THE BENEVOLENT SOCIETY by Sarah Cornwell
It is April, and the first long rain has turned the streets of Brookford to mud. The wheels of the prison’s mule cart cut two deep grooves into the Crosses’ private lane, and into these rushes the town’s gray wastewater, forming tributaries that stretch like filthy fingers toward the house. These are the observations of Becky Cross, who stands before the door to her empty stable apartment, bunching her sopping hems to her ankles, though there is no way to ward off this kind of weather.
Beside her stand the other ladies of the benevolent society, smiling brightly, bundled in their cloaks and mufflers – an absurd welcome party. Becky’s husband, Will, could not come home early from the foundry, and more than anything she wishes he were here to stand beside her. Boys chase the cart down the lane, mucking up their boots, trying to get a good look at Becky’s new ward.
Atop the cart, the madwoman sways. Her hair is loose and dark and her skin a bone white, a white that has never seen the sun. Becky finds her even stranger by daylight than she seemed in the dank prison basement. The cart stops before the stable and the men from the prison lift her down, her knobby ankles searching wildly for a foothold, her hands bound behind her back. They have dressed her in cloth slippers and a white, waistless shift that fills like a sail as they pull her forward, and she slits her dark eyes against the wind. Helen and Ruth move forward to help her down, but the men wave them off.
“I wouldn’t touch her, ma’am,” says one.
“Nonsense,” says Helen, laughing. “Madness is not contagious.” She takes the madwoman’s hand, which hangs like a wet white glove, and squeezes it. The madwoman does not register this, or anything. Her eyes are dull and do not focus. Becky opens the door to the stable apartment and stands behind it, thinking of herself wishfully as a shadow on the wall, of which nothing is required. For she is not like the charitable ladies who moo at her side. She does not see what they see: a lost soul, an opportunity. Becky sees the devil coming for her, aided by the weak and the unwary. She sees ruin, barely disguised, stepping from the cart into the lamplit room of her soul.
* * *
A week earlier, there was not yet a madwoman. There was only Helen and her mimetic zeal for Dorothea Dix, and her insistence that the Brookford Ladies’ Society for Benevolence and Charitable Works do their part in Miss Dix’s crusade on behalf of the insane poor. And so, on a dreary Saturday, the ladies of the benevolent society picked their way down the prison lane. To the girls who paused in the street to watch, mindless of their soaked packages and their errand lists, to the half-fitted gentlemen pressing their faces to the window of the tailor shop, they looked in their bunched skirts and cloaks like five black ducks, waddling prim toward the prison gate. The last banks of snow wasted in the shadows of buildings. The superintendent himself, a tall man in a gray winter suit, unlocked the gate and hurried the ladies inside.
There were only four chairs in the prison’s parlor, so Becky stood. Becky is the youngest and the least willing member of the benevolent society. She would like to spend these Saturdays out riding or walking, alone or with Will, but it is important to him that she maintain his family’s stature in Brookford and so she endures this dull female company. Ginny is the nearest thing to a friend Becky has, but her allegiance is insubstantial and seems apt to shift without warning. There is also Anne, childless at forty-two but very rich, and pretty, credulous Ruth, who keeps the books. And there is Helen, the worst of them. Helen is the mother of three secretive children, nearly grown, who have no use for her. Becky feels a contempt for Helen that you can only feel for people more advanced in life, whose errors you are sure you will never make.
* * *
They all murmured graciously, accepting oversugared tea in white china cups from the superintendent. He bowed his head as he set the empty tea tray on a table. Becky could see that he had made himself nice for them; he had combed his coarse dun hair flat across his head, and two of the buttons on his vest seemed newly sewn by an unpracticed hand, perhaps his own, in a thread several shades too light. He was probably afraid of Helen and her obvious intentions – indeed, of all the ladies – and this seemed inappropriate to Becky, and made her feel ashamed.
“How many insane do you keep here?” asked Helen.
“Only two. Madwomen, both.”
“And why are these here, and the others in the poorhouse?”
“These,” he said, “are the incurables.”
It was more than two months since Dix’s memorial on the mistreatment of the insane poor was presented to the state legislature, and still, all across Massachusetts, outraged wardens and almshouse matrons were misspelling their vitriol in the local papers. The inmate in question was not kept naked in his open-air pen, the warden insisted; he had merely on the occasion in question torn his clothes off, himself! The woman Miss Dix describes as beseeching Jesus for mercy does, on most occasions, ask the same favors of a darker lord! Miss Dix is a talented writer of fictions, snarled her opponents. They are afraid, preached Helen, because the state legislature has been moved to action by the sympathetic nature of woman: purely as response to Miss Dix’s intelligence, they have passed a bill to expand the facilities of the state asylum at Worcester. We must all rise to this call! And Helen actually did rise, subtly, in her perch on her horrible overstuffed sofa.
