Returning home from our supper with the Thurstons, I ran on ahead. Sitting so long with grown-ups had made me fidgety. When I got to our house, Eleanor was at the door waiting, a frightened look on her face. She scarcely said hello to me but kept her eye on Aunt Maude.
“Is Carlie asleep?” I asked.
Eleanor nodded and looked more unhappy than ever.
Papa was just sending me off to bed when we heard Aunt Maude’s angry voice. I followed Papa into the dining room, where Aunt Maude was scolding Eleanor. Aunt Maude turned to us. “It’s Isabel’s glass punch bowl. There is a chip in it. I have told Eleanor never to touch it, and now just see what has happened.”
Eleanor had made herself very small. Her face was as red as her hands, and there were tears running down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry, ma’am. It’s my fault.”
“You don’t belong in a decent home. You don’t know how to handle nice things.”
Papa put a hand on Aunt Maude’s shoulder. “Let us give Eleanor credit for pointing the accident out to you. Now I think we should hear what Eleanor has to say.” He waited for Eleanor to tell her story, but Eleanor only shook her head, repeating that it was her fault.
I noticed a puddle of water snaking out from under the dining room table. Papa saw it too. He pulled up the tablecloth to find Carlie’s stuffed rabbit, Promise. It was soaking wet.
Papa said, “Verna, go upstairs and get your sister out of bed.”
Carlie wasn’t in bed. She was standing at the top of the stairway, her lower lip caught between her teeth and her forehead all scrunched up. It was how she would look just before she began to cry. She followed me down the stairway but had to be coaxed, sobbing, into the dining room.
Papa put an arm around her. “Caroline, tell me the truth. Did you take the punch bowl down from the sideboard?”
Carlie nodded her head yes.
“And then what happened?” Papa asked.
Between sobs, Carlie said, “I was in bed, but Promise was getting the bed dirty because he was all sandy, so I came downstairs and got the big bowl to give Promise a bath in. When I went to put it back, it was slippery. It jumped out of my hands.”
Aunt Maude turned to Eleanor. “Where were you when this happened?”
“I thought Carlie was asleep in her bed. It was such a nice night that I sat on the back steps and watched for falling stars. I never should have gone outside. It’s all my fault.”
“You are not to be trusted with children,” Aunt Maude said.
Papa looked angry. “Of course Eleanor is to be trusted. Caroline had no business getting out of bed. Now, girls, I want you upstairs at once. Eleanor, you go along home to the asylum, and remember, this was not your fault.”
After Eleanor left, Aunt Maude said, “That was Isabel’s favorite bowl. I don’t know how you can make light of it.”
Papa said, “Maude, a chipped bowl is not the end of the world. I am sure Isabel would agree with me.”
As Carlie and I went up the stairs, I heard an angry Aunt Maude say, “You took that woman’s part against me.”
Papa replied, “There is no taking of parts. There is only speaking the truth. This is not the first time I have had to explain to you, Maude, that Eleanor is very sensitive to criticism. There has been too much of it in her past.”
After what had happened, I was afraid that Eleanor would not return, but the next morning when I awoke, I smelled pancakes. Aunt Maude seldom made pancakes. Eleanor was careful in all she did that morning, handling the dishes as if they were eggshells and saying little. Aunt Maude was on her best behavior as well. I heard her say to Eleanor, in a voice that sounded like it had been pushed through a sieve, “Perhaps I was a little hasty last night in what I said to you.”
Quickly Eleanor replied, “I’m truly sorry about the bowl. If it can be repaired, you could take the cost out of my salary.”
Aunt Maude said, “There will be no need for that.” But Aunt Maude, being Aunt Maude, could not keep from adding, “I only wish it had not been that special bowl.”
The next day was a Sunday, and Eleanor didn’t come on Sundays. Aunt Maude made us fried eggs for breakfast. The centers were hard, and Carlie whispered to me, “Aunt Maude killed the eggs again.” After we had eaten, Carlie and I put on our hats and white gloves and followed Aunt Maude to the asylum chapel. Papa had left early to take his place in the choir.
Both Carlie and I looked forward to church, because we always heard a new word or two from the pulpit that meant pennies. The asylum chapel was a small copy of the church that we used to attend. The patients were neatly dressed in what looked to be their best clothes. With the exception of a few who slunk down in their pews or looked suspiciously about, the churchgoers appeared perfectly normal. A minister stood at the pulpit, talking away. While we listened for words, Carlie poked her fingers into and out of her gloves, and I tried to twist my straight hair into curls. The choir, all wearing identical white robes, was seated to one side of the altar. I spotted Papa and Eleanor at once and, catching Papa’s eye, winked at him, causing Aunt Maude to nudge me.
