What I Loved

and I looked into a second room in the same box. Its back wall was covered with the painted image of a woman looking out a window. Her long dark hair had been pulled to one side to bare her shoulders. The style of the painting was straight from seventeenth-century Holland, but Bill had complicated the image by lightly drawing over it in black. The drawing was of the same woman, but the style of the rendering was different, and the sketch on top of the painting made me feel that the woman was standing with her own ghost. Written twice on her arm, once with red paint and once with black crayon, was: T. BARTHÉLÉMY . The letters appeared to be bleeding.
    "Didi-Huberman mentions Barthélémy," Violet said. "He was a doctor somewhere in France who wrote his name on a woman, and then commanded her to bleed from the letters at four o'clock the same afternoon. She bled, and according to the report, the name remained visible for three months." I continued to look into the small illuminated room. On the floor in front of the painting of Augustine were tiny articles of clothing — a petticoat, a miniature corset, stockings and tiny boots.
    Violet pulled open a third door. This all-white room was lit from above by a small electric chandelier. A tiny painting in an ornate gold frame had been propped against the back wall. The canvas showed a fully dressed man and a naked woman in what appeared to be a hallway. You couldn't see the woman's face, but her body reminded me of Violet's. She was lying on the floor as the young man straddled her back. Gripping a large pen in his left hand, he appeared to be writing vigorously on one of her buttocks.
    The middle box had two doors. Behind the first was a small doll who made me think of Goldilocks — long blond curls, checkered dress, and white pinafore. The little figure was having a tantrum. Her eyes were screwed shut and her mouth was stretched wide in a silent scream as she clamped her arms around a pole that divided the little room in half. In her fit she had contorted her body to one side so that her dress had twisted up around her waist, and when I scrutinized her little face more closely, I saw that a long bloody scratch ran down one of her cheeks. On the walls that surrounded her, Bill had painted ten shadowy male figures in black and white. Each man was holding a book and had turned his gray eyes toward the howling girl.
    The second door in the middle box contained a black-and-white painting that resembled a photograph from the Salpêtrière. Bill had used one of the photographs of a woman in a crucifixion pose to render his version of Geneviève, a young woman whose medical ordeals had mimicked the trials of saints — paralysis, seizures, and stigmata. Four Barbie dolls were lying face-up on the floor in front of the photo-painting. Blindfolds had been tied around their eyes and their mouths were taped. As I studied the dolls, I noticed that words had been printed on the mouth tapes of the three first dolls: HYSTERIA, ANOREXIA NERVOSA , and EXQUISITE MUTILATION . The fourth tape was blank.
    The third box, with its lone figure at the bottom pushing open a door, contained two other well-hidden doors. I found the first one, its knob disguised among a dozen others that had been painted in a trompe l'oeil style. I looked into a brightly lit room that was much smaller than the others. On its floor lay a miniature wooden coffin. That was all. Erica opened the last door to reveal another nearly empty room. It had nothing in it except a dirty, ragged piece of paper with the word key written on it in a tiny cursive hand.
    Erica bent down to examine the little sculpture of the man in the top hat walking out the door to Greene Street. "Is he a real person, too?" she said.
    "She," Violet said. "Look closely."
    * *
    I crouched down beside Erica. I could see the figure's breasts underneath the jacket. The suit looked large. It bagged at her ankles.
    "It's Augustine," Violet said. "That's the end of her story — the very last entry in her observation: "9 septembre— X. .. se sauve de la Salpêtrière déguisée en homme."
    "X?" I said.
    "Yes, the doctors shielded their patients' identities by using letters and codes. But it was definitely Augustine. I've traced it On September ninth, 1880, she escaped from the Salpêtrière dressed as a man."
    It was early evening by then. Erica and I had both come straight to the Bowery from work. Hunger and weariness had begun to weigh on me. I thought