* * *
The superintendent led the ladies down a turning wooden stair, the layers of limestone sediment in the walls crumbling to the touch. At the end of a long, dim corridor, they came to a double-door, and passed through into the prison’s laundry. There was a broad hearth for the heating of cauldrons, in one of which a blister-fingered laundress stirred a soup of sheets.
In the next room were two women penned in a structure much like those Dix described in her memorial: a lattice of wood rising to the ceiling, and forming a square cage. There was no stove, and it struck Becky that the warmth she felt now sourced from the hearth in the contiguous room; at night, or on days when laundry was not done, this room must be very cold. One of the madwomen was blonde, and one dark-haired. The blonde jumped up, shrieking, as the ladies appeared. The dark-haired sat silently on the ground, her chin on her knees, rocking back and forth. They were both dressed in men’s clothing: torn vests and trousers and oversized collared shirts. “They cannot tell the difference,” the superintendent said, before questions of propriety could be raised.
Both women were fixed to the stone floor of their enclosure by irons fitted to their ankles. The superintendent squinted at the irons and frowned. “Hello!” said Helen to the madwomen. Becky watched the superintendent fall back to convene with the laundress. He spoke sternly and she gestured to her fresh laundry, as if in excuse.
“We are here to make sure you are comfortably kept,” said Ruth, slowly and distinctly as one speaks to an idiot. “Are you comfortably kept?”
The blonde madwoman pressed her face to the bars, puffed out a disconsolate breath, and yelled, “Legs like an oyster! Cunt like a peach!”
Becky edged to the back of the group to shelter behind Anne’s broad, frilled shoulder. Whatever Helen said, everybody knew that caution was best when dealing with disease. Helen approached the blonde madwoman brazenly and stopped just shy of her range of grasp.
“Do you have a family, dear?” asked Helen. “Is there someone you’d like to reach?” The blonde licked her lips and hung back from the bars, smiling like a wicked child. As Helen and Ruth posed question after question to no response, Becky’s thoughts detached and drifted featherlike from one thing to the next: from the damp cling of her dress to the rain and the maybe fullness of the chamber pots she had placed at five points in the kitchen and in Will’s study to catch rain, to her hands as she raised them to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear; to a sudden panic at the dark half-moons of dirt beneath her fingernails. God forbid the others should notice.
As the superintendent returned, Ginny asked him, “How long did you say she has been here, the dark-haired one?” The dark-haired madwoman’s shirt had been rolled up to the elbows, and her arms were no thicker at the elbow than at the wrist. Her feet were bare, and her toenails long and split; things a man might not tend to, in making a woman look right, thought Becky. Her face, so shielded from the elements and from the pleasanter ravages of lived life, could have been any age.
“Eight years,” said the superintendent, and Ruth clucked in her throat. “Report truly, ladies. With the state’s permission, I will happily release these lunatics.”
“It is not a matter of release,” hissed Helen, “but of decent moral treatment. I have a cousin who attends at the Worcester asylum, where they are making great advancements with their traitement morale. The lunatics there do garden work, read the Bible, and even dance and sing.”
The superintendent drew himself up and eyed Helen sadly, as if calculating how plainly to speak to her on a subject about which he felt he knew a great deal more. “With all respect, madam, these are minds sunk far from reason. They know no morality, no more than a dog or a cat knows.”
“I assure you, sir, these are human souls who suffer.”
“Right,” he said. He turned to the pen. “And where is the evidence of those souls? Where are those suffering souls when this one” – and he indicated the blonde – “threatens murder and screams smut, and this one” – the dark – “gnaws through wood with her teeth like a rat, to escape from food and care?”
Helen opened her mouth to respond, but just then, the dark-haired madwoman stood up. She walked as far forward as her shackles would allow, and, unfolded, she resembled a shy, long-haired boy in her vest and trousers. Her face remained perfectly expressionless, yet her eyes seemed all of a sudden to focus, and to move intently from each face to the next. She swayed on her heels, forward and back, like a sapling in wind. She put a tremulous hand to her breast.
* * *
On the walk home, Helen was silent as the others chattered. The rain was gentle on their backs; the world seemed friendlier than they remembered. Only when they had reached Ruth’s house, and Ruth was about to turn up her walk, did Helen speak her mind.
“We must extract that poor woman.”
