what it would look like in the spring, but she kept this thought to herself. Off to the west she could see the courthouse with its fancy cupola, and beyond that the first ridges of the mountains. From the hallway at her back came the strong odor of ammonia, lemon, and resin.
“I’m sure it’ll be nice here in the summer,” Cattie Jordan said. She cleared her throat as though to take back the words.
The high-ceilinged room had cream-colored walls, a yellow pine floor, a low narrow bed, one spindle-back chair, and a small deal table upon which sat a Bible. They’d asked for a private room, which Cicero could afford, but now Mary Bet wondered if he might be lonely here. It’s only for a few nights, she told herself. They left his brown canvas traveling bag on the luggage stand and said good-bye.
They spent the next two days going back and forth from the hospital to the rooming house to the shops on Union Street, buying things Cicero might need for his room. “We’ll come back up at Easter,” Cattie Jordan told her niece. This was after Dr. Eastman, who had taken charge of Cicero’s case, informed them that Cicero had tried to get out and had threatened a nurse who attempted to stop him.
“I told him we wouldn’t leave him here,” Mary Bet kept saying. “I promised him.”
“Well you shouldn’t have. They seem awfully nice there. I think that Dr. Eastman is very competent, even if he is from New Jersey. If he had a little more hair and a smaller nose with less hair in it, he might even be attractive, the kind you might be interested in, Mary Bet.” She eyed her niece, but Mary Bet ignored her aunt and kept looking through the bins of socks and slippers. She wished she had time to go over and pay a visit to the deaf school, just so she could lay eyes on the last place her brother had lived.
“Oh,” Cattie laughed. She squeezed Mary Bet’s hand and held up a pair of fuzzy rabbit-fur slippers. “Wouldn’t your father look something in these?”
Mary Bet had to stifle a laugh, picturing her father wearing the slippers. She was annoyed with herself for being so amused by her aunt. She wondered if Cattie had any close friends back in Williamsboro, and for the first time she thought perhaps her aunt, besides wanting to marry her off, really did wish her some happiness.
“Well, I’ll say one thing,” Cattie remarked, “that doctor’s no Joe Dorsett. Not that I blame you for that business—you were young and easily fooled. But you’d be a good catch for a doctor or a lawyer, I can assure you.” She brushed something from her niece’s shoulder and pulled back as though to regard her.
Mary Bet did not look up, though she could feel her aunt’s gaze. Standing here with her, she suddenly missed Joe, missed having him to go on walks with and talk to. The weight and shape and light of his physical presence beside her she felt as an absence, and she dropped the rabbit fur slippers she was holding because they somehow reminded her of him and how she had banished him from her life and how sadness and longing had come to fill the space inside her. It struck her as strange that she should feel such sadness for a boy, a despairing heaviness of heart that was not the same as grief for her lost family members; it was a different species of
sadness altogether—an unhappiness for the future, or what might have been the future. She had to move.
Out on the wooden sidewalk she adjusted her bonnet and waited for her aunt. “I just needed some air,” she told Cattie Jordan.
“Are you feeling faint dear? Do you need to go lie down?”
“No, I’m better now. I think I want to go back to the hospital and then walk over to the deaf school and have a look around.” They began heading back up to their rooming house.
“All right, it might do you some good to see where your brother was. I’ll go with you.” A cool wind swirled dust up from the road, and Cattie Jordan retied her hat ribbon tight against her chin.
At the hospital, the day somehow got away from them. Cicero told Mary Bet that “that woman”—he pointed to his wife—was a nuisance, and so Cattie went to the solarium at the end of the ward, where a patient was playing the piano; after a while, she took herself back to the rooming house. But Cicero would not let Mary Bet out of his sight. When she tried to go out, even to relieve herself, he held her hand and said, “I don’t think this is the right place for me. Please don’t leave me here.”
“I’ll be right back, Daddy,” she told him, then hurried from the room, biting her underlip to hold back the tears.
Out in the hall, the nurses gave her sympathetic looks, and later in the day Dr. Eastman assured her that she was doing the best thing for her father that she could possibly do. “Many aren’t as lucky. He has a nice room with a view. There are games and activities for him, and he can do all the reading he wants, as long as it’s not agitating. You said he likes to read?”
“Yes, sir,” Mary Bet said. “I’ll send up a box of books for him. But when do you think he’ll be able to come home?”
Dr. Eastman glanced at her, then down at the clipboard in his hand. His nose was unfortunately large, Mary Bet thought, and he was short and bald as well, and unlike Dr. Slocum his eyes were
guarded and thoughtful. She only hoped that he was better with his patients. The whole place, with its smell of cleaned-over panic, was distressing in a way she had not anticipated. Every now and again she could hear a shout or moan from a ward down below, and even on her father’s hall, with its subdued colors and sunlit spaces, there were the odd noises of patients muttering insensibly to invisible people. She just wanted to get out, into the fresh air. How could anybody stand it here? “It’s hard to say,” Dr. Eastman said, his Yankee-edged voice grating on her. “A psychotic case at your father’s age—I have to honestly say, he may be here indefinitely.”
“Can’t you cure him then?”
“Miss Hartsoe, as I told Mrs. Hartsoe, we do what we can. Routine, exercise, and medication.” He ticked the three pillars of treatment off with his thumb and two first fingers. “That’s what we offer. A stable, predictable schedule, plenty of fresh air and outdoor exercise, if the patient is able to function outside, and a narrow array of drugs—mostly sulphonal, laudanum, potassium iodide, strychnine.” He ticked these off as well, his gaze over Mary Bet’s head, as though he were talking to himself, and she could not help but wonder if he were not to some degree affected by the lunatics who surrounded him.
