“Is this about the other night? I didn’t mean to upset you.”
At least he realized that he’d crossed a line in suggesting that Lillian needed a psychiatrist.
“No. No, it’s just that I haven’t seen her in a while. After all, she is my mother.”
So that afternoon, Lillian and Peter pulled into the long, curved driveway alongside a hedge of deep-blue hydrangeas with bright-green foliage—a smart choice, as those leaves faded later in the season. As the road turned, the lawn, bushes, and trees came into view, and the main building of Friends Hospital splayed out before them. It was as wide as a city block and as grand as a picture-perfect French chateau, with its pale-yellow stucco and inset stones around the windows. The structure didn’t look much like a mental hospital, but after all, wasn’t that the point?
They might have been anywhere.
They could pretend they were anywhere.
It had been impossible to pretend she was anywhere but a mental institution when Lillian’s mother had been a patient at Byberry, the state-run asylum housed in fifty buildings on ninety acres just ten miles away. Anna Feldman had been committed to that hospital by her in-laws right after Lillian’s father had died—or that’s how it had seemed to an eleven-year-old. She hadn’t known it was a hospital for people with mental problems. She’d expected her mother to come home, but she never did. There was no point in crying about it, her grandmother said.
She hadn’t asked or dug around for more information. Her mother’s diagnosis had been a nervous breakdown, hysteria, and later, presenility. Lillian had been so young when it all happened. She had been grateful to her grandparents for keeping her mother safe.
That’s how Lillian saw it, even though none of the treatments had worked. They wouldn’t describe the treatments, saying she was too young to understand. Every time she heard her grandparents whispering about another treatment, she would eavesdrop, praying that this time her mother would be cured and come home.
It was to no avail, and Lillian learned to stop hoping. Stopped expecting any treatment to improve her mother’s—and her—life.
Anna Feldman had never recovered or improved. Her mother would never come home.
Lillian was, essentially, an orphan.
Then and still.
When Lillian was eighteen, she and Peter became engaged. He was young to already be running Diamond Textiles alongside his father. Only once she was engaged had she agreed and arranged, behind her grandparents’ back, for Peter to meet her mother. He had insisted.
One sunny Sunday, Lillian and Peter walked hand in hand into a long, dark building—Building N6, it was called—and down a hallway that reeked of urine and bleach. Lillian held a handkerchief over her nose in an attempt to mask the smell, but the nausea she felt required an effort of will to keep at bay. Peter only wrinkled his nose and kept striding down the corridor.
They walked past a dozen closed doors, hearing screams, cries, and moments of uncanny silence, before they reached her mother’s overcrowded dormitory.
Her mother had been positioned in a chair by the window. Displayed, in a way, with her arms and legs placed in what looked like uncomfortable and unnatural angles—posed for visitors. The first time she visited as a child, Lillian had known that the arrangement of her mother’s arms and legs wasn’t true. The mother she remembered had been soft and warm. This mother’s spindly arms had been crossed on her bony lap as if to contain her movement.
Her mother hadn’t recognized Lillian since age twelve, though Anna babbled about a Lilly she thought was someone else. Lillian had been crushed. She assumed it was a temporary situation, brought on by whatever medicines or treatments her mother was given.
It had to be. A mother didn’t forget her only child.
After Peter’s first visit, Lillian had led him back to his car, listening with relief as the main doors clanged shut behind them. She managed to hold her feelings in check until they reached the parking lot. She was used to ignoring her heartache. And she wanted to see Peter’s reaction to her mother before she said anything else. Would this change his love for her?
Peter had been silent during the walk back to the car, and Lillian couldn’t tell what he was thinking until they reached his car, and she heard a gag and retching sound. When she looked his way, Peter was bent over, and vomit spewed from his mouth.
Vomit. She didn’t have to ask what his reaction meant. She had been foolish to think he would still marry her after he met her mother, after he saw who she came from. They rode home in silence. She felt numb, but Lillian was no stranger to dominoes falling. Here they went again.
But things hadn’t turned out the way she’d thought they would.
Not only did Peter still plan to marry Lillian, but a week later he arranged to have Anna Feldman transferred to Friends Hospital, a Quaker institution, and the first private psychiatric facility in the country. One of its finest.
In those days, she looked at him and saw generosity of spirit. Was he still the same Peter?
Even before they were married, and when her grandparents were still alive, Peter paid the bill. He hadn’t complained or mentioned it in the past sixteen years. And twice a year they visited Anna together. The visits didn’t last long, and Lillian was sure Peter would rather rake leaves, but he came without complaint, like he did today.
He’d brought Lillian this time because she’d asked. He was the same Peter. Older, wiser, but the same man, devoted to his family. To doing what it took to keep everything upright.
He hadn’t objected or rolled his eyes, the way some people might have done.
Now here they were, driving the winding road toward Lillian’s unfortunate past—the one they usually pretended didn’t exist. Neither of them brought her mother up in conversation, and Lillian was grateful for that.
She sighed, then camouflaged her bubbling emotions with a cough. Peter’s quiet cooperation was proof he loved her, no matter what else transpired—or didn’t—between them. He had her back in this, which is why she did what she did. Her service to Peter’s life and career—and even her love—was laced with gratitude. How selfish she must be to view her life as less than enough when he had done so much.
When he kept her dominoes standing.
After Peter shifted into park, she reached out and squeezed his hand. She had been too critical of their life, of him, and of herself. “Thank you for doing this,” Lillian said. She glanced through the windshield. Her mother’s residence hall, dressed in ivy like a college dormitory, peeked out from between oak trees.
“No problem. Shall we go?”
A few minutes later, she and Peter were walking side by side down the same sun-soaked hallway they had first been through sixteen years earlier when they moved her in.
This place always smelled like lemons.
As Lillian pushed through the door to the courtyard, Peter gently laid his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t expect too much,” he said. It wasn’t a mandate so much as a cautionary note. He was right. She mustn’t hope for anything. Her mother hadn’t recognized her in person last time, and she might not recognize her in an old photo either.
In spite of Peter’s comment, Lillian simmered with hope, an uncommon sensation, especially here. She couldn’t believe she’d never shown her mother pictures of herself before. She’d brought photos of her own wedding, the girls, and her house, but she’d never thought to show her mother a photo of herself and Lillian’s father. No one had suggested this might be a way to jog Anna’s memory—to help her emerge from wherever she existed inside her mind. Lillian patted her pocketbook.