“If it were steady,” said Mr. Benson, “it wouldn’t be ocean travel.”
“Of course it wouldn’t. I know that.” The dentist looked about as if he’d lost something. He settled his head against a pillow, gathered a blanket over himself and bunched it at his neck. “Pain is my chief preoccupation,” he said. “I am expert in pain. Justice is not a subject I’ve given much attention. Generally, I’ve trusted God and the judiciary to balance the scales. But lately I find the subject to be of interest. Pain and justice so often fraternize—and only now do I realize this. I am writing letters about my experiments.” He scribbled in the air. “Reasoning by analogy, I discovered—it doesn’t matter. You don’t care. But you must care about pain. We all care about pain. Here,” he said, handing Mr. Benson a glass globe from which two pipes arose like a devil’s horns. “Breathe this.”
“What is it?”
“Relief.”
At the end of one horn was a cap, the other a mouthpiece. Inside: a liquid. After a moment, the dentist leapt from the bed and snatched back the globe.
“Don’t, then.”
“I didn’t say no.”
“You didn’t say yes. You want to suffer, by heaven, then suffer.”
“I am not suffering—”
“We all suffer.” Slowly, with one hand, the dentist scratched his cheek. “The sea is a cold companion, isn’t it? A desolation. Desolation puts those lines on your face, Mr. Benson, rubs raw that skin over your cheekbones, reddens your knuckles. You hurt, but you don’t need to. No one needs to.” He held forth the globe as if to say, Watch me, then wrapped his lips over the mouthpiece. He held the piece there with his teeth, pinched his swollen nose shut, and with his other hand turned the faucet’s knob. He took a deep breath. Then a second. He sat himself on the bench, in the space Mr. Benson had cleared, then breathed again. His eyelids fluttered; his left foot in its stocking tapped the floor. With a languorous hand he turned the faucet shut, let the globe roll to his lap, the liquid inside sloshing. Mr. Benson waited and watched. What he’d known in Liverpool began to itch at the back of his throat. The captain did not like surprises. The captain had not liked it that endless night when he found Mr. Benson leaning over the ship’s prow, stricken with melancholy and tempted by the dark, murderous waves—the struggle evident in his posture, in his pleading eyes. “Coward,” spat the captain, pulling Mr. Benson by the collar away from the deck’s rail. “Weakling.”
Contentment eased across the dentist’s face. The pimples and bruised eyes seemed a natural part of his landscape. He was awake; his eyes turned round in their sockets. But he seemed not to perceive what he saw. With a lazy finger, the dentist scratched his chin. A half smile lifted the left side of his face.
You know nothing about my desolation, Mr. Benson thought. But his anger stuck like a pill in his throat, and it told him that perhaps the dentist did know him, a little.
After the dentist fell asleep, Mr. Benson stepped into the corridor and shut the door. Lamp in hand, he paused, and though he was not a man to pray he spoke a prayer. At that moment, the ship’s captain approached on his way to the galley for coffee. “First nursemaid!” he called. “There’s a frightened woman in No. 10. Please go hold her hand.” He laughed, and for the first time Mr. Benson understood that his position aboard ship was assured so long as the captain needed a human whetstone upon which to sharpen his cruelty.
That night, Mr. Benson lay in his cabin entangled with the Russian woman, her cheek tear-damp against his shoulder, her small white body squirming in his arms, her cinnamon dog curled on the floor at the bedside. “I’m so lonely,” the woman said. “I do not deserve such loneliness. I should die.” She kept crying. Mr. Benson said, “But you won’t.” That night at the railing, when he had considered the waves, he’d learned that when it comes to death, desire and misgiving often balance each other; he recognized that tension in the woman’s eyes. “Steady as we go,” he said.
When at last she slept, Mr. Benson listened to her breathe and could not himself stop thinking about the Nantucket whalers of his youth or of the dentist, a dead-alive sort of man, or of the way the captain looked on him—the easy sneer, his naked loathing.
The next morning, Mr. Benson brought a loaf of bread to No. 32, and he asked whether he might try the dentist’s pipe.
“It’s not a pipe,” said the dentist, laughing.
