Sarah Canary Page 5

  His patients were not expected to couple at all, were, in fact, segregated by sex, at least in their sleeping quarters, to prevent this very thing. Dr Carr had little to say about their care. The asylum was run according to the contract system, and the authority of the physician was secondary to the authority of the contractor and his profits. Dr Carr made the original diagnosis. He chose what medications were to be tried and in what dosages. Beyond that there was little he was permitted to do. His recommendations that particular patients be discharged were often opposed by the contractor, one Arnold Greene, who was paid ninety-one cents a day by the Territory for each patient and saw, therefore, in each cure the loss of revenue. When the doctor and contractor differed, the superintendents for the asylum invariably ignored the doctor. Research might have been a great comfort to Carr if he hadn’t been faced with these intransigent frogs. It was so unjust.

  3

  Morning at the Steilacoom Asylum

  Assent – and you are sane

  Demur – you’re straightway dangerous—

  And handled with a Chain—

  Emily Dickinson, 1862

  Despite his isolation, Dr James Carr tried to keep up with current developments in his field. He had written several letters to colleagues detailing the astonishing earthquake cures at Steilacoom last year. There had been a flurry of gratifying interest, but no one could duplicate the results. The cure only seemed effective when it had the authority and scope of an Act of God. Nothing smaller worked. He had spent several weeks designing the Carr Quake Chamber, a tubular cell suspended from the ceiling by rope. He had drawn up plans, specified dimensions, sacrificed nothing in the way of patient comfort or the gyrational range of the device. It would never be built. Certainly not at Steilacoom, where even outmoded technologies such as the Autenrieth Mask, the Cox Swing, Reil’s Fly-wheel, or Langermann’s Cell were deemed beyond the austere budget of Contractor Greene. For a time, Carr had been quite interested in the fat-and-blood cure popularized by Dr S. Weir Mitchell, a leading neurologist during the Civil War. The fat-and-blood cure emphasized overfeeding, massage, and complete rest. But someone had told Contractor Greene that Leland Stanford found it cost-effective to supply the Chinese railway workers with opium, which acted as an appetite suppressant and reduced food costs. Most of the patients in Steilacoom were on some sort of medication anyway; many of them took opium derivatives. Contractor Greene cut their meals to two a day. He called this trimming the fat from the budget.

  The regimen Dr Carr now envisioned for Steilacoom rested, like a footstool, on three solid points. The first was hearty food – beef, in particular, as so many of the insane are lacking in iron. He described to Greene a fortifying dish that could be made by scraping the tender parts of a steak away from the tendinous connections so that the juice is retained and then salting it heavily. This diet would be contraindicated, of course, in those cases where patients suffered from the delusion that they were made to eat human flesh or the blood of their friends.

  The second point was exercise. Steilacoom boasted its own roller-skating rink; all that was required now was the provision of a reasonable number of skates so the patients would not have to wait so long for a turn. Dr Carr would have liked to see the insane on horseback, too, and participating in guided gymnastics, but he tried to deal in realities.

  The final point was music, music and dance. The medicinal benefits of music, he told Contractor Greene, were hard to overstate. A piano or melodeon in the female ward would answer the purpose. Violins for the men. There was already an asylum band and Dr Carr would have liked to see every inmate participate, the most incapacitated being asked only to play the triangle or the sticks.

  The superintendents, led by Hank Webber, their most illustrious member, had promised Greene that when Dr Carr’s contract expired, he could replace him with a physician of his own choice.

  ‘Get the patients out in the open air,’ Dr Carr was always nagging the wardens. ‘The breath of God’s free atmosphere, the open face of Mount Rainier, these things are a wonderful tonic,’ and they took this advice when wood needed to be cut or water drawn, and they did, out of respect, refrain from kicking the lunatics in the physician’s presence. Even so, they resented him. Dr Carr could feel this and he complained to the patients about it often.

