The Cape Doctor

by E. J. Levy

  Nonetheless, I was fastidious in my ablutions—carefully bathing my hands in hot water and in wine after our sessions, an eccentricity that my fellow students mocked.

  “Poor Perry doesn’t know where to put the wine.”

  “Who knows what other anatomy lessons he’s got wrong?”

  “Get the boy to a bawdy house, before it’s too late.”

  But I failed to consider what I should most have feared: the danger I posed to others.

  As the weeks passed, I grew increasingly confident in my attire, even cocky. As I began to excel in my studies and impress the faculty, I noticed less the bindings that wrapped my chest, the discipline of deepening my voice; speaking with authority became reflex. Masked as I was, I felt seen, as if I wore my true face in the world. That of Jonathan Mirandus Perry.

  My masquerade proved adequate in the self-regarding company of boys and men, but I feared I might be discovered in the close company of more observant women, so I avoided them. I felt lucky that the century—with its wars—had divided the sexes, separating men from their womenfolk and protecting me from too-close inspection by the fairer sex, safeguarding my secret.

  So I was uneasy when I received the invitation from Lord Basken, our patron, to dine at his home in George Street to celebrate the New Year. There would be no avoiding women at the dinner. It was one thing to present myself in classrooms, to pass myself off among boys and merchants, but quite another to impersonate a young gentleman, a university student among those accustomed to speaking with same. I considered pleading illness, perhaps injury—a limb broken just enough to prevent me from lifting a fork? My mother was excited on my behalf. I knew I could not evade it. We owed him our lives.

  That first dinner at Lord Basken’s would be a test, one I knew I must pass.

  Preparing for the dinner took much of the day. My mother oversaw my attire: she insisted that I wear an emerald striped jacket, a vest of embroidered maroon silk, a starched yellow muslin cravat; the shoulders of my coat were padded, its plush cuffs ornamented with buttons; she could not persuade me to relinquish my long surtout in favor of a more fashionable shooting coat.

  I held my elbows in to keep my chest bindings steady. I stood before the cheval glass, brushing my hair forward, plucking my collar up between my fingers, settling my face into the bored, disinterested expression of men. And thus prepared I went out into the cold, wet evening to have dinner with the eleventh Earl of Basken, the patron we’d never met.

  The uneasy glances directed my way when I first entered the drawing room, where guests had gathered before dinner, told me that I was younger than I hoped to appear, or less fashionable. Or less convincing. My long surtout was a regular subject of fun among my fellow students. My mother had insisted that I improve my dress, but I drew the line there.

  I heard a woman’s voice say, “Why, he is a child.”

  My patron replied, “He is a relation of Jonathan Perry, the painter—you know of him, of course.”

  “Of course. But is he…” She lowered her voice.

  “They say he is a nephew.”

  I had studied what I could from my few formal dinners with General Mirandus, had been coached by my mother; this was to be my exam. Could I play whist? Would I remember to remain when the women retired to the drawing room? How to toast? Would I remember which fork was for salad, which for fish, for meat? To keep my voice low and calm? Would I think to tip the soup plate away from me to bring up the last spoonful of turtle soup? Would I know how to speak of nothing at length?

  Saying nothing is an art. My dinner companions appeared to have mastered it.

  Lord Basken led me around the room, making introductions to people whose names I forgot instantly, despite my mother’s warnings. They spoke of hunting and of balls and occasionally of books. Wanting to impress, awkward with small talk, I defaulted to debate. Doubting my capacity to charm, I would be memorable, admired. So I challenged premises reflexively.

  “Surely you can’t believe that?”

  “And what should I believe instead?”

  Lord Basken roared with laughter. “You truly are your uncle’s—” he paused.

  “Nephew, sir. I am indeed.” Where we do not find love, it’s easy to seek its poor surrogates—admiration, envy. I understood my uncle better now; I was perhaps like him.

