by E. J. Levy
That first year, one book above all impressed me: William Harvey’s de Motu Cordis, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, which revolutionized our understanding of the blood’s circulation, which men had mistaken for over a thousand years. I studied Harvey’s work—and his life—eager for a model for my own.
I first heard of Harvey in a lecture by Dr. Hamilton. “It has often been said,” Hamilton began, “that the world knows little of its greatest men, and in the case of William Harvey the statement is strikingly true.” It knows less of its greatest women, I thought.
We studied Dr. Harvey, of course, because he’d discovered the circulation of the blood two centuries earlier and revealed the true function of the heart. Before him—thanks to the Greek physician Galen—the pulse was thought to be a kind of respiration, air sucked into arteries, with vessels acting as bellows. There was imaginary respiration all over the body. That blood moved was known, but Harvey was first to see that it moved in a circle—and that respiration and circulation had distinct aims. For 1,500 years before Harvey, Galen’s fictional body was taken for a fact.
We treated imaginary bodies. We still do; to some extent, the body is a figment of the imagination of its time.
William Harvey was Physician to the King when his book was published; it destroyed his reputation, even though he was correct. His revelation that Galen was wrong—and thus prevailing medical practice founded on a fantasy—enraged his readers. He was dismissed as mad, “crackbrained”; his fellow physicians turned on him. When he died thirty years later, he’d lost friends, reputation, even the power of speech.
At home that night in Lothian Street, I told my mother about Harvey’s discoveries and his scandalous claim that “the heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them.” Usually she’d nod complacently when I spoke of my studies, but this time she enthusiastically agreed; Harvey’s gospel of the heart’s supremacy confirmed what she held most dear—sentiment our salvation. Is it the heart that moves us, or the mind? My mother had no doubt. She was sure my uncle would have helped us had he had a better heart; my father would not have turned us out had his been good.
But I argued it is the thoughts of men that guide them, and govern their actions—and should. Sentiment, the heart, is a fickle master, unreliable as a mob and as unpredictable; it can turn hard and ugly quickly.
Harvey’s discoveries were the result of dissection, observation, induction, as I hoped my own would be. I thrilled to see such rigorous logic applied to the body and that most important mystery, the heart.
The body was not, as my mother feared, profaned by examination, as if one were cross-examining God, but honored by attention. Love, all love, is attention. To be seen truly is the greatest gift.
Throughout that first winter, I studied Harvey’s text and others, aware each day of the slightly longer light, still burdened by the velvet darkness that arrived with the cold and the wet early each winter afternoon; looking out the window onto a woolen-grey sky, the steep shingled rooftops of the facing buildings, the dirty black chimney pots and facades with windows blank as dead eyes, the sounds coming up from the street below, voices in the hallway, the chill ahead of me, the fire by which my mother sat warm at my back.
Gradually, increasingly, when I joined my mother by the fire, she did not speak, except to ask if she might perform some service—did I want another pillow? She no longer called me by my given name, Margaret. As if her daughter were truly dead. I ached to embrace her, to talk as we had, but she rejected every attempt; when I held her, she stood stiffly, as if it were improper, unseemly, then stepped away, saying she had work to do.
One evening when I put on a nightgown to sit by the fire, without my usual chest bindings, as the bandages had left my chest chafed and sore, she shouted at me, asked what I thought I was doing. I didn’t understand. “What if a neighbor saw you, dressed like that?” I knew she meant with my chest unbound. You could, I realize, see the outline of my body beneath the thin fabric against the fire. I felt ashamed. Lonely. We no longer spoke of the future in Caracas.
As the months passed and we settled into Edinburgh, I missed the general more, not less, as my relations with my mother cooled. In the past, my mother had depended on me, confided in me; no longer. At night, while she sat by the fire mending and sewing, I sat at a desk by the window and read, alone.
In London, I had told her of Mirandus’s home, of the room of books and hot chocolate and the pet rabbit. Now, when I described the eccentric faculty or some new bit of knowledge, she smiled politely, listened attentively, but the old warmth between us was gone, replaced by a respectful formality. As if the chill of Edinburgh had cooled our hearts.
Only when we were out on the street did I feel my mother draw near to me; she would take my arm as we walked, I nearer the curb to protect her from any mud that might splash up from passing carriages and carts; I helped her into carriages and out, took off her cloak and returned it to her shoulders. It was when we entered a shop and she deferred to me that I felt the bond between us most keenly again. “My son will take care of it,” she’d say, with unmistakable pride, confident in my abilities, and I would. I would search out small things to delight her—ginger biscuits and hot chocolate to drink, corned beef and cabbage, butter, cream—hoping to spark the affection we’d once shared.
When my mother slipped and called me “Tom,” mistaking me for my brother, I tried not to mind. I failed to see it as a sign, a warning.
I slipped up only once that first year, when I ventured to invite Jobson home with me for tea that winter.
“Jobson, may I present my mother, Mrs. Brackley.”
He bowed. “It’s a pleasure, Mrs. Brackley.”
“I’m gratified someone takes pleasure in it, I’m sure,” my mother said, looking put out to have to pause in her tasks. “You’ll be wanting some tea, I imagine.”
