The reader of the clouds followed Dr. Severance of Staten Island, but he brought no sunshine.
Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster tried electrotherapy.
Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster tried baths (hot).
Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster tried baths (cold).
Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster tried massage.
Poughkeepsie was clearly a place throbbing with Spirit voices, numinous with the beyondness of things. You headed north, up the Hudson, and you were drawn mysteriously toward it by a power beyond your control. First there was Andrew Jackson Davis, the famous “Seer of Poughkeepsie,” and then – as if that wasn’t enough excitement for one place, a place of sensitive, scholarly girls attempting to concentrate on higher learning – there was Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster and the Webster Nervine Asylum, his clinic for extended stays. Like Andrew Jackson Davis he seemed to receive communications from another world, hear voices that no one else could hear. He certainly didn’t hear her voice at times. What he did do was to, somehow – what was the word to use? – encroach upon the areas that belonged to Dr. Twemlow, her medical doctor.
(The areas belonged to her, to her.)
Dr. Twemlow – his name always made her think that he ought to have some slight speech impediment (who on earth was she, to t-t-talk about sp-p-peech imp-p-pediments, to att-tt-ttempt to t-t-talk?) – faded, retreated, before the irresistible advance of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. If she had a stutter, then he could have a lisp. If it was a lisp. Lisps were for “s” sounds (weren’t they?), but what was the term for an inability to pronounce “r” sounds? For want of knowing the correct term – perhaps it was “lisp” – she continued to think of Dr. Twemlow as a lisper. (Cruel to have an unpronounceable “s” in the term that defined the condition.) His lisp, like a misspelled limp, hindered him as he staggered along in the race with Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. He, the athletic running partner of Dr. Brown! He, rarely without a fine sheen of sweat – Millie tended to complain – and a smell of embrocation – she liked this even less – about him.
No, it wasn’t “lisp.” It was something to do with having a too-short tongue. Poor depwived short-tongued Dr. Twemlow, a man quite incapable of producing a juicy raspberry. On some days – looking wearily across the room at winsomely evasive, fearsomely insistent, Millie – it must be the sound he longed to produce more than any other as a summation of all he felt most deeply about her. How he must crave to evolve into one of the long-tongued! To spring into action with the most resonant of uninhibited letter “r”s, the wettest and most spectacular of raspberries! It wasn’t just the desperate desire to produce the sound that conveyed the contempt that he – the verb was wonderfully appropriate – longed to pronounce. The creation of a dramatically drenching fall of spray – cruelly denied him – upon the face of his adversary, a Niagara Falls of derision (derrrrision!), would have been an essential part of the pleasure.
The red and yellow triangular flags were a blur as Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max – leaping up and down on tiptoe in their excitement – signaled success for Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster.
“Twemlow dwopping back! Twemlow keeling over! Twemlow withdwawing fwom the wace!”
Twemlow cwushed!
Twemlow wouted!
Twemlow overthwown!
The reader of the clouds examined her face and eyes in particular detail, as if assessing her suitability for his enthusiasm for hypnotism that followed, one of a long line of enthusiasms. If you wished to know what Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had been reading recently, you did not examine his library list (though his carefully locked bookcases would have yielded clues); you studied his changing treatments of her. He commented on her pockmarks (smallpox when she was seven), and told her that her eyes were unusually dry, muttering the phrase “difficulties with tears” to himself. He tended to talk out loud as he examined her. It was not to explain things to her; patients were not in the confidence of their doctors in such matters, not a party to the mystery of their art. It was, indeed, surprising that doctors did not talk to each other (and to themselves) exclusively in Latin, the language of The Bearded Ones.
(Dr. Wycherley treated Alfred Hardie like a human curiosity as he inspected him for the signs of madness. Like Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster – though Dr. Webster had much the more appropriate namesake – he had the name of an English dramatist. John Webster wrote about death and murder. John Webster wrote about madness.
