The Good Doctor

by Paul Butler

  “I followed you from your lodging tonight. Only two tavern stops. What commendable restraint!”

  “I’ve got to go,” the young doctor mumbles and tries to turn away, but Grenfell grips both his arms at the shoulders and pulls him close, pats him briefly on the back as he does so, to give