A Story for the Season
On the highway toward the newspaper office, the landscape to the south changed for an instant from farm fields to a medieval walled city brooding in the distance under the sky.
Was I dreaming?
I took the next exit and that old-world vision from a moment ago revealed massive Victorian brick buildings looming in a park of trees and courtyards filled with triumphant weeds, trash and silence.
Stone entrance steps lay crumbing to dust below a decaying balustrade. Dead vines were crucified to red bricks. On the first floor, the glass in the windows were long gone, covered with gray plywood, and the windows on higher floors had been smashed jagged by vandals.
Curtains stripped of color by time and the elements moved in the breeze through barred windows.
I spotted words cut in stone over one of the main doors: “Lake of the Woods Asylum.” It wasn’t the cold day, just a week or so before Halloween, which made me shiver. It was the last word that created the instant chill, sparking a memory I unsuccessfully try to hide from, of Colleen when I was five, and she, my sister, was 19.
Along with my aunt, she had raised me after my mother died when I was a year old. My aunt was good, but Colleen was my comfort and solace.
My father told me later that, after the voices only Colleen could hear became louder, and she was often missing from the house in the morning, having walked out only in her night dress, a well-meaning doctor suggested a place where she could get help.
My father listened. She was taken to a place like this, not far from our Long Island town, and where I last saw her, when my father drove the three of us, Colleen silent, something within fortifying her solitude, as she sat with us.
I had never been more frightened.
And it is where she had died in a fire, that killed 10 other patients, a year after she was committed. Just a week before her death, my father had handed me the phone’s handset to speak with her. I had refused. I loved her too much, I was too confused, too frightened to hear her voice coming from, as my father said, “the asylum.” I ran from the room, shouting, “No! No! No!”
There’s not a day passes that I don’t think of my beloved sister. She comes to me in dreams sometimes, silent, her eyes closed. She haunts me. I’ve been lucky. I love and am loved. But my rejection of Colleen has stayed with me like a permanent injury.
I’d been at the Lake of the Woods Journal just a week. Retired, I came up from Long Island to the New England town to fill in for an old newspaper friend who had been put out of commission by a knee replacement.
I was enjoying being back in a newsroom, and who could resist spending time in the dreamy golden days of a northern October, with the town dressed for Halloween. Pumpkins sat on porches, huge spider webs clung from trees, and plywood ghosts haunted lawns.
At the office I asked about the asylum. Liz, a young reporter a year out of journalism school, told me a little about the place and that the complex of enormous, empty buildings was ticketed for the wrecker’s ball.
She had done a story on how teenagers now and then got in and had beer parties. She’d done follow-ups on the unsafe structure, and got no comments from the property owners or the county about securing it.
“There’s an easy way in,” Liz said. She’d take me the following day. We’d share a byline for a story to ignite some official responses.
My intuition about the place was correct when I did some research. Terrible things happened there, as in other huge institutions, until new drugs freed the mentally ill to control their conditions at home through pills rather than being warehoused, where in many cases quacks dispensed “therapies” that caged human beings like animals.
The primitive methods of treatment included restraint devices unchanged since the dark ages, and procedures that drilled holes in skulls, reducing patients to cyphers.
When Liz and I arrived, I followed her to stairs leading down from the courtyard, which seemed to be blocked by plywood. But with a smile, she moved it aside and opened a door at the bottom.
We were in.
She had brought two flashlights, and we needed them in the half light. Stairs led up to a darkened cluster of rooms. Our beams bounced back to us from thick dust and fell on a solid oak chair with leather straps for arms and necks, a hole in the seat for a bucket below. In another room near an abandoned gurney with a stained cover were torn notebooks and beer cans.
“High school,” Liz said. “Homework and beer.”
She started sneezing, eyes running, and catching her breath, said, “Oh, God, my allergies.”
I was weeping, too, but not from the dust. Why was I punishing myself?
At the end of a hallway, we came to what had once been a reception area, with broken furniture. On a falling-apart desk was an old rotary-style phone with its cord dangling, torn from the wall.
In the next room, Liz’s sneezes wouldn’t stop, and now she was coughing. “I’ve got to go,” she gasped. I told her I’d see her outside; I wanted to make some notes. I heard her sneezing her way down the steps and the door closing.
In the silence, in the half-dark, I scribbled in my notebook. And then was struck breathless by a sudden sound. I willed myself not to hear it, but the ringing of a phone continued.
With the powerlessness of a dreamer to change the dream, I followed my feet back into the dim, devastated reception area. All I could see was the old, disconnected phone, ringing louder at every shaky step I took. Unlike years ago, when I refused to hear a voice, I took up the handset …
Liz was standing in the windy courtyard, a bright presence amid the trash and weeds. “You’re smiling,” she said, a bit astonished, and put her hand on my arm. “Are you O.K.?” “Yes,” I said, covering her hand with mine. “Yes. All good.”