(“Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae,” Dr. Wycherley intoned as he examined Alfred, a man casting a spell, or drawing out demons. Here was a doctor who had the right idea, the correct sense of the dignity due to his profession. Dementiae didn’t sound too promising, another demon unleashed from the darkness.
(When he chose not to utilize Latin, he employed multi-syllabled technical terms, equally obfuscating for the uninitiated, the beardlessly unworthy.
(Dr. Wycherley asked Alfred about his headaches, and about his inability to sleep. He asked him about his nightly visions and voices. Dr. Wycherley sounded just like Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, the two dramatists peopling their stages with crowds of lunatics, derangedly speaking the words that they had written for them.)
Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster spoke as if he were in a lecture hall, expounding upon his discoveries to serried ranks of the behatted and bebearded rising in rows above him, or as if he were Dr. Seward in Dracula – what better comparison? He, also, was the owner of a private lunatic asylum – dictating his diary into a phonograph. When the public tired of the voice of Enrico Caruso, they could listen to Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, tapping their feet to the infectious rhythm of his sentences. He assumed highly dramatic postures in front of his audience, as if frozen at the thrilling climax of an opera, or posing – with an expression of piercing yet caring intelligence (this took considerable concentration) – for a new painting by Thomas Eakins, The Webster Clinic. He’d make sure that potential patients heard all about it. As painted by Thomas Eakins, he’d trumpet in his advertisements, a rather racy endorsement (there was something a little – ahem – controversial about some of Thomas Eakins’s paintings, and some of his personal proclivities), but it might well attract a more artistic – and therefore more profitably neurotic – clientÈle. Mrs. Italiaander had a painting by Thomas Eakins, depicting her late husband among a group of his fellow architects, all of them holding models of buildings they had designed, and looking like a race of giants. He was the fourth one in from the left.
“The female has difficulties with tears. Note the dryness of the eyes …”
Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster pointed with a histrionically angled forefinger, allowing ample time for Thomas Eakins to register the play of light and shadow across his noble features. There was a distinct sensation of strain in holding that slight compassionate smile for long periods.
She had made a note of the title – thank you, Oh Bearded One – in these words. Difficulties With Tears. This ought to be a novel, like The Life Class.
At first, as it had been with Dr. Severance, it had been like working on some weakness of her body, building up the strength of some frail consumptive, an Elizabeth Barrett Browning of the wall bars, curls dangling upside down as she hung suspended. “How do I love thee?”– three forward rolls on the mats – “Let me count the ways”– backward somersault on the beam – “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height”– long forward swoop on the rings, gentler glide back – “My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight”– vigorous run up to the vaulting horse, a thump of the feet on the boards, a spring into the air – “For the ends of Being and ideal Grace” – “Pant, pant, pant!” A struggle for breath. Perhaps being ill was the only way she had to show that she was a woman – frail, delicate, well-bred, too gentle for the rough world – when her body failed to illustrate the acceptable criteria for ticking. That moustache certainly gave pause for thought, pencil points hovering indecisively in the pretick posture.
Cough.
Sigh.
Loo
k pale.
Be submissive.
Be reticent.
Be modest.
Be polite.
Be grateful.
Up into the air, out to the side, up into the air, out to the side: she swung the Indian clubs, synchronized with the other gymnasts stretching out in front of her, behind her, either side of her, stretching to infinity, like the floorboards, the wall bars, the gasoliers – not thinking, not seeing: there was no need to think, no need to see – part of a symmetrical pattern like the shapes viewed through a kaleidoscope, its end twisted in the hand, not a human being at all, really.
