Chapter 21 Emily #2
Emily always sat with Annie Little now at breakfast, then Eliza, Lizzie, Peggy, and Gertrude at dinner and supper, when Annie sat with another psychiatric inmate who was hesitant about other company.
Emily felt the matrons keeping a closer eye on her lately, surely wondering why she had chosen to befriend one of the Blues.
But so far they’d said nothing. And Annie, it turned out, was a calm and interesting conversationalist now that Emily had gotten her talking.
“No one ever asks me questions,” she’d told Emily, “except medically related ones. I haven’t had a real conversation with anyone in years. Talking to you has made me feel a bit like myself again. Alive.”
She came from a small town, was married at twenty and moved to Toronto when her husband got a job at an architectural firm.
He’d gone to Trinity College and always wanted to return to the city, so they did.
Thinking Annie was settled, her parents had moved to Ottawa when her father was elected to the House of Commons in 1945. He’d been re-elected four times since.
“It sounds like you had a good relationship with your mother,” Emily ventured as she shovelled toast into her mouth. She didn’t want to hurt Annie, but couldn’t help asking the next obvious question. “Do they write?”
Annie fixed her with an expression that was both sad and wry. “No. My mother used to, but having a lunatic daughter isn’t good for my father’s professional reputation, now is it? If anyone found out, he’d be ruined.”
Emily ceased eating, then exhaled heavily, thinking how lucky she was to have the father she did.
She pictured the mischievous smirk on William’s face the night she’d told him about this mission, and how he had fought to support her.
She thought of how, as dusk had settled on their backyard and cigar smoke curled over his head like a question mark, he asked her how she was going to get this story.
Not whether she could; how she would. He had an inherent belief in her abilities, and the thought nearly brought tears to her eyes right there in the dining hall.
Oh, how she missed him. She’d sent one letter so far, in coded language, telling her parents she was all right.
She would send another this week, but would need to leave out the lice infestation or it would never get delivered.
“Have they ever met your son?” Emily asked.
Annie inclined her head. “Mother has, yes. Not Father, I don’t think.”
Emily was becoming enraged by Annie’s continued incarceration, and was already determined to try to advocate for her release—somehow—at the end of her own sentence, even before the article was published, if she could.
Although, if the article had the impact Emily hoped for, it might be enough to at least trigger some sort of official investigation, which might then lead to Annie’s release regardless.
Emily had tried and failed to imagine what it would be like to meet your fifteen-year-old child whom you hadn’t seen since birth.
Equal parts terrifying and elating, surely.
Annie didn’t talk about the future much, though, and Emily understood why.
Strawberries consumed, Emily shook some salt and pepper onto her scrambled egg now in a desperate attempt to coax some flavour out of it.
“It feels a bit different in here now, doesn’t it?
” she said to Annie, raising her voice over the chatter.
The dining hall was notably louder with the addition of the eighteen girls from the shuttered maternity home, who tended to cluster together at a couple of the large round tables.
It must have come as quite a shock, Emily supposed, to find themselves in a prison, but word had spread as fast as the lice that the other maternity homes in the city were full.
Theirs had shut, the sedulous rumour mill reported, because one of the residents had stabbed their headmistress and hanged herself in the foyer.
Apparently the girls were all openly talking about it; one of them had even seen the body.
However, with no access to a newspaper, there was no way for Emily to verify the story.
Still, it seemed likely that it was all true, since the home had shut down suddenly, leaving the expectant girls with nowhere to go.
Only the four nearest their due dates had been removed to the few vacancies available at the other maternity homes around the city. The rest were relegated to the Mercer.
Emily wondered why some girls pregnant out of wedlock were sent to more comfortable maternity homes to begin with, while others, like Vera, were consigned immediately to prison.
Based on the scope of the Female Refuges Act, it might simply have been a matter of how angry and vengeful their parents had become at news of the pregnancy.
Some families reported it to the police as an “incorrigible” offence, while others clamped down on it with a morality-driven vise as they shipped their girls off in secrecy, determined to smother the misdeed with a blanket of discretion.
“Yes,” Annie said now, eyes on the new inmates.
“We’ve been this full before, but not for a while.
I like it better when there’s more people, though.
The Blues don’t stick out quite so much in the crowd.
” She chewed her lower lip. “It used to bother me, seeing the expectant girls. But I had to get used to it if I wanted to be let out of the psych ward for mealtimes.”
Emily nodded sympathetically. “I imagine it’s incredibly difficult, Annie. I’m sorry.”
Annie shrugged. “The medicines help—some of them, anyway. But some of the experimental drugs Dr. Stone’s tried me on have made me feel more insane than I did when I came in.
Others dull the pain. And I guess that’s the point.
Dull us into submission.” Her face twisted in frustration as she tried to cut some beef with the edge of her fork. “Speaking of dull…”
“Here,” Emily said, handing over her knife. Emily glanced up at the table of new girls only to find Matron White staring back at her, green eyes piercing Emily’s like a cold syringe.
Annie followed her gaze. “Did she see you give me that?”
Emily nodded. “Yes. Don’t worry about it.
Just stay calm.” She swallowed the hot little flicker of foreboding.
“Can I ask why you keep taking the medications?” She did her best to appear nonchalant, though she could still feel the matron’s eyes on her.
“If you say you don’t feel unstable anymore, why are you still on them? ”
Annie took a slow sip of her lukewarm tea. They were never served drinks any warmer than body temperature. “Because,” she said to her plate, pushing some mushy beans around, “I can’t very well say no, can I?”
