Monday, October 3 1887
I spent Monday like a bird on a clothesline. The slightest vibration had me up and moving to the windows, or else toward the door. Every step in the hall, every voice heard below, every turn of the hours, I was certain was the herald of my emancipation.
There were visitors being given a tour. They paused to listen to Miss Morgan play on the piano, clustering close to her until one whispered, “You know she's a patient.” Then they all retreated as if she had leprosy, leaving her equal parts amused and indignant.
A lady called Gwendolyn received a letter, the first I had seen delivered to any patient. Apparently, it was such a rare occurrence that it was considered a treat, and all the women of Hall Seven begged Gwendolyn to read it out, crowding around her to drink in news from the outside world.
I was not among them. Instead, I was staring out the window.
“Where have you gone?” asked Anne.
“Gone?” I said, startled.
“You must not become of those.” She nodded across the room to a woman staring vacantly at nothing. “The ghost women. Not even here, just haunting this place. I would not be surprised to see them walk through a wall.”
“This place probably does have ghosts,” I said, and I swear I felt a chill pass through me.
Luncheon passed, and there was still no sign of a caller for me. That afternoon, Anne and I were told we would be working in the scrub brush factory on the island. A factory girl once more.
I protested, saying, “I am expecting a visitor.”
“No visitors,” Miss Hart told me. “You're on restriction. Dr. Caldwell's orders.”
So that's what he meant! I trudged off to the factory, wishing I had not been so petulant with him. What if the doctor's order kept the Colonel's agents away from me?
Oh, God—what if he can't get me out?
That was a thought that festered rapidly. What if they had petitioned the court and been rejected? Or, horribly, what if he had decided I was too inconvenient to rescue? I'd embarrassed him in the Journalist with my story about hiring women. Was he a man who would sacrifice a woman for the sake of his pride?
Is there a man alive who wouldn't?
But no, the Colonel was not a villain. He had murdered a man once, true, but in self-defense. He would not murder me this way.
Though he might not think it murder. He might think, from my mad rush to pitch him an insane story about hiding in steerage among the flotsam of Europe, that I was actually deranged.
Oh, dear Lord. Does he think I belong here?
At that moment my hand was full of badger hair, which I was busily knotting together to turn into the bristles of a man's shaving brush. The work was monotonous and brain-achingly simple, and only lasted three hours. Then we were back in Hall Seven, and Miss Morgan was playing, and women were dancing. Some of the doctors even stepped in to take a waltz around the room with their favorite patients.
I looked for Dr. Ingram, but he was not there, so I strode up to Dr. Caldwell. He mistook my purpose and grasped me in his arms for a polka.
“Doctor,” I said, trying not to step on his toes as we hopped along, “I should like to have the restrictions removed.”
“Oh, now you speak English, do you?” he asked knowingly.
“Perfectly. And I am hoping for a visitor.”
“Why? No one has visited you yet. Save for those pesky reporters. Never you fear. I've given the word that they should be turned away. They shall not bother you again.”
Turned away! “I would not be bothered!” My voice was strained, and not from the dancing.
Spinning me around, his knowing smile broadened. “I thought so. You like attention, don't you? All this fuss about the mystery girl. I doubt half of your story is true.”
As the other patients cheered and clapped, I decided to take my fate in my own hands. “You're correct. My story was false. I'm not Nellie Brown. My name is Nellie Bly, and I'm a reporter for the New York World.”
He laughed. “Anything for attention! I've seen it often in women here. Don't worry. After a time, the need becomes less intense, and these fanciful delusions will fade.” Releasing me, he took the arms of another girl, leaving me wide-eyed and aghast. When he finally moved off, he was murmuring my song to himself. “Nelly Bly has a heart warm as cup of tea, and bigger than the sweet potato down in Tennessee…”
I had revealed the truth, and it had not mattered. I was not going to be believed. I was in a madhouse, which proved I was insane.
♦ ◊ ♦
During our afternoon walk, my agitation finally got the better of me. I wanted to walk with Anne Neville, but the nurses said I could not because her dress would not match mine in color. They liked their color coding in Hall Seven. I persisted. “I have walked with Anne since we first arrived, and I will walk with her today.” Miss Fitzpatrick looked me over. “You walk where you're told.”
A week earlier, I would have given in. Instead, I caught hold of Miss Fitzpatrick's elbow and held on. The nurse tried to pry my hand free, and was surprised that she could not. When Miss Fitzpatrick raised her hand to me, I said in a cool voice, “Don't try your beatings on me. I am perfectly sane, and will not go easy.”
Miss Fitzpatrick's lips curled into a taunting smile. “What are you going to do? You have no help, and all I have to do is call out and a dozen nurses would help me to make you obey.”
