Enduring

by Donald Harington

  The dormitory was well-lit, and as Latha was to discover, the lights were never turned off. For Latha, who had grown up without electricity and had had some problems adjusting to the lights in Mandy’s house, it was going to be extremely difficult to sleep with all of that illumination. It was going to be extremely difficult to sleep with thoughts of baby Sonora in her head. It was going to be extremely difficult to sleep on an empty stomach. It was going to be extremely difficult to sleep without a drink of water. It was going to be extremely difficult to sleep with all of the noise, which never ceased throughout the night, of madwomen babbling, chittering, moaning, crying, sobbing, and shouting whenever they got over their mountains by whatever means they could.

  So Latha did not sleep. Not because she didn’t want to, but because it was impossible. At some point (there were no clocks anywhere in the institution) she realized she simply had to urinate, and she could not even countenance the thought of returning to that hideous toilet, so she got up and wandered around the room, looking for a private place to pee. She encountered sleepwalkers and walkers who were not asleep. A woman asked her, “Have you seen my Bible?” and Latha was obliged to shake her head. Another woman said, “How can I sleep without my Teddy?” Latha did not know if Teddy was her lover or her bear. A young girl tugged at Latha’s gown and asked her if she was her mommy.

  It was very difficult to find any secluded place that was not well-lit, and Latha was getting desperate with her urge. After making a circuit of the whole room, in sheer frustration she simply squatted in an aisle and let it flow out of her. As she finished, a woman in the nearest cot said “That’s against Rule Thirty-Five.”

  Back in her own cot, she faced the ceiling with her hands behind her head. She was exhausted, and kept her eyes closed, but sleep would not come. If only she had a drink of water. She thought for a while of the woods and meadows of Stay More. She smiled at the image of Swains Creek riffling over rocks, but that made her thirstier. She counted and recounted the money in the cash drawer at her teller’s window at the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company. She wandered up into the second level of Ingledew’s General Store and shopped for a pair of shoes, trying on several. She walked down the main street of the village, hand in hand with…with…with Every! He smiled at her, real big, and she smiled back and said, “Please, dear Every, let me go to sleep!” but he would not. He walked her all around the town and they waved or spoke to all the citizens.

  Two women were fighting, pulling each other’s hair, and Latha realized it wasn’t Stay More but right here in the Arkansas State Lunatic Asylum. The fight woke several sleepers. Soon two attendants stormed into the dormitory. Both were women, but well-built and masculine, and mighty enough to separate the two fighting women and to inject them with hypodermic needles. Once the two fighters were returned to their cots, one of the attendants called out, “Back to Dreamland, ladies,” and left. Latha tried to return to Stay More but could not.

  Eventually she watched the first light of dawn creep up the window near her bed. Somehow it reminded her of the dawn the time she slept with Every and waked from her swooning to see him asleep beside her and the lovely light coming up over Ledbetter Mountain. This image was so dreamy that it finally put her to sleep. It seemed she slept for only a minute before a heavy hand shook her shoulder and she opened her eyes to see a woman dressed like Miss Turnkey but somewhat more feminine, and standing behind her a man in a white smock who was clearly a doctor. The doctor said, “Time to wake up, Miss Bourne. It’s after five. This is Nurse Shedd, and I’m Doctor Meddler.”

  Latha sat up in the cot, and the doctor grabbed her wrist and took her pulse while Nurse Shedd stuck a thermometer in her mouth. The nurse was holding a thick bundle of folders and handed one to the doctor. He opened it and skimmed it and said, “I see you have aphasia and are thus unable to articulate. Is that correct? You may simply nod or shake your head in response to my questions.”

  Latha was tempted to attempt speech and ask him what the dickens he was talking about, but she just gave her head a nod, wondering if it was customary for the doctors to visit at five o’clock in the morning. She was impatient to put her head back down and return to sleep.

  “You are convinced that there is no reason why you should be here. Correct?”

  She nodded.

  “You were committed by your sister, Mrs. Vaughn Twichell, in whose home you had been dwelling. Correct?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you feel any pain?”

  She shook her head, although actually she was pained by his presence.

  “You are twenty years old, unmarried, but I must say simply gorgeous.” She didn’t nod her head because he hadn’t said “Correct?” He turned to his nurse, “Don’t you think so, Nurse Shedd?”

  “Yes sir, she’s the best-looking one we’ve caught so far.”

