Southern Son

by Victoria Wilcox

  Though he’d started out the fall session with confidence in his abilities and hopes of good marks, he was finding the schoolwork to be more difficult than he’d expected and most of the students better prepared for the material than he was. Two of his classmates were doctors, planning to add dentistry to their medical practices. Three were dentists already, hoping to expand their knowledge in the field. Six were the sons of dentists who’d already spent years working in their fathers’ practices and studying their fathers’ textbooks. But none was better prepared than a soft-spoken young man who stunned the class by interrupting one of the professors on the first day of the session.

  “Excuse me, Sir,” Jameson Fuches said, raising his hand. “I believe you mean the mesial, rather than the distal. Or if you do mean the distal, perhaps you are discussing the adjacent tooth.”

  The fact that the error was certainly just a slip of the tongue and no cause for embarrassing correction in front of the class, made the student’s comment seem like a criticism, and the lecturer answered with sharpness.

  “And I suppose you are an expert in dental terminology, Mr. Fuches?”

  “No Sir,” the student replied, “but my preceptor is: Dr. Homer Judd of St. Louis, Missouri. He is a student of classical languages and fluent in Greek. It was he who invented the dental nomenclature now in use.”

  “Yes, Mr. Fuches, I am aware of the work of Dr. Homer Judd. But the question which begs answering is why, with Dr. Judd as your preceptor, you would make the journey all the way here to Philadelphia? I understand that he is dean of his own dental school in St. Louis, the Missouri Dental College.”

  “Yes, Sir, he is. I attended that school for one session, but Dr. Judd sent me here to learn the most modern techniques and bring them back to share with the other students. Dr. Judd believes that the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery is the finest school in this country, Sir.” And though the young man had rudely interrupted the lecture, there was surprisingly little arrogance in his manner.

  “Well, indeed,” the lecturer replied, seeming somewhat mollified. “Now, may I get on with my own lecture, or would you like to take over as professor for the day, and finish up for me?”

  A ripple of laughter went around the room, and Jameson Fuches blushed bright red right up to his fringe of pale blonde hair.

  “No Sir,” he said politely, “you’ll do adequately.” And that made the class laugh out loud, and even the lecturer seemed amused.

  After that, everyone at the school called him “Professor Fuches,” though Jameson was never so bold as to correct a lecture speaker again. But he took pages of notes and the rumor was that he was planning to write his own textbook on dentistry someday and dedicate it to his preceptor, Dr. Homer Judd.

  The other rumor about Jameson Fuches was that he was a German, though he had no foreign accent, but his surname was certainly of Germanic origin and that made him suspect. For in a city where immigrants filled most of the working class, it was unusual to find a German attending professional school. Germans ran the restaurants and hotels and boarding houses that professional men frequented, but they didn’t often rise to the professions themselves. They even had their own section of the city, Germantown, and their own German-language newspapers. But when one of the other students questioned Jameson about his family background, he only blushed red again, and said that he’d been born in New York City where his father had settled after sailing from France. Still, his scholarly aloofness and his uncertain heritage left him out of the circle of prominent young men at the dental school.

  John Henry wasn’t sure what to think of Jameson Fuches, though they sat only one chair apart in the alphabetical seating assigned by the dental school. He was German looking, that was true, with his pale skin and paler blonde hair—tow-headed, they would have called him back home, though the Georgia sun would certainly have turned his fair complexion ruddy red. But other than his unusual looks, there was little about him to draw attention. He was quiet, studious, and impeccably polite, and though he rarely initiated a conversation, when John Henry asked him some dental question or other, his answers were always clear and concise. So if the studies got too hard, Professor Fuches might just be a good substitute as a tutor—if John Henry ever got that desperate. For he was well aware of the social structure in Philadelphia that found its way even down to the dental school: Northerners before Southerners, Americans before foreigners. John Henry was one of only six Southern students at the dental school that session, so his standing among his classmates was shaky enough without associating himself with the likes of Jameson Fuches.