My laugh might have sounded a little hysterical. “Do you know what? If I wanted to leave here this instant, I could merely go down to the river, jump in, and swim across. Once in New York you would never have Nellie Brown again as a patient.”
“Try it,” said Miss Fitzpatrick. “We'd all like the show.”
It was tempting. It was so tempting. But out of the corner of my eye I saw Anne mouth the words The Lodge. Instantly, I subsided. Mad as it sounded, if I was to be free, I could not try to get free.
Dutifully, I took my place among the dresses of my color. I hated the look of triumph on Miss Fitzpatrick's face.
The walk held no joy for me that day. Nor for the trees, which had finally begun to lose their leaves.
♦ ◊ ♦
That night I was like Shakespeare's Juliet just before she drinks the Friar's potion, imagining all the scenarios that might bring about her doom. Perhaps the Colonel had fallen ill. Perhaps he'd had a stroke, and was at that moment prone and insensible in some hospital, with the secret of my mission trapped in his brain. Why, oh why did I not send a letter to Mother telling her about my assignment? Why did I not take more precautions, extra insurance, some additional means of extricating myself from this hell I blithely entered of my own free will?
I calmed myself with thought of Macdona and McCain. Both men knew I was in the asylum, and if Macdona knew why, McCain could certainly guess. They would see me freed.
Except…
I had spurned Macdona's ham-handed flirtations. And I had tried to poach one of McCain's stories. Those were reasons enough for them to wash their hands of me, a silly girl who didn't know what was good for her. In over her head. What an example to make. “This is what happens to a girl who doesn't know her proper sphere.”
Sphere. Wilson. What would he say to all this? I could almost hear him: “Well, you naughty girl, you've done it now. I tried to warn you. But you're so stubborn, you can't be taught. You have to experience everything. Laborious factories, dangerous Mexicans, it's not enough for you to observe, you have to thrust yourself in there and be part of the story. Well done. Only now you're trapped as a subject in a story they'll never let you report.”
No, Wilson would never be so cruel. If McCain carried my news to him, the Quiet Observer would move heaven and earth to get me free. He would do anything for me. I was sure of it.
Anything, save love me.
Doris had fallen asleep on the floor, which meant my only companion in wakefulness was Vanessa. She was back at the window, her hair unbraided and free, reading a fantastical tale from her newspaper. Naturally, it was a romance.
“Joyous, joyous Tuesday,” said Vanessa. "Once upon a Tuesday, there was a darling young lady named Bianca Rose who wore her hair quite long, in two impossible braids. Just before midnight, she was sitting before a crackling fire in her home writing an urgent telegram to her love, who was taking ship that night for Ceylon. She knew what she should write. She should say her sister, her Pearl, was deathly ill, and their cousin Joseph had gone out West to find a fortune and never returned. The town practitioner of medicine told the lovely Bianca Rose that she must send to all her kin, for Pearl might not recover from this blinding fever that left her either raving or simple. What Bianca had told no one as yet was that she was feeling the creeping fingers of fever upon her own face, inside her own eyes. Without help, without aid, without care, she and her brother would never survive.
"So Bianca Rose looked at that spare telegram form, thinking of the only man she had truly loved in all her life. Knowing her sister needed her, and would never stop needing her, Bianca Rose had spurned him—at the same time, fracturing her own heart into a thousand pieces. Rejected, her love had gone far away, heartsick and bereft, promising never to return to trouble her.
"Now she wrote to him the words she should have spoken: `I write you a note of celebration, of love, of poetry. It takes so little to make me smile because of thought of you. Let us celebrate every hour on the hour the celebrations of the hour just past. I love you.' And she signed the form, `Your White Rose.'
"She sent it off, that expensive message that carried no news. It was worth it, because it carried the truth. She loved him. She could not let him think that she did not. And she could not worry him with her illness. If he returned, let it be for love, not for fear. Let it be for love.
"Pacing the floor of the master bedroom, she heard Pearl groaning across the hall. The striking of the clock echoed through the hallway. One o'clock. Two o'clock. Three. Quietly, she slipped downstairs to sip a bit of tea. As she reached the bottom, she noticed the doctor, asleep on a divan in the parlor. Poor man. Bianca Rose roused him and sent him home to his wife, a friend through the ladies' mission, who often came along to hold Bianca's hand. They would chat amiably, each knowing the danger underneath the idle talk.
"When the doctor was gone, Bianca Rose remained outside, sitting on the swing under the tree and losing herself in memory. When the clock struck five, she returned to her room, resigned to a little sleep before another grueling day.
"Bianca Rose was just nodding off when she was startled by a knock on the door. The doctor shouldn't be back. She rushed to the foyer, opened the latches, and flung open the door, hoping—not daring—to believe.
"There he stood, framed against the rising sun, not even a scrap of luggage, and unshaven face. `I love you,' he told her. `I could not stay away.'