  “You haven’t married because you haven’t found a man worthy of you. Correct?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re not a lesbian?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re not a virgin?”

  She shook her head.

  “How often do you masturbate?”

  That was one of those big words that Latha knew very well what it meant. But it wasn’t a yes-or-no question, so she could only shrug her shoulders.

  “Weekly, shall we say?”

  She nodded, and the doctor wrote something in her folder, and then he asked, “What did you dream about last night?” She’d had so few minutes of sleep there wasn’t any dreaming that she could recall, and besides, she couldn’t speak. “I’ll just suggest a few possible dreams, and you nod your head if you dreamed that one, okay?” He began to recite some possible topics—murdering her father, being murdered by her father, marrying her mother, giving birth to a dog, etc., etc., and she did not nod her head to any of these, or have any memory of having ever dreamt them. The doctor said to the nurse, “She’s okay for B.” Then he asked Latha, “Do you have any questions?”

  Latha had so many questions she didn’t know what to do with them but she had long ago decided that asking questions wouldn’t get her anywhere. She shook her head.

  The doctor looked at her oddly and then asked the nurse for her clipboard and turned a sheet to its blank reverse side and handed it to her. “Write on this your answer. Is there anything we can do for you?”

  In block letters, she printed, “YES. LET ME GO.”

  The doctor laughed when she showed it to him. “That’s what they all say,” he said. “But where would you go if we let you out?”

  She wrote, “STAY MORE.”

  “I can’t, really,” he said. “I’ve got a hundred other patients to examine. But perhaps you could make an appointment with Nurse Shedd to see me in my office tomorrow?”

  At breakfast, which consisted of toast with jelly, Latha sat again with Mary Jane Hines and was careful not to say anything that might bring on her sadness. Mary Jane asked her what she thought of Doctor Meddler, and Latha said, “I’d hate to be alone with him.”

  Mary Jane giggled and said, “Me too! And my advice is, don’t ever go into his office.” Mary Jane explained that she’d heard some of the doctors in D Ward were much worse, but Dr. Meddler was the only doctor they had for this ward, which was B Ward, combined with C Ward. “Those letters are like grades in school,” Mary Jane said. “I really ought to be in A Ward because there they let you go out and walk on the grounds and have special privileges. The only privilege we get in B Ward is library, which is all that keeps me from going really crazy and being transferred to C Ward or worse.”

  “Is there no F Ward?” Latha asked.

  “Yes, the hopeless cases are in F Ward, which is way over on the corner of the campus, almost near the men’s quadrangle.”

  “Oh, are there men here too?”

  Mary Jane giggled again. “Of course! Insanity is not the exclusive prerogative of the fairer sex, although Dr. Meddler seems to think it is. As it happ
ens, there are more women than men in the hospital. I’ve seen some of the men from their A Ward walking the grounds, and they could pass for doctors.” Mary Jane finished her coffee and plucked from her short hair a cigarette. “If I can get this thing lit, you can share it with me.” Latha vaguely remembered Rule Eleven. Or was it Twelve? No tobacco in any form, and no alcohol in any form, are permitted at this institution. Latha repeated this to her, wondering if it might throw her into a depression. But Mary Jane simply shrugged and asked, “Do you have any play-like matches?” Latha handed her an imaginary match, which she struck on the underside of the table, lit her cigarette, inhaled largely, and offered Latha a drag on the cigarette, but Latha shook her head. Mary Jane proceeded to give her a lecture on the benefits of tobacco, how it calms you and helps your nerves and also makes you feel more sociable. Latha said she would have to think about it, but she didn’t want to acquire any habits that were hard to break.

  “Like sex?” Mary Jane giggled.

  “That never got to be a habit with me,” Latha said.

  “It wasn’t exactly a habit with me either, but I sure miss it,” Mary Jane said, and got a wistful expression on her face that soon turned into a look of great sorrow. And that was the end of the conversation.

