“My daughter,” she said to her now, “won’t it be pleasant to have someone to relieve you of your…responsibilities?”5
But it was Theophilus who answered, looking at these scenes of reunion in disgust.
“No,” he snapped, “you an’t wanted here! We get along better without you!”6
Yet whatever her husband claimed, Elizabeth could see that wasn’t true. Dirt lay thickly all over the house, the beds needed airing, and she dreaded imagining the state of the carpets.
The next day, rolling up her sleeves, she got straight to work. But Theophilus seemed determined to block her, notwithstanding the domestic sphere was supposed to be her own. By now, Elizabeth had transgressed too much even to be allowed that woman’s world. He fired the girl she’d hired before she’d even crossed the threshold. He forbade the children from helping with any aspect of her planned spring clean. Even when Elizabeth placed a simple saucepan on the stove to boil some water to clean the walls with, Theophilus took it off again: “You shall heat no water upon my stove.”7 In response, trying to keep the peace, Elizabeth merely bit her tongue. She cleaned with cold water instead.
When Rebecca and Sarah called by on October 26, she’d moved on to the feather beds and was scrubbing them in the yard. Rebecca noted that “they needed cleaning badly.”8 Sarah was simply delighted to see her friend’s hard work paying off: “It looked as if the mistress of the house was at home.”9
Yet Elizabeth confided that things were not as picturesque as they might appear. One problem was that the locks and keys of the asylum had seemingly followed her home. Theophilus had locked her good clothes and all her linen in a closet and refused to give her the key. She could neither change the sheets when she wanted nor access her winter hose and the smarter garments she’d longed for ever since he’d sent only her dilapidated clothes to the asylum. Yet he was immovable in not letting her gain access, even though he allowed the children the key—a slight that did not go unnoticed. Only Elizabeth could not be trusted, lunatic that she supposedly was.
Worse, he ordered the children not to mind her. She felt they’d developed slovenly habits in her absence regarding “bathing, toilet duties, hours of rising and retiring, and their wardrobe.”10 Yet when she tried to encourage the stricter behavior she’d always insisted on in the past, Theophilus cut in. He “required them to disregard my directions, whenever they conflicted with his own plans or wishes.”11 But Theophilus did not seem even to see the dirt she easily spied behind her children’s ears and ingrained in their home. “It don’t need it,”12 Theophilus would snap when she tried to clean something, batting her hands away.
There had been one particular scene that had really hurt. One day, soon after she returned, she saw Libby struggling to make piecrust in the kitchen. When she stepped up to the table and excitedly said, “Let me show you how to make your crust, my daughter, I see you don’t understand how to do it,”13 Theophilus once again intervened.
With “his hand upraised”14 and his voice “loud and most authoritative,”15 he’d shouted, “I forbid your interference!”16
It seemed his wife could do nothing right.
Yet uncharacteristically, Elizabeth did not speak up for herself. “I exchanged no words with Mr. Packard upon this or any other subject—I knew argument was useless,” she explained, “and…would only add fuel to the flame of hatred and distrust which evidently still rankled within him.”17
At least she claimed that was the reason why. It could have been something else was going on. Perhaps she’d finally learned her lesson. After all, being too assertive might get her locked up in another asylum. Now she was finally home, finally back with her children, the idea of another banishment must have seemed even more dreadful than before.
She had more motivation to avoid it too. Surely the worst thing of all about being home again was the discovery that her children had been taught she was insane. Though Elizabeth maintained in some of her writings that “three years was too short a time for their father to convince these children,”18 every single day, they were instructed “not to respect the counsels or heed the voice of a maniac just loosed from the Asylum.”19
The situation must have been desperate for Elizabeth. It made it even more crucial that she was not committed again. As calmly as she could, she went about her business.
And as she shopped in Manteno, exclaiming with her fellow townspeople at the shocking price of goods in the midst of war—the cost of bread and eggs had almost doubled since she’d gone away—she had pleasant conversations with her neighbors, such as Joseph Labrie, the local postmaster, and Isaac Simington, the Methodist minister. Her conduct gave clear evidence to her community of her state of mind.