Hunched, scurrying people jostled her, and bumped into her, and bruised her, and none of them noticed when she slipped in the slush and fell. Her skirts were soaked and her boots were ruined and her hat had vanished into the windy blast.
It took her three tries to get to her feet again, and nobody helped, or even saw.
I’ve lost my purse! she thought, horrified.
No purse. No money. No train ticket. No way home.
Perhaps the jostling people had been thieves, laughing at her, a pathetic suburban girl trying to find her way.
Slush filled her boots. Her mother’s lovely coat was soaked and soiled. Annie Lockwood wanted nothing except to find her class and catch her train and go home. But without her purse? If I could get to Grand Central, she thought, it would be warm in there, and I’d use my phone card and …
And call whom? Mom was in Japan, Dad was at Miss Bartten’s, Tod couldn’t help. And even if she found her class, could she admit the string of lies? What excuse could she give? They’d laugh at her, or worse, take her seriously, and be kind to her little demented mind, and get the school psychiatrist in on it, and bring Mom home from Japan.
No. Whatever she did to get out of this, she had to do without confession.
She plodded street after street, legs stiff as icicles. There was no purpose to her journey anymore, but she could not find a place to stop. Her feet went on like some dreadful enchantment.
New York City splintered, and fell off itself, like pieces of a glacier. All the world except Annie moved fast, while Annie’s slow feet seemed to freeze to the ground.
I have to get out of this wind, Annie thought. I am literally freezing to death. The cold could stop my heart. Leave me frozen on the stones like an abandoned kitten.
Halfway down a narrow side street was a row of large, elegant trees. Through the snow they seemed only half there, and half people seemed to move from half a house. The tree trunks were encircled by gold-tipped spears of black iron, part of an elaborate fence.
The half people moved toward her and, half frozen, Annie Lockwood half understood.
In the lunatic asylum, the patients were being fed. “Besides, Mr. Stratton,” said Ralph when he brought supper, “you write to girls. What can a female do, huh? Females is of lower intelligence than men.” To prove his point, Ralph hurt Katie a little. Ralph enjoyed slapping.
Katie’s family didn’t want to have a deformed child around the house and had sent her to the asylum, explaining to the neighbors that their daughter had died. She might as well have.
Supper was a large bowl of lukewarm oatmeal with milk and brown sugar. For Strat, there was a spoon, but Ralph was not in the mood to give Douglass and Katie spoons. They had to put their faces in the bowl and slurp it out, like animals.
Douglass had very little brain, and his family didn’t want him because he had never acquired speech. He could make noises, and after being cooped up with Douglass for so long, Strat understood the fear sound and the hope sound and the happy sound. Douglass, amazingly, was often happy. When Katie read aloud, or massaged his neck, or combed his hair, Douglass would beam at her and make his happy sound.
Really ugly people and really dumb people and really crazy people were kept in the same place.
It was important not to let Society know that one of the family was below standard. How would the attractive members of the family get married if such news got out? It might be in the blood, and who wanted blood that failed?
Strat’s blood had failed.
His father had sentenced him to a private lunatic asylum. There were only sixty patients, so it wasn’t as bad as Utica, the state asylum, with thousands. But it was just as impossible to get out of.
Katie was allowed to read, though of course the only books were the Bible or collections of sermons. Luckily the Bible had many wonderful stories, and luckily Katie liked to read aloud, so they knew by heart everything about Daniel and the lion’s den and Joseph’s coat of many colors.
“It’s 1898, Strat,” said Katie gently, finally answering his question to the long-departed doctor. “You knew that. You know you’ve been here nearly six months. You know we had Christmas and New Year’s.”
Except during the precious hour of exercise, weather was gone from their world. The inmates had no windows. No sky. No sun. Strat missed the outdoors as much as he missed the rest of the world: friends, talk, college, sailing, tennis, good food.
Where did time go, when you lost it?
