folklore, the novel: ch ii: mad woman
This chapter is inspired by “mad woman” off the album folklore by Taylor Swift. It is chapter two of my draft novel based on my concept of what the album would be as a single interconnected story.
chapter i: inspired by the song seven here.
*Trigger warning: Postpartum psychosis, suicidal thoughts, catatonia. Please take care of yourself and skip this chapter if this would be triggering content for you!
“No one likes a mad woman, but you made her like that.”
The Bowery Mansion was something of a mystery to even the highest of St. Louis society. An impressive yet reserved black stone house, it was placed on the most expensive plot of land sold this century in a bustling, promising city. The home’s grand image was designed as an imitation of Rome, the revival style that swept through the town as the money of train and factory systems trickled out into the Midwest. Squat columns, sweeping arches, and gothic lines defined the mansion. The house drew enough attention on its own merit, known by some of the children in the neighborhood as a likely haunted location. Perplexing to the neighbors along Lindell Boulevard with their homes proudly jutting onto the street and facing over the park, the Bowery Mansion was placed far, far back onto its roaming plot, far from any prying neighborly eyes. A long, winding cobblestone path slithered through iron gate and through the grounds, disappearing around the side of the house.
Though seemingly destined by design to appear shrouded and lonely, the Bowery home was once the crown jewel of the young wealthy set. In its luxurious appearance, certainly, but more importantly in the family who owned it. Charles and Dorothea Bowery’s union had once been the wedding of the decade, a couple who had met as teenagers at the Fair had finally come home from expansive, decadent social lives they’d had in the postwar years abroad. It remained a mystery as to what may have brought the couple into hiding, though salacious rumors tried to make sense of what reasons Charles Bowery may have to hide a wife and small daughter away. Like any secret, the more intently one guarded it, the more avidly strangers will seek to uncover it.
Should one of these neighbors ever have been invited in, they would have been surprised at the inside of the estate. While the façade of the house appeared gothic and darkened, the inside was bright and organized. Colorful silks and thick rugs were layered throughout the living room and sitting room, bringing color to anywhere the eye might go. On the walls, textured landscapes and art from all over the globe hung together in an imperfect style that gave the pleasant sense of being at a homey museum.
In the kitchen and hall, the newest style of copper pots and pans hung from the center ceiling, and their cook could be found happily whistling an Irish folk song as she went about her tasks, waiting for the butler, the maid, or the chauffeur to come pay her their usual daily visits. At present, she was alone in the kitchen, kneading freshly picked rosemary and thyme into a puffy dough. Her favorite visitor sat nearby, soon to finish taking her breakfast at the small wooden table awkwardly set against the corner wall.
Winding up and away from the kitchen was the master bedroom, set at the top of a grand marble staircase. Dorothea Bowery pressed her fingertips into her palms as she listened to her husband list through all the meetings and tasks he would be responsible for that day. Draped in a long black silk robe, calmly getting ready for her day like any other wife on the street might do, Mrs. Bowery knew what her husband wanted to see. She knew what performance he wanted her to act out for his reassurance.
The vanity helps her stay contained in their pretend play each morning, the little desk so serious in its carved lines, engraved with her wedded initials at the corner. Small drawers and a rounded mirror contain her collection of cosmetics, ones that the type of woman who would own this desk might like, including shades from Paris and London brought back by her doting spouse. In the open vanity, compacts of rouge, white powders, and coverup bottles all arranged as they might be on a cosmetics counter display. In the side drawer, there are pencils of charcoal eye liner, mascara with fluffy, bristled brushes, and oil papers. Lipsticks, almost universally never worn by her, line a small shelf displayed for her liking.
“I would not expect me home before 6 pm, Dottie, given everything going on. There’s no saying what these layoffs might strike into these men, especially with how things have already been in North St. Louis.”
His words barely got through, so wrapped up was Mrs. Bowery in her own mind, her own suspicions of how this man might actually be spending his time that evening. Perhaps Dorothea would have had more sympathy for him were she more familiar with the world outside of their door. Perhaps this was something Charles should have considered before forbidding his wife to leave their mansion. As it was, she didn’t believe him, and he hadn’t been quite as savvy at reading her expression since she had been put on the medications, and stopped giving his interpretations once he found they were seen as incendiary more than soothing.
Charlie Bowery stepped into his own role, and sought permission to leave his wife with the usual inquiry.
“You’re feeling quite alright this morning, yes? Feeling okay?”
