Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders by Julianna Baggott

Author:Julianna Baggott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2015-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Harriet Wolf: Murderess

Harriet

Despite my greatest fears, this institution would prove the opposite of the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children. Having shed the word “asylum” from its name, it was the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. There was light Swedish massage, billiards, bowling, a nine-hole golf course, tennis, concerts. The staff, it was rumored, hired semiprofessional baseball players so they could beat the other local teams—the YMCA, police, firemen.

The problem was that I was guilt-stricken. If I hadn’t been returned to my mother, would she have ever gone out? Do shut-ins die of contagion? No, they don’t. But because of me, my mother was out in the world again and died. The Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children had been right about me all along. I was “a disturbing element,” “vicious and immoral.” I was unable to be saved from “crime or a life of degradation.” I was certain that I was a murderess, that I had killed my mother.

I told no one.

When I think of myself at eighteen at Sheppard Pratt, as it was known, I think of us. I was raised as an us, after all, a they—the feeble-minded, mere refuse, a societal problem to be dealt with. Ours were lives of domesticated sheep. We were herded into rows. We sang in unison if we sang at all. We were so unaccustomed to being singled out and addressed that we had to be reminded to speak when spoken to. We kept our eyes on the shirt in front of us. When guards said “you,” we thought they meant “all of you.” The individual you was so rare that there was no time for an I to take hold. I didn’t have a self. Eppitt confirmed my existence, and I confirmed his, and we touched each other—lustful proof.

Likewise, for four years my mother and I existed because we both existed. When she was gone, I was stripped to something elemental and foreign to myself. I looked in mirrors and didn’t recognize my own face—pale and slack, with a bloat to my eyes, which wanted to drift.

At Sheppard Pratt, we were all psychiatric patients, each of us suffering, but doing so together allowed us to shift our burdens a little, each taking some weight on our backs. Beautiful and deranged ghosts—we haunted not the place but our own bodies. I was mourning, of course. And for a while I allowed myself to shuffle along with the others, their current buoying me. I was part of them. The nurses, in long white gowns with white bibs and white nurse’s hats, floated. The male attendants wore all white too. Down a long dark corridor they glowed.

I was put in Norris Cottage. Cottages, cottages, like my childhood returned. But Norris held only four patients and our attendants. Dr. Brush said that small numbers were good for us. My father, I assume, was paying a pretty penny for this—blood money. I didn’t care. There was one woman whose family built her a

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