Jaclyn Gilbert

Novel Extract

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The opening chapter of Issue Four Featured Writer Jaclyn Gilbert’s new novel, Pauline. Read a conversation with Jaclyn here.

THE SUMMER I spent resting apart from you—the summer I met Pauline—I dreamed the ocean below Oak Bluffs was an estuary trickling silver, eddying under a little bridge where streams became rivers that flowed into the sea. I dreamed of who I had been before you were born, of the things I had once painted before I met your father. The fringe along a raven’s wing, the enameled edge of a stone, the sheen of water in a clear, glass bowl.

I couldn’t leave the sanatorium until I gained fifteen pounds, proof I was well enough to return to you. You needed someone to sew for you again, to feed you meals, to sing to you and teach you the ways of the world, and who was I to leave you when you needed me most? I tried very hard to sit still in my chair, a wing-backed chair that was tall and cream-colored with little red buds like the impression of roses. I watched the patterns the shadows made over the floor as though the shadows were my thoughts, and my thoughts were empty of meaning. In the shadows, I learned to tell time again, to anticipate certain routines. 

When the shadows reached longest over the floor of my room, Doctor Winfried arrived with my morning tonic, a raw beef soup with four drops of chlorohydric acid to calm my nerves. I then drank four pints of milk (or was it three?) with two slices of buttered bread, followed by a morning massage to awaken my organs and loosen my joints. In the afternoon, when the shadows shortened, Doctor Winfried gave me laudanum to rest. He always tucked me in like a little doll with porcelain lids he might as well have closed into the darkness. When I woke, the same rhythms resumed. 

Sometimes, it was Nurse Genevieve holding a pad, a tray. 

Miss Fulsom it’s time to weigh you Miss Fulsom are you ready for your breakfast Miss Fulsom have you finished your milk?

Nurse Genevieve had a sharp pointed nose and soft green eyes that appeared milkier than they should have been—had she let the in the brightness of day, but she kept her eyes veiled and cold, and I never asked why when she said she’d be back later with my early dinner of mutton chop and more laudanum for resting soundly into the night. 

The trouble was, I couldn’t always fall asleep right away, especially in the early evening, when it was still light. Through the window, I might see a flock of birds shimmering blue, or the wind shaking leaves from the trees. Sometimes, if it was warm enough, or wasn’t raining, I might find another woman hanging laundry over the great lawn beyond the chapel spire.  A well woman who had climbed the rungs of the doctor’s cure, now free to clip or unclip her own laundry. 

In the shadowy light, I liked to watch color shift along the line, sheets and linens of various grays and blues deepening at dusk, like the sky before the rain. I liked the look of the clips, the light shining on metal, and the way the clothes fell into a woman’s hands when they were dry, piling into a mass ready for folding. I never saw the face of the well woman that was there, clipping or unclipping, her back turned to me, and I knew I would likely never see her up close while I was still here, for I had just begun my cure, and a woman well enough to hang laundry was at the end of hers, on the edge of going home. 

Doctor Winfried’s Rest Cure was still new to the era. Before then, doctors had worked by way of injection, or conversion, using shock, but Doctor Winfried emphasized the sustained benefits of isolation, and a diet rich in fat and blood to restore the weakened nerves of women who had one day found themselves bored at home, weeping for no reason. Women who forgot how to attend or host dinner parties. Women who only wanted to paint in oils, burning their canvases afterward. Women who never knew how to dress in public. Women who preferred riding breeches and reins over skirts and beaded earrings. Women like me.

At Oak Bluffs, half of us had been assigned to private cottages scattered about the premises. There were no maps, and so I did not know the distance between residences, or how far away the ocean was from the ridge; I only knew that there was a day room for practicing ironing and sewing, and a great lawn for hanging laundry when you were well enough. Though there were still those of us with little hope, those confined to the Main Ward, I mean, where one could only move from one hall to another—East to West—but I had qualified for the doctor’s latest treatment by then, skipping the ward system altogether, and you must know how desperate I was to see you. 

