The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  On Tuesday evening, when Lucretia still hadn’t returned, William gave vent to his apprehensions in front of a new friend. The friend was Edwin Fanning, a door-to-door book salesman whom William had invited to stay at the house. After the children went to bed, William asked Fanning, who was occupying a spare room in the attic, to sit with him in the parlor for a while. He poured him a brandy. He talked to him about buying some volumes of an encyclopedia the salesman was touting, and then he began to unburden himself. He told his new friend that Lino had promised to give him and Lucretia a large sum of money in exchange for room, board, and English lessons, but that he thought Lino might be an impostor. “A rogue,” he said, adding that even if Lino wasn’t a rogue, even if he was really going to make him and Lucretia rich, he didn’t care anymore. No, “I’d rather be poor,” he fumed, “than have my peace disturbed the way it’s been since this fellow came here.”

  Fanning was a good listener. So William continued his diatribe, and after a while he got to what was really on his mind, which was his suspicion that Lucretia and Lino wanted everyone to be asleep when they came home so that what they did next wouldn’t be noticed. “In all probability,” he declared, “their object is to tarry until the family has retired, and perhaps then to engage in improper conduct.”

  Fanning didn’t say anything, and William went on fiercely, “If I know of their going together to Mina’s lodging room, I will be in there, and by God I’ll kill him.”

  He felt better after that. Tired out, too. And why not? It was nearly eleven. Way past his bedtime. “I’m going to bed,” he announced. But he couldn’t stop himself from imploring the salesman to serve as his surrogate. “You stay up,” he said, “You stay up, and if they come home and go to that rogue’s room, you let me know.”

  Fanning did as he was bid. He stayed up till past midnight. But Lucretia didn’t come home, and finally Fanning went to bed, too.

  The next morning Lucretia still wasn’t home. Nor was she home by afternoon. William was beside himself. Then at last he heard the horse’s hooves clattering up the driveway, and saw William Jr. bound out of the carriage and Lino saunter onto the porch and Lucretia come gliding through the front door, her voluminous skirts rustling and her coppery curls flying. As soon as he saw her, William was sorry for the way he’d spoken about her to Fanning, and he felt sorrier still when Lucretia told him why they’d been so delayed in Philadelphia. Almost as soon as they’d arrived there, she explained, Lino had received word that his sister had died. He’d become distraught, too distraught to make the trip home.

  Listening to her, William shook his head sympathetically. Poor Lino. Poor, poor Lino. The Mexican had gone into the parlor and crumpled onto the sofa. William turned from Lucretia, sat down beside the grieving man, and tried to comfort him, reciting to him several consoling verses from the Bible.

  As William recited, Lino cried, and afterward he began speaking passionately about how much he’d loved his sister and how devastated he felt by her sudden death. William cried a little, too. It was partly out of sympathy, partly because he was feeling guilty, ashamed of himself for having spoken ill of Lino to Fanning and especially for having done so at a time when the poor man was suffering a death in his family. William felt so bad that he asked Lino if there was anything he could do to help. Buy him some mourning clothes? A fine suit that would show his respect for his dear departed sister?

  When Lino accepted his suggestion, William went to his desk and immediately wrote a letter to Watkinson, authorizing him to make Lino a good mourning outfit and to charge it to his account.

  Lino requested black trousers, a vest, and a costly black frock coat from Watkinson, and on Thursday, June 16, he went into town with Lucretia to pick up the clothes. After he got them, he put them on, then he and Lucretia separated. She went to attend to some personal chores, and he went into a pharmacy on Chestnut and Sixth, across the way from Watkinson’s.

  It was the handsomest drugstore in the city, the creation of Elias Durand, an émigré from France. Durand had studied his profession in Paris and served Napoleon as a pharmacist in the Grand Armée, and he still bought all his medications and chemicals from France, which led the world in the manufacture of drugs. His taste for things French was also evident in his shop’s sophisticated decor, its array of polished mahogany cabinets, marble-topped counters, and etched-glass windows and doors.

