3. Percival

3

Percival

A few minutes after ten, my taxi driver pulled through the gate of Marbella Mental Asylum. Marvin, the gatekeeper, recognized me and waved us through. We traveled down a winding driveway, rows of poplar trees on either side. I rested my head on the back of the seat and focused on the fluttering leaves, anchoring myself to something beautiful before I faced the ugliness that awaited.

The taxi driver glanced back at me, either unable or unwilling to hide the curiosity lurking in his beady eyes. "You know someone here?"

I ignored his question, simply paying him before climbing out of the back seat. Blinking into the bright sunlight, I pulled my hat further down my forehead and made my way toward the main entrance. The grounds were lovely this time of year, with petunias, geraniums, and marigolds blooming in pots near the front door. Since my visit last week, the tight green buds of the hydrangeas had blossomed into balls of purple. Bees flew merrily from flower to flower, their soft buzzing familiar and soothing. This was my sixth summer visiting Marbella. I knew what to expect.

Drawing in a deep, fortifying breath, I gripped the handle of the front door and walked into the white-marbled lobby. Tugging my hat from my head, I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dim light.

When I'd brought Mary here, the nurses had told me predictability and routine were good for the mentally disturbed. If I were to visit her, they advised, it should be the same day and time every week. This suited my personality fine, as I liked order, especially in the midst of the current chaos of my life. Since I'd returned from the war, I'd visited on Saturday mornings.

However, when I'd served as a doctor in the war, months and months passed without anyone coming to see her. Since I'd come home, I'd returned to scheduled visits. Every Saturday morning, I woke early, bathed, dressed, and headed to the train station. It took an hour each way from my home in Manhattan, during which time I read or looked out the window, dreaming of better days.

The extensive grounds were quite beautiful, with perfectly cut grass, planters with lavender—for their calming purposes—and various other shrubs and flowers. Even after six years of weekly visits, the garden's lush beauty always took me aback. How could something so lovely hold so much pain?

The building itself reminded me of a stone castle. Inside had been designed for hosting hundreds of patients. I'd visited enough to know the layout by heart: the admission area, dormitory-like sleeping rooms, a large dayroom for activities, treatment and isolation rooms. They kept the facilities spotless, unlike other asylums I'd visited while trying to find a place for Mary.

This warm summer morning, patients were engaged in various activities on the patio and grounds, including sewing, painting, and doing crafts. Several worked in the vegetable garden. Others sat in the rocking chairs that lined the patio, unable to do much other than stare at the view, because they were constrained in straitjackets. Nurses in starched uniforms kept a close watch, reminding me where we were. Not a beautiful castle but a place for the disturbed and violent.

Including my wife.

"Good morning, Dr. Bancroft." Margery, a middle-aged nurse with a hawkish nose and sweet smile, greeted me.

"Good morning. How is she today?" I asked.

"According to the night nurses, she woke from a bad dream, and they couldn't calm her down without a sedative. However, she's much better this morning. She had her breakfast without any outbursts and now she's dressed and waiting for you in the garden."

"Did you tell her I was visiting today?" I asked, even though I knew the answer.

"Yes, but she didn't understand," Margery said kindly. She knew as well as I that there had not been a time in six years that she'd remembered I was coming. Or that I was her husband.

How could she when she thought she was only sixteen and enrolled at a boarding school?

Some mornings my visits were short, with Mary staring into the distance, completely unengaged, as if I were not there at all. Other times she railed against me, threatening to kill me because of the demons she believed lived inside me.

"How are you feeling today?" I reached for her hand, but she snatched it away, looking at me through alarmed eyes.

To her, I was a stranger. An older man, no less, trying to hold her sixteen-year-old hand.

"I'm quite well, thank you. My mother and father are visiting later."

Her mother and father were dead. Her father had been tragically murdered a month or so before our daughter was born six years ago. Unfortunately, Mary had been with him and held him in her arms as the life drained from his body. Several weeks later, something or someone had spooked her mother's horse during her morning ride. She been thrown from the horse and died from a brain injury.

Weeks after that, Mary had gone into labor with our daughter.

The doctors believed the trauma of her father's murder in addition to the strain of childbirth had been too much for her, and she'd suffered a mental break. She'd had bouts of paranoia and depression during our short marriage but nothing like what was to come. The morning after she gave birth, she'd become disturbed, paranoid, and violent, convinced there were demons living in Mother, me, and baby Clara. I'd thought she would recover and become her old self after she healed from childbirth. But as the days went by and she refused to care for the baby, I began to despair. My mother, a practical and competent woman, had tried everything she could think of to coax Mary into interacting with Clara, but it was of no use. We'd had to bring a wet nurse in to feed the baby. Meanwhile, Mary had deteriorated further. Still, I believed I could take care of her myself.