Everyone stilled. Now that it had been said, it seemed a matter of course. Becky felt a sinking in her gut. They all felt it: how could they deny a responsibility that they had fairly requested? The dark-haired madwoman stood up for her soul. In laying her hand upon her breast and fixing them with that look of piercing consciousness, it seemed she had offered them the custody of her heart. And what Christian woman among them could refuse such an offer?
* * *
At the next meeting of the society, Helen unveiled a draft of her memorial for the Herald, copyedited strenuously by Ruth. The memorial was heavy with woe, and, scanning it, Becky could fairly hear the clucks and groans it would receive as it was passed around Brookford parlors and dining tables. Helen misunderstood the strengths of Dix’s style, for here, no reasoned argument lay submerged beneath the reportage. Here was all pathos and no policy.
Next, Helen unveiled her plan. “I have written to my cousin at Worcester to see if he can find a room for our own poor Brookford madwoman.” The ladies applauded. “He will let us know presently. In the meantime, though, we cannot leave her in that awful place. Becky,” said Helen, holding out a plate of cakes, “isn’t it true that you’ve let your stableman go?”
Becky nodded. Of course Helen knew these things. Of course.
“So you’ve a vacant apartment.”
Everyone breathed in sharply, understanding. Anne beamed. “Oh, Becky, would it be a terrible imposition?”
“It is on the second storey,” Ruth pointed out. “And don’t the windows have bolts?”
Becky thought of the little apartment over the stable: its musty hay scent, the broken leather harness straps hanging from a stud by the door, the sad white sheets she had laundered and put back on the iron bed, though the stableman had gone. “They do.”
“I imagine everything is quite secure in your house, Becky. Cross Iron locks on every door!” Helen said. “And I think you do have the time, these days, don’t you?”
* * *
The men from the prison escort the madwoman up the narrow staircase to Becky’s stable apartment, one before and one behind her. Her muddied slippers make a scuffing sound on each step. Becky follows them up. “This is good?” one of the men asks, flicking the iron turnbolt on the outside of the apartment door.
“Oh, yes,” says Becky. “It is William’s own.” She watches the men glance around the shabby rooms – a front room with chair, table, armoire, and stove, and a back room containing only a bed – and unknot the madwoman’s wrists. The madwoman stumbles forward and moves along the wall, just, thinks Becky, as a cat will investigate the perimeter of an unfamiliar space. There are four bolted windows in each room, and behind the bed, a low square locked door that leads to the hayloft. The men tip their hats and leave, and Becky watches the madwoman, who has made one entire circuit of the apartment, sit down on the bed and run her fingers back and forth along the tasseled edge of the coverlet as the clip-clop of the mules’ hooves recedes. Who knows what she might do, what fierce impulses might be buried beneath that eerie calm? Becky lights the stove and retreats quickly to the house.
Will is even later than expected, and Becky busies herself with chores, looking out now and then as the light fails, to see the madwoman’s shadow moving back and forth through the flickering square windows of the apartment. Worried that her digestive faculties might have declined on the prison diet, Becky orders soft foods for dinner: boiled potatoes and chopped meat. The cook is curious to catch a glimpse of the new charge, and so Becky gladly sends her to deliver the meal. Becky looks through her dresses for the oldest, and lays it out on her bed.
Now that the maids are gone, it is only for Becky to haul the pots, brimming with rain, one by one, from beneath the leaky spots in the roof to the kitchen door, and heave the water out into the bushes. She replaces each, and, unsure of what to use to absorb the overflow, ransacks the linen closet. The scraps from the ragbag only cover half the floor, so she throws down wool blankets, but as she watches them darken she realizes that as long as this weather keeps up, wool will never dry.
The Cross family has lately suffered a decrease of income. Will spends nights over his ledger as if he can stare it into submission, but the money drains invisibly away. Will’s grandfather was a blacksmith. Will’s father, business-minded, built the ironworks and foundry into an operation that now employs over two hundred men, and died just in time to see the flowering of his profit. The Cross Ironworks lifted Brookford out of obscurity; no longer a hamlet like any other, Brookford became an iron town.
Will inherited his grandfather’s set of skills: the wrong set. The current slump is only the first in a series Becky has known to expect since the first year of her marriage, when she began to notice Will’s tendencies to fancy: the whittled birds that appeared on all the windowsills, the long reveries, the paper and pen he keeps by the bed, with which to record his dreams. It was this same quality she fell in love with, though she never would have married him had she known. She married for money and never expected love; now love is all she has. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.
