I waited for her to elaborate, wondering if the insane were subject to Kate’s method of letting information flow from the discomfort of silence. Vivienne went blank, as if something had wiped clean her mind. Her eyes rolled to the corners like lazy green marbles.
“Vivienne!” The sound of my voice snapped back her attention. “Please finish your story. Why did they take your baby?”
She began to play with her long hair, gathering it to one side and twisting it into a white swirl that hung down her shoulder. She looked like an elderly mermaid, if ever there was such a creature. “I offended the goddess. I was beautiful, and she was jealous. She told my lover to forsake me and she stole my baby away!”
She was quiet for a moment, but something begin to seethe inside her. She raised her arms and began scratching at the air in front of her. “He is right here, right here with me but he won’t show himself. His world is all around us, I tell you. It is invisible to our eyes and silent to our ears, but it is right here!”
She looked at me with great desperation, and then grabbed my arms. “You can bring him to me! You must call to him and tell him where I am!” She let me go and paddled at the air, each stroke of her old arms more violent. I stood up, moving away from her. I did not think she could hurt me, but the sight of her was so pitiful. “I know you are here!” She screamed loudly, beating at the thin air with her hands.
Hurried footsteps came toward us. The two hall supervisors rushed in, each taking one of Vivienne’s arms. She flailed, trying to get out of their grip. “I want my baby!” she yelled. “What have they done with my baby?”
“You had better leave now, madam,” Mrs. Kranz said to me. Her voice was firm. “Shut the door and wait outside.”
Vivienne’s shawl had fallen off and I could see the old spotted flesh of her arms hanging off the bone. Her head was thrown back and she stared at the ceiling, limp in the arms of the two women, a trickle of tears sliding from the corner of each eye. “Good-bye Vivienne,” I said timidly.
Her head snapped forward and she looked straight at me, fixing her eerie green stare upon me. “They will come for you and they will know you by your eyes.”
Chapter Twelve
When I walked into the room, his eyes swiftly grazed my body, nibbling at every little detail, and then met mine with his signature look of concern. I told him everything that had happened with Vivienne, which he listened to with great focus and patience. “What I do not understand, Mina, is why the experience was so upsetting to you.”
I had not said that it was upsetting, but apparently it was obvious in my demeanor and my voice. “I am a doctor, Mina, a doctor and a friend. Surely you know that you can tell me anything.”
Seduced by the care in his voice, I found myself telling him bits of my own history-that when I was a child, I spoke to invisible people, to animals, and sometimes heard voices, and that my behavior had upset my parents.
“I still have strange dreams, John, dreams that I am an animal of sorts, and these dreams make me get out of bed and wander in my sleep. After these episodes, I sometimes imagine things, lingering images from my dreams. Sometimes I think I am being followed. It worries me. After Vivienne’s outburst, I started to wonder if I was glimpsing myself at her age.”
He listened very carefully to what I had to say. Then he smiled at me as if I were a child confessing some petty crime that her father found endearing. “Dear, impressionable Mina, I did warn you that visiting the patients would be upsetting.”
“I only wanted to help,” I lied. I could not confess that my true motive had been to discover more about Lucy’s death.
“The very idea that you might have anything in common with Vivienne! Let me set your mind at ease. Vivienne is what is known as an erotopath, a sexually preoccupied woman who becomes obsessed with one man, in this case, the lover who she recast in her imagination as the fairy prince.” He grinned at me, waiting for me to smile back. “The erotopath generally becomes an annoying menace to the man, and he rejects her. The rejection drives the woman to nymphomania, which is a disorder in women who have abnormal sexual desires. It is a serious type of uterine hysteria. Do you see how drastically different that is from your innocent childhood fantasies and your dreams?”
I nodded, unable to admit that some of my dreams were not so innocent.
“Vivienne’s family committed her because she had been randomly seducing men, causing them no end of shame, and eventually she had a child out of wedlock. To exonerate herself, she insisted that the father was a supernatural being.”
“You must admit, she spins a good yarn,” I said.
“The typical hysteric develops elaborate, far-fetched romantic histories for herself. Vivienne is not even her real name. Her name is Winifred,” he said. He opened a tall cabinet, lifting a file and glancing at it. “Winifred Collins. Born 1818.” He showed me the name and date before returning the file to the cabinet. “She identifies herself with Vivienne, the mythical sorceress who enchanted the sorcerer Merlin.” Seward smiled wistfully. “A tale to interest a boy once enthralled by Arthurian legend but not much for a head doctor to go on.”
“Poor old dear,” I said.
“Vivienne is fortunate. Her family set up a trust for her care. Many girls like her are thrown out with their babies and have to earn a living on the streets.”
“I am sorry to have disturbed a patient,” I said. “That was not my intent.”
“It was not your fault. The nymphomaniac loves to give vent to passion. I once saw a girl let rats eat her fingers, thinking that her lover was covering them with kisses. Some girls hurt themselves, lacerating their bodies and claiming they don’t feel a thing. It’s a sort of penance for what they have done.”
“Penance?”
“Why, yes, they feel tremendous guilt over their promiscuity. Not all women are as noble and as good as you, Mina.”
Crimson color spread across his cheeks. His eyes softened and his brisk professionalism disappeared, wiped away by something else, something tender. I knew that in that moment of vulnerability, I could extract the information I sought.
“John.” I said his name softly, as if it were itself a question that must be answered. “We must talk about Lucy.”
For what seemed an interminable amount of time, Seward said nothing, but studied my face. Though I remembered Kate’s advice, I still felt compelled to explain myself. “I received a letter from her, written after I had left Whitby. She was excited about her engagement. Not six weeks later she was dead.”
He sat in his chair and cupped his forehead in his hands, shaking his head back and forth as if the memory anguished him. This time, I let silence reign. Finally, he spoke. “There is no polite way to phrase it. Lucy suffered from erotomania-her obsession with Morris Quince. Quince’s rejection drove her to hysteria, after which she could not be convinced of Arthur’s love for her. Once she got it into her head that he had married her for her fortune, she had a complete breakdown. At the very the end, she was not so different from poor Vivienne.”
“It’s hard to believe that of our Lucy,” I said. Yet I had seen the tendencies when I was in Whitby. Loving Morris Quince had made her seem mad and act as a madwoman acts; I had told her so myself.
“Lucy had all the causes that make females prone to hysteria: preoccupation with romance, high spirits, irregular menstruation, a delicate mother. She was also capricious and had abnormally strong sexual desires.” He gestured toward his bookcases. “The symptoms are well documented.”
“But hysteria is surely not fatal,” I said. “Vivienne must be upward of seventy years of age.”
“Lucy starved herself to death,” he said. “Believe me, we tried every treatment. We tried to feed her through the tubes, but she regurgitated. We tried the water cure, which generally settles even the most extreme hysteric, but it only made Lucy worse. When she was on the brink of death, Dr. Von Helsinger even tried to give her blood transfusions to strengthen her.”
