Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain

by Kirsten Menger-Anderson

  OLAF AND THE COW head arrived at the hospital just before nine, when the inns and taverns closed their doors, and the denizens of New Amsterdam abandoned their empty glasses and cards and backgammon games to return home to bed or a nightcap of West Indian rum. Had he arrived at the iron-braced door any later, he would have had to wait for the streets to clear before he stepped into the hospital. But as long as he entered before the mandated closing time, he could confidently assume he’d passed unobserved.

  Inside, he set the head on the plank floor and felt for a candle and tinderbox. Even in the moonlight that crept through the shuttered hospital windows, Olaf could discern that Dr. Johannes le Sueur had left the space in disarray, abandoning pints of urine on the central table and leaving a broken glass and its pungent contents spilled on the floor. Why could his colleague not attend to his own debris? As he lit the candle and then the gas lamp and set to work with the broom, anger and dismay coursed through his muscles.

  He had to rest for a moment, breathe deeply and exhale before he could take up his saw. He bit his tongue so pain would keep him focused. He should leave the work for tomorrow morning, early, when he felt rested; he should return home, to his mother, who must be hungry. But the thought of his mother, her hands still tied, her wide eyes gazing into his, forced his hand. She was failing.

  Bone crumbled beneath his saw as the pale mass of the cow brain unfolded before him. Into the center he drove two probes. He knew the texture and composition and where to find the pineal gland. He’d mixed its tough meat with dozens of tinctures, observed the effect on color, size, and elasticity, and noted the mixtures that appeared promising. The answer was there in the body before him.

  “Olaf! By God.”

  In the doorway stood Dr. Johannes le Sueur, dressed in his good jacket and crowned hat, just in from a stroll, it seemed. He was not a man to welcome spilled animal blood, particularly on the night of the full moon.

  Turning from the gray-green gland squeezed between his probes, Olaf saw not a man but a monster, an apparition with cruel eyes and clawed hands that could steal what remained of the night.

  “You must let me continue,” he said.

  “What devil’s work is this?”

  Johannes shut the door and stepped closer. In his hand he held a walking stick, slightly raised, Olaf thought. The metal orb at the top caught the gaslight.

  “What we have is the soul,” Olaf said. “The seat of man’s soul.”

  “What you have is a cow skull. Cows have no soul.”

  “But here — here before you —”

  Olaf wanted to tell him about Descartes, about the work that medical men were doing abroad. He wanted to show his piss-prophet colleague what the new science taught, and he wanted his colleague to turn around and go home, or rather, not to have arrived at all. But he could say none of it. He felt the heat in his cheeks, a twitch in the muscle of his shoulder. The gland fell from between his silver implements.

  Johannes stepped forward, and again Olaf tried to form words. Johannes would tell Stuyvesant; Stuyvesant would ban Olaf from the colony, or worse, discover the past that had driven him to New Amsterdam’s shores. Where would he go? How would he study?

  “Away!” Olaf cried, though it was he, and not Johannes who was leaving. The two men passed each other, Johannes moving slowly, walking stick extended in self defense; Olaf armed only with an animal impulse, flight. He grasped the door frame for support. Moonlight spoiled the darkness, lightened it so he could not wear its disguise. Still, he turned and ran, deep into the night.

  WHEN OLAF AWOKE, he was lying prone in front of the stone church near the waterfront. His shirt had torn and he’d lost both shoes and stockings. Rocks pressed the soft upper arch of his feet. The skin of his right arm was broken and bleeding in four lines of red fingernail scratches. His clothes smelled of the ocean, of drying sea bass and slippery brown bladder wrack. He clutched a handkerchief, Adalind’s, the cloth filthy, but still perfumed with nutmeg and cinnamon. Around him fragments of cream-colored eggshell littered the ground. A line of ants disappeared beneath the one step leading to the church door. Night had passed leaving only the effects of forgotten moments. Why had he come here? Had he spoken to Adalind? What twisted path had led him to this spot?

  “Have you come for food?” In the doorway stood the schoolmaster who was conducting services while the minister returned to Holland to attend to his ailing father. A fringe of blond hair encircled his bald head like a halo that had slipped a few inches too far. “You needn’t kneel,” he continued. “Is it water you need?”

