I LOOK THROUGH THE reinforced glass observation window into A-Ward’s dayroom. It’s surprisingly pleasant, lit by large windows and filled with white wicker chairs and tables. Two dozen women mill about or sit.
A wall clock by the nurses’ station says three o’clock.
Wallace opens the dayroom door and I hear the white-noise murmur of the room’s inhabitants. “You three will be in A-Ward while the doctors determine the best placement for you. I suggest joining those ladies,” and she points to a nearby table where women are weaving strips of fabric onto square frames. “They’re making pot holders to be sold at the local market. Making yourself useful with a homemaking task helps keep the mind out of trouble and prepares you for the day you might return home.”
The other two head for the crafts table to join their fellow sweatshop workers, but I hang back, eyeballing the nurses’ station window for possible lock picks—till I see Wallace’s good eye on me. So I go to a nearby stack of magazines.
It’s a grab bag of choices: on the top of the pile is Life magazine, whose cover features a picture of two men pointing to a towering, twisting structure that looks like it’s made of marbles and toothpicks. The headline reads: “Uncovering the Mystery of DNA’s Double Helix Structure: James Watson & Francis Crick.”
I flip to the next, Amazing Stories, whose cover is a colorful illustration of dinosaurs menacing a man holding up a small device with a spiral antenna. I flip to the next magazine, Woman’s Day, and thumb through its well-worn pages past ads for catsup, detergent, and scary white lingerie, till I come to one in which a woman holds a large thermometer. Below her are the words “Ferber, the meat thermometer that tells you the temp HE likes it.”
Who is HE? And why does she care?
When Wallace turns away, I put the magazine down—and notice a cluster of patients nearby now whispering as they watch me. Like Nurse Gibbs, they seem to have caught a glimpse of my attempted escape. More gossip for the Hanover grapevine.
I head for a nearby bookshelf, and among the battered novels I find For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. Though my memory is currently Swiss cheese, I’m quite certain I like the lean writing of this man so keen to prove he’s a man. I’m snagging both books when I hear happy music coming from a black-and-white TV housed in a metal cage across the room.
I walk over and see an elegant woman in pearls with pert, pointy breasts and a tiny waist on the old TV’s small, blurry screen. She’s smiling as she cranks open a large metal tin, peeling off its top to reveal something that looks an awful lot like a lung, though the can insists it’s a ham.
Now she’s got the ham-lung in a pan and anoints it with circles of pineapple before popping it into an oven. A clock’s hands spin rapidly around, and as the music crescendos, the woman joyfully carries the finished ham-lung into her dining room, where husband, daughter, and son wait. As the woman places the maybe-organ before them, she turns to us. “Harvey’s precooked hams. You owe your family the very best,” she says, then winks at me.
There’s something intoxicating about this woman’s certainty of her place in her safe, canned ham-lung world—and I find myself caught up in a sort of happiness by proxy.
But my reverie’s interrupted by whisper-shouts.
“Hey, hey there!”
Lillian, the woman who grabbed me earlier, is waving me over with a fanned-out deck of cards. Lillian’s all smiles now, no sign of her recent Soviet electric land mine fears. More important, the table she sits at is next to a window whose grate I’d like to check out, so I join her.
“Hello there. My name’s Lillian,” she says as I sit down at the table. She seems to have no memory of our recent encounter. “Care to join me in a round of hearts?” Lillian proposes as she starts dealing cards. But then she pauses. “I heard you don’t recall a thing about yourself. Suppose you don’t even like hearts?” A distinct possibility. But Lillian must decide it’s worth the risk because she returns to dealing.
“Shouldn’t you be working on a pot holder for Miss Wallace?” I ask her.
“Dr. Sherman said not to worry about going home yet or pot holders. Says there’s other ways to be of use in A-Ward. Besides, card games are on the list,” Lillian says, and points to a sign on the wall that reads: “Miss Wallace’s suggested activities: reading, checkers, cards, mah-jongg, and approved crafts.”
Below it is a second sign: “Ladies, show courtesy for those taking care of you. Never curse. Use your better words and don’t forget your may I’s, pleases, thank yous and yes ma’ams.—Miss Wallace.”
“Quite the respect junkie, Miss Wallace,” I say.
“She was a big shot army nurse in Korea. A major,” Lillian says. “I think she misses all the rules.”
I reach down to quietly pull on the steel window grille next to me. Solidly bolted to the wall. No play. Not promising.
“Plotting your escape so soon?”
I look up, expecting some eagle-eyed nurse has spotted me casing the place, but it’s a patient. She’s in her early twenties, blond and perky in a fluffy pink angora sweater. “Georgina Douglas,” she says, extending her hand to me. “I saw you earlier, fighting your way through Nurse Wallace and her henchmen. Dorothy, is it?”
“Not my name,” I say, ignoring the hand, and she pulls it back, miffed.
“Then what is your name?” she asks.
“Not your problem,” I say.
Lillian taps her arm. “Georgie, she’s got amnesia.”
