He wrote his thoughts in a notebook, including suspicions about his failure in Boston and whether Morton or Jackson—the two of them!—could be involved. How could it be coincidence that nitrous oxide failed only that time?
When finished, he marked the notebook’s cover Tooth Pulling. A misdirection should Morton return to snoop—via steam train or dream or otherwise.
One afternoon, a tap-tap at the office door, and a hen’s muffled chuckle. Though lost in a laughing-gas world, Horace heard it, distantly, and he closed the spigot on the faucet, breathed instead the air of his office and let the world return, which it did, as always, quickly. His legs wobbled as he opened the door to find the woman who was mother to Maggie, the mad girl, and who held a small coop of three chickens at her side. He glanced over her shoulder and saw she’d come alone. She wore a patched coat, and around her neck a black scarf with red tassels. Her dark hair lay tangled at the ends, and he thought to offer a comb for her tresses (and that is the word that came to him—tresses). Her back was arched, lifting her breast, straightening her shoulders, giving her a regality, queen of Dutch Point. She held her lips tight, unsmiling, and dabbed a clean kerchief to her mouth near the two pinprick moles at the corner. He invited her in. Her knuckles were pink and chapped.
“You have no gloves,” he said and felt an impulse to warm her hands in his. Instead, he arranged tools on his desk.
“You worked on my daughter once,” she said.
Nodding. Arranging. “You also attended my exhibition involving birds. I remember.”
“I’d hoped you would.” Half her mouth smiled. “Levi says you asked for visits. Others who’ve been told me about the gas. You dream, they say, and you’re healed.”
He thought the phrasing lovely, and he smiled. “Remind of your name,” he said, though he remembered. Nan.
She did, then asked how much she would owe for his work.
“There’s no charge.”
“Oh, I can’t afford that.” Her smile filled him with a strange sense of ease, but then she stumbled. He reached for her, withholding his hands when he saw that she’d caught the table and righted herself.
“Haven’t eaten in a while,” she said. “Can’t get food past the pain in my mouth.”
She set the coop on a table at which he’d been sitting for lunch. Laying hens, mottled brown and gray. A chicken shuddered, and a curled feather fell from the cage to settle in the sauce of his beans. Nan unbuttoned her coat and untied her scarf, closing her eyes and lifting her chin, as if wanting distance between the knot and her tender jaw. He took the scarf to hang on a peg and noticed wood shavings and bits of feather tangled in its weave. Her dress, tightly laced, had been expensive once and flattered her despite the bygone years since it had been in fashion.
“A cup of coffee?” he asked. She declined. Despite her proud bearing, she looked smaller than he remembered, as if whatever pained her had also caused her to shrink. He noted redness in her cheeks and a pimpling of flesh along her throat. Far off, factory bells chimed the end of lunch break.
He steered her to the patient’s chair but hesitated to place the gas bladder in her lap, and when she nodded permission, he arranged it with the care of a housemaid positioning a silk pillow on a loveseat. Her breathing was shallow, and he turned to record this in his notes, but as he put quill to paper forgot what he meant to write. Turning back, he marked again the swell of her breast. Shallow breathing, he wrote.
“How is Maggie?”
“Still at the retreat. Nothing to be done, is what they say.”
When counting her pulse, he left his fingers overlong at her wrist, feeling the warm delicacy of her skin. He made careful notes regarding an oh-so-slight swelling of her jaw, how it seemed also in her lips. With each letter, he concentrated on shape and line. “Please,” he said, “will you undo the top collar button?” He explained, as he had with all his patients, that he wanted nothing to impede the flow of gas to the lungs, but for the first time his request embarrassed him. “I will invite a lady from another office to stay with us,” he said. A disapproving frown conveyed she wasn’t so fussy. She complied using just one hand—a twist of her fingers—and he realized he still held her other wrist as if counting her pulse a second time. The chickens murmured. The skin beneath her bodice showed fever symptoms as well. Warm pink across her breastbone.
“Could I die?” she asked. The casualness of her question surprised him.
“I’ve inhaled the gas many times,” he said. “It hasn’t killed me.”
“You own property,” she said. “Men who own property can’t die so easily. Not like those of us who have none.”
He showed her how to take the gas. “Fill your lungs, then empty them entirely. Expand the rib cage. Take in many such breaths.”
She practiced. She said she smelled the chickens and the wood stove’s smoke. Then she laughed. “It’s an attractive quality, isn’t it,” she said, “a ruined mouth?”
He felt something open inside him and recalled the white dog, how it lay in the woods, magnificent in its vulnerability, more perfect in pain than in health. It wasn’t ruin itself that was attractive, no, but some quality of the wounded, and because of it Nan became more beautiful, and he felt tender toward her, a protector; her trust straightened his own back.
“No reason to talk so much,” he told her.
But when she was silent, he missed her voice. He heard particular autumn days in its timber and resonance, the days that follow the first chill, when warmth surprises, and sun gilds the leaves of maples and birches, and the gourds want harvesting. He lay a hand across her forehead, felt dampness near her scalp line. “It’s nothing messy,” he said, “a simple procedure. A trickle of acid to kill the pulp.” He let his fingers fall against her tangles. “Are you comfortable?”
“You said I shouldn’t talk so much.”
He smiled, squeezed her hand; she squeezed back and held his. “You didn’t answer truly before,” she said. “Could I die?”
Breath caught in his throat. He found he did not want to speak for fear she would let go his hand. Then she did.
“I’ll breathe your gas,” she said. “But you must tell me what you’ll do with my remains should I die. Will you dump me in the Hog River? Or give me a proper burial? Or will you hide my body in some dank cellar?”
“Which do you prefer?” He smiled as he fiddled with the bladder’s faucet.
“I’d rather be eaten by fishes than by worms.”
She took the faucet in her mouth, and he turned the spigot. She breathed as he instructed. From outside, he heard the complaints of passing goats. He imagined a small herd on the street, a boy with a stick and a dog keeping each in its place.
He took his time as if the procedure were one of leisure, a pleasure to savor. There was reverence as he touched acid to tooth—and later, grateful and wretched and on his knees, he would wonder whether such reverence was a form of idol worship. But for now he only wanted to concentrate, to shift his attention among his senses. He saw that a wooden button at her midbreast was chipped. When she breathed, he listened to a soft whistle from the back of her throat, as if a thrush’s nestling hungered there. Leaning near, he smelled cedar and imagined that she’d slept the night on a bed of shavings. Her lips gave against his fingers as he opened her mouth, and he wondered about her age and then decided not to wonder about her age. He adjusted a mirror for brighter light.
With a damp kerchief, he wiped the corners of her mouth and whispered, “Nan?” She nodded, but the spell of the gas had taken hold. The whistle, softer, came again from her throat, so he released one more button, the button with the rough chip.
Whiteness revealed, the gentle curve. He looked away from it, reached again to open her mouth, touched her lips, her chin, paused at her neck. He let his fingertips trace the larynx to the bump of the collarbone, edge the spacing of the high ribs just above her sternum. Then he turned his hand and let his knuckles drift across her blouse where her breast
rose with each quiet breath. The whistling thrush. The scent of cedar. His hand back and forth, grazing the fabric. With his apron, he wiped his eyes.
Another button pinched between his fingers. Abrupt, this awful need, and it took hold of him, he yielded to it, his lips grazed the warm swell of her bared breast.
Her eyes opened.
In his mind, he startled away, but when he looked his hand still rested on the fabric, on her breast. She saw, too, smiled a drowsy smile. If he’d had another moment, he later told himself, he might have decided upon the right action. Or if he’d had a lifetime. But he had neither—and never would. Nan shifted in the chair, languorous. Her fingers caressed the faucet in her lap. When she handed it to him, her tongue flicked to wet her lips. He twice breathed deep, shivered. “It doesn’t hurt,” she said as she helped him lift her skirt.
Afterward, alone again in his office, Horace locked the door, shuttered the windows, and sat in his patient’s chair, a bladder in his lap, his skin atingle. So unsettling to feel both weak and bold, to know remorse and gratitude. He wished Morton were across the hall, or at a tavern where they might meet. You could trust Morton’s vices. Morton could explain how Horace’s life had just changed, what might happen next.
An adulterer who fornicates without regret—a great man. Hadn’t Horace said that once? Hadn’t he called Morton a great man?
And Horace?
He breathed from the bladder.
A daughter, Elizabeth had said. Bodies coupled again as husband and wife. Husband and wife! Yet here he sat, fresh from a first infidelity. So much for oaths and vows. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps the gas made him fragile. A great and fragile man. Another breath.
In and out. In, out. In. Out.
Inout
and thoughts of Elizabeth
of Nan
of buttons undone
The old year surrendered to the new, dry and cold, the skies blue as God’s grace. Her husband hurried about outdoors, attending to a fire he had burning under a lidded cauldron. Elizabeth watched him from inside the cottage, through the window over the kitchen basin, where she washed morning dishes. The cauldron, full of water, hung over a fire pit he’d dug the past day, its brace fashioned out of the limbs of an oak tree. She’d always wanted a fire pit out of doors for candle-making and the like, though Horace had been too busy to build one. Now that she had agreed to try his shower-bath, she had her wish.
One wish. A wish. Not the wish. It had been weeks since their conversations touched on the idea of another child. What she had thought was a simple decision about family had become tangled: Horace’s devotion to her well-being, his oath before God, sin’s peril, love’s pity. She no longer knew what to say or to think, and it seemed the same for Horace. That he would soon leave for several months of travel removed any urgency to resolve the matter. All that remained was prayer and patience, and the twinge she felt whenever she spied a mother with a little girl.
Horace’s hand darted under the cauldron as he moved fiery sticks here and there, crouched to blow into the ash and smoke. Watched pot, she thought, but then steam from the cauldron’s lip curled into the winter air. With rag wrapped about his hand, Horace lifted the lid to peek inside. “It’s ready!” he called, his voice sounding hollow though the windowpanes. He began ladling water into a pail.
She dillydallied as she undressed in his workshop—where he had assembled the shower-bath—so that when Horace first arrived with a bucket to pour water for the bath, she had shed only her apron and frock. And with the next bucket her stockings. With the third, she had removed her undergarments and stood behind the dressing curtain as natural as Eve, turned in such a way as to hide her belly’s sagging skin and what the years had added to her hips.
“A shower-bath nymph,” he said and pecked her cheek.
“It looks to be a very fine machine,” she said.
“Finer than the working model I built. The manufacturer employs talented craftsmen. It’s sure to sell.”
Pray God, she thought, let it be so. She worried for him, of course, once more alone and gone from home, three months convincing merchants throughout western New England and New York state to carry the shower-bath. He assured her: the manufacturer had agreed to fund the trip, with particular stipulations having to do with revenue and whatnot. Horace would earn back in shower-bath sales what he lost in those months he gave up his practice. She appreciated and respected his faith in his new invention, but it was not money that worried her—or not what worried her most. It was the memory of his last sojourn and his sorry return from Boston, bootless and muttering. Yes, he’d recovered himself. But birdsong still haunted her, so that even a caged bird’s trill stopped her breath. She watched him perhaps too carefully, and for the last several weeks had observed in him a nervous spirit. Quick each day to the office, and once home he shut himself in his workshop. Shut himself, she noted, away from her. Shower-bath business, he told her. She listened, yet in a spot just below her heart she felt slippery fear: that it was not his new invention that gripped him but the allure of that loathsome gas.
“Hurry, hurry,” he said, his rough hand on her shoulder directing her into the bath.
“Don’t scald me.”
“No, no. By the time the water is in the pipes, it cools enough. You’ll love how clean you become.”
“I always love being clean,” she said.
She faced the spigot and worked the pedals as he’d shown. Water began to pump out, a trickle at first.
“Push harder,” he said.
His eagerness made her smile. “I forgot a wash cloth,” she said.
By the time he’d fetched one, she’d pumped the water into a hard, hot rain. It splashed against her breasts, and her skin flushed, and she lowered her head to catch the spray. She could hear gurgling and rushing through the pipes. Horace kept talking, but this small compartment felt too lush, too private, to allow for intrusion, and she said, “Hush now. You want me to enjoy this, let me enjoy it.”
The water slid over her, and she soaped up, skin tingling, a saturation at her core, and she thought of Eden and damp, warm moss, and of rivers. She ran a wash cloth up the backs of her legs and inside her thighs. The water sprayed her face, and she smiled, and something in her reached out with a hope. Wash my eyes, oh God, she prayed. Let me see clearly.
When the water cooled to the temperature of the room, she stepped out. Horace waited, grinning, holding a large towel spread to welcome her. Before she moved into it, she paused to study him: his unkempt air, his swirl of hair, that eminent brow, delight asparkle in his eyes. When she drew close, he wrapped her tight and held her until she thought she might coo, then he whispered near her ear.
“Wonderful,” she answered. Her legs became like air or water, and looking down at her bare feet next to his in boots, she felt a pleasant vulnerability. “Eden in a box.”
IV
NEW ENGLAND TO
NEW COVENANT
The maid—her teeth so bucked they rested on her lower lip—did not know him, a stranger gone twelve years who claimed to be Abiather Shaw’s stepson.
“Did you send Miz Betsey word of your visit?” she asked, then canted her head oh so suspiciously, big teeth biting.
This was New Hampshire in late May, a busy village near the Connecticut River, inside a familiar house that for Horace had never felt like home. Through open windows the afternoon’s breeze lifted lace curtains, carried street sounds into the parlor. Somewhere outside a girl chided a pup, and chain links rattled and chunked.
Horace retied the ribbon on a box of hard candy. “For my mother,” he said. “Your Mrs. Betsey.” The maid took the package, asked him please to wait.
His fingertips nudging aside a curtain, Horace looked through wavy glass to mark the boy whom he’d paid a penny to guard his horse and wagon and what it carried: a working model of the shower-bath for demonstrations, and a crate of bladders, filled. The boy leaned against a rear wheel, his eye on a girl—almost a woman—
who on tiptoes stretched to wipe a soapy rag over the high points of a bookstore’s display window. At the wagon’s front end, the mare, Newton, in harness twitched her ears against biting, flying creatures. Horace put his face nearer the window, wanting the breeze and sun. Elizabeth in Hartford would be washing windows, too. He winced. His conscience, that vengeful horsefly, still bit. He’d prayed for forgiveness, but all these months later to wake beside Elizabeth or to sit a pretty woman in his dentist’s chair was to pretend that bite didn’t sting and to act as if blameless. The deception wearied him. The days seemed ready to shatter and cascade in shards at his feet. The shower-bath had provided an excuse to leave home, and though he wanted its success and the income that would bring, he also embraced self-banishment as useful penance. Separation from Elizabeth might distance him from his failings, a respite during which he’d work to regain the brighter, truer parts of his soul. Failure, he told himself, is handmaiden to hope. Upon his return, he’d be the husband his wife deserved.
Yet he’d not told her about those bladders of gas that he’d packed. Still a man who kept secrets. Must be honest with himself about that, at least.
When he entered his mother’s sitting room, she praised God and—as if Horace had left the house only a few minutes earlier to buy tobacco—asked him please to move a sofa to a spot away from the window. “Careful with it, though,” she said, her chirping-sparrow voice tinged with its day-to-day hysteria. “You know how your father prizes his floors.”
He lifted the sofa high. “My father is dead.”
But she seemed not to hear. “Two inches right.” Her head cocked, she held her hand as if directing a puppet, invisible strings looped to her fingers. “I couldn’t stand this arrangement a moment longer. Everything looked ajumble. Did the new girl ask you to wait long? We didn’t know you were coming. That’s good. Right there. Now, before we sit, give your mother a hug.”
The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist Page 16