"Being loved was a new experience. People had told her they loved her before. But she had never believed it until this moment.
“And they lived happily ever after,” said Vanessa, holding up her creased newspaper for proof.
The tears on my cheeks were proof of her power as a storyteller. To love, and be loved. So simple, yet what we all longed for.
I might never have another chance, I thought. And so I picked up my pencil and wrote the words I had never dared to even frame as thought:
Dearest Q.O.,
The fact that you'll never read this means I am, for once, free to be honest. It goes against the grain, honesty. For a reporter, it's all facts, no feelings. And the facts of us demolish my feelings.
Fact—you are a married man, a devoted husband.
Fact—you are nearly twice my age.
Fact—you have never shown more interest in me than as a polite friend and mentor.
Fact—I love you.
Yes, here I am, you think, a silly girl with a crush. But believe me when I say the love I have for you is as much fact as feeling. My heart is full of you, you infuriating man. To think I should love a cheerful curmudgeon, an old-fashioned man with last century's ideas. A man who approves of me as a friend, yet disapproves of me as a person, a woman, a fellow being. I long in equal measure to strike you as to kiss you.
Fact—I like your wife, and pity her, and admire you for your dedication to her. It is a mark of love, endurance. How can I watch you endure the pains of your marriage and then fail to endure my own infatuation with you? That would make me unworthy of you. The only way to be worthy of your love is to deny myself that very love. How perfectly trite. How very gothic. I am a “type.”
What's genuinely amusing is that the tale spun about me by the doctors and nurse and reporters is not far from the truth. They say I was made mad through a love spurned and jilted. Why else would I be here, but that it's true? When I came to New York, and Blackwell's, I was not just running toward my career. I was also running away from you.
You think me adventurous. In a certain light, I suppose I am. But at heart I am a coward. Because the one adventure I did not dare was you.
Don't think I did not consider an affair. But even if you would have considered such a thing (I know you would not), affairs, by their nature, end. They are temporary, impermanent, finite. Were I to give in to temptation, I could not endure the inevitable ending. “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?” Perhaps, if your love has died. But to enter a love knowing it is doomed? Wonderful for novels, dreadful in reality.
No, it's better to love from afar and feel pride in not imposing that love, adding my burden to your already overweighted shoulders. I know they are as broad as mine are narrow. But I can bear the weight of my love for you. It is a delightful anguish.
You started me on this path. I shall continue to walk it, no matter the result. Because I hope to make you proud of me.
I hope I have shown what girls are good for.
I closed my book and clutched it tightly to my chest, closing my eyes as well. Tomorrow was unknown, and unknowable. There were only three things in life of which I could now be certain. My vocation. My mother's love. And the love I carried like a secret torch within me.
Inconvenient. But beautiful.
♦ ◊ ♦
“Nellie Brown?” said Miss Hart. “You have visitors.”
Stunned, I remained seated on my bench in Hall Seven. “What?”
“Visitors. In Dr. Ingram's office. Quick now!”
As I set down my knitting and rose, Anne said, “Who is coming to see you?”
“I have no idea,” I replied, hardly daring to hope. Has the Colonel come himself? Or Macdona? Or…
My fanciful thought was the McCain had cabled Wilson, and the Q.O. himself had come to pull me free of this morass. If this had been a novel, that's what would have happened.
Instead, I found Dr. Ingram sitting with two men. The first I had never seen before in all my life. He was in his thirties, with flaxen hair and a face marked by childhood pits. The second man was familiar, but I could not immediately place where I had seen him. He was also on the youngish side, with thin brownish hair and pince-nez glasses perched across his wide nose.
“Nellie,” said Dr. Ingram, “these men have come to see you.”
“Oh?” I asked warily.
The pitted-faced fellow removed his hat. “Miss Brown, my name is Peter Hendricks. And you know Mr. McDougall.”
“Do I?” I looked to the other man, trying desperately to place him in my memory.
“Nellie, it's me, Walter!” cried this Mr. McDougall. “I'm so relieved to see you. Frannie and I read all about you in the papers, but we never dreamed that the mysterious waif was you!”
Frannie? Unsure how to play along, I said, “As you can see, it is me. How is Frannie?”
“Worried sick about you,” said McDougall with a wag of his finger. “She even wrote her father, the colonel, about it. And the colonel hired Mr. Hendricks here.”
Cheeks flushing, I was careful not to betray my delight. “I feared the colonel had forgotten all about me.”
“Hardly,” said Mr. Hendricks. “His language has been quite colorful. Well, you know the colonel.”
“Indeed,” I said, with the hint of a smile.
