The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  “So much of everything,” said Horace. “There’s hardly space for my envy.”

  Morton looked pleased with the comment, pleased, in fact, with all things. “Since my name appeared in the newspapers,” he said, “I’ve enjoyed the attention of many investors. My Elizabeth now wears a corset made in Paris.”

  Morton himself wore a new red coat with beaver-fur lapels, and after he hung that coat on a wall peg, he donned an apron monogrammed with all four of his initials. He offered a duplicate to Horace, who declined but gave Morton his coat to hang. With his fingertips, Morton picked pills from the lapel and studied Horace, shoes to hat. “Gray and black. What, the shower-bath not paying off? Come work for me if you want to afford brighter colors.”

  “The shower-bath is with lawyers,” Horace said. “I expect a settlement. How did you hear of it?”

  Morton grinned. “My in-laws bought one.”

  Then Morton busied himself with the day’s mail, and Horace drifted near a table set up as a miniature laboratory, on which a cat’s tongue of flame heated a glass globe and the liquid inside. A long tube extended, and at its end he found a peculiar mouthpiece with its own valve knob. He fit it against his teeth, found it comfortable, then set it down and wiped it with a nearby rag.

  “This is your preparation?” he asked.

  “I call it Letheon. For the river Lethe, from which we drink and forget.”

  “The souls of the dead drank from that river.”

  “You’ll see how well Letheon works. Confidence in the product will allow you to sell it honestly. You can make a great profit as my agent—enough to buy a new coat.”

  “Change the name if you want it to sell. What ingredients comprise this lethal potion? A disguised nitrous oxide? Your chemist friend Jackson did the mixing?”

  Morton looked stern, as a teacher at an obstinate student. “Don’t be an ass. Jackson is nobody. I’ve done this on my own.”

  No, Horace thought, you haven’t.

  The elegance of Morton’s office offended him. Too sentimental, too ideal. He expected to hear harp or some such music in this dental heaven. And then, remarkably, he did. Morton hurried to the door, and Horace understood the celestial strains to be door chimes. Across the threshold came a woman, gliding, hair the shade of autumn oak leaves, waist small, bosom generous—more Nan, he thought, than Elizabeth (and chastised himself for thinking of Nan more often since that encounter at the cattle fair). With a childlike finger, Morton’s patient tucked a curl of hair behind the easy curve of her ear, and Horace felt desire’s pinprick. Morton kissed the woman’s proffered and gloved hand, showed her to a chair, made proper introductions, smiled, cooed, assured, and when she was comfortable fit the mouthpiece between her teeth. “Now,” said Morton, “watch.”

  But the longer Horace observed, the more agitated he became. The woman breathed through the mouthpiece. At first, she arched her back, lifted as if to rise from the chair, but with hands on her shoulders Morton held her in place. Her eyes darted, focus erratic. Her right knee bobbed.

  “Exhilaration,” Horace said. He rolled his sleeve cuffs to his elbows. “I’ve seen this before.”

  “You haven’t. This is not nitrous oxide, Wells. If your exhibition proved anything it proved that nitrous oxide can’t be trusted.”

  Then the patient calmed, also nothing new. Her eyelids fluttered, closed. Her breathing became regular, her limbs limp. Morton turned the faucet and removed the mouthpiece.

  “Voilà,” he said. He fingered open her mouth and reached blindly with the other hand. “Tooth key,” he directed, as though Horace were already in his employ.

  In her youth, Elizabeth had read of the time when people in Massachusetts believed in witches, and walking Boston’s streets she understood why they might. A toothless woman leaning out a first-floor window did not so much laugh as cackle. Mangy cats shrieked and chased vermin; they hissed at Elizabeth’s ankles as she passed. Unshaven men spit in the street, and she noticed one scarecrow of a fellow sprinkle a wall and shake himself before buttoning his trousers. “Boylston Street?” she asked a turnip seller, who shrugged. “Boylston Street?” she pleaded with a police officer, who pointed. She hurried that way for many blocks until her legs tired and her sense of direction turned about.

  When a blind woman began to dog her heels, offering three times to wash Elizabeth’s dirty laundry, she hired a passing livery driver.