  Besides, keeping himself in favor with the right people had its rewards. One of those Yankee students, a New Yorker named William DeMorat, had an uncle in Philadelphia who owned a photography studio, and the uncle, as a kindness to his nephew’s friends at the dental school, had offered to make portraits of each student. John Henry’s had turned out well, he thought, the sepia-toned print showing a fashionable young man wearing a vested wool suit with velvet lapels, his sandy hair slicked down and darkened with macassar oil, his blue eyes looking clearly into the future. Only the thin new mustache above his resolute mouth showed that the subject was still young, not yet twenty-years old, in a school filled with mature men—though none of them were more determined to succeed than John Henry.

  The photograph had turned out so well, in fact, that he thought he might give it to Mattie as a Christmas gift—and hoped she wouldn’t mind too much that it came from the camera of a Yankee. He owed her a photograph in exchange for the one that she’d sent to him. It had come carefully wrapped, a small leather-framed daguerreotype of a young woman with a delicate heart-shaped face and luminous dark eyes, her hair swept up in tendrils, silver earbobs dangling close to her slender neck. And staring at the photograph, John Henry could almost hear her gentle laughter, welcoming him home.

  She wrote often that autumn, her letters coming by the twice-daily Philadelphia home postal delivery service established by Benjamin Franklin. Home mail delivery was another of the luxuries of living in Philadelphia, since back home in Georgia the mail came only twice a week and had to be picked up at the post office. The only problem with old Ben’s innovation, as far as John Henry was concerned, was that with the mail coming twice daily, he had two chances a day to be disappointed if an expected letter did not arrive.

  But he wasn’t often disappointed, for Mattie was a good correspondent and rarely a week went by when he didn’t receive a long letter from her, filled with news from home. She told him how the family was doing, how her younger sisters were turning into young ladies and how little Jim Bob was growing taller every day. She told him about her students at the Jonesboro High School, and how proud she was of their progress. She even told him about the weather, and how the fall leaves were turning to yellow and gold and making a patchwork of color on the country roads.

  The one thing she didn’t tell him though, and the one thing he wanted most to read, was that she loved him. But Mattie was a proper young lady, he reminded himself, and too well-bred to trust her passions to paper and ink. Besides, with all that family around, how would she find the privacy to say such things, anyhow? So he consoled himself that her constancy in writing reflected her feelings clear enough, without the tender words he longed to read. And as long as those letters kept coming, one a week and sometimes more, he had no reason to doubt her feelings for him.

  There was nothing tender about the letters from his father. Henry’s words were as spare as his affections, written on thin paper sheets crisply folded around John Henry’s monthly allowance money. The Valdosta City elections were coming up, and the contest was still a close one. The cotton crop in Lowndes County was looking better, though not as good as it had looked before the War. The buggy business was steady, and he was thinking of starting up a nursery farm on the property at Cat Creek. But mostly, his father’s letters were reminders of John Henry’s duty to do well in Philadelphia, with so much invested in his schooli
ng. Rachel, he said, sent her love.

  John Henry was proud to reply that he was, indeed, doing well. After the first difficult September session of medical lectures and exams, the class was moving into the clinical work in which John Henry excelled, and he was beginning to feel more at home in Philadelphia, riding the street cars for a seven-cent fare, and finding his way around without getting lost too often. He didn’t add that he’d even taken himself up to Fair-mount Park on the Schuylkill River to see a sculling race, in case Henry should consider that diversion a waste of good study time and chastise him for it. For though his father was a thousand miles away, buried in the small-town life of south Georgia, his good opinion was still something John Henry hungered for.

  The good wishes from Rachel he simply ignored.

  The first snowfall came at the end of November with a short fifteen minutes of flurries followed by a brilliant blue sky and a stiff northeast wind. By midnight the temperature was below freezing, and the next morning the ponds around the city were covered with thin ice. But while most of Philadelphia seemed unimpressed by the change of weather, John Henry was jubilant. He had never seen a real snowfall before, only the occasional ice storm when a winter rain turned to freezing sleet, and the sight of the snow falling, like so many bits of fine white paper drifting down from the clouds, dazzled him. So when William DeMorat and some of the other students suggested that they celebrate both the first snow and the last class of the fall session with a visit to the Arch Street Opera House, John Henry readily agreed. Although the theater was right across the street from the dental school, he’d never taken the time to see the varieties acts there.

