Secrets of the Asylum

by Linda Hughes

  Strolling down Red Drive toward the farm, she savored the smells of springtime. Fresh grass, more lilacs, gladiolas, and lily of the valley sprinkled color along the lane, all mixed to give her a heady kind of intoxication. She loved the renewal inherent in this time of year.

  Passing two dour nurses in their prim white uniforms, white stockings, white shoes, and little white starched caps perched on top of their heads, she nodded respectful greeting. “Beautiful day, isn’t it, ladies?” she asked. One of them merely returned the nod and the other ignored her completely.

  “Hello, Lizzie!” Rock the Hermit hollered in greeting from where he sat on a stool in front of one of the men’s cottages. Born in Poland with his English never quite becoming clear, it came out like, “Ell-oh, Leezie!” But she understood Rock perfectly well and found him to be oddly interesting. Although everyone called him The Hermit, he’d once walked with her and told her the sad story of how he’d been a teacher and accidentally killed a student. He didn’t go into detail about how the “accident” took place but she knew that was why he now resided in the asylum. Although the cause of that accident would probably never be clear to her, she knew the asylum staff wouldn’t let him roam free if they felt he was a danger to anyone. Those who were a danger were locked up.

  “Hello, my friend!” she called, waving back at Rock the Hermit.

  Continuing on to the asylum farm, she took the narrow footbridge over Kids Creek, then followed the dirt road past the peach orchard, the raspberry patch, the cherry orchard, and the apple orchard. The fruit trees had just blossomed in a dramatic display of pink and white. Everybody here knew the story of how the farm came to be when Dr. Munson declared that “beauty is therapy, work is therapy.” Any “resident,” which is what Dr. Munson preferred that patients be called, who was willing and able to work, and who had ground parole, which depended on mental state, was given a job. She’d never been given a specific job, making her suspect employees were so pleased at having first dibs on her paintings they preferred to leave her free to roam about for creative inspiration. But many of the residents became farm workers, which wasn’t new to a lot of them, and they reveled in getting out of their wards. The farm provided the vegetables, fruit, chickens, pork, beef, and dairy goods needed to feed its hungry inhabitants and staff. They even owned a milk cow champion, Traverse Colantha Walker.

  “Hi, Traverse!” Elizabeth called and waved as she passed the pasture. “I’m going to paint you one day, you know!” The bovine damsel looked up, chewing on her cud, but didn’t seem impressed. The fifty head of Holstein with her didn’t even lift their noses from their juicy spring grass meal.

  Elizabeth’s intent had been to weed the vegetable garden, but suddenly she became struck with a suspicion that because it was such an agreeable day, her friend might be walking in the woods nearby. The asylum resident looked around. Although a dozen people worked the garden and a few men came and went from the barn, nobody paid any attention to her. So, she veered from her path and ducked into the apple grove. Passing the Spy apple trees, which she knew were great for baking tart pies, she went to the McIntosh trees, her favorite for eating raw. Being late spring, apple buds had poked their delicate white petals out all over the grove, nowhere near producing fruit yet.

  She sidetracked into the apple cellar at the side of a small barn beside the grove. The wooden cellar door, slanted onto the ground beside the barn, sat open. Going down the dank steps, the coolness of the earthen storage room struck her as she descended. Stooping beneath the low ceiling, she let the dim light from outside guide her to the McIntosh bin, where she inspected two plump apples among the stash left from last fall’s harvest. Finding them to be without worm holes, she put one in each of her skirt pockets. Then she went back out and ventured into the woods beyond.

  Sunlight streamed through the large oak, maple, and jack pine trees of this part of the woods, causing dappled light to rollick upon her as she walked. Capturing lovely images in her mind for paintings, she wandered in the direction from which her friend usually came. And there she was, sitting on a log watching a baby squirrel.

  “Abby! I’m so glad you’re here! I didn’t know for sure but hoped you would come.”

  The Indian looked up, smiled, and stood, taking long strides to meet her friend for a hug. “Lizzie! Of course, I’m here. How are you?”

