by Rose Doyle
‘I'll be the one to decide the restrictions on my daughter,' his quiet tone was more chilling than his angry one as he held open the parlour door. 'I'd be obliged if you would leave us.'
For a few seconds I was almost sorry for Mary Connor. She stood like a small animal in a trap, fully aware she'd put herself there. Then she recovered.
'As you wish,' she said, 'but Miss Buckley will regret working in a dispensary.' She looked at me and I knew nothing would make her happier than to see the first marks of smallpox on my face, the dread flush of typhoid. Then she turned and sailed wordlessly past my father.
He waited until she had gone up the stairs before he said, 'I don't want you working in that place, Alicia, but I will not be told by that woman. If it will settle your mind and make you more kindly disposed towards Maurice McDermott then so be it. You may help out in Eccles Street for a few days a week from now until the new year. No longer.' He slammed the door behind him as he left.
'Before God I don't know how I could have given birth to you, Alicia.' My mother's voice was dreamy. 'A place in a Magdalen convent would be too good for you. We've done all we can, your father and I. You will marry Maurice McDermott or make your own way in life from now on.'
'Then I will make my own way,' I said.
She was staring into the fire and didn't seem to hear me.
Early the next day I took an omnibus across the city to the dispensary. It seemed to me more the thing than arriving by carriage. Late in the night before I'd removed the fancy trims from a Paris gown and looked sober enough in navy blue. The rhythm of the horses' hooves over the cobbles soothed my nervous expectancy. It was a cold, sharp day but I sat on top of the omnibus so as to enjoy the spectacle of the city below.
Most of the people in the streets at that hour were servant women; you could tell by their dress and way of walking. I could see too into the baskets on the heads of the women hawkers; some filled with fresh cockles and mussels, others with fruit from the markets. There were boys and dogs everywhere, and soldiers and men in black topcoats on their way to work in offices.
I needed the diversion. My father had refused to speak to me as I left and Bess had told me angrily that what I was doing was an 'act of madness'.
All this and, at the end of my journey, a man who, to say the least of it, was disinclined to work with me.
Dr Daniel Casey hadn't been pleased to find me at work in the dispensary. After a tight-lipped greeting he'd taken me by the arm into the outer hallway. 'We had an agreement. We were to talk together about you working here. Nothing was to be decided until then.' His anger made him look less of a boy. He was flushed and I was careful not annoy him further.
'It's an accident that I'm here,' I assured him at my earnest best, 'I came with Sarah, hoping to see you. She needed to see a doctor. But a patient, Mrs O'Toole, was in labour when we got here and Dr Connolly needed assistance.' When I stopped and touched his arm he moved away from me. 'I didn't plan, or connive or conspire to come in here behind your back.'
'I've no doubt that's the way it happened,' he was still furious, 'and Mrs O'Toole has every reason to be grateful to you, I'm sure. But that doesn't mean you can stay and be a nurse to the rest of our patients. You're not…'
I'll never know what I was not because Dr Connolly came flapping into the hallway and cut him short. 'Sort out what's between the two of you some other time,' he was brusque, 'the waiting sick need both of you, now.'
I worked that first day for a further four hours, washing and putting cream or iodine on cuts, boiling water, taking the names and details of patients, boiling water, holding children still while their wounds were stitched, cleaning and washing, boiling water. I helped both doctors.
When Mrs O'Toole's husband came I carried her dead baby to her and she put it into its small coffin.
I was getting ready to leave when Daniel found time to ask me what had been wrong with Sarah. I saw no point in lying, or even in avoiding the question. 'She's going to have a child,' I said. 'She took poison in the night to end the pregnancy but was glad then when it didn't work. She came to be examined to make sure everything was all right.'
'Oh, God, not Sarah . . .' He stared into the basin of water on the table. 'That lovely young woman.' His expression was indescribably sad.
It wasn't the response I'd expected and I didn't try to say any more. I couldn't.
'What did Dr Connolly say?' he asked, after a while.