  Olaf knew the schoolmaster from the few Sunday sermons he’d attended months earlier. The schoolmaster, despite his kind voice and smile, did not seem to recognize him.

  “Come inside.” The schoolmaster extended a hand. He stepped forward, past the eggshells and the handkerchief Olaf did not remember dropping.

  “I am mad,” Olaf said. He brushed the dirt from his palms. His time in New Amsterdam was done. Other men, great men, would carry on his studies. Not Johannes le Sueur, not this man of God, and not Olaf — certainly not Olaf. He might find refuge in another town, build a new practice, care for his mother for as long as he could. But he had no time to find the cure.

  “Come inside,” the schoolmaster said again. “Men can only do so much.”

  “We can heal the soul,” Olaf answered. “We have the power.”

  Then he accepted the outstretched hand, because faith alone did not grant him the strength to rise.

  THE BURNING

  Richard Shaftsbury lit the fire and then a single candle. In the early days, the first days of his marriage, he and Gardenia burned dozens of candles before she returned to the kitchen and he set out lines of silver tankards. Tallow had flowed like ale, and the tavern had the warmth of expectations: they’d build a mahogany bar, stencil flowers above every door, serve chocolate, from London, which Gardenia had seen once. The King’s Inn, they’d called it, raising the carved wood sign. Now, four years later, only the soft light of the evening’s candle held promise.

  The one early customer sat across from Richard, though Doctor Clementius Steenwycks never paid a cold shilling for his evening libations. People whispered that he was as odd as his father, who pickled animal heads and sliced them apart until he lost his reason entirely. He’d raped a woman — Clementius’s mother — in the shadows of the docks where she awaited her young husband, a man who raised Clementius as a son, despite a shroud of rumors and ignominy. As a youth, Clementius found love only with the feebleminded daughter of a blind locksmith, and she bore him one son, Jan, now grown and gone, before she succumbed to fever.

  “Raining again,” Clementius said, silk robe parted over narrow chest, pipe filled with Indian tobacco. His eyes, a peculiar hazel that appeared to change hue as his gaze shifted — first to Richard, then to the kitchen, then to the smoke rising before him — had a self-satisfied glimmer, as if the doctor had peered into himself and found everything in perfect order. Though his shoulders hunched awkwardly, a symptom of long nights of study, he remained fit and well groomed. “Are you ready?”

  Richard nodded. Rain kept all but the rowdiest drinkers away, and the night promised brawls. On rainy nights, he thanked the Lord for bringing Doctor Clementius Steen-wycks to his inn, thanked the Lord that he had a medical man on hand, and one willing, on occasion, to snatch drunkards from their stools and thrust them into the darkened streets. Most evenings Richard bemoaned the fact that he’d let his two best rooms to Clementius for half their worth. He’d thought the doctor’s practice would bring business. Never once did it occur to him that the practice would never be large, or that the few patients who arrived each day would feel too sick for lime punch and whiskey.

  Clementius pushed his half-empty cup across the table. Tonight he would stitch broken lips and wrap bruised arms and bent fingers — tasks beneath a doctor with vast experience and interests, but which Richard respected far more than the strange remedies imported
from London or the careful studies the medical man did on the hogs in the New York streets. Clementius had curious interests, but then, he was an unusual man.

  “Perhaps Gardenia will prepare roast beef?” Clementius said, a demand more than a question. The doctor would eat and drink as he pleased tonight. The fact that Gardenia was indisposed and unable to cook did not matter. “And an apple crisp with cream.”

  Richard wiped the tabletop with the torn cuff of his shirt. What bothered him more than the menu, which would keep his lovely servant girl in the kitchen all evening, was the gnawing certainty that the doctor had requested the dishes for exactly this reason. Richard should never have confided in Clementius. But the two had spent so many evenings in the flickering light of the tavern that the innkeeper had at last broken down and admitted everything: his wife, Gardenia, was a drunk who belched unwomanly odors. She drank whiskey with breakfast and swallowed great gulps of rum for supper. The last time she’d tended to tallow, she’d left the task unfinished and the tavern dark for several nights. The time before, she’d made soap, the bars harsh and misshapen. After bathing with them, the lodgers broke out in rash, leaving the doctor to attend to the scabrous skin with mineral tonics. Her bread did not rise; her porridge never thickened; she left trousers and socks on the line long enough that the wind made them filthy. She failed to attend to her appearance or that of the tavern. Richard hired the servant girl because Gardenia wouldn’t — couldn’t — help. Wasn’t there some justice in that? Some right of man to small pleasures?

