Gloria Whelan
The Locked Garden
To all those who worked
to preserve Building 50
of the Traverse City State Hospital,
and to find for it a new and different life
Contents
One
We were standing on the front porch as our belongings…
Two
On the first night in our new room we discovered…
Three
In our eagerness to escape Aunt Maude, Carlie and I…
Four
We had been at the asylum two weeks when an…
Five
Returning home from our supper with the Thurstons, I ran…
Six
Without Aunt Maude the house felt light, as if it…
Seven
Sooner than we expected, Aunt Maude returned. Papa, Eleanor, Carlie,…
Eight
The next morning Carlie refused her breakfast. Aunt Maude looked…
Nine
Although Carlie was eating again, she had not forgiven Aunt…
Ten
After Aunt Maude left, Mrs. Luth, another patient from the asylum,…
Eleven
Papa didn’t leave for the asylum until after Carlie and…
Twelve
It was Louis who told me where I would find…
Thirteen
The last of the leaves had long since disappeared in…
Author’s Note
About the Author
Other Books by Gloria Whelan
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
We were standing on the front porch as our belongings were carried from the wagon into our new home. Just down the road was the asylum. It was the largest building I had ever seen, spreading across acres of ground and towering over the flat, empty countryside. Its two wings stretched toward you like arms. “Welcoming arms,” Papa said. I wasn’t sure.
The chimneys were shaped like turrets. “It’s a castle,” Carlie said. Carlie was my six-year-old sister, Caroline. Carlie thought the barred windows were to keep in a princess.
“The asylum is for sick people,” Papa explained to Carlie. “It is a hospital for people who have a sickness of the mind or the spirit. They come here to get better. Asylum is from the Greek word ασυλov, meaning ‘sanctuary, a place of shelter.’” Where words were concerned, Papa never missed a chance for a lesson.
Aunt Maude said, “More like a dungeon if you ask me.” Aunt Maude saw only the gloomy side of things. Happiness made her miserable, and joy to Aunt Maude was a sin.
“How can they be happy in there, Papa?” I asked. When I was sad, I liked a good run down a hill.
Papa put an arm around me. “The patients know that they are here to be helped by people like me.” Papa was a well-known psychiatrist. He had written learned papers that had been published in the American Journal of Insanity.
Carlie was still seeing the asylum as a castle. “I think they are waiting for a prince to come and set them free.”
Aunt Maude said, “That’s nonsense, Caroline. I’m sure it isn’t proper for us to be standing out here on the porch for everyone to see. Come inside, girls, and help me put things away.”
Our furniture looked uncomfortable in its strange setting, like a person wearing someone else’s clothes, but our little home was very pleasant. Some houses shut you out the minute you walk through the door. No matter how long you live there, you are always a stranger. This house was friendly and welcoming. There was a fireplace in every room to keep us warm against the northern Michigan winter and a sun porch for the summer. There was a pantry, a kitchen, a parlor, a study, and a bedroom downstairs for Papa and one for Aunt Maude. Carlie and I would share a room up a narrow stairway. Our room was tucked under a sloping roof and had a small window.
Though I thought our new house very pleasant, I was sorry to leave my old home in the city, worried that I might leave behind my happy memories of Mama. I hated having Aunt Maude mix her memories of Mama in with mine, for they all seemed to be of Mama’s illness and death.
While Carlie hunted for her dolls, Papa looked for his books, and I checked to be sure my journal was wrapped inside my long underwear, where I had hidden it. Aunt Maude reached into a box and held up a dress of Mama’s. It was white cotton printed with blue flowers, and I remember Mama wearing it summer afternoons. When we gave her things to the church, for poor people, Aunt Maude had insisted on keeping some of them. “I remember when your dear mother wore this,” she said. “How young and happy she looked, and now she is gone.”
At these sad words Carlie burst into tears, and Papa hurried off to the study, shutting the door behind him.
Aunt Maude was my mother’s older sister. “Dear, dependable Maude,” Mama used to say. After Mama’s death from typhoid, Aunt Maude came to live with us. At the sad time of Mama’s death it was natural that Aunt Maude should have black dresses and mournful looks. But two years had passed. Carlie had become used to thinking of Mama in Heaven, where she was sure Mama watched over us and ate suppers that were all desserts. As for me, I had used up my tears and was looking about me and even smiling. Those smiles were ever the occasion of Aunt Maude’s chiding me. As her fingers would trouble the brooch that contained a tiny wreath woven of Mama’s hair, Aunt Maude would say, “How brave you are, Verna, to find a smile in spite of your terrible loss. I wonder how you find the strength to put your dear mama out of your mind, but you can be sure I, for one, will never forget her.” Though I had tried to climb out of my sorrow, after such words as that I would fall back and have to begin my struggle all over again.
I had hoped in our new home things would be more cheerful, but here was Carlie in tears and Papa behind a closed door. I blamed Aunt Maude and couldn’t keep myself from saying, “You have made Carlie cry.”
“Nonsense,” Aunt Maude said. “You are very rude, Verna. Caroline is just thinking of your mama. Come to Aunt Maude, my dear.” She drew Carlie to her and soothed her with a peppermint drop. It was very wicked of me, but sometimes I thought Aunt Maude made Carlie cry just so she could comfort her.
