City for Ransom

by Robert W. Walker

  “It is me, Christian, Dr. Jane Francis.”

  He squinted and blinked all at once.

  “You once loved me, respected my father…and you…and…”

  “…and you left me.”

  “Not you. I left Washington for Europe to further my studies, to gain access to—”

  “Your future.”

  “—a true medical library, recall?”

  “Yes but you stopped writing, and all these years I had no idea. I thought some awful fate’d befallen, that you were…dead. Now look at you.”

  “I can explain.”

  “What have you done to yourself?”

  CHAPTER 13

  They had brought their voices down and spoke under the minstrel’s songs, and the muffled conversations of Hinky Dink’s.

  “I’ve a daughter in medical school. Can’t do that on what a woman makes—not in any womanly profession or in my chosen profession.”

  “But you’re a gifted physician with surgical skills touting phrenology and nonsense and selling snake oils! And doing it as a man. A waste on more levels than I can say.”

  Hinky interrupted, asking if the young Dr. Tewes would care to partake of a drink. She ordered Amaretto liquor.

  “My God…” Christian moaned, “Ransom—”

  “What of ’im?”

  “—has the wrong idea about…and—”

  “No one else is to know, Dr. Fenger. No one! You must promise. You must reveal my secret to no one, and especially not to Alastair Ransom.”

  “But the blackmail and the—”

  “I’d never’ve gone through with it, sir, never.”

  “But Tewes may’ve?”

  “A means to an end.”

  “To gain access to Alastair’s case?”

  Jane nodded. “I can explain why.”

  “You don’t understand. As angry as I am at Tewes, you must know—”

  “I can sense Ransom wants to hurt me…ahhh, Dr. Tewes, that is.”

  “Hurt you? He wants to drown you in Lake Michigan, and I just handed him all the justification.”

  “That’s his knee-jerk reaction? Kill Tewes?”

  “He could be lurking in the shadows of the alleyway just outside right now.”

  “Then the two of you…you really were plotting—”

  “Dr. Tewes’s demise, yes.”

  “My God…perhaps I play my part too well.”

  “I’d say…yes.”

  “How can we stop him without telling him the truth?”

  “There mayn’t be any stopping him short of his discovering you wear knickers!”

  “Shhh! Please.” She looked around but no one heard above the lament being sung of unrequited love. “But Ransom’s a law enforcement official, a police officer, an inspector in the—”

  “All the more reason to fear him.”

  She gulped and Hinky handed her the Amaretto at the same instant. She threw it back and swallowed. “I needed that.”

  “We have to tell him something.”

  “No!”

  “I…we left it with his calling on you at your office…asking for a miracle cure for those recurring headaches he’s suffered since the bomb.”

  They sat in silence. The balladeer song changed to a mother’s child lost to war. Finally, Jane said, “All right…when he comes to see me…do you think him foolish enough to…in my own home…that he’d—”

  “No, actually, I think he’ll gather information on you—Dr. Tewes—for now.”

  “Clumsy…comes ’round ostensibly for an examination? For the headaches?”

  “A phrenological exam, during which he’ll interrogate you—Tewes that is. We agreed at the last only to get some dirt to counteract Tewes, but…”

  “But what?”

  “For one, he’s bloody unpredictable, and I didn’t like that look in his eyes when—”

  “Far from pleasant, agreed. Funny…as children, I admired him so, but he’s so changed…and I rather doubt he has any memory of—”

  “As children?”

  “I have the dubious honor of having gone to the same school when I was four, before Father moved us to the far north side.”

  “Can’t imagine Ransom ever having been a child.”

  “But in so many ways…he still is.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “This new science of the mind and neurosurgery fascinates the child in me, I suppose.”

  “I insist on walking you home, Dr. Tewes. In the event you should encounter any unpleasantness.”

  “A big unpleasantness named Ransom, you mean? That won’t be necessary, Doctor.”

  Christian released a twenty-year-old sigh. “My God, so it’s now Dr. Jane Francis. Had you not gone off—”

  “Believe me, sir. I learned more from watching you work than anything in all my studies, both here and abroad.”

  “And now you’re back. Declare yourself, Jane, and I’ll do all in my power to get you an appointment at Cook County.”

  “As what? I would be put to work doing nursing and scut work, and we both know that, dear, sweet Christian.”

  He stared into her knowing eyes.

  “Don’t look that way at me. You know it’s true. You, sir…you live in a world of your own making, but the rest of us…we live in this world.”

  “In the end, we all of us create our own reality. You’re foolish to’ve created yours as Tewes!”

  “You say that…that it is up to me, yet you know why I had to leave Chicago, and why I had to return as Tewes.”

  “A woman asking for a look at a private collection of medical books to fulfill her dissertation so she might graduate on to medical school, yes.”

  “And I was turned down.”

  “You ought to’ve fought them!”

  “With what?”

  “With the strength your father instilled in you!”

  “You sound like my Gabrielle.”

  “Your girl…now in medical school?”

  “Yes, and she is such a dreamer.”

  “Dreamers are needed in this life.”

  “Perhaps…but my dreams were done in by reality.”

  “But reality is what you create of it, my dear.”