I feared you growing without me there to watch. I feared your cheekbones sharpening around your smile, your eyelids turning fuller and less translucent while you slept, the bottoms of your feet calloused, when before they had been soft and needless of shoes. I feared how soon you might forget me, the way memory is when you are young, little more than the shadow of being kept safe or not, and I wanted so badly to be worthy of your trust again. I wanted to be as good as I was before I turned ill. 

You were only thirteen months when I left. I knew I wasn’t well, and yet I fought your father when he called the carriage screaming no please no Harry please as he and Robert and restrained me and said it was for the best. They said there were things I could take to sleep at the sanatorium. They said my room would be full of light, that the food would be better than the best meals we had at home, that I would have plenty of time to rest and recover for your sake. It took three days to travel by train. My head echoed into the night, dreaming of machines, of cold steel plates and wire ties. 

Though Harry was a railway investor, I did not know where I was going. Pennsylvania, where you were, where I’d grown up, felt so far away as the train skirted cornfields and paddocks, past bridges and waterways that led past oyster fisheries and seaside towns—all the way to New Hampshire, where the sanatorium was. As we mounted the ridge by stagecoach, the trees became shadows and people trees, or were they shadows under Doctor Winfried’s scrutiny? In his office where the air was damp and tasted of metal, as he tapped my spine and held me down, forcing pills from glass bottles that made the days bleed into weeks. The doctor told me not to worry after Harry left without me remembering ever saying goodbye.

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How many days had passed? I suppose it had been sometime during my third (or fourth?) week, when Doctor Winfried had me stand on the scale. Together, we watched a little red arrow inch upward, pointing three pounds heavier than when I’d arrived.  

“Very good, Jane,” Doctor Winfried said, marking the number—103—with his sharp fountain pen. He had black, tortoise shaped spectacles that made his eyes small as raisins, and a long, waxed mustache.

 “In just a few weeks, you’ve already regained such good color in your face,” he said. “Keep this up and it won’t be long before you can accept visitors,” but before I could ask how many visitors (would I have to choose between you and Harry?) he tore a little page from his pad. 

“Call it a ticket,” he said. “A voucher. Starting this afternoon you may sit outside, on the porch by the garden for an hour before your second dinner is ready.”

I could hardly contain myself, for the joy felt palpable, like breathing air after staying underwater too long. That afternoon, I rose from my bed earlier than usual, dressing proudly in a brown gingham dress that had been a gift from your father. From Harry. I wore my best brown saddle shoes and tied my hair in a loose bun at the nape of my neck. I liked the feel of the breeze on my neck best—when my hair was up—to feel the breeze along my skin in the late summer light. But that day, as I sat in a slim wicker chair along the broad porch, overlooking a garden path marked by manicured hedges and deep green shrubbery, and blue pansies and violets and white begonias that had not yet withered, I almost thought it wasn’t real. The plants and flowers that were still alive, and the early foliage in the trees. Time passing as little spots of gold and flecks of red in them, the sun moving through their sparse places like light through a sieve. 

Though I wasn’t to interact with other patients here, I noticed another woman wandering the hedges beyond. Why was she allowed this free rein, while the rest of us had to keep still? Had a well woman hanging laundry wandered off?

Nurse Genevieve didn’t seem to notice, fixed as she one a little clock for telling when my hour was up. If she’d seen her, she would have stopped her, I thought. Besides, the woman appeared as quickly as she disappeared, the green of her dress bleeding with the green of the tall hedges and groves. Once, she paused long enough for me to realize she wore a kimono of olive silk. Her long gray hair hung loose about her shoulder as she made a kind of figure-eight dance about the hedges and groves. I could not tell if she noticed me watching her; or, even if she did, whether she cared.   

Then she mouthed words with her lips, but the image rippled again, and when she reappeared, I saw how one of her kimono sleeves was empty. Flowers fell from the place where her arm would have been, forming a trail of green as she paced in rows, humming silently.