Eleanor sang a solo, “Jerusalem.” It was a hymn I loved. Imagining its “chariot of fire” appearing through the clouds sent shivers down my spine. Mrs. Thurston was right. Eleanor’s voice was like a glass of cool water on a hot day. I happened to look at Papa while Eleanor was singing and saw that he was staring at Eleanor. On his face was the look he got when there was an article in one of his journals that interested him. Aunt Maude noticed the look too. Her mouth formed a tight line, and her hands clenched until the knuckles whitened.
On the way home I collected a penny for aspire. Carlie got a penny for damnation, which I think she chose because she could say the damn part.
“Really, Edward,” Aunt Maude said, “I cannot understand your paying those children for words.”
Papa said, “Teaching children that there is a value in words, Maude, cannot be a bad thing.”
Even though it was July and ninety degrees out, Aunt Maude always gave us the same Sunday dinner: roast pork, applesauce, mashed potatoes, carrots, and peas. Carlie was separating her carrots from her peas, I was mixing the applesauce with the gravy, and Aunt Maude had just opened her mouth to tell us to stop playing with our food when Papa said, “Maude, on such a warm day you needn’t take trouble over a hot dinner. A little salad and a sandwich are all we need.”
Aunt Maude got red right down to her neck. She always treated Papa’s suggestions as if he were criticizing her. “I’m sorry you don’t care for your dinner, Edward. I notice you don’t seem to have any problem with your appetite when it’s Eleanor cooking.”
Papa looked startled. He hadn’t seen Aunt Maude watch him while Eleanor was singing. “Whatever can you mean, Maude? You know that I enjoy your meals. I am only remarking on the suitability of a large hot meal in this warm weather.” After that it was so quiet, you could hear everyone chew and swallow.
Before we could escape the hot kitchen, I had to dry the dishes and Carlie had to put the silverware away. Since Carlie had to have all the spoons and forks fit one another just so, that took a long time. When we were finally outside, Carlie and I wandered over the asylum grounds. We stopped to watch a bee lose itself inside an orange lily. A hummingbird mistook Carlie’s flowered sunbonnet for a blossom. Where a geranium or pansy had wilted, a gardener was substituting a fresh plant. Most of the gardeners were patients, and their faces were familiar to us. They interrupted their work to call out a pleasant greeting.
Louis was working outside on this afternoon instead of in the glasshouses. He was bent into a grasshopper shape, clipping grass around a flower bed, and took his time straightening up. Putting a finger over his mouth, he quietly tiptoed to a maple tree, signaling us to follow. A little way up the tree was a robin’s nest cleverly fashioned of bits of birch bark and grass stuck together with mud. Four open beaks poked up from the nest. “I find plenty of worms in my digging,” Louis said, “but I wouldn’t chew the worms up even for them little fellows.” He winked at me. “I got the birds all on my side now,” he said.
The last time we had seen Louis, he had promised to bring his medal from the Civil War to show us. Now he took it out of his pocket. It was wrapped up in a square of cotton. “I was with the Army of the Cumberland,” he said, “following General Rosecrans back and forth across the Tennessee River. After I was shot, I was in a hospital. You couldn’t sleep what with the moans all around you. The floor was slippery with blood, and there was legs that had been cut off all piled up. I still have nightmares.”
I didn’t want to hear any more, but Carlie asked, “What happened to all the cut-off legs?”
Louis grinned at her. “They just walked off.” He noticed the expression on my face. “It wasn’t all so bad. We was bivouacked not far from the Tennessee River. By the camp the river was littered with garbage and filth. But a mile upstream the water was pure. Willow trees hung over the river; whippoorwills called. Miserable as the fighting was, once I could get away for a bit to the river, I was fine. That’s how it is here at the asylum. I hate it inside, but once I get outside and get my hands in some dirt, I’m fine.”
He bent down and began snipping again. “I got to tend to the grass. The flowers don’t mean as much to Dr. Thurston as his grass. It’s as if this little green piece of the world is one thing he can have just the way he wants. All day long he has to do with us patients in the asylum and our difficult ways; then he comes out here and sees the perfect green lawn. He’ll stand here and look at it as if he was a drowning man and it was a boat.”