I'd been wrong.

One night when Clara was two weeks old, we'd been unable to get her to stop crying. Our ancient nanny, who had helped to raise Mary and her brother, was useless after about 9:00 p.m. Thus, Mother and I took turns walking her up and down the hallway in our Manhattan townhome.

By the time we finally had her calmed and tucked safely into her bassinet, I'd tumbled into bed fully clothed and fallen immediately into a deep slumber. A noise had wakened me. I rolled over, thinking it morning, expecting Robert with a tray of coffee. But no, it was still dark outside. Not morning but the middle of the night. However, someone was in my room.

In the dim light, I saw a figure approach. Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I realized it was Mary. Light from the hallway glinted against something silver and shiny in her hands. She had a revolver in her hands, and it was pointed right at my chest. I scrambled to turn on the bedside lamp. Light blinded me for a moment. When I regained my sight, she had not moved, her eyes glazed and dull, as if all the life had been sucked out of her.

"Mary, darling, what are you doing?" I used the most soothing tone of voice I could muster in my current frightened state.

She babbled something nonsensical, pointing the gun at me with shaking hands.

Instinctively, I put my own hands up. "Mary, it's me. Percy. Please, put the gun away."

She mumbled something about the devil, and then she fired a shot that ripped through the muscles of my shoulder, leaving me with a searing, burning pain. I couldn't fully understand what was happening, but I saw her fall to her knees. She tossed the gun aside and started to scream. Robert, my valet, had heard the gunshot from his room downstairs and rushed into my chambers. I think I shouted at him to call the police, but I can't be sure. By then, shock had set in. After that, my memory grew fuzzy and disoriented. Then I lost consciousness.

When I woke, I was in the hospital. The first thing I saw was Mother sitting next to the bed. She told me the surgeon had removed the bullet and I'd continued to improve hour by hour. "We weren't entirely sure you'd make it." She dabbed at her eyes as she told me what had happened after I'd passed out.

Robert had charged into the room and proceeded to kick the gun under a dresser and take hold of my wife. Although by then, he later told me, she was as limp and compliant as a rag doll. Not knowing what else to do, he'd tied her to a chair and called the police. They arrived shortly thereafter to take Mary in to the station.

"She doesn't know what's happened or what she did," Mother said as she patted my hand. "Kept screaming about the devil. And, darling, here's the strangest part. She thinks she's sixteen. She remembers nothing after that."

In the weeks that followed, I recovered from my surgery while negotiating with the police about my wife's care. They'd agreed not to press charges against her, but only if I put her into a mental asylum.

I'd not wanted to. At first, I'd insisted we could look after her ourselves, but the police were opposed to that idea, saying it would not end well. Mother and I had talked at length, hoping to find another solution, but fate forced my hand.

"A psychosis was brought on by the birth of the child and the stress of witnessing her father's violent death," the psychiatrist at Marbella had told me after a thorough evaluation of my wife. "Most of the time, she thinks she's sixteen. Other times she's sure that everyone around her is possessed by demons."

Now, six years later, I walked with Mary across the lawn. She'd shown no improvement in all the time she'd been here. Because she thought of herself as sixteen, she'd convinced herself that she was attending boarding school. Often, she told other patients and nurses that her mother and father were coming to visit. The psychiatrist theorized that she'd reverted to a time in her life when she'd felt safe and well taken care of.

If she became agitated or violent, the staff sedated her with barbiturates. Today, after what sounded like a hard night, she seemed fairly lucid and calm. If one were to observe us without knowing the truth, they would see a young couple enjoying a summer day together. Reality was a much darker tale. One that even today I found hard to understand and accept. She was no longer the woman I'd fallen in love with. Instead, she was forever stuck in her teenage years.

"Shall we sit?" I asked as we approached a bench.

"If it pleases you." Mary sat primly with her hands folded in her lap. She wore a simple linen dress, and the nurses had helped pin her hair into a neat bun at the back of her neck. Slim and petite, she had always been a beauty, with large brown eyes and a round face. She looked at me, clearly wary. "Why are you here?"

"I'm here to visit with you." We often had the same discussion.

"You're too old to be my suitor." She looked down at her hands, cheeks flushed. "Does Father know you're here?"

"No, but I'm a good friend of yours. I like to visit you on Saturdays. Do you remember?"

"Do you know my father?" Mary asked.

"Yes." If I told her he was dead, it would only upset her. I'd learned that mistake early on.

"He wants me to marry well, but I want to marry for love."

We'd been married almost four months when the true nature of her father's business dealings came to light. He was not a businessman as I'd thought, but an illegal crime boss. A dangerous, powerful man. A mobster. In addition to gambling and labor racketeering, Mr. Price controlled whole neighborhoods, expecting payment for protection.