The nicest things left are all from Becky’s family: the highboy in the parlor, the roll-top writing desk, the silver. Will is too honorable to borrow, and instead, their comforts dwindle. He has dismissed the stableman and the maids, but kept the cook on. He has sold the chaise and all but one horse. Becky asked no questions through all this, knowing they would feel to him like jabs, but on the day that the horses sold, she raced to the stable and nearly collapsed with relief to see that though he had sold both the big bay quarterhorse and the white, he had kept the roan gelding, the one she loves.
Now, through the rain that seemed to return in measure with the darkness, Becky runs to the stable. She offers her face to the roan, who presses his muzzle to her cheek, who breathes a warm and steady breath. Will has taken down the wooden stall dividers so as not to waste the empty stalls, but the roan crowds in his old corner. Becky works the currycomb across his auburn coat. Now that there is call for it, the horse care she knew as a child has rushed back into her head; she wonders what it has displaced – French, arithmetic, table settings. Becky never dreamed how difficult it would be to take on the upkeep of the Cross house. She resolves to wash the grit from under her fingernails tonight, but it seems hopeless; she will only find more after tomorrow’s chores. When she grows tired she leans against the curve of the roan’s belly and is comforted. She cannot imagine what she will lose next.
* * *
Will comes home at ten o’clock, and they go together to the stable apartment. Will carries wood for the stove. He is enthusiastic about this undertaking; when Becky asked his permission, hoping he might say no, he told her how proud he was of her charity. Now he introduces himself to the madwoman and takes her hand as if she is a fine lady; she fixes on the shiny buttons of his frockcoat. “I hope you’ll be at home here,” he says. He sits respectfully for ten minutes and then they go.
The cook has retired, and Will and Becky eat their dinner cold at the table. The silence lengthens and Becky knows she must turn his thoughts toward her, away from the foundry, or he will fall morose and later lie awake. She describes how the madwoman came forward in the prison basement, hearing the debate over her soul, and is pleased to see Will transported by her account, his beautiful hands resting on the tabletop, his expression intent. He wears a trim, tawny beard, and his eyes are deep-set and serious. He sees only the good in her, and that might be what worries her most.
“She hardly sounds incurable.”
“But how can such a person be cured?” says Becky. “She doesn’t speak. She hardly seems to see.”
Will studies her. “It’s not only in speaking or seeing that we show God our love.”
“Of course.” Becky stops short. She has been married to Will for three years, and still, she can’t find the edges of his religiosity; she trips over them as one trips over a rail marking the boundary of an overgrown garden. He speaks so rarely of God outside of church, she forgets. Like all of Brookford’s best families, the Crosses are Unitarian, and so, of the opinion that it is our capacity for love that brings us into God’s grace, not our capacity for faith. Becky finds this beautiful, and, though she was raised Calvinist, tries her best to agree. Adopting a new religion is like learning a new language: she can think in the new with enough fluency to conduct her daily life, but still, she dreams in the old. She remembers the first time she saw a lunatic as a child: a filthy man raving in a public street, his eyes spidered with red. When Becky tried to look away, her mother leaned down and clutched her chin to make her look, and told her, “That is what becomes of a sinner.”
That night as they make love beneath heavy blankets and on sheets Becky has warmed herself with bricks from the stove, Will pauses, his jaw pressed soft to her temple, and he says, “I’ll have it turned around by fall,” and Becky clings tight to him so that he cannot see her doubting face.
* * *
The first week is eventless. The old blue dress must be taken in and even then, it has a scarecrow drape on the madwoman’s frame. For Becky, routine makes the arrangement feel less strange. She brings meals alternately on a wooden tray and in a basket, replacing the old with the new. When she stays to watch, she observes the madwoman, after a time, go to the table and eat with a startling refinement of manners. For the first few days, Becky does not touch her ward. But soon, those galling details that she noticed in the prison carry her past her revulsion. Stains on her honor, as the mistress of the Cross household. She brings a scissor and trims the madwoman’s toenails; holding her breath, she forces herself to grasp that pallid foot, chill and yielding as a dead fish. The brittle nail flakes before the blade. She brushes and braids the long brown hair and ties it with one of her own ribbons. Afterwards, she washes her hands in scalding water.
Helen visits daily at three o’clock to read out scripture or, every now and then, classical poetry. She sits always in the armchair, and the madwoman stands with her face to the window, or paces slowly from wall to wall, following the grain of the floorboards. Becky sits at the foot of the bed or stands. Beneath them, the roan paws the new hay that Becky has thrown down from the hayloft in the privacy of the wee hours. Becky never invites Helen inside the gutted house; soon this will become conspicuous.
