The Girl Who Couldn’t Read

2

After our visit to the hydrotherapy room, Morgan took me on a brief tour of the institution. We began on the second floor, where the dormitories were arranged along a long corridor that must have run a good deal of the length of the building. Most of the women slept in large rooms accommodating twenty or so beds, although some were in smaller rooms, and a few were in isolation.

‘It may be that they are violent or that there is something about them, some habit or tic that is a nuisance to others that makes them a victim of violence, or simply that they continually make a racket and keep everyone else awake,’ Morgan explained. ‘We try to keep things as peaceful as possible.’

Each sleeping area had a room nearby where two attendants alternately slept and kept watch. ‘Is this to prevent the patients escaping?’ I asked.

‘Escaping? Escaping?’ He looked askance at me. ‘Good God, man, they cannot escape, because in order to do so they would first have to be prisoners. They are not; they are patients. They do not escape; they abscond. Or would do if we were to let them. Anyway, the sleeping quarters are locked at night so they cannot wander.’

I surveyed the length of the corridor and the many doors. ‘What about the risk of fire? Surely if one broke out, there would not be time to unlock all these doors?’

He sighed. ‘You may well be right. I have my doubts about some of the women we are forced to employ and fear that in such a case they would think only of saving themselves rather than chance their own lives getting the patients out.’

‘I’ve seen a system where the doors in a corridor are linked and locked by a device at the end of the row that secures or releases them all at once.’

He stopped and stared at me. ‘I know of only one institution that has such a system. Sing Sing prison. How came you to see it?’

I could only hope he didn’t notice my momentary hesitation before replying. ‘I didn’t mean I’d actually seen it, sir. I meant that I had seen there is such a system. I think I read about it in the Clarion or some other newspaper.’

He resumed walking. ‘I’m sure we cannot afford such luxuries. The state will fund these things for lawbreakers, but not, alas, for lunatics.’

I could not help clenching my fists at the idea that prevention from being burned to death in a locked room should be considered a luxury, but said nothing. I was not here, after all, to take up the cause of the lunatics.

On the ground floor we visited a long bleak room with bare wooden benches around the walls, bolted to them, all occupied by inmates, and in the centre a table covered by a shining white cloth, around which sat half a dozen attendants. The entire room was as spotless as the tablecloth and I thought what a good job the attendants must do to keep it so clean. I would later mock my own stupidity for this assumption. At either end of the table were two potbelly stoves, whose heat I could only feel from a few feet away when we approached them, but even if my own experience hadn’t told me they were inadequate to the task of heating such a large room, I would have known because the women on the benches were shivering and hugging themselves for warmth. The backs of the benches were perfectly straight and you could tell they were uncomfortable from the way the inmates were forced to sit upright upon them, the seats being so narrow the sitter would simply slide off if she slouched. Each bench looked as if it would accommodate five people, which I could tell from the fact that every one had six women sitting on it and looked unpleasantly crowded. These inmates were all clad in the same coarse, drab calico garment I had seen on the woman in the hydrotherapy room. On one side of the room were three barred windows set at more than five feet from the ground, so that even standing, let alone sitting, it was impossible for any but an exceptionally tall woman to see out of them.

When I mentioned this to Morgan, thinking, but not saying, that it was a poor piece of design, he said, ‘That’s the idea. We do not want them looking out – it would be a distraction.’

I had to bite my tongue not to ask distraction from what, since the women had absolutely nothing to occupy them. There was no sound from any of them and they all seemed subdued, staring blankly into space, or down at the floor or even sitting with their eyes closed and possibly dozing, until they became aware of us, whereupon I sensed a ripple of excitement pass around the room.

A woman stood up and approached Morgan. She stretched out a hand and tugged his sleeve. ‘Doctor, doctor, have you come to sign my release?’ she said. She was old, perhaps sixty or so, with a bent back and a brown wizened walnut of a face.

Carefully, he lifted her hand from his arm as if it had been some delicate inanimate object and let it drop gently by her side. ‘Not today, Sarah, not today,’ he told her. ‘Now be a good girl and sit down, for you know we have to see you can behave properly before there can be any talk of release.’

I was impressed he knew her by name – he’d told me there were some four hundred patients in the hospital – which made him smile. ‘She’s been here thirty years, since long before my time. She asks me the same thing on every occasion she sets eyes on me; she does not realise she will never go home.’

While this had been going on, other patients had taken their lead from Sarah and risen from their seats and a great hubbub of chatter had sprung up. In response to this disturbance the attendants rose from the table and busied themselves taking hold of those who were walking about and leading them back to the benches and where necessary pushing them down onto them. ‘Now behave!’ I heard one attendant snap at a young woman. ‘Or you’ll be for it later.’ Instantly the woman turned pale and meekly went back to her place.