Once, just outside my cottage window, I’d overheard the doctor tell Nurse Genevieve a woman among us had been in the war. My own father, your grandfather had served, and I could not help but wonder if he had ever crossed paths with this woman. Perhaps she had sung songs to the wounded in the darkened rooms of the armory hospital, making rounds in her nurse’s cap and wide belt. A black cape draped over shoulders as she carried basis and sponge for men in bandages. Limbs clotted red. 

“Is something disturbing you, Jane?” Nurse Genevieve said. I had stood up from my chair without realizing. 

“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s only the air. The breeze. I wanted to feel it.”

She appeared stern, her lips pursed. 

“Would it be alright?” I asked, “to take a short walk in the garden?” Out loud, the words sounded as dangerous as asking for scissors or matches, but Nurse Genevieve said nothing. “For some pansies,” I went on. “A small bouquet.”

“You have half the hour left. Do with it what you must.” 

I tried to hide my elation by speaking softly. “Thank you,” I said.

Along the path, a light breeze brushed my cheeks, rustled my skirt. Sunlight pricked the edges of leaves and the tops of shrubs, a soft halo of light, as I walked just far enough not to be seen, though not so far as to raise suspicions. 

I found her in the shade of the hemlocks. She looked at me obliquely, not meeting my eyes straight on, but when she turned, our eyes locked, and hers were the soft green of Spanish moss glistening into mine, the wrinkles around her mouth like rivers, her silver hair unbrushed and strewn with broken bits of leaves. I wanted to whisper hello, but the possibility of hearing my own voice terrified me. When she turned, I could not speak, and then she drifted further beyond a hedge, only to reemerge suddenly, spinning a circle, her single arm like a wing angling the breeze as she looked up at the sky. Was she laughing? 

Then she turned again, looking further into me, but this time it was not her eyes I saw, but the long lines of her collarbone above where her kimono crossed. When I could not look any longer, I bent down for a slender scratch daisy by my feet, and when I looked up, she was still there, her eyes gleaming like an animal’s out of the dark. Then a stronger breeze passed, whispering her kimono open, and it was too late for me to look away again, the bare stump of her shoulder exposed in the sunlight. But she wasn’t afraid. She did nothing to cover her wound; only half looked away, as if I’d never been there. 

I was running out of time. I needed more flowers, more daisies and violets, and pansies, which I gathered quickly as I could, and then I hurried back to Nurse Genevieve. In my hands, the flower stems felt waxen and alive, like your little fingers in mine, but they weren’t your fingers. Only stems.  

“What do you plan to do with those?” Nurse Genevieve asked from where she stood on the porch. “You can’t keep them in water.”  

“I thought I’d dry them,” I said, proud to have thought so quickly of a solution. I was even prouder, or, rather, relieved, when Nurse Genevieve said nothing and hooked her arm into my mine, guiding me back to my cottage. By then, the sun had sunk lower into the hills, and for as much as I wanted to ask about the other woman, I couldn’t risk giving her away if she was in hiding.  

In earnest, I waited until the next day when I would be free to walk in the garden again. Time stood still until then, but when the hour arrived, each minute felt too short as I walked briskly to the place in the hedges where she was. I found her in the same silk kimono, though she had made a belt of red ribbon to keep it closed. She stared down at patch of dirt, refusing to see me, and yet I felt her watching me watch. Before I could speak, her sandal began to slide, drawing shapes into the dirt, long, deliberate shapes. After she finished and drifted off beyond a thicker row of shrubbery, and I went to see what she had drawn, I found not notes, but three numbers: 4 1 2. 

I could not tell if they were meant for me. Perhaps there were other women to whom she spoke in code. Perhaps we had been assigned numbers instead of names. Or was she referring to a place on a map, a ticket number, a doctor’s code? 

