TONIGHT WE PRIVILEGED A-Warders are enjoying an after-dinner treat in the dayroom—a movie projected onto a large white sheet they’ve hung on the wall. Several benches have been arranged in rows for us. Georgie and I occupy the one in the back.
Lillian’s hunkered down underneath us and being very quiet—her Soviets and their electro-mines must be close tonight.
There’s tension on the bench. I finally told Georgie about my appointment with Sherman. About my new need to learn the addresses of the real Dorothy Frasier’s hangouts before I can escape so I have a chance at tracking her and my purse down once I’m free. And I told her about refusing to play ball with the doctor by sharing my memory and his reneging on our deal.
So she’s been ruminating. Definitely has some things she’d like to get off her chest if asked—which I make sure not to do.
The man we’re watching on-screen is an actor I know I’ve seen before. He’s got a kindly face that bears a striking resemblance to the sheriff’s deputy, Officer Worthy. Right now he’s gazing across a crowded dance floor at a woman he knows. When she spots him, her face lights up, and a series of emotions plays over it, like she’s seeing their entire future together compressed into seconds—and it’s exactly the life she wants. He’s the one.
I wonder about the mystery man kissing me in my true north memory, those intense feelings in that moment with him. Was he the one? I replay the scene in my mind—the warm summer sun, the boy’s laughter, the crescent-moon scar on the man’s palm, the way his kisses on my shoulder sent a thrum through my body. Every known bit of the memory, hoping to draw more details out of my subconscious.
But my thoughts are interrupted by Georgie, who can hold in her lecture no longer. “All you had to do was give Sherman something, anything,” she vents, the darks and lights of the movie playing over her face. The couple on-screen is dancing now, and as they do, the floor beneath them begins to hilariously split apart, revealing a swimming pool below. I pray Georgie will be done soon. “How hard is that?” she asks.
“Pipe down, Georgie,” someone sitting ahead of us says. “We’re trying to watch.”
Georgie says, “No, I will not pipe—”
“You need to stop worrying,” I tell her.
“And you need to start worrying, Bix,” Georgie hisses back. “He’s about to decide your ward placement—determining just how hard it’ll be to escape from Hanover—and you can’t cooperate just the slightest?”
A pitiful cry comes from Lillian below.
“Now you’ve upset the chronic,” Georgie says.
“Lillian’s a chronic?” I ask Georgie.
She nods. “Been here at least ten years. Relatives aren’t exactly clamoring to take her,” she whispers. “At this point Hanover’s all she knows. The routines, the rules, what she has to do—who she has to please—to stay in A-Ward and keep her privileges.”
“I didn’t realize,” I say. “Probably not what Lillian expected when she entered this place.”
“No one expects it,” Georgie says. “But a run-in with staff here, a bad diagnosis there, and you can find yourself down-alphabet, receiving ‘state-of-the-art’ treatments that leave you looking less and less like someone doctors would consider releasing. And it’s not long till you agree with them. Before you know it, you’re fully institutionalized, a permanent part of Hanover. Lillian’s fortunate—she at least managed to luck into A-Ward.”
“You’re not being very subtle,” I say.
“Not trying to be. You, with your need to fight authority, are exactly the kind of person who could run into deep trouble during a year at Hanover. You need to go—and soon.”
“First you think I should stay, now you want me to go. Which is it, Georgie?” I say, laughing. But she just glares. “Relax, I’ll have those addresses and be long gone before he assigns me to a ward.”
Georgie levels her eyes at me. “You’ve already got a scheme in mind, don’t you?”
On-screen, the couple falls into the pool, joined by the rest of the dancing crowd. Hysterical. Why can’t she just let me watch?
“Spill it,” says Georgie.
Georgie was not a fan of the plan.
“Don’t do it, Bix,” she pleaded that night. “If you’re caught, it’s hello, D- or E- … maybe even F-Ward, locked down each night in a room full of Normas and Carols. I want no part of this foolishness.”
When I pass her in the hallway, clutching the forged patient pass I managed to steal from the nurses’ station a couple of days ago, Georgie looks the other way.
I arrive at the ward gate and find I’m in luck: the nurse on duty is preoccupied with taping up a poster that reads, “St. Aloysius Boys’ Choir Christmas concert, Dec. 7 at 4:00 for patients from A to F Wards and guests. Women’s main dining hall. Refreshments will be served.” The nurse barely gives my pass a glance before buzzing me through.