  Lino had a friend at at the fancy shop, a clerk named Alfred Guillou. He’d met Guillou a few weeks earlier when he’d stopped in the pharmacy to ask for street directions. The young clerk, who knew some Spanish, had considerately supplied the directions in that language, and since that time Lino had paid him several other visits. He’d chatted with Guillou about his origins and told him he was the son of the governor of California, but he hadn’t given him either his true name or his adopted name of Espos y Mina. Instead he’d said he was called Estanislao de Cuesta, just like Mexico’s consul to Philadelphia.

  Today he dawdled among the shiny cabinets and finally mentioned to Guillou that he was planning to stuff and mount some birds. Arsenic was a principal ingredient in taxidermy. Lino followed his statement by asking if the shop had any of the popular arsenical soap he wanted to use.

  “We haven’t,” Guillou said. “But we might prepare it.”

  That wouldn’t be necessary, Lino demurred. “If you have plain arsenic powder, that would answer.”

  Guillou wasn’t sure whether he ought to sell Lino arsenic itself. He said he’d ask the boss, and called over Durand.

  Durand was a clever man, the inventor of an apparatus for carbonating water who would soon open the first soda bottling company in America. More, he was scientifically astute, so knowledgeable about drugs that Philadelphia’s top physicians were in the habit of asking his advice before they prescribed medicine to their patients. But he was a poor judge of intent. After peering down his long Gallic nose at his clerk’s impeccably dressed friend, he averted his gaze, turned his heavy-lidded eyes toward his shelves, and took down one of his French porcelain jars. Then he scooped some powdery salt onto his brass scale and sold Lino two ounces of arsenic.

  The following night William was seized with stomach cramps and nausea. He wasn’t worried about it. Assuming that something he’d eaten had been a little spoiled, he reviewed what he’d had. Roast veal, hot boiled pork, and green peas at the midday meal. Cold pork in the evening, topped with smearcase, the creamy cottage cheese that he relished. No one who’d dined with him had a stomachache, not Lucretia or Lino or any of the children or boarding students. But none of them had eaten any of the pork, his favorite, even though he’d urged it on them, told them how very tasty it was. It must be the pork that was making him feel so bad.

  A little brandy would calm his stomach, he decided, and asked Lucretia to fetch him the bottle. But even though he drank a hearty swallow, his stomach continued to feel queasy, so he asked her to get him the peppermint. Alas, she couldn’t find it, which was unfortunate, because without the mint, he stayed up most of the night vomiting, and the next morning, Saturday, he still felt sick.

  That was when Lucretia suggested they send for Dr. Phillips. William didn’t want Phillips. He didn’t want any doctor. “The doctor will only give me medicine,” he grumbled. “I have drops for stomachache in the house. I’ll take those.”

  Lucretia gave him the drops, but he continued to throw up. He threw up all day, and all night, too, and on Sunday morning Lucretia insisted on getting Dr. Phillips. She didn’t consult William, just sent Lino over to Bristol, and next thing William knew, Phillips was there examining him. “You’ve had a mild attack of cholera morbus,” he said when he was done, and advised eating lightly for the next few days.

  Doctors! “A beefsteak would do me more good than anything else,” he’d groused at Phillips.

  After Phillips left, Lucretia went into the kitchen. She’d hired new help to replace Ellen, who’d finally quit. She’d hired Juliann, a local woman, as cook, and Ann B
antom, a black woman from Philadelphia, as part-time housecleaner and laundress. But it was Sunday, and neither Juliann nor Ann was in that day. She herself would have to cook William a meal, a light meal as Dr. Phillips had recommended. She decided on rice gruel, boiling the grains until they were soft and letting little Lucretia, who liked helping out in the kitchen, pound them in the mortar until they formed a smooth, gluey porridge.

  The next morning Ann came to work but Lucretia still had no cook—Juliann had sent word she was sick. There was nothing for it but to do the cooking herself again. What to make for William? Going across the road to the poultry farm of her neighbors, the Boutchers, she bought a chicken, then hurried home and set about making the chicken soup Dr. Phillips had recommended.

