The Queen of England — I

In the Summer of 1956, Elvis Presley released his first hit, Heartbreak Hotel; Certs breath mints were created; Play-Doh, Ski Soda, and Yahtzee were introduced; The Price is Right aired it's first episode; and I met the Queen of England at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia.

I recently graduated with an MD in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and set out to embark upon my first year of residency. Four years, I'd work in a hospital and then I could move anywhere. I had dreams of moving out west. But I had to stay around Pennsylvania because the obligations of my residency program. I don't know why of all places I chose the asylum in Weston, West Virginia. I suppose, I was drawn. It is the largest hand-cut masonry building in North America and sits on 600 acres of land. It was also known as the Weston State Hospital and opened in 1864.

I had read somewhere that it was haunted. So I suppose I should be honest and disclose that my real interest was one of curiosity and great hope. Maybe it was all those Saturday horror double-features I watched as a kid in the theaters where I group up in Altoona — but I longed to conduct paranormal research on the side of my given duties and to be the man who gave definitive legitimacy to paranormal science. Yet it was a secret I kept to myself, for it could burden a man's career as a serious professional psychologist, or at least make me a laughingstock of a community I hadn't yet to be accepted. 

I was in awe driving up the long drive to the mammoth hospital. The sycamores along the lane, old and towering, stood like vigilant watchmen. Their trunks, bone-white and pealing. It was a behemoth of stone. And there at the top of the drive near the walkway was a kind-looking elderly man waiting for me beneath the cover of a black umbrella that was necessitated by fat deliberate raindrops from a swath of ominous clouds that cast the asylum in a ghostly gray pallor. It certainly looked haunted as it was, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I approached.

I turned off my radio to prevent any unfair judgment of my youthful musical appetite that would be unpalatable to an older man, or so I presumed. Elvis Presley hadn't yet been accepted to the generation of men I aspired to be accepted by both out of necessity and respect. I turned off my car, a graduation present from my father, that was too ostentatious for a doctor yet to begin residency, but ostentatious enough for me, still very much boyish in my mid-twenties, to accept. I tried to make up the difference in the presentation of my manner with my wardrobe that consisted of six modest gray and black suits and several ordinary grandfatherly ties which I hoped made me look more distinguished and forgave the pseudo-Elvis Presley hairdo I couldn't help but to sport. I hurried to fix my hair, combing it with my hand before the introduction, burying it in the back of my scalp to appear more clean-cut than I was. I hoped the good doctor wouldn't look down at my shoes. 

"Ah, Dr. Swan, I presume," the gentleman said as I got out of the car my hand still rustling through my hair. I knew that he must be Dr. Cooperrider from our correspondence. He was a very genial gentleman, advanced in age, but obviously very young in spirit. It seemed as though he had an indelible sense of youth — the forever young sort. His wild smile as he stood there in his white suit under that black umbrella was my first introduction to the hopsital and made me feel immediately welcome. I was to shadow him for the next four years. God-willing, by the frail looks of him. 

"I am Dr. Cooperrider. But please call me Abel," he smiled. His face was a labyrinth of wrinkles. 

"Gladly. Abel. A fine Biblical name it is. But only if you call me Charles."

"Charles," he repeated, grinning. He sighed. "Very English. Very proper. It was my father's name. I'm not exactly as astute as I once was, but that is a name I will remember."

He smiled, his gray eyes squinting. They were the color of the clouds. He had various states of smiles, I realized, and offered no other expression. We shook hands there on the lane and I felt a bond to him and knew I had made the right decision. A valet came down the walk and kindly took my keys and parked my car in a lot behind a grove of trees out of view. I was shown to my office by an orderly named Sullivan and immediately blown away by the grandeur of the hospital as I stepped inside almost to a new world apart from the chaotic outer one. I must have looked like a child as I walked in, marveling at the white marble and the vaulted ceilings. The brightness and the welcoming nature of the building was far from what I expected or had seen in other places I toured, including the Pennsylvania State Psychiatric Hospital in Reading. It was seemingly constructed to be welcoming. To give a person a sense of relief that is was neither a torturous prison, nor a hellish dungeon, but a place of refuge.

