Read an Excerpt
Love in the Asylum
A Novel
Chapter OneThe AsylumAn asylum, Alba believes, is where you are sentwhen you want to die — a sanctuary for the prevention ofsuicide.
Alba's asylum, Abenaki Hospital, sits, elegant as ahotel, atop one hundred acres of land — devoted to farmingin the days when inmates worked for their stay — nowgrown over with fields of wildflowers and the occasionalwooded grove, blue-gray mountains skulking in the distance.To get there you must cross the Manasis River,giving your name to the security guard in the hut thatwaits before the covered bridge. The nearest town isalmost twenty miles down Rural Route 3 — a sleepyMaine village where the residents have the hospital'sphone number on speed dial, for when they spot a suspiciouscharacter on Pleasant Street. Though most of the inmates these days are self-committed, leaving Abenaki is made soinconvenient that, once inside, the majority of patients, out oflethargy or comfort or discouragement, do not think of escaping.Except of course for the drug addicts, for whom special precautions are taken.
Abenaki is an Algonquin word meaning "People of the Dawnland."In the eighteenth century, the land was occupied by a smalltribe of Abenaki Indians, who had managed to save a scrap of theirhomeland by maintaining a neutral position between warringFrench and English colonists, and making themselves useful toboth. There was a tradition — no one knew quite how it started — ofsending white women off to live with these natives: wives, mothersand spinster daughters who had displayed behavior that could notbe explained or cured by local doctors. Women whowept too copiouslyand often; women who walked or screamed in their sleep;women who attacked their husbands with sharp instruments, ordefecated in their own kitchens; women who tried to take their ownlives. The Abenaki were thought to be especially tolerant of theold, the sick and the insane; some believed they had secret, potentdrugs that could cure things white medicine couldn't even diagnose.But mostly the women were sent there because they could be; theIndians took them in and saved the white families from shame andinconvenience. There were stories of husbands who, wracked withguilt, went riding out to see their wives and found them leatherskinnedand toothless, dressed in native clothing, speaking a barbariclanguage, with no memory of their former lives or no desireto return to them. But generally, people did not visit the Abenaki;they were sent there to disappear.
Ultimately, most of the Abenaki men, lured by the promise ofbetter land, became Revolutionary soldiers and were killed in thewar. The women, both Indian and adopted white, died in a massacre in the winter of 1777, the details of which remain a mystery.In the aftermath of the war, the land was bought, despite therumors of spells left behind by grudge-hungry Indians, by a doctorwho had controversial theories about the origins and treatment ofinsanity.
A mental asylum, retreat, center or hospital — depending on thepolitically correct terminology of the day — has existed on theAbenaki land ever since. The name has been changed a number oftimes. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was runby the Catholic Church, it was called Saint Dymphna's Asylum,after the Irish patroness of nervous illness, and resembled a convent,with halls full of stealthy nuns. Nowadays it is one of the mostrenowned and expensive hospitals in New England, and includesadult and adolescent wards, as well as a drug rehab program witha highly publicized success rate. Famous people come here, andpraise the staff in interviews in People magazine; movies have beenfilmed among the half-dozen Georgian buildings, where only aclose-up lens reveals heavy gridiron lining the glass windows.Behind the main buildings are a few log cabins, left over from whenthe hospital housed both staff and patients in a pavilion plan.Though they should be torn down, there are some who feel the outbuildingsgive the place a sense of history — as if those nativewomen are still there, tending pots over a fire. Of course, the cabinswere built long after the Native Americans were gone, but this isconveniently forgotten. The movie directors love them.
No one disputes that the hospital has saved lives, though it hasalso lost a few — in bathrooms, the river, on tree limbs in the woods,and, once, in one of the historical shacks — but these episodes arerare, not to mention hushed up. In 1983, the name of the hospitalwas changed back to Abenaki, partly because of the inspiring translation— the doctors think dawn is a hopeful word — but mostly because it validated a new plaque endowed with the words ESTABLISHED, 1789.
When Alba Elliot was still in high school, she traveled with herfather to San Francisco. They took a boat tour to Alcatraz, andwhen Alba stood in the concrete prison yard and saw the city's skylineacross the water — looking like life held captive and miniaturizedin a confetti-filled dome — she thought immediately ofAbenaki. She'd already been a guest there twice, and rememberedthat, late at night, through certain hospital windows, she could seethe faint glow of real life beyond the borders of that unused cushionof land. Prison, she thought, would be similar to a mental asylum.Not as comfortable, but operating under the same dichotomyof rehabilitation and punishment. A place where you watched yourlife tick by. Alcatraz became her nickname for the hospital, and shealways says it with a biting, almost furious humor, which her fatherrefuses to find amusing.
Alba knows Abenaki's history not because she has been there somany times that the nurses remember her birthday, but because sheread about it in a book she found while organizing the hospital'snew library ...
Love in the Asylum
A Novel. Copyright © by Lisa Carey. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