“You should eat something,” Mr. Benson said as he took the globe.
A few minutes later, full of the vapor, he felt brave, and he did not hate himself so much. Afterward, he said, “That’s a better place you sent me. I expected to see God and His Angels.”
The dentist used the side of his hand to brush breadcrumbs from the pages of his record book, where he had made notations. “It’s not heaven,” he said. “But for a time, it shortens the distance. Then you fall back.”
No. 11 rue de la Paix. To welcome Horace was a bronze plaque, weathered green and bolted into the wall, on which he read the name he’d found in a newspaper article and carried all the way from home: Christopher Starr Brewster. An inch or so below were the royal crest and the likeness of a tooth. The French king’s dentist—a Connecticut Yankee—signified in bronze.
Horace’s long winter shadow crept up the door, painted red. To either side were broad, paned windows with curtains open. Peeking through, he glimpsed a waiting room twice the size of his whole Hartford office. Fashionably dressed women sat along the four walls in matching straight-back chairs, each gripping a toothbrush. In military-marching unison, they stuffed the brushes in their mouths, stroked forward and back, up and down, cheeks stretched. Then, as if governed by a single mind, they removed their toothbrushes and rested their hands in their laps.
A man in their midst pointed with a long, delicate finger to his own toothbrush, to his mouth, demonstrating brushing technique. He wore black—black coat, black shirt, black gloves—with a high collar and loose scarf, a pointed bit of beard, and his straight blond hair combed back as if he faced into a windstorm. A quick question appeared on his face when he glimpsed Horace, who at once let his gaze drift to the street, trying to appear as if he awaited a business associate or a lover.
Above, gossamer clouds tinted the blue. People hurried here and there, filling the air with carnations of white breath, and a towering red-faced man chased his top hat, wind-tumbled toward a puddle of snow melt. Horace believed he had left his own hat aboard the Hibernia; what happened to his gloves he couldn’t say. Unsettling, how aboard ship he so immediately and completely gave himself to the gas. Like waking or falling into sleep, as if he had no say in the matter. And what dreams! Truer than they’d ever been—he had even kissed his father’s cheek. Their felt presence still agitated him.
Toes stinging from cold, he stamped his booted feet on the cobblestones and wished even now for a breath of nitrous oxide. All around, people yelled—their words sounding to him like bubbles bursting. He flinched at the start of each new argument, not yet knowing how Parisians lived a never-ending quarrel: a cacophony of curses and insults, with trollops kicking beggars, soldiers berating shopkeepers, aristocrats exchanging evil looks with intellectuals, police clubbing everyone—even the nuns.
A nearby church bell tolled the hour, and a general bustle followed from inside the dentist’s office: chair legs scraping the floor, a closet opened, women in conversation. Horace wiped his nose with a handkerchief, kicked snow from his boots, and stepped through the door.
The women—varied in age but uniformly tidy with cinched waists and ruffled dresses—were packing toothbrushes into handbags or purses, their French sounding again to Horace like bursting bubbles, though these blown from liquefied silk. The man kissed several women farewell, and accepted kisses, and when the last had left, he smiled at Horace and spoke something in French.
“Only English,” Horace said, arms outstretched in apology.
The man’s face opened with delight. “Fellow American!” Twice he slapped his chest. “Norwich,
Connecticut! Come, sit down. Have you a problem with a tooth?”
“You are Dr. Brewster?”
“As it reads outside the door.” Brewster gave Horace a long look, and Horace was glad to have shaved that morning, though he was aware that he’d lost weight since leaving home. His pants hung loose; his shoulders floated inside his coat. A feverish sweat broke over him, and his hands—why did they tremble as if still cold?
“I practice dentistry in Hartford. My name is Horace Wells.”
“Dr. Wells?” Brewster whispered. Then, more loudly: “I’ve read about your experiments.”
“What have you read?” Horace asked. He could not make sense of the new expression on Brewster’s face. “What do you think?”
Brewster shook Horace’s hand. “I think I’m embarrassed that I mistook you for a patient. Horace Wells!”