After (briefly) following in the footsteps of Dr. Severance, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had decided – he declared it like an Arctic explorer about to cross a white untracked wilderness – to enter the inner self. Long had he labored on the conscious – this was the impression he liked to give – and now it was time to take a deep breath, and plunge into the sub-conscious, the hidden chaos beneath. Instead of travelling to Poughkeepsie for short stays at the clinic, Alice now traveled the short distance across Longfellow Park to his consulting room at 11 Park Place. Every week, on Wednesday – she thought of it as Ash Wednesday – she arrived at ten o’clock in the morning, and stayed for fifty-five minutes. The House of the Interpreter. That was what she thought to herself, Christian pausing on his journey to the Celestial City. Sunday mornings were for the Reverend Goodchild, and Wednesday mornings were for Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. It was as if Wednesday had become another day of worship, the day on which she bowed down and worshiped her God, confessing her sins with most Catholic-like humility. Humiliation certainly came into it. Would fifty-five minutes give her enough time? Forgive me, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster … He probably relied upon her fees to pay the – considerable – cost of his brandy and cigars. He looked at Alice, and saw candlelight glinting on cut glass, a slight unsteadiness in his walk, smoke curling toward the ceiling.
He wore – it was his uniform for work – a black business suit, a shirt with a stiffly starched collar, and a black bow tie. It was like being treated by a waiter or a department-store floorwalker temporarily corralled behind a counter. He should be standing behind his desk as she entered, leaning slightly forward, his weight upon the tips of his fingers and thumbs.
“Might I recommend?” he should be saying. “This is proving to be very popular with our more discriminating customers,” “Might I have the pleasure?” or “It is no trouble at all, Madam.” She should have a list in her hand, knowing precisely what it was she had come to buy, drawing a firm line through each product as she bought it.
It had started with hypnotism. This was the product on offer, and – although it was not on her list – she had bought it. It was Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s first enthusiasm – the first new enthusiasm of which she was aware: electrotherapy, the baths (hot), the baths (cold), and the massage had probably all once been enthusiasms – and her initial thoughts, as he sat her so that she was facing him, their knees almost touching, enveloped in a fish-smelling miasma, were that he was going to try phrenology after all. It seemed to be the only thing he had not tried, and would have been a logical next stage: the inner self read from the outer manifestations. The cold skull would be warmed again, the undulations traced and interpreted.
When he produced the pocket-watch from his vest pocket – it was done with a consciously elegant little professional flourish, the surgeon producing his scalpel – she thought, for just a few seconds, that it was her dead father’s watch, and it spun and glittered as if in the hands of the Reverend Goodchild.
“… I come down dah wid my hat caved in.
Doo-dah! Doo-dah!
I go back home wid a pocket full of tin.
Oh! doo-dah day!…”
She would sit motionless, with her hair held away from her forehead, as if feeling for the impression left by a watch-chain, by a coin: the word CÆSAR, worn smooth like one of the half-erased words on the phrenology head, the profile of Venus facing right, the slumped, defeated figures of the enslaved man and woman. She became a piece of melted wax, a sealed document enclosed within her body by the pressure of his signet ring, pressed upon her by his fisted hand. Well-flexed fingertips would start to push their way through her hair, feeling for her scalp, as she held her breath, her eyes blind, like her face as a small girl in the statue in the park, gazing out and seeing nothing. Spirituality, Faith, Trust, Wonder, Hope, Expectancy, Thoughtfulness, Grief. Each emotion would fleetingly blossom upon her face – flickering and dying – as his fingers moved across the hidden areas of her mind, the contours of her head caressingly fondled in intense silence as he played upon her head as upon a piano. This would be how he would think of it. The instruction book – How to Learn Phrenology by L. N. Fowler – would be propped up with its lower edge on the back of her bowed neck, a book of sheet music propped up on a music rack.
(Mama’s piano was a Chickering, in memory of Louis Moreau Gottschalk.
(A single coin would not suffice as payment for his valuable time, the solitary clunk into the metal mug held thrustingly forward by the importunate beggar. A jingling pocket full of tin was more what he had in mind, and the coins would not bear the name CÆSAR. He’d be very keen on that pocket full of tin. That would definitely appeal. He’d doo-dah, doo-dah all day long if he had that. Crisp new notes would be even more acceptable.