I did not realize that her irritation was over my grave error.
“That would be delightful,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Your mother?” Jobson asked me later, as we sat alone together awaiting tea in the tiny parlor overlooking Lothian Street.
“Did I say mother?” I smoothed a crease on my breeches. “She is like a mother to me, I suppose. I meant, of course, my aunt.”
Later my mother scolded me, anxiety making her shrill: it was the first time I noticed how thin she had grown, how worn out by the masquerade. In contrast to my own liberty, my mother lived in isolation to protect our secret. While I flourished in the role of a bright young man, my mother played the part of the widowed aunt, and our roles seeped into our skins like the constant damp of Edinburgh.
Despite the rift his first visit occasioned, Jobson visited our home often after that. He was a great admirer of the bare-knuckle boxer Belcher and made much of the calculation required in the sport, whose distinction from mere fisticuffs or street brawling he claimed was evident in the fact that it was governed by rules. Often, as we sat studying together in the endlessly cold dark afternoons in the lodgings in Lothian Street, quizzing each other on Latin texts and the Hippocratic Corpus, he would grow restless, rise and stretch, his arms over his head, his vest straining across his broad chest, then he’d clap me on the ear and raise his balled fists, legs braced apart in the pose of combat.
“Let’s do battle with our books, Jobson, not one another, shall we?”
“Up,” he’d insist. “Get up. Do you good. Can’t be salubrious to sit all day in a chair.”
“We’ve only been at it an hour, Jobson.”
“Time for a break, then. Up you go.”
And I would patiently stand with my arms folded over my chest while he tossed punches in my general direction, bouncing on the balls of his feet, his arms twisting to deliver what he narrated as now an undercut, now a left to the jaw. When he was feeling particularly sporty, I’d hold my forearms over my chest and cover my face with my fists to buffer the blows.
“Ar
e you quite done?” I’d ask from behind my hands.
“Almost,” he’d say, panting.
He insisted on calling boxing “a gentleman’s sport,” and claimed it was part of an ancient tradition of combat, such as the Greeks and Romans had engaged in to test men’s mettle and to bond, appealing to what he knew to be my classical interests. Boxing, he claimed, was close kin to the ancient Olympic games of pankration—a wrestling match whose sole constraint on its participants appeared to have been to disallow the gouging out of eyes.
But despite his prodding, he could not make an athlete of me. And I came to suspect it was not for me that he exhibited his pugilistic prowess, but for my mother, whose presence made him gallant and almost witty, quick to recount stories of our teachers and of dances he had attended in London, a glamour that she seemed delighted to admire. She lingered over the tea things when she brought them in, served us and sometimes laughed, as she never did now when we were alone.
I learned quickly that first year in Edinburgh that man’s measure is woman. As dark was defined by night, so we were to be defined by our relations with the fairer sex. It was then I grasped that the dismissal of women was not contempt, but contained fear—mixed with the rage that attends unsatisfied longing.
“That’s a fine Scottish filly,” Jobson remarked as an open carriage drew past our group with a familiar local beauty, its red-haired mistress, seated inside.
“Be a pleasure to ride her,” said Bertram, a spotty youth from the American wilderness of Massachusetts.
“I’d take her bareback,” Chesterton said. “You feel the sweat against your thighs.”
I colored to hear him, embarrassed less by the rough remark—than by memory. I knew what sort of experience such boys had. I’d had enough hands on me in Cork to know; a palm shoved between my legs in a crowd, down the bodice of a loose dress; shoved against a wall out of sight of others; age was no obstacle.
“Have we offended your delicate sensibility, Perry?” Chesterton asked.
“Not at all.”
“But you’re blushing like an English maid.”
“I was only wondering,” I said. “Have you much experience of horses, Chesterton?”
“I’ve mounted a filly or two.” The others laughed.
“Do you ride them hard?”
“I’ve had my pleasure.”
“Ah, that’s the easy bit, no? Question is, have you given any? Or are they the sort of old nags one pays for the pleasure of mounting, stabled by others for the purpose?”
Chesterton pushed forward and shoved me in the chest before Jobson stepped between us, calling it enough.
“Let him alone, Chest,” Jobson said, holding him off. “Perry’s just having his fun.”
“At my expense.”
“Less expensive than an old nag,” I said.
“Enough,” Jobson said. “Enough.”
I knew the sort of experience that Chesterton must have had, the sort he bragged on now, as if it were an honor he had earned, the sort my own brother could have claimed; I’d heard maids speak of being forced by boys like him, had once even seen my brother take a servant girl into the potting shed, her eyes wide with fear. I could not forgive myself that I had not stopped him; I had turned away, refused to meet her eyes, refusing the connection, the vulnerability we shared. From his ostentatious brag, I sensed that Chesterton’s interest lay elsewhere, not with girls at all, but with Jobson perhaps, whom he adored. Though it would have cost him his life to admit it.
