NO ESCAPING THE DARKNESS
“IT WAS A DUNGEON,” Marvin Gilmore said about Boston State Hospital. “Like something out of medieval times.” Located on 232 acres of farmland, it began its therapeutic tenure in the late 19th century with promise, with the idea that a quiet pastoral setting outside the bustling city would do wonders for the lost and the troubled. Six decades later, it had degenerated into a brutal place. Gilmore never forgot the filth, the smell, the danger. “The worst place you could end up in,” he said. There were screams in the night.
He took a job there as an orderly after he was mustered out of the U.S. Army at the end of World War II to help pay his tuition at New England Conservatory of Music. He worked the witch watch—11pm to 7am. His were the clacking shoes in the halls during security checks, the jangling keys. He cared for the living and the dead and coped as best he could with those straddling the hell in between. He’d restrain those who kicked up a fuss and washed the corpses of those who’d kicked over a chair, wrapping them in white cloths, lifting them into the back of ambulances bound for the morgue.
There was one shining light during the two years he walked those dim, dank halls. One of the patients in a crowded dorm on his circuit would wait up for him; a little man, blind and black, whose unassuming disposition belied a craving for an audience. “He kept me up through the shift,” his audience of one recalled, “telling me about the days he was ‘upstairs’—in the money.” Gilmore kept him awake too, and given the variety of assaults that could erupt at any time in those dorms, that too was a favour.
