Whenever she thought of them these days, they always drew “most desperately upon my heart-strings.”29 Her final memory of her baby, Arthur, was perhaps the hardest to recall. He had clasped his fat little arms around her neck and clung sweetly to her, his burbling babble of newly minted words—“Dear mamma! Dear mamma!”30—a precious melody in her ear. But to think of him and the others in such a dismal place was almost too hard. Sometimes, it was easier to be a blank slate with memories rubbed clean away.
Only every now and then would she let herself dwell on them. And when she permitted herself a recollection—of Arthur’s “loving caresses and innocent prattle,”31 or George’s dark eyes, or even Libby’s “sweet spirit”32—that memory brought “pleasure almost unalloyed.”33
That morning, Elizabeth adjusted her spectacles and looked down at Jenny, still playing with her dress. Her heart rushed out to her like a tide. “I must love somebody,” she thought. “And here I can live by loving God’s afflicted ones.”34
Slowly, she closed her Bible. She watched as the young woman continued to play with her dress, her fingers speaking a lonely language she could not translate. They sat there for a while: the woman and the girl; the mother and the child. And perhaps Elizabeth had a ghost of Libby somewhere in her mind, for after a while, she bent forward toward Jenny, hesitant and hopeful at the same time. With a mother’s hand—a hand that had done this hundreds of times before—she gently parted the short hair that had fallen over Jenny’s forehead. She could have been stroking her own child’s hair. Cautiously, with maternal love held tightly in her chest, she planted her lips in the space she’d made: a sweet and tender kiss.
Jenny’s response to the uninvited affection came instantly—with a blow upon Elizabeth’s temple that came from a tightly clenched fist. Though Jenny was delicate, her madness made her strong; it seemed “more like the kick of a horse, than the hand of a human.”35 Elizabeth’s glasses flew wildly across the room while she, for a moment, was knocked unconscious, the heavy blow breaking blank darkness across her brain.
When she awoke, the world seemed maladjusted. She was bleary-eyed, shell-shocked, and stunned. Her left temple throbbed with an urgent, bloody pain. Her left eye felt an unyielding pressure; she feared that it might burst. She forced herself to pry both eyes open.
Jenny was standing before her.
“I am going to knock your brains out!”36 she cried.
Her hands clenched into fists.
CHAPTER 18
Elizabeth backed out of the room slowly, letting no words escape her that might provoke Jenny further, as she could be prone to “sudden frenzies.”1 She quickly found Minnie, who took one look at her and sent straight for the assistant physician.
“O, Mrs. Packard,” Minnie breathed in shock. “What a wound you have got upon your temple!”2
Dr. Tenny came and tended to her; for a while, there was a worry Elizabeth might lose her eye. Her face swelled up and ugly bruises bloomed across eye and temple both: a kaleidoscope of color that deepened day by day. Eighth Ward had no mirrors, but even if Elizabeth could have caught a glimpse of her own reflection, she would not have recognized herself. She lay on her bed, head throbbing painfully in time with her heartbeat, the chorus of night voices now nine-inch knives carving through her tender brain.
McFarland showed no sympathy, even after this attack. When Elizabeth explained what had happened and begged for removal to some safer ward, he simply said, “It is no uncommon thing to receive a blow for a kiss.”3
Did he speak from personal experience?
He did not ameliorate her situation in any way. In fact, he made it worse. In the wake of Jenny’s violence, he directed that Elizabeth should eat her meals beside a woman named Sarah Triplet, whom he deliberately moved from Fifth Ward to Eighth. She was known as “the most dangerous patient in the whole female wards.”4 Even the staff were scared of her.
Elizabeth greeted her cautiously as she took her allocated seat. “Old Mother Triplet,”5 as Sarah was known, was an elderly woman of indeterminate age. Large and fleshy, she cut an intimidating figure even before factoring in her unstable mind. Fifth Ward was even worse than Eighth, reserved for “rare and extraordinary specimens of distorted humanity”6 and not for the “ordinary”7 insane. It also housed the criminal maniacs—the arsonists, murderers, and homicidally obsessed who’d been dispatched to the asylum by order of the courts or else by a thankful jail only too glad to be rid of them.