The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  Though his wife tried to hide her vigilance, Horace detected it and accepted its necessity. He no better understood what he now called “Morton’s Cure” than Elizabeth did. It had come without his awareness, like the descent into sleep’s truest dreams. Humbug, he’d cried, and Morton twisted his mouth, and rain fell, and what bedeviled Horace—those shrieks—relented. They did not quiet. They did not end. If anything, he might say, they had lifted, let him be. Whether this new clarity, seemingly accidental as grace, hinted at remission from his history with pain, he was unsure.

  In the parlor one bright afternoon, Dr. Taft listened again to the wet sighs in Horace’s chest. He admitted that Horace’s health seemed improved, but he nevertheless prescribed a bleeding. Horace declined. Elizabeth, sitting nearby, poked a needle through an embroidery hoop and nodded her agreement. The doctor’s frown showed his disappointment. “If not a bleeding then at least consider this a season of reading and contemplation. Otherwise you risk consumption.” Elizabeth replied in a flat, unimpressed tone: “My Horace contemplates with an intensity that would exhaust a draft horse.”

  Nevertheless, Elizabeth enjoined her husband to measure activities in minutes and half hours. Rest in the between times, she urged. No rough-and-tumble games with Charley. He was not even to read to the boy but rather sit while Charley read to him. And so Charley introduced several books to his father that summer, including one that told stories about great American inventors who changed history, and as Charley read aloud about Eli Whitney and Benjamin Franklin and Robert Fulton, his father often napped, restlessly, and dreamed of his own unborn inventions: dental tools or machines to ease daily life. When he woke, he sketched what he had dreamed and felt calm.

  He showed Elizabeth the sketches and with a sharp pencil pointed out their features. She praised when his work deserved praise and offered suggestions when warranted. Mostly, she encouraged his occupation with anything other than “that loathsome gas.”

  He disapproved of her phrase. To blame the gas for his troubles was like blaming the sea for a boat that sinks under its foam. Better to build a tighter boat. If nitrous oxide had been a kind of poison to him, that meant he needed to improve his processes, tighten up his experiments. Elizabeth might consider the gas loathsome and his hopes for it failed, but Ben Franklin did not harness electricity on his first try. Nor did Robert Fulton’s first engine power a ship across the Atlantic.

  His mind needed a respite, true. But despite his best intentions, he woke thinking about the gas, and his last thought before he lay beside his wife each night was about the same. If poison, it was one that fascinated and perturbed him, quickened his pulse.

  Frannie Steele had lost patience with the new crowd in the house. “Too many people!” she told Dorothy, “too many people!” So now that the troubles had abated, she accepted the marriage proposal of a widower from Manchester named Rothman, whose children were grown and who wanted a companion to warm his bed and wash his socks.

  “I’ll have the wedding here,” Dorothy said. She twisted her index finger in her whiskers, swallowed a big gulp of ale, and put aside Horace’s newest drawings of something he called an improved shower-bath. “Mr. Rothman wants the wedding at his farm, but I’ll not have that good woman married in mud and manure.”

  Horace pointed to the papers. “It’s like bathing in the rain,” he said, “except it falls indoors. My improvement involves a foot pedal and treadle action.”

  She picked up the pages as a dog seizes a rabbit, shook them in her hands and studied them a polite, brief moment.

  “Where does the water go afterward?” Her tone sounded as if he’d just handed her a dead bird and asked her to gnaw the beak.

  “Into a pot to carry out.”

  “You’d need a mule to carry the water necessary for my bathing.”

  He thought a moment. So did she.

  “No more than twenty guests for the service,” she said. “But a larger crowd for the reception.”

  “What if I create a closed system? The water circulates.”

  She turned over the pages to their blank sides and waved Horace to fetch her lapdesk and quill. He pointed to his work, and his eyes showed his alarm, but she waved again. “Quill and lapdesk,” she said. “Be quick. I’m inspired.”

  What choice did he have?

  “If we move these tables into the bedrooms,” she said, “the company should fit in the parlor.” She made a note across the back of Horace’s plans. She kept writing and talking until she entered a kind of fury, eyes narrowing, hand punching the quill’s nib against the paper. “Coneflowers a possibility for Frannie’s bouquet,” she said, “but daisies preferred. No. Daisies a must. Coneflowers, then, in a dozen vases, including one on the pianoforte. Or gladiolus. I’ll invite Honesty Cox to play the music; she knows her voice squeaks and won’t be tempted to sing. Reverend Hawes will do the deed, though with strict limits on the length of his homily or I swear on Mr. Sedgewick’s grave I’ll never tithe again. You’ll arrange entertainments for the reception, won’t you, Horace? A game of graces for the ladies? Don’t look at me that way. Graces for the ladies, battledore and shuttlecock for the gentlemen. And for Frannie’s return to wifeliness we’ll kill the fatted calf, won’t we? Sink forks into its marbled steaks.”

  Dorothy set aside the quill, shook the papers into a neat stack. She looked straight at Horace, her eyes red and shining wet. “Heaven knows, nephew, that I wanted to salve dear Frannie’s grief and, if I am honest, my own. But it seems Dorothy Sedgewick is no lasting balm. And that fact demands its own consolations.”

  During the ceremony, Charley sat with Daphnis, the black cat, rearranging its dumpling-plump self on his lap, and he insisted his father hold the orange-and-white Chloe. When the couple exchanged vows, Chloe arched her back and circled Horace’s lap, pawing with extended claws through his trousers and into the skin on his thighs. In turn, Horace tensed the muscles in his buttocks, lifted himself almost imperceptibly, and clamped his hands in a death squeeze around the edges of his seat. But there was something lovely about Chloe’s abuse, the cat purring, the pain precise and delicate: a strange honor, the sense that the cat was making use of him. And then Chloe curled into his lap; his reward.

  Later, after the guests had left, he would write that in his notebook, that a little pain heightens pleasure. Does, therefore, a little pleasure heighten pain? He wondered whether that relationship could be expressed mathematically. A cat’s claws plus your lap equals what?

  Outside, the ripe sun made guests cheerful, and children tried to catch downy seeds as they drifted from trees to the lawn. Farmer Rothman and his new wife won all the games of battledore and shuttlecock, the red-faced groom frightening opponents with his clumsy intensity. After games, the company dined on veal and venison and summer vegetables, sang hymns and cut cake. Elizabeth found her husband collecting the strewn battledore rackets and the hoops, and she took his face with both her hands and kissed his lips. Her cheeks flushed. He felt a liquid rush, a happy coolness to counter the day’s heat.

  “Have you been drinking Aunt Dorothy’s ale?”

  She pet his side whiskers. “Playing graces,” she said. “Let’s stroll.”

  Hand in hand they walked to where tall lilacs had been trimmed into trees, and she sat with him in their shade. She smoothed her dress, ordered from Lowell, of silk and Alabama cotton, the sleeves banded down, a belt fastened high at her slender waist. Aunt Dorothy had loaned her an Oriental hand fan, and with it Elizabeth cooled herself. Her hair in a bun snuggled at her collar, its decorative braids and daisies done up in a pattern too complicated for Horace ever to unravel, nor did he want to. He wanted only to look at her, girl and woman all at once, who had plucked him from the crowd. She tucked strands that had come loose during graces, and when she turned her head into the sunlight he saw the finest hairs flash on her cheeks. He invited her to lie with her head resting in his lap, and she did, closing her eyes. With fingertips at her temples he counted her pulse
without meaning to, and he thought about nothing and then thought how wonderful it was to have a mind full of nothing.

  She whispered as if from a dream, “Did you see Charley playing with Farmer Rothman’s grandchildren?”

  “I saw him giving tours of the cats’ outhouses.”

  Her fingers played with the neck of her dress, revealing a linen corset underneath. “You have your smaller self,” she said. “I would like one, too.”

  He smiled, then didn’t, then did again. Spots of sun flitted through the lilac leaves and over his face, and he felt himself blinking too much.

  “A daughter?”

  She nodded. “If it’s God’s will. Something tells me it is.”