He laughed and led Horace out of the waiting room and into his office, which was warmed by a stove and well appointed with spittoons hammered from fine brass, drawerfuls of ready-made dentures, and a cabinet that held hundreds of dental tools. “It’s a weakness,” Brewster admitted. “I want them all.” A life-size statue of Saint Apollonia seemed to bestow a blessing on the two patient chairs, each with headrests upholstered in black velvet. Horace recalled his little cottage in Hartford with its hand-size bust of the saint, a gift from a wealthy patient’s husband, and felt himself poor, a feeling exacerbated when Brewster set out pastries, a half dozen cheeses, and a bottle of red wine.
The men sat in the patient chairs, which swiveled. Apollonia, over Brewster’s shoulder, studied Horace with glass eyes. In legend, she was an old woman, a deaconess tortured by Romans who had yanked out her every tooth, blood and root. But here sainthood and a sculptor had rendered her as a woman of childbearing age—bosom full, eyelashes long, mouth expressing an ecstasy, head crowned with a shiny plate for a halo. Pincers in her right hand held a bright, golden molar. It doesn’t hurt, he heard her say, but the voice belonged to the woman, Nan.
Horace unfolded the newspaper article from his pocket. In his mouth, the cheese crumbled, becoming thick and viscous as melted gold. “You are famous among Connecticut dentists,” he said.
“As are you! Nitrous oxide. Painless surgery. The Ether Wars! Why didn’t you send a letter to prepare your way? Why the surprise?”
Horace tried not to stare at Apollonia, the parted lips that suggested her bliss. Her eyes raised heavenward, her free hand stretched flat, palm almost caressing her cheek. Daylight dazzled in the office’s mirrors, and how it fell on the statue gave Horace to think that Apollonia might actually be breathing, bosom rising and falling and rising.
“I fear tensions from America could have followed me. Might Morton have spies in Paris?”
Brewster groaned. “Spies? You make him sound like a government. He has friends, perhaps even employees. All I can say for sure is that he and that boor Jackson have sent letter after letter warning me against you. ‘Wells failed; his theories are humbug,’ et cetera. Every day another envelope from Boston. Some days two! If they want us to take their arguments seriously, they should come here, as you have done.”
Brewster poured again for each of them, a drop sliding down the bottle’s neck to stain the label. “It’s no guarantee our medical societies will give your discovery priority over the others, but your presence helps your case.”
“There is no question,” Horace said. “I discovered painless surgery.”
“From the French perspective, that’s not been settled. But I’m glad you’re here nonetheless.”
Not been settled? Horace wondered whether to show some indignation. But now Brewster asked questions about dates and details. Ought the dosage be less for children, and what about boys against girls? Had Dr. Wells noticed varied reactions in smokers or tuberculars? How often did patients laugh? Had he worked with ether? (“Just recently.”) He asked how Horace had recorded his results, and who had witnessed the work. “Have you affidavits to support your claim?”
“Results have always been my chief concern. I am no lawyer. Never for a moment did I consider how best to argue the priority of my discovery. Now, apparently, it matters.” Horace lifted his chin and emptied his glass. “You don’t believe I was first?”
Brewster smiled and poured more wine. Glass-eyed Apollonia seemed to lean nearer, her blessing a tease.
“Not yet,” Brewster said.
A few days later, Horace had been moved at government expense into an apartment with skylights and a featherbed, fancy with silk sheets. From a balcony he could see the Tuileries Palace and its flourishes: the French make a pastry of everything, he thought. A hatter had come by with samples, then returned that afternoon with a chapeau of such lightness and balance it seemed to Horace that he, like the saints, wore a halo.
Bathed, shaved, and fed, he could believe that even his most outrageous daydreams seemed likely. Parisian scientists (spectacles, white hair, waistcoats) would praise his work, then: Join us! Here in Paris! He pictured Elizabeth, ruddy with health, park-strolling in the company of a teenaged daughter, the two fluent in French and holding hands. He saw himself and a grown-up Charley dressed in fashionable suits, the wool so fine that not a thread itched. From his balcony, he picked out three houses he might buy.
