The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  “How are your teeth?” asked Morton.

  “To hell with my teeth.”

  Blame the scene on Riggs. He had noticed Morton lathered up at Coles Barber Shop and informed Horace. His friend had been so unpredictable of late (domestic troubles, an evident coldness between him and his wife) that Riggs hoped to spare him the ugliness of a chance meeting with Morton, the ether feud and such still unresolved. “On a visit with his Elizabeth to her family,” he had said, trying hard to meet Horace’s eyes. “A day or so, and he’ll be gone.”

  Later that night, Horace had visited Riggs, muttered something about a patient in Wethersfield, and Riggs, though worried, loaned his horse. He suspected, but couldn’t know, that a hard ride later, at the farmhouse belonging to Morton’s in-laws, Horace would knock at the back door, say that he had heard about a dentist on the premises, and with a hooked finger stretch his cheek as if to show an inflamed gum.

  Now Horace and Morton sat in the dark garden, a trellis of last summer’s morning glory vines tangled and dry behind Horace’s head.

  “Aren’t you cold without a coat?” said Morton. “I am.”

  “Is it cold?”

  “It’s January, Wells.”

  Horace nodded, adding the present month to other facts rushing around in his head, none willing to settle down and be considered. In this part of the garden there was washed gravel underfoot, decorative, and Morton dragged his boot soles over the small stones, a musical clatter. He shivered and brought his cigar to his lips.

  Horace hoo-hawed. “Look how well my student has done.”

  “The cigar? A good Connecticut leaf wrapper. My father-in-law’s. He can afford these. I’m broke. Don’t let anyone tell you the government’s word is any good. No one honors my Letheon patent. Surgeons from New York to Georgia have learned that it’s mostly ether, which they use and no one pays me a penny. Manufactured fifteen hundred of my inhalers but only sold fifty. It happens that a sponge works well enough.”

  Horace stared into the derringer’s barrel, a darkness truer than the night’s. In silence, Elizabeth had packed his clothes in a trunk while he sat at the kitchen table, unable to stop his knees from bouncing. Earlier she had said, “Any city but Hartford.” He asked for how long. She never answered.

  Morton turned the cigar in his fingers, fashioned a V in the gravel with his feet. “Which one of us do you hope to kill, Wells?”

  Horace slapped at his ear as if there were a fly there, but Morton knew it to be too cold for flies.

  “I took the pistol from a man who had stolen my hat.”

  “Maybe you’d best go home to your Elizabeth.”

  Horace smiled as if holding back a secret, but there was no happiness in it. “Why did you marry a woman with the same name as my wife?”

  “That was a coincidence.”

  That fact swirled inside Horace’s head a moment, then rocketed out of his ear into the sky, and he watched it until it became lost among the stars.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “God preordains.”

  “Then you’ll have to ask God. A single-shot, that pistol?”

  “What’s your philosophy, Morton?”

  “Your questions scare me a little.”

  “A man should have a philosophy. I don’t, not really, and I think I’ve suffered because of it. There were these gymnasts in Paris—”

  He stopped at the sound of footsteps nearby, coming closer. The shape of a heavy man, big in the hips, wearing work gloves and a coat. He smelled of straw. Horace folded his arms, tucked the pistol away. Morton stuck the cigar in his mouth.

  “That you, William?” the man asked. “Is there still bread pudding?”

  “There should be,” said Morton. He waved toward Horace. “Ben, this is my old friend, Horace Wells. Horace, this is Elizabeth’s cousin, Ben.”

  “The Doctor Wells? I hear you knocked out Nancy Hasket from New Britain when the surgeon cut out her tumor. Nancy’s my wife’s sister.”

  “I hope she’s doing well.”

  “Very well. Sings your praises to the Almighty every night, from what I hear.”

  “Give her my best.”

  “I will.”

  Ben stuffed his hands in his pockets. He bounced a time or three on his toes. “Shall we go inside?” he said.

  Morton tapped ash from the end of his cigar, studied Horace, who kept his arms folded and his gaze cast down.

  “You should look up,” said Morton. “Tonight’s an impressive heaven.”