Helen sometimes snaps or stamps her feet, trying to shock the madwoman to attention, but the madwoman hasn’t shown a sign of understanding since she stood up in the prison. Groomed, she looks less wild but sadder, as if she is disappointed with the world. “Oh, you poor thing,” Helen will sigh, and the madwoman will continue about her business, tracing the window frames with her index finger or letting her mouth fall slack and running her tongue over each tooth. Becky finds it satisfying to watch Helen fail. Not like that, thinks Becky. Nobody wants to be pitied.
* * *
The earth is firm enough for riding, finally, and Becky takes the roan on long windy tears through the meadows and forest behind her house, down the alley roads into the German section of town, and around to Main Street, where she slows to chit-chat with people she knows. She feels almost carefree, as she felt in her first year in Brookford, when she was the new town belle, William Cross’ lucky bride. When she is nearly home, in the privacy of the woods, she willows her body backwards to lay her head on the roan’s croup and feel the rhythm of his swaying walk. The leaves overhead are lit to a shifting, brilliant gold.
There is a rustling, and Becky picks herself up in case someone should see her so unstrung. The sun is so brilliant that for a moment, her vision is filtered through a veil of floating optic circles, but she thinks she sees the madwoman in her old blue dress, standing in the high grass. She blinks and when she looks again, there is nothing. She rides hard for home and stables the roan. When she climbs the stairs to check, there is the madwoman, perfectly still, standing with her face to the window.
* * *
The second time it happens, it is evening, and Will has stayed late again at the ironworks; they are filling a large order for stove parts. Becky is sweeping one of the upstairs rooms, empty but for an antique crib – the same room and the same crib that Will slept in as a baby. She had opened the windows earlier to air out the house, but, having forgotten to close them, she is maddened now by the clots of dust that ride updrafts away from her broom and pan. She sweeps, they float away from her. She hates the house, and her hate swells to envelop the whole town, the whole continent. She drops the broom and lets out a shrill scream that is instantly absorbed by the spacious, empty rooms. And then the madwoman appears in the doorway, her braid come apart, twigs in her hair.
Becky gapes for a moment. How could she possibly escape that apartment? And then, how many times has she done it, and why return? What has she seen, wandering through the house at night or peering down as Becky mucks the roan’s stall in men’s work boots? What has she heard? Becky imagines her standing over the bed as she and Will make love and she thinks, well, at least someone knows we are rich in private, and then thinks, what a strange and shameful thought.
Becky marches to the madwoman and takes her limp hand. She leads her out of the house and down the twilight path to the stable, up the stairs, through the door whose deadbolt has not been tampered with or turned, and right to the iron bed. She relights the stove, for even after these warming days, the nights can turn cold. She puts her hands on the madwoman’s shoulders and pushes her down onto the bed. The madwoman does not resist, but grabs for the edge of the coverlet and recommences to stroke the silky tassels. Over the last few weeks, feeding her and grooming her and washing her in a wooden tub, Becky has become familiar with the madwoman’s body; she knows it better than she has known any female body not her own. Becky takes the madwoman’s head by the nape and turns her cheek to the pillow. She rakes her fingers through the sickly fine brown hair until the twigs are gone and the knots worked out, and then she divides the hair in three and works a neat braid.
* * *
Every day at two, Becky makes herself presentable. She dabs scented oil on her neck and she slides a piece of paper beneath her nails to catch the grime. She keeps an eye out for Helen’s tall, bustling figure turning up the path, and she goes out to receive her.
Today, however, she has gone down to the stable ahead of time, as she has forgotten to remove the roan’s night blanket, and worries that he is overheated. She unlatches the wide stable door and sighs; after the last time, she has sworn she will not be taken by surprise. The madwoman is leaned up against the horse, her two hands fisted in his mane. The blanket has been removed, and sits, folded, on the ground. Something in the ceiling, through the bales of hay, catches Becky’s attention: the little hayloft door stands open.
Voices rise from the path. Helen’s voice, and then, answering, Will’s voice. It is Sunday, and Becky thought he would stay in his study from church until supper. She goes to the madwoman and pulls on her fist, but the madwoman doesn’t release the roan’s mane. He snorts and rolls his eyes. Becky tugs on the madwoman’s shoulders. “Come.” But the madwoman clings to the horse like a burr. Becky pinches the madwoman’s bicep and twists. The madwoman opens her mouth in a silent howl, and something glints in the wet dark. Is that a silver tooth? Becky thinks, how amazing that none of her past wardens should have pulled it.
