But in Elizabeth, they found a “confidant…counsellor…bosom friend.”12 The prayer circle, over time, became a place of whispered secrets and shared slights. Though Elizabeth at first urged her friends, too, to take things up with McFarland, she soon saw he “did not listen…with kindness”13 to the women’s concerns. In contrast to his expressed sympathy to her, he seemed “indifferent when complaints of cruelty were made,”14 turning away, speechless, merely moving on to the next woman on the ward.
Elizabeth said nothing, but she did take note.
“We are free to think here,” she wrote, “and I for one am going to make the most of this.”15
And the more Elizabeth thought, the more troubled she slowly became.
That August, Elizabeth had a visitor. She walked from her ward to the reception room when summoned, steps sounding in the corridor like a heartbeat of hope. Yet that did no justice to the person waiting for her in the parlor. When she first burst in, she thought her heart itself might burst.
Toffy. Her Toffy. Her firstborn son.
He stood waiting to greet her, that dear face she’d known for eighteen years somehow marked with new manliness. When Isaac had written to Toffy about her situation, her eldest child had pledged to protect her—and he had come, even though his father had threatened to disinherit him. “These two dear sons,” Elizabeth wrote of her eldest boys, “did stand, true and firm as the Alps, in their determination never to forsake their own dear mother.”16
They fell upon each other in a tangle of happy limbs. With Toffy now living apart from his family in Iowa, it had been two years since Elizabeth had seen him. After he kissed her “with all the fondness of a most loving child,”17 mother and son stood still in an embrace, both feeling that safety and security that, before, she’d always given him. He was, truly, her “tower of strength for my days of adversity.”18
“Mother,” he told her, “I could not bear to feel that you had become insane, and I could not believe it, and would not, until I had seen you myself; and now I see it is just as I expected, you are not insane, but the same kind mother as ever.”19
If he could have, Toffy would have released her from the asylum that very same day. But he was only eighteen: three years below the age of majority. In the eyes of the law, he was still a child.
Nonetheless, his faith in her strengthened Elizabeth’s own foundations. “When all the world forsook me and fled,” Elizabeth later wrote of her son with quiet pride, “you stood…true to the mother who bore you.”20
Eventually, however, Toffy had to take his leave. Yet he did not leave her empty-handed. He left behind a promise, tucked inside her heart, that he’d write soon. He vowed to do all in his power to get her out.
His words perhaps reminded Elizabeth of a similar promise from the Blessings. Two months on from their visit, she was still no wiser as to the success or failure of their plot, nor did she even know if they were still trying to help. She’d observed, with increasing anxiety, that her asylum friends like Sarah Minard had few visitors: “Scarcely anyone seems to care for their friends after they have served a term of imprisonment [here].”21 She was starting to fear her own friends might now feel the same. After all, they hadn’t replied to her letters. It was almost as if she’d “passed beyond the river of death”22 so their words could no longer reach her.
But there was no metaphysical obstruction. If their words were not reaching her, it must be because they no longer cared. “Sometimes,” she wrote, “when we most need the sympathy and aid of friends, we find ourselves utterly forsaken.”23
It made her friendships with the women of Seventh Ward even more precious. The patients formed a little community, thrilling together at an inmate’s discharge or greeting the news of an arrival with an empathetic “wail of horror.”24 Together, they watched in shock one day as “a lady of refinement…was stripped of all her clothing, except a torn chemise, and laid upon her back on the floor, while Dr. Tenny sat astride her naked body to hold her down.”25 The attendants then applied a straitjacket to this wild woman who would not obey the rules.
It was rare to see such violence and restraint on Seventh Ward; all the women were aghast. Yet such a scene only tightened the friendships between them as they became “sisters in bonds.”26
So Elizabeth was taken aback when Mrs. Hosmer took her aside in the sewing room one day. The directress glanced left and right for eavesdroppers before saying urgently, “If you ever wish or expect to get out of this place, Mrs. Packard, you must give up…these morning prayers.”27