Stealing Faith by Leora Skolkin-Smith

Author:Leora Skolkin-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Story Plant
Published: 2023-02-15T13:46:45+00:00

Chapter Seven.

The ambulance arrived at New York Hospital in White Plains at around five o’clock and I was still thinking of Faith. I was then inside an elegant Tudor building filled with antique nineteenth century-like rugs, chestnut armoires, a grandfather clock, and mahogany tables with lamps shaped like Aladdin’s lanterns, also antique, 1930s. I didn’t know exactly the date, but there was something Hollywood about the beautiful building and interior, its polished perfection and stillness. One expected Joan Crawford or Bette Davis to emerge from inside their hollow halls, crazy but with perfect hairdos, in a lavish setting like one imagines from the old-time movie “asylums.” It had been Faith, though, the obverse reflection of such glamour, who had emerged again in my desire and imagination, in my regret and hurt. The imprint was going to dissolve, I was thinking. I was lost now to madness.

The sparse, institutional ward for women was different from the rest of the estate, with netting-guarded windows and a nursing station, bright and fluorescent-lit. They ushered me in, cold and shivering and wet, and by that time, they had asked if I had meant to end my life. I didn’t answer. All I remembered was the door opening, and suddenly the sunlight on the carpets departing as a dark ward replaced the outside hallway under my feet, and the sun from the window was like the last breath of warmth and understanding I would know for the rest of my life.

It was to Hall Eight North, an all-women ward that I had been ushered into. I was led by a nurse to a youngish doctor who was writing vigorously away on a sheet of paper. I only remembered a tiny bit of the admitting interview with the sterile doctor. “Do you know who the current president is?” “I’m going to give you five numbers and ask you to recite them backward to me.” “I’m going to ask you to remember five words and then I’ll ask you to repeat them back to me.” “What dooes ‘people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones mean’” “Who are you?” “What issues would you say brought you here?”

Dr. Zorn, a very young woman in a silky skirt, wearing black stockings and Liz Claiborne pumps the color of radishes, was assigned to me. Dr. Zorn’s hair was long and shiny, black as coal. She was a slender woman of low height carrying a pretty, brown-eyed face. Dr. Zorn could have been a senior at college; her age seemed slippery so one could not quite pin it down, but I later learned she was twenty-nine from one of the nurses. Dr. Zorn had already done her internship at McLean, a leading psychiatric hospital, the Harvard of booby hatches. She shopped for her clothes with attention to terrific style: a neat, orderly but beautiful array of dresses and skirts to her thin calves, and blouses such as a New York model might wear — not florid but plain and perfectly ironed and neat, with faint colors like a faded blue or spanking-clean white.

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