For the next two days, it was too rainy to go outside. As I sat under the hooded roof of the porch watching the flowers droop with water, the grass rich with green, I did not see her (but why would she pace in the rain?). It wasn’t until the next day, when the sun appeared, and Nurse Genevieve escorted me for my free hour, that I saw it there, 4 0 5, scratched in tiny script below my cottage door. Of course, I thought! Every cottage number started with 4 and ended with two other numbers.  

“Stop. Stop fidgeting with your hands,” Nurse Genevieve said. 

I tried to slow my thoughts long enough to slow my hands, but when we reached the porch for me to sit, I could hardly stay still. I waited for the sun to peak over the hemlocks, over the dry garden dirt. Though we weren’t allowed to write in script, for fear of taxing our nerves, when you were well enough, you could practice light calisthenics. You needed to be strong enough to wash and hang clothes to dry.   

By the dry patch in the hedges, I did not see her, but I felt her watching between the trees, between shadows. I had so little time, should Nurse Genevieve come and find me drawing into the dirt. I closed my eyes and raised my arms high above my head. Then I bent my legs like a gymnast might, staying there as long as I could, knees shaking as I reached my shoe back, slowly crossing over and down into a 4.

I paused, looking up to see if Nurse Genevieve was coming, or whether she might be watching now, but no one was there. Quickly I swerved to draw 0. For the last number, the 5, I pretended to stomp a spider, digging my foot back and around, though I loved spiders and hated to pretend. When I opened my eyes, she was nowhere, and I would never know if she’d read what I had drawn. After Nurse Genevieve called for me, and I hurried back to her, it took time to regain my breath. Though dirt covered my saddle shoes, she said nothing. Nothing of the soft dust along my ankles and cheeks.

Later that night, lighting struck pink through the window, cracking the trees, shaking the shutters. Despite my usual dose (or had they lowered it?) I couldn’t sleep, the way the pounding rain felt more inside than outside my body. Perhaps in going to cover the pansies from the rain, Nurse Genevieve had found the numbers in the dirt and told Doctor Winfried, and now it was it him knocking, the doctor, come with wire ties for my wrists, for the Main Ward? When I heard a louder knock, I felt certain it was him, but then I remembered he needn’t knock. He had a key. 

 I rose from my bed and pressed my ear to the door. 

“Who is it?” I asked.

“It’s only me,” a voice said softly.  

When I opened the door, I found her waiting. Before the doorway, she stood slouched and cold in her usual silk kimono: the moss-colored silk wet and darkened by rain. Her silver hair turned charcoal, glimmering softly in the kerosene light.

“You must be freezing!” I said, “Please, please come in!”

Head down, she crossed the threshold. I fetched a towel for her, and a spare nightdress. I waited for her to meet my eyes, but she refused. We were still strangers after all.

“The bathing room is just over there,” I said, pointing to the door adjacent to my bed. 

When she re-emerged in dry clothes, she appeared something like an angel, a shroud. Her charcoal hair, now partly dry, appeared thicker, and her skin shone. 

“Are you warm enough?” I asked. 

“I’m fine,” she said, the empty sleeve of her kimono loose by her side. I nearly gasped, surprised by the sound of her voice, as if it had passed from the vacant side of her body and into the room. How young her voice sounded, like a child, though she was likely old enough to be my mother. What could she want from me? 

A long silence passed between us in the hazy glow of the lamp over her gray eyes. Then she said her name.

“I’m Pauline,” she said. “Pleasure to meet you.”

I wanted to tell her it was a beautiful, the sound of her voice.

“Pauline,” I said. “I’m Jane.” 

“I know,” she said. 

When I asked her how she knew, she explained that unlike me, she was an out-patient, free to come and go. She said she’d heard the doctor speak my name at the laboratory, though she didn’t know my address until I wrote back to her. 

“You don’t have a cottage?” I asked. 

“No,” she said. “I only made one up.” Her face looked expressionless, and I could not understand why she would lie. What was the point?