  Ben, correctly appraising nothing casual or festive in the moment, tipped his hat to both men. “You two should get yourselves some coats,” he said, his back to them as he walked the path to the house. “It’s icy out here.”

  Then Horace shivered, feeling the cold for the first time this night. “Two old friends,” he said, “having a chat.” A big dog barked somewhere, and Horace’s borrowed horse whinnied in a way that sounded like a woman’s scream. Horace glanced to where he’d tied the animal—to a post just off the Hartford Road. Morton blew smoke, spit a shred of tobacco onto the gravel.

  “You knocked out Mrs. Hasket with the nitrous oxide?”

  “I did.”

  Morton nodded. “So between the nitrous oxide and the ether, we really have done something, you and I.”

  Horace pointed the pistol at Morton’s face, and Morton felt a hot something jump up his throat. “I did it, Morton. You replicated my work and called it new.”

  Morton’s eyelid began to twitch. “You quit the job unfinished,” he said. “I stepped into the space you left.”

  “You keep telling people that I gave up because nitrous oxide didn’t work.”

  “Would you rather I publish in the journals that you lost your mind to birds?”

  “I have a pistol, Morton.”

  “All the more reason for me to speak truth. Cleanse my soul.”

  “Neither of us has time enough for that.” Horace laughed, then tumbled from his seat to the gravel near Morton’s feet. Morton startled—dropped his cigar—but the gun did not fire. “You see?” Horace said. “I’ve lost my equilibrium.” He began to sweep his hand across the gravel, making that musical clatter, and he mumbled. “This way, that way, which way you will. I’m sure I sing nothing that you can take ill.”

  Morton leaned as far back as he could into the swing, retrieved his cigar from where it had fallen, said low-voiced, “I told you once, Horace, that you need to wear brighter clothes. A red necktie. A purple handkerchief.”

  “Vanity and greed,” said Horace. “Your chief sins.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way to me.”

  “In the land of pain, everything is in excess. Too much or too little. Money, love, hunger, pride, need, blood, warmth, cold. It’s all the same. Too much or too little of a thing, and you hurt. That’s why in the land of pain everyone is either a martyr or a villain. The rivers are all rapids. The sky always throws hail.”

  “You were a good teacher to me, Horace. You will not believe me, but I’ve never meant you ill.”

  “I’ve become a student of pain.” Horace gathered a deep breath. “For naught.”

  From inside the house, a new hymn began, this one with voice accompaniment. Morton checked his pocket watch.

  “It hurts me to see you this way,” he said. “I wanted you on my side. I’m sorry for the scandal, the bankruptcies, the slanders, but I can’t stop now. What’s begun, I need to win. For my wife’s sake and my own.”

  The derringer, Morton noticed, lay near in the gravel. With his boot, he drew the pistol closer, then stepped to cover it. Horace was by turns rubbing his temples and scratching his cheeks.

  “I thought I saw it once,” Horace said, “something that could be my philosophy. These gymnasts with golden skin. Human sculptures. I was about to tell you before. In Paris. They worked with unnatural effort to contort themselves into perfectly balanced positions.” He lifted himself to stand, raised one leg bent at the knee, stretched arms to grasp at the
sky. Fixed and trembling, he counted aloud until at last he tipped. “You see?” he said. “You’d hope God would make it easy for us to steady ourselves. I mean, in spirit or body or mind. But it’s not so. Up close, I saw how those golden men struggled. It’s too much work, I think.”

  Morton stood, brushed his hands on his trousers, then helped Horace to his feet.

  “You are overly dramatic,” he said, “as bad a poet as I am a banker. You’ve always been so.” He offered a hand, and the men shook. “Good night, Horace,” he said. “God keep you. It’s a long ride back.”

  “Back to where?” Horace asked, as he retreated into the night.

  VIII

  MANHATTAN

  Water ran brown from the tap, so Horace set the empty cup on the basin’s wide ledge, opting not to drink.

  “Mudhattan water,” said Cuthbert Bronk. “If you want to drink something clear, I know where you can find a stiff horn of liquor.”

  “No, thank you,” Horace said, voice scraping. He’d spoken little the last several days.