She peers into the madwoman’s mouth, and she sees the shiny thing again: not a tooth, but something else, behind the lower gums. She moves her hand toward the madwoman’s face and the madwoman doesn’t respond, so she darts two fingers between her teeth and down, beneath her tongue, where she feels a long, slim wire. The madwoman bites down. It is all Becky can do not to scream. The pain is terrible, and she pulls back hard – hard enough not only to extract her bleeding fingers, but to draw out the wire as well. It is several inches long, spit-shined to a high gleam, and curved to the U shape of her jaw. The madwoman swallows thickly. The voices are close now.
Becky pockets the wire and pries the madwoman’s hands away from the twining horsehair. It is not hard to overpower her atrophied body, and once removed from the horse, she becomes pliant. Becky sets the madwoman’s hands on the ladder up to the loft and she climbs. Becky follows. They both kneel to scramble through the hayloft door, and Becky pulls it shut behind them. She will have to find the key later to lock it properly. Footsteps on the stair. Becky thinks of how to hide her bitten hand but then it strikes her: she is now inside a purportedly secure, deadbolted apartment. How can she explain this? There is no time to think; she closes herself in the closet just as Will opens the front door.
“She does not respond,” he is saying, “but she makes use of the space, and she seems to enjoy the windows.”
Inside the closet it smells of mold. Clods of dirt from the departed stableman’s boots litter the floor; she must have forgotten to sweep here. She can see through a crack between the boards of the door, but the view is only of blue fabric; the madwoman stands in front of the closet.
“Yes,” says Helen. “I think she is making great progress.” Becky scoffs internally. For what must be about a half-hour, though feels like much longer, Helen reads psalms. Every so often, Will comments thoughtfully. The air in the closet is close and Becky’s back aches from standing still. The madwoman seems not to have moved at all; the view through the crack remains blue. Becky tries to fend off the thought that keeps circling back to her, vulture-like: why is she hiding the madwoman’s behavior at all? Why is she in the closet, and the others in the room?
Finally, there is the creak of Helen standing up. Will’s voice: “I am sure Becky will be sorry to have missed you.”
“Yes,” says Helen. “But since I have the fortune of your company, let me ask you a question that has been weighing on me.” There is a pause. “My son is recently engaged, and plans to settle with his young wife here in Brookford.”
“How nice for you to have them close,” says Will.
“Yes. I wondered, to be quite frank, what your plans might be in regard to this house.” Becky tries to control the volume of her breathing. Plans? “If you plan to sell, Charles is prepared to offer you half again the value. You won’t get a more generous offer.
“I imagine not.”
“We did so love your father.”
“I will consider it.”
Becky feels as if she has fallen down a stair and lies, bruised and angry, at the bottom. Where is his shame? The bolt turns in the door. The footsteps and voices recede. She slumps against the splintery wall of the closet for a long minute.
Then, the closet door opens outward. The madwoman stands with her hand on the knob and looks at Becky. Her pupils contract; her brown eyes grow sharp. Becky feels a sort of nakedness that is not altogether unpleasant. Red-faced and mussed, having hidden and spied, marked as she is for this long sick slide into poverty, her cut fingers bruising now in the shapes of the madwoman’s teeth, she realizes what it is: she feels known.
* * *
Becky sits at her kitchen table with the madwoman’s basket of breakfast, turning the shiny wire over and over in her hand. How is it that the madwoman eats with such table manners? She must have had a mother, once. Is there some respectable woman out there with a portrait of an unrecognizable girl hung over her piano? What must she have done, to be so punished by God? And what, thinks Becky, must I have done?
She slips the wire into the bodice of her dress and she brings the breakfast. The madwoman is sitting on the floor with her chin on her knees, rocking back and forth. Becky sets the basket on the table and waits, but the madwoman doesn’t get up. Becky wishes the madwoman would rise and spit and damn her for withholding her means of freedom; this way Becky damns herself and it is worse.
As the days pass, it grows clearer and clearer to Becky that the madwoman is distressed. She eats little, she rocks, she breathes sometimes in odd chugging rhythms. She stands at the window, knocking her head against the glass. She refuses to sit for Helen’s readings; she moves to the farthest point from Helen and faces the wall. One time, she marches straight to the closet when Helen arrives, and shuts herself inside. Becky is horrified, but Helen doesn’t know what to make of it.
Becky waits for Will to approach her with news of Helen’s offer, but he says nothing. She asks him to please let her know if there is any significant change in their affairs, and he kisses her forehead and says, “My love, of course.”
