These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

  “You have to be patient,” the secretary warned, her tone almost noxious. Soon she extracted a folder and, sighing, set it on the counter. I grabbed it, still clutching Mademoiselle’s letter. “It stays here, sorry. Files aren’t to be removed.” She glanced toward Monsieur Directeur’s door, where the argument had given way to what sounded like cheerful banter.

  Fortunately the file was thin, containing only a few old letters and notes. The patient had begun exhibiting symptoms as early as her twenties: paranoia, marked feelings of persecution. A vague diagnosis, early on, of Kraepelin’s dementia praecox or Bleuler’s schizophrenia; no mention of treatment protocol besides the standard ones, physical labour and fresh air — though surely fever or coma therapy had been tried? Some lofty, unspecified references to her “talent” were noted, as well as periods of near-recovery, with carbon copies of several doctors’ recommendations for her release.

  Accompanying these, a letter caught my eye — from a relative, the mother, I gathered — refusing responsibility under any circumstances for the patient’s freedom. She’s hurt us enough, it said. Date of committal: March 10, 1913, to an asylum north of Paris; the following year, a switch to another institution; and not long after, the transfer here. Mount of Virgins, Pavilion 10. The Mount of Venus, the orderlies called it.

  “Thirty years — she’s been here ever since?”

  The secretary blew a smoke ring and stubbed out her cigarette. Perhaps it was her eyebrows that made her look slightly scared.

  The door opened and the directeur appeared. Behind him was a man, obviously some kind of official, in Vichy blue. The fellow jammed on his officer’s cap and bustled past, jostling my arm enough to knock the letter from my hand and most of Mademoiselle’s file to the floor. The directeur stooped to help retrieve her papers, his faded blue eyes meeting mine.

  “So you’ve met ‘the sculptor,’” he said, his smile jocular but distracted, one could even say skittish. “And how was your first week — Miss Poitou, is it?”

  The secretary cleared her throat. Best not to correct him, I took this to mean, the poor man befuddled by whatever he had on his plate. Never mind that I’d put in nearly two weeks.

  By then I’d almost forgotten my purpose. “Sir, there’s something that needs your vetting.”

  “Oh dear — as you’ve noticed, surely, I’m afraid I have business slightly more pressing.” He waved off Mademoiselle’s letter. “Miss Poirier, I’m sure you can take care of it.”

  ***

  MAKING CERTAIN ALL were decent — a few persisted in trying to strip to their birthday suits in the sweltering heat — I managed, just, to get everyone queued in time. During the head count, who limped up but Mademoiselle, haggardly resplendent in her hat? Just the ticket, a special case to deal with, never mind that one needed six pairs of eyes to monitor the rest.

  Head promised, as she took her supper break, that the priest who served as chaplain would help out. Fat chance, I couldn’t help thinking, if there was a God and he implemented what the Church said I deserved. Absurd to think that before nursing I’d almost chosen the cloister. But, for you, wouldn’t this be like refusing to cook after burning yourself, Sister of all people had said to dissuade me, even after waiving the requirement for permission my father refused to give. To think I was that green. Vows are made out of passion, not fear. Are you so ready to give up on the world, because of what happened? Of an accident really, though in Sister’s view there’s no such thing as an accident, only providence. The answer was fairly obvious: No.

  Ever since, I’d missed more holy days of obligation than an epileptic could shake ten fingers at. If only the aliénées’ outbursts could be as predictable — not that anticipating disturbances made attending Mass easier. Marching my guests in single file down the walkway, I felt my abdomen contract in dread.

  The chapel, with its slender, grimy steeple and keyhole slits for windows, was as far as one could get from Lyon’s cathedral. There, hard to imagine, I’d knelt for more than my share of Sundays, a business finally put to an end by a doddering priest who, instead of hearing and absolving me of my sin, blamed me for it. Well and good.

  My charges filed inside like obedient cattle — all but Mademoiselle, who hung back, seemingly engrossed in some distant activity. The faintest breeze stirring the palms outside the directeur’s villa and an ambulance slowly wending its way past Admin.

  “Coming?” I held the door and she slowly caught up, gaze fixed on the flagstones.