  “Where on Boylston?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, relieved to note that the driver had teeth and working vision. “My husband says there are shops and theaters.”

  “Too early in the day for a show,” the driver said as he snapped the reins. The horse’s shoes clopped the stones. “You can probably buy a ticket for tonight, though.”

  “I don’t go to plays,” she said, which was mostly true. She had little opportunity. Hartford’s elected council outlawed most theater as immoral and likewise prohibited display of many paintings and sculptures. Horace called such restrictions “old-fashioned prudery,” but Elizabeth had been satisfied with what entertainments the law allowed. She’d attended historic and biblical exhibitions in which Hartford’s school children portrayed George Washington, or Adam and Eve debating the serpent. But no, she’d never seen a play with paid actors and actresses. Truth to tell, she’d never seen much of anything. Born in Hartford, married there, and settled, too. For their honeymoon, she and Horace did travel as far as the Connecticut shore. There she corked a vial of beach sand to bring home and thought herself clever until she learned that most visitors did the same.

  “Oh, you’ve got to attend the theater,” said the driver. The reins dangled from one of his hands, and with the fingers of the other he worried an angry pimple on his fat chin. “S’like spying on people’s lives.”

  He reined his horse in the shadow of a great hall with wide stairs of polished granite. “The Boylston Theater House,” he said. He studied the length of the building’s columns, then tilted himself toward her and grinned. “You watch the play, waiting for everything usual to go topsy-turvy. And when it does—heavens! Sometimes it nearly stops your heart.”

  “My son once played Christian Charity in a panorama. Given his personality, he might have been better suited for Faith.”

  The driver grunted. “Nothing topsy-turvy in that.”

  “No,” she agreed, and she was surprised to hear longing in her voice. Life offered enough of its own upset. Why would she want a play to provide more?

  She paid the fare, and he motioned toward a shop she might like, said it was full of notions, first-rate stuff. Buttons shaped from ivory and the like. “I forbade my wife to go there,” he said as she stepped to the street, and he shook the reins and drove on.

  Elizabeth paced outside that shop for a while, glancing through the window at a needle kit and fine threads, and fought the tug to go inside. Odd how poverty made temptations more keen. She’d never been a spendthrift when she and Horace had money. But since the start of their privation, she had a peculiar urge to purchase beyond necessities, to buy all things, possess all things. Pretty baubles and bits of framed stained glass to dangle in the light of a window. Neat needle kits. A rainbow of spooled threads. Perfumes. She had never purchased a perfume. But now that she spent every hour of every day scheming how to get sugar and flour and beans, wanting had become her general condition—no matter the object.

  So pace and glance and glance and pace, but best not to enter. Next door, however, was an art gallery. Perhaps she could pretend it was a museum where the exhibits weren’t for sale. Before Charley was born, she and Horace had visited Hartford’s atheneum and spent time with the historic scenes depicted by Mr. John Trumbull, paintings of an edifying or morally instructive nature and thus permitted for public display. The mortal sacrifices of generals. Gallant riders upon gallant steeds. She recalled her patriotic thrill to see Thomas Jefferson represented in his red waistcoat and red hair, looking most independent and craggy. Arm in arm
, husband and wife whispered what details each noticed: the turn of a soldier’s lapel, a flag’s frayed edge. Serious business, their study, until Horace noted that everyone in the paintings was tight-lipped. Hiding their wooden teeth, he joked.

  This Boston gallery welcomed sunlight through tall street-side windows to shine on its polished wood floor. A candle heated a bowl of scented oil so the room smelled of cinnamon, and an immense silence reached to the high ceilings, creating a space as for prayer. Behind a counter near the back, a man marked in a ledger book. He wore spectacles and a black frock coat; his shirt featured a chin collar piped with gold braid. His nose was elfin, his raven hair mussed in a way that looked as whipped and designed as frosting on a cake. With a manufactured smile, he raised his chin and offered to answer questions. Elizabeth nodded an acknowledgment, and then the room’s silence expanded again, and the silence seemed unbreakable.

  Nothing here resembled Mr. Trumbull’s work, she saw that at a glance. Such color! On that canvas: linen white, gold, and darkening blue. The linen was the exotic dress of a woman, herself pale as death. She reclined on silk-cased pillows, staring toward Elizabeth and through her. Perhaps it was the painting’s distant, ominous sky, or the woman’s pallor, but Elizabeth sensed an unseen, looming destruction. What might it be? She searched the canvas, saw a loom and a brazier, and at the painting’s edge an African woman—concealed in shadow, naked breast slipping from her blouse.

  Elizabeth moved on.

  Here, an Oriental setting—Istanbul, perhaps, or Palestine. In that one, a monkey painting a picture. There, a woman—astonishingly nude—carrying a rainbow-colored vase. And over there a man, at rest amid sculptures, contemplative, but all around him the paint pulsed, as though the sculptures enjoyed life’s spark.

  None of these paintings, she decided, could ever be exhibited in Hartford.

  Nearer to the man in the frock coat, her attention was drawn to a canvas splashed with red and teal. A woman reclined on the red pillows of a sofa, her eyes heavy-lidded as if she were just waking from a nap. The teal was a wool blanket pulled high, but not so high as to conceal perfect shoulders and a perfect neck. Her blouse startled Elizabeth, how she wore it so low. Her small mouth almost matched the cushions red for red, and her nose was big and real, so the neck and shoulders seemed that much more angelic.

  With her left hand she toyed with a twist of dark hair, which lay across her breast. The woman gazed past Elizabeth into the gallery, toward what or whom Elizabeth couldn’t say. But she was struck by the woman’s expression, satisfied yet expectant.

  Then a jolt—not of body, but of soul—fixed her sight on a finger of the woman’s left hand. She wore a wedding band.

  Elizabeth raised fingers to her bottom lip. If she hadn’t, she knew, she would have touched the canvas. She wished the oils ran wet again, so she could dip a fingertip in each color and thereby reclaim something familiar, something of her past.

  Once, she had been this woman.

  Once, it had been a honeymoon morning, overcast, the air tangy with saltwater spray. In the painting in her head, Elizabeth, just awake, enjoys the coziness of an unfamiliar bed, cool air on her bare shoulders, the hush-hush of waves easy against the beach. Her husband (the word thrills, its new meaning in her life), returns after a morning of bird-watching. Binoculars on a strap around his neck, silt and dune grass stuck to his boots, he prepares for her a plate of biscuits and sweet butter, speaks of sandpipers and curlews. With her left hand, she plays with her own hair.

  In the presence of the painting, in the presence of the memory, Elizabeth lowered herself to her knees. The man in the frock coat spoke words that sounded French, sounded concerned, as if he could see the mix of joy and longing that had overcome her. He drew near, taking her elbow, and he helped her onto a small wooden stool. She placed the heel of her hand against her head, shut her eyes tight. She could cry now, she felt certain. But if she were to cry now …

  She shook her hand at the walls. “I’ve never seen paintings like these.”

  “We specialize,” the man said. “French artists only. You collect art?”

  “No.” She gasped, turning to another wall, where a woman in a white gown, black ribbon below her bosom, sat on the ground in a gray landscape. Legs stretched forward, head downcast. Her left arm was something she’d forgotten. It lay on the earth, palm upturned, a dead, beautiful thing.

  Not now, not a tear …

  “Where I live,” she whispered, “we don’t have paintings like these. They’d violate the laws.”

  The man laughed the smallest laugh she had ever heard, small and mean as a tick at the scalp, and the laugh rescued her; she knew she wouldn’t cry. “Yes,” he said, walking to his counter, shoe heels clicking on the hardwood. “Les hommes d’etat deny us all our consolations. These men of state—why do they want us to suffer?”

  The last in a long line of patients had left. Morton rinsed the spittoon and set tools in order. Horace put up a jar of gold foil. Folded the blood-spotted aprons.

  “You are certain your preparation will not damage the lungs or trachea?” he asked. “Have you consulted with patients weeks after? Monitored their breathing?”

  “No one has complained.” Morton waved to a woman passing on the sidewalk, visible through the window, and she smiled in turn. “Had I assistance, I would make those investigations you suggest. But I’ve been busy with other aspects of the discovery.”