I could see the asylum through the window, and I wondered if people there felt as miserable as I did, for nothing was turning out as I hoped. When Papa was offered the opportunity to come to the asylum, he asked Carlie and me if we minded moving to a new home. “These last two years have been unhappy ones,” he said. “Let us make a new start.”
Carlie said she would go if she could bring her clothespin dolls and her stuffed rabbit, Promise. Promise got its name when Carlie begged for a pet and Papa gave her a stuffed rabbit, promising that when she was old enough to care for it, she might have a real one. For myself, I thought more about what would remain than what I would take. I hoped that by moving, we might leave Aunt Maude behind, but when I asked, “When will Aunt Maude go back to her own home?” Papa looked startled.
“There will be no going back to her own home, Verna. She will of course go with us. You haven’t forgotten that Aunt Maude has rented out her home.”
So I knew there would be no new start.
Aunt Maude had been against the move. In a voice that whined and scolded all at once, she asked Papa, “Edward, how can you leave the home that you and my poor sister shared? How will you keep her memory in strange surroundings?”
Papa said, “I need no house to remind me of Isabel. She will be with me wherever I go, but this is an opportunity I can’t pass by, Maude. The asylum is as fine a hospital as any in the land. Dr. Thurston, its director, is skeptical of my theories, but he is an open-minded man and will allow me to pursue my research. It is an embarrassment that in this year of 1900, when we have
an airship that can sail through the skies, we can think of no better way to cure diseases of the mind than to shut people up. I am convinced that one day we will find a remedy for such illness in our medicine chest.”
Now we were in our new home, but everything was the same. A hundred times I had resolved to be nicer to Aunt Maude in hopes she would be nicer to me. I knew she would never like me as much as she liked Carlie, but maybe I could get her to like me a little. I lifted a box marked “china” onto the dining room table. “Would you like me to unpack these dishes, Aunt Maude?”
“Put that box down, Verna. That is your mother’s best china, handed down from our own mother. No one handles those dishes except me.”
I thought Aunt Maude’s heart must be like a tiny house with only a very little room inside, just enough for Carlie but not enough for me. When I was younger, I used to play a game with Carlie. We would go for a walk and then pretend we were lost, wandering up and down the street, looking for our house, making believe it wasn’t there. We would frighten ourselves and cry until one of us tired of the game and we ran home. I felt lost now, but this time it was no game, and there was no familiar home to run to.
TWO
On the first night in our new room we discovered that there was a poplar tree outside our window. Its noisy leaves kept Carlie awake. “Why is the tree angry?” she asked, and climbed into bed with me.
But the next morning was bright and fine, and the soft chatter of the leaves seemed friendly, not angry. We had moved to the asylum in June, after our school term was over, so we were soon outside in the sunny weather. Aunt Maude worried when we were out of the house. She appealed to Papa. “Surely it is dangerous for the girls to wander around the grounds of the asylum, Edward. A patient might do them harm.”
Papa was reading a journal. I knew he hated to be talked at when reading. Any answer at such a time would be quick, cross work. He looked up and said, “Maude, that is nonsense. They are perfectly safe here, and fresh air is good for the girls. I would not be surprised to find a little healthy activity to be of benefit to you as well. You would not have so many great concerns over small matters.” With that Papa escaped to his office to work on his book.
After Mama died, he began to write a book about his ideas for curing people in asylums. It was to be called The Closed Mind. Papa would shut himself into his study and work away night after night, so Carlie and I called the book The Closed Door. I believe that when Papa is writing, he doesn’t think so much about Mama. Words are Papa’s medicine. When Mama was alive, Papa used to spend time with us in the evenings. He told us stories about when he was a boy. His papa worked as a printer for a newspaper. Papa would help his father make words with hundreds of pieces of wooden type. He grew to love words. He gives Carlie and me a penny for every new word we bring to him.
Now Papa was back behind the closed door, and Carlie and I were left on our own. But there was so much to explore that Carlie and I didn’t mind. Since we had always lived in a city, the countryside around the asylum appeared vast and empty, but the more we explored, the faster it filled up. The asylum stood in the midst of trees and shrubs. Carlie and I could hide from Aunt Maude in the tangles of shrubs and up in the trees. In the city it had been hard to disappear, because everything belonged to someone who didn’t want you there. But here we could hide for hours.
Many of the trees were newly planted, so the asylum appeared to stretch even higher over everything. It was a small kingdom. Gathered about the large building was a little cluster of houses, like children about their father. Beyond the asylum were its barns and silos and fields. The word silo got me a penny from Papa. At the far edge of the fields was a small lake, but we had been warned against going there.
I knew little of trees and plants. Among the familiar birches and maples we saw many strangers with oddly shaped trunks and puzzling leaves. There were flower beds everywhere: cheerful red geraniums; flocks of daisies; peonies whose pink petals crawled with ants, spoiling their prettiness. Though I warned Carlie that it was forbidden, she couldn’t resist snatching at a flower here or there, so she always arrived home clutching a ragged bouquet.
