Instead I work hard on sorting through Sky’s papers. Although all I really want to do is read Dr. Bennett’s journals I spend the bulk of each day ordering Sky’s journals, making up files in acid-free folders, which I’d asked Sky to order in advance, for manuscripts, drafts of early stories, and correspondence. There are decades’ worth of letters from 1975 to the present, letters to and from her agent, her editor, and her hundreds of fans (she kept carbon copies of her own). I notice, though, that there’s no personal correspondence. No friends. And that all the paperwork—journals and letters—dates from 1975. There’s nothing from her boarding-school or college days, which I suppose makes some sense as far as archiving her professional papers, but since she’s asked me to assist her in writing her memoir I ask her if she has any material from this period.
“The trunk I shipped back from Europe was lost,” Sky explained when I asked her about it. “Which I always took as a sign that I was starting a new life when I came back here. That’s when I started writing. Who needs a past when you have an imagination?”
I thought the answer was a little glib, the kind of aphorism she used to fob off reporters—and I suspected the truth lay in her father’s journals. I’ve organized them chronologically now and bookmarked all the sections that mention E.S. so that I can reread them. I save them for late in the day and read them in the cool of the study on the second floor of the tower.
E.S. still fixated in her delusion that her baby was taken from her because something was wrong with him. She believes she is responsible for the child’s congenital abnormalities. I asked her if she was afraid the child was mentally unfit because of her current mental instability. She laughed and replied, “That’s rather a Catch-22, isn’t it? You think I’m crazy because I think my baby had something wrong with it, but the only sane explanation for my belief involves admitting that I’m crazy.”
I laughed myself over E.’s response. It was clever and obviously the product of an educated woman (at least one who had read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22). But I stopped laughing when I read Dr. Bennett’s next lines.
E.S. is always at great pains to demonstrate her intelligence and education to me but I fear her native craftiness impairs our progress. She is always looking for a way out of our discussions instead of a way into her problems. I have moved our meetings to my home office in the tower in the hope that the more informal setting will make her lower her guard and engaged a private nurse to accompany her to and from the hospital.
I imagine E. as she is being brought up the hill. She’d be wearing the shapeless pajamas and canvas shoes I’ve seen in pictures of the asylum from the seventies, accompanied by a private nurse like a lady-in-waiting, ushered into a medieval-looking tower. She must have felt like a peasant girl being brought before the feudal lord to be punished for stealing a crust of bread. I admire her for maintaining her composure.
Today E. asked me why I didn’t just show her that her baby hadn’t been damaged. I asked how I could do that without producing the child and she responded that I could show her medical records, adoption forms, pictures.
“What makes you think I have those?” I asked. She responded by waving her hands around in the air. “Look!” she cried. “Look at all these books and papers you’ve assembled. You’ve built a fortress of paper to keep the world out!”
I looked at the books and files lining the eight walls of the study—even the door leading to the main house was behind a bookcase. E. was right; Dr. Bennett had erected a fortress of paper. What had he said to that? I looked down at the journal for his response.
I waited until she had calmed down and lowered her arms. “And yet, I invited you in.”
But E. had an answer to that too. “Only as a prisoner.” She picked at her hospital clothes with her fingertips. Her nails are chewed to the quick, her cuticles ragged and bloody.
“And if I let you wear your own clothes?” I asked. “Would you feel less like a prisoner then?”
“A little,” she replied, “and even less if we could meet up above, where at least I could see the sky.”
I conceded to both of her requests. I instructed the matron that she was to have her own clothes to wear—belts and shoelaces excepted. I granted, too, her request to have a bit of red ribbon to tie up her hair, although I made sure it wasn’t long enough to constitute a strangulation risk. I confess I am curious to see what she does with the ribbon. She seems to have an obsession with it.
I thought of the pink ribbon I’d found in the hiding place. Might it have been red once? Had E. put it there? Did it have some connection in her mind with the baby she lost? I remember one of the mothers in the group saying it was an old-fashioned custom to tie a red ribbon on the baby’s crib to ward off the evil eye. Had E. hidden the ribbon in the place she thought her baby was being kept?
I promised E. we would meet on the top floor of the tower from now on. I am hopeful that both concessions will give her a sense of control again and that she won’t be as compelled to hold on to her