  One of the most sympathetic of the insane was the young man named B.J. Voisard, who now stood outside Dr Carr’s office, trying to figure out how to open the door with one hand and not drop the load of wood he was carrying with both hands. The problem proved insoluble. Fagots of wood clattered to the floor and B.J. had to dance to protect his feet. When the wood had settled, he swung open the door.

  ‘I heard there’s a new woman in the ward,’ he told the doctor, dropping to his knees to gather up the scattered kindling. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  Dr Carr was seated at his desk with his notebook open before him and the tip of his pen in his mouth. He had undone the cuff of his right shirt sleeve to allow the free flow of blood to his writing hand. ‘I’ve only had time for the most cursory examination,’ he answered. His eyes were a pale, filmy blue and he blinked them often. The lashes were white and almost invisible. ‘Might be an ecstatic. She makes those meaningless, ecstatic noises, so that’s the direction in which I’m leaning now. I’m going to send for her again after breakfast. Then we’ll see. Anyway, a new patient in January is not too surprising. Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.’

  When he had been admitted, late in October, B.J. had been delirious. He had no memory of this, but he had read the notes Dr Carr had made at the time. Tongue coated, breath very offensive, bowels constipated. Intellectual monomania with depression, Dr Carr had concluded. B.J. still spoke rapidly and often appeared to be uneasy, but his physical health was much improved – his digestion was better, his secretions more free – and he was often quite lucid now.

  He glanced at the contents of Dr Carr’s desk. The glass office window defined a small neat square of sunlight about the size of a blotter. Inside it, the colors made vivid by illumination, were a slab of obsidian that the doctor used as a paperweight, a letter opener shaped like a golden feather, and his notebook, pressed open to a clean white page. On the edge of the desk, pushed out of the sun, there was an empty whiskey bottle. At the bottom of the bottle, two frogs sat and ignored each other.

  ‘It’s not mating season,’ B.J. told the doctor. ‘It’s winter.’ He wondered where Dr Carr could have even gotten the frogs. One of them had the pale palm of its hand pressed against the glass, four fingers spread wide. The curvature of the bottle magnified the hand so that it seemed all out of proportion to the frog’s body. ‘Where did you get the frogs?’ B.J. asked.

  ‘Boston,’ said Dr Carr. ‘I sent away for them. In the big hospitals in the East, where there’s lots of money and the doctors earn big salaries, frogs mate like weasels. There’s never any shortage of frogs.’ His voice had an abused edge to it. B.J. liked the doctor and wanted to make him feel better.

  ‘Would you like to talk about it?’ he offered.

  ‘I ordered six. Four of them arrived dead. I’m just lucky a male and a female survived. Count your blessings, right, B.J.?’

  B.J. dropped the wood by the fireplace and approached the desk, dusting his hands off on his pants. He had a splinter at the base of his left thumb. He picked at it until it came out, leaving one small drop of blood, which he licked away. ‘Can I see what you’ve got on the new woman?’ he asked.

  Dr Carr flipped back two pages in his notebook. ‘Just the observations I made last night when she was admitted. I haven’t gotten back to her yet today.’ He passed it over the desk to B.J. Dr Carr’s lines slanted upward and he had a rounded, feminine hand. His ‘e’s’ yawned from the page like ‘o’s.’ B.J. underlined the words with his index finger as he read.

  According to Dr Carr, the woman in black who had appeared so suddenl
y in the graveyard the night before had the classic facial features of the criminally insane. He cited the work of Cesare Lombroso at some length and included a description of the new woman. Thick black hair, gray eyes, diastema of the teeth with exceptionally large canines, a repulsive, virile air, and big, sensual lips. This tallied closely with Lombroso’s description of the accomplished or potential poisoner. Contractor Greene tended to employ reliable patients in the kitchen to save himself the wages of an additional Chinaman. Dr Carr had made a further notation restricting the new inmate from this duty.

  He had also written that the woman appeared to have menstruated recently. Dr Carr had seen this immediately, had, in fact, been looking for it and said so forthrightly in his notes. This, more than any other factor in her appearance and demeanor, had made him tell Sheriff Jeb Chambers that the Chinaman who had been found with the woman could well be an innocent victim in the case, however much the layman might be tempted to draw the other obvious conclusion. If called into court, he would be forced to say so. He could cite authorities on this subject. Delasiauve, among others, had been quick to call attention to the abnormal mental condition into which many women are thrown at each menstrual period. Their desires are exaggerated or perverted; they may even be impelled to criminal acts. In his own practice, Carr noted parenthetically, he had once treated a young lady who, while menstruating, suffered from the delusion that a large Negro man was entering the house through the window and pointing a pistol at her. He had read of more extreme cases, such as Marce’s account of a patient who furiously attacked with a knife anyone who offered her the most trifling opposition during her menstrual period. He knew that the menstrual cycle, which represented the disappointment of the maternal instinct, could occasion a gross perversion in which the natural feminine desire to procreate became instead a desire to kill. There were already legal precedents for what he was saying; he had told Jeb so. Last night’s entry ended with a list of them. Dr Carr had gotten as far as the Lydia Palmer case, which had yet to go to trial.

  B.J. handed the notebook back. ‘What’s diastema?’ he asked.

  ‘Excessive spacing between the teeth,’ Dr Carr told him. ‘There is so much room beside her upper canines that the lower ones occlude when the mouth is closed.’

  ‘Oh,’ said B.J., returning to the fireplace. He knelt on the hearth and turned back the edge of the rag rug so that it would stay clean while he swept up the ash from yesterday. ‘It’s too cold in here for you to work,’ he said solicitously. ‘Maybe if it were warmer the frogs would think it was mating season. Let me get things going.’ He arranged the logs, hoping they were dry enough. He tore strips from an old newspaper and stuffed them into crevices so that the logs would light. ‘There’s an article here about Belle Starr,’ he said. Much of the article was now on his hands. There were actual, decipherable letters across his palms. Raven-ha, they read. He stared at them for a moment before wiping them off on his thighs. Indian talk, he supposed. Lake Raven-ha. On the shores of Raven-ha. ‘Now she’s flayed a man with her quirt just for being saucy. She’s married another damn Indian half her age. And it set me thinking, you know, how masculine a lot of these women who like to ride so much are. Do you think it’s possible they’re just wishing they had what men have? I mean, is it too farfetched to think the horse could be a sort of substitute for . . . a male member?’ B.J.’s voice fogged slightly on the last words. He coughed, looking over at the desk where Dr Carr had stopped writing and was regarding him, his fingers slipping absently up and down his pen, which now rested its nib on the paper in his notebook.

  ‘A horse is a lot bigger than a penis,’ Dr Carr said. His voice was gentle. ‘Think about it, B.J. You know this.’ He put the pen down and withdrew his watch from his breast pocket. ‘Come here, B.J.,’ he said. ‘Look at this. Perceptional distortion is not an uncommon symptom for a man with your condition. I once had a female patient tell me my watch was as big as a carriage wheel. Could you hold this watch in your hand?’

  ‘It’s a perfectly normal-sized watch,’ B.J. lied. Really he had never seen a watch so huge. It was a pumpkin of silver and glass, and the doctor’s hand trembled under its weight. ‘I know that horses are bigger than penises. I was abstracting. Maybe these horses are the closest thing to a penis these women can get.’

  ‘I don’t want a penis as big as a horse. Do you want a penis as big as a horse? Is this why you think Belle Starr wants a penis as big as a horse?’

  ‘She doesn’t,’ said B.J. ‘She just wants a penis, and a horse is the closest she can come.’

  Dr Carr put away his watch. ‘A pen is closer to a penis than a horse,’ he said. ‘The root word is even the same. A knife is a lot closer. Do you think Belle Starr has no access to a pen or a knife?’