  “Well it’s high time!” DeMorat said incredulously. “Aren’t you interested in culture?”

  “You can’t exactly call the Opera House culture. Looks like mostly minstrel shows and varieties acts, judgin’ from the playbill. I doubt they’ve ever played Verdi.”

  “Who wants to hear Verdi?” DeMorat said with a bored yawn. “Give me Andy McKee, or Lew Simmons playing the banjo. Or better yet, show me an actress in skin tights, dancing a fandango—now that’s what I call entertainment! It’s about time we taught you some debauchery. You’re far too pristine for Philadelphia.”

  Though DeMorat had a risqué way of talking, John Henry suspected he wasn’t too far from pristine himself, as he spent most of his time in the dental clinic when he wasn’t studying and never showed up late or drunken. It was just his New York sophistication talking—an easy worldliness that John Henry admired.

  “So what time does the show start?” John Henry asked. “I’d hate to miss any of my first night of debauchery.”

  “Who said anything about nighttime?” DeMorat chided him. “We’ll start with the matinees, and go on from there. For in addition to being a patron of the Opera House, I am also a valued client at several of the finer taverns in town. And you, my young protégé, will soon become one too.”

  The interior of the Arch Street Opera House was as grandly ornate as its façade, with a velvet-curtained stage and a crystal chandelier hanging from a stamped tin ceiling. Around the stage, seventeen rows of wooden benches were set in a horseshoe bend, while two balconies balanced on eight pairs of Corinthian columns. And though there were no private boxes for wealthy patrons, the admission price still seemed steep: two-bits for the balcony and seventy-five cents each for a seat at the front of the orchestra, but well worth it to get a good look at the dancers—though they’d have been hard to miss, even from the back of the balcony.

  The dancers seemed to be wearing little more than their underpinnings, their arms and legs bared and their bosoms impolitely exposed. But John Henry’s astonishment didn’t mean that he didn’t enjoy the show, and he had to work hard to find a balance between polite applause and the cat-calls some of the men in the audience were making. The girls didn’t seem to mind the attention though, twirling flirtatiously close to the gas footlights at the edge of the stage and giving the men in the front row an even better look at those bared bosoms. And seventy-five cents, John Henry quickly decided, had never been better spent.

  But the thing that John Henry most remembered about that evening was the thrill of ordering his first drink across a saloon bar. For much as he had done his share of youthful drinking, he had never actually walked into a drinking establishment and ordered a glass from a barkeep before. His liquor drinking had been pretty much limited to borrowing some of his father’s whiskey from beneath the sideboard or sharing a stolen bottle in the back room of Griffin’s General Store with the other boys in town. So it was with a feeling of both adventure and accomplishment that he joined DeMorat and the others in standing up to the polished wood bar at the Broad Street Saloon, put one foot on the brass foot-rail like a practiced sporting man, and asked for a shot of Bourbon—and never had liquor tasted better.

  After the shots of whiskey, the dental students stopped at the Dublin House Hotel and Restaurant for a light supper and a glass each of French champagne wine. Then they moved on to the Volks Halle Hotel, to play ten-pins and shuffleboard and ease their thirst with some foamy lager beer. The Thistle House came after that, where they drank dark Dublin Porter and heavy English ale, and some of the other students said good-night and left the rest to their entertainments. By the time they reached the St. Bernard Sample Room and got back to the Bourbon, it was just DeMorat and himself, and John Henry was feeling peculiar.

  He’d never been drunken before, only a little tipsy from time to time. But he was well beyond tipsy now, with his head pleasantly spinning and his thoughts all loose. He was witty, he was dashing, he was having trouble keeping his balance as they walked along the brick streets of Philadelphia. And even that was amusing, laughing at the passersby who turned away in prudish disdain as the two young men stumbled from one saloon to the next. But what did a chastising glance from strangers matter, anyhow? They knew themselves to be true gentlemen and bon vivants. DeMorat said so himself, looking serious over a glass at a Front Street groggery by the river.

  “Did you notice that fandango dancer looking down off the stage at me? The one with the dark-siren eyes?”

  John Henry took a sip, wiped his mustache clean, and tried to focus on DeMorat’s face.

  “I wasn’t payin’ too much attention to their eyes,” he said earnestly.

  “Well, she was looking at me, all right,” DeMorat said. “The last girl on the left in the chorus line. The one with the shapely thighs.”

  “Why, Mr. DeMorat!” John Henry said in pretended surprise at his companion’s coarse language. “You know ladies don’t have thighs, they have limbs. Which we, as gentlemen, are not supposed to notice. Like their bosoms,” he said properly, then hiccoughed.

  “Breasts,” DeMorat corrected, lingering on the word. “Which we do, of course, notice. Why else would they pad themselves with ruffles and such to add to their natural, wondrous dimensions?”

  “They pad themselves?” John Henry asked in amazement. “How do you know?”

  “I know,” DeMorat said with a self-important air. “Really, it is amazing how innocent you still are. Well,” he said with a sudden determination, putting down his glass and standing shakily, “we must remedy that.”

  “What are you talkin’ about?”

  “We must introduce you to some women and let you study human anatomy for yourself—thighs and breasts and every other delightful aspect of femininity. I did promise you a night of debauchery, didn’t I?”

  John Henry couldn’t argue the point, and he couldn’t say that he wasn’t tempted. But he was also beginning to feel a little queasy, the pleasantly euphoric spinning of his head beginning to turn into downright dizziness.

  “I believe I’ll have to decline . . . your gracious . . . offer,” he said, his words suddenly sliding together. “Perhaps someother night . . .”

  “You are beginning to look peaked, Holliday,” DeMorat said with a laugh. “And we still have so much yet to do: billiards, bagatelle, several hands of poker . .
.”

  He didn’t wait around to hear the rest of DeMorat’s catalogue of gambling games, as the dizziness turned to nausea and he pushed himself to his feet and ran from the tavern, retching into the brick gutter.

  He had only vague recollections of what happened after that: DeMorat hailing a horse-drawn cab and helping him up the stairs to his boarding house room; gaslight flickering on the ceiling as he lay across the bed, his head spinning; waves of nausea that made him run to the wash basin, heaving until his whole insides ached. And sleep at last.

  He had thought that the nausea would be the worst of it. He was wrong. The worst came next morning, when he awoke with the first hangover of his life. The giddiness of the night before was gone, and in its place was a piercing pain that made the daylight streaming into his window seem like fireworks going off in his head. And when DeMorat knocked on the door to see how he was faring, the noise sounded like a canon salute.

  “You look like hell, Holliday!” DeMorat said cheerfully, clearly not suffering any himself from the night’s intemperance. “Have you seen yourself in the mirror?”

  He hadn’t even thought to look at himself, since opening his eyes at all was a torture. But when DeMorat held a silvered shaving mirror to his face, he had to agree that he did, indeed, look hellish. His face was still peaked with a purplish cast about his mouth, his nose was red and running, his eyelids were swollen over teary bloodshot eyes.

  “And you smell even worse than you look,” DeMorat commented. “Morning-after vomit, I suppose. Though I take some of the responsibility myself for not watching better how much you were drinking, being a novice at this still.”

  DeMorat’s half-hearted apologies didn’t help John Henry’s mood any, only serving to remind him of his complete failure at debauchery. The sporting life, it seemed, was not meant for him.

  “Nonsense,” DeMorat countered, “everyone starts out that way. You’ll get over the liquor sickness soon enough. You just need to toughen yourself up a bit, keep drinking regular until it doesn’t bother you so much. Why, I had an uncle who could down a quart of hard liquor a day like drinking water, and never have it show. Just takes practice, that’s all. And as for the rest of it, well, there’s plenty of time yet. We’ve still got all of Christmas vacation ahead of us, after all.”