Eventually all the patients were seated again and after a few more stern words from the attendants, the chatter died down and silence reigned once more. Some still looked at us, with what seemed like great interest, but most resumed their earlier pose, and simply sat and stared empty-eyed straight ahead, not even making eye contact with the women sitting opposite them on the other side of the room.

‘What are they doing here?’ I whispered to Morgan.

‘Doing? Doing? Why, man, you see for yourself, they are not doing anything. This is the day room, where they spend much of the day. They will sit like this until it is time for their evening meal.’

‘When do they have that?’

‘At six o’clock.’

It was presently only four o’clock. I could not help thinking that if I were made to sit in total silence with nothing at all to occupy me, even if I were not off my head to begin with, I soon would be.

Morgan looked at me angrily, and I wondered for a moment whether I’d actually spoken my thoughts aloud, but being sure I hadn’t, I saw I had irritated him by the tone of my questions. He took my queries as criticism of the regime, which, I began to see, they were, since I was so appalled by what I was seeing that I could not prevent a certain disbelief creeping into my tone.

‘It is, as I said,’ he paused to let go a sigh of exasperation, ‘a question of management. If they were all doing something, they would be more difficult to manage. Any activity would have to involve something to do it with. If you allowed them books, for example, some of them would damage the books, or they would throw them at the attendants, or use them as weapons against their neighbours. And even if they simply read them it would not be good, for it would give them ideas. They have too many ideas already. It would be the same with sewing or knitting. Can you imagine the possible consequences of handing them needles? So removing potentially dangerous objects and maintaining an air of calm is essential for control. But also it is therapeutic. They acquire through practice the ability to sit and do nothing. It teaches them to be calm. If they can do this, then both their lives and ours are made easier.’

After this he took me outside via a rear entrance to show me the grounds. There were extensive lawns and an ornamental pond and beyond this some woodland. I felt a great relief to be out in the open air. I looked back at the hospital. It was a forbidding sight and I could not help thinking how daunting the first approach to it must be for a new patient. The style was gothic, with a fake medieval tower at one end and a round turret at the other. Much of it was strangled by ivy. The windows were small, which accounted for the gloom within, many of them merely narrow openings to imitate the arrow slits of an ancient castle.

Once again Morgan must have read my thoughts. ‘Dismal-looking edifice, isn’t it?’

I turned away from it. ‘I fear no one could say otherwise. It looks as if it ought to be haunted.’

He began to walk away and I heard him mutter something that sounded like, ‘Oh it is, my boy, believe me, it is.’ I had the sense that he was talking to himself and did not think I could hear him.

I caught up with him just as we came upon a group of lunatics out for their daily walk. Still clad in their same worn calico dresses, each woman now had a woollen shawl and, bizarrely, a straw hat, such as you might wear on a day out on Coney Island, making the overall impression strangely comic. The women were lined up in twos, guarded by attendants.

As they passed us, a shiver of horror crept through me. My gaze was met with vacant eyes and inexpressive faces, while many of them jabbered away, seemingly holding conversations with themselves, or sometimes leaning toward their partners and talking animatedly, although in most cases the other woman appeared not to be listening, either staring mutely ahead or muttering away herself, lost in a conversation of her own. I saw too that these women were under restraint. Wide leather belts were locked around their waists and attached to a long cable rope, so that they were all linked to one another, a sight that reminded me of old illustrations I had seen of slaves being led from their African villages to the slavers’ ships. I did a rough count and estimated there must have been around twenty women roped together in this fashion.

We stood aside to let them pass and I could see many of them had dirty noses, unkempt hair and grimy skin. My own nostrils attested that they were not clean, whereas I hadn’t noticed any unpleasant smells amongst the other women in the day room and was surprised that there should be any now we were in the fresh air.

‘Who are these women?’ I asked Morgan.

‘They’re the most violent on the island,’ he replied. ‘They are kept on the third floor, separate from the rest. They are all extremely disturbed and their presence would not be compatible with the treatment of the others.’

As if to verify this, one of them began to yell, which sparked off a reaction in another, who commenced to sing, in a strangely beautiful and haunting voice, the old song ‘Barbara Allen’, and for a moment it felt as if the sadness of the song was a reflection of her state, but then others broke out in a discordant caterwauling, raucous stuff such as you hear in low taverns, and one woman added to the cacophony by mumbling prayers, while others stuck to simple cursing, casting oaths defiantly into the air seemingly at nothing or no one in particular, but to the world in general and what it had done to them.