Carlie complained of the heat, and we left the path for the acres of trees that made little pools of shade. A figure came from behind a tree. “Well, it must be Caroline, and here is Verna as well.” It was Dr. Thurston himself. He seemed pleased to find us exploring the grounds. “Have you ever seen such a beautiful lawn? And what do you make of my little forest? ”
“I know the maples and the birches and the pines,” I said, “but there are trees I’ve never seen before.”
“Whenever I take a trip, I send a tree back. Two years ago Mrs. Thurston and I traveled to Japan and China. This mulberry tree is grown in Japan, where its bark is used to make paper, and that mulberry tree over there is grown in China and its leaves are fed to the silkworms. Look here.” He led us to a strange willow tree whose branches were twisted into corkscrew shapes. “This tree grew from a twig I brought all the way from Nanking, keeping it watered while we traveled thousands of miles by cart and ship.”
“But how did you get it up through the hole?” Carlie asked. Someone had once told her that China was at the bottom of the world and you had to dig right through the earth to the other side to get there.
Dr. Thurston smiled. “Well, it wasn’t easy.” He gave the willow a friendly pat. “I have never seen such natural beauty as I saw in China. Willows are planted along the rivers so that their tresses lean over the water like women washing their hair.” His face reddened. “You have caught me in a poetic mood, children. I must beg you not to tell on me. Your father will think I am too much a romantic to be a scientist, but it gave me great pleasure to think of bringing back to my patients some of the beauty I had experienced.”
We came upon the little garden with the iron fence and the fountain.
Carlie, who had not heard Dr. Thurston’s explanation at the supper table, asked, “Why is the garden locked?”
“Sadly, my dear, there are patients who are not well enough to roam freely. Yet it is important that they have the advantage of nature’s beauty. Nature, Carlie, is the mother that heals. Your father, fine scientist that he is, may look for a medicine to cure the terrible ills of the mind, but I say that we must surround our patients with beauty, and nature will do the rest.”
Carlie was not to be put off by fine talk. “Is the hole you made to get to China still there?”
“Ah, no. I’m afraid we had to fill it up so that no one would accidentally fall in.”
After he left us, I thought over Dr. Thurston’s ideas. It was all very well for the gardeners who worked outside and for the patients who strolled along the paths of the asylum, but what of patients in the back wards and even those like Eleanor who were confined to long hours cooking and cleaning and didn’t have much chance to be cured by nature?
I knew how much Eleanor missed being outside. She often spoke longingly of her family’s farm. The doctors had finally given her permission to make a visit to her parents, who lived close by, but Aunt Maude could not find a time when Eleanor was not badly needed, which was strange to me, for when speaking of Eleanor, Aunt Maude referred to her as “useless.” I did not see how she could be both necessary and useless.
At the end of July Eleanor finally got to see her family, for Aunt Maude received a letter calling her away. The family that rented her house while she stayed with us was moving. She needed to return home for a week or two to see about preparing the house for new renters.
“I don’t see how I can leave you,” she told Papa. “Eleanor will be no good at all without my supervision. You must not let her get into sloppy ways.”
Papa assured her that we could manage. I said nothing at all, for I knew my pleasure at her leaving would show and Papa would not like that. Carlie said, “What if you get lost, Auntie Maude, and can’t find your way back?” Aunt Maude could not mistake the hope in Carlie’s voice. Carlie’s happy expression as she watched Aunt Maude pack and my eager offers of assistance must have told Aunt Maude that Carlie and I were looking forward to her leaving.
Aunt Maude looked up from her packing and startled us by saying, “I’m afraid, girls, that I have not earned your affections.”
I was embarrassed to see two tears start down her cheeks. I hurried to say, “Aunt Maude, I am sure we appreciate all you have done for us.”
“It’s not appreciation I want, Verna.”
Aunt Maude was asking for our love. Sometimes you are asked for something you might be able to give, but you will not give it. I have had two cookies in my hand while Carlie has gobbled down hers. When she pleaded for one of mine, I could have given it to her, but I told myself she didn’t deserve it. I said to myself now that Aunt Maude had not deserved my love, and when she asked for it, I was silent.
Carlie, who was so greedy and must have everything she saw, stored it all up and gave it back without a thought. Now she thrust her stuffed rabbit at Aunt Maude, the rabbit that Carlie would not let out of her sight. “You can take Promise to keep you company,” she said.
Aunt Maude smiled, the first real smile I remembered seeing on her face. “Thank you, Carlie. I won’t need the rabbit, for I will have the memory of your kindness.”
Eleanor made herself very small and quiet, and we held our breaths until the day the carriage drove up and Aunt Maude, after many cautions to Eleanor and to me and Carlie, and after many false starts, reluctantly climbed in and was carried away.