In the beginning, after her hospital stay, he noticed the way he asked his wife to assure him, sought that she, the “disturbed” one, become the carer. As weeks and months wore on, and as their baby daughter depended on him and the wetnurse alone, he stopped noticing. This morning, somehow seven years later, it did not register how much he needed his wife’s habitual reassurance that she would not lose connection to their reality again.
Dorothea, despite how far she might be from who she had once been, always kept close to her promise to care for her husband, in good times and bad, in illness and in health. The bad times had happened to him because of her sickness, so an omission of illness felt like a small mercy to offer the man she loved.
“Yes, dear, I’m feeling well today. I’ll see you once you’re home.”
Mr. Bowery reaches for the edge of his wife’s dressing table, and leans down to lock eyes through her handheld mirror. In the moment, even if just for the briefest second, he remembers it all, and he senses the same dulled edge of fear that he feels every morning he has left his wife for the past seven years. Is it really a lie in a marriage if both partners agree on the omission? Dottie and Charlie both felt silence was their best hope of preventing any recurrence of her long illness.
Dorothea gazed back at her husband in his brown suit, use-worn bag in hand, and felt her face soften as she willed gentleness into herself, a demurring smile creasing her mask. Accepting this usual transaction, Charlie turned on his heel and left for the day, reasonably assured that his wife was, in fact, not insane.
As her husband closed the door, Dorothea felt the effortful mastery of herself slip away. She felt her mouth gape open, her eyelids droop, her back and shoulders arch in on itself. The only movement she made was that of a release to allow her left hand to return to its restless, repetitive motion. She watched listlessly as her hand grasped stupidly at itself, over and over, until she took one of her lipsticks and anchored the movement upon its gilded, twisting barrel. Her thoughts, once racing, now slowed, stammered, stopped. A familiar stupor began to weigh on her, and she felt herself hovering between her body and her mind. An episode, again, as it had been originally in the hospital.
The taper candle at her vanity dripped wax down its edges, spilling over the cool steel plate, extinguishing the flame into its own pool. Earlier that morning, she had heard daughter wake, rise from bed, and skip her way down the stairs to the kitchen, where she would eat breakfast with the cook as she did each day. Her husband, heading down the stairs now, would kiss their daughter’s head, ask the cook what was for dinner, and whistle a tune as he left. Her husband’s keys jangled at the door, and then a few minutes later at the front gate. She would hear Betty pack a lunch with the cook, and head out the door for a day of play in the park, on this long and hot day of summer.
All of this motion, yet Dorothea Bowery sat restless but motionless, her wringing, twitching left hand twisting around and around the lipstick, scarlet oozing from the edges and over her arm. Her mind beating against itself, with a veil of blankness descending on her again.
It was nearly five in the evening when Mrs. Bowery began to stir, whether from rest in her dissociation or strength to emerge from her rigid state. The doctors at the hospital had once called these episodes by a strange name—catatonia.
With effort, she tried to stop the purposeless movements of her hand, and gazing at the cold ginger tea and extinguished candle, she felt herself trapped as though a wind up toy in Betty’s playroom. As she became more aware and more panicked, she had a sense of her re-integration, of being pulled back into the unpleasant sensation of a body in pain. She found her hand still listlessly meaning the same circle, the same golden cylinder of the lipstick. She could not stop it, did not seem to be the one controlling it, and she watched helplessly as she destroyed it, bright burgundy crushing out of the edges of the tube.
Dorothea Bowery knew the reason she and her husband agreed on their daily little lie. Though she had been considered cured at her coming home from the Asylum six years ago, the mercy of her husband was to look away when her eccentricity crossed the line into madness. He also was kind enough to not insist on any more children, and to not speak of any such desire, as the birth of their darling little girl had been the cause of Dorothea’s hysteria. It was not every husband who would make this allowance. It was not every man who would take back a woman who had almost tried to end the life of both herself and her baby. Found wide-eyed and rigid at the top of the Mother and Infant’s Hospital, Dorothea had stood holding baby Betty by the limb nine floors above the ground, her left hand twisting round and round the thin, red ankle.
Her husband was a good man. He had loved her, deeply and intelligently for twenty years before her madness ever appeared. A different sort of man might have left her, left her to deepen into madness at the state asylum, and every day Dorothea was aware of this. Other men, when told that for the unfortunate women who experience birth psychosis never get better, would have stopped visiting. Charles Bowery was a good man, and such a good man couldn’t be blamed for falling in love another woman when the doctors had told him his own wife was permanently something worse than dead, destined to live the rest of her days behind a locked door.