Georgie looks at me. “So, Not-Dorothy’s feeling a bit confused about where she’s landed? I’ll give you the nutshell version. This is A-Ward, filled with the basically sane and the only slightly insane: your nervous breakdowns, alkies, depressives, manics, degenerates—ladies who want too much or the wrong kind of sex—”
“Is there a wrong kind?” I ask.
Georgie ignores my wisecrack. “We even have some schizophrenics. But mild schizos—not the going-on-about-the-devil-at-all-hours kind. Or the swearing, combative kind,” she says, eyes on me. “Agreeable ones like Lil here.”
Lillian smiles, happy where she’s landed in Georgie’s sanity peck order. “Thanks, Georgie,” she says, then turns to me. “We ladies of A-Ward are the luckiest patients at Hanover.”
“Luckiest?” I ask, eyeing the women doing semicompulsory crafts.
“We’ve got privileges the others don’t,” Lillian says. “Movie night, badminton, ballroom dancing—”
“Sure, that’s all very nice,” Georgie says, “but our biggest privilege—we only get talk therapy, none of Hanover’s ‘state-of-the-art’ treatments.”
“So, why are you here in A-Ward, among the lucky?” I ask her.
“No big mystery. I’m a convalescent. Checked in temporarily for nervous exhaustion. Daddy thought I could use some rest to rebuild my strength.”
“Georgie’s father’s a real big cheese of something or other. Rich and powerful,” Lillian adds.
“We chose Hanover because it’s discreet,” Georgie says, pulling a pill off her pink sweater. “Not like those gossip mill clinics closer to D.C. Plus Daddy happens to know Dr. Sherman, so it was the natural choice.”
Georgie’s eyes are blinking double-time and her smile’s trying a bit too hard.
She’s lying, but the what and why of the lie aren’t clear.
“Come January I’ll be back home,” Georgie says, “rested and refreshed. And do you know why? I follow the rules. Don’t give the staff any trouble.”
“Yeah. You don’t wanna make the doctors or nurses mad, make ’em think you’re difficult,” Lillian says, slowly shaking her head. “Or you’ll end up down-alphabet.”
“Down-alphabet?” I ask.
“Hanover talk,” Georgie explains. “What ward you end up on after the observation period depends on how hard the doctors and nurses think it’ll be to manage you.”
“Meaning?” I ask.
Georgie grabs the cards out of Lillian’s hand, gathers up the rest, then lays one in the center of the table. Taps it. “At Hanover’s center is the administration building—visitors’ room, doctors’ offices, bookkeeping, infirmary, the tower. To its left is the men’s wing, to its right, the women’s, both three stories, jiggering out section by section,” she says as she lays cards on either side of the first in a stepped pattern that forms a jagged V.
“I’m familiar,” I say.
She smiles. “Right, you’ve already toured the grounds,” she says, winking, then taps the two cards flanking the center one. “The first section of each wing holds A-, B-, and C-Wards. All have fairly light security ’cause we give staff the least trouble. Don’t have too many ‘oppositional tendencies’ is how the doctors put it.”
“We’re missing the fewest marbles,” Lillian adds.
“But the further down-alphabet you’re sent,” Georgie says, “the more care and security you’re going to get. And treatments—I’ve heard hydrotherapy, insulin, electroshock. Lil knows firsthand.”
Lillian nods solemnly. “And they don’t just use the treatments to treat.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“If a patient acts up too much, they shock ’em,” Lillian says. “Calms us down real fast.” Lillian’s “electro-mines” she imagined in the hallway earlier—are her ECT experiences filtering down into her delusions?
“Plus the shocks wipe out a patient’s recent memories,” Georgie says. “So they forget ever even being upset.”
“Like shaking an Etch A Sketch,” Lillian says, shivering at the thought. “We tried our best not to be shook.”
Jesus.
Georgie taps a card. “G-Ward, that’s where security tightens and the real chronics start: schizos, psychotics, assorted gorks and catatonics who’ve lost their connection to reality, too difficult—or dangerous—for their families to take care of. Those patients rarely leave Hanover.”
“Some get buried right on the grounds,” Lillian says.
All those numbered graves I saw. Chronics.
Georgie taps the farthest card. “At the end are the violent and disturbed wards. They hardly leave their rooms.” Like that patient shouting her warning to me through the bars as I ran past earlier. “Right now, they’re evaluating you,” Georgie says, eyes leveled on me, “deciding just how much trouble you’ll be. So, I’d be good, Miss Not-Dorothy. Go along to get along, or you’ll find yourself down-alphabet.”
“Or worse,” says Lillian as we watch Georgie sashay away.
“Worse?” I ask but she doesn’t answer, her attention now drawn to something in the room. Something I can’t see. Fear now floods her face, and she grips the table tight.
“What is it, Lillian?”
“It’s coming back,” she says, shaking her head, then looks at me. “I don’t want this…”
“What?”
“My ghost world—all those electro-mines planted out in that cornfield. It’s gonna trap me inside it … like a room with no doors or windows to escape.” She looks away from me. “That sound, that awful blue sound when someone steps on one…”
I put my hand on her shoulder. “Then stay here with me, Lillian,” I say, but she doesn’t seem to hear. Instead she slides down off the chair onto the checkerboard floor and slowly rocks back and forth.