We were welcomed to our new home by the wives of the other asylum doctors, who came wearing hats like platters heaped with flowers and feathers. They brought covered dishes of scalloped potatoes, roast chicken, apple coffee cake, and molasses cookies. Mrs. Thurston, the wife of the hospital’s superintendent, brought little frosted cakes, each one with a real sugared violet on top. I thought them the most beautiful cakes I had ever seen, and Carlie asked if they were fairy food, but Aunt Maude declared them frivolous. (Later, when the women were gone, I looked up the meaning of the word so I could take it to Papa for a penny. The dictionary said frivolous meant “lacking serious purpose.” I did not see why everything must be put to a serious use. I reminded Aunt Maude of the Bible’s lilies of the field, which “toil not, neither do they spin” and she said I was being “impious,” which got me another penny from Papa.)
Aunt Maude had me put on my best dress and pass the refreshments. I heard her confide her fears to the women. “How can an asylum be a suitable place to bring up children?” Though Eleanor was nearby in the kitchen, taking care of Carlie, Aunt Maude did not bother to lower her voice but asked, as she had asked Papa in different words, “Are not the patients dangerous?”
“Oh, never in the world,” Mrs. Thurston said. “There is nothing of that kind here. Of course there are disturbed patients in the back wards, but they don’t go about. You could not find a more pleasant spot than the asylum to raise children: fresh milk and butter from the asylum’s own cows, fresh vegetables from its gardens, help in the house, and a congenial society.” She smiled. “Of course we are isolated here, and in any close society there will be little quarrels and gossip, but I would be surprised if the saints in Heaven itself didn’t have their little differences.”
Aunt Maude frowned. She did not like jokes about holy things.
I was about to hear some of the gossip Mrs. Thurston had mentioned. Mrs. Larter, who had a hat with what looked like a small dead bird resting on it, said, “Last year there was a very unpleasant episode when a staff member became too friendly with one of the patients. The staff member had to be let go because—”
Mrs. Thurston’s glance fell upon me. She interrupted Mrs. Larter, saying to us, “Unfortunately, Verna, just now the doctors’ families are an older group, and there are no children your age here, but you and your sister will have each other and will make friends when school starts this fall.”
I loved my sister, but I was eager for a friend whose idea of a good time was something besides making hollyhock skirts for clothespin dolls.
Mrs. Larter said, “Of course it’s just a one-room schoolhouse.”
“A one-room schoolhouse?” Aunt Maude’s eyebrows flew up. “Surely the girls could be taken to the school in the nearby town.”
“Oh, dear, no,” the women all said nearly at once.
Mrs. Thurston explained, “You can’t imagine what the winters are like up here. The snow falls until there is nothing left to see but the tops of the trees. If the girls tried to travel into town, they might get to school in the morning and not be able to return home for a week. They’ll have to attend the country school.”
With the excitement of snowstorms to come and the novelty of attending a whole schoolhouse contained all in one room, I couldn’t wait for winter. But until that time there was still summer to get through, and summer meant Aunt Maude.
Carlie and I considered Aunt Maude as menacing as a hornets’ nest, and we learned to keep our distance. While Carlie turned to Eleanor, I opened a book. But Aunt Maude was a terrible trouble to Eleanor. She had a great need to tell people how they must improve, and since Carlie and I were stubborn and would not listen, she concentrated on trying to improve Eleanor. Papa frowned upon these criticisms. “She is doing her best, Maude,” Papa said, so Aunt Maude did not criticize Eleanor when Papa was near.
Aunt Maude refused to see how hard Eleanor tried—how she polished the dining room table until it shone; how she made gingerbread, knowing it was a favorite of Carlie’s; how she struggled to make the dainty cucumber sandwiches Aunt Maude liked with her afternoon tea. Nothing Eleanor did satisfied Aunt Maude. Eleanor did not air the beds before making them, or the airing took too long and the beds were not made in a timely fashion. The piecrust was too tough or too crumbly. Eleanor forgot to put down crumpled damp newspaper to catch the dust before she swept, or she wasted too much newspaper in the crumpling.