As the clock ticked by, she was drawn back again into the hospital room where everything had gone wrong—blood, tearing flesh, screaming, a mind splitting in half. It seemed impossible to her that any woman could experience that and not change for it. When the doctors explained to her that the treatment was harsh, but was the only chance she had, she believed them. When they had her taken to the “water treatments” and made her sit under freezing showers, she had endured. When they asked her what she had done, what bad thing she was hiding, she had gone so far as to makeup a story that would offer them a reason for why her mind split. When they had brought her the medications, and said that these, at last, will calm her, she took them, and she continued to take them seven years later.
As she watched her hand, again moving of its own accord, the twitching and trembling seemed to take up residence in her feet and core. This, at last, was the sign she had been waiting for, that her husband had been asking for her to assure him was absent.
The doctors had told her husband she would never return to herself. They had shaken his hand, and gently informed him that mourning her, rather than seeking to help her get better, was the kindest thing a man could do for the memory of the wife he once, but no longer, had. In grief, he had believed them, and gone on to form an affair with the nurse who had been caring for their daughter since birth. One can imagine the shock when while at breakfast, just a few days shy of Betty’s first birthday, Charles received a letter from the St. Louis City Lunacy Asylum. In words of both apology and celebration, they informed Charles his wife was very much herself again and seemed to be that rare miracle of a patient. He sat, dumbstruck, with his small daughter as she giggled with the woman he had planned to propose to later that evening.
Dorothea wondered if that girl would still be waiting, all these years later. Finally, finally, she might say, that damned wife has gone mad for good. Straining at her muscles to move, Dorothea pulled herself as though she both puppeteer and puppet.
She could not be expected to be granted a reprieve forever. As she emptied the desk, she reminded herself that she had been able to see her baby become a smart little girl, lived happily with Charles, have some of her own self back before losing it to the abyss forever. She would not allow a ghost of herself to inhabit her body, scare her daughter, harm her husband. Dorothea had always known she needed an escape plan, she just had hoped she would never have to use it.
Her husband would be arriving home soon, gathering Betty first from her room, asking how her hours in the park had been, making her giggle with rambunctious voices and rough housing. Dorothea felt her muscles exerting force in ripping at the middle of the vanity. She felt glass fall by and shatter, continuing as though moving by motor to open the desk. Finally, her hands gripping the inner stabilizing board, she cranked the vanity open, revealing a small, hidden compartment under the body.
Dorothea knew herself to be a good mother, despite the fact she had once wanted to kill her daughter, in the same way that she knew Charles to be a good husband, even though he had let her be killed the day he believed the doctors at the hospital. Truth was not something the human mind could always grasp accurately or act upon, and she accepted that. She would not, however, live with it. She had already seen how the fear had changed Charles, try as he might to hide it. In response to her madness, he had hardened, made himself into walls to protect her from the world, and their daughter from her.
In her vanity mirror, a crumpled watercolor portrait stuck out from the broken glass. On the steps leading into the World’s Fair, there was herself at 14, sitting with a lanky 16-year-old boy, both holding ribbons from the Young Inventors Competition. She looked at the girl in the portrait, and then look at the open vanity, to find herself staring back, agitated and dull.
Underneath the spare board, under all the extra powders, brushes, and oils, there was a secret. It would not be a cure for her, but it would heal the life of her husband and daughter.
She had seen women that made her know there was something worse than illness or death to fear, and that was in the blank faces, the near mechanical way they wandered the grounds. For crimes or mental disturbances much less serious than her own, the treatments had been discussed and implemented. Chemical sedation, as she had now, was the warning bell for a mad woman. The women who scared Dorothea were those who had failed the medications and treatments, and with no other option left, were taken in the night to a room far off the main road, for what was then simply known as “the procedure.” The women who came back from it never truly came back at all.
A whole life swirled in her mind as she glanced down at the small handgun fit into the dusty, wooden compartment. This gun, her friendly companion, her way out.
Even now, Dorothea could recognize the edges blurring between reality and disturbed fantasy. She had decided, all those years ago, that if the lines ever became indistinguishable, it would be the end.
The only question that remained was that of her daughter. Many mothers said they would be willing to die for their child, but Dorothea felt what she had in front of her was far more difficult: Would she continue to live for her?
She heard her husband’s pattern of noises return to their house—the swish of the quick opening of the door, the slow shut to avoid any sound that might frighten his fragile wife, the click of the lock at the door. She heard her daughter run down the stairs, yelling about the tree she had climbed that day. Both sets of footsteps made their way up the stairs, ready to pull in the third of their small family.
Dorothea sat with her left hand twisting, again and again, uselessly, the barrel.