Abel and I spoke for an hour or so about the nature of what I would do for the next four years. A presidential term, I realized looking up at a portrait of President Eisenhower on his wall. He asked if I had settled in, how I liked Weston, the usual sorts of things. I told him I had taken a room with the widow Marple, and he smiled as I told him of her, confirming what he already knew, that she was a fine woman and kept busy as a hen. The room was clean and comfortable. Her husband was a friend of his, he confessed. He was the local judge who had died in the fall of 51 or 52, he recalled, of heart failure. Judge Lloyd Marple and Abel Cooperrider were fishing buddies. He shared a picture of them with me that he kept in a drawer. 

He asked if I fished and I said yes, though I did not. I felt the need to ingratiate myself to him like I was his son or grandson in need of his approval, a flaw of youth, I suppose. He was fatherly by nature. He was the kind of person one didn't want to disappoint. He pulled out a pipe and lit it and began to smoke, blowing aromic clouds of burning tobacco about the small office. The exhausted match lay in a large green glass ashtray with a dozen other corpses.

He inhaled deeply and leaned back in his oak swivel chair which croaked incongruously with the slightness of his frame. It was a chair as old and rickety as he, but far less congenial, and unlike him, stubborn and crotchety. Then after a moment or so of silence to reflect upon something he did not share with me, perhaps the pleasantness of a simple thought or memory or some complex strategy of words, as my eyes scanned the room for clues to his existence and motives, it was on to business. He quickly filled me in on the residents of the hospital, giving me brief biographies, spending more time on the more complex and interesting ones, rather than on the garden-variety lunatics, or the criminally insane, which he seemed to despise if not to abhor. He expressed adamant disdain with modern medical practices. He railed against lobotomies and electric shock therapy. You'll encounter none of that here, he swiftly warned me. Not anymore. Not on my watch.

Usually, he prefaced the descriptions of the residents by their room number. I listened attentively, taking notes, though I wasn't sure he expected me to. I didn't want to forget, but moreso I wanted him to know that I valued his insight and I was attentive. My pen scratched furiously across my pad. Then he got to "434" and my hand stood still on the paper as though it was sacred ground upon which it refused to trespass. I was suddenly too inexplicably enamored to scribble shorthand notes. I looked him in his gray eyes as though in that way I could better absorb what he was about to say. 

"The Queen of England," he said. "Elizabeth the first." The manner of pride in which he described her is what seemed most peculiar to me. As though he were a zookeeper and she was the only panda in all of North America. It was like that, only more. I sensed not that he was being satirical, but that he had some matter of reverence for this woman. I looked up at him to make sure I had heard him correctly.

"We don't let her out of her room," he warned. "God so help us, if ever she gets out of that room. Heads are going to roll." 

"Heads?" I nearly laughed but he didn't appear to be joking. He was as serious as President Eisenhower on the wall. 

"Yes."

"Delusions of grandeur." I noted, speaking aloud inadvertently as I went back to writing. It has long been a quirk of mine to speak aloud what I write, often without realizing that I do. The rain picked up outside and pelted the window giving a quick intermission to our story. Abel walked over to shut it, but not before a metal fan blew the smell of the rain into the room. A fly took refuge in that glass ashtray and caught my attention, reminding me of something when I was a boy. Silly things such as flies and toothpicks and pipe smoke remind me of boyhood.

"It is more than that," he explained. "More than just a delusion. We don't know anything about her. We don't know her real name. Nor where she came from. She showed up one night with not a stitch of clothing on her. It was a rainy night about six months ago. Freezing cold. February. It appeared that she had been sexually assaulted, but we weren't sure. She wouldn't allow for an examination. Perhaps, it was the trauma from the rape that caused her this particular malady. But the unusual part is that she is very convincing. She knows more about Queen Elizabeth than any British historian I know. I had a few from different universities come and meet with her. They were as perplexed as the rest of us."