Emily nearly pressed her as to why not, then thought better of it.
She recalled Dr. Stone’s tray full of silver instruments, the cupboards of drugs and the restraints she’d spotted on the hospital bed.
If an inmate refused to comply, the staff had the means to force it.
And the psych cells and washroom were gated off with controlled entry and exit.
“So Stone tries different drugs on you?” Emily asked.
Annie nodded.
“Why you?”
Annie sighed, glanced up at Matron White, who was no longer watching them, sharp eyes on the new girls instead.
“Well, that’s the biggest question of my life. Why me, indeed.”
Emily was quiet a moment, silently composing lines for her article, heart fluttering with mild triumph. Annie was corroborating the claims of experimentation in the Incorrigible note.
“I guess I’m definitely one of the calmer psychiatric inmates,” Annie mused. “I’m afraid of some of the others, honestly. Though I think most of them wouldn’t be as bad as they are if they weren’t stuck in this place.”
“Are they drugged as well?”
“Yes. Sedatives mostly. And nearly all of us have electroshock therapy. It helps some more than others.”
“Does it help you?”
Annie shrugged. “Not especially. Afterward my whole body aches. Sometimes I’m sick. It makes me terribly tired, and more sensitive, I think.” She pauses. “And then when I get emotional, they call me crazy.” She raises her eyebrows at the irony.
Emily’s insides contorted in anger and grief on her friend’s behalf. “And this is still happening today all because fifteen years ago, you had a bout of psychosis? And you’ve felt mentally healthy ever since?”
Annie simply looked at her in confirmation.
Emily swore under her breath as the bell clanged outside the dining hall.
They rose with the swell of chatter and movement, then made their way upstairs to the second floor.
Annie always had to return to the psychiatric wing after meals, and Emily wanted to use the toilet before she hurried back downstairs for chapel.
The two women pulled over at the locked psych wing gates, Emily lingering for a moment as Annie flagged Matron Carnegie on the other side.
Carnegie was a small, round sort of woman with a plain but kind face.
She had pale brows that rarely furrowed in anger and disdain like so many of the other matrons’ did.
She was fairly new to the psychiatric wing, Annie said, and perhaps that accounted for her kindness and compassion.
Just as Matron Carnegie unlocked the gate, a woman about her size but thin as a child and with dirty hair came racing up behind her, eyes wild, lips pulled back in a sort of snarl, like a lion baring its teeth. Emily screamed just as Annie cried, “Rose, no!”
The matron turned in alarm as the madwoman launched herself at the gate and gave it a violent rattle. Her eyes were on Emily. “Get away from Annie!” She shrieked. “Get away! Go away! She’s not yours!”
“Rose—!” Annie protested as Carnegie seized the wild woman and shouted for assistance.
Emily backed away several paces, horrified.
Two more matrons came rushing down the hall and all three struggled to subdue the insane woman.
After a moment of struggle she was dragged away, raving, and eventually her growls dissipated as the solid door of her cell shut behind them.
“Who was that?” Emily gasped, heart flinging itself against her collarbone.
Annie entered the psych wing and shut the gates behind her before responding. “Her name is Rose,” she said. “She’s a friend of mine. Sort of. At least, I think I’m the only friend she’s got.”
“I don’t wonder!”
“Don’t,” Annie implored, and Emily was surprised into silence. “She’s not as insane as she seems. She—” She glanced over her shoulder, but the psych hall was now deserted. “Everyone says she murdered her husband in cold blood. Stabbed him in the back.”
Emily blanched. “Did she?”
“Well…yes. But he’d beaten her senseless for years before that, she says.
The night she killed him, they’d had a terrible fight, and she was all bloodied.
He had a knife, and told her if she didn’t get him first, he was going to kill her.
She says he handed it to her, like a dare, almost. Then he turned his back, so she lunged for him. ”
Emily’s hand came to her mouth.
“She told the court it was in defence, said that after years of him treating her like that, she fully believed he was serious, that he was going to kill her later that night.” She shrugged.
“Apparently, they thought she must have been insane because when the police came to arrest her, she attacked them. Nearly bit off one of their ears, I overheard once, because she couldn’t stand to have another man touch her that night.
And I suppose that must have looked insane, mustn’t it? ”
Emily thought of Peggy, of her similar experience. She’d been in such a state of hysterics when the police arrived that they’d arrested her instead of her husband. Perhaps she, too, couldn’t stand to be touched by any man after all her husband had done to her.
Emily nodded slowly. “I wonder,” she mused, “how things might go differently for women if we were allowed to become police officers. A woman would have understood. She wouldn’t have seemed like another threat, at least.”
Annie’s brows raised. “Goodness…women police officers. That’s quite a thought.” She exhaled. “At any rate, I am sorry about that. I think Rose is just jealous I have another friend.” She blushed, eyes sweeping Emily’s face as though nervous she might disagree with the word.
“Oh,” Emily said. She smiled, then stopped, feeling somehow guilty for expressing pleasure when Rose was evidently so distraught about it. “I can understand that.” And she did, but also hoped Rose wouldn’t come at her like that ever, ever again.
“I’ll talk to her, Emily,” Annie said. “But I should go, as should you. I don’t want you in trouble for being tardy.” She gave a little wave, then turned and walked back down the hall, disappearing beyond her open cell door.
Emily turned reluctantly, heading downstairs for the chapel, her mind fixated on how in the name of God Annie had been incarcerated for the past fifteen years.