  Abby picked up a bag she’d brought and hung it from one arm while Elizabeth wound her arm through Abby’s free arm. Out of habit, they turned toward an open patch where an old shed stood. A break in the trees allowed the ramshackle wood structure to bask in the sunlight.

  “I’m good,” Elizabeth said. “Isn’t it a beautiful day? I’ve missed you! Did you get a ride with Mr. Hollis today?”

  “Oh, yes, he’s always so kind about bringing me into town and then letting me ride back with him in the afternoon.”

  “Do you think he’ll ever give up on delivering his milk by horse and buggy?”

  Abby chuckled. “Probably not.”

  They reached the shed, with only three walls remaining, but a surprisingly stable plank roof. The mortar in-between the planks of the walls long ago weathered away, giving the structure a cozy feel with light streaming through the slits on one side to draw delicate stripes on what remained of a plank floor. The women stepped onto the floor and under the shelter of the roof, and Elizabeth let go of Abby’s arm to free herself to scrape the toe of her boot across the sun stripes on the floor, as if she might be able to make them move.

  “How long has it been, my love, since we’ve seen each other?” Elizabeth asked, lifting her gaze to Abby. “You know how bad I am with time. It feels like forever.”

  “One month and two days. We had that nice spell of weather and then it got cold again. I’ve missed you, too. I can come more often now that the weather has turned.

  “But today I came for a special reason. I have a message for you from my spirit guides.”

  Elizabeth stopped fussing with the floor and looked up. Abby turned to face her.

  They knew they could not be more unlikely friends. Although both comely women of the same age, thirty-eight this year, one was pale faced and the other had tan skin. One had shoulder-length, black, curly hair and the other a glossy, black braid trailing down her back to her waist. One wore a simple ankle-length cotton skirt and plain shirtwaist blouse, but the drape of the fabric belied its expensive tailoring. The other wore a clean, hand-sewn, long skirt but a tattered leather jacket that looked as if it had been through a hundred years of wear. Elizabeth wore new work boots while Abby’s footwear, although polished, still managed to look like it had miraculously survived the French and Indian War. In other words, they appeared to be the least likely of companions.

  Yet, they had first befriended each other twenty years ago.

  Consequently, they talked to each other as only old friends can do, with abbreviated sentences and a sense for what the other would say next.

  “About the girl,” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s coming.”

  “Yes.”

  “She may try to see me.”

  “That I don’t know.”

  Elizabeth merely nodded. Without another word, Abby took a blanket out of the bag she carried, spread it on the floor, and proceeded to dole out a picnic lunch of dried venison strips, homemade bread, cheese, and carrots, as she’d done so many times before. Elizabeth contributed the two apples stowed in her pockets.

  The two women ate in silence, the only sounds being the occasional hoot of an owl and the gentle rustling of the leaves in the surrounding forest trees. The sun shifted the stripes on their floor and only when the stripes disappeared altogether with the apparent gathering of clouds above did they decide it was time to leave their place of peace and quiet.

  Outside the shed, they hugged one last time for this day and walked their separate ways.

  5

  Meg stared out the window of the train, torturing hersel
f by looking back at Chicago, which sat in full view as the train rounded Lake Michigan just outside the city on its journey east and then north. The tall buildings, the sheltering private girls’ school, the finishing school, her stylish flat, and the shops: Those were the places that had served as her primary home since the age of twelve. And more recently, she’d spent an inordinate amount of time in exciting speakeasies. As she looked back, one last tall church spire silhouetted against a cloudy gray sky faded from view and her city was gone. The sense of loss she felt, leaving her life as she knew it behind, seemed almost as bad as having lost Robert.

  Of course, her father had always insisted that Traverse City was her real home. She’d returned there for holidays and summers until the age of eighteen, when she spent a year doing the continent, a tour of Europe. Since meeting Robert two years earlier, she’d only been home once for a brief stay, although her father came to Chicago to see her twice a year. She wasn’t stupid; she knew he also did business while there. She knew she should be glad of that, as his wise investments gave her a lifestyle most people could only dream about.