  “You and Gabby will love one another.”

  “You…daughter.”

  “Sadly, the young man murdered at the train station was seeing Gabrielle, and God forgive me, I’d forbidden their seeing one another, and now this.”

  “Poor child.”

  “She can’t be distracted from her studies—not by anyone or anything, not if she’s to succeed.”

  “Succeed like her mother or like Dr. Tewes?”

  She bridled at this. “We’ve had disagreements…over not allowing anything to distract her from her goals.”

  “Her goals?”

  “Yes, her goals.”

  “Well, Jane…I am an outsider here, but—”

  “The young man who was killed, he’d walked her home from the fair. It was to be the last time she’d see him! That’s what I told her…and prophetically and sadly…”

  “And how is she taking it?”

  “Too calmly…too well. Going about…my God, as if nothing of the sort could possibly’ve happened.”

  “A holding pattern; in order to deal with it. Grief must manifest itself in some form or other. Keep her close; keep a watch on your daughter, Jane.”

  “I have.”

  “To lose someone close is difficult enough, but to lose someone to this madman afoot in Chicago?” Dr. Fenger looked profoundly sad for Gabrielle.

  “Yes, so here again is reality. Like a hurdle everywhere.”

  “Still…inside here,” he said, pointing to his head, “you can and will one day turn a corner, and when you do, you’ll be living your dream, as Dr. Jane Francis.”

  “Discouraged, disillusioned, hurt. How do I ever dream again?”

  “You find a way.”

  “Hell, Christian, you’ve heard the views held b
y Dr. McKinnette and the great Dr. Banefield Jones and Dr. Stille. That women haven’t the disposition or the stomach for medicine, and especially surgery.”

  “They harp the belief of the general population.”

  “Fools all!”

  “Unfortunately, yes, but Jane, that was years ago, my dear.”

  “Not for me, sir. For any woman in medicine, that is today.”

  They sat silent, each thinking of the vile words of McKinnette, Jones, and Dr. Alfred Stille, that day at the symposium; words leveled at the few women in the room, including Emily Blackwell, sister to Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell.

  “Rush Medical College refused Emily Blackwell permission to allow her to finish her medical studies. Rush—your medical school—in 1852, and why? The Illinois State Medical Society censured the school for admitting a woman!”

  “That was 1852. This is 1893, Jane.”

  “And the problem of training women in medicine continues unabated. My Gabrielle faces it every day at Northwestern, the same narrow-minded pig-swallop that constitutes the average doctor’s attitude toward us, that we are as mentally unfit as we are physically unfit for—”

  “You needn’t recount—”

  “—for even a business profession.”

  “I know. I know all this.”

  “But you left the room when Dr. Stille finished his remarks during his presidential address to the American Medical Association.”

  “You’ve read the minutes, and I suppose you’re right to condemn me, but I was only eighteen. Have you carried Stille’s words with you since?”

  “I have, yes. Shall I recite?”

  “Please don’t.”

  She did. “‘All experience teaches that woman is characterized by a striking uncertainty of rational judgment, capriciousness of sentiment, fickleness of purpose, and indecision of action—which makes her totally unfit for professional pursuits.’”

  Fenger knew the truth of it. What women in medicine faced. Prejudice, backward beliefs, amazingly parochial attitudes. Not only were women, in the eyes of most medical professionals, mentally unsuited for professional study, but in the case of medicine, there were additional “reasons” to bar them. These had to do with modesty and morality that caused awkwardness during physiological discussions and in dissections—both of which felt like venues no lady ought attend. Quite unladylike is how Dr. Byford had phrased it. “But Jane, more recently…was it sixty-nine? Bill Byford at Chicago Medical solicited and accepted young women to—”

  “Yes and again the male students petitioned at close of term that women be removed!”

  “Making idiotic charges against Byford and other faculty as I recall.”

  “Claimed they’d prudishly omitted a number of observations and clinical techniques due to the presence of women.” Jane paused. “Damn, some of the leading physicians of Chicago are still the biggest blowhards and the loudest opponents of women in medical education.”

  “I remember when Nathan Smith Davis advocated separate female colleges for medicine, and for halting women from gaining a foothold in the American Medical Association,” said Fenger. He laughed.

  “What?”

  “Sarah Hackett Stevenson took him and the status quo on.”

  “Now there was a hell of a woman.”

  “Your greatest advocate, Jane.”

  “Aside from you, but true enough, she kept me on my game.”

  “The first seat in the AMA ever occupied by a woman. Courageous lady.”

  “A student of Darwin and Huxley at the famous South Kensington Science School in London.”

  With gnashing teeth, he shook his head. “Has she returned to Europe?”

  “Not quite. She’s removed to Springfield. Point is for all the eyes women’ve opened, the problems persist.”

  “I’m not blind, but this is a societal problem, dear, and it persists in all areas of commerce and business—not just medicine.” Fenger lifted his drink for a sip.

  She drank a second Amaretto.

  He shook his head, gathering his thoughts. “I recall once we got a cadaver in, and the man, kind enough to leave his body for scientific study, had one stipulation else his body goes to the earth.”

