Prosperine Albrizio

Prosperine Albrizio is an elderly psychiatric patient whom Dominick Birdsey first regards as a menacing, nearly inanimate presence and later approaches as someone from whom he needs forgiveness. Her story is brief and partly obscured by conflicting names and missing records, but that obscurity matters: Dominick’s encounter with her moves from contemptuous judgment to an act of attempted care, while the narrative refuses to make her condition or response fully legible.

Identity and Institutional Setting

Dominick encounters Prosperine during his regular visits to Ray, when he brings clean laundry, shaves Ray, and talks with him and his companions. Passing the people he calls the wheelchair sentries, he notices an elderly woman whose shriveled appearance and intense stare lead him to nickname her Princess Evil Eye. The label makes her memorable to him, but it also reduces her to the frightening look he perceives rather than establishing who she is.

The story later identifies the absent woman as Prosperine. When Dominick asks Warren where the old woman is, Warren says she is Prosperine and has been taken to the hospital with pneumonia. He adds that she has refused food and drink and may be nearing death. The news turns the figure Dominick had treated as a fixture of the institution into someone facing an immediate, vulnerable end.

Her identity remains unsettled even after Dominick reaches her. A notice reads ALBRIZIO, PROSPERINE, DO NOT RESUSCITATE, prompting him to wonder whether she is Prosperine Albrizio or Prosperine Tucci. He decides that resolving the name matters less than getting to her in time. The narrative thus supplies a formal name and a possible alternative without explaining the discrepancy or providing a dependable personal history.

From Contempt to Recognition

During the earlier visit, Prosperine’s stare prompts Dominick to stare back, as if returning what he believes she is directing at him. He recognizes that the gesture makes little sense and is pathetic, yet he remains caught in a harsh comparison: children die of cancer, accidents, and AIDS, while this elderly patient continues to live. He recalls a newspaper story about a seventeen-year-old who waited a year for a bone-marrow match that never came, then thinks of Prosperine as a burden kept alive while children die.

That reaction belongs to Dominick, not to an objective account of Prosperine’s worth or experience. His thought that she is a “vegetable with a beating heart” exposes how completely he reads her through bodily dependence and the unfairness he sees in survival. The scene does not give Prosperine a voice with which to answer him. Instead, it shows the moral failure in his own gaze: he knows his retaliation is pathetic, but that awareness does not initially prevent him from judging her life as waste.

The Visit During Hurricane Bob

When Dominick learns that Prosperine has been taken to the hospital, he acts with urgency. During Hurricane Bob, he borrows two rabbits and backs away from the woman who questions him, insisting that the situation is an emergency. The storm and the improvised rabbit rescue bring him to Prosperine’s bedside, where the order not to resuscitate makes the possibility of her death explicit.

Dominick places the box on the floor and asks, “Can you forgive me?” He also asks her to make him whole again. Then he lifts the two rabbits by the scruffs of their necks and holds them before her. One kicks in the air and becomes still as he rocks them back and forth before the Monkey. Prosperine moans softly and closes her eyes while wind and rain beat against the building.

The scene records Dominick’s plea and gesture, not a clear answer from Prosperine. Her moan and closed eyes do not establish that she understands him, forgives him, or recognizes the rabbits. The encounter nevertheless reverses the posture of the earlier scene: where Dominick once returned her stare in defiance, he now stands before her asking for forgiveness. The rabbits make his appeal tangible, but they cannot make it certain that he has repaired any harm or that Prosperine can respond.

Records, Absence, and Narrative Significance

The later account places Prosperine among the psychiatric patients released from the Settle Building before it closed in March 1992. She had been in the third-to-last wave to leave. No records survived, or existed, for a Prosperine Tucci, and Dominick finds no evidence that Prosperine Albrizio and Thomas Birdsey knew each other during their long stays at Settle. The narrative offers only possibilities: Thomas might have brought her coffee from his cart, or she might have passed him in the dining hall while imagining that her nemesis was present.

Those possibilities remain explicitly unconfirmed. They do not establish a relationship between Prosperine and Thomas; rather, they show how little the surviving account can recover about lives spent inside the institution. Prosperine is first fixed in Dominick’s memory by a nickname and a stare, then brought back as a named patient whose files and connections are missing. Her brief appearance leaves two things in tension: Dominick’s impulse to turn her into a symbol of a cruel universe, and the concrete fact of a person who is ill, dependent on care, and possibly dying. His appeal for forgiveness marks a change in his treatment of her, but the absent record and her unreadable response prevent that change from becoming a simple resolution.