  Her grandfather, an ambitious “shanty boy,” a lumberjack, had eventually made a fortune as a lumber baron in the Traverse City area. Then he’d astutely invested in copper mining in the upper peninsula of Michigan, sawmills around the state, railroads throughout the northeast part of the country, and shipping on the Great Lakes. From there, especially when the forests started to become depleted and the lumber business waned, her father expanded the family holdings by investing in companies like Ford Motor, Firestone, and Edison. So, yes, Meg knew she was extremely privileged compared to most young women. Still, she’d always felt like something was missing.

  That emptiness had started, she knew without a doubt, when she was six years old and her two-year-old brother, Harry, disappeared. His real name had been Henry, but even her father had relented in calling him Harry, it fit so well. She had loved her little brother dearly and his loss devastated her. He’d been her favorite playmate, too young to stop her from dressing him up in silly costumes and coercing him into playing the part of the hobo or pirate or cowboy in her pretend scenarios. He’d been a jolly little boy, a delight to be around.

  And then one night he was gone, his little bed empty while his bedroom window ominously sat open. The panic that followed had terrified the six-year-old girl. It was then she realized that her family was different. Something was and always had been wrong, but she didn’t know what.

  Police, townspeople, the nanny and servants, church congregations, the Chippewas, everyone in the community spent days scouring the countryside, the lakeshore, old buildings, and the limestone caves that dotted the hillsides that led to Grand Traverse Bay. Her father spent days sitting by the new telephone in the house, waiting for a demand from kidnappers. None ever came.

  Harry was never seen again.

  It was then that Meg’s mother was sent away to a hospital for consumption. Too young to understand what that meant, Meg only knew that her mother had become seriously sick when her brother disappeared and the maids whispered that the loss had been too much for her, and she would never get better.

  Her father’s despair became inconsolable. Meg remembered him pulling her onto his lap and hugging her so tightly she thought she’d pop. It had been as if he’d been afraid that she, too, would slip away from him.

  Yet he’d sent her away at the tender age of twelve, away from everything she loved: her nanny, the cherry tree groves, the apple orchards, and the big lake with its shoreline just perfect for playing.

  A flashback to that first time her father took her to Chicago on the train, the reverse trip of the one she made now, overwhelmed her with the knowledge that on that first day she’d felt as forlorn as now. It didn’t seem to matter which way she went, there was no joy in the journey. But, of course, after overcoming her initial fear and loneliness, she’d settled into her new life in the city. After all, she had no choice.

  Now she didn’t know what her choices might be. When he heard about her broken engagement, her father insisted she come home for the summer. The flat in the city would remain under the care of the servants while Meg decided what she wanted to do.

  The city of Chicago out of view now, she looked at Lake Michigan. Her lake. She supposed lots of people felt that way but it had always seemed to be there just for her to soothe her fears.

  She thought back to the time she’d been home on holiday at age sixteen. A thin grin found its way to her lips at the thought. Quite rebellious for a young woman schooled in a protective environment, she’d confronted her father about why he’d sent her away. Five years later, she could picture the sadness in his eyes as if she were looking at him this very moment. He’d been working at his desk in his study when she’d lashed out at him, and he’d invited her to sit down on the divan and came out from behind his desk to sit beside her.

  “You’re old enough now to know, Margaret. I sent you away because life here for a teenager in your position would have been brutal, even at Holy Angels. It might be a private Catholic school, but not even the nuns can watch out for you all the time. I was trying to protect you. In the process, I punished myself because I missed you terribly. We’re all we have left of family, Meg.” She became moved by his sudden use of her nickname. “But things would not have been good for you here. When you’re more grown-up you’ll be able to handle it, but not yet.”

  “What things?” she stumbled over his words in an urgent need to know.

  “It’s your mother, dear. She’s not well. She’s not in a hospital for consumption. She is in the Northern Michigan Asylum. You know what that is, don’t you?”

  Meg had stared blankly at her father, although she knew what it was. “You mean… you mean, she’s… mad?”