He thought of the last time he had seen Anna Sophia Lockwood. She had wavered, becoming a reflection of herself. She literally slipped between his fingers. He was holding her gown and then he wasn’t. He’d had a strand of her hair, and then he didn’t. Nothing of her was present. Just Strat and the soft beach air. When he stopped shouting, he tried whispering, as if her vanishing were a secret and he could pull her out.
She had not wanted him to address her as Miss Lockwood, but Strat could not manage anything as familiar as Annie. So he had called her Anna Sophia, singing her two names opera style: Anna Sophia; Sophia Anna.
But the situation had been resolved, and his engagement to Harriett made public, and there had been dances and fetes and dinners, and Strat knew that if he could not have Anna Sophia—and he couldn’t—he wanted Harriett. She was the history of his own life, his companion since they were children; possibly his best friend.
The subject closed to them had been Anna Sophia. Harriett had met her, of course, been nearly ruined by her, and knew Strat’s theory of century changing. But Strat’s heart—lost to Anna Sophia—they did not discuss. It hurt each of them far too much.
Time. Where was Harriett all this time? His sister? His mother?
“I have lost half a year,” he whispered. “How many more will I lose?”
“All of them,” said Katie.
At the cure cottage, Beanie and Charlie were visiting Harriett.
Charlie, who had been an army officer, didn’t want to lose any of his skills. He sat up on his cure chair with his rifle and shot apart glass bottles that his man put up on stones at the edge of the frozen pond. Come summer, nobody was going to do any barefoot wading along that part of the shore.
“In only three months,” said Charlie proudly, “I have gone from being allowed ten minutes sitting up to being allowed a ten-minute sleigh ride. No doubt I shall soon be tobogganing every morning at forty below.” This was a complete lie. He was getting worse. But he did not want Harriett to know.
If his dreams can come true, thought Harriett, perhaps mine will too. She allowed herself a delicious picture of life: a lovely house, a warm fire, laughing children, her beloved husband, Strat, smoking a pipe.
A fourth patient joined them. Phipps was not Harriett’s favorite person, but in a society so isolated, any person was more desirable than no person.
“Hullo, Phipps,” said Charlie, not very willingly.
“Hullo, Phipps,” said Beanie, throwing a snowball at him. Phipps ducked and frowned at Beanie. As always, Phipps had some unpleasant subject to bring up. “I’ve spoken to Doctor. Supposedly our disease is caused by a little bacillus. I don’t believe it. He says you can look at it through a microscope. I don’t believe that either. We got sick because we offended God.” This seemed to make him rather proud, as if he had accomplished something that mattered.
“How comforting,” said Beanie. “In what way did I offend God? I will have you know that I have led a blameless life.”
“Nobody,” said Phipps sharply, “has led a blameless life.”
“Speak for yourself, you bacillus,” said Beanie.
“Let’s get along, please,” said Moss the nurse. “Arguing isn’t good for the cure. It’s a strain on the lungs.”
They stopped immediately. Nobody wanted a strain on the lungs. Harriett went to sleep every night now with a sandbag on her chest, to keep the ribs from moving.
When Charlie, Phipps and Beanie left, Moss gave Harriett a sponge bath, strong rubdowns with
coarse towels, to improve her circulation. Then came a wonderful dinner, hot and filling. Except for the fact that she had been banished, because people were afraid of her breath, life here was good.
Moss read aloud a psalm, because Moss was a great believer.
Harriett went back and forth. There were times when she had great faith and knew God would save her, and if He didn’t, heaven would nevertheless be wonderful. There were times, however, when she felt that religion was crap.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me,” said Moss.
I, thought Harriett, do not want to walk through death until I am eighty! Do you hear me, Lord?
And then the coughing broke through.
It ripped her lungs open and blood spilled out. Moss held her, keeping her tight, coaxing her to hang on through the agony, choke the cough down. Win. Stay alive.
When the cough ended, Moss and her helper Mario changed the sheets and blankets, again tucking Harriett in—clean, soft, white.
