by Lynn Morris
“No, I didn’t bring you something nice to eat,” he answered, going to a tea table by the settee and lifting a crystal decanter. “I brought you some more medicine. Did you drink all the brandy, Manon?” He spoke in French, for his wife spoke no English.
“Mm, I left some, didn’t I?” she said, pulling herself with effort into a sitting position. “You brought my medicine? Thank heavens, how I need it. Give it to me, Marcus.”
His eyes narrowed as he poured the last dregs out of the brandy decanter into a cut-glass tumbler. The bar set was one of the few nice things they had left. With slow deliberation he turned, swirling the amber liquid with relish. His lip curling, he taunted her, “Why can’t you get it yourself, my dear? Just can’t quite get across the room these days?”
Her head drooped. Almost inaudibly she answered, “I did fall yesterday, Marcus. You should see the big black bruises on my hip.”
“I don’t think so,” he said sardonically, taking a sip.
A very small sniffle came from Manon’s bowed head. “I-I’m just so weak and dizzy. Every day now, it seems.”
“Take your medicine,” he said brusquely, “and stop drinking all my brandy.” He got his medical bag and walked to a small side table by Manon’s recamier. It was littered with a tumbler, still half full of brandy and water, soiled handkerchiefs, crumbs of chocolates, a half-empty bottle of toilet water, a cheap romance novel, and Manon’s reading glasses, small rectangles that sat on the end of her nose.
As Marcus pulled out four large brown bottles and one small clear one filled with a thick green liquid and found places for them on the table, he suddenly wondered how old Manon really was.
They had met almost five years ago, when she was the toast of Paris as the prima donna in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio. He was an eager, passionate, fervent medical student of nineteen then, he recalled with bitterness, and Manon had told him she was twenty-two. She hadn’t even looked that old, with her bright dark eyes and glossy black curls and slim, lithe figure. She looked, in fact, like a slender teenaged boy, without the awkwardness, which was why she had such extraordinary success in operas where she played a woman disguised as a man. Her slim, athletic body and rich mezzo soprano voice had enchanted Marcus from the first moment he had seen her.
And now, he thought acidly, just look at her. She looks like she’s fifty years old—the wife of some coarse Cornish fisherman—
A baby’s wail came from upstairs. It began as a low cry, then went up in volume and pitch until it was a high shriek. Marcus banged the last bottle down irritably. “Manon, go do something with her,” he snapped.
With elaborate nonchalance Manon picked up one of the brown bottles and started working the cork. “She’s been crying like that off and on all day, Marcus. Perhaps something is wrong with her, yes? You should go see.” Her fat fingers worked and grew more frantic. Finally Marcus grabbed it out of her hands, pulled the cork, and handed it back. Her hands trembled with anticipation. Abandoning her attitude of carelessness, she took the bottle and turned it up, closing her eyes with relief.
“Not so much so fast,” he said irritably. As the baby’s cries continued, Marcus turned on his heel, marched up two more flights of stairs to the second chamber floor, and threw open the nursery door.
A small waif of a girl with wispy no-color hair and enormous brown eyes looked up at him with alarm. She sat on the floor by a cradle that held a tiny baby with thick black hair. When Marcus came into the room the girl scrambled to her feet and curtsied nervously, her eyes downcast. She was wearing a dress that had once been blue but was now a dull gray, with a yellowed and stained pinafore. Her stockings were laddered, and she wore no shoes. For a moment, as Marcus looked at his stepdaughter, he saw her as an impartial observer would see her: a thin, sickly-looking girl of six with dirty hair and old tattered clothes. Her neck looked too thin for her head, which seemed much too large for her body. For a fleeting moment it occurred to Marcus that this was a sign of undernourishment in children, but his irritation at the shrieking baby pushed all other thoughts.
“B-bonsoir, monsieur,” she stammered. Of course Solange spoke no English either.
The room stank. With narrowed eyes Marcus looked around at the bare wooden floor, the mean grate with barely a coal ember, the bed with one sheet and one coverlet, the two dolls and one monkey made out of rags that were the only toys in the nursery. It was dark, for only a single candle burned. Dimly Marcus saw a pile of diapers and rags in the corner and identified the stench.