It seemed the harder Eleanor tried to please Aunt Maude, the more fault Aunt Maude found with her. Once, after one of Aunt Maude’s scoldings, I came upon Eleanor crying. When I asked what the matter was, she quickly began peeling an onion and blamed it for the tears.
Eleanor often looked longingly out the window. When I asked what she was looking at, she said, “The out-of-doors. I feel like I am stuck inside someone’s pocket. At the farm on a day like this,” she said with a sigh, “I’d be picking the first strawberries. We always picked before breakfast, when the berries were still plump with the dew and the sun hadn’t turned hot.” Instead Eleanor had to stay in the kitchen, kneading a great lump of dough, for Aunt Maude had taken a dislike to the bread put out by the asylum bakery and wanted Eleanor to bake bread according to Aunt Maude’s own recipe. The woodstove was fired up, and waves of heat settled in the kitchen.
Carlie and I were free to escape into the July day.
“Why does Aunt Maude scold Eleanor all the time?” Carlie asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, but that wasn’t exactly true. Aunt Maude was stingy with her love and thought other people were too. She seemed to believe that if Carlie and I loved Eleanor, we wouldn’t have enough love left over for her. I noticed that when Carlie shadowed Eleanor around the house, Aunt Maude would find a way to get Carlie’s attention and draw her away from Eleanor. That gave me an idea, the first good idea I’d had on how to get rid of Aunt Maude. I’d tell Carlie not to be shy about letting Aunt Maude see how much she preferred being with Eleanor to being with her. Perhaps Aunt Maude would be so jealous of Eleanor that she would leave.
THREE
In our eagerness to escape Aunt Maude, Carlie and I were out of the house after breakfast each day and on our way to the cow barn to see the cows milked. The barn was lit with lanterns that cast shadows of giant cows on the walls. It smelled of milk and hay and animals and was full of the cows’ restless shuffling and warmth. Carlie loved to play with the cats and kittens that were kept in the barn to hunt mice.
We followed the wagons that carted the milk from the barn to the dairy. The dairy was cool on even the warmest day, for gallons of cold well water flowed through the contraption that separated the cream from the milk. The cream was then churned into hundreds of pounds of butter. From the dairy, wagons carried the milk and butter to the asylum kitchens.
While the dairy was cool, the asylum laundry was so hot that Carlie would not go into it. “It makes me melt,” she complained. The patients who had to work there gathered outside the building on their breaks, their faces shining with sweat, their damp clothes clinging to their backs. They drank gallons of water, and I had seen them on a dare, giggling and full of mischief, tip the water pails over one another.
All the food for the patients was grown on the farm. The fields with their rows of corn and lettuce and tomatoes and carrots were like a market. There was a cannery, where vegetables were put up to feed the patients in the winter. There was a piggery, where we were allowed to hold the small piglets that struggled in our arms until they slipped out and went squealing to their mothers. There was a butchery, but we never went there. Whenever I thought of it, I had bad dreams.
The most amazing place was the series of heated glasshouses where flowers lived in rooms like people. Patients worked there. Our favorite gardener was Louis. He was grandfather old, with a stoop to his shoulders from leaning over the glasshouse benches and the flower beds. He had brown eyes that were magnified by his glasses and got even bigger when he was talking about his flowers. He was always on the look
out for bugs, and when he found them, he squeezed them to death between his bare fingers. Louis was always happy to answer my questions.
“Do you sell the flowers?” I asked.
“Oh, no, miss,” he said. “When a garden looks a little bare, we tuck new plants in, but most of the flowers we send up to the asylum. Before I was myself again, it was what I looked forward to. I liked to guess what would turn up. I favored the snapdragons. When I was well enough to work, I said, ‘Send me to the flowers.’”
Though Louis appeared very gentle, he told us that he had come to the asylum because he had sent letters to the governor and the congressmen in our state and to the president in Washington. “I told them what I thought of them, told them what I was going to do to them too if they didn’t pay attention to what I said.” He looked sheepish. “Guess I got a little carried away. I still write my letters, but they won’t let me mail them.” He looked around to see if anyone was watching. “I got one right here to President McKinley. Be a good girl, Verna, and mail it for me.” Before I could refuse, he hastily tucked it into the pocket of my pinafore and scurried away.