But would anything make her lungs clean and soft again?
This was most unusual. Dr. Wilmott himself, director of the asylum, had come to look them over.
Even more unusual, Strat was not confined, but permitted to walk about the room. It soothed him to count. He had stalked the twelve-foot-square room two hundred ninety-six times so far this afternoon. He had stepped over Melancholia and Conspiracy (two patients who really were lunatics, and whose shrieks and sobs and mutterings gave Strat headaches day and night) two hundred ninety-six times and they hadn’t noticed him once. This is my life, he thought, and for the millionth time, not the two hundred ninety-sixth, he could not believe it.
“Dr. Wilmott, would you please give permission for me to exercise again today?” he said. “Sir,” he added.
Dr. Wilmott shook his head. “You are a danger to yourself and others, Mr. Stratton.”
If only that were true! He would love to be a danger to somebody. He would start with his father.
Strat’s very own father had instructed Strat’s very own Yale professor—for whom he had written the incriminating essay—to arrange the kidnapping. His professor had introduced two burly men with him as friends involved in a joke. Strat loved a good joke, as all college boys do, and willingly agreed to have his hands strapped together. Once those strapped hands were strapped to the interior of a very strangely outfitted carriage, the professor explained that Strat’s beliefs in God were so incorrect that extreme measures had to be taken.
And then his father—appearing out of nowhere—glanced briefly into the conveyance. “Good,” Hiram Stratton, Sr., had said. “Take him to the asylum.”
Strat still thought it must be a joke, and did not fight back until it was far too late, and that, too, was counted against him—a normal person would have fought back. It was like being accused of witchery in old Massachusetts—they held you under water and if you died, then you were a normal person who needed air.
“Father,” he had said, not yet scared, “what is this nonsense?”
“You need enclosure and treatment,” his father had thundered. “Writing essays about century changers and time crossing and girls who don’t exist?”
So it was about Miss Lockwood. Beautiful, funny, wonderful Anna Sophia. Even then, Strat was still in love with her—three years after she came and went, one year after his engagement to Harriett. His heart still filled with joy and loss whenever he thought of Miss Lockwood.
“You,” said his very own, very angry father, “are an instrument of Satan.”
“I’m your son!” Strat had shouted, but his father had not replied, and Strat was taken by force 275 miles north to the sort of place he had not dreamed existed.
Now, Dr. Wilmott said sternly to Katie, “Have you been studying your books of moral works?”
“Yes, sir.”
Katie’s face was so ugly, so misshapen, that the doctor did not look at her, but into the stale air above her. “You do understand,” said Doctor, “that God has punished you, and there is nothing that I can do for you.”
“I do understand, Dr. Wilmott, that you are a wicked, hideous, evil creation and God would never dream of working through you,” said Katie calmly.
Strat froze. She must never talk to the staff like that! They would hurt her. They would punish her terribly. You had to beg from them, compliment them, you had to—
“You ugly deformed reject of society! You dare to address me like that!” hissed Dr. Wilmott. He raised his hand and Strat the athlete recognized the strength and rage in that moving arm.
But it was not Hiram Stratton, Jr., who moved to protect Katie.
It was Douglass.
Douglass stepped between the doctor and Katie and took the blow without a quiver, and took the next blow, too, and the next.
Stop it, said Strat, but to his shame no words came out.
“Stop it,” said Katie to Dr. Wilmott. “You know Douglass has done no wrong.”
Dr. Wilmott and Ralph strapped both Katie and Douglass to restraint chairs. Strat let it happen, and when they were done he said to Doctor, “I have been good, sir. May I be allowed some exercise outside?”
And Doctor smiled, and said yes.
“Well!” said Miss Bartten, beaming at Tod.
They were in a nice restaurant. Starched white tableclothes and linen napkins big enough to make beds with, and crystal glasses and scented candles.
“Your father and I are going to Mexico!” cried Miss Bartten. “Won’t it be fun!”