(His face replaced the face on the front of the sheet music she had taken upstairs, the copperplate lettering of Mama’s maiden name – Lucinda Brouwer – faded by sunlight, the ink become a barely legible pale brown, the words written centuries ago. If she tried to play music, his would be the face watching her, immediately in front of hers like a reflection with a beard. Alice’s mother, like Mrs. Albert Comstock, like Mrs. Alexander Diddecott – like, for that matter, Mrs. Humphry Ward or Mrs. Henry Wood – was always known by her husband’s name: she was Mrs. Lincoln Pinkerton. Alice was unaware that it had ever occurred to her – as a small girl – that her mother might actually have a first name. She never heard her father address her mother by her Christian name. She had come across the name Lucinda Brouwer in books, and on music, and had asked her mother who this person was.
(“That was me,” – even then Alice had noticed the use of the past tense – her mother had replied, and for the first time Alice had been confronted with the idea of her mother’s being Lucinda Brouwer, this person in the past who had been entirely absorbed within Lincoln Pinkerton. She had once had a name, a girl’s name, a name of her own.)
Almost, she had lowered her head in front of him, bowing, offering him her head for his hands, a patient inviting him to inspect her hair for infestation. She had a picture in her mind of phrenology charts and phrenology heads, and pictured her own head divided – for his convenience – into labeled sections, like the charts in butchers’ shops illustrating the different cuts of meat on the carcass of a cow or a pig all ready for the knife. He would produce his sharp little knives, and, Hamlet-like, brood awhile above her skull, planning his first incision, holding his scalpel like a ravenous Sunday luncheon diner, sensually prolonging the moment before his first crammed mouthful. Her own hands remained decorously folded in her lap.
It was the first of her ten o’clock appointments, and then – as now – there had been snow upon the ground. She was facing the window, and glanced over Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s shoulders, and across the road outside, taking a last, deep breath before submerging her head under water. The water would be frozen; she would see her own reflection moving up toward her from under the ice. She must have been very prompt – doubtless driven by her uncontrollable eagerness – because the clock in the waiting room started to chime the hour as she sat down.
One …
First the hall.
Two …
Then the waiting room.
Three …
Then the consulting room.
In the park, snow lay upon the marble head and the marble shoulders of Albert C
omstock (enough to bury a football team had accumulated in the cleavage of his buttocks), and she was conscious of averting her eyes from the ghastly sight. There might be incalculable and highly dangerous repercussions if you gazed upon such a sight in the presence of a trained alienist, one capable of discerning the secret, hidden things of the mind. Not to mention the increased pulse rate, the whimpers of desire, the drooling. There was snow upon the heads and shoulders of the statues of all the other Bearded Ones. She could see them clearly through the branches of the bare, leafless trees: Reynolds Templeton Seabright, John Randel, Jr. …
There was silence in the room. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster did not choose to speak until he had a rapt and total stillness – Five … Six … – and measured his valuable time so exactly that she should not be given one second for which she had not paid.
To see statues in dreams, signifies estrangement from a loved one. Lack of energy will cause you disappointment in realizing wishes.
Nine …
Ten …
Then the pause, always that pause before the silence that followed. She was urging the hour onward, hoping to hear the chimes of eleven o’clock follow, and know that the fifty-five minutes were up, that she had – in fact – overrun her allocated time by five minutes, and should no longer be there. He’d be hurrying her out the door. Other loonies would be lined up, waiting. When G. G. Schiffendecken arrived in Longfellow Park, his waiting room was remarkably similar to that of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, and was probably modeled upon it, though – of course – you heard fewer screams of agony from the dentist’s consulting room beyond, fewer sounds of metallic implements gouging and clattering.
Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s hand was cold as he briefly touched her face. It was now ten o’clock. The treatment could commence. She could have her fifty-five minutes, starting now, on the last chime of ten, not the first. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster was clearly a man capable of sharp practice, cutting corners when it suited him. Perhaps she should carry on counting, to ensure that he did not give short measure, count out all the three thousand, three hundred seconds – she’d worked this out the night before – for which she would be paying.
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