  “In Boston, I did dream we had a daughter.” He coughed once into a kerchief, tightness just now in his lungs and throat. The midwife’s long-ago shouting repeated in his ears. Those strangling sounds Elizabeth made. Her eyes, though open, had seen nothing.

  Elizabeth laughed, alive there on the lawn. “Don’t look so grave! So, why don’t we?”

  The shovel biting into the compliant dirt, how he had carried Charley into the hole. Had he lost his senses? He supposed he had. Elizabeth’s agony eating away whatever made Horace Horace—bringing back that negation born at his dying father’s bedside and returned too often since. It was never him, never him—yet he bore the consequences.

  As though sensing his thoughts, she said, “I’ll take the risks.”

  He believed her, and that belief brought both pride and fear. He reached for her hand, touched lips to her fingertips. So real, so tender. Her heart, alive and fierce with such courage. But she had only survived her travail; she’d not witnessed it, did not grasp its full substance. He tried to explain. He said, “It is no crime that I love you more than I wish for a child.”

  Now she sat upright. A few grass blades stuck to the skin near her wrist, and she brushed them away, then settled out of his reach.

  “That you love me,” she said, “means you would consider my wish.”

  “I am considering. What if God gives another boy?”

  “His will, as I said.” She shrugged. “We try again.”

  She sat straighter if that were even possible, and lifted her chin, and he thought in this moment even angels would admire her beauty. Her eyes fell upon him, bright green with as powerful a gravity as the moon’s, drawing answers up out of him like a tide.

  “Horace,” she said. “Tell me what has happened to us. We have not—it has been so long since you, since we …”

  A finch alighted so a lilac branch waved and caught his eye. The buds, he noticed, were spent, brown husks needing to be pruned. He knew he must tell her about his oath, because she asked and because he loved her.

  It was a relief to him as he spoke. He wondered why he’d kept the oath a secret so long. She would not die, he told her. He would not be the origin of what killed her. But as he explained, he saw that his words created a new space between them, one with both distance and weight. Something moved across her face. A wave, then another, color, then shade, sorrow then confusion. When Elizabeth spoke next, her voice came as if from a wound, as if a wound itself could speak.

  “You made that decision alone? Without me?”

  He tried to find the words. When he made the oath, she had been closer to death than to life. He’d act differently now—or hoped he would. Who could predict what the tormented soul would do in such a moment. Yes, true, he had made that decision alone. Yet always she was with him. Always.

  “A child we have never known?” he asked. “How can that be worth your life?”

  Just as when she had lured him into the lawn, she pressed her palms against either side of his head, brought his face close, touched her forehead to his. “Charley’s birth taxed me,” she said, “but I am here. With God’s help, I survived. With God’s help, I’ve endured an unnatural distance you and your oath opened between us. But I want a daughter, Horace. I want you in my arms among the quilts I’ve sewn, and I want a daughter to come of that.”

  “Of course you must go,” Aunt Dorothy said, though even Charley knew she wanted them to stay—especially now that the clop of Frannie’s thick-soled shoes was only an echo in the vast Sedgewick house. “It is natural that a man and his family make their own home, just as it is natural that we all someday accustom ourselves to solitude. Now my turn comes round again.”

  It was a Thursday in September, and a cold snap had broken the valley’s summer heat and dampness. Elizabeth hugged Aunt Dorothy to whisper blessings and gratitude, and Charley promised the cats he’d return to help them hunt mice. Once arrived again at Lord’s Hill, Horace spoke a prayer of thanks before he thumbed the door latch. Then the family crossed the threshold into their cottage for the first time since winter, like survivors of a banishment now returned safely home.