“You’re going to mail it for him, aren’t you?” Carlie asked. Louis always sent Carlie home with a fistful of blooms. “There are stamps in Papa’s study.”
“I don’t think I should mail it without showing it to Papa.”
“If you do that, you’ll get Louis into trouble.”
I thought for a minute. “I’ll show it to Eleanor. She’ll know what to do.”
Eleanor unfolded the letter and read it out to us:
Dear President McKinley,
I am a veteran of the Civil War and fought for my country, which is now in trouble because someone, and I ain’t saying who, is sending birds to watch me. The birds are up in the trees looking in my window and watching me when I’m working. I’m not going to do anything to the birds because it ain’t their fault, but look out in Washington, D.C.
Yours truly,
Louis Snartler
“I’ll tell you what,” Eleanor said, “Let’s just pretend the woodstove is a mailbox. That way Louis isn’t going to get into any trouble. We don’t want any policemen from Washington coming here and looking for him.”
“What will you tell Louis?” Carlie asked me.
“I’ll think of something.” It seemed to me that Louis was making things up a little like the authors who wrote the books I loved to read.
A few days later, when we saw Louis again, he said, “Well, that letter I told you about got some action. There’s a whole new set of birds up there, and they ain’t paying me any attention.” So everything turned out all right.
If Aunt Maude was making calls on the wives of the doctors, we sometimes stayed at home with Eleanor. Carlie and I would beg Eleanor to tell us what the asylum was like inside, for the great building was a mystery. Eleanor would not stop working but chatted on as she peeled potatoes or polished the silver. “It’s cozy, really. They keep everything spotless, and there are even white tablecloths in the dining rooms, something I never saw at our farm. Flowers are set about on the tables, and there are pots of ivy hanging from the ceiling so you feel you are in a fairy forest. They have dances for the patients and card parties, and once they took us out and let us fly kites. That was my favorite day. I was still on the locked ward then, and it was such a treat to see those kites up in the sky, free as could be, but still they had that string to fall back on so they wouldn’t just drift away.”
Eleanor lowered her voice as though someone might overhear her. “Of course, the back wards are not so nice. The patients there are what they call disturbed, and they break things. You couldn’t have vases of flowers about on the back wards. I was there just for a few days when I first came. That’s where I met Lucy Anster, who was my special friend. We were both in a bad way. I was crying all the time, and Lucy kept finding a way to hurt herself. Lucy is still there, but they soon had me to rights, and here I am. The doctor says if I keep improving, I might get to visit the farm and see my brother, Tom, and my mom and dad. I’m lonesome for my mother and Tom.”
“Not your dad?” I asked.
“He’s like your aunt Maude. Nothing I do pleases him.” Eleanor quickly looked around. “I shouldn’t say anything against your aunt. I’m sure she means well, and she’s taught me how to take care of all your nice things.” Eleanor gave the silver teapot an extra buffing.
“I think she’s mean to you,” Carlie said. “She’s always scolding you.”
Eleanor’s shoulders drooped, and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “I’m used to that. I got plenty of it from my dad. What’s hard is being inside a house all day. Farm women like me are used to the screen door slamming. There’s weeding and hoeing in the kitchen garden. Then there’s the berry picking: raspberries on the farm and wild blueberries and blackberries off somewhere in the woods. Even in the winter there’s breaking a trail through the snow to feed the chickens and collect eggs. Sometimes this house is like a collar that’s too tight around my throat. I feel eingeschlossen.”
Eleanor said that was German for “shut in” and got me a penny from Papa. I knew when I went to Papa, he would ask me where I had heard the word, and I was all prepared. I said, “That’s how Eleanor feels because she misses being outside. Aunt Maude keeps her so busy, she can’t even sit on the porch steps for a breath of fresh air.”