  When dinner was announced, we proceeded to the dining room and I had to suppress an urge to ogle the silver, which glowed with a high polish, to inspect the Spode china, the bright crystal goblets for water, wine, port. Even in the soft dim candlelight, the room and the table dazzled. Candlelight lent it all a pink, fleshy cast.

  I hardly recall the food; I hardly ate, so focused on the utensils, the patter of chat.

  When we were served a dessert of cake—a confection of pastry and coconut and whipped cream that resembled millinery more than pastry—I wished I might sketch it for my mother. There was a chocolate cream and an elderflower ice, then an enormous silver bowl of fruit of every kind was brought around: small green apples and small red ones, oranges and fat purple figs, grapes and even a pineapple, and strawberries—sent, it was said, from Lord Basken’s greenhouse at Dryburgh Abbey, where impossibly they were said to grow throughout the year.

  “You must come stay with us during your vacation, Master Perry.”

  “I would like nothing more,” I said, wondering how I might arrange to have my sister join us, my aunt.

  A woman on my right described to me the ruins there, the haunted beauty of the place, until we were interrupted by a debate over the education of women, which Lord Basken was vehemently in support of.

  “Am I not right, Master Perry?”

  I wondered what he knew of me.

  “I am all in favor of the education of women,” I replied. “There’s nothing I should like to see more, except perhaps the ruins at Dryburgh Abbey.”

  It did not seem to me base flattery that I practiced, but social grace or alchemy. Like an experiment performed in chemistry—mixing vinegar and baking soda—I sought a combination that would produce the most pleasing result, the approbation of my host.

  After dinner I won at whist while appearing to lose, so charmingly, so ineptly, inviting the help of female advisers that my victory was cheered by all except one young man, who threw down his cards in disgust. A matron beside me set a hand on mine, and said that I simply must come for an at-home when her niece from London was next in town. She had come out the prior spring.

  I was a great success.

  It was almost a week before I found time to sit at the table by the window and report to General Mirandus on the dinner, to share these small triumphs and see in his response their value, their weight in the world, giving them a reality they seemed to lack; I wanted to prove him right; I wanted him to know he’d not been wrong about me. I wanted to assure myself. I longed for news of him, and of Sarah and their sons. No one else—save for my mother—knew the thing I’d done, the worth of it, the cost.

  It was while I was a student in Edinburgh that I began to keep my little book of quotations and definitions, bons mots and words that I didn’t know or whose etymology interested me. Terms and stray phrases from the books that I read and liked. I favored Honi soit qui mal y pense; Shamed be he who thinks evil of it, the Order of the Garter’s motto, that Anglo-Norman maxim. Often they were simple words. Familiar words whose etymology made them seem new. Strange and delightful. As the body now seemed.

  Manifest had particular charm. It still does. Like an incantation, as if to say it were to bring one’s will to pass. As I sought daily to do.

  Manifest.

  A manifest was originally a document that detailed the contents of a ship, its passengers and cargo and crew, from the mid-century Italian manifesto, from the Latin manifestare (to make public), from the Latin manifestus (caught in the act).

  But that is not its only meaning. As an adjective it refers to that which is obvious, clear to the eye (the hospital’s manifest failings); as
a verb it means to display or make evident, to demonstrate (as in, I manifest the virtues of a man); it can refer to that which becomes apparent through symptoms, such as an ailment (a disorder that manifests in middle age), or to the appearance of a ghost or a spirit (a deity manifested as a bird). The Americans, in that still-new century, would come to believe their destiny was manifest, obvious, as I believed mine was then—they believed in westward expansion; I believed I would rise. And I did. Quickly. My skill manifest to all.

  But it was not without cost, my rise.

  My mother was a strong woman, but she drew her strength from customary surrounds and comforts, her pillows and needlepoint, a familiar hearth and streets she’d walked as a child. Whereas I took heart from the new world revealed to me in Edinburgh and in my lectures on literature and medicine, my mother seemed daily drained. When news came from Mr. Penrose, a family friend, that my father was in debtor’s prison in Dublin, she was not comforted by the news, as I was. Perhaps she missed him, for all his faults. Certainly she missed the only home she’d ever known—Cork with its familiar streets, its defining rivers and bridges, her parish priest. Everything that bore witness to who she had been and was.