“My father’s not crazy,” she said. “He just needs some rest. He’s had a hard life, you see.”
“Yes, I understand. But with his violent tendencies, he needs more than rest. We’ll try to keep him on this ward, which allows for some freedom of movement. If he improves, he may find that a light job in the laundry or cafeteria is beneficial. And we have art classes and reading classes and lectures and chapel services. He won’t be bored.”
“And you won’t put him in restraints?”
“It’s always a last resort, and it’s for the safety of the patients.”
From the window, Mary Bet could just see, to the left of the treeline across the road, the brownstone top of the school for the deaf. And yet there was no time to go over there. They were leaving on the train in the morning, but she would be back up to see her father in a few weeks. There would be time to explore the school and the town, to delve into the past. She owed it to Siler, she told herself, and she wasn’t afraid of what she might find. No, she thought, I’m not avoiding it.
MARY BET AND
Cattie Jordan went home and tried to find a way to live together under the same roof. Except for Clara, all of Mary Bet’s close friends were engaged or married, and so Clara and Mary Bet became regular guests at each other’s houses. Clara had never been a pretty girl, and as a young woman she was even less attractive. To Mary Bet, she had the most beautiful and expressive eyes she had ever seen in anybody, except for Myrtle Emma, but she knew that her tall, sturdy figure and heavy dark eyebrows were not features that men would find pleasing. When they were going somewhere together, Mary Bet was often embarrassed by how Clara would praise her as they put on their shawls and jackets.
“Thank you, darling,” she would say to Clara’s compliment about her hair, “now if I just had your nose, I wouldn’t be half bad to look at.”
Her own physicality, which had made her uncomfortable, she now took as a kind of power, yet she was unsure whether and how to use it. A few young swains about town, since discovering that Joe Dorsett was out of the picture, had asked her to church picnics and young people’s socials, and after she’d turned them all down—for none of them suited her quite right—she had developed a reputation as a snob, at least where men were concerned.
It was, in fact, her refusal to attend a dance with a young law student, the son of Cattie Jordan’s only friend in Hartsoe City, that
made her decide to move out of the only home she had ever known. When Cattie heard of Mary Bet’s refusal, she sat waiting for her in the parlor, ready to pounce.
“You’re a young fool,” she snapped, rising as Mary Bet came in. “And I hope you’ll be happy living alone the rest of your life.”
“That’s all right,” Mary Bet returned, “as long I don’t have to live with that Sloan Pickford. His breath was terrible, and he wasn’t very polite—he acted like he was doing me a favor.” She hurried up to her room, thinking “and here I was thinking Aunt Cattie Jordan could change somehow and not be Aunt Cattie Jordan.”
The next week she moved in with Clara and her mother. She had begun forming a vague notion, an idea she turned over in her mind while falling asleep, or upon waking, of bringing her father home, no matter what the doctors up there said. How could they stop her? But then during the day, she would busy herself mending and sewing for Clara and Mrs. Edwards, and going back and forth from her house to see to the animals. She and her aunt rarely spoke to each other, though sometimes Cattie Jordan would come out to the chicken yard and inform Mary Bet about her father’s situation.
And then one day in the summer Cattie Jordan decided to sell Cicero’s store. She sought out the advice and help of Robert Gray and his son, and they drew up the paperwork. William Wade, the young man who’d been managing the store since Cicero’s breakdown, had found two investors. The timing seemed perfect, and through Robert Gray’s son he inquired whether the store might go up for sale.
Mary Bet was in a state of panic. What if her father should improve and come home? The idea of her aunt coming to such a momentous decision by herself seemed impossible to believe.
She had to speak to her father, and the only way to get to him in time was on the telephone at the post office. They couldn’t hear
each other very well, and he became agitated and started yelling incoherently—something about his father trying to ruin him. One phrase caught in her mind, because he repeated it—“Let it be done.”
She took that as a sign that she should turn it over to God. But what did God want her to do? She had given up her childhood rituals—the touching of her chin with joined hands, the obsessive hand-washing, and even the attention to her scrapbook. But she still prayed several times a day. She asked Clara’s advice and was grateful that her friend did not say, as so many had, that he was certainly going to get better.
Mary Bet did nothing, and a week later Cattie Jordan signed the papers selling the store. And a week after that, Cattie came down with a bad summer cold that quickly turned into pneumonia. Mary Bet visited her every day, and sometimes twice a day, because there was no one else, besides Dr. Slocum, to look after her. She rehired Essie, and finally she moved back in. Her aunt lay up in her parents’ bedroom, her faded brown hair spread out upon the pillows, looking bewildered and afraid. “I’m too strong to catch pneumonia,” she complained.
Mary Bet read to her and told her that, yes, she was strong and that her reserves of strength would see her through. She kept to herself what people said, clucking their tongues, about how strange it was that Cicero’s new wife kept the house cold all winter, then took sick in the summer.
Her son, Sheriff Hooper Teague, came over from Williamsboro for a visit. He ended up staying four nights, because his mother’s condition did not improve. “I don’t think she’s been the same since Daddy died,” he told Mary Bet. “I don’t know how you felt about it, Mary Bet, but I wasn’t in favor of her marrying your father. I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t listen. I didn’t think it was a good idea for either of them. I’m sorry if that offends you.”
“It doesn’t atall,” Mary Bet confided. “I wasn’t in favor of it myself.”
“You’ve done so much for Mother, and I just want you to know how much I appreciate it.”