He spent a week writing an account of his discovery, which Brewster had promised to have published in European journals. Morning and night, he scratched out recollections of Colton’s exhibition, Cooley’s leg, his own aching tooth, even his Boston failure. He considered but decided against calling the gas a miracle. The civilized world, Brewster had told him, did not want prophets and their heaven-sent wonders. It wanted scientists—scientists who also were heroes.
So he made no mention of unflattering particulars—no birds in the attic, nor a woman with a chipped button on her blouse, nor a Chinese boy. Silence, he recalled Elizabeth once saying, could also be truth.
An enclosed carriage arrived Tuesday, drawn by two white horses and accompanied by a driver and an attendant. Brewster was to introduce Horace to a noted landscape painter and also to show him the government’s laboratories outside the city.
“We’ve started our own experiments using ether and nitrous oxide,” Brewster said, pouring a glass of wine for Horace as the carriage got underway. “But it’s with chloroform that France will make its mark.”
Horace sipped. He had never tasted something that so enchanted his tongue, his mouth. “This is a royal carriage?” he asked. “Truly? Elizabeth will be flabbergasted.”
Brewster smiled. The carriage drove them out of the city, and the men talked about art and dentistry, and it occurred to Horace that if this were always his life he might never again take a whiff of nitrous oxide or ether.
“What a lark,” he said, “to put your fingers into the royal mouth!”
Brewster again lifted the bottle. He seemed always to be pouring wine.
They traveled through farmland, crusty snow in patches on north-facing slopes. The loamy smell of hot manure in cold air reminded Horace of his father, and he found he’d made fists of his hands. Flustered, he released the grip, studying his own knuckles, the now open palms.
Brewster corked the wine as the carriage slowed and stopped. Outside, he hurried Horace—stiff-legged and tipsy—toward a stone barn marked with the royal crest, triple the size of any barn Horace had ever seen. Ivy climbed its walls, and the roof tiles, once orange, had browned from weather. “You work with the vapors in a barn?” Horace asked.
“This is where the horses are.”
Brewster signaled an attendant, who rolled the barn doors in their runners to each side. A delicious warmth of straw and animals enveloped them.
“Horses? I don’t understand.”
“We experiment on horses. Not ideal, but we try to account for differences. If a horse is ten times a man’s weight, for example, we expose it to ten times the gas.”
“With due respect, Dr. Brewster, the horse can’t relate to you the gas’s
effects.”
“True. But we observe reactions.” They’d arrived at the stalls and a dozen or more horses. A bay nearby made fluttering noises, lips working and skin shuddering away flies.
“Strange sensitivities in horses,” Brewster said. “Have you noticed how they can ignore a rider’s kick to the ribs, yet are aware of every fly?”
“That speaks to my point. A horse experiences sensation otherwise than us. We must study effects on people.”
The barn’s dormer windows made paths for clean sun, and in the light the bay’s coat showed all its patches and grime. The horse reached to nibble at a button on Brewster’s shirt cuff, and Brewster scratched its forehead. “Which people, Dr. Wells? The royalty? The bourgeoisie? Should we experiment on the workers? The criminals in our prisons? Horses have died in our tests. And you want us to work on people? Barbaric.”
Brewster shouted French words toward a doorway, and shortly after a small man in a smock appeared, then pushed past them with hardly a nod. Thick-lensed spectacles warped the appearance of his eyes, and his front teeth gapped. He carried a bottle, a towel, and a hand-sized burner, unlit. “One of our concerns,” Brewster said, “is ether’s flammability. If Morton is using the vapor by another name, as you suspect, that’s irresponsible. What if a patient’s lungs ignite?”
Brewster gestured for Horace to make room. The man had tied a kerchief over his own nose and mouth and was now dousing the towel. Horace recognized ether’s odor and felt a familiar pinch, a small but deep yearning. When the man pressed the towel against the horse’s nostrils, the animal started, its eyes widening, then, after a few breaths, half closing. The horse staggered, confusion evident in its twitching ears. Its unbalance—its struggle against awkwardness—struck Horace as its own barbarism. He recalled staggering about his workshop, his headaches, the confusions, and his now shaky hands. True, he had never experimented on horses. He’d worked that abuse on himself.
The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist Page 23