  Enclosed in the tomb-like stillness ahead of us, the witless blessed themselves, fervently bobbing and curtseying. Be a healthy example, Head’s constant reminder dogged me, as if I needed it. Happy to dip my fingers in the font’s cool water, I thought of Sister Ursula’s faith, her encouraging nudges. Expect the best — E.T.B., Solange. Not that one acts with rewards in mind. But with God’s help no sacrifice is too dear. And no door is permanently shut.

  I took a seat next to Mademoiselle, the rearmost pew offering the best vantage point for watching the others. Loud humming and Tourette’s-like swearing had erupted; headbanging, rocking, and a full range of catatonic tics and automatisms were sure to ensue. Expect the unexpected; adjust and adapt. Being an example, I knelt. Is it too much to ask, a half-hour without violence, I prayed.

  Accustomed to the congregation’s quirks, the chaplain welcomed us. Easy for him — tending souls has nothing on tending bodies and minds. Sit down, stand up, kneel. Despite everything, Mademoiselle had the routine, if not its execution, down pat. A guest two pews ahead prostrated herself. Another swayed to some lively inner music. My mind was set adrift by the snuffling, hawking and cawing, the chaplain’s mild drone, the smells of candle wax, incense and ammonia. Heavens, if I’d joined the convent, received a new name — Sister Marie Charles, perhaps — to purge me of my former self, I’d have become service personified. The moniker safe as a number, stripping away the foolishness of the sixteen-year-old girl I’d been.

  Momentarily, I confess, I nodded off, awakened by Mademoiselle’s sharp nudge. Don’t let the candles’ flickering trigger any fits, I thought. Mademoiselle coughed and I patted her back, the clammy heat of her coming through that fetid tweed. Guests rocked noisily to their feet and, not soon enough, were trooping up for Communion. Frowning, Mademoiselle peered straight ahead, lips moving slightly. Despite my lack of faith, I felt a twinge sitting things out to keep an eye on everyone. The nuns’ words kept coming back: The gift of believing comes through the Holy Ghost. As the aliénées loped forward, it seemed to me that if the Ghost were here, and had a sense of humour, He might be amused.When Mademoiselle stayed put, I patted her arm. “You’re not receiving?”

  “A sin,” she said, “to take the Sacrament without confessing — my brother insists.” Her laugh broke the uneasy stillness, that hat of hers drooping over one eye. “The sinners are those who keep me here. No fault of mine.”

  When in doubt summon dear Nightingale. Encourage your patients in all goodness, in any way that can relieve their suffering. Yet another voice stirred. The sacraments comfort the disconsolate. Swallowing my hypocrisy, I suggested that she might find some consolation — in Communion, I meant.

  “And when was your last confession, Soitier Polange? You sound like Paul,” she began to rant. “What have I done worse than anyone else? The priest nastiest of all telling me to ‘repent.’” Her tone caused two guests ahead of us to turn. “Before I die, he says, or face damnation. God would be so cruel. Hell could be worse than this?” Smiling smugly, she gritted what remained of her teeth. I’ve made my peace, her look said.

  What could one do but nod?

  “If I’ve done anything wrong, which I haven’t,” she sniffed, “I’ve paid through the nose!”

  “Of course you have, dear.” Who hasn’t? I wanted to say.

  Not soon enough the chaplain gave the final blessing, “Go in peace.” I shepherded the group as quickly as possible through the stifling dusk. With the bombings not far away — in Mar
seille, the orderlies keep reporting, probably just to scare us — and most of the patients already terrified of the dark, night can be slightly nerve-racking. Though welcome, the pavilion’s lights were piercingly bright, reviving those in a stupor with a near-Pavlovian promise of supper — boiled cabbage on this occasion. While I rushed to get them settled, the notion of a sharp instrument probing the frontal lobe stayed in mind.

  Mademoiselle refused supper to scribble away in the lamplight. When I returned to collect her plate, she pushed it away untouched. “Did you mail it?” she demanded, barely looking up.

  “It makes you feel better, not eating? Poison, my eye.” It was an effort at levity, about all I could muster after the long day, bedtime yet to be gotten through.