  Since that day with Morton at the Hog River bridge, Horace’s head and lungs had cleared so that now a deep breath felt as satisfying to him as a mainsail’s whoosh and pop as it unfurls into a stout wind. Consequently, at Lord’s Hill he became his old industrious self, resuming dentistry while in his spare time constructing a working model of his improved shower-bath. The model gained the attention of a local manufacturer, who agreed to refine the construction and reproduce the machine it if it were patented, so Horace sent away that paperwork. “A little extra money,” he told Elizabeth, “or a wagonful should the shower-bath prove a great success.” At his office, he gathered dental patients old and new, and he reread his notes about nitrous oxide and requested that chemists deliver bladders to his office. “Be cautious,” Elizabeth said, kissing his cheek. “The gas makes you fragile.” Later, when he recalled her words, he pictured himself glass blown, all smooth turns and long, slippery colors, airy as an angel.

  So as not to alarm her, he did not advertise the gas that fall and winter as a tool of dentistry. But if a patient knew and asked, Horace turned a key in its padlock and withdrew a bladder from a crate. And if a patient did not ask but suffered pain that made Horace wince—

  my gums feel stabbed by pins;

  it’s as if demons mean to fork the tooth from its bed;

  there’s that keen fishhook, and the awful anticipation

  —he would suggest the gas. When eyelids drooped, the purest relief would wash over him, and he’d work. He never charged for the gas, and he made no marks in his daybook regarding its application. But those operations bolstered his belief in his discovery, in the scientific necessity of the sweet breaths he gave and of those he took.

  He wanted to imagine a daughter with Elizabeth’s face. For her sake, he tried.

  At Lord’s Hill one night, the weather tolerable, he carried a mug of Aunt Dorothy’s favorite ale to a clearing beyond the cottage. From there he could see the city below and past that the valley’s great river with its steamboats and its farms on the far bank. He put the mug to his lips, tasted the ale’s tang. A north wind tossed his hair. He liked to think it blew all the way from Vermont, and that breathing it filled his chest with the maple-scented clarity of his birthplace, its black earth and blue-white snow.

  A daughter. The question was not yet settled. Just that morning, Elizabeth had put her soft and warm lips to his, and he felt a hint of pleasure from his wife as a husband ought. They were leaving for church, their affection interrupted when Charley asked help to tie his shoelaces. As the family rode to the service, Horace enjoyed watching Elizabeth in that familiar way, admiring the whiteness of her skin, the inviting line of her neck. At the service, he prayed, telling God he loved his wife, and that he knew he ought to love God more, but must his two loves conflict? So arduous, the tension. To love God and keep his vow was to punish his wife, who had done no wrong, and how, he asked God, does that fulfill Your will? Wasn’t it possible, he prayed, that Elizabeth survived Charley’s birth because Heaven meant for her to bear a daughter? But then, as if offering God’s reply, Reverend Hawes announced his sermon’s theme: the sin of taking the Lord’s na
me in vain. A growing noise filled Horace’s head until it became a roar, and he heard none of the minister’s talk, but gripped Elizabeth’s hand as she squeezed his own. Afterward, her face gone pale, she trembled as she spoke. “You did not want to risk my life,” she said. “How can I ask you to break your vow and risk your soul?”

  That night, he finished his ale, his eyelids now dropping, his head too fuzzy to make sense of oaths and daughters. Inside, he dressed in his night-clothes and slid into bed beside Elizabeth, who drowsed and warmed herself against him, and—suddenly a white dog with a mangled foreleg lunged for his throat, and he startled awake surprised and afraid that by flailing he had struck his wife.

  And Morton stood by the bed, face sharp with the intensity it showed that day at the Hog River. Morton repeated the question he asked then: nitrous oxide and what else?

  Nothing else, Horace said, as he had in life.

  Then Elizabeth whispered Horace’s name, and Morton stepped from the room, the door closing behind him, and Horace turned his head upon his pillow and let his wife’s caresses calm him to a peaceful sleep.

  The next morning at his office, Horace recalled his dream and wondered what element Morton might have had in mind. Surely he had something in mind. A man with creditors must always be on the prowl for easy fortunes. Poppies and opium? Might a vapor be distilled from those? Or from ether? In Europe, he’d read, chemists had uncovered a gas called chloroform that suggested itself as a possibility for annulling pain. Perhaps Morton knew about these, too. Or Morton’s chemist friend, bug-eyed Jackson. Certainly bug-eyed Jackson.