  I took her waning as a sign of sorrow, did not read in it, as I should have done, that she was weakened by her cloistral days inside the four rooms of our tenement home, spacious as it was. The long cold days, the damp mornings that became damp afternoons.

  Perhaps I should have been ashamed to have my mother laboring on my behalf, but I was not; I was too absorbed by my studies. I was gratified to have her bustling around me as I worked at the kitchen table, or endeavoring to be quiet, to leave me undisturbed as I studied by the fire. I felt important that I could command such silence, such effort, on my behalf. I told myself I would repay the debt with a home of her own.

  We spent many pleasant evenings discussing the house that we would set up for my mother, sister, and me—once I was a doctor. My mother was keen on settling in Rome or Madrid, for the weather and the faith. She dreaded the prospect of the Americas, which she was convinced (thanks to Royall Tyler’s novel The Algerine Captive) were overrun by rabid Protestants, savages, and brutish colonists, whose inhumanity was proved by their refusal to relinquish the barbarous practice of slavery (though that trade had only recently been abolished on English soil). She was certain all Americans lived in log cabins and wore animal skins. Only the promise of settling in the capital city of Caracas in a Catholic nation on a Catholic continent could soothe her doubts and briefly reconcile her to life in the New World.

  We spoke of the house we might have—each in turn imagining an addition she would like: a pond with colorful fish for my sister (when she joined us), a Roman-style atrium for me, a vegetable garden and orchard for my mother; I imagined a stable with a brace of grey horses and a bright red carriage. I read up on the plants and animals and soil, the sugar plantations and cacao.

  Imagining our future became a consolation, our principal entertainment. We talked about what we would buy, what we would wear, what we would eat once we were rich. I spoke of books I would acquire, paintings; my mother spoke of food. Each night we devoured an imaginary banquet: oysters, turtle soup, partridges, fish, beef and lamb and blood sausages, strawberries with cream, pineapple, Orange Fool, chocolate cake and cream pastries, walnuts, biscuits filled with jam.

  “We can plant lemon trees,” my mother said.

  “Better,” I said. “We can grow bananas.”

  “What’s a banana?”

  “I’m not entirely sure, but it is said to be a fruit both soft and sweet, with a heavy skin, and shaped rather like a cutlass.”

  “Sounds dreadful,” she said.

  “It does, doesn’t it? We can grow oranges instead.”

  We contemplated growing our own cacao—though neither of us was quite sure what that might entail, or even what the valuable seeds looked like—but we relished the idea of having hot drinking chocolate every morning, rich with cinnamon and cardamom. We passed that first dark, rainy winter in Edinburgh in happy reverie: inventing a life for ourselves, sunny and bright and free of the past, combining familiar comforts and companions with the promise of adventure in a new world.

  Delighted as I was by the progress I was making in my studies, I was only truly at ease and content in my mother’s company, forthright, gruff, but affectionate. We would read to one another in the evening and talk of our future, which seemed certain to be brighter than the past.

  When my studies were complete, we would bring my sister with us to Venezuela. I could imagine the delight her presence would cause among the general’s acquaintance in Caracas, among those capable of discerning superior qualities despite obscure birth. And I allowed myself the vanity of imaging that I might, with application and the general’s patronage, rise to a level of prominence that might secure my sister’s own. For surely if nature were the measure of merit, she would stand far above the rest. And so together we passed bright days despite the brutal grey cold of that first Scottish winter.

  Despite the miserable weather and the stench of corpses that lingered on my hands and in my nose, I was happy where we were, there in Edinburgh. Each day I felt more at ease, more the person I had always been, privately, when as a child I’d closed my eyes in the dark. I was discovering among men that winter a freedom of movement that I’d never known before, even as a girl, but I learned quickly that this was not the same as liberty: I’d thought a man’s life would grant me freedom, but my movements were simply constrained in novel ways. I could reveal to no one, save my mother, the body that was mine, whose proportions I learned to disguise with the corseting another generation had reserved for women but now esteemed in men.

