The tiny evil version of me

Cleveland Infirmary for the Poor and Insane

Cleveland, Ohio , 1865

The day the mayor and his coterie came to gawk at the asylum inmates, they feasted on strawberry cream cake.

I knew, because I tended those strawberries all through berry season. I made the berry cream cake, cushioning my reddest strawberries on little cream clouds. Miss Carrie scolded me for eating them. Those strawberries are not for you, Miss Mary, she scowled. We’re saving them for the City Councilmen and the Mayor.

I didn’t tell her that my name is Bridget, not Mary. But I did pilfer the leftover strawberries and share them with the Sewing Room girls.

I spent most afternoons in the Sewing Room, working for my freedom. I didn’t mind the Sewing Room, just like I didn’t mind pulling weeds in the strawberry fields outside the asylum walls all summer. Mrs. Barton, the sewing matron, told me I had an artful eye, that my talent for dressmaking rivaled the best seamstresses in the city. I’d even become the go-to seamstress to make baptismal gowns for the Catholic babies.

But when the Mayor of Cleveland and his councilmen came, I got flustered.

“Would you look at these high-falutin’ people dressed to the nines like it’s a night at the Opera,” said my friend Jennie, pressing her hands against the glass. “Imagine having a party at the insane asylum. I can’t help wondering if they’re mad, just the way they think we’re mad.”

Jennie’s hair was a shade of red, like mine. But my hair was the color of a fall apple, and it blanched in the summer. The Infirmary wardens kept calling me blonde and fair. And those were good things. But Jennie’s hair was scarlet, and her fleshy body in freckles. The wardens didn’t like her.

“Must be a rich man’s game,” one of the Irish Marys said.

“Girls, get back to work,” Mrs. Barton said. Jennie and Mary and the other inmates sat down at the long table covered in half-finished lace doilies and floral bonnets. The Matron tapped my shoulder.

“Bridget, the mayor is touring the women’s lunatic ward and would like a patient to guide them,” she whispered. “Please set a good example.”

I slipped out of the Sewing Room. I never wanted to disappoint Mrs. Barton. I now had an excuse to visit my favorite doctor, who had taken me under his wing as his secret apprentice, as well as my favorite lunatics.

“This is the locked ward, where we keep the tragic cases,” Dr. Hughes, the wicked doctor, explained to the City Council and the mayor. They had brought many friends along, all men—lawyers and judges. “This is why we must keep the funding flowing from the city coffer.”

Dr. Hughes nudged me. “Tell them where we are,” he hissed in my ear.

I swallowed hard. “This is the lunatic’s ward,” I said, stumbling on the words. I hated the word lunatic. At least it was better than “madwoman,” which the ignorant peasant women who still believed in witches called my mother back in Ireland. “The patients here are locked in their cells most of the day...”

Dr. Hughes quickly went from nudging to smacking me from behind, which the Council couldn’t see. “It’s for their own good,” he said in a terse tone.

We walked past the cell of a wild-eyed woman who was spoiling for a fight. She threw herself against the bars, raging at her jailers as well as the Council.

“I have a tiny evil twin who lives in my nether parts,” the young woman railed at the Councilmen. She had a Cork accent, so she was Irish like me. Unlike me, she was badly deformed, like Quasimodo. “If you lay hands on me, she’ll summon the Archangel of Death to put a curse on your heads.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Hughes, the wicked doctor, led the tour today.

“No one in their right mind wants to lay hands on you, you ugly hoor,” he barked. “Be quiet before I put a muzzle on you like the dog you are.”

He turned back to the Mayor and the City Councilmen, who tittered at the awkward mention of the madwoman’s nether regions, her private parts. Dr. McCoughlin, the good doctor, called it “female genitalia” in a slightly embarrassed yet doctor-like tone.

When he turned back to the snickering councilmen and their entourage, Dr. Hughes’ demeanor turned on a dime.

“She’s too far gone from the menstrual madness,” he explained. “I ordered my underling to perform a full hysterectomy; I’ll look into why he hasn’t yet.”

Then he shook his head. “It’s a shame our religious neuroses hinder us from euthanizing infants with grotesque deformities at birth as an act of mercy. They would do it in France.”

Even the councilmen blanched at that, and they snickered some more, as if Dr. Hughes must be joking. I’d been here long enough to know he was serious. Down the hallway, I spotted the good doctor making his rounds. He gave me the secret signal, but saw I was distracted by my tour guide duties. Dr. Hughes made me stop at the cold stone cell where the medical students examined a little boy, dressed much older than his age in a velvet suit. They demanded he strip naked and began observing him, scribbling down notes.

“Gentlemen, these are the hard cases,” Dr. Hughes explained. “Look at this.”

The mayor gasped and thumped his chest. “My God, what’s wrong with...that child?”

Dr. Hughes motioned for me to step aside and stay out of grown men’s business.