* * *
On a bright afternoon in May, the benevolent society descends on the madwoman’s apartment to celebrate: a spot at Worcester has opened up, and a carriage will be sent. Helen brings a ginger cake, and Ginny brings her violin. Anne is trailed by a servant bearing extra chairs. The madwoman wants to sit on her bed, but Anne keeps fussing over her, guiding her into the front room, where the party is set up, and she keeps drifting back. Becky notices the madwoman’s energy rise to the level of the commotion – twitching shoulders, quicker steps – though none of the other ladies seem to register it. Becky wears her two fingers bandaged, and tells everyone that she has slammed them in a door. Will stops in to pay his respects, and Becky pretends not to see the look that passes between Helen and him: as if she owns him already.
“What will it be like at Worcester?” asks Ruth, parceling out cake.
“She will have her own room, and the doctors there will treat her as they see fit. She will benefit from the society of other patients.”
Becky tries to imagine it: her madwoman wandering the manicured grounds with a flock of like madwomen, all waltzing expressionlessly to a metronome, or all counting blades of grass while a white-clad attendant reads from improving texts.
“It will be so good for her,” murmurs Anne, dreamily setting a glass of water down too near to the edge of the table. It falls, shattering: water pools, glass catches the light. “Oh!” Anne stands up and waves her hands in consternation. The madwoman moves toward the sparkling shards. Becky feels a fleeting shared pleasure: so many little jewels to be touched and counted.
“Becky, a pan!” says Helen.
“I can send my man,” says Anne, gesturing to the door, outside of which her servant waits on the stairs.
Helen’s expectant gaze is like a bellows aimed at Becky’s heart, heating her ire to a red-hot glow. Anyone who touches her now will burn. “Aren’t you enjoying this,” says Becky, and the whole room stills to listen. “Watching the Crosses fall. Wouldn’t it be a dream for you to order me about. Perhaps I can stay on as your maid in my own house, is that what you have in mind? Becky, a pan!”
The other ladies stare at Becky, who has never said so many words to them in a row. Helen raises her eyebrows. “My dear, I only meant, since this is your house, you might know where to find a pan.”
The madwoman has knelt and bloodied her fingertips touching the glass shards. Ruth grabs her beneath the arms to pull her away and the two struggle weakly.
Now that she has begun, Becky cannot stop her onslaught of spite. It feels in this moment that Helen is the cause of her every sorrow. “And where will you keep the pan, dear Helen, when you are mistress of this house?”
Helen knits her expression up practically. “I will not be mistress of this house. It will be my son’s wife who puts things in their places. I am sorry for you, Becky. I have no doubt you will enjoy Boston.”
“Boston?”
“Your husband tells me it will be Boston.”
The other ladies turn to Becky with looks of pity. The heat rises in Becky’s throat and she can hardly think. This is the worst blow of all; that Will has confided in Helen what he has not yet told Becky herself. So it is done. So it will be Boston, and no doubt a cramped apartment and a job in a shop. Her parents will be ashamed of her. She will never be redeemed. And here is Helen, the font of all pity, with her rosy wrinkling cheeks and her awful ashy hair. Helen, a loveless jealous old bitch – jealous since the day William brought Becky home, jealous of her youth, her wealth, her beauty, her station. There is murder in Becky’s heart.
The madwoman gives up on the glass and rocks back on her heels, away from Ruth. She looks at her bleeding hands. She looks up. She looks at Becky’s face and her eyes grow sharp. Everybody is watching Becky, waiting for her response, so Becky is the only one who sees what happens next.
The madwoman lunges at Helen. Her bony hand snakes out to smack Helen across the jaw and then she is clutching Helen’s throat, throttling her, and Helen is making sputtery puppy yelps. Becky is rooted to the ground; all she can do is watch. Her old blue dress has gone crazy, she thinks, in her shocked half-logic. The madwoman makes a throaty gnashing moan as she presses the air from Helen’s throat. The moment stretches forever in its suddenness and in its horror.
Then, everything moves very quickly.
Becky and Ginny surge forward and grab the madwoman’s shoulders, pry her away from Helen. After she loses contact with Helen’s skin, she is so easy to control that Ginny falls down, expecting more resistance than the madwoman offers. Ruth thunders down the stairs and out into the afternoon, screaming, and soon men come running, leaping over the hedges. Ginny rushes to help Anne tend Helen; they fold her in half, her head between her knees, to help her catch her breath. She wheezes from the belly; her neck is purpling fast. Becky sits the madwoman on the bed, and she feels no fear of her. She feels, rather, like she is the guilty party, though nobody knows her thoughts in the moment before the madwoman lunged at Helen.