"I see."

"Oh, and she doesn't speak at all in a British accent, as one might think she would to keep with the delusion. She is not trying to be convincing. She doesn't appear to care what anyone thinks. She speaks with an Appalachian accent, which tells me that she isn't far from home. Yet if you ask her, England is her home." 

"Interesting." wrote my notes under the title 434.

Abel could tell I was instantly enthralled and he smiled at my enthusiasm. And though his kindness was genuine, I hadn't a doubt that he was overly generous with it for this was a trap and my entire purpose of being welcomed here for my residency was related to "Queen Elizabeth." He confirmed as much, saying he hoped that I "could get through to her." But advising that we must do so in an unorthodox sort of way. 

"How so?"

"You must, if you will, become one them."

"One of them?"

"I know it is very unconventional and if it doesn't work, we'll pull the plug and there will be no harm. You don't have to, of course. It is an idea I had, confirmed by you when you pulled in listening to your rock and roll in your sports car. She is young like you. I just think you can appeal to her. Relate to her. Listen empathetically. Let her confide in you what she doesn't feel she can in the rest of us. At least, enough for us to get somewhere. To get something. Some scrap or clue as to who she is. She won't talk to anyone about anything other than of the history of Britain, the enemies of Britian, her rule as queen, and the restoration of her throne. And one other thing, Sir Walter Raleigh. She's spoken a great deal of Sir Walter Raleigh."

I listened as he poured it on me. How naive I was. He was suddenly a car salesman talking me into an old Buick.

"You can have the room next to hers. She'll never see it. We can set it up as comfortable as the widow Marple's. And I'll explain to Helen why you can only stay there two nights a week. Your nights off, of course. We will compensate her for it. It will only be for a little while. It is worth the effort."

I didn't know what to say. How could I say no. I was too new to say no. Too young. Too uncomfortable. Besides, if there was a breakthrough, I would be credited with it. It might mean a meaningful opportunity for me to understand something that was currently not understood by anyone. Advancement was not lost on me and I was ambitious as I was young. And perhaps, I might learn something of the paranormal while conducting this undercover psychological experiment for Dr. Cooperrider. And by humanitarian terms, I might discover her true name. Help reunite her with family. How could I say no?

"During the day you will be able to work as normal. You can leave any night you wish back to the widow Marple's. Elizabeth will never know where you go or what you do. She has no view of anything besides the back of the facility. A wheat field and a distant treeline. Weekends you can have off. Find you a pretty girl in town. You can go to the movies. Do what you like. She will just think you are sleeping if she thinks of you at all. Or medicated. She will not know what you're doing."

"But how will we communicate?"

"Ah! You see there is a hole in the wall between those two rooms. 432 and 434. No one is currently in 432. You will communicate through the hole. There is a metal flap that you can pull down. If it goes well, we may let you enter her room to dine. Call it therapeutic reassurance or some mumbo jumbo. But I must warn you, an orderly with — ill intentions — entered her room one night on the night shift and, well, she bit out his tongue. And his jugular. Killed him. In so doing, she solved the mystery of our staff rapist who had impregnated 7 of our ladies. Bless her heart. He picked the wrong room. She didn't say a word or make a fuss. He was discovered when we fed her breakfast the next morning. She was covered with blood and said she had already ate."

"Interesting."

"To say the least. So what do you think, Dr. Swan?" 

"Must everyone address her as 'Your majesty?'" I joked.

"No," he replied. "In fact, she doesn't like being referred to as such since she is not currently on the throne. We simply call her, Elizabeth."

It was such a beautiful name. Just to say it. How it rolls off the tongue. The last syllable. So I stood there and recited it to myself as he opened a cabinet and pulled out a glass decanter in the shape of a rooster. In two short glasses he poured us bourbon. And then he toasted, "To Elizabeth!" 

"To Elizabeth!" I replied holding my glass up to his. And as that swill of Kentucky bourbon splashed over my lips, I knew I had made an agreement. To be a spy. To be resident 432, with an unspecified mood disorder.