These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

  “Ah, yes, the great Dr. Anabanel,” I nodded. The beds resembled instruments used to martyr subjects in the sisters’ illustrated biographies of saints. “Of course. The crazy crib.”

  My superior seemed a little bemused. “The Bedlam bunk. Indeed.” So she has some sense of humour, despite the initial curtness. “A saving grace, you’ll find, Poitier, for some.” She then said that when the crib didn’t work, there was always the Wyman’s bed strap, an added restraint.

  “And failing that,” — I was keen to impart my brilliance — “the Freeman-Watts procedure, of course. The new method of leucotomy, going through the eye sockets instead of through the skull. I do wonder about its precision, don’t you? Not to question the doctors —”

  She picked a speck of dried blood from one of the cribs’ lids, lids that swung back on hinges, and raised a brow. “At least with the crib and fetters keeping limbs and torso in place, Nurse, we see how it works.”

  “Of course — but is it more humane?”

  Though I hadn’t spoken hastily, she just about took my head off. “What could be inhumane about preventing someone’s scratching herself to death? The trick is tightening cuffs sufficiently without causing undue bruising. Though injury is often unavoidable. Novice could use some practice.” She fanned herself with one hand, as if the topic made her warm.

  Head locked the room behind us as a string of women in civvies shuffled past, escorted by an orderly and a gap-toothed nurse in blue who looked barely old enough to be finished training. The patients, a drooling, nail-biting crew, displayed various and sundry tics and automatisms; their eyes appeared to look right through us. One stood out on account of the bright green blouse she was wearing, a cheery note amidst drabness.

  Their mutterings echoed as they slouched off — out of our hair, joked Head Nurse, unlocking a ward. The room was narrow as a railcar and just as bare, with yellowish walls scrubbed to a dull sheen, and not a shred of curtain, the better to not strangle themselves with. There was a solid row of beds along each wall which were hastily made, not unlike the one in my cell, their wrinkled white blankets yanked into place. So much for the sisters’ perfect corners. It was airless and stuffy, yet I felt a chill. This ward was designated for the better ones, I was told, les aliénées able to work. To think what “better” meant might’ve made some girls shiver, despite the sun creeping through shuttered windows, everything shellacked in a somewhat unforgiving light.

  “The cribs,” I asked, as mildly as could be, “is there much need for them?”

  “It depends. If shackles and Veronal don’t help — care must be taken not to give too much. So some appreciate the crib, Poitier. Those at risk of harming themselves.”

  I WAS LED to the next ward and put in charge of washing and dressing. The little nurse brought hot water, which apparently has to be brought from the Men’s Pavilion. A temporary inconvenience due to shortages, I wondered, though my question went unanswered.

  “They don’t bite — not all of them anyway,” Head Nurse joked, hinting that most of our guests are quite docile — an advantage, certainly, though my mettle of a decade’s experience flagged ever so slightly when she added, “at least until after breakfast.”

  Two dozen patients wearing threadbare gowns lolled on their beds, some moaning. One sang at the top of her lungs, Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse. I tried humming along as I started at the first bed, checking the patient over for sores, lice, etc. She made no fuss at having face and hands wiped, pulse taken. If only the rest had been so easy. The next, her hands curled and useless, wailed and turned to the wall. Another tried to lick me.

  Have mercy, a voice inside me coaxed, a carry-over from Lyon that clashed somewhat with Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, tous en rond.

  The songstress I left till last. She clawed at my cap and managed to overturn the basin — a small ordeal given the rigmarole of fetching hot water. But once I got her calmed down enough to bathe, she went soft as putty and even asked to kiss me before launching back in: Sur le pont d’Avignon … les filles font comme ci … les garçons font comme ca …

  I managed a peek at the watch pinned to my apron bib. 07H40. It was Sister Ursula’s parting gift, the days of her supervision suddenly more remote than I could have imagined. Despite the day’s promise to be sweltering I felt a bit clammy. So much for looking crisp.

  Head Nurse said to hurry so those able and well enough to attend wouldn’t miss chapel; as if to hammer this home, somewhere a bell tolled. The little nurse — Novice — and two orderlies rounded up the freshly toileted and herded them out. Head wanted their beds straightened but told me not to strip them. What ailed our guests generally wasn’t communicable, she said, her gums showing when she smiled. Oh, she had a sense of humour all right. Only badly soiled bedding, and that of patients with unwanted company — pediculosis corporis, the lousy — was to be changed.

  The instant the task was accomplished, my supervisor thought of something else, someone we’d missed: a “mademoiselle” who was something of a special case. “The poor thing,” she said with a snort, her expression impatient. “Almost famous, once. If you can believe it.”

  I glanced at the crucifix above the doorway. A relic from the nuns? The ward’s sole decoration, it was well out of reach of anyone inclined or determined to stab or puncture herself, even a tall person perched on a chair. Since it posed no threat, no one had bothered taking it down.

  “You’ll find some of them stubborn — they generally are, at first. This one dislikes being bathed.” Despite the number of patients earlier dispatched, Head Nurse needed to shout to be heard. “But if she’s approached properly, where there’s a will there’s a way. Like our Maréchal dealing with les fritz,” she said, quite seriously.

  ***

  ON THE UPPERMOST floor, we followed another corridor, our footsteps absorbed by the shrieking around us. The light splintered rather than glowed, showing fresh repairs in the plaster.

  Head stopped before a closed door and rattled the knob. “Mental’s different from general, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you. It often requires a different tact. The summer’s been hard on this one, and the spring. Do your best.” With that she hurried off, hefting her keys to unlock the heavy doors barring the stairwell.

  Not a bite to eat since the directeur’s croissant, I have to say my throat filled with a sourness. Ignoring the wailing from across the hall, I knocked, then tried the knob. It refused to turn: some mechanical problem? I tried again, no luck. Good heavens, could it be locked? What kind of place allowed a lunatic to bolt herself in? Just a little mortified, I was reduced to peering through the keyhole.

  What filled it would’ve made someone with less experience reel back: an eye, large, unwavering and blue, a November blue, blue as a winter sea. The taste in my mouth went bitter, harder to ignore than the taste of hunger. Perspiration beaded my lip, the feeling in my abdomen not all that different, perhaps, from the first time I’d watched a scalpel split skin — a queasiness that was quickly overcome, though I resisted the urge to bless myself, a hangover certainly from the Hôtel-Dieu.

  “Madame? I’m here to bathe you,” I was forced to call out, my voice of composure met by a cough, not, mercy me, by cackling.

  “Mademoiselle. In your dreams.” The voice correcting mine was imperious if frail. “Never satisfied, are you. Go away! If you weren’t under that rat-scum’s thrall, you’d know I’ve nothing left to steal!”

  I rattled the knob, feeling slightly silly. For someone infirm, the aliénée’s grip was tenacious. “Mademoiselle?” My tone was full of resolve. “Let me in, please.” A nunnish voice inside me, not unlike Sister Ursula’s, chided, Feel the fire of your vocation, Solange, the duty to help those who cannot help themselves. Yes, yes, yes. You have the upper hand, I reminded myself.

  The eye’s feeble-minded owner was surely gloating, however, having wangled a private room and exemption from Mass! So much for Principle One, our profession’s founda
tion, about treating the sick equally and disavowing favouritism. Very likely this patient was dangerous, blaming others for what might be her own degenerate, even criminal acts. That pupil with its blue, blue iris blazed steadily through the keyhole.

  So much for easy.

  “Open up!” I was reduced to ordering, grateful no one was nearby to hear. “Let me introduce myself.” A gendarme without a stick was what I felt like, pushed to abandon Principles Two and Three, which Sister Ursula so emphatically advocated: Be gentle, practise humility. Though I’ve faced similar resistance — convincing people with kidney stones, burst appendixes, gangrenous feet, and so on, to lie still — this was different. Unlike the sick in body with the will and reason to live, such patients as this require protection from themselves. It boiled down to trust, and routine.

  A blessing and a comfort, routine — hadn’t I said so to Head not ten minutes earlier? Especially with the war on, the bombings and rafles, our own government aiding the Boche. “You don’t know who to trust,” our supervisor had agreed, perhaps a little too hastily.

  Just then, Novice appeared with a steaming basin. “Don’t take any guff off anyone. Don’t hold your breath, either.” She quickly trotted off.

  Balancing the basin on one arm, I tried the knob again, succeeding only in sloshing water on tiles in need of buffing. I began to fidget. If the patient didn’t open up by the count of ten, I’d call an orderly. “Don’t be alarmed, I’m not here to upset you — I won’t hurt you, I promise — just a nice little sponge-bath, then I’ll take your pulse —”

  “You can drink your bathwater,” the voice replied. “May the lunatics have pissed in it!”

  Foot poised to tap nine, I felt my voice rise. “No need to get excited. I’ll simply be a second.” I looked for a buzzer — there must be a way to call someone. “Please?” I finally begged, to a sobering degree of chagrin.

  Only then, rather miraculously, there was a click, of the lock being tripped or a bolt sliding back. Hinges creaking, the door inched inwards by a crack. However, something made me pause and wait. I listened to the patient getting into bed and, straightening my cap, entered.

  The room was no larger than mine, its furnishings a straw chair and small table heaped with papers. Sunlight straggled in between the bars, or attempted to. A gnarled little thing wearing a seedy woolen hat and coat with, of all things, a skeleton key pinned to one lapel, was lying atop the covers, stretched out on her back.

  As I set down the basin, something brushed my shin. I all but leapt out of my skin — mon Dieu, it was a cat! A ginger tabby worming out from under the bed.

  The old lady struggled to sit, dangling her feet — swollen, from what I could see of them in their worn-out shoes — over the bedside. Ignoring me, she held out her arms, and the cat leapt into them. The patient kissed it, crooning, “Wise little soul, don’t you hate water!” I glimpsed her teeth when she spoke. The state of her dentition was appalling, not that she seemed troubled by it. She studied me suspiciously as she cradled the cat, her piercing blue eyes peering over its head. “You like cats? If not, you had better get out.”

  I said I needed to check her pulse, among other things.

  “Who do you think you are? An angel?” The patient laughed quietly and scratched the cat’s chin, cooing to it. Leaping to the table, it swung a leg up and licked itself. I tried to take the patient’s hand, but she wrenched it away with surprising strength. Even bundled up — under her coat was a shabby blue woolen dress — she looked to be all skin and bones.

  “I need to check for lesions — sores, dear.” Picturing Sister Ursula, I thought of her raising up Jesus as a model of patience. Jesus tending lepers.

  The patient gave me a sour look and held out palms lined with dirt. “There! Not a scratch, you see?” She batted me away when I went to remove the coat. “Are you stupid — can’t you see how busy I am?” Again I noted her teeth, or what remained of them, some blackened stumps. The poor creature narrowed her eyes that once, long ago, in her youth perhaps, her very distant youth, would have been pretty. Her voice was a snarl. “Surely you have more pressing business? The lunatics need you far more than I do.”

  “Time for some freshening-up.” I spoke more loudly than necessary, unfortunately remembering too late that geriatrics and dementia do not automatically indicate deafness. Head Nurse’s comment about the patient’s dislike for bathing reasserted itself. “I just want to give you a little wipe-down, dear.”

  “And who are you?” She sounded half amused. Rose, shrinking from my reach, and with a tottering exactitude lowered herself onto the chair. A trembling hand flicked a wisp of hair under a hat that might’ve been fashionable during the last war. She picked up a stub of a pencil from the table and began scribbling away on a paper scrap. Other items strewn there included a leaky-looking pen and some broken nibs.

  Weren’t writing implements dangerous in such hands? No telling the injury such objects could inflict. Should they be confiscated?

  In a strip of sunlight, the patient bent over her efforts — enraptured, suddenly, as though I weren’t there. Symptoms of schizophrenia. I ran through a mental list: lack of insight, unwillingness to co-operate, flatness of affect, suspiciousness, apathy, delusions of persecution, emotional withdrawal, restricted speech, hypochondrial/neurasthenic complaints, hallucinations, collecting and hoarding, incessant letter-writing.

  By now Novice’s water was cold. Must someone be called each time you need hot? I took the opportunity to peep out into the corridor. There was no aid in sight, so I dampened the face rag.

  She dropped the pencil — “No!” — and almost overturned the basin.

  “Now, now — just a lick and a promise.” Sister’s term. “It’ll make you feel better.” It wasn’t exactly easy, keeping an even tone.

  “If it was true, you’d give your name. Unless you use an alias.” I flushed, I admit, enunciating, “Solange Poitier, RN” — heavens, almost the way I had done addressing the Milice on the train. “And I should believe you?”

  “I’d lie?” I couldn’t restrain a tiny laugh. The spill had wet the bedding, hardly the end of the world. Better laugh than swear — it was important to maintain a sense of humour. “Enough cat hair here to cause an asthma attack,” I let slip, on the lookout not just for flea bites but wheals and any other signs of allergic reaction. None were in plain view, oddly enough, but that was hardly reassuring. “For extra warmth, is that it?”

  I took advantage of her blinking to dab at her mouth. Exasperated, she shoved the cloth away. Her eyes darkened — with a mixture of fear and rage, the one barely distinguishable from the other. Cause to hesitate, anyway.

  The poor thing raved, “Trying to gag me! Smother me! As if I won’t soon enough be silent! I knew you were up to no good, breaking in! And here I thought the worst of my enemies had died off!” Then as sharply as it flared, her hysteria flickered and went out. The patient’s face brightened, her ravaged look dissolving. Her voice was triumphant if weak. “But you have no power over me, Soitier Polange, none whatsoever. You’re to be pitied, that’s it. One of that rat-face’s minions, that’s who you are, charmed like the rest, then sent to torment me.” Ignoring the thudding in my chest, I began to strip the bed. “Leave it!” She withered then and turned to her papers. With her looking so pitiful in her coat, the stray sunlit threads no doubt picked and pulled by the cat, it was all I could do not to seize the pencil, likewise that ridiculous key. Perhaps the patient sensed my frustration — one must never forget, patients can. “Don’t touch anything,” she shouted, “and don’t come back till you have news for me — good news.”

  ***

  BUSY IN HER station, Head Nurse was too preoccupied with filling in charts to see me coming. The blue of the eyes in her portrait of Maréchal was almost welcoming, set against so much faded green and yellow. It was louder here than on the upper floor, which housed mainly guests in isolation. The lights’ hum threaded together all the shrieking and moaning until
their blended drone grew almost comforting. It wasn’t so very different from Lyon, where patients cried out before and after diagnoses and procedures. Silence would’ve been alarming.

  “So you and Mademoiselle are acquainted,” Head remarked without looking up. “I should’ve warned you. Seeing a new face, some think we’ve been invaded.” She was drinking tea, and smiled grimly into her cup. The room with the kettle was close by; difficult, though, to imagine wangling a break, and I happened to say so. “Be grateful you have the lambs, then,” she reminded me. “Speaking of which, you’ll meet the doctor in charge on her rounds.”

  “About the hot water, the inconvenience —” I managed to blurt out.

  “Oh — but a little cold never hurts to revive them.” Was she being funny? Show pity, never scorn, the voice inside me piped up. If I appeared a mite distracted, Head picked up on it, frowning. “A daydreamer, are we?” She sent me back to the first ward to unlock and clean the windows, get things aired out before breakfast. The task, which meant locating a stepladder, was a chance to enjoy the view, though the sound of praying — someone’s loud, feverish cries for deliverance — kept me grounded, thank you. From such a height, a slash of purple could be seen beyond the chapel and the sprawling pavilions’ tiled roofs, bordering a distant field: a lavender crop?

  As I squeegeed, dusted and wiped, my eyes on the fields and some faint, snow-capped mountains in the farthest beyond, I began thinking of the cribs, and the remarks Head had made earlier about the savagely deranged. I tried summoning the fullness of an article I’d crammed on the train — not that I’d absorbed its entirety — and when I completed the chore, once again sought Head out at the desk, eager to carry on our discussion. It was important to demonstrate that I was knowledgeable.