Now the men are here, rushing into the apartment, failing to sense that the danger is past, bringing the chaos to a maximum. One holds a leg he has wrenched off one of Anne’s fine chairs and Becky thinks, what a waste.
Will is late in joining, but frantic when he hears what has happened, and sees Helen being carried down the stairs in the fireman’s style by a pair of young men. Anne is doubled over in the grass, trying to breathe through her panic. Only Ginny has stayed upstairs with Becky and the madwoman. It is a strange sight after so much frenzy: the madwoman sitting harmlessly on her bed, Becky and Ginny sitting to either side of her, waiting. Below, the roan fidgets and stamps.
“She’s alright,” Becky tells her husband as he barrels toward them. “She’s alright now.”
“Let her stay,” says Ginny. “Look.” She stands to demonstrate: she pulls Becky away and the madwoman twitches, she guides her back and the madwoman is still.
“Well, she won’t go to Worcester now,” says Will.
Becky looks at her bandaged fingers. They’ll put her back in the prison. That cold cage, that leg-iron. She thinks of Helen’s face and how much she would have liked to have slapped it herself, just before the madwoman flew forward. Her whole life, Becky has tried to be good, but still, she thinks these terrible thoughts, she has these terrible urges. Maybe she is not good. Maybe the devil did not ride in with the madwoman on that cart, but has been residing here, in Becky’s soul, all along. The thought of her madwoman rocking back and forth in that dungeon makes her feel fierce. To hell with everyone. There are other things to be than good.
Becky asks Will to check the locks, and while he is thus engaged, she reaches into her dress and draws out the U-shaped wire, slips it into the madwoman’s palm. The madwoman’s fingers close on it reflexively. She ducks her chin to her chest and pops the metal back into her mouth. Her jaw works side to side as she fits it back in place, and then she is still. She never looks at Becky.
“Come,” says Will, and they leave, turning the deadbolt flush behind them.
“I’d like to ride,” says Becky after a dinner she barely tastes. Will insists on keeping her in sight. He is truly afraid; it has shaken him deeply that his judgment could have put Becky in danger. He watches her groom and saddle her horse, and canter wide circles around the meadow behind the house. He sits on a stump and whittles. When she dismounts and leads the roan back in, she describes a wide arc in front of the stable. At the farthest point, she can look up and see the flickering apartment windows. There, pressed to the glass, is the madwoman’s face. Good. She walks the roan back and forth in front of the windows.
“Becky,” calls Will, “let’s go in.” Becky begs a minute. She mounts the roan slowly, looking toward the window, exhibiting the placement of her foot in the stirrup and the swing of her body up into the saddle. She pretends to brush something out of the roan’s mane, and she dismounts again. She nods up at the madwoman, and the madwoman’s impassive face stares down. Becky walks the roan out of view, into his expanded stall, and he goes right to his accustomed place. She offers him her face and strokes his neck. She stands with him for as long as it would take her to put away his tack, but she leaves him saddled, and closes the stable door. She goes to Will; they go inside and up to bed.
* * *
In the morning, the prison superintendent himself comes with the cart, and half of Brookford gathers to gawk. People peer through the Crosses’ windows into the empty rooms of their house. People crowd the path, children run through the brush alongside to find a good vantage point. But when Will turns the deadbolt to let the superintendent into the apartment, the madwoman is not there. The horse, too: gone.
“I don’t know,” says Becky. “Will checked the locks himself.”
* * *
Becky wonders how God will judge her. She has done good and bad things, and thought good and bad thoughts, and she hopes the equation will come out in the positive. She has no idea if the madwoman will be able to manage on her own, if in her memory there exists a map toward some previous life – that respectable mother, that portrait over the piano – or if she’ll be found tomorrow wandering in the street, and sent right back to that awful cage. Perhaps at Worcester they might have, by some miraculous new method, cured her, but Becky cannot imagine her finding peace in some new locked room. She hopes that she has done a kind thing, but she is not sure. Sin or no, she misses her friend. In her head she names her Jane.
As the days shorten and as Helen’s bruises fade, as Will fights his losing fight, Becky stops going to meetings of any kind. She sees Ginny and sometimes Anne, and they help her put her things in order for the move to Boston. She spends her last months in Brookford in the fields and in the forest, sometimes with Will, but more often, alone. The summer scorches the paths, and the brook is full of small fishes. She walks and walks, but she never sees a soul.
Sarah Cornwell is the author of the novel What I Had Before I Had You (Harper, 2014). Her stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Mid-American Review, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, and The Pushcart Prize XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses.