by E. J. Levy
I passed with notable excellence.
I was not yet eighteen, and I had obtained a degree in medicine from the foremost medical school in the world with the highest possible mark. My father was in debtor’s prison, my mother was dead, my siblings lost to me; no woman in the history of the world had done what I had; few men had acquitted themselves half as well. I had made myself a surgeon, almost a gentleman. It had been a most remarkable journey.
I returned to my friend’s rooms triumphant, eager to share my news with Jobson and to celebrate together, confident of his success, but I found him nowhere. I searched our usual haunts—the tavern, the club, the library—until finally I returned home, chilled but still elated. Lord Basken had heard of my triumph, and he had sent a note inviting me to dine with him. I bathed and readied myself for the dinner and was on the verge of heading out when Jobson arrived at my rooms, reeking of acrid vomit and ale; I stripped his clothes and helped him into a chair beneath a blanket. He did not need to tell me he had failed, where I had succeeded.
I had measured myself against my peers relentlessly the last three years, and when I prevailed, as I almost always did, I reveled in it, feeling the sting of their envy like a kiss, a strange inverted bond, as if such measurement could draw us close, make me matter more than I did to anyone now or thought I ever would. I lived in such triumphs, besting those I knew. I thought they would admire me for it, or at least envy me—that poor proxy of affection. A frisson of feeling that approximated love.
But I did not relish my friend’s failure that day; I had relied on our succeeding together, even if I hoped to be the more brilliant of us, the more praised. It hadn’t occurred to me that he could fail.
I took no pleasure in his loss. It was my loss, too. For a moment, poking the fire to raise its flames, it seemed too much to bear, to leave my friend. We had planned to go together to London to be dressers to the famous Sir Astley Cooper; we had planned to share rooms. Now I would go on alone.
By the time my friend woke, I had brewed tea, brought fresh currant buns from the baker’s, a rare flash of blue in the sky, despite the cold coming through the pane.
“The majority fail the exams on the first try,” I said. “There’s no shame in it.”
“Shame not to be together,” he said.
“I will still be in London when you come next year,” I said. “Perhaps by then I will have learned to box.”
“I very much doubt that,” he said.
I told him I’d be back from dinner early, would not linger.
“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”
Stepping out the door to go to dinner at Lord Basken’s, I pulled my coat tighter against the cold, but the chill reached me anyway.
There was much to hold me in Scotland. My mother was buried in its ground. My only friend was there; my patron, Lord Basken, was nearby. But I could not stay. It would never be safe to linger in any place, which is why I would be a military surgeon, once I finished training. My only consolation was the prospect of a reunion with General Mirandus and his family.
Having applied and been accepted as a pupil dresser at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospital, assigned to Sir Astley Cooper for the coming year, I returned to London in the autumn of 1812. When I got off the boat in London, I arranged my lodgings first, then went straightaway to Laundy’s, the premier manufacturer of surgical instruments, to get a proper cutting kit.
Then I went directly to General Mirandus’s home in Grafton Street, passing through streets I’d walked so many times just a few years ago. It was eight years since I’d first visited that city, six since I’d been invited into Mirandus’s library, three since I’d been rechristened Jonathan. It seemed a lifetime. When I presented myself at General Mirandus’s familiar door, I was overcome with a sense of elation and relief; I had made it. I had arrived.
When I knocked, an unfamiliar servant answered and informed me that the general and his family no longer resided there. Where had they gone? He could not tell me. I thanked him. He closed the door. And with that I closed the door in my heart that they had opened years before onto that unexpected garden, and prepared myself for the life before me, the days ahead, in which none would know me, not even—I feared—myself.
,
I will be dead less than a month when the debates will begin over my body, partisans taking sides as if I were a bill in Parliament, a horse on which to wager. Dr. Bradford, with whom I worked in the West Indies, will write in the Medical Times and Gazette to gallantly insist that I was a man through and through, if “devoid of all the outward signs of manly virility,” while the Manchester Guardian will assert with equal certitude that I was a woman all along. There are those who will claim (erroneously) that my body bore evidence of multiple children, others that it was marked with a caesarean scar. Still others that I had no sex at all, like an angel, or rather that I was in possession of both, a Colossus straddling worlds.
In a way, I suppose I was.
There are those who insist I was intersex, hermaphrodite. They claim to have studied my “case”—speaking of me as if I were a patient to be cured—declaring with proprietary authority that I was “an imperfectly developed man,” a man in a female body. How else to explain my success? They debate my corpse as if it were a question, a riddle.
Does it matter? Why can’t we get over the body? Give it a rest? We are measured by our works in the world, for better or for worse; the honor we do outlasts and outlives us, weighs in the scales of time far more heavily than do our bones, so why weight the body so? What matter if I were a woman or a man? Rather, ask what I did with my time. Ask only did I reach, did I go beyond what was easily within my grasp, did I excel, triumph, amaze? Did I live up to my imagining? Is there any other measure?
They’re right, of course, who say that I was not a woman pretending to be a man: I was something far more shocking—a person no longer pretending to be other than that, a person simply being a person, the equal of any—simply being who I was: witty, difficult, charming, obstinate, brilliant, angry, no longer pretending not to be that person. That is the scandal, the real shocker, even now. That I, born a woman, might be a distinguished surgeon, a charmer, a great flirt, a greater success, a legend, a scandal.
These anatomists of my past seem incredulous, outraged, baffled by the possibility that I might successfully assume the name and attire of a man to make my way in the world, succeed; shocked still more that I’d retain both after my retirement from medicine and the military, as if my good name were mere fancy dress, a masquerade, and not after all my truest self.
Who among us is undisguised, after all? Which of us reveals himself truly to the world? My name was borrowed, yes, a kind of mask, but I was the doctor, I was the lover, I was the scandal and the hero, I was Jonathan Mirandus Perry. There was no one else.
.
Chapter Four
The Cape Doctor
There is a spring wind that blows on the southern Cape of Africa, southeasterly up from the Antarctic, that breaks ships against the rocks and blows clear the skies over the settlement of Cape Town, clearing away the soot and fumes, the stench of sewage and men’s sweat, like a great broom sweeping clean the air, carrying the dust and heat and pestilence out to the Cape Flats, leaving the air fresh for those who live to breathe it. It wraps itself around Table Bay and pollinates the silvertrees, swirling through the colony, like a gorgeous Malay twirling at a Rainbow Ball. Fierce and terrible, unsettling and healing, the wind was affectionately known by the Dutch locals as die Kaapse dokter; the English, in the dozen years I lived there long ago, knew it as the Cape Doctor. As I was known.
I arrived in Cape Town in August 1816. In October, die Kaapse dokter did.
It’s hard to describe the effect of Cape Town. The exuberance of it. A riot of life. After the cloistral student years in Edinburgh and London, the cold and clammy damp, Cape Town was like throwing open a window after a long, arduous winter—the kind of winter you find only in the north
Atlantic, wet and dank and smoky from fires. Everywhere you turned in Cape Town, your eye was met with marvels, as if in reward for having made the dangerous crossing. The sea was a glistening blue-green, palest jade to lapis lazuli, the steep green mountains rose sharply above bone-white beaches, and presiding over all of it, the grey cliffs of Table Mountain, across which fog rolled each evening like a cloth and withdrew again each morning, like a woman dropping her dress. The mountains surrounding the bay were wreathed with strange, unearthly flowers—the prehistoric protea, which resembled pine cones in brilliant orange and yellow and red; flowering stalks of candelabra lily; trees strange and skeletal and knobbed as a human spine; and brilliant pink Watsonia flowers—made more radiant by the pale blue sky and bluer sea, the shore a marvel of surf-rounded monoliths as if Stonehenge had been arranged by nature here.
The Cape of Good Hope—which I’d later see with Lord Somerton—was like a jewel, a mountain carved out of emerald, a tent of green, color of County Cork; tall as a Salisbury Cathedral draped in green silk, cascading to the gem-blue sea. Steep as the cliffs of Cornwall.
As a girl, I’d heard young women in Cork sing ballads of true love and read novels that made romance sound like meeting one’s destiny. I’d felt that only once before in my life—looking into the landscape of the body in Fyfe’s dissection theater. But I felt it again on arriving in Cape Town. Here was my home, so far from it. I did not feel, as so many Europeans mistakenly would claim to, that this was my land, but rather that I was its—I belonged to this place, without having known it existed.
The journey from London had been long and tedious and full of tiresome subterfuge, as I fought to maintain privacy on board ship—tossing out my cabin mate each morning that I might dress—so I was relieved to set foot on firm ground again (the bustling, fish-reeking docks at Table Bay) even as my legs were unsteady and my lodgings unpromising in the extreme. I was to be quartered at the Castle, where all military men were sent, a damp, dim, stone structure in port, whose chill dark corridors could not entirely extinguish the exuberant light of those days. I took comfort in the thought that Mirandus had spent time in a similar circumstance in prison in France. I vowed, as he had, that I’d not linger.
I had failed to find General Mirandus in London, had not heard back from him after my last letter, so when I completed my studies with Sir Astley Cooper, I entered the army as a military surgeon. I had accepted a first post at Plymouth, then Chelsea, now in Cape Town, hoping that I might hear from the general any day with an invitation to join him and his family in Caracas. But I received no word, no news. Except for the little that I read in the press.
It was odd to have no word of him, but I did not flatter myself that I could weigh heavily in his thoughts, when so much else demanded his attention. Still, I scoured the papers for items about him, had asked on board ship whenever we took on new crew, what they might have heard.
The ship’s captain had been full of news, collecting word of other men as some collect coin, as if it were a kind of wealth. From him I’d learned that the Cape Governor, Lord Somerton, was a difficult man—arrogant and autocratic, given to extravagant loyalty and enmity both. Like me, the governor was recently arrived from England, having come two years before with a young family. It was said Lord Somerton had once been an uncommonly handsome man and as vain as a woman about his looks, and was sensitive about his age, now that he had passed two-score and five. I wondered that a man could keep his vanity in so rough a place, so far from fashionable society, but he was said to keep abreast of fashion and to covet the latest news from Paris. He was rumored—though surely this was a joke—to have persuaded the captain of the ship that had borne Napoleon to St. Helena’s the previous year to pause in Cape Town to give a thorough accounting of the latest Paris fashions to Somerton’s wife and daughters. This was considered especially funny, since his sympathies were entirely against Republicanism, and he was rumored to have lost family to the guillotine in France.
He sounded like the model of everything I loathed. A man whose name alone, not merit, had earned him rank, contrary to the meritocratic impulse of the age. Hearing him described aboard ship, I recalled Mirandus’s quip: A gentleman should always be wary of rank, given the word’s rancid concomitant, “decay.”
We were unlikely ever to be friends, Lord Somerton and I, if only by virtue of unequal birth. But he governed the Cape colony in more than politics; I’d heard he was its social arbiter as well, and if I was to successfully enter this society, it was through him that I must do it. Lord Basken had instructed me to introduce myself as soon as possible, and had supplied me with a letter of commendation to that end; he had called it my “ticket to soup,” pleased to know the common idiom, assuring me it would grant me an invitation to dinner at the very least. I’d planned to call on the governor as soon as I was settled, only to find that before I could, I was summoned—the very morning I arrived—to Tunhuys (or Government House, as the English called it), the governor’s palatial residence, to tend to his daughter, who’d fallen ill.
I went at once, taking time only to change my coat.