That evening I was delighted to hear Papa instruct Aunt Maude, “You must give Eleanor an hour off every afternoon.”
Aunt Maude bristled. “I never heard of such a thing, letting the help have a holiday like that.”
Papa was firm. “One hour a day is not too large a price to pay if it helps Eleanor to recover from her illness.”
“This house is not part of the asylum,” Aunt Maude insisted.
Papa had the last word. “That is just what it is.”
From then on, when the dinner dishes were done, the vegetables were scrubbed for supper, and the table was set, Eleanor burst out of the house with Carlie holding one hand and me the other. Aunt Maude stood wistfully at the kitchen window, watching as we ran off.
There was always something new to see when we were with Eleanor. She discovered things where anyone else might just pass right by without a second look: a cocoon attached to a branch, or the shape of the holes a woodpecker made in a tree, or a little patch of violets hidden in the grass. Eleanor’s favorite place was the small lake at the edge of the asylum fields. We could walk all around it in half an hour. It was called Mud Lake, but Carlie said that was an ugly name. She called it Green Lake, for in the afternoons the reflection of the trees that ringed the shore made the water a deep green.
We had not been allowed to go there unless someone was with us. Aunt Maude would not go, and Papa was too busy, so we were exploring the lake for the first time. There was a beaver lodge on the lake, and Eleanor said if we got down on our hands and knees, we could smell the musky odor of the animals inside, and that was true. The beavers, who slept all day, woke up when they heard us. They swam out into the lake and hit the water with their tails to make an explosion. Eleanor said, “It’s their way of warning the other beavers that strangers are nearby.”
When it was hot, we took off our shoes and socks and, holding up our skirts, waded in the water, feeling the soft mud ooze up between our toes. Eleanor made us stay close to shore. She warned, “If you give it a chance, that mud sucks at you like hands grabbing hold of you and pulling you down.”
Sometimes we would scare up a heron. The heron was nearly as tall as Carlie, and after she saw it spear a frog with its cruel beak, Carlie hated the bird. Eleanor showed us raccoon tracks and the empty clamshells the raccoons had left behind after their midnight supper. Carlie, who could not see a thing without picking it up and taking it home, collected the shells for doll dishes. I gathered snail shells, and Eleanor showed me how to make a hole in each and string them for bracelets. Like the wild berries we picked, the shells were just there, gifts, and y
ou didn’t even have to be good to get them—which was just as well, because I knew I was not being good. I was going out of my way to make Aunt Maude see how much more Carlie and I liked being with Eleanor than we liked being with her. I hoped she would take the hint and go back home.
Each afternoon Eleanor’s hour flew by, but no amount of coaxing kept her too long at the lake, for once we had been a couple of minutes late in getting back and found Aunt Maude standing on the pack porch, a hand shading her eyes, watching for us. “If you are late again, Eleanor,” she said, “you will take your rest hour here in the house.”
FOUR
We had been at the asylum two weeks when an invitation came for us to have supper on a Friday evening with Dr. Thurston and his wife. Carlie was to stay home with Eleanor to watch her, but I was invited. Carlie didn’t care. “I’d rather stay with Eleanor,” she declared. Ordinarily I would have felt the same way. I didn’t look forward to an hour of having to sit up straight, eat everything on my plate, and make polite conversation, but the Thurstons lived in the asylum, so at last I would have a glimpse inside the mysterious building.
Aunt Maude was torn between the honor of being invited for supper by the asylum’s superintendent and her conviction that it would be dangerous to set foot inside the building. “How can the Thurstons bear to spend their days among such people?” Aunt Maude asked.
Papa gave Aunt Maude a twisty smile. “You forget, Maude, that is exactly what I do, and I don’t believe I am any the worse for it.”
“But to live in that building, day and night. What can it be like?”
“I think you will be surprised at the Thurstons’ home, Maude,” Papa said.
Aunt Maude dragged her heels on the way to the asylum and had to be coaxed to go through the massive entrance. Once we got inside, Papa indicated two locked doors on either side of the entrance hall. “Those are the wards,” he said.