  “Let me guess. Rush Medical must preserve the body from any and all indignities. Meaning no female medical student could work over him.”

  “Even in death, a man remains modest.” He held up a finger. “Look, Jane, Sarah Stevenson graduated from the Woman’s Hospital Medical College, an outgrowth of a hospital established in 1865 by—”

  “Mary H. Thompson, a hospital for indigent women and children—”

  “—which only last year became a department of—”

  “I know, Gabby is studying at the Thompson School at Northwestern University now, but as I said, she’s having similar problems as any woman in medicine has for the past sixty years! Mary Thompson herself finished for her degree during that one-year experiment for the Chicago Medical College, the same year three other women were stranded in their studies. Now it’s 1893 and soon it’ll be 1900, Christian, and you want me to believe things have improved?”

  “By degrees, yes.”

  “Degrees?”

  “Women are now admitted into competition for internships at Cook County Hospital and Asylum.”

  “And how many of those internships’ve gone to women at your precious medical facility?”

  “The numbers improve each year, I assure you. Hopefully, by the turn of the century coeducation in medicine will be an accepted reality.”

  “Do you know what happened to my reality, sir, when I was no longer at ease at Rush, made to feel that way by the male students?”

  “You disappeared.”

  “Not entirely, no. I first wound up at the Hahnemann Medical College.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “That place occupying several rooms over a drugstore? On South Clark?”

  “The one that prospered last during the Civil War, yes.”

  He bit back a show of anger.

  “Not long there, I moved on to the Bennett College of Eclectic Medicine and Surgery, where the systematic teaching of pathology and bacteriology has only now begun. I got some smattering of laboratory work in chemistry, a bland education in surgery, histology and nothing of physiology.”

  “Little wonder you ran to Europe, but you might’ve come to me first. Why didn’t you?”

  “Pride perhaps…anger…the anger of youth.” She failed to say she feared he’d fallen in love with her.

  “Ahhh…fire of stubborn youth,” he replied.

  “I’ve no regrets of going abroad. I returned with a medical degree and my Gabrielle.”

  “A good thing, I’m sure.”

  “Look, Doctor, you ask that I deal with reality now. Deal with it was your most oft repeated admonition to all your med students.” She indicated her disguise. “I dress in drag to fit the reality that makes it a man’s world.”

  “It’s ethically wrong, Jane.”

  “And you? How do you deal with reality? You torture yourself for countless years?”

  A brief stunned look as if struck by a sudden pain and Fenger calmly replied, “Me…me and reality…how do I deal with it?”

  “Your hands’re in it each day.”

  “While I find beauty in the human body, I also find suffering. Yes, I suppose I do recreate this thing we call reality in my work every day…”

  “Yes, in order to do what you do.”

  “…in order to remain standing and doing surgery for eighteen, twenty, thirty hours at a stretch at times.”

  “Like when Haymarket happened, the Great Fire?”

  “Haymarket, yes, and as a much younger man, the fire. Actually the Great Fire benefited my reputation. Soon after, I was teaching at Rush and practicing at Cook County at age thirty-seven.”

  “You patched up Ransom when he was hurt in the bombing at Haymarket, didn’t you?”

  “Everyone was called to he
lp.”

  “And you saved Alastair Ransom’s life.”

  “Any doctor would’ve done what I—”

  “No, sir. I looked at the hospital record.”

  “Really now?”

  “Another doctor had written him off, and even then, you understood how ninety percent of wound infection occurred, so you took sanitary steps to see to it that he did not lose his leg or his life for that matter. You were so far advanced over the other men practicing medicine then.”

  “He proved a strong patient.”

  She half smiled at the characterization. “Being bullheaded may’ve saved him in some situations, but you saved him that day. It’s what you do, Dr. Fenger, what sets you apart.”

  “Please…being set apart is a lonely proposition.”

  “Regardless, you…you save lives amid all this circus—this passing parade of angels and demons in this…this—”

  “This floating opera we call Chicago?”

  “Precisely.” Jane stood and bid him good night, taking her leave.

  CHAPTER 14

  Later the same night

  Jane gasped, startled to find Alastair Ransom on Dr. Tewes’s doorstep, wearily smoking. In a cornice window, she saw Gabby staring from behind curtains, that damnable pistol—an ancient old breach-loading Sharp’s longer than Gabby’s forearm—poised. Jane had removed the firing cap, rendering the thing useless whether loaded or not. Apparently, Gabby found Alastair not only an exotic fellow, but at least as frightening as if a bear had wandered up onto the porch.

  She wondered momentarily at the strangeness of life in its permutation through the aging process; how such a handsome, bright-eyed, intelligent, soft-spoken, pleasant, sweet-hearted, concerned, giving creature as Alastair’d been as a child could be so different now. How had he become such a clod, a sot, a womanizer, and a fool?

  “What are you doing here, Inspector?” she asked as Tewes. “Surely, you’ve not come to beat me senseless or to shoot me?” She said it loudly enough for neighbors to hear, but primarily, she wanted Gabrielle to calm down.

  “Here to offer my apologies.”

  “Really? This comes as a surprise,” she lied.

  “I know you mean well.”

  “And what has brought you round to this startling conclusion?”