The argument would have been unmemorable if it hadn’t led me to a bawdy house that night, an invitation that Jobson said, under the circumstances, I really could not decline. So I joined the others that evening and entered the sad, dim parlor where girls no older than myself were offered to my friends and me. When the time came to choose, I picked the youngest, saddest of them—a girl of thirteen or fourteen—and followed her up narrow stairs and into a room hardly big enough to hold the narrow bed where she dropped her peignoir and, thus stripped, lay back down on the bed, arms over her head. There was nothing erotic in such abjection. I turned away, embarrassed for her, but mine was a delicacy she seemed more to resent than appreciate.
“Just my luck,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“You a poof, then?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon?” I repeated, turning to her.
“You know—like boys more than girls?”
I must have colored at the inquiry, shocked that she spoke of such things openly. It was known there were clubs, societies where such things took place, but sodomy was also known to be a crime, punishable by death. She seemed to mistake my blush for confession.
“Just my luck. Don’t get paid unless we do it.”
“I’m not a poof,” I said.
“You sound like a poof.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“What’s wrong with your voice?” she said, sitting up on her elbows.
“Nothing,” I said. Then, in a deeper tone, “Nothing.”
“Well, then,” she said, “that’s more like it. Why don’t you join me,” she patted the handsbreadth of bed beside her.
“Look,” I said. “I’m only come because my friends insisted, but it’s not my…habit…to pay for this sort of—for female attentions.”
She let out a long breath and leaned back onto the bed again. “Poof,” she said again.
“Look here,” I said again. “I’ll pay you extra if you simply tell the others that it was wonderful, that I was wonderful, but you must never let anyone know that we did nothing.”
“You pay me for nothing,” she said.
“I’ll pay you extra,” I said. “For the story.”
She seemed uncertain about whether to accept the offer until I pulled out a half crown and set it on the bed beside her. It was twice a laborer’s daily wages; it could buy a whole chicken in London, well more than that here. I promised I’d not tell the mistress of the house. It was for her alone. She rolled onto her side and reached out for the coin, but I covered it with my hand before she’d touched it.
“But if I hear that you’ve breathed a word of this to anyone, ever, I will come and cut you stem to stern, clavicle to cunt. I will cut out your heart. Do you understand?”
She stared at me and nodded, saying not a word. Whether it was the money or the threat, she appeared to warm to me after that, and we spent the allotted time in quiet, easy conversation. I told her about dissection and was surprised to find her interested; her questions about the heart and circulation of the blood were keener than most of my fellow students’. I told her things that Mirandus had told me, of how women were left longing for him, desperate when he left.
“What do you suppose he did to them?”
“Told them stories,” I said.
“Women don’t fall in love with men for their stories.”
I shrugged. I thought perhaps I had.
When we left the room, she was blushing, holding my hand. She kissed me tenderly at the foot of the stairs, in front of the others, entreated me to hurry back; Chesterton never spoke of the matter again.
By the end of our second term, we’d lost a number of our acquaintances to illness, to marriage, to family obligations in the West Indies, and Jobson and I became closer for our narrowed circle, though in truth he won friends with an ease I could only admire, never emulate. He remained a favorite among the students and faculty, who often invited him to their clubs or to dine at their homes. Given his popularity, I was left more and more alone—to myself, to my mother’s company—but I did not mind.
Anatomy remained my favorite subject, despite the absurdity of Monro’s lectures, and I often lingered long after our private tutorial at Barclay’s or at Fyfe’s to go over what we’d examined that day. I took to bringing a pasty or some cold meat for supper, since our sessions often ran late into the night. One evening, my mother arrived at Barclay’s and I startled to see her there in the doorway. I rose and we
nt to her.
“Is everything all right?” I asked, fearing for her.
She nodded. “I just thought you might want supper.” She gestured to the basket she carried, covered in a cloth. “What an awful smell. What are you doing, Nephew?”
I thought she spoke this last word with undue irony.
“Morbid anatomy,” I said.
“Morbid indeed. Is it gory?” she craned her neck to see around my shoulder to the body splayed on the table below.
“Butchering a chicken’s worse,” I said. “At least here when you cut into the neck, the body doesn’t run about. And you get enduring knowledge for your trouble.”
“I’d rather have supper,” she said.
“As would I, right now,” I nodded to the covered plate. “But I’ll eat when I get home. Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it.”
I suspected she had reasons of her own for the visit, beyond a generous heart. I knew that she was lonely, eager for company. She had only me. It was not enough. But company could be costly. Exposing us all too much.
When my mother fell ill with fever in late April, I sat by her bed whenever I was home, but she insisted that I continue to attend my lectures unimpeded. I returned from class one evening to find her pale, lips tinting blue, barely able to stand as she oversaw the cooking of a stew. I insisted she stay in bed. Each day when I returned from class, I cooked meat broth, spooned it into her mouth, aware that what she needed was sleep, rest, a warmer sun.
I consulted Dr. Hamilton, who urged a sojourn in warmer climes, Italy or Spain. When I explained that we hadn’t the funds, he considered the matter gravely, then proposed what he said he rarely urged: “Sell capital.” I thanked him and left, closing the door quietly behind me.
My mother asked to see a priest, but I dismissed it as an unhealthy submission to despair.