  She made a bland concoction, simmering the bird merely in salted water. But by the time the chicken was cooked through, its flavor had transformed the liquid into a rich broth. She added some seasoning, poured her soup into a pretty blue bowl, placed the fowl on a separate plate, carried both dishes to the parlor, and asked Mary to take the meal upstairs to her father.

  Little Lucretia was keeping William company when Mary arrived with the food. The two girls got him up, sat him in the rocking chair, and made his bed. Then Mary took advantage of her position as elder sister and assigned Lucretia to help their father eat.

  Lucretia didn’t mind. Her father was feeling a bit better, the little girl noticed. He wasn’t vomiting anymore.

  Still, he ate slowly at first. He started with the gizzard—he was partial to gizzard. But he said this one was tough, so he gave the rest to her, and soaking a cracker in the soup the way her little brother John used to do when he was a baby, gummed the broth-drenched biscuit. The sucking made his appetite return and soon he was ignoring the soup and tackling the chicken again. He seemed very hungry—he ate all of the breast and part of the back.

  When he was done with his meal little Lucretia hefted the heavy blue bowl and the plate of leftover chicken, carried her burden gingerly down the stairs, and set it on the kitchen table. Then she skipped back upstairs to her father.

  He didn’t seem so well now, she thought when she scuttled into his room, not so well as he’d been before he’d eaten. He was vomiting again.

  Downstairs, a few hours later, the cleaning woman was having a hard time. The children, all five of them, had been running in and out of the kitchen all day, and Ann had hardly had a minute to straighten up. Now it was nearly teatime. She’d best get started, Ann realized, and picking up the bowl of soup and plate of chicken bones that had been sitting out on the table since midday, tossed them into the yard.

  After tea, when she’d done all her work, Ann thought maybe she’d take the liberty of looking in on poor Dr. Chapman. She wasn’t supposed to go up to the bedrooms, just stay below stairs or out in the yard. But under the circumstances, she hoped, surely she’d be forgiven if she broke the rules and offered her sympathies to the invalid. So tiptoeing upstairs, she peeked into the sickroom and asked the doctor how he was feeling.

  “Not so well as in the morning,” he lamented. “I have a misery at my stomach. It feels very much like fire.”

  Edwin Fanning, the book salesman, was still staying at the Chapmans’, and that evening he came home from his rounds with the volumes of The Family Encyclopedia William had agreed to order. Fanning wanted to show the books to William, but Lucretia said her husband was too sick. With a candle, she lighted the salesman’s way to the sickroom, and as soon as they entered he saw what she meant. William was vomiting profusely into a basin.

  “Tarry with me through the night,” William said when he lifted up his head.

  Fanning said he would.

  He had terrible pains, William moaned, pains that were not just in his stomach, but in his head and chest, too.

  Fanning pulled the rocker close to William’s bed and sat down, and Lucretia left him to look after William for a while. Seeing her go made William bitter. “When Don Lino is sick,” he railed, “all attention must be paid to him. But now that I am sick, I am deserted. I am left.”

  Lucretia stayed away almost a whole hour. While she was gone, Fanning did his best to comfort William, and when she returned he talked worriedly to her about her husband’s condition. She seemed to think his trouble had been caused by some bad beef she’d inadvertently served—didn’t Fanning recall, she asked, that beef dinner they’d had a while back? The meat had been stale, spoiled. The rest of them had hardly touched it, but William had consumed a great deal.

  Fanning didn’t think it was the beef that was making William so sick. That beef dinner had been more than two weeks ago! Besides, he’d seen William after he ate the beef dinner, and William had been fine.

  Maybe she ought to get Dr. Phillips again, he suggested. He’d be willing to go to Bristol to fetch him, even at that late hour.

  Lucretia said it wasn’t necessary. “Then give him some salt and water to stop his vomiting,” Fanning urged. “I’ve heard it recommended.”

  Lucretia went out, returned with a teacup, and began spoonfeeding something to William—the salt and water that he’d suggested, Fanning assumed.

  Despite this, William went on vomiting. Or at least trying to, for he wasn’t really bringing anything up, just heaving, gagging, convulsing. He was in agony. He was in so much agony that he seemed to prefer death to the continuation of his ordeal. “I cannot,” he groaned, “live so.”

