As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

  He believes that rattle is something his sick mother had placed in his little hand when in tears—he’s asked if she cried when she left him and I always say that of course she did—she’d set him on our stoop and then run away, perhaps coughing into a handkerchief. Papa and the others can tell Alex the made-up story of how he came to us. Even Dora Sutcliff, who adores him, can relay the account we concocted. But Alex never asks them to retell it, only me. I guess it’s because I’m the one who found him.

  For the first year and a half he was with us, he slept in a crib in my room. When he was two, he moved across the hall to share a room with Willa, but only for a year. She wanted a room of her own again when Alex turned three and she was eleven. She took my old room on the third floor. Evie’s at the university or the asylum most of the time these days, and Papa’s on the first floor in Uncle Fred’s old room, so it’s often just Alex and me on the second floor. When he has a bad dream, I’m the one who goes to his bedside to console him. I tuck him in at night. I make his breakfast in the morning. I’m the one he runs to when he’s scared or hurt. Evie is like a mother to him, too, when she’s around, but she’s not the one he calls for first. It’s my name that flies off his tongue when he’s got something important to say. Last year, when he was six, he asked me if I could be his mama instead of his sister. And it took me several seconds to find my voice and tell him that I loved him just like a mama would.

  “But I don’t have a mama and I want one,” he’d answered.

  “You did have one, though,” I’d said. “And she loved you very much.”

  “She’s not here!”

  “Oh, but she is.” I’d placed one hand over his heart. “Right there. Just like my mama’s right here in my heart.” And I’d placed my other hand over my own chest.

  He had asked to see my mother’s photograph then, the one in a gilt frame and sitting atop the mantel in the sitting room. I went and got it and he took it up to his room.

  Papa asked about the photograph later that night when he noticed it was gone and I begged him to please just let Alex have it for a while. “You have other photographs of Mama,” I’d reminded Papa. Alex has nothing by which to remember his mother’s face.

  My father said nothing. He was probably thinking, “But that’s not his mother.” He didn’t say that, though. He just nodded and then headed down the little hallway to his rooms at the back of the house. Alex still has that photograph on his dresser.

  He knows Mama was not his mother, but he can’t remember anything about the woman who did give birth to him. Mama’s photograph reminds him he had a mother and she loved him. Sometimes you need a little help imagining something that used to be yours but which you have no memory of.

  I, however, remember everything about my mother. Her voice, her fragrance, the way she swirled the cat-shaped tea infuser in her cup, the soft tap of her heels on the stairs, how much she liked birdsong and the color yellow, how she called Papa “Tom,” and the way she talked to the dead in the embalming room as she made them look beautiful again.

  I suppose these are the reasons I also love the sound of birdsong in the morning, and sunny yellow hues, and tea made with the cat infuser, and why I chat to the people in the embalming room when I am getting them ready for their grand good-bye. All of these are echoes of Mama’s beauty and mystery. These things keep me close to Mama, close even to that part of her I hadn’t yet come to fully know because I was too young and we simply ran out of time.

  I hear a man’s voice now beyond the kitchen as I step into the hallway that leads to the rest of the house—then the sound of the sitting room piano.

  The voice is Palmer Towlerton’s, and my heart takes a little stutter step. Palmer is my current suitor. He works for the city as a facilities manager. He is from New Jersey and he’s tall like Papa but with darker eyes and hair and he’s five years older than me. I met him at the library on Locust Street on one of my trips with Alex to borrow books. It is one of the many city buildings over which Palmer’s department has oversight. We’ve only been courting for a couple months, but I like Palmer very much. So does Papa. Actually Willa likes him, too.

  He is not like Jamie Sutcliff, whom I haven’t seen in six years. Palmer is talkative and energetic and spontaneous. Jamie Sutcliff is quiet and even-keeled and more thoughtful. At least he was. I guess I don’t know what he is now. He’s only come back to visit Philadelphia once, and I didn’t see him then because we were all in Quakertown for the holidays that year. Dora and Roland have traveled to visit him, sometimes having to go as far away as San Francisco. Dora has said that the war, just those few months Jamie fought in it, changed him. He doesn’t like being at home now or around anything that reminds him of home, which includes his parents and us and anything related to the man he was before he shipped to France.

  I asked Evie quite a while ago what might have happened to Jamie in those few months that ruined home for him. At the time, she was in her last year of college before medical school to become a psychiatrist. She said it’s not how short or long an experience is; it’s the depth to which it touches the core of who you are that matters.

  “You and I don’t have to be told how quickly one’s world can change, Maggie,” she’d said.

  Palmer Towlerton had a draft number, but it had been issued in the last weeks of the war when the registration age was lowered to eighteen. He never got called. I’m glad he didn’t.

  I’d forgotten now that Palmer had said he was going to try to arrange his Saturday afternoon so that he could join Alex and me on our outing to the park today. He knows how devoted I am to Alex, and it doesn’t seem to rankle him. I do wonder, though, if he understands that if we should marry, Alex surely comes with us. Papa can’t raise a seven-year-old boy with just Willa for help, and Evie is hardly ever home. And Alex thinks of me as a mother figure. He would miss me too much. I’ll need to be ready to work all this into a conversation with Palmer about our future together, if we are to have one.