“It’s a eunuch,” Dr. Harvey said. “A male born without a penis or testes. Look at the empty scrotum where the gonads should be.”

The medical students nodded along and took notes.

“He was born this way, totally emasculated,” Dr. Harvey continued. “The police found him abandoned in an alleyway over near the Opera House. His mother is a showgirl at a caberet downtown. The child preferred to wear dresses and hairbows, claiming he was a girl. So she used him as bait in her whorehouse, inviting every lecher in Cleveland to sneak a peek at her lacy underthings more suitable for a bridal chamber. But then a patron discovered the little girl was not really a girl, and he savaged him. See all the bruises?”

I watched from the common room, where the saner inmates sat with nothing to read, no cards to play, nothing to do, except stare at the walls or each other. The little eunuch looked as he stood there naked, shivering.

I should have known better. But it wasn’t my better sense that prompted me to interrupt.

“This child is not a boy,” I said.

All of the men turned to look at me. Dr. Hughes’ mouth formed a straight line.

“Correct,” he said. “He—it—is a eunuch.”

“No, she is a girl,” I said. “I saw it once or twice, with my midwife mother. Sometimes a girl is born this way.” She pointed to the child’s groin. “You see that ridge down the middle? ’Tis where the outer flesh—the ah, the ah...” I was blushing. I thought of Dr. McCoughlin, awkward but always kind.

“Her outer female genitalia is fused together,” I said. “That’s why she looks like a boy. A quick incision is all it takes to fix it. I watched my mother perform it on a newly born infant.”

I raised my eyes to the men. “And we found she was a girl after all.”

Dr. Hughes snatched my arm. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said. “My colleague, Dr. McCoughlin, will take over for a short time while I reprimand this impudent one.”

The men laughed. Dr. Hughes didn’t. When we were out of sight, he shoved me against the wall. “Who asked you to open your trap in front of those important men,” he said. “Who do you think are?”

I started to explain again that my mother was a midwife in Ireland, and he pushed the center of my chest again. “Who are you? Which medical school did you attend? I ought to strap you into leg irons and whip you til you bleed. What’s wrong with you? A touch of the masturbatory madness?”

I clenched my jaw. “What does that mean?”

I could see the blue veins throbbing in the doctor’s temple. “It’s something you mad women do compulsively,” he said. “Do you touch your genital organs for pleasure?”

I stared at him for a moment, unable to blink. “Do you?”

Dr. Hughes slapped me hard across the face. “How dare you, you arrogant little tart,” he said. “Get back to the poorhouse where you belong. If I hear your babbling profanities about the female organs again, I’ll put you in leg irons and cut out your insides as well as your outsides.”

As he walked by, Dr. McCoughlin, the good doctor, grasped my arm.

“Will you come with me?” he asked. “I have a patient I’d like you to examine. You might have seen this condition when you helped your mother. Also, try to quell her rage, will you? The next thing you know, Dr. Hughes will be in there with a scalpel, slicing out her uterus.”

That was the wicked doctors’ cure-all; their diagnosis when no other seemed to fit. Blame the woman’s problems on the hysteria emanating from her womb, then rip it out.

We went to the Quasimodo, who was now stark naked. Dr. McCoughlin asked me to feel for her womb.

“I think she has a tumor on the ovary,” I told him once the medical students had left.

“A tumor?” Dr. McCoughlin repeated. “But she was born with the condition...”

“Yes, they always are. It’s not a cancer. The tumor resembles a child in the womb, with eyes and hair. Some doctors call it a monster tumor. But my Ma said ’tis just the remains of a deceased twin. A twin that never grew into a baby.”

Dr. McCoughlin furrowed his eyebrows, looking doubtful. “Go on,” he said.

“When the one twin fails to grow, it collapses into the other’s body,” Bridget said. “It remains there forever. There’s a Greek or Latin name for it, for a ‘monster baby’...”

“Teratoma,” Dr. McCoughlin said. He scribbled something on his notepad. “I believe it’s described in the medical texts as a teratoma.”

“My Ma said it’s a twin’s way of carrying a dead brother or sister forever,” I said.

The Quasimodo girl looked up, her matted hair stuffed behind her normal ear. “It’s the tiny evil version of me.”

“Evil? That’s only because your mind is fielding incoming thoughts from your twin, causing the whole system to go haywire,” I said. “Imagine a telegraph wire, trying to transmit two messages to the War Office at once. It wouldn’t come through very clear, now would it? It could shut down Mr. Lincoln’s defense department.”

I dropped my hands. “The only operation she needs is removal of the teratoma. Not a full womb removal, Dr. Hughes’ cure-all for every malady.”

Dr. McCoughlin squeezed my shoulder. “You’re brilliant, Bridget,” he said.

“Brilliant? No,” I said. “I am a midwife’s daughter from Galway. And that’s why I might be right.”

“You might,” Dr. McCoughlin said, dismissing the medical students so he could tend to the eunuch child alone. “You just might.”