Dr. Ingram was delighted. “Excellent! Certainly you seem to have jogged her memory.” He waved us all to chairs. “Nellie, Mr. Hendricks here is a lawyer. He says that Mr. McDougall and his wife are willing to take charge of you. That is, if you would rather be with them than here in the asylum?”
I made a show of thinking before saying, “Yes. I should prefer that. When would I leave?”
“Soon, we hope,” said Hendricks. “We must get a judge to sign the form.” He turned to Dr. Ingram. “I trust there will be no problem getting Miss Moreno released.”
“None at all. She has been very well behaved, and a thorough delight to speak with. I regret, Miss Moreno, that I shall no longer have the pleasure of your company. But I trust you will be happier with your friends.”
“I trust so as well. Walter, please thank Frannie for me. And the colonel. I cannot wait to tell him all about my adventures.”
“He's eager to hear all about it.”
“You have to go back to Hall Seven for now, I'm afraid,” said Dr. Ingram as he rose to escort me to the door. “And if you can, refrain from telling the others. You know how excited they can get.”
Before leaving, I turned to Mr. Hendricks. “Oh, I do have one request.”
“Yes, Miss Moreno?”
“Whenever you arrange my release, could you have a proper meal waiting for me?”
♦ ◊ ♦
My release came sooner than I had dared imagine. I was in a double line for our morning walk across the grounds. We had paused because one of the other lines had some commotion ahead of us. Being nearsighted, I had trouble seeing at that distance. “What's happening?”
Mattie was craning her neck. “One of their ladies has fainted dead away.”
Squinting hard, I saw this was the truth. Beside me, Anne gasped. “Nellie—it's Tillie!”
“No!” I broke the line, but many hands hauled me back into place before the nurses saw me. As I strained against them, I saw Miss Grupe and Miss Grady forcing Tillie to stand and trying to compel her to walk. “They mustn't! They should take her to the hospital.”
“Nellie Brown!”
It was a male voice, which made all heads turn, including that of little Tillie.
Hendricks and McDougall were walking alongside Superintendent Dent, who held in his hand my papers of release.
I turned to Anne. “I'm leaving.” She burst into tears, and we hugged each other. In her ear I whispered, “I'll come back for you.”
From her own line, Pauline Moser called to me. “What's to do, Nellie?”
“I am going home!”
“You never say!”
Word spread like wildfire, and women from both halls broke their lines to rush up to my liberators and plead with them. “I'm a friend of Nellie's, she can't live without me, take me with you!”
“I know her best! She slept in the cell next to mine!”
“I'll cook for her! I'm an excellent cook.”
Never shy, Pauline Moser didn't bother with words but simply attempted to kiss McDougall on the lips.
By the time the nurses had swatted them all back, the suits of both men were rumpled and in disarray. Dr. Dent waved at me. “Hurry, Miss Brown. Don't dawdle!”
Anne released me and I hurried over as if my chance at escape might expire. Dent told me I should collect my things and dress in my own clothes, which a nurse would collect.
As both lines of women trudged in opposite directions, I waved to my friends, kissing my fingers to them. “Adios!”
At the last moment, a small figure broke her line and raced back toward our little cluster. Staggering with delirium, Tillie threw herself into McDougall's arms. “Please, sir! You must know me. You inquired after me. She's an imposter! I'm the real one! I am Nellie Brown!”
I was so shocked I wanted to cry. McDougall attempted to extricate himself from Tillie's manic grip as the superintendent angrily waved a nurse over.
“The poor thing!” Miss Grupe took Tillie by the arm, putting on that simpering voice she used in front of the doctors. But the grip on Tillie's arm produced a gasp of pain. “She's not her best self today, as you can see. Come along, Tillie dear. And calm down. The best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine.”
With her arm held in a viselike grip, Tillie was too weak to resist. But she threw me such venomous glare that I took a frightened step backwards.
“Wow! What a bug!” laughed McDougall softly. “Lucky for us that nurse was here.”
I turned a look like Tillie's on him. “She was as sane as anyone when we arrived. It's this place that has driven her out of her wits.”
The superintendent started to protest, but I didn't bother to hash it out at that moment. In a few hours, I would be able to do far more for these women than just raise my voice.
A nurse took me inside and helped me collect my things, and I changed into my modest attire. The shawl I had brought from Bellevue was among my clothes, and had passed to them its musty smell. But I did not mind. It was my souvenir from this place: a tattered wrap of insanity that perfectly symbolized everything I had experienced.
In my own clothes once more, I was taken into a proper bathroom, and for the first time in ten days I saw myself reflected. My lips were chapped. Huge circles hung below my eyes. Tangled into a rough braid, my hair looked waxen and unkempt. And there was a fire in my eyes that I could not recall ever being there before.
That's when it came to me. The word I had been looking for. Crucible. And I had passed through mine.
Ten minutes later we were on the boat, leaving Blackwell's Island.