With a guttural rumble of disgust, he went down on one knee and scooped the wailing child out of the cradle. She was soaked and soiled, and the cradle’s bedding had been dirtied. He turned on Solange, and she flinched. “Has your mother been up here even once to see to this child today?” he thundered.
Solange’s tiny hands, like a bird’s claws, twisted in front of her filthy pinafore. “She…she isn’t well, sir. She’s too sick to come all the way up the stairs.”
“She’s too fat and lazy to come all the way up the stairs,” he snapped. “Very well. Is there a clean diaper in this house?”
“I…I…” Solange half-whispered, her eyes darting around the room.
“Never mind,” he rasped, striding to the small half-bed and laying the child down on it. Gasping, half-retching, he stripped the baby of her long gown and dripping diaper. Her delicate skin was red and irritated, though she didn’t have a rash or sores—yet. Grabbing the pillow, he stripped off the cotton pillowslip and wrapped the baby in it. Thrusting the baby brusquely into Solange’s arms, he ordered, “Take Lisette downstairs. If your mother won’t come up here and take care of her, then you two can just move into the parlor.”
Solange hurried out the door, holding Lisette in a desperate grip against her thin chest. She was afraid going down the stairs, for the stairwell was almost totally dark. Also, though Lisette was only eight months old and small too, she was much too heavy for Solange to be able to carry her with only one arm, so Solange couldn’t hold on to the railing. Finally, hearing Marcus stamping and cursing in the nursery behind her, she tightened her hold of the baby and leaned heavily against the wall as she picked her way downstairs. She stopped at the parlor’s open door, looking at her mother in the half gloom with hesitation. Lisette was still wailing.
Manon was staring blankly out the front window, her mouth slightly open, her eyes heavy lidded. Slowly, with a slight wobble, her head swiveled toward the door. “Solange? No, no, darling, take the baby back up to the nursery. I cannot bear her crying.”
“Dr. Pettijohn told me to bring her down here,” Solange said tentatively. With an effort she shifted the baby in her skinny arms.
“Oh, my head, my poor head,” Manon whimpered, pressing her fingers to her temples.
“It’ll be all right, Maman. I’ll try to stop her crying,” Solange said, hurrying to an armchair by the fireplace. Awkwardly she climbed up in it, holding the baby, and with relief laid Lisette across her lap. Already the pillowslip was wet, and the baby was cold. Solange pulled her pinafore across the baby and took both the tiny waving hands in her own. “It’s all right, baby,” she whispered. “It’s all right, baby. Don’t cry…don’t cry…” She began to hum in a whispering half breath, rocking slightly, very slowly, in time with the music.
Even through her drugged haze, Manon recognized the song her daughter was humming. “That’s from Serse,” she said dreamily. “I sang Amastre. On opening night at the Imperial Opera House in Toulon, they gave me so many flowers that my dressing room couldn’t hold them all…. There were flowers in the hallway, flowers backstage, flowers in every dressing room, flowers strewn all the way out the stage door to the street….” Leaning back and closing her eyes she began to sing softly: “Ombra mai fù…”
The aria was from Handel’s opera Serse, or Xerxes, King of Persia. It was the opening of the opera, a very famous passage, coming to be known simply as Handel’s Largo. It was a slow, quiet song, and though it hardly seem
ed suited for a baby’s lullaby, Lisette’s blue eyes focused on Solange’s face, and her wails quieted to soft little half whimpers.
Marcus stormed into the parlor and said mockingly, “How lovely, my dear. How amusing to hear you sing. But Lisette needs your attention, not your singing. She is filthy and hungry and wet, and she stinks. I haven’t found a single clean diaper, much less a dress, for her in this whole accursed house.”
Viciously he flung his armload of ragged cloths onto Manon’s lap. It was Solange’s bedclothes and the old muslin curtains from the nursery window. “I’m going out to get her some formula, since you are no longer any kind of a mother to feed her. By the time I get back, I want her to be washed and dressed in a clean diaper and dress. If she is not—” He lowered his head and glared at Manon with such vitriol that she shuddered.
Turning on his heel, he stamped down the stairs, his footsteps hard and loud. The heavy front door slammed shut with a crash that shook the house. Lisette jerked and began to cry again.
