Free Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler

They sat on benches at four wide-planked tables. They had tin spoons and tin bowls. They bowed their heads and spoke the grace.
     
    ‘Truly grateful,’ B.J. said, resting his forehead on his locked thumbs. ‘Amen.’
     
    There were twenty-three inmates in all at the asylum - sixteen men and seven women. They represented the following forms of insanity in the following proportions: Idiophrenic insanity, 6; Sympathetic insanity, 14; Toxic insanity, 1; Anaemic insanity, 1; Insanity resulting from arrested or impaired development of the brain, 1.
     
    Ada, the woman from Germany, entered. She was late; she was dragging the new woman behind her. Ada pushed the new woman onto the bench first, then sat next to her, leaning sideways with her body until the other woman had moved farther down the bench and Ada was directly opposite B.J. She gave him a fluttery, conspiratorial look. Her gray hair was combed up from her forehead and away from her face. But when she turned to see that the new woman had a spoon and a bowl of mush, B.J. noticed Ada had forgotten to comb the back of her hair at all. It ruffled up from her neck like the feathers of an angry chicken.
     
    ‘What’s her name?’ B.J. asked.
     
    ‘Sarah,’ said Ada. ‘Sarah Canary, because she sings like an angel. She’s been put in my room. I’m in charge of her. I’m to help her settle in.’ Ada made many of the sounds of her speech deep in her throat and spit often when she talked. B.J. had never been around many Germans and did not know if they all talked this way or if this was a symptom of Ada’s illness or if this happened because Ada was missing one of her front teeth. He had discussed her case on several occasions with Dr Carr.
     
    ‘The woman from Germany is in love with me,’ he told Dr Carr as a way of introducing the topic.
     
    ‘Men and woman have profound physiological differences,’ Dr Carr answered. ‘Some more obvious than others. The capacity of the skull is greater in the male and, what is really remarkable, is that this masculine advantage increases as the race becomes more civilized. Thus the skulls of the Negroes in Africa show less sexual differentiation than those of the Europeans.’ He blinked his eyes rapidly and leapt from his chair, unfastening the glass door of the bookcase and removing a large black book. He opened it roughly in the middle, flicked through a few pages with his thumbnail. ‘The average cranial capacity of the male German, for example,’ he said, his index finger floating over the text, ‘is 1538.76 cubic centimeters, but the German female capacity is only 1265.23. This is a difference of 273.53 cubic centimeters.’
     
    ‘She stares at me when we eat, ‘B.J. said.
     
    ‘The gray substance and white substance in the male brain are also heavier than in the female. It is not necessary to ascribe superiority to any of this, of course. Merely difference. Men are better at manly things. Women are better at being women. This current trend to provide them with similar educations is very wrong-headed.’ Dr Carr shut his book with a sound like a clap.
     
    ‘She’s always trying to get me to come to her room.’
     
    ‘Well, that’s not allowed,’ said Dr Carr. ‘Surely male patients aren’t allowed in the rooms of female patients. What are we running here, a hospital or a bordello?’
     
    ‘A hospital,’ B.J. said. He’d been in both.
     
    ‘Women feel the tyranny of their bodies so much more than men do. Love affairs are seldom a good sign.’ Dr Carr shook his head. ‘One of the saddest cases I ever encountered was a woman, happily married, aged forty-six, in whom there were no discoverable hereditary influences toward insanity. Just at the time her catamenia were becoming irregular, she was seized with uncontrollable libidinous desires. Prior to this she had never exhibited any sexual proclivity, and intercourse rarely afforded her any pleasure at all. Now she could scarcely be taken out into