  The doctor, clean-shaven chin jutting out at an unappealing angle, had admitted the possibility, had noted that the servant girl was indeed comely, and had discussed the matter with the butcher, cordwainer, cooper, and a whole crew of mariners before Richard promised a reduced monthly rent in exchange for the doctor’s discretion. Though Richard did not mind bedding the servant girl while Gardenia lay passed out on the kitchen floor, he shuddered to imagine his wife’s reaction if she heard tell of it. All the traits that first drew him to her — her strength, her will, her violent temper — would become sharp, devouring teeth. He’d emerge bloodied and broken, if at all.

  “Richard!” Gardenia’s voice rose from the dirt-floored cellar, where earlier that day she’d fallen and decided to remain. She’d called for a blanket, which Richard provided, and then asked for a towel. How she ordered him about! When she had been well, managing her share of the inn’s tasks, he hadn’t minded. He’d loved her girth and the awkwardly curved seams in the dresses she sewed herself. He loved the dark, empty rectangle where she’d lost a tooth in a childhood fight. He loved, once loved, the woman whose thick layer of fat now protected her from the otherwise intolerable dampness of the cellar floor. “Bring some bread and molasses,” she called.

  Outside, thunder rumbled — soft, yet promising to near and rage. Richard sighed. The cellar was off the kitchen and down a half flight of wooden steps, far closer to the bread than where he now stood.

  “The girl will fix dinner,” he said to Clementius before turning to his wife’s demands. “Whatever you please.”

  AS EXPECTED, THE night brought nothing but ruffians — mariners mainly, in baggy tar-covered breeches and heavy wool coats — men accustomed to water and storms, who paid before drinking, for none would serve them otherwise. They sang loudly of ships that became women, of masts that tickled the sky, and of whores who waited on the lower decks promising honey and lime juice. Their ship had docked two days ago. Hard-earned shillings still clinked in their pockets.

  Richard poured round after round of cider and punch. His head ached, and rum soaked his shirtsleeves. He was the ale master; his world was measured in pitchers and pints. And with the servant girl trapped in the kitchen over apple crisp and Gardenia asleep in the cellar and the demands for refills piling upon him in rapid succession, he discharged hard cider with a sloppiness that left the floor awash in alcohol and mud.

  Clementius, who usually retired to his rooms after dinner, remained in the tavern, appearing almost saintly in his night robe. He’d moved near the fire and now bent over a pile of medical journals obtained at an exceedingly high cost from the Continent. He studied these often, sometimes sharing a highlight with Richard: an obscure case of frogs in a child’s stomach, a grandmother who birthed a wild duck, a man who’d grown seven thumbs. “I’ve seen no such wondrous things in New York,” he’d say mournfully. “Not a one.”

  A plate crashed against the floor. Richard turned from the bar, but not in time to tame the first of the evening’s disruptions.

  “A pound of yams? A pound of yams!” The screaming mariner had a scar that ran from jaw to ear and likely beyond, concealed by tufts of lousy brown hair. He rose from his stool, legs uncertain, arms braced to fight.

  “Coward!” The opponent had been to the King’s Inn before and had a limp to show for it. “Fool!”

  “I’ll eat no more yams!” The first punch fell like a dead branch from a tree, inevitable but without force.

  “None of that.” A third man rose, but Richard already stood between the fighters, his hand outstretched, palm raised.

  “A shilling for the plate,” he said.

  The night was young and the mariners not too drunk to reason. Richard closed his fingers over the handful of coins. The mariners glared at him, their stubbled chins defiant. In the old days, the early days, Gardenia quelled the fights. None would strike a woman, and one of her icy blue stares would silence even the meanest rogue.