One day, we discovered a garden tucked away behind the asylum, with a high iron fence all around it and a locked gate. We pressed our faces against the bars of the fence, feeling their cold hardness on our skin. Inside was a fountain making a faint rippling sound as water spilled over into a stone basin. I wondered who was allowed into the garden and how the flowers and trees felt shut up all by themselves.
Often in our explorations we came upon patients strolling about the grounds or making their way to the barns and fields where they worked. At first we were wary of them, keeping out of their way, but we soon saw that they were much like anyone else. Carlie, who could not let strangers pass by without making their acquaintance, was soon calling many of the patients by name. There were nearly a thousand, some of whom, Papa said, were not well enough to walk freely outside. When Carlie and I looked up, we saw faces at the barred windows, kings and queens imprisoned in their castle.
We were assigned a maid, Eleanor Miller, to care for us. When Aunt Maude learned that Eleanor was a patient from the asylum, she was horrified. “A madwoman in our house! Never.”
Papa explained, “It is the custom, Maude, for patients who are making a recovery to assume some work responsibilities. In addition to helping to pay for their costs, they gain experience that will assist them in finding employment when they are discharged from the asylum. Work is natural to man and is an important part of the patients’ treatment.”
Aunt Maude was not calmed. “We will awaken with our throats slit.”
A little shiver went through me, but Papa only smiled and said, “If our throats are slit, I think we will not bother to awaken. I have seen Eleanor’s history. She has been suffering depression and is coming out of it nicely. She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Eleanor arrived as Carlie and I were finishing breakfast. Papa was already at the hospital. Eleanor did not look as though she could do anyone harm. She was young and slim, even a little bony. Her hair was so fair that it was nearly silver, and so fine that though Eleanor had knotted it and stuck it in place with many pins, strands and wisps escaped, making her head look surrounded with a silver halo. Her best feature was her eyes, bright blue, under pale lashes. Her worst feature was her hands, red and chafed.
When she saw me looking at them, she hid them behind her back. “Farm girl hands,” she said. “I’m used to scrubbing and cleaning.” She turned to Aunt Maude. “I’m not afraid of work. Just tell me what I must do.”
“There will be plenty to do,” Aunt Maude said. “I only hope you know how to handle nice things. I don’t suppose you were used to them at the farm.”
“My mama has a bowl, all cut glass,” Eleanor said. “With the sun on it, it shines like a diamond.”
“We don’t have time to listen to what your mother may have,” Aunt Maude said. “The kitchen floor needs a good scrubbing.”
Eleanor hurried to fill a pail and went to work, humming to herself until Aunt Maude said, “There is no need to make that noise,” but after watching how hard and cheerfully Eleanor worked all day, Aunt Maude had to admit to Papa that evening that Eleanor “had possibilities.”
Much to Aunt Maude’s irritation, Carlie took to following Eleanor about all day like a little puppy. When Carlie learned that she could speak German, she begged Eleanor for German words. Eleanor taught her Haus, Brot, Schwester for “house,” “bread,” and “sister.” Carlie ran to Papa with the words and got three pennies.
At first I didn’t pay much attention to Eleanor, but one day we both were out in the backyard, Eleanor beating dust out of the rugs and I sitting in the shade of an apple tree, reading a book. I put my book down and asked Eleanor, “Do you like coming here every day instead of being at the asylum?” I was curious about Eleanor. Even though she was a patient, she didn’t seem all that different from me.
“Oh, yes.
It’s dull there without much to do, and it’s bad for my melancholia when I’m shut up.”
“What does melancholia mean?” It sounded more like something you ate than a disease. I repeated the word to myself, thinking I could get a penny from Papa for it.
“The doctor says it’s a kind of sadness,” Eleanor said. “It’s like a tune that stays in your head, and you can’t get rid of it.”
When I asked her why she was sad, Eleanor only shook her head. “I keep my sadness to myself,” she said. “There is no need to make you sad as well.”
I knew exactly what she meant, for Mama’s death was like that for me. When Carlie thought of Mama and missed her, she cried and let everyone know what she was feeling, but when I thought of Mama, I just wilted like a flower kept out of water and didn’t let anyone know how I felt. I decided Eleanor and I were alike, and after that, I knew I had someone I could talk with as I used to talk with Mama—and couldn’t talk with Aunt Maude.
The first chance I had to be alone with Papa, I begged him, “Send Aunt Maude away, Papa. I’m twelve now and I can take care of Carlie, and Eleanor will take care of the house.”
“Verna, I’m ashamed of you. You should be grateful to your aunt for all she is doing for us. Of course I won’t send her away. Eleanor is not entirely well and can’t manage both you girls and the house.”
“Not entirely well,” Papa had said. But Eleanor, who was cheerful and, in spite of Aunt Maude’s complaints, went about her work singing to herself, did not seem ill to me. I thought how pleasant it would be to have Eleanor instead of Aunt Maude to care for us. When I saw that Papa would not send Aunt Maude away, I resolved to find a way to make her leave, giving no thought to what my scheming might mean for Eleanor or Aunt Maude. I thought only of what I wanted.