The women were forced to keep to the footpaths and I thought how they must have longed to kick off their shoes and run barefoot across the soft, elegantly coiffed grass. Every so often one of them would bend and pick up something, a leaf or nut or fallen twig, but immediately an attendant would be upon her and force her to discard it.

‘They are not allowed possessions,’ Morgan observed to me.

Possessions! What kind of hell was this where a fallen leaf was counted a possession? I could not help but be reminded of Lear, in which I had once played Edmund – who else? – and the old king’s speech: ‘Oh, reason not the need, our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous.’

Following in the wake of this miserable spectacle of humanity, we passed a small pavilion, no doubt a vestige from the days when the asylum had been a private residence. On the wall was painted in elegant script ‘While I live, I hope.’ I shook my head at the irony of this; you only had to look at these poor women shuffling along to see there was no truth in it.

We wandered the grounds for the best part of an hour, during which I had several uncomfortable moments, as every now and then Morgan attempted to quiz me on my ideas for the treatment of lunatics, while at the same time ridiculing them without managing to convey any clue as to what these ideas actually were. I began to feel quite aggrieved that he should patronise me so and frustrated that I could not produce any counter-argument, and sensed myself losing control, which of course would have ruined everything. I held my tongue only with the greatest difficulty.

Morgan pulled out his watch. ‘Dinner in six minutes. You may as well observe the dining hall.’

Back inside the hospital we looked on as the more violent inmates, still in twos, were marched through a doorway in shambling parody of a military manoeuvre. They were taken off to a separate dining room, Morgan told me, for they needed careful supervision while they ate. After they had gone, I followed him into the long, narrow dining hall where the rest of the patients were standing, behind backless benches on either side of plain deal tables that ran almost the entire length of the hall’s centre. At a word from one of the attendants the inmates began to scramble over the benches and take their places upon them in such a disorderly fashion I couldn’t help thinking of pigs at the trough.

All along the tables were bowls filled with a dirty-looking liquid that Morgan assured me was tea. By each was a piece of bread, cut thick and buttered. Beside that was a small saucer that, as I peered more closely, proved to contain prunes. I counted five on each, no more no less. As I watched, one woman grabbed several saucers, one after the other, and emptied the prunes into her own. Then, holding tight to her own bowl of tea, she stole that of the woman next to her and gulped it down.

Morgan watched and, when I glanced at him, lifted his eyebrow and said, ‘Survival of the fittest,’ and smiled.

Looking around the tables, I saw women snatching other people’s bread and others left with nothing at all. All this Morgan viewed with such complete indifference that I began to despair of humanity, until I noticed one inmate, a young woman, not much more than a girl really, with long dark hair that fell down over her face, half veiling it, tear her own slice of bread in two and pass one portion to the woman next to her, who had been robbed of her own and who accepted it eagerly, showing her gratitude with a smile, the first I had seen in this place. At this moment, as if feeling the weight of my eyes upon her, the girl who had given away her own bread lifted her head and stared straight at me with a look that chilled me to the bone. It had a knowingness in it, as if she saw right through me and recognised what I was and observed something in me that enabled her to claim kinship. I was only able to hold her gaze for a short time before I had to look away. A minute or so later, I glanced back at her and, finding her eyes still fastened upon me, had to turn away and walk to the other end of the room.

While all this scramble for food was going on, attendants prowled up and down behind the women, not bothering to stop the petty larcenies, but tossing an extra slice of bread here and there when they saw someone going without.

When the bread and prunes had been consumed, which in truth didn’t take long, for there was not much of it and the women were obviously ravenous, the attendants fetched large metal cans from which they dispensed onto each of the women’s now empty plates a small lump of grey meat, fatty and unappetising, and a single boiled potato. You’d have thought a dog would have baulked at it, and indeed I don’t think I ever saw a dog so poorly fed, but the women fell upon it as if it was the most sumptuous feast. A few, I noticed, grimaced as they bit into the meat, showing it to be as rancid as it looked, but managed to swallow it nonetheless. Everyone else devoured it as fast as they could chew it – and it was evidently so tough, this was no easy thing – and, when it and the potato were done, looked balefully at their plates as though they could not believe the meagre offering was already gone.

Afterwards Morgan and I had our dinner in the doctors’ dining room. Although the dining table would have accommodated six people, there were only the two of us. I asked how many other physicians there were, at which Morgan shrugged. ‘We do not have unlimited resources, you know. The state does not set great store on treating the mentally ill. We cannot afford to employ more staff or anyone more experienced than you. Which is fortunate for you. Normally someone just starting out upon a career as a psychiatric doctor might wait years for an opportunity such as you have here.’