  She didn’t so much as turn her head. “Hunger brings peace. If you knew a thing about the world, you’d see.” The only sounds — immediate ones, anyway — were her breathing and her pencil’s scratching. “But I wouldn’t turn up my nose at warm milk.”

  Warm milk, St. John’s wort, other old wives’ remedies: if only they were curative! I remembered Head’s remark, made while straightening the pins in her cap, that at a certain stage in life some guests feel an urge to make peace. Yes, Dr. Freud, I’d felt like laughing, mostly out of tiredness. “Peace with themselves, peace with loved ones, with God,” she had said — almost something our dear Pétain would say — even as she chided, “We aren’t their confessors, Poitier. It’s not for us, whether we believe or not, to act as proxy. The chaplain should hear Mademoiselle’s confession. Whenever she’s ready to give it. In case the end is sudden and quick.”

  A fine can of worms that would open! Mademoiselle’s baring her soul as helpful now, I would imagine, as treating cerebral hemorrhage with Mercurochrome.

  Looking over her shoulder, I saw that it wasn’t words filling the page but drawings. A scribbled likeness of the guest herself, and that of a mousy girl in a cap — a stiff, starched one, a nurse’s. Something about her features was all too familiar, and it was not a bit flattering.

  “Do I really look like that?” I said, managing a laugh. I recalled Dr. Cadieu’s remark, or Monsieur Directeur’s, that Mademoiselle’s talent had been artistic. “I always wanted to draw.”

  Her smile was sugared paraldehyde: sweetly, burningly unpleasant. “And, like you, I always wanted to poke needles into arms and wipe arses. Go ahead,” she taunted, rolling the pencil toward me.

  Remembering the mountain of chores yet to be done before night nurse came on — utensils to be counted and sealed away, teeth brushed, faces washed, guests toileted then put to bed, the wards locked down — I drew a daisy, a leaf and stem.

  “Brava!” she brayed. Now her look was sugar with a tincture of paraldehyde, burningly sweet. She began rooting through her drawer, produced a hatpin — a good-sized one! — and, struggling up, stuck the picture to the wall. “So you’re not completely useless, Solange Poitier, after all.”

  “You … liked making pictures, then? You used to paint, or draw?” I had been to Paris, once, had seen beret-wearers at their easels along the Seine and in the Louvre, which I’d visited at Sister Ursula’s insistence. Don’t miss the Raphaels. The raffles, I’d thought she said.

  Mademoiselle peered at me oddly. “Don’t be stupid. Anyone can make a picture. Think of the belle époque! A renaissance?” she crowed in a pinched, mocking way that, if not for her hat, teeth and the fusty odour rising from her, would’ve been comical. “I was to sculpture what Gentileschi was to painting! I made men and women as beautiful and as ugly as the gods, do you hear — as only God himself, my brother’s God, could.”

  “Well, that must’ve kept you out of trouble.” I couldn’t resist a wink. Out of the mouths of lunatics, each word was to be taken with a serving of salt well sifted.

  Our guest gave me a haughty look. “And they say I should repent, that I’m so full of sin I’ll be shut out of glory.” Smirking, she welcomed the cat onto her lap; in the dim light its fur appeared lank. “Do you believe in such things, Miss Solange? Being of a pure and simple heart, perhaps you’ll be my confessor-saint? ‘Bless me, Nurse, for I have sinned.’” Chortling, she bowed her head. Sister would’ve been rightfully offended. But who knew, really, what to make of it? Despite my being quite new and rather green, I was wise enough to realize that knowing too much can sometimes bite you, or force you to bite someone else — all the more trying for those who know better. Best, always, to keep things light.

  “Tell me about your statues. Maybe you’ll draw one for me. You did … make statues?”

  The old woman flapped her hands. “Do you know what it is to have a child, Miss Poitier? Each and every creation is just that. No more, no less.”

  The edge in her voice was wearying. I checked my watch.

  “You live by that thing, your hands by its hands,” Mademoiselle remarked. Her gaze narrowing, I could see the tiny blue veins in her eyelids. “So did I, once. Life according to the hands of a timepiece, the hands of a scoundrel — what difference?” The old woman shrugged morosely. “Did you post my letter?”

