Mrs. Triplet sat on Elizabeth’s right-hand side. She came from Kentucky and likely had a Southern drawl. As Elizabeth greeted her politely, Mrs. Triplet took instant umbrage.
“I will kill you!”8 she said fiercely in reply. She always spoke in “tones the most vehement.”9
Elizabeth gulped but had no choice but to remain where she was. It was a baptism of fire—sometimes almost literally. “I considered myself very fortunate,” she later wrote, “if I left the table without being spit upon by her, or by having her tea, or coffee, or gravy, or sauce thrown upon my dress.”10
It was a world away from the civilized mealtimes she’d once enjoyed on Seventh Ward and even further from her beautifully decorated parlor in Manteno, where her fine white china had sat neatly inside a closet painted pea green. Often, mealtimes on Eighth were even more fraught than that brief description, with spitting the least of Elizabeth’s concerns. As meat was almost always served, usually pork, it was the one time of day when knives could be found on the ward, and the patients took advantage. Frequently, they would throw the blades at one another, every sudden strike the boiling point of some internecine conflict that had been simmering beneath the surface. Mrs. Triplet was once compelled to act in self-defense when a sharp knife abruptly whistled past her head, missing her eye by an inch.
A domino effect followed. It was an almost everyday occurrence. One patient would attack another, and then all the rest would grab any object close at hand to fight back. The women around Elizabeth would suddenly “seize the tumblers, salt-cellars, plates, bowls, and pitchers, and hurl them about in demoniac frenzy, so that the broken glass and china would fly about our face and eyes like hailstones.”11 Under fire, many times Elizabeth had to duck and dodge this onslaught of unconventional weapons, “hurled in promiscuous profusion about my head.”12 Trying to make herself smaller, she bent double as she crept out of the dining hall, trying to slink unseen, leaving her unfinished meal behind her.
Worse still awaited her though.
Worse was when they seized her directly and dragged her around the ward using fistfuls of her hair.
Though she tried to be brave and kind, she soon became terrified. She felt her life was “constantly exposed,”13 “almost daily and hourly endangered,”14 including at night. Frequently, she would wake with a start to find a roommate flinging night pails around the dorm with noisy violence. Her only option, in such circumstances, was to clamber up on top of her bedstead, from where she could just about reach the transom window over the door. Then she would yell her head off, crying out for help. Sometimes the sleeping attendants would hear her and remove the wild patient. Other nights, they slept right through.
For Elizabeth, the situation became untenable after only a few weeks on the ward. She “begged and besought”15 McFarland to remove her, even just to a room of her own on Eighth, where she could at least sleep without the threat of violence. But he was merciless. “Even before I could finish my sentence,” she remembered, “he would turn and walk indifferently away, without uttering one syllable.”16 She condemned him as “a very cruel, unfeeling man.”17
But she did not have many opportunities even to appeal to him. McFarland came far less frequently to Eighth than he had to Seventh, and when he did, “he laid his hands upon me in a different manner…far too violently.”18
In that fierce grip was another new reality. “Dr. McFarland did not treat me as an insane person,” she said, “until I had been [at the asylum] four months, when he suddenly changed his programme entirely.”19
All previous privileges were abruptly withdrawn. Elizabeth was not allowed to leave the ward, even with an attendant. While the other patients on Eighth regularly enjoyed a carefully managed walk or ride in the grounds, she was denied even this. Her only access to fresh air came from the dormitory window: a small square that sadly sketched the borders of her blunted world. She begged McFarland to let her work in the laundry or ironing rooms at least so she could get some physical exercise beyond her daily cleaning, but this plea was rejected. When she first moved wards, she was banned from leaving for any reason at all, except to attend the odd chapel service if she was granted a place.
But perhaps worst of all for Elizabeth was that her writing privileges were withdrawn; it was expressly forbidden for her to be given even a scrap of paper. After having been allowed, for the first time in her life, to write freely and regularly, this cruel curtailment felt like a literal choking. Words had become as essential as air. Without them, she felt her life bottlenecking, the doctor’s hands around her throat, pressing firmly down on her windpipe. Ever since she’d joined the Bible class back in February, she’d been carefully committing her thoughts to paper, seeing herself take shape on the page. But now she was back to nothingness, transparent and tongue-tied. The evaporating, empty steam that left no trace of itself behind.