Domenico commits Prosperine to a psychiatric hospital

Domenico commits Prosperine to a psychiatric hospital in a story he tells as part of his account of the family’s past. He secures her confinement by persuading Mayor George B. Shanley that she threatens his household, then uses the hospital’s admission process to remove her from his home and community. The episode’s decisive significance lies in the gap between the protective case Domenico presents and the revenge he later acknowledges: institutional authority becomes a means of private retaliation.

The Case Domenico Presents

Domenico describes Prosperine to the mayor as a woman from the Old Country who had once lived and worked in his household. He says that he and his wife had taken her in, but that she had turned against them. In his account, her curses and petty thefts were signs of troubling behavior; the decisive claim is that she had threatened their young daughter. He says they had therefore put her out of the house.

He further tells Shanley that Prosperine had run away and returned, and that he had recently seen her at a window. According to Domenico, he and his dog followed her scent to a shack near Rosemark's Pond, on the other side of Pleasant Hill. Because he works nights, he claims to fear for his wife and child while he is away. These details build a picture of an alleged threat, but they are presented through Domenico’s account to a mayor he is trying to persuade, not as an independent assessment of Prosperine.

From Municipal Intervention to Hospital Admission

Shanley initially proposes having Prosperine arrested and jailed. Domenico redirects him, arguing that a brief jail stay would only postpone the problem and that she should instead be placed in a psychiatric hospital. He reinforces his argument by telling the mayor that she had claimed to be a witch. Shanley accepts the proposal and contacts Three Rivers State Hospital, treating the transfer of responsibility from the city to the state as a practical solution.

The hospital requires a blood relative to sign the admission papers if Prosperine will not sign herself in. Domenico represents himself as her relative and characterizes her as unlikely to recover. He then meets the police and a doctor at the hospital, where Prosperine has been brought in a straitjacket. Once he has signed the documents, he asks for a private moment with her under the pretense of saying goodbye. Instead, he whispers a threat and spits at her before leaving. The sequence makes clear that his participation is not limited to reporting a concern: he helps arrange the confinement and uses his access to deliver a final act of humiliation.

The Story Behind the Official Account

Domenico’s narrative initially frames the commitment as protection for his wife and daughter. Its later details undermine that justification. He says he had told Shanley a carefully constructed version of events, presenting Prosperine as a danger and himself as a worried family man. His private conduct at the hospital, followed by his admission that he had wanted to punish her for having crossed him, reveals a retaliatory purpose beneath the public account.

That distinction matters because the episode shows how institutional action can be set in motion through a persuasive but interested report. Shanley acts on the danger Domenico describes; the hospital requires a relative to authorize the admission; and Domenico supplies the signature. The evidence does not establish an independent diagnosis or assessment of Prosperine, nor does it confirm the allegations Domenico makes to the mayor. The event is therefore narrated less as a clinical decision than as a chain of authority that Domenico successfully directs toward his own end.

Confinement and Aftermath

Domenico says that he never saw Prosperine again and does not know whether she was still living at the hospital. He also says he was never notified otherwise. The uncertainty leaves her fate unresolved: her confinement is definite in his account, but her later life and eventual outcome are not. The immediate consequence he emphasizes is instead his own lasting satisfaction at having won a battle against her.

He recalls that satisfaction as persisting through the twenty-six years of tragedy and grief that followed. The memory lets him cast the commitment as a personal victory, even as the circumstances he recounts expose the cost of that self-image: Prosperine disappears from his story into an institution, while Domenico preserves the episode as proof of his cleverness. In the wider narrative, this account also stands beside later discussions of psychiatric confinement, including the legal procedures governing Thomas Birdsey’s admission to Hatch. Those later procedures involve emergency observation and review by the Psychiatric Security Review Board; they do not establish the basis or process for Prosperine’s commitment. The contrast is in the narratives’ attention to authority and confinement: one gives procedural detail, while Domenico’s account shows how a family conflict can be translated into institutional action through his own representation of events.