  “How about a roasted chestnut?” Cuthbert tossed one from a paper bagful into his mouth. His boot heels and his voice echoed in the bleak, unadorned apartment. The glass chimney of the room’s one lamp was soot black, dimming its light. Wallpaper fell in ragged, shadowy peels. The floor, unfinished boards, lay rough with slivers. The rest was rodent smells and a straw mattress for one, frayed quilt scrunched at the foot, with a coverless pillow, bone-yellow in the depression where heads had rested.

  A place where love comes after it is broken, Horace thought.

  “So, will it suit you?”

  With the side of his gloved hand, Horace brushed turds from the table top.

  “Mice?”

  Cuthbert nodded. He picked up a palm-sized insect from the dusty floor, its body a twig, its wings gossamer. Dead. “All sorts of things find their way in here,” he said. “In the woods, we call it nature. Here, it’s filth. How does that make sense?”

  The wallpaper’s pattern repeated the same scene: a leaping stag, a unicorn, a maiden. Over the basin, someone had penned a huge penis onto one of the unicorns. Beside it parts of a maiden had been peeled away, her bodice shredded. Horace found it discomfiting to look at the woman.

  “I’ll need a good chair.”

  “Spend the loan however you want. I’ll expect you to start paying your share of the rent after the first month. Nights when I need the bed, I recommend you be on the street or in that room.” He pointed to a door off the east wall.

  “The bed might confuse my patients. Can we move it to that other room?”

  “No, I prefer this spot. It has the window.”

  Here in the city, Cuthbert no longer wore the buckskin and farmer’s boots of a New Covenant Liberite. He dressed in a suit and coat of current fashion, with fitted leather gloves. His hair was trimmed at the temples.

  “What happened to your purple hat?” Horace asked.

  “What? Oh. I don’t know. That Delia woman took it, I think. Or I gave it to her.”

  Horace twisted his wedding ring round his finger. He sat on the bed’s edge and cupped his face with his hands. “I thought you might have married Delia,” he said.

  Cuthbert barked. “Her family had no money, and my father won’t approve of women without. But women with money won’t have me. If it weren’t for whores, I don’t know how I’d cope. Murder my father, I suppose.”

  Horace looked at the pillow, the yellow spot.

  “I smothered mine,” he said, then wondered whether he should take the words back. He’d never spoken them before, not to anyone. Not even to God. He picked up the pillow, crushed it against his belly and bent forward so his head nearly touched the floor. “I thought it was the worst thing I would ever do.”

  Cuthbert laughed. “Killing my father,” he said, “would be the best thing I could do.” He was still smiling when he again offered Horace a chestnut. Horace declined, and then Cuthbert didn’t smile anymore. “You’re not serious?” he said, “about your father?”

  So long unsaid, those words to describe a deed. Horace wondered himself whether to believe them, to believe the memory they evoked.

  “You become pain,” he said, smiling sadly. “Pain has no limits. It’s infinite. Like God.”

  TEETH EXTRACTED WITHOUT PAIN—H. Wells, Surgeon-Dentist, who is known as the discoverer of the wonderful effect of various stimulating gases in annulling pain, would inform the citizens of New York, that he has removed to this city, and will for the present attend personally to those who may require his professional services. It is now over three years since he first made this valuable discovery, and from that time to the present, not one of his numerous patients has experienced the slightest ill effects from it; the sensation is highly pleasurable. Residence, 120 Chambers Street, West of Broadway.

  On that third Monday in January, the day his notices appeared in the morning papers, Horace swept the apartment floor. He hung a mirror shard over the basin to hide that shredded-wallpaper maiden, then shaved with gritty water from the sink. Buttoned his sleeve cuffs. Turned his chair to face the window. The chair was a high-back he’d bought from a dining room set at a pawn shop; he hadn’t noticed the off-kilter legs until he’d carried it up the stairs, but it would have to do. The daylight, however, worried him. What came through the curtainless window was dingy, unlikely to illuminate the deep recesses of patients’ mouths. At least he had the gases, purchased from a chemist on Broadway along with other components: acids and bases and alcohols he might mix for testing. More complicated concoctions were yet to arrive.