  Chapter eighteen

  Since Mary Jane was more mute than Latha whenever she got into one of her down moods, Latha decided she should have more than one friend. There was an exercise period after breakfast, when everyone stood in rows and tried to imitate Nurse Shedd while she bent down to touch her toes. The problem was that lowering your head like that right after a meal made you nauseated, and Latha wasn’t the only one who disgorged her toast and jelly. An attendant with a mop, broom and bucket was busy cleaning up. For the first time, Latha was aware that she, like all the other girls, was barefoot. She had spent so much of her life going barefoot that she hadn’t even thought about it. The woman next to Latha put her hand on the back of Latha’s neck, and that made her feel better. “What you need is some ginger tea,” the woman said. “But ’course we aint got ary.” They introduced themselves, and it turned out the woman was from Madison County, just one county over from Newton County. Her name was Flora Bohannon. “What are you in for?” she asked. It was a common question among inmates, which made the place seem even more like a penitentiary. Flora, like Mary Jane, was so friendly that Latha knew she might be able to speak to her.

  “I haven’t been diagnosed yet,” Latha said. “When they get around to it, they’ll find there’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “That’s what everbody says,” Flora said. Nurse Shedd had wandered off, and the exercise period was over. “Are you doing Occtherp?”

  It sounded like a mental condition, but Latha hadn’t heard of it before. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Occupational therapy,” Flora said. “They put us in this room for the rest of the morning and give us things to play with. Come on.”

  Flora escorted her to the occupational therapy room. Flora explained that she would much prefer to do knitting, but knitting needles were not allowed, so she had to try to knit with her fingernails, and it was a slow, tedious job, but she showed Latha the small square that she had managed to knit, full of dropped stitches but a piece of fabric nevertheless. It was also more or less durable, unlike the other items in the room, which were strictly temporary: stacking blocks of wood into a castle, or working a jigsaw puzzle.

  Latha accepted Flora’s offer to teach her how to knit with her fingernails. An attendant gave Latha a ball of violet yarn. Latha had never learned how to knit back home, although her Grandma Bourne had tried to show her how, so she was at a disadvantage to Flora, who claimed to have knitted all manner of sweaters, socks, mittens, and comforters “on the outside.” Latha asked her what she was in for, and she declared that she had dipsomania. “I just never learnt when to stop,” she said. “And it got me in a lot of trouble.” Her brother, Ralph, was also an inmate of the asylum, over in one of the men’s wards, and he had the same affliction, only worse. She could tell Latha many stories about some of the outrageous things that she and Ralph had done whenever their daddy brewed up a fresh batch of moonshine. Flora visited Ralph in the visitation room, under strict supervision, not more than once a month, and Ralph told her about all the crazies in the men’s ward and about the horrible conditions over there. “If you think we got it bad, sister,” Flora said, “just be glad you aint a man.” The men were mostly treated like animals or slaves or both or worse.

  Latha and Flora became good friends, although Flora cautioned Latha that occasionally she should be prepared to see Flora subjected to either hypo or hydro. Whenever Flora’s craving for something to drink got out of hand, and she started raving, a nurse would inject her with a sedative or take her to the hydrotherapy room, where she would be packed up in cold, wet sheets until she quit raving. Flora never knew, when she began to rave, whether she would get the hypo or the hydro. Naturally she preferred the former, because it brought on a state that was almost like that of a booze binge, whereas the hydro made her thirstier than ever because she couldn’t drink any of the water that she was surrounded with. “It’s enough to drive a body nuts,” Flora said.

  After dinner, which nearly everybody called “lunch” except Latha and Flora, and which consisted of some inferior parts of chicken, boiled—wings or neck or feet—served with a boiled potato and boiled turnips, everyone was “free” for the rest of the day. There was nothing to do. B Ward patients who had been on good behavior might be allowed to join the A Ward patients in strolling the grounds of the courtyard, an area enclosed by the conjoined buildings of the asylum, so there was no access to “on the outside.” C Ward patients did not have that privilege, and most of them simply remained in or on their cots throughout the afternoon. Flora and Latha spent a while trying to find out if they knew any Ozark folks in common, but although Flora knew Caleb McWhorter, who had been Latha’s teacher in the primary, they discovered that Madison County and Newton County, while being side by side and nearly identical in size and topography and in the fact that the settlers of both had come from the same parts of Tennessee and Kentucky and North Carolina, were worlds apart, and thus Flora and Latha, who sounded alike, had no other common ground.

  In the middle of the afternoon, Flora revealed that if Latha petitioned Nurse Shedd, she could get library privileges. The only book Flora was interested in was the Bible. “They took my Bible away from me when they locked me up in here,” Flora said, “and damned if I aim to go to the library just to see another’un.”