The vicious thwacks of Miss Campbell’s typewriter can be heard long before I reach Sherman’s office. I pause short of the open door and make sure no one’s watching before quietly depressing the door latch and securing it with some stolen tape. Then I duck around the corner and wait. It’s not long before Miss Campbell emerges from the office for lunch. She shuts the door before heading down the hall to the staff dining room.
I slip into the office and ease the door closed behind me. It’s quiet, just the clock on the wall behind the desk slowly ticking away as the second hand sweeps around. Next to it is the wall calendar with the boy in the big Pilgrim hat. Days one through eighteen are now checked off. November eighteenth—I’ve been in Hanover six days. Seems like more. The ringing in my ears I felt that first day is now nearly gone.
I fish the key to the enormous file cabinet from its hiding place in Miss Campbell’s desk, unlock the E TO J drawer, then thumb through the F files till I find Dorothy Frasier’s. I flip it open on top of the drawer.
Claim checks for my wool coat and the pennies taken from my shoes, are paper-clipped to the inside. The file’s top sheet is pink and marked “Medical”—a copy of my infirmary visit write-up, beginning with the tetanus shot, followed by a cataloguing of my various scars, my barely uneven pupils, and ending with my punctured eardrums. After that, Dr. Sackler, the infirmary doctor, has jotted “Patient, a healthy 23 yr old female, is cleared for all treatments.”
Below it are notes on my gynecological exam: “Cervical os presents as normal,” blah, blah, blah …
I flip past it to the stack of yellow Dorothy Frasier’s police reports. At the top of the pile are a bunch paper-clipped together, each with the heading “Culpeper County Sheriff Department Incident Report” and stamped with the word “Duplicate.”
I scan the first: “Incident Report #93767 … Dorothy Frasier, female, Caucasian, 23 … Found trespassing and exhibiting loud and disturbing behavior on the grounds of a house of worship … Date and time of offense 4-19-54, 23:20 hours … After resisting officers, the individual was brought to Culpeper County Hospital for observation and evaluation. No charges of trespassing or disorderly conduct filed.” At the bottom, I spot the word “Location” and an address: “St. Mark’s Church, 169 West Eggers Avenue, Doyletown, VA.”
The next few describe more trespassing incidents on the church grounds with no charges filed. But the last is different: “Received report of a break-in at the chapel. A broken door window was observed … Individual was found at the foot of the altar, bleeding heavily from a self-inflicted wound. She was transported to Culpeper County Hospital’s emergency room and, after successful treatment, was moved to the psychiatric ward. Committed, per judge’s bench order, to Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital for a minimum stay of twelve months. Criminal trespass and criminal damage to place of worship charges not filed.”
The five reports all share the St. Mark’s Church address—the first of Dorothy’s haunts. I take a moment to commit it to memory.
I’m flipping to the next paper-clipped set of police reports, from the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C., for the address of Dorothy’s other haunt, when some papers fall out of the file onto the floor. Two sheets paper-clipped together. I pick them up, about to shove them back in the file, when I notice the subject line on the top sheet: “Dorothy Frasier Directive.”
It’s a memorandum from Dr. Sackler to Sherman, dated November 15, 1954:
Per your request, I have examined Dorothy Frasier thoroughly, and in light of both my clinical observations and her medical and psychological history, it is my opinion that the patient possesses a questionable capacity to responsibly govern her reproductive processes and sexuality. Therefore, should a decision be made to treat her with any procedure or regimen likely to further undermine that capacity, it is in the best interests of the patient that proper precautionary measures should be taken.
Attached is the form signed by me so that you may obtain consent from the appropriate authority. But I caution against rushing into initiating any treatment with such lasting consequences. Please keep me apprised of all developments.
I flip to the attached page. At the top are three words: “Directive for Sterilization.”
What Dr. Sackler meant by “housekeeping.”
I can’t stop rereading these words that so clinically discuss the elimination of my ability to procreate. Till the voice intervenes—
Yes, that’s bad, but get what you came for. The two addresses.
Right. The addresses. And I turn back to the file, about to flip to the Washington, D.C., police department reports—when I feel them return. The ghost bees. That buzzing I felt in the seclusion cell. It’s quickly climbing its way up through me, and Miss Campbell’s desk light is now crowned with a rainbow. The white roar is coming.
Shit, shit, shit!
Calm yourself. This is good.
No, this is bad. Very, very bad.
But it doesn’t have to happen—because none of this is real. I just need to root myself in the here and now, let the painful vibration pass like a bad cramp while I hold fast to the details around me:
Dorothy Frasier’s file.
The boy in the Pilgrim hat on the calendar.
The second hand of the clock just sweeping past the twelve.
But it doesn’t matter what I do, what I cling to, the white roar comes to collect me anyway.