THE WOMEN

As noon approached, people gathered at the Memorial Garden site. The city had erected a large canvas tent and set up rows of folding chairs, wobbly on the uneven ground. The old stone fountain with carved lions’ heads had been repaired and water flowed once again. Many people came from the town, including elected officials and college students, former patients, and former caregivers. Families still mourning their lost members.

Most surprising, every single one of our neighbors from Azalea Court showed up. Donnie and Eric had gone door to door that morning, explaining the importance of the event to our little community and asking people to attend. And they did. Even Aggie and Arnold, who had already started packing their clothing and dishes, their birdhouses and dolls, into cardboard cartons from the supermarket.

Some people came reluctantly. Bea didn’t feel much of a connection to the Court or the people who lived there. In fact, she was already thinking seriously of leaving us. Eric had turned out, sad to say, to be a disappointment. She was tired of introducing him as a landscape artist to her colleagues, which didn’t happen often, but they couldn’t avoid the yearly medical practice party without looking like she was hiding something. She had to accept reality: her husband was just a gardener. Eric sat next to Bea, but he looked everywhere else, as if he also understood their marriage was over. Bea wasn’t the woman he thought she was, the woman he needed her to be. He had insisted that Marc and Morgan attend too, but he allowed Marc to bring his tablet as long as he muted the game of slaughter he couldn’t stop playing. Morgan was happy to come and moved back three rows to sit next to Aggie, who gave Morgan her favorite doll, Cookie, as a gift, along with a grocery bag of clothes. Morgan couldn’t stop smiling.

Aggie divided her attention between Morgan’s excited chatter and the new family, Timothy and Winda and baby Imani, sitting in the row ahead of her. Aggie leaned forward on her folding chair, as if she wanted to say something to them, maybe to apologize. But she couldn’t summon up the courage or maybe she simply didn’t know the right words. Then Imani, held over her father’s shoulder, caught Aggie’s eye, and grinned. Aggie pulled her hoodie across her face, and then back, playing peek-a-boo with the baby. Maybe she wouldn’t insist on moving off Azalea Court right away.

Donnie had helped round up neighbors to attend, but he was terrified of what Evelyn might do or say. Something was changing inside his wife, and he didn’t yet know what it would look like, this new willingness to talk about the past. What had shaken loose her frozen self? What would a thawed Evelyn even look like? Watching his wife talking with the new family as if she had known them her whole life, smiling and cooing at the baby, and touching the woman’s arm, Donnie almost wished she would go back to the old, mildly bitter Evelyn. At least that way he knew who she was.

Jess and Gandalf hadn’t been able to sleep much at all. They had cuddled for hours, whispering, and giggling inappropriately. They looked exhausted but happy now, chatting in the second row with Detective McPhee and her wife.

We filled in the rows of folding chairs facing the portable podium borrowed from the Forbes Library and positioned at the front of the tent. As MC, Jess checked the list of speakers, searching the audience to make sure the necessary people had arrived. Asher sat alone in the front row, all the way on the right, looking through his papers. We all snuck glances at him, wondering what he was thinking, what he would say, how he would react to our plans.

Lexi and Gloria sat at the other end of his row with an empty seat between them. Gloria wore the locket around her neck. Lexi noticed that Gloria kept fingering the small gold heart, and she wondered how her family might change. She wondered how generous she could bring herself to be to this new person in their lives.

Iris waited in the living room of the home next door. She wanted her appearance to be a surprise. To Asher and everyone else.

At twelve sharp, Jess called us to order. One by one, she introduced the speakers, who said the expected things about honoring the lofty aspirations of those who built the state hospital and lamenting how far short of those ideals the reality turned out. The speakers, from mayors to previous superintendents, from former patients to bereft family members, mostly kept to their time limits. It turned out that Rebecca of Rebecca’s Way was still very much alive. She told her story and we all wept. We welcomed her into our hearts as a lost woman who was found.

The spoken words wove a tapestry among us all, a canvas of regret and hope, of suffering and resolve. The town committee offered us the opportunity to plant daffodils on the garden terraces after the program. Over time, they promised, the bulbs would spread, to eventually represent each of our fellow human beings who lived and died in the hospital that once stood in our neighborhood and still haunted us.

When it was time for the keynote address by Dr. Blum, we all stole glances at Evelyn, hoping she would swallow her anger as she had promised. She sat next to Donnie, grasping his hand and a balled-up tissue.

Asher shuffled to the podium and began by recounting, with merciful brevity, the list of treatments employed at the hospital over 135 years of treating patients with mental illness: from gyrating chairs to lobotomy, from cold baths to insulin, from cathartics to bloodletting, from basket-making and farming to electroshock therapy and Thorazine and newer drugs. Then he put down his notes.

“Some of you know that I’ve been writing a book about the treatment of mental illness. I am ninety-four years old and I have been working in this field for my entire adult life. I’ve come to the sad conclusion that we know—that I know—far too little about why mental illness happens, about how to treat it, often even about how to offer comfort.”

“Today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht.” His voice grew frail and thin. “The night of broken glass, over a century ago in Germany. That is important to me because it triggered the journey that took me from the Polish shtetl where I was born to a partisan camp in the forest. Eventually, those events brought me here, to America, to my wife Iris. I carried with me one small valise of clothing and a much larger one that was heavy with deep fears. The fears led to mistakes, and then to covering up my mistakes with lies. I did bad things, hoping that those things would protect my family.”

We all watched him closely, listened to his sentences swollen with tears.

“The past haunts me. Perhaps it haunts us all,” he continued. “Certain events in our history haunt us profoundly, as individuals and as a society. The state hospital that stood right here is part of that history. We are here today to dedicate this garden memorial to help us face our past, in sorrow, shame, gratitude and maybe, someday, joy. Our work as human beings is to do what we can to own our mistakes, to apologize and make reparations, to move forward in life more honestly.”

He paused, looking around the audience, then touched his chest with both hands. “I am sorry.”

He looked around the audience. “If only my Iris was here. If only I could apologize to her in person.”

At that moment, as we had planned, Iris stepped into the tent. It took her a few long seconds to walk with her cane to the podium. Asher looked stunned. She held out her hand to take the microphone from him. She lifted it to her lips and turned to the audience.

“You all heard him, right?”

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “Do you forgive me?”

“Not yet. Not even close.”

When the buzz of voices quieted, Iris spoke.

“I understand that many of you have been searching for me. Thank you. I apologize for the worry and trouble I caused. Nobody made me leave. Nobody kidnapped me. I ran away to figure out what to do about things that happened in the past, things I just learned about. Those awful things my husband mentioned. I can’t make them better, but I can share them with you. Maybe together we can make sure they never happen again.”

Iris paused to gather her courage. “So now, I’d like to tell you about my friend, Harriet. She was a chemist and a teacher. She wanted to make the world a better place. We had dreams of raising our children together and working for peace. Who knows what we might have accomplished? Harriet wasn’t mentally ill, but she ended up a patient in a mental hospital. Our hospital. She died here, in this place where we now live. She was buried in our field. She was my lifelong best friend and she was one of us. This is her story.”