'That she should look after herself and everything would be all right.' I hesitated, then went on, 'Sarah says that Mary Ann came to her last night. They spoke. She believes it's thanks to Mary Ann she didn't lose the child.'
'She was hallucinating,' he was curt, 'the ergot will have been the cause. Of course Mary Ann didn't come to her.'
I wasn't so sure. Sarah believed it and Sarah wasn't fanciful, as a rule. Again, I said nothing.
'Is the father about?' Daniel asked.
'He hasn't replied to letters sent him. Sarah hasn't told her family. There's only you, I and Dr Connolly who know. Maybe the father, if he got the letters.'
Daniel Casey didn't ask me who the father was. 'Tell her I will help in any way I can,' he said.
When I left he walked with me to Berkeley Road, where there were horse cabs. The cold air, unfortunately, invigorated him.
'I must tell you again that I don't want you working in the dispensary. You're putting yourself at risk. You're young and educated. It's no place for you. You can surely find some other way to escape your parents' plans for you.'
'You're every bit as bad as them.' I stopped and turned to face him. Our breath made clouds in the cold air between us. 'Just like them you can't accept that I want a life in medicine. Who questioned you, Daniel Casey, when you decided to become a doctor? Who told you that you didn't know your own mind? No one, I'll wager, and all because you're a man.' I moved away. 'I don't need your approval. Dr Connolly wants me to work with him.'
I hoped he would come after me. I didn't want us parting on bad terms.
He did. 'My family put up a ferocious opposition to my becoming a doctor,' he said as he fell into step beside me, 'my father dying of typhus fever nearly destroyed my mother and sisters.' He was looking straight ahead. 'They didn't want the only other man in the family taken from them in the same way.'
The knowledge that he had a mother and sisters who loved him made him seem different to me. Made him a man as well as a doctor.
'It's not your place to worry about me, Daniel,' I said, 'not about my catching typhus fever or anything else. If anything happens to me it will be because I choose to take the risk myself.' I peered at, and assured, his stern profile. 'I'm the only one accountable.'
'You should at least know the facts.' He ran a hand through his hair, making it stand on end like a yard brush. 'Figures show the death rate among Irish medical practitioners higher than among army officers in combat. Fifty per cent higher . . .' He cleared his throat. 'The same figures show that twenty-five per cent of Irish doctors die in discharge of their duties.'
He stopped, leaning against an iron railings, waiting for me to speak. Paint flaked from the railings and fell about him like a small shower of soot.
'Why, with all these facts, did you decide to practise medicine?' I said.
'Because I see medicine as a practical art. I want to know about and use new means to cure or alleviate diseases.' He gave a small shrug and smiled. 'It's in my bones. It's all my father left me.'
'I see the practice of medicine as a practical art too,' I said, 'and what my father has given me is a great need to make a life for myself independently of him and my mother.'
We left it at that, for then.
Within a week it was December and the days had become colder, shorter and bleaker than in any December I could remember.
I worked hard in the dispensary and got used to Daniel Casey's quiet, stubborn company. He was the best of doctors. Even Dr Connolly, who'd worked, he said himself, 'with every kind of
quack in the medical book', thought so.
Daniel Casey saw the worst of the diseases too. He was the one went out to the tenements to treat those stricken with smallpox and diphtheria and pneumonia and tuberculosis, all of them too ill to come to the dispensary themselves. He was a driven force, a living reminder of all that he'd told me about the chances taken by his dead father and every other dispensary doctor in Ireland.
Working in the dispensary didn't improve my tolerance for Maurice McDermott as a doctor. It was coming up to Christmas when I lost what little tolerance I had for him as a man, and as a happy consequence lost him as a suitor.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Allie
The city was not at its best.
The snow which had fallen for two days left the streets piled with frozen slush on top of which animal droppings steamed.
I wasn't at my best either when I arrived home to find Dr Maurice McDermott waiting for me.
He, however, was in fine form. Flushed and beaming, he heaved himself out of an armchair by the drawing-room fire to greet me. The port bottle on the small table beside him was almost empty.