  “It takes time to spend this much money.”

  “Yes,” said Morton, and he laughed. “It does.”

  “Why don’t you give me a taste of this Letheon? I’m still partial to nitrous oxide in my own work; my experience with ether—” He paused, seeing in his memory the body of the Chinese boy, how Delia washed the face. “—it ended badly. I’ve shied from it since. But if you want me to represent your gas, you’ll need me to argue on its behalf over nitrous oxide. And who better?”

  “I’m not saying this is ether.” Morton stood and drained his mug. “But I knew you’d want a taste.”

  Soon Horace held the mouth-faucet between his incisors.

  “Will you take notes?” Horace asked, and Morton nodded.

  The vapor smelled and tasted aromatic, smoky and sweet, with neither the clarity of nitrous oxide nor the pungency of ether. But the immediate effect was similar.

  Horace’s fingers swelled and tingled. Morton’s face, once gaunt, now stretched wide and high, his whaler’s beard exaggerated to biblical lengths. Morton in the Bible! Ha! Horace preached the verse: “Then Morton went out, and held a council against him, how Morton might destroy him.” Morton the Pharisee. Fair to see. Nan’s face is fair to see…. Genitals tingling, swelling like the fingers. Morton must make a note. Morton! The genitals tingle and swell! Morton’s reply, breezing from one side of Horace’s skull to the other …

  Then, a darkness so deep he was not aware of the darkness.

  A pinging noise brought him back.

  What’s that you say, Morton?

  “You’ve had enough.”

  Horace gagged. He coughed twice.

  “I made notes,” Morton said. His face had become clear again. “Listen: ‘Fair at spheres. Pharisees mask pain. Pray, pray pain, prain.’ I spelled prain with an i, but I suppose it also could be spelled with a y.”

  “I said nothing that made sense?”

  “Here’s the most coherent: ‘A clear argument for relief of pain must cause no pain by its clarity.’ ”

  “The effects,” said Horace, “resemble those of nitrous oxide.”

  “Enough with nitrous oxide. How are the legs?”

  “Give me a moment. I spoke no Bible verse?”

  Morton laughed, then said that while Horace recovered he’d bring the aprons to a laundry girl down the street. As he left, Heaven’s doorchimes jingled.

  Flimflam, Horace thought. An exhilarating gas is an exhilarating gas. Whatever Morton’s preparation, he’d discovered nothing more valid than discovering that l
ake water could satisfy thirst as well as water from a rain barrel. Ether in disguise, that was Horace’s best guess. A way to deceive and make money: the invention of a thief. French corsets and monogrammed aprons? Morton—I’ll bloody your face.

  His legs, though weak, carried him to his coat, and then to a shelf where he tucked a bottle of Morton’s gold foil into his pocket. His due for a day’s work.

  Elizabeth sat cross-legged on the bed in their dark room, waiting for her husband. Outside in the alley below, a weeping man shouted a woman’s name, and from the lodge next door Elizabeth heard a fiddle playing a waltz. The top buttons of her dress’s collar lay open. She leaned close to the bed post and studied the swirl of its unpolished grain. In her lap, she held a box of saltwater taffy, each piece wrapped in blue and yellow tissue. Wait for Horace, she told herself. Unwrap them only when he comes to you.

  At a pawn shop, he sold the gold foil, then found a chemist-apothecary who sold nitrous oxide in bladders under a sign that read For Lung Ailments.

  “Tuberculosis?” asked the apothecary.

  “Justice,” said Horace.

  The taffy turned to sweet silk on her tongue. She thought about the woman in the painting and the man who had painted her. Given the woman’s expression, Elizabeth could imagine the painter, too. The focus with which he looked on her. All the lead inside her chest had liquefied, and she knew it had only been there as a bulwark against the sharp longing she felt for a better time with Horace, for their unencumbered love. That would never return, she knew. Even so, she wanted Horace to become again like that painter—to adjust her hair, to mark how light fell, and with a finger on her chin to turn her face into its brightness. She wanted to become the subject of his intensity.

  But now he staggered through the door, no painter, but a man laughing without gaiety.