But Toffy was not his father. He had a full-time job. When he became Elizabeth’s male representative, McFarland apparently charged him; the fees were a maximum of $3 （about $61） a week, capped at $156 （about $3,000） a year.
Yet in that exchange of money, Elizabeth saw liberation. It totally changed her mindset. Consequently, when Toffy came to visit in May 1863, she made a radical suggestion: why didn’t they head into Jacksonville together?
So that May, for the first time in two years—for the first time since she’d insisted she’d never voluntarily return to her ward—Elizabeth Packard left the hospital. In her mind, she left as a free woman, on the arm of her son.
How wonderful that walk must have been. Step by careful step, Elizabeth made her way back down the asylum’s brick sidewalk that she’d first strolled along with her husband three long years before. The trees, seeming to salute her as she went, were much more mature than when she’d last walked by them. As they reached the boundary of the fence, she noticed with awe that twelve-foot entrance gates and stone gateposts had been constructed where previously there had been none. They stretched far above her head, dominant and fearsome. As she crossed the boundary, she must have felt so free.
The novelty continued all the way into Jacksonville. The old footpath the patients had once used had been replaced with a substantial plank walk. Mother and son strolled merrily down it, Elizabeth marveling at how much the world had changed since she’d last been in it. When last she’d shopped at the public square, the sidewalks had been “a hodgepodge of rotting, rat-infested plank walks…that sank into the mud each spring,”8 but the merchants she was visiting now had laid out smart, ten-foot streets made of good brick or stone, with actual curbstones too. It was all so civilized.
To talk to the shopkeepers, to nod at passersby: all these were things she had not done for two years. She felt her neck bending, memories of times past easily summoning back the social niceties. Everything felt new and old at the same time. The fresh air on her skin. The smile on her lips.
The ability to come and go exactly as she pleased.
When Elizabeth returned to the asylum, she walked happily through the front door and back up to her ward. She was “simply a boarder who voluntarily submitted to all the rules of the house.”9 Why should she not return freely to her rented room?
After all the trauma, she’d found a certain peace. “I really felt safer under the gallant protection of Dr. McFarland,” she wrote of this time, “than I could have then felt in any other situation.”10
But had she known what was happening in New York City, Elizabeth would not have felt safe at all.
CHAPTER 34
It was a six-story brownstone that stretched along the entire block front of Broadway. Built at a cost of some $1 million （$33 million）， it was a place that “dazzles and bewilders the visitor,”1 evoking the “palaces of ‘Arabian Nights.’”2 Patrons’ shoes clicked on marble floors as their eyes alighted on frescoed ceilings and silk damask draperies. They took their seats in rosewood furniture “rich and inviting.”3 Thirsts were slaked from gold and silver goblets while the largest plate-glass mirrors in the United States reflected back the opulence.
Also reflected in those mirrors on May 19, 1863, was Dr. Andrew McFarland.
At the famous Metropolitan Hotel in New York, he laughed heartily with his fellow superintendents, their deep voices rumbling like coming thunder. It was the annual meeting of the AMSAII, and he was informing them all of a curious case he’d been studying.
Yet he was not—as Elizabeth might have hoped—telling them of a brilliant female author whom he was currently protecting from persecution.
He was telling them how he had “got tired”4 of a patient who’d given him “infinite trouble.”5
“I proposed to the Board of Trustees to discharge her,” he revealed to his peers at their meeting, “as the only means of getting rid of an intolerable and unendurable source of annoyance.”6
McFarland had recommended Elizabeth’s release. But not because he thought she was sane.
Because she’d caused too much trouble.
That first trustee meeting, back in September 1862, when Elizabeth had thought she’d convinced both the doctor and the trustees of her sanity, was actually the first time McFarland could have requested her discharge, because patients were always given a trial of two years to see if the doctors could help them recover. But the first chance he’d gotten, he’d wanted her gone.