'I called to see your good father, Alicia,' he said with a small bow, 'only to find him away. When the housekeeper said you were expected home I decided to wait. I hope, Alicia, that you don't mind us being alone?'
The way he was forever using my name, with his Alicia this and Alicia that, made the skin of my scalp crawl.
'I trust myself completely in your company, Dr McDermott,' I said.
'And you're right to do so, Alicia my dear, absolutely right.' He rubbed his hands together. 'My intentions towards you are completely honourable.'
He was wearing a yellow vest with a spotted bow tie. He looked ridiculous but clearly thought he looked young.
'I haven't given any thought to your intentions towards me, Dr McDermott,' I smiled. I'd discovered that as long as I smiled
I could say anything I pleased and Dr McDermott wouldn't take offence. He didn't now either.
'I wondered, Alicia, if you would care to go to the Exhibition Palace to see Blondin perform?' He was rubbing his hands so hard I expected sparks to fly. 'He's the hero of Niagara, you know, and he's to perform on a high rope at the highest possible elevation . . .'
'I know all about Blondin, Dr McDermott, and I'm amazed you would think me interested in such nonsense.' I didn't smile.
'I see, I see . . .' He indicated an armchair I should use and sat into his own near the fire. The familiarity of this irritated me beyond belief. 'Sit a while and talk with me.' His encouraging smile made me want to run from the room.
'Will sad tales of dispensary work entertain you? It's all I have to talk about these days.' My yawning was not a pretence; I was very tired.
'Your interest in medicine is commendable,' he said, and pursed his cherry lips, 'but that northside dispensary is no place for a young woman of your sort. I can tell you anything you need to know about medicine.'
'I think not.' I took an armchair near the centre of the room. 'The most unpleasant things interest me. Disease, the spread of infection—'
His laugh cut me short; it was loud and unfunny. 'Nature has designed women to nurture the young, Alicia. It's their purpose, and a fine and noble one it is too. It seems to me, my dear Alicia . . .' he gave a small cough and dabbed his lips, 'that your natural, womanly urge to nurture has driven you to the extreme of nursing work in this dispensary. If you had younger brothers and sisters to occupy you, or a child of your own . . .'
He left the thought unfinished and his smile, this time, reminded me of a malevolent gnome. I looked at him with a dislike he was too drunk to notice.
'I've no wish to nurture,' I said, 'only to cure. I've decided to
devote my life to the practice of medicine. I intend becoming a doctor.'
I'd said nothing to him about this before and it was a waste of my time saying it now. He looked mildly amused and not very interested.
'Women function better as the helpmeet of man, Alicia. Men, after all, go into the world to keep it a better, safer, place for all of us. Women should not be exposed to the horrors of medicine.'
'Medicine seems to me to be more about the miracle of healing.'
'The male is better equipped to minister to the horrors of the diseased body.' His eyes on mine were like those of a small, unpleasant animal.
'Horrors, Dr McDermott? You keep using that word. Surely the sick or diseased body is pitiful? Surely the horror is that we are so unable to make it well? And surely, too, women have a role to play in the care and healing of other women?'
'Women are made for beauty, Alicia, and to enjoy beautiful things. They are the opposite of us brute males, a leavening force in this cruel world.'
'Women give birth,' I pointed out, 'when they are lucky enough to go to term. Where is the beauty in the lives of the fifty per cent of pregnant women who lose their babies in Dublin each year? You must know that infant mortality in Dublin is the highest in Europe.'
'So they say.'
He took a cigar from his pocket and without asking my permission snipped and lit the end. I held my tongue. I was hungry and said a small, silent prayer that he wouldn't stay to dinner.
'You must know, my dear Alicia, that it's women of the labouring classes who lose their babies. It's nature's way of curtailing numbers.'
The door opened and Mary Connor, in a lace collar exactly the whey colour of her face, glided to the centre of the room. She showed not the slightest ill effects of her fall.
'I've had three places laid for dinner, Dr McDermott.' She ignored me. 'Since I presume you'll be dining here when Mrs Buckley returns?'
