The Marchesi Girl
Illness is in part what the world has done to a victim, but in a larger part it is what the victim has done with their world. -Karl A. Menninger, psychiatrist (1893-1990)
They didn’t strap her into a straightjacket when they came for her. They didn’t do that anymore—use restraints. They weren’t wearing white scrubs either, as they did in old movies about incarceration of the insane. Times had changed since the days of constrained capture and howling asylums. In place of stun guns and tranquilizing inoculations, they’d learned to manipulate with kind words and veiled threats.
And they were full of those: “We’re not going to hurt you,” they told her. “We’re here to help you,” they promised. “We know you want to come with us and not make a scene,” they said, scanning the busy street outside. Think Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, except that Mia never trusted strangers, however kind they were.
Bad enough it was a pleasant summer Saturday, warmed by an implacable sun, and all the neighbors with even fractional eyesight could witness the goings-on. From their front porch, lemonade at the ready, the Barnhardts minded their grandson mowing the lawn. There was Vera, running winded up and down the street, guiding her young son on a bike without its training wheels. Mr. Johnson on the corner teaching his uncooperative schnauzer a new stunt.
Sadly for Mia, this was a short city block where neighbors kept a close watch on each other’s property, where everyone knew one another along with a sizeable portion of their business. It was not a place to maintain a low profile. Everyone would surely be asking themselves, “What’s going on with the Marchesi girl?”
Every pastel house lining the narrow Kansas City street was unique in its way, but all shared some faux feature of the Cape Cod style of architecture. Shake shingles, pitched roof with end gables, a story and a half—a recognizable style—even here in the Midwest, worlds away from the Massachusetts peninsula where the design took its name.
The house from which Mia was escorted by two brawny men and one robust woman was built in 1949, in response to the housing shortage for families of the millions of soldiers returning from the Second World War. This was a different kind of battle, but still war.
Michael’s house on this urban avenue was an adapted Cape Cod. There was no central chimney but it was shingle-sided, and it did display a pair of characteristic dormers jutting out the upper story roof that, to Mia, were two more enormous eyeballs scrutinizing her being taken away, against her will. Ironically, Michael’s house was a designated Neighborhood Safe House.
But at least they didn’t put her in a straightjacket. That would have killed her. It would have killed Michael, too. But he felt he had no choice.
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