  I admit I have lain awake some nights imagining what it would be like to be Palmer’s wife. He is not the first man to want my affection—there have been a few others—but he is the first to capture it. He is the first to measure up to Jamie Sutcliff, or at least Jamie as I remember him. Every young suitor who has asked me to a dance or a concert or a party, I have compared with Jamie. And even though I wish I didn’t, the fact is, I do. I still have Jamie’s letters from France. There are only four of them, and goodness knows I wrote ten times as many to him, but they still whisper to me the kind of person he was before he left for the army, and the kind of person I still want to believe he is—underneath all those terrible memories of the war.

  Palmer doesn’t remind me of Jamie, not in the least. But he does make me think less about Jamie. More so than anyone else ever has.

  I make my way into the sitting room now. Willa is at the piano and she’s singing “Moonlight and Roses.” She is golden-haired and beautiful, and her voice is angelic. If she were a few years older, I’m sure Palmer would be positively smitten with her. I should be jealous of her constant flirtations with my beau. If she were seventeen and not fourteen, I no doubt would be.

  Palmer stands just inside the sitting room, which I’m happy to say we updated with new furniture and decor a year after the flu. He is politely listening to my sister, who no doubt coquettishly asked him to listen to her play and sing. Willa began taking piano lessons the summer after Mama died. She caught on quickly. It was as if she had been born to excel at music. She can play and sing just about anything and rarely needs the sheet music. She is a natural, as Dora Sutcliff likes to say.

  Alex is a few feet away from them, absently kicking a little red ball on the carpet, obviously bored. He will see me in a moment or two standing just beyond the open doors. When he does, he will run to me and beg for us to go now that Mr. Towlerton is here. Palmer will turn then and smile at me, and Willa will stop and po
ut. I’ll ask her if she wants to join us, and the frown will slip off her face as if it’s made of water.

  But I wait for Alex to catch that glimpse of me. I want Willa to continue with “Moonlight and Roses” a few seconds more. I want to hear her sing how the smile of a long-ago love can still haunt your dreams.

  CHAPTER 48

  Evelyn

  “I’m so very sorry,” Dr. Bellfield says, kindly but in a way that suggests he’s said this before to other people. He no doubt has.

  The man to whom he speaks, Conrad Reese, slowly turns his head to look out the window. His wife, Sybil, only three years older than me, is sitting on a chaise in the garden just on the other side of the glass, unaware of the high fence fifty yards away, or that she’s wearing a bathrobe in the noonday sun, or that she’s at Fairview Hospital for the Insane rather than at home. The beauty of her physical body masks the invisible disease that has wrapped itself around her mind.

  Sybil is Dr. Bellfield’s patient, but the diagnosis I make as a second-year resident, that she suffers from dementia praecox, a psychotic disorder that only gets worse, was confirmed by him. Her symptoms supported no other conclusion. Many months of erratic behavior, followed by delusions and hallucinations, followed by paranoia, followed by her current near-catatonic state, point to no other finding. I’ve seen this terrible malady before, not just in the pages of my textbooks but here at the asylum, where I’ve been working and studying as part of my residency.

  The progression of Sybil’s illness is the only constant in her life. Her mind is like an onion whose layers are peeling off all by themselves. And just like there is no way to reattach an onion’s layers, there is no way to stop Sybil Reese from mentally disappearing.

  This has been the most sobering fact I’ve learned in my residency. The mind, like any other part of the body, has crippling limitations.

  “Is there nothing else you can try?” Conrad Reese says, now looking from Dr. Bellfield to me to the doctor again.

  Dr. Bellfield reiterates that we’ve utilized every remedy we know: bathing therapies, sleep cures, barbiturates, hypnotics, alkaloids. No cure exists at present for dementia praecox. Sybil Reese is going mad, and there is no stopping it. Ours is the third hospital he has tried in his search to cure his wife.

  “I’d like to see her,” Mr. Reese says a moment later, and there is something in his voice and manner that tells me he already knew that his wife would never return to him. I think maybe he has known this for a while but didn’t want to admit it.

  Dr. Bellfield starts to clear his throat, preparing, no doubt, to tell Mr. Reese that his wife has stopped communicating. Sybil speaks to no one now, makes eye contact with no one, recognizes no one. But her husband has asked to see her, not have a conversation with her.

  “Of course,” I tell him. “I can take you to her.”

  Dr. Bellfield closes his mouth and nods in acquiescence.

  I lead Mr. Reese out of the building and into the early-September sunshine. The lawns on the grounds are still lush, the hydrangeas are still in bloom, and the leaves on the sugar maples are still green. Hard to believe that in a month, everything will look different. And yet the hospital grounds blanketed in snow will be lovely in another way. Our hospital is a haven compared to the other asylum, on the east side of Philadelphia, where the patients are chained like criminals to their disease. There are no lawns or flowering shrubs or happy canaries in cages or interior walls papered in paisley prints. I could never work there. The east-side asylum is not a place in which to get well; it’s a place to be forgotten in. Here at Fairview, every attempt is made to cure. There, the objective is only containment.