  So Latha went up to the library by herself. It wasn’t very big, consisting of a few hundred books that had been donated to the asylum by people on the outside who didn’t have any further use for them. Latha found an interesting looking volume by David Grayson, called Adventures in Contentment. If there was anything Latha needed, it was contentment. The book was illustrated with nice pen and ink drawings of country scenes. But when Latha asked the attendant to check it out, the attendant looked at her as if she were a lunatic, and said books could only be read in the library. So Latha sat at a table and read the first three or four chapters. It was a story about a nice man named David Grayson who leaves the city and buys a farm in search of a simple life, and he has all kinds of friendly encounters with neighbors and strangers in which he learns as much from them as they learn from him, in terms of a philosophy of life that leaves one satisfied if not contented. The people and their ideas and way of talking reminded Latha very much of Stay More and Stay Morons, and she was excruciatingly homesick, and had to stop reading.

  She returned to the dormitory and tried to take a nap, which most of the occupants were doing, but it was too noisy, because several of the occupants were talking loudly, not necessarily to each other but to themselves or to the walls. One of them was saying to Nurse Shedd, over and over, “It’s time for me to go home.” Nurse Shedd tried to get her to believe that if she didn’t shut up, she would be transferred to D W
ard. Nurse Shedd’s constant repetition of the threat was more monotonous than the woman’s constant talk of going home. Latha’s friend Mary Jane Hines rose up from her cot and stood upon it and shouted, “NOBODY IS EVER GOING HOME, SO BUTTON YOUR TRAP!” Then Mary Jane lay back down to brood deeply on the import of her words, and covered her head with the blanket. Her words had stopped all of the talking from every corner but had also awakened all the nappers, who started talking steadily with more noise than those who had stopped. Latha reflected upon the possible truth of Mary Jane’s words. Was it not possible ever to get out of here?

  At supper, which consisted of a bowl of gruel of some sort, she asked her new friend Flora if it was true that no one ever left. “Why, never the week goes by,” Flora replied, “that somebody or other don’t figger out a way to escape. I just wish they’d tell me how before they leave, because it’s no good afterwards.” Flora counted off on her ten fingers the various inmates of her acquaintance who were no longer here. “’Course they never tell you when it happens, or where they went. For all I know, some of them died and was taken off to the cemetery. Or maybe they got transferred to A Ward for being real good or transferred to D Ward for being real bad.” One reason that B and C Wards were combined together was that it saved the problem, and the paperwork, of transferring an inmate from one to the other. Latha wanted to know which of the two wards Flora was in, and Flora said she had started out in B Ward but was now officially in C Ward. What was the difference? Flora said that each morning the doctor—the patients called him Doc Meddlesome—would ask her what she had dreamed about the night before. If she just dreamed about ordinary things—baking a cake or shopping for groceries—she was B Ward. But if she dreamed something shocking or terrible, like sleeping with her father, then she would be C Ward. “I never even had to dream it,” Flora said, laughing, “because I really did sleep with my Paw. But that’s why I’m in C instead of B.” Flora claimed it was possible to tell just by looking at somebody whether they were B or C. “Now you,” she said, “are pure-dee A, ’ceptin for the fack you can’t talk to meanies like the docs or the nurses, which is why you wound up in B. Maybe if you was to try real hard to talk to the docs, they’d promote you to A.” To demonstrate her claim, Flora proceeded to classify all the inmates within their field of vision, particularly at their table. “That lady on your left, Clara McGrew is her name, is obviously C, a clear-cut psycho, and a arsonist besides. She burnt down the whole town she lived in. This here ole gal on my left is a B. Ask her what she dreams about, and she’ll recite ‘The Child’s Garden of Verses.’ Over yonder at the end of that table is Betty Betty Chapman. I aint stammering; her middle name is also Betty. I reckon her folks just didn’t have any imagination. Which ward would you put her in?” Latha studied the woman, who, like many of the others, seemed perfectly normal, and she guessed perhaps B Ward. “Wrong!” said Flora. “That witch is a schizomaniac, which means that you caint never tell when she might up and start screaming the awfullest words you ever heard. She’s the opposite of you. You caint tell Doc Meddlesome the time of day. She tells Doc Meddlesome what a sorry stinking prick he is, and what a whore his mother was, and what awful things he does to his wife at night. But the joke’s on her, cause Doc Meddlesome aint got no wife!”