  A change of subject was needed, badly. “What sorts of statues did you make?” An idea struck me, bright but hopelessly obvious. “Maybe if I brought you something to … work with,” — sculpt was the word, but it hardly seemed appropriate — “you could make something to jolly things up? The place could use some decorations, couldn’t it.”

  The possibilities, I thought. Flowers and storybook animals, domesticated yet free. Numerous guests were enjoying second childhoods, and anything of a cuddly nature an antidote to the Maréchal’s portraits. Given his official love of children, his upholding of motherhood and procreation as our country’s salvation, it would hardly be contradictory.

  “You haven’t answered my question, Miss Poitier. My letter?”

  I chose my words carefully as I lifted the cat from Mademoiselle’s lap and shooed it under the bed, out of sight, out of mind. “Perhaps, if you agree to make us something, I can arrange with the directeur —” “A pox on the directeur, and the rest! I’d be careful if I were you, Solange Poitier. Yes, even you, working for them while acting as my friend” — Friend? I almost said — “you’ll see the dangers of playing one off against the other.”

  Don’t take their ravings personally. Novice’s frequent advice. “Is there something I can get you, anything you’d like before lights out?” I said.

  “Only to be home, lying in Maman’s garden.” Turning to the wall, the old woman hugged the cat so tightly its eyes bulged, yet it purred. “Have you any clue, Nurse, what it’s like longing for something that is everything and nothing?”

  Suffice to say: “yes,” sleep being it. Thus ends this entry.

  8

  LUNATIC ASYLUM

  DAY? YEAR?

  MY DEAREST C,

  Perhaps, in the smallest way, you take after Maman? She remained steadfast, you’ll recall, in refusing to let me sculpt her. Was it 1884, ’85? You watched me follow her from room to room, asking, “What are you afraid of?” Was it some secret the clay would reveal? Or was she a primitive, scared the white man’s camera would steal her soul? I don’t suppose you know any better than I do.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she would brush me off. “Pictures are nicer, something to hang on the wall. This apartment, the clutter — look around. Is there an inch of space for yet another bust? Unless you wish to contribute to renting a larger place.” Surely she saw that I needed practice? I insisted, persistence being the key. Eventually my attempts to sway her were partly paid off when, in our father’s presence, she agreed to let me draw her. “But only if you’ll leave me in peace.” I promised she wouldn’t be sorry, finally winning her confidence.

  The portrait I did in pastels showed her at her needlework, the only way she consented to sitting idle. Still she quibbled. “But I look so stern, my eyes too far apart. It’s not how I appear, is it?” she demanded of Papa.

  Our brother snickered. “Of course not, M
aman.”

  Louise, always one to suck up, put an arm around her shoulders. “You’re beautiful to me, Maman!”

  And my friend, our boarder, whose prissy English lifted everything into a question? “Oh, Madame — it makes you look like there’s something troubling you?”

  My friend was bold if foolish to raise it, and not long after, was asked politely to find “more suitable” lodgings. It was awkward sharing a table with a stranger, Maman decreed, the expense raising the price for room and board. You weren’t there the day my friend moved out. It wouldn’t affect our friendship, she said. If a rift grew between us, it was Maman’s fault.

  For a time Maman’s portrait hung above the vanity in her bedroom. “So this is how I look to you, my girl?” she said one night as she was brushing out her hair, its darkness barely threaded with grey. “And I thought a daughter loved her mother.”

  “Of course we love you, with all of our hearts, Maman,” we each piped up, ready as ever with what she wanted to hear. Our brother having fetched her nightly cup of tea, each of us bid her goodnight.

  “Do you know? A son loves his mother, but a daughter will always be there. It’s what I decided when your brother was born. Not you,” she said, to Paul’s dismay, “the brother who came before any of you. A perfect baby boy whom you, missy, might have replaced. The one I lost.”

  “And this is the pain you wear on your face?” I meant in no way to upset her.

  You went awfully quiet at that. “Can’t you see it’s my bedtime?” was her swift, sad reply.

  That same spring she and Papa found a more spacious flat a few boulevards over. Wouldn’t you know, during the shift from one dwelling to the other, her portrait went amiss, not to be displayed again. “The movers, they lost it,” both our parents claimed. Too true, alas: the world full of thieves, though I was not yet fully aware of it.