  Over the filth and demon rum came the scent of baked apple. Richard turned to the kitchen, to the haven where he knew the servant girl stood. The mariners, the foulmouthed men, could wait.

  “Two helpings,” Clementius called after him. “Ask the girl to bring …”

  “She’ll not come out here!” Richard did not mean to raise his voice. He hadn’t even realized how angry he was until that moment.

  “Is this gratitude?” Clementius said. “I spend good money for the latest research from France and Holland and Austria, to ensure your health. I sit here now, prepared —”

  “Two helpings,” Richard said. “With cream.”

  In the kitchen, he set his pitcher aside. Bowls of dried plums and West Indian molasses sat behind a plateful of softening butter and a halved loaf of bread. The servant girl picked baked sugar from the top of her apple crisp. Above her, the sheet of hand-blocked French wallpaper, which Gardenia had purchased at great expense from the booksellers, had blackened and begun to peel.

  “Angel,” Richard said. Behind him, the bar hummed softly, far away. “My little angel.”

  The servant girl turned, guilty smile radiant. “I didn’t hear you, sir.”

  He stepped closer and cupped her chin in his palm.

  She contemplated him, raised two sticky fingers to trace the lines of his face. “You look tired,” she said.

  He bent forward to kiss her, felt her thinness. He could lead a happy, balanced life with her by his side. He pulled her closer. His hand found her neckline, the soft, warm skin of her breast.

  “The apple bake,” she said.

  “It will wait.” Now that passion had woken, he could not bear to return to the tavern. He lifted the girl easily, pressed her back to the wall. “Angel,” he said, trousers dropping round his feet before he reached forward to push up her skirts. He felt her thighs tense as she stretched her legs. He thought he heard her giggle. A skillet slipped to the floor. Hanging bunches of lavender and horehound struck the wall with the lovers’ rhythm. “Angel!” he cried.

  Hardly a minute had passed. A giddy minute. A wonderful minute. A minute in which Richard felt more pleasure than he had in months. He would come to the kitchen again, he decided. He would take refuge in the servant girl. He would hold her, stroke her, kiss her. His cheeks flushed, his breath came hot and quick. He listened to the screaming for a full breath before he realized that the voice belonged to Gardenia.

  “Fiend!” she screeched. “Monster!”

  Rich
ard turned; the servant girl slid to the floor. Gardenia, red hair colored with vomit, glared at them. Her skin had hardened into numerous deep wrinkles, her lips hung slightly apart. She’d come for the baked apple, Richard realized. The smell had drawn her, a dumb beast to a heavenly trough. He hated her. Hated the hands worn raw from years of dishes, and the burns on her arms from the stove. He hated that she failed to sew and cook and clean. He hated her thickness, her rum-sweat odor.

  “Adulterer!” she yelled. Unsteadily, she turned toward the tavern. The servant girl shrieked, her almond curls freed from the cap that had fallen to the floor only moments before.

  “Gardenia.” Richard realized his wife would cause an uproar, provoking the men in the other room. But Gardenia had already pushed open the door.

  “You will suffer for this!” she screamed over a chorus of derisive cries and catcalls. “Suffer till the end of your days.”

  Richard raced to her side and placed a restraining hand on her shoulder “Come here,” he said. “Come down to the cellar.”

  THE SERVANT GIRL discovered the body. She’d gone down to the cellar for a pint of cream, she said later, though Richard suspected that she’d thought to beg Gardenia’s forgiveness. Her scream, a mix of rending fear and surprise, brought him to the cellar with Doctor Clementius Steenwycks at his heels along with a stumbling group of drunken mariners.

  “What is it?” Richard said, before his eyes adjusted to the dimness. Above his casks of pear and juniper wine hung thick clouds of smoke. The floor was covered with soot, so slippery that he nearly lost his balance — nearly tumbled into the fatty remains of his wife: a leg, stocking intact; a thumb; two fingers, one with a wedding band; and a few strands of hair.

  “By God,” Richard said. The darkness did not conceal his disgust. He raised a trembling hand to his shoulder, pressed it over his heart. “Gardenia!”

  “I’ve only read of such things,” Clementius said. He breathed deeply, despite the foul stench, and turned to push the nearest mariner aside. “Away with you! All of you!”