  As the ten o’clock bells tolled, he opened his door to an empty hallway. No one waited with broken tooth or infected gum. They’ll come, he told himself. But a half hour passed, and only one man had glanced into his office—another tenant, he guessed, skulking, hollow-cheeked, unshaven. Downstairs, Horace checked the street-level door to make sure it was unlocked. Perhaps he needed to hang his name and profession outside. He decided to visit a sign painter the next day.

  The return up three flights left him wooly in the head. Crumpled onto Cuthbert’s straw mattress, he tried to remember when he’d last eaten. His tongue recalled a vague taste—creamed potatoes? a chowder?—but his attention drifted. On the walls, stags leapt and unicorns stood vigilant. The maidens—their dissolving colors, their peeling gowns—lounged repeatedly. Dark lights burst behind Horace’s eyes, and the maidens rolled off the walls to crowd his bed. They spoke to him all the chastisements he deserved and had wanted Elizabeth to say, and they did so in her voice. A chorus of Elizabeths. With faces that belonged to Nan.

  He startled awake. Someone knocked at the door.

  The chemist’s delivery boy padded into the room. Horace rolled off Cuthbert’s mattress onto all fours. Picked himself up. He signed for the package, then staggered toward his worktable, gave the boy a new list.

  “Morton’s inhaler? Pricey instrument. You know a sponge works as well.”

  The boy was not much taller than Charley. Perhaps the same age. A delivery job might do Charley good. “I know,” Horace said. “But if it’s in your stock …”

  The boy said he’d ask the chemist. “I’ll deliver tomorrow at the earliest.”

  After the boy left, Horace returned the broom and dust pan to the closet. On the shelf where he set the pan, he discovered other abandoned tools: a plumb line, a plane, a chisel sticky with cobwebs, a wall scraper spattered with whitewash, its handle dark from some worker’s oily grip. He brought them into the room’s dim light, washed the lot in the basin. The scraper fit his palm nicely. Its blade, though rusted, had kept an edge. At a spot where the wallpaper hung loose, its paste decayed, he scraped at a stag, peeled its head from its torso. Then, the maiden beside it. She let go the wall at one stroke.

  Sorry shape, that paper. Horace could peel every last scrap, clean the walls and paint them white. The idea of the work felt right, necessary. It would be no atonement. God alone could decide the state
of his soul. But perhaps some defiled part of him could be cleansed. He envisioned the walls empty except for one last maiden, the blade behind her as she fell away, a fresh whiteness in her place. Cuthbert would thank him. Elizabeth, when again they met, would see his brighter self.

  The next day when he heard boots clomping up the stairs, he set aside the scraper, patted his brow with a rag. Flecks of wallpaper littered the floor, but not so many as he’d hoped. A glance told him it would be weeks before he finished.

  The chemist’s boy appeared at the door, presenting Morton’s inhaler.

  “My employer wants you to have this sponge, too,” he said. “At no cost. He told me to laugh when I gave it to you, but I don’t think it’s a funny joke.”

  “I don’t either,” said Horace.

  The boy took his money, and Horace returned to his chore, sometimes using a fingernail where the scraper had failed. He worked for hours until every muscle and bone felt too much a burden. Even his shadow weighed more than he could bear. At his work table, he cradled Morton’s globe, so airy and elegant, his oily fingers smudging the glass, and he thought he also needed to be airy and elegant. He needed less of himself. So, having filled the bowl, he sat in his chair and rocked on its uneven legs, and inhaled, and heard his own voice—singsong, as if calling to faraway children: El-iii-zabeth, Char-leeeey, Char-leeeey, El-iii-zabeth.

  In that empty, windowless room attached to the office, Horace sat propped against the wall, on his pillow, listening for Cuthbert’s arrival. The night’s chill seeped through the wall’s many cracks, enough draft to turn a wisp of dust and animal fur about the space. To shelter the lit wick, he had set his candle in a corner, and he didn’t care that its drippings clotted on the floorboards. He held Morton’s orb toward the light and watched the chloroform inside catch and refract the flame, watched the flickering liquid dance.