Once I learned the true nature of her father's enterprises, I'd been hurt and angry that she had not told me the truth. However, she was pregnant by then, and my instinct to protect my family grew stronger. "We'll have our own life separate from them," she'd said to me. "I'll tell them to leave us be. I'll stay away."

She had not kept her promise. She'd been with her father when he was killed.

In addition, she'd kept something else from me, an omission that turned out to be worse than her father's illegal activities. Starting around the age of sixteen, she'd had episodes of manic, violent behavior, including hearing voices that were not there, followed by depressive episodes that lasted weeks. These were the precursor of what was to come. However, at the time of our wedding, I'd had no idea. In fact, the truth had been purposely kept from me by her family.

In hindsight, her mother and father had seemed overly fixated on marrying her off, pressuring me to hurry it along if I was serious or to leave her be if I was not. Unbeknownst to me, they'd witnessed her mood swings, impulsiveness, and delusions for years.

I was still in medical school, finishing up my residency, when I'd met her at a party of a mutual acquaintance in September. By Christmas, we were engaged. Not my typical behavior, that was for certain. I was a slow-and-steady type of man. Mary's vivacious, unpredictable personality had attracted me. She'd made everything shinier and more fun. At least, that was the way she appeared to me in those early days, before I understood the depth of her illness. Before I'd identified the tornado headed my way, we were married.

Until then, I hadn't seen her manic episodes followed by periods of extended sadness or depression. I'd been to medical school and learned about people with these ailments, yet I did not know of their existence in Mary during our whirlwind courtship.

Still, I loved her with a passion. I'd told myself we could be happy despite some of her challenging behavior. My job as her husband was to be patient and understanding. Like so many who love someone with all their heart, I convinced myself that my adoration could save her.

When I put her in the asylum, I'd promised myself I would never give up on her, convinced she only needed help from medical professionals. Eventually, I thought, she would get better and be able to come home. It was only the last few years that I'd resigned myself. My wife would not be returning to us. My daughter would grow up without a mother. I was a married man without a wife.

Thank God for my own mother. Without her, I don't know what I would have done.

"If you're not here to court me, why are you here?" Mary asked me, pulling me from my pondering.

"I enjoy your company."

"How strange you are."

If the circumstances were different, I might have found that statement amusing.

We sat in silence for a few moments. Above us from a branch of a tree came the sound of birdsong.

Mary abruptly turned toward me, her eyes seeming almost feverish. "Things happen here at night. I hear them screaming. They're hurting the girls. I don't know why."

"I think they're only looking after them," I said.

"Who are you?" Mary asked, blinking.

"I'm Percival. Percy."

"Percy? That's a name for a boy, not a man."

"My mother calls me that," I said. "And you called me Percy. Before you came here, that is."

"No. No, I wouldn't call you that." She twisted her fingers together. "They scream at night, hoping someone will help them. Did you know that? Are you supposed to help them? Is that why you're here?"

As accustomed as I was to these abrupt segues, they still jarred me. "No, it's not the reason I'm here. I come to see you, that's all."

She watched me, eyes narrowed. "Why do you come here?"

I sighed, not wanting to repeat the whole cycle. But I didn't have to. She abruptly stood, wringing her hands. "You're here to take me away, aren't you? To put me in with the girls who are in trouble." She started screaming obscenities and flailing her arms, as if attacked by a swarm of bees. Other patients turned to look at her. A few others started to scream as well.

I stood, reaching out to try to calm her, even though I knew better. She rushed toward me and pushed her hands into my chest. I'm a large man, which would have made it comical to see such a small woman trying to knock me over if it hadn't all been so sad.

Two of the nurses came running over and tackled her to the grass. One of them held her down while the other poked a needle into her arm. Mary continued to flail for a few more seconds before slumping over. A male orderly came with a stretcher and strapped her down. By this time, her eyes resembled glassy, polished stones. It was as if the life had been snatched from her.

I sat alone on the bench for a period of time—perhaps minutes, perhaps a lifetime—thinking about my life. It was impossible not to think, during moments like this, how my middle had been carved out, leaving me like a hollowed-out tree. Although I was grateful for my mother and daughter, I continued to yearn for what Mary, and I had once had. It seemed so long ago now, the life I'd taken for granted and assumed would always be mine.

During my time as an army doctor during the war, the reality of her illness had been easier to push aside. I'd been busy, dealing with life and death every day on the front lines. Clara had been home with my mother, so I could rest easy knowing my daughter was well taken care of. My wife, on the other hand, had been locked away inside this place without any visitors.

Now that I was home, I would do my best to make up for the years I'd been away. Even though my Saturday visits took their toll on my spirits, at least I hadn't abandoned her here in this lonely place like so many of the other patients.