 “The doctor is studying me,” she said. “Not for hysteria, but for phantom limb.” 

“What do you mean?”

She pushed her night dress down to show me the emptiness beyond her shoulder.

“He wants to know why I can still pain in my hands, though I have no hands. Why I can feel it happening.” 

 “The war?” I was thinking of Father, of the leg he lost on enemy lines.

“The doctor likes that to be the common story,” she said, smiling out of disdain or humor? “That I am to appear as one of you, frail and weak of nerves. 

Why he’s planted rumors. That I am mad on account of my time in the war. A veteran nurse! Can you imagine?” 

None of it made sense: a ploy meant to trick me, or make me more agitated? So I would have to stay here longer?

 “I lost my arm in an explosion,” she said. “A shipyard just outside the conservatory. I was studying piano.”

Absently, I reached for my own wrist, feeling it there. 

“Don’t look so put out,” she said.  “I thought you’d be glad.” 

“Glad?”

“To have a visitor.” 

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of it.” 

She only smiled dimly. “It isn’t fair, is it?”

“What isn’t?” 

“To be kept here like an animal.” 

I didn’t believe I heard her right, but as she looked at me, her eyes narrowed with knowing.

 “I’ve only ever wanted to get well,” I said. “I want to see my child, my son. I miss him terribly.” 

“And you think you’ll get better here?” 

A spoon on my nightstand flashed, but when Pauline looked to where I looked, there was nothing but the varnished wood of my nightstand. 

 “I must rest and eat to become strong,” I said. “I have already gained weight, and I have more energy.” 

She nodded.

“What is his name?” 

“His name?” 

“Your son’s?”

“Benjamin,” I said.

“How old?” 

“He is almost two. His birthday is next month,” I said, realizing this suddenly in a way that I hadn’t that I would likely miss your birthday, but maybe Harry could bring you by then. Not knowing what else to say, I said: “What about you?”

“Me?”

“Do you have any children?”

“No,” she said. 

“Why not?” 

“I suppose I never desired them. Or a husband.”

“I always wanted to get married,” I said quickly—”I wanted a baby, though I don’t remember it all.”

“Are you certain of that?”. 

“Yes,” I said. “He had colic, but I didn’t make enough food. He screamed for me.”

“Is that what he told you?” she asked.

“Who?”

“The doctor? Your husband?” 

 “I remember trying to feed him,” I said, “but he wouldn’t latch, and then we called for a wet nurse. That was before Father became sick.”

“Oh,” Pauline said. 

“A stroke?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Something else.”

She drew her hand to her mouth then, as if holding a cigarette. But there was nothing burning. Only air.  

Into the silence, I wanted to ask her how long she’d been missing her arm, how long since the explosion, but she only reached for my hand with her good hand, and where I expected it to be cold from the outside air, it was warm. Soft.

 “What if I told you I know a path,” she said abruptly. “To the water where we won’t be seen…there is a night boat that leaves with shipping cargo.”

“But the doctor will be on watch, won’t he?”

“No,” she laughed. “He trusts his patients are asleep, and besides, I have a key. I know a way to leave and come back before sunrise.” 

She showed it to me then, the iron key lifted from her kimono pocket, cold with rain, in my hand, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many miles away it was, how far until water separated from land?

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Jaclyn Gilbert is the author of the debut novel Late Air. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, was a 2019 and 2023 writer-in-residence at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild and Vermont Studio Center, and her short fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Post Road Magazine, Tin House, Lit Hub, Paper Brigade, and Connecticut Literary Anthology. Most recently, she founded Driftless Literary as an agenting collective for representing genre defying work in the U.S. and abroad.

Photo Credit: Hugh Findlay’s photography and writing have been published worldwide. Nominated for a Best of the Net award in 2023 for photography, he is in the third trimester of life and hopes y’all like his stuff. Instagram: @hughmanfindlay. Portfolio: https://hughmanfindlay.wixsite.com/hughfindlay