  When the other students visited a bawdy house, or came to blows, I was careful to steer clear to preserve my secret, which gained me a reputation for being delicate. I missed the physical freedom I’d known as a child in Cork, where my sister and I were allowed to wander the fields around town, gathering flowers to press among pages of newsprint or bits of cloth, picnicking in muslin gowns loose and light as leaves, secure in the liberty conferred by disregard.

  To counter the effect of my growing reputation for delicacy, I took to imitating our teachers’ belligerent intellectualism. I learned to be caustic, arrogant, indifferent to prevailing opinion. The only unforgivable sin in our ardent age was to be bland, to be without fervor in a sentimental era. We felt ourselves to be living in a great time, on the verge of something extraordinary—an age of new discoveries in science and medicine and politics that thrilled those of us ready to embrace new understandings.

  Our faculty were a cavalcade of eccentricities, from the majestic Dr. Gregory, who taught us physic and wore a hat cocked over his brow throughout lectures and was given to rages that rivaled my uncle’s, to the stately Dr. Hamilton and the soporific Alexander Monro. Our teachers were flamboyant and contentious, given to extravagant fits of opinion and temper. It was rumored that several had come to blows.

  “Did you know Gregory bludgeoned Dr. Hamilton with his walking stick?” Jobson asked, as we waited in the lecture hall one February morning for Dr. Gregory to begin; we watched him sift through his notes at the podium.

  “Doesn’t seem to have damaged Hamilton’s wit,” I said. “Or improved his looks.”

  Jobson gave his polite patrician laugh, which sounded like a cough.

  “Damaged Gregory’s purse,” he said. “They say he paid a hundred pounds in damages.”

  “A sure spur to contrition,” I replied.

  “Not at all. Gregory claims the pleasure of beating Hamilton was worth every penny.”

  I laughed and drew the glare of Dr. Gregory, who raised his walking stick at me in warning. I covered my mouth with a fist and pretended to be mid-cough. We’d heard he was given to beating students as well, so were careful not to provide occasion to witness it.

  Of all our faculty, only Dr. Gregory seemed to disapprove of me, to grow more hostile as my answer
s in class that spring term grew more keen, precise. I was accustomed to winning praise from my teachers, so I was dismayed to find I inspired rage in Gregory instead. I endeavored not to care. I’d heard he was competitive with his students. Given to fits of pique. I chose to take it as a badge of honor. In lectures I tried not to delight in others’ failure, which amplified my own success.

  Of all the thrilling discoveries of those years at university, the most magnificent was my discovery of that greatest liberty of men: not to have to please. To be able to indulge bad temper and dislike, to feel whatever I might. Without apology. I shrugged off sweet disposition like a cloak.

  My favorite lectures were those of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, who taught Midwifery. Hamilton’s lectures followed his father’s famous text, Outlines of the Theory and Practice of Midwifery, beginning with Anatomy and Physiology, then Pathology, then Labours (those requiring Hands alone and those Necessitating Instrumental Delivery)—including the monstrous Caesarian section, an operation reviled by our teachers and texts. Extreme narrowness of pelvis or extraordinary bulk of the child were considered the only justification for recourse to the “horrid operation,” which I had observed only in autopsy. As Hamilton said, “Some positively deny that a woman can survive the daring attempt.” Sir Fielding Ould called it “a detestable, barbarous, and illegal piece of inhumanity.” I noted it.

  The life of the mother was paramount in our minds, as in any sound physician’s. It was understood that we were charged with delivering her, the mother, of the child. I learned from Hamilton that the physician’s work is to facilitate the body’s method, to assist nature, be her midwife. It was an unusual doctrine, almost heresy in our age of increasing intervention among accoucheurs, often at the patient’s expense.