'Thank you, Mary, thank you, I'd be delighted.' He was immediately his bluff and hearty self. 'And maybe, while we wait, you might bring another bottle of port wine so as Miss Buckley could enjoy a glass? She's somewhat overexcited on the subject of women in medicine.'
He laughed. Mary Connor nodded. She still didn't look my way.
'Bring the port for Dr McDermott, Mary,' I said as I stood, 'I won't be having any. I'm tired and I'd like to eat in my room.'
Mary Connor made no move to go. I grew hot in a way that had nothing to do with the fire.
'Tell Bess to make up a tray for me when you go for the port, Mary.' I faced Maurice McDermott. 'My overexcitement would make me bad company at table.'
'I'll be most offended if you don't dine with me,' he said as he heaved himself out of the chair again. The beaming mask had gone.
'My mother will be delighted to have your company,' I said. 'I'm afraid that you and I have too many differences for us to make polite dining companions.'
'I'm sure we can find a subject convivial to both of us.'
'I'm sure we can do nothing of the sort.' As the last of my patience went I heard Mary Connor's tongue make its familiar click. 'You're the enemy of medical progress, Dr McDermott, the enemy of the poor and, though you may not know it, the enemy of women too.'
His hand, holding the cigar, shook. I knew I had gone too far but, on the principle that I couldn't take things back, I finished what I had to say. 'We're too different for a friendship between us ever to develop, Dr McDermott. We're in no way suited to one another.'
'I doubt, Miss Buckley, that you will ever find anyone suited to you.' He threw the remains of the cigar into the fire. 'I doubt you will make a doctor either, no matter your own ideas on the subject. You seem to have little to offer but rudeness and a dangerous anarchy you've brought with you from France.' The words came out of him in a loud torrent he'd probably been holding in. 'You'd do well to keep your views to yourself, miss, until they have been restrained by experience or altogether changed.' He raised his hand and snapped two fingers at Mary Connor. 'My coat, if you please, and my hat. And perhaps you would be good enough to tell Mrs Buckley I'll not be dining here again.'
I watched from my bedroom as he went down the front steps. He'd nearly reached the bottom when he stumbled, recovered himself and ki
cked viciously at the railing. The sight did me a world of good.
When my dinner failed to arrive on a tray I went to the kitchen and, eating my meal there, told Bess what had happened.
'You're storing up a lot of misery for yourself,' she said, 'if you'd any sense you'd have dangled him until he got tired of waiting your parents will tighten the rope on you now and no mistake.'
'They want me married. They will find someone else for me,' I said.
I wasn't altogether wrong. The someone else to pay court was a friend of my parents', though not one they'd chosen as a suitor.
Christmas came and went quietly, and so quickly there was a part of me still waiting for it to happen on the second day of January 1868.
I saw Sarah twice and she was well and managing to keep her secret. She hadn't yet heard from Jimmy Vance but was making plans to visit the Curragh camp when the days got longer.
My father, though unforgiving of my treatment of Maurice McDermott, didn't try to stop me going to the dispensary. He wasn't inclined, he said, to go back on his word during the season of charity and goodwill.
My mother behaved as if I didn't exist.
The weather changed in the New Year when the spell of cold, bright days which had seen us through Christmas came to a dramatic end on Small Christmas Day.
The sixth of January dawned dark. Around noon the lumpen, grey cloud hanging low over the city released a deluge of rain that went on for two days. The streets ran like rivers and the river Liffey swelled like an ocean. When the rain stopped the cold returned and then, within a day, more snow arrived.
If I'd ever had doubts about the grasp the hand of God had on the affairs of men and women, and I'd had plenty such, the weather that January did away with my uncertainties. That inclement time started a chain of events which led to the occasion which decided the rest of my life.
The rain caused a flood in Eccles Street and the dispensary was closed for four days. By the time it opened the snow was severely limiting the movements of both horse cabs and omnibuses.
An entire eight days went by without my crossing the city, or even leaving the house.