Tod said to his father, “Maybe homicidal guerrillas will kidnap you. Maybe fire ants will eat off the soles off your feet. Or killer bees—”
“Stop it,” said his father.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” said Tod, hitting his forehead in remorse. “Miss Bartten, forgive me! I was being rude to you when all you did was ruin my parents’ marriage. Gosh, what was I thinking of!”
“Tod,” said his father through gritted teeth, “we are in public.”
“Young people today have no standards,” said Tod confidingly to Miss Bartten. “I mean, they actually think when a man promises to be faithful to his wife, he should do it! Can you believe that, Miss Bartten?” Tod laughed.
“Stop it,” said his father.
“Yes, I think we should stop,” said Tod Lockwood. “And the first thing we should stop doing is pretending that this is going to work.”
Tod left the restaurant.
The point here was to upset Dad and Miss Bartten (whom he refused to call Peggy; Peggy was too friendly a name and he, Tod, was not going to be friendly; forget it) but the point also was not to let Dad notice that Annie was not here. Or if he did notice, he should be darned glad, because Annie had even more of a viper tongue than Tod.
He knew his father was saying to Miss Bartten, “Tod’ll be back, he’s ten miles from home, and there’s no such thing as a taxi in this town.”
Tod grinned into the falling snow. He had picked Dad’s pocket. He had the car keys. It would be Miss Bartten who had to walk.
Hiram Stratton, Jr., age twenty-one, had not known that anything could be worse than being locked in a small room with a Melancholia, a Deformity, a Conspiracy, and an Idiot.
But now it was he, Strat, who was the deformity.
He had let them attack Katie. Let them take it out on Douglass. He had groveled, reminding them that he was a good little boy, and could go out into the sunshine. And sure enough, here he was, in a special, iron-fenced garden he had never seen before, and sure enough the setting sun glittered on the deep white snow, the first thing of beauty he had seen in six months.
All the tiny offenses of his life were nothing to this. He breathed in the fine clear air for which he had sacrificed his soul.
It was not worth it.
Whether God forgave him or God did not, the forgiveness he needed now was Katie’s, was Douglass’s.
Strat no longer needed to worry how he, the victim, the pat
ient, had gotten here; he needed to worry how he could stay a man in spite of being here.
There was Katie, whom God had seen fit to deliver into this world twisted and wrongly shaped, and people punished her for it.
There was Douglass, whom God had seen fit to deliver into this world without intelligence, and people punished him for it.
Poor Melancholia, who ached with depression, was punished for his grief. As for Conspiracy, she believed her family had locked her up to get her money. Strat would have believed her, because look what his family had done to him, except that her stories were never the same; were not stories even, but mad ravings.
Oh, Anna Sophia! thought Strat. You thought I possessed every virtue. You told me you would never meet a finer man. How wrong you were. I have never been a worse one.
In the beautiful snow garden, under the lengthening blue shadows, Strat, too, was in pain. What have I done? I have not helped Katie or Douglass. I am a person to be ashamed of.
“May I go back to my room now?” he said quietly to Ralph.
Devonny Aurelia Victoria Stratton and Walker Walkley moved slowly toward Fifth Avenue. Each elegant house—French mansard, Italianate, Gothic Revival—had bulbous stairs leading steeply up to a high first floor, and from each, the snow was constantly swept, lest a lady or gentleman slip.
The party was not far: one of the Vanderbilt houses on Fifth Avenue. It was a good-bye party for Devonny herself, because she would leave for California in the morning, and her father had not told her when she would return to New York. Father and her stepmother, Florinda, had gone to California on a whim, and found it surprisingly warm and gracious. (This was Florinda’s word—her father would not know what gracious was if he lived another fifty years.)
Walker Walkley was tall and dramatic in his beaver coat and top hat. Walk saluted another gentleman with his cane. “Good evening,” they said back and forth, bowing and nodding.
Devonny was grateful for her hooded cape of sea otter, lined with wine-red velvet. She needed it against the terrible cold.