Manon buried her face in her hands, and her shoulders shook with sobs. Helplessly Solange watched, still rocking automatically back and forth, trying to soothe the baby.
“Ohh, what am I to do? Whatever am I to do?” Manon moaned. Then suddenly she jerked upright and grabbed one of the brown bottles Marcus had brought, knocking over her tumbler of brandy and breaking her reading glasses. With desperate haste she yanked out the cork and turned the bottle up. The heavy liquid made two loud gurgling noises as she drank.
Manon wiped her mouth with a slow, careful movement. Then moving as if she were encased in thick molasses, she reached out the bottle toward the table. She weaved back and forth slightly, and the bottle wavered over the small table. With an extreme effort of concentration, Manon finally managed to set it down. Her eyes were almost closed, her mouth open, the jaw loose. A small dribble of spittle traced down her chin and dripped onto her breast.
“Oh, Maman, Maman,” Solange whispered helplessly.
Manon didn’t hear her. Her head wobbling on her fat-folded neck, she fell back onto the recamier in an awkward half-sitting, half-lying position, oblivious. With a drunken wobble she turned her head again to stare out the window. It was dead dark, and there was nothing there to see, but Manon kept staring out at the dark glass and the blackness behind it.
With a tragic sigh much too deep for such a young child, Solange knelt down on the small woolen rug in front of the coal grate and laid Lisette down. Then she went to her mother and lifted her foot—one of them was still sprawled down on the floor—and placed it carefully on the recamier. Manon didn’t move or look up. Solange took the tail of her pinafore and wiped her mother’s chin, then picked up the bundle of cloths that were strewn around. She folded the curtains, sneezing because they were so old that the dust puffed out from them as she handled them. Then she smoothed them as best she could and laid them across Lisette, who was crying, softly now, from exhaustion. With one last worried look she dashed from the room and down the stairs.
It was ink black on the ground floor, and Solange groped down the hallway to the kitchen, her eyes darting back and forth in fear. In the kitchen she saw only vague outlines, odd shapes looming out of the dark, throwing shadows onto the walls that she could only see out of the corners of her eyes. With desperate haste she grabbed the milk pitcher from the worktable. It was empty, she knew, because she had soaked a rag in the last drops of milk that morning for Lisette to suck on. She set it in the sink, standing on tiptoe. Then, with a half jump, she grabbed the pump handle and started cranking. It made an awful creak that sounded like horrible shrieks, and Solange whispered fearfully to herself, “Hurry, hurry, please hurry.” The pump finally caught, the handle became hard to pull, and a trickle of water came out. Solange pumped until the pitcher overflowed, then ran water for a while to rinse it out clean. Finally she grabbed it and started back upstairs to the parlor, feeling her way with the desperate haste that children have when they flee the night terrors.
The water was icy, and Lisette cried pitifully the whole time Solange bathed her. Manon never moved.
Hurriedly Solange used a bathing flannel—the last clean one—as a diaper for Lisette and wrapped her as best she could in her own bed sheet. Then she climbed back up into the chair and by the dying embers watched the slow, deep rise and fall of her mother’s chest and waited for her stepfather’s return.
Part III
True From the Beginning
Thy word is true from the beginning:
and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever.
Psalm 119:160
Twelve
The Odd Man
“Psorists and Scorists, Hydropathists, Iatromechanists, Iatrochemists, Magnetizers, Galenists, Modern Paracelsian Homunculi, Humoral Pathologists, Schoenleinian Epigones, Broussaisists, Contrastimulists—just look at this!” Cheney fumed.
“Okay,” said Shiloh uncertainly, lowering his newspaper. He had finished his lunch—a thick roast beef and cheddar cheese sandwich—and was sitting companionably with Cheney as she finished her breakfast, though it was just past noon.
“I didn’t mean look at this,” Cheney amended, although she pointed to one of her magazines with a triangular piece of toast that dribbled butter all over a page that had Cheney’s messy handwriting in the margin. “I meant listen to it.”
“Okay.”
“I started just jotting down some of the medical advertisers in the newspapers and in my ladies’ magazines. This makes—let me see—thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight! Just today!”
“Thirty-eight what, Doc?” Shiloh asked patiently.