  There are other patients out on the lawn as we step outside. Most are sitting in chairs or on lounges. Some are strolling about with a nurse by their side. Were it not for the hospital gowns and bathrobes, they would all look like vacationers at a quiet hideaway. As we draw near to Sybil, a girl about Willa’s age—and stretched out on the same kind of chaise as Mr. Reese’s wife—raises her head to look at us. The girl arrived yesterday. A necklace of angry bruises across her throat reveals the method of her suicide attempt. The orderly who sits beside her is there to make sure she does not run headlong into the reflecting pool to drown herself or attempt to scale the wall and die jumping off it. But he is reading to her, I notice. He also looks up as we pass, and I smile at him. He’d likely been told he had to do nothing more than watch the young girl, and yet he’s reading aloud to her. He smiles back.

  When we reach Sybil Reese, I lean over and touch her hand, gently. Were I to pull on her arm, she would rise willingly and follow me like a sleepwalker. “Sybil, you have a visitor,” I tell her. “Your husband is here.”

  She blinks languidly but does not turn toward him.

  Mr. Reese exhales heavily and then sits down on an empty chaise next to his wife. He takes her hand.

  “Can she hear me?” he asks.

  Medically there is nothing wrong with Sybil Reese’s ears. She can hear. But I know what Conrad Reese really wants to know is, will his wife understand anything he says?

  “I think you should say whatever your heart tells you to say, Mr. Reese,” I respond.

  He nods. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Take all the time you need. I’ll wait for you there by the door.” I turn to walk away.

  Before I can take a step, a question is off his lips. “How do you do it, Miss Bright? How do you work day after day in this place?” He is looking over at the young girl with the rope burns around her neck. The girl is staring at her hands.

  I doubt Mr. Reese is truly expecting an answer, but I offer one anyway. “Because I believe someday, if we work hard enough, we will discover how to help someone like your wife.”

  “You really think there’s a cure out there for this?”

  I know from reading Sybil’s file that she has been ill for a long time, the first symptoms beginning when she was a new bride five years ago, and that Mr. Reese kept her at home as long as he could. “I do.”

  Mr. Reese nods once. “I won’t be long.”

  • • •

  I first wondered what it might be like to study psychiatry when Uncle Fred gave me his anatomy book and showed me his favorite chapter, on neurology. Not long after that day, everyone I knew—including myself—had to scramble to make sense of what the flu and the war had taken from us. Millions upon millions of people had died around the globe from the flu, far more than in the war itself. The simple reclaiming of delight and goodness and joy had been a staggering endeavor that took place inside our minds, in the tangles of neurons that have always distinguished us from brutes and beasts. Our injuries were hidden deep within our psyches. That was where we needed the balm that would heal us.

  Papa was the first person I told, in my first year of college, at the age of seventeen. He didn’t think psychiatry was a wise choice for me. Not because he didn’t think I would excel at it but because so few women went into the field of medicine aside from nursing, and fewer still studied psychiatry. He was afraid I would work myself to the bone getting the doctorate only to find I wouldn’t be hired anywhere. My weaker sex is still believed by most to be highly susceptible to fits and hysteria. I, being a woman, had better odds of becoming a future mental patient than of becoming a psychiatrist. I persisted, though, and Papa finally gave me his blessing—but not before he asked me why I wanted to pursue this kind of medicine when there were so many others to choose from.

  “I want to understand,” I’d said.

  “Understand what?”

  “Everything.”

  My course of study is nearly over—one year remains—and I am astonished that for all I know now about the human mind, there is so much I don’t know. Dr. Bellfield doesn’t know everything. Nor do Dr. Freud or Dr. Jung or any of the other great minds in the universe who are considered the pioneers of this new fie
ld. The human mind is so complex, sometimes it seems the more we study it the less we understand.

  Papa is glad that my schooling and residency will soon be complete and I can then concentrate on being properly married off. He doesn’t say it quite like this, but it concerns him that I will be twenty-three in January and I’ve no suitors. Maggie has Palmer Towlerton calling at the house now, and Willa is forever talking about the boys she likes. But I spend all my waking hours at an asylum full of the mentally ill. Not a suitable place to find a husband. Papa’s words, not mine.

  It’s not that I don’t want to be married. I do. But I want to experience again that electrified sensation I felt with Gilbert all those years ago, when the way he looked at me made my heart flutter. That feeling had been real and wonderful and different and very new. I had only just started to love Gilbert when the flu snatched him away from me.

  I remember what it was like, though. I remember how that sensation swirled inside me for those months I was the new girl and Gilbert was still alive. I knew I had sampled something rare and divine.

  I think if Mama were here she’d tell Papa not to worry about me. I have my studies. I have my work. I have Papa and Maggie and Willa and dear Alex. And I have my memories of what that first bloom of romance is like. Sometimes I think I can hear her voice assuring me that she is proud of who I am. Other times I’m convinced it is only my own voice inside, telling me I don’t need anything else—or anyone else—for my life to be complete. I came through the crucible, and it did not reduce me to ashes.