  B.J. sat back on his heels and stared into space for a few minutes. ‘I guess it was crazy,’ he concluded. ‘Now that I think about it more. You’re right, of course. It’s ludicrous.’ He shook his head cheerfully. ‘That’s why you’re on that side of the desk and I’m on this one.’

  ‘You’re just overexcited.’ Dr Carr’s voice was soothing. ‘Your progress has been excellent. You mustn’t expect the treatment to be a straight road. Bound to be some twists. Let me finish the fire here. I want you to go back to your room and lie down for a little while. Will you do that, B.J.?’

  ‘All right,’ said B.J. He stood and brushed off the bits of bark and dirt that clung to his clothes. There was a dark ink smear on Dr Carr’s notebook where the pen tip had run when he stopped writing. B.J. could see it clearly from where he stood. ‘You’ve spoiled your page,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  Dr Carr looked down. ‘Well, I’ll be,’ he said. His voice carried a message of surprise and pleasure. ‘It looks just like two frogs coupling, doesn’t it? See, here’s the male . . .’

  ‘It looks like a puddle,’ said B.J. ‘Like a rain puddle.’ He looked at the blot again. ‘Only smaller,’ he added and then shut the office door carefully behind him and moved through the dark hallways to the male part of the asylum.

  He had to pass through the female section on his way – not directly through, of course, but through the corridor around it. Someone was howling inside. The introduction of a new patient always threw the ward into chaos. He stood at the door and listened for a moment. The howling was guttural; it was the woman from Germany. She was in love with him; B.J. knew this, much as his natural modesty coaxed him to demur. She watched him all the way through breakfast, trying to mesmerize him with her eyes. Snake eyes. Sometimes he could hardly eat. And sometimes she invited him to her room, where she claimed to have two dead fleas dressed as a bride and a groom, laid out in an old jewelry box. She had made their clothes herself, she said, and caught the fleas herself as well. Killing a flea without crushing its body was not an easy thing to do. She had finally starved them in a stoppered medicine bottle, a project which had taken a surprising number of months. And the tiny veil had taken hours to attach. Almost a year of work was represented. B.J. would have liked to see these fleas. If only it hadn’t been wedding clothes. If she had dressed the fleas for the opera, perhaps. Or in ceremonial Indian dress.

  The floorboards in the corridor tipped suddenly upward, forcing B.J. to walk uphill or wait until they tipped back. It was either part of his condition, landscape distortion, or it was another earthquake. Both were too common to alarm him. He waited for the floor to flatten.

  A woman in black, a woman he had never seen before, curled out of the doorway, soundlessly, like smoke. Diastema of the teeth. Gray eyes. Large, sensual lips. She wore her hair cut short in the current fashion of the Duchess of Austria; B.J. had seen illustrations of her haircut in advertisements in the paper. Her dress was a complicated affair, though very unclean. He was surprised by her hair and her clothes, which suggested money. People with money didn’t end up at Steilacoom. She stood directly in front of him. She probably thought he had been listening at the door.

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ B.J. told her quic
kly. B.J. was often rather frightened of women, but this woman was so very small. Her mouth was slightly bruised, which showed that she had already been initiated by the wardens into life in the asylum. She had an air of fragility about her. B.J. felt protective. She had no business being in the corridor.

  ‘You go back to your room,’ B.J. said to her, hastily, looking around to see if anyone was listening. ‘Or you’re going to be hit again.’ He tried to remember which warden was helping with the women this morning. It was a popular duty. Was it Houston’s day? He thought so. ‘Are you crazy? Go back,’ he said more strenuously. She smiled at him, but he would take no more responsibility. He didn’t want another woman falling in love with him. Expecting things. Flowers. Gifts. Notes. Time. Women, all women, whatever their mental condition, had this unnatural need for attention. It wasn’t enough just to be with them, even. You had to talk about them. You had to talk about nothing else. How you felt about them when you first met them. How the feeling was even stronger now. How you had never felt this way before in your whole life. He pushed past her. When he turned to look back, she was gone.