“If I were polite, I’d call them thirty-eight schools of thought, but since I’m not, I call them thirty-eight quacks,” Cheney answered indignantly. “I mean, can you imagine sending someone like Mr. Jack to an iatromechanist for his rheumatism?”
“No, because I don’t know what an iatromechanist is.”
“In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mechanics was a branch of science that adhered to the concept that physical energies and forces such as the wind and the stars and thunderstorms affected people’s bodies, so they attempted to diagnose illnesses by studying the erosion of rocks and the wind direction and so on,” Cheney explained. “Now they call themselves iatro—from the Greek iatros, physician—mechanist.”
“You speak Greek too?” Shiloh asked, astonished.
“Well—actually, yes, I do,” Cheney said, going back to her magazine. “Although you do have a tendency to forget if you don’t use it. I doubt I could converse in it now or read an unfamiliar text. Just look at this! ‘Physiologists after Hamberger,’ for goodness’ sake!” She banged her cup down on the saucer, and Sketes hurried to mop up the sloshed coffee.
“They’ll do it to you every time, those ol’ ‘Physiologists after Hamberger,’” Shiloh said in a wry aside to Sketes.
“Yes, sir,” she agreed, rolling her eyes.
“Hey, Doc, before you drift off into quackery land again, I’ve got a question,” Shiloh said, pouring her a hot cup of coffee from their brand-new silver coffee service. He had bought it from Tiffany’s, and Cheney had never even noticed it.
She looked up. “Yes?”
“So how would this iatromechanic—”
“Iatromechanist,” Cheney corrected him.
“—this quack cure Mr. Jack’s rheumatism?” he finished.
“I have no idea,” Cheney answered shortly.
Shiloh studied her, his eyes dancing. “No? ’Cause I was just thinking, you know, that you and Batson agree that Mr. Jack’s knee gets worse when it’s cold and wet, and Cleve prescribes a hot dry towel wrap for it. Now I know I’m just a dumb mutt, but to me that sounds like an iatromechanistic diagnosis and an allopathic prescriptive.”
Cheney blinked.
“Also,” Shiloh went on breezily, “you said just last week, on the night of the full moon, that you dreaded working on that night, because it was the weekend and the
full moon and people got hurt and got sicker and got crazier during a full moon. Sounds kinda like an iatromechanistic principle to me. Right?”
Cheney stared at him for a few moments longer, then smiled. “You are so intelligent, you have such a grasp of—” She stopped, flushed a little, then ducked her head and took a sip of coffee. “You’re right,” she finally said evenly, meeting his gaze again. He was watching her curiously. “Never mind all that, it’s too much for anyone this early in the morning. So what is your schedule for the day?”
“I hate to tell you, but it’s 12:14,” Shiloh said, glancing at the clock on the mantel. “But I know that’s like early morning for you, Doc. You’re making little Chinese puzzles with your toast crumbs, so I know you’re finished eating. Are you awake?”
“You sound like my mother,” Cheney said grumpily. She played with her food when she finished eating, and all of her life Irene had tried to break her of the habit. “Yes, I’m awake. Come on, Shiloh, let’s go sit by the fire. My feet are freezing.”
This brought on a small flurry of activity that Cheney, being pampered all her life, barely noticed. Sketes hurried to place the coffee service on a side table by the fireplace. On one side of the hearth was a green velvet settee and on the other were two wing chairs. Cheney sat in one, and Shiloh moved a fat hassock from an armchair on the other side of the room, then put her feet up on it.
“I’ll go get a lap robe, Dr. Cheney,” Sketes said.
“Mm, thank you, Sketes,” Cheney said absently. She was reading the last two paragraphs of an article entitled “Cashmere and Alpaca—The Choicest Woolens for New York Winters.”
Shiloh stoked the fire until it fairly roared, then arranged the fire screen. He poured Cheney’s cold coffee out into a modest crockery pitcher that Sketes always included in their informal breakfasts, because Cheney had a tendency to let her coffee sit until it was cold. He made her a steaming new cup, with two sugars and heavy cream, and heated up his own coffee. Leaning against the mantel, he sipped it and looked out the bay windows, courteously waiting until Cheney finished reading before speaking.