  Fanning sat with him until eleven o’clock, and he would have stayed up longer, except that he had an appointment early the next morning to show textbooks to the principal of a boys’ academy, and he needed his rest. So he decided he’d best go to bed.

  He climbed up to the attic, and there he ran into Lino. The Mexican was chatty, expansive. He offered Fanning his bed, the feather bed, a far more restful affair than the bed in Fanning’s room.

  Still, Fanning declined the offer. He hadn’t forgotten the things William had said about the boarder. That he thought he was an impostor. A rogue. Fanning didn’t want to sleep in such a man’s bed, however comfortable it might be.

  The next afternoon Benjamin Boutcher noticed that his ducks, which had gotten into the unfortunate habit of wandering off his property into the Chapmans’ yard, were at last starting to waddle home. They were parading single file, one behind the other. Boutcher watched them as they traversed a patch of lawn between the Chapmans’ house and shed. The Chapmans’ boarder, Lino, was watching them, too. He was standing, Boutcher observed, underneath a buttonwood tree, right close to the flock. Then, just as the ducks reached the road, one of the ducks fell over dead.

  The poultry farmer shook his head in annoyance. He’d only recently begun keeping ducks, and they were proving more difficult to raise than chickens. Their constitutions were delicate—they got sick if it rained too hard. They were stupid, too. If you were building a shed and happened to leave a bucket of lime water around, they’d find it and drink it, and if you threw any pickled food into the garbage, they’d scratch it up and swallow it and the salt would stick in their craws. Swiveling, Boutcher continued to study the nuisancy birds as they headed across the road. They were walking oddly, he saw, tottering like toys. Seconds later the first few ducks made it back onto his own property, entering it through a hole in the fence near the drainage ditch. But as soon as they were in the yard, another bird collapsed and fell over.

  Boutcher was disgusted. He called one of his sons to come outside and look after the birds and slammed into his workshed. But in a few minutes he heard his son shout that another duck was dead.

  A laconic man, in as few words as possible Boutcher told the boy to get rid of the dead ducks. “Bury them,” he ordered. But later he found himself talking obsessively to his wife about what had happened. Because he’d had some twenty ducks, and they’d all died. All except four fat ones that hadn’t been able to get to the Chapmans’ yard because they hadn’t been able to squeeze through the fence.

  Ellenor figured that what was w
rong with the birds was that they’d eaten some of the kitchen waste in the drainage ditch. She’d been cleaning fish that morning, and she’d flushed the guts into the ditch. “Fish water can kill ducks,” she reminded him. But Boutcher didn’t think his wife was right about the salty fish water. “They’ve been poisoned,” he insisted.

  In the Chapman house that Tuesday afternoon the family grew more alarmed about William’s condition, and toward evening Lucretia asked Lino to fetch Dr. Allen Knight. He was a younger man than Dr. Phillips, and she didn’t know him quite as well, but Knight lived only a quarter of a mile away. He could be at the house quickly.

  Dr. Knight arrived at about seven o’clock. William spoke to him huskily, told him he had a burning sensation in his stomach and that he’d been vomiting and having diarrhea. Knight began to examine him. The patient’s mouth was terribly dry, he noted. His legs were frigid. He had no fever.

  Cholera morbus, Dr. Knight decided. The disease was usually accompanied by fever. But he’d seen some cases of it where the temperature stayed normal, the way William’s was. Prescribing calomel, and extricating from his bag a supply of the tasteless compound, he mixed the calomel with a little water and portioned it into several small convenient doses.

  Dr. Knight returned several times on Wednesday. William was much sicker. His mouth was even dryer than it had been the day before. His mind was wandering with delirium. His pulse was barely perceptible. Knight told Lucretia to make mustard plasters for his hands and feet, which felt even colder than they had yesterday, and he sent word to the local drugstore to deliver some tincture of opium.

  Dr. Phillips also came by that day, and this time he remained in the house, sometimes resting, sometimes attending to the increasingly debilitated William.