  “Yes, that’s what the doctors decided. She simply could not cope with your brother’s disappearance. I became afraid she would run away and get lost in the woods, or take a train and not know where she was, or something even worse. So, I took her to where I know she’s safe. She has a beautiful room overlooking the park. She even has her own studio for painting. Do you remember how much she loved to paint? She still does. I know she’s happier there. She doesn’t have to worry about anything. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I guess so,” Meg fibbed. Her mother had never spent much time with her, leaving her to the nanny. But still, she was her mother. Why had her mother so easily left her? That seemed too big a question to ask.

  Her father patted her knee and put his arm around her shoulders for a side hug, something she knew was difficult for this proper man who’d never quite seemed to know exactly what to do with a teenaged daughter. “So,” he continued, “I sent you to Chicago to avoid the gossip about your mother. Now seems like a good time to tell you about it, as you’re getting old enough to understand. It’s just gossip from people who don’t have anything better to do. But, still, I wanted to take you away from the stigma of having a mother who’s in an asylum. My hope is that someday, however, you’ll want to come back home and live in Traverse City forever.”

  That was the last time Meg heard her father speak of her mother.

  He had stood and offered her a hand, smiling down at her. She took his hand and rose off the divan. She didn’t tell him she couldn’t imagine coming back to this hodunk town to live forever.

  But here she was on a train headed for that town, with no idea where it would lead.

  6

  Abby hadn’t entered Lizzie’s cottage since that fateful day fifteen years ago when Herbert Sullivan had his wife taken away. The Indian woman remembered it all too well.

  All those years ago she’d gone on one of her morning treks to the big house to have tea with her friends, the cook and the servants. On that morning, she’d taken the walk hesitantly, as the night before while sitting in her rocking chair by the fire she’d received a shady message from her spirit guides that something momentous was about to happen at the big house. Her fear had be
en that little Harry’s body had been found. She approached the kitchen door that day afraid of what she might learn.

  But instead of news about Harry, the kitchen had been teeming with the shocking revelation that the mistress of the house had been taken away, kicking and screaming, in the middle of the night, by big men in a big black carriage. Mr. Sullivan, they said, insisted she had consumption and must be nursed at a hospital but the cook, the cook’s assistant, and the upstairs and downstairs maids highly suspected it was something else.

  They invited Abby in for tea and gossip, as usual, and she joined them at the long, plank kitchen table while they bantered about wild stories that Mrs. Sullivan had gone mad since young Harry disappeared only months earlier, or that maybe her husband had discovered she had a lover, or that Mr. Sullivan had tired of his spirited young wife and wanted to remove her to replace her with a more suitable companion. The most disturbing theory, however, was that Mr. Sullivan had been such a tortured man since their little son Harry went missing that he’d gone mad, having his wife taken away out of misplaced despair. It was anything, they insisted, but consumption.

  Why, hadn’t they heard her gaily singing Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye just the day before? A person with consumption couldn’t sing like that!

  Abby had sat silently sipping her tea and picking at a biscuit to try to suppress the sickness she felt as her stomach tightened and twisted in anxiety. Her secret best friend, her Lizzie, was gone. When she could take no more of the gossip, she politely excused herself, took her basket of charitable goods, thanked her kitchen hosts, and left.

  Fleeing to her cabin in the woods, she’d locked herself in for three days to grieve the loss of her friend.

  Several years before that, when she’d first become aware that somebody had fixed up that old shed on a green knoll about halfway up a big hill near the south side of the Sullivan property, she’d initially been dismayed. She didn’t want what she’d come to think of as her private beach to be disturbed. The Sullivans never came down here, except for the nanny and little girl during nice weather in the summer. Abby had no trouble avoiding them. And the servants certainly never came down. All her life since she’d been old enough to roam about alone, she’d walked that shore from the northern line of the Sullivan property where her cabin sat tucked into the woods and she’d always managed to do so in privacy. Walking along the bottom of the hills and dunes hid her from view from the big house. She couldn’t see the house from there, so no one in the house could see her, either.