I declined the offer of a carriage, preferring to walk after the weeks aboard ship, despite unsteady legs. I walked quickly through the dusty streets, dodging wagons and men on horseback, and dark-skinned men in chains, through the bustle of a major port, which Cape Town had recently become with Napoleon in residence nearby. (I’d heard the traffic in claret alone sustained the Cape economy.) I walked through the shade cast by the Groote Kerk before I reached the pleasant walkways of the Company’s Garden, much discussed on the voyage over for its abundant produce and leaf-shaded paths.
The governor’s residence seemed all the more stately in the midst of the raw colonial town. Its walls were crocus yellow, the columns and portico a brilliant starched white. I had heard that Lord Somerton had spent a king’s ransom on the renovation of the ballroom, an extravagance that secured my dislike of the man I had yet to meet. A fortune on a library I could understand, but redecoration of a ballroom seemed to signify a trivial mind. What I’d heard of him on ship had inclined me to this view. He was a man whose reputation preceded him, as did that of the beauty of his daughters and of his late wife.
I don’t know how I looked to him the day we met, but I can guess. There is a portrait of me from the time, painted on ivory when I was in the barracks in Chelsea, in which I have the long, sad face of Botticelli’s Venus; aristocratic cheekbones, high and prominent; and fine, small ears beneath a cap of golden ringlets. My nose is my best feature—long and slender—setting off my dark eyes, my pencil-thin brows; if my mouth is too small, it is a minor fault. It suits well the delicate curve of my chin. I look every inch the young poet, the serious young man, my gaze a contradiction—at once direct and far off; I seem fixed on some distant goal, some great thought. Every inch the Romantic hero; Young Werther himself.
In the final famous photograph taken of me in Kingston, Jamaica, 20 years later, I retain the posture of the dandy I once was, if not the hair. My hair and face are a ruin, as my heart was. Desolate. Despite my turned-up collar, my neat tie, my highly polished boots and well-cut coat, I am a wraith in that final famous image, flanked by the manservant Dantzen and Psyche, the dog. I look altogether too much like a poodle; the dog and I share a face, in fact. My right hand rests gently on her head. My left thumb tucked into my pocket on my vest. My long Ciceronian nose, still my best feature, too large against my shrunken face. My jaw grown long and bony, my mouth a small dark frown; my earlobes hang, framing eyes that seem to squint. As if trying to see what’s coming, what lies ahead. We never do. For better and for worse. I didn’t know what was coming.
When I first saw him standing in his offices at Tunhuys, the governor’s back was turned to me, hands clasped behind him, gazing out over the gardens; he struck me as a monumental man by virtue of his height and dress. But when he turned to greet me, the impression changed: I thought he was too pretty to be a man. His features were too
delicate, like a young woman’s. There was something self-consciously manly about him, as if he were slightly straining for the effect. Though later I would think that he was straining to cover grief, to offset an impression of melancholy, of which he was conscious and by which he was embarrassed.
“Doctor Perry, good of you to come.” Lord Somerton was polite but curt, his courtesy born of breeding not inclination, bespeaking condescension if not slight, making clear he was indulging in a pretense of social equality where there was none, and that my rank did not merit in his eyes. He could not disguise his dislike of my profession.
He offered me a chair and I sat, noting that he did not. Instead, he began to pace. Like a man whose energies are too little engaged by his work, who would rather be out hunting, riding, shooting things, a man for whom these rooms were too small, too tight a fit.
I’d heard that he was given to guns and dogs and horses, which interested me not at all. But if he was to be my patient, I came prepared to be patient with him. Having heard about Her Ladyship’s death from fever the year before, I had expected to find a man chastened by loss, but on him even grief wore the face of glamour.
“Your uncle commended you most highly,” he said, as if he rather doubted the letter I’d borne with me on my journey, which I’d had the good sense to send ahead with the servant who had summoned me. He held the letter out to me. I took it. My passport to this new world.
“Lord Basken has been most generous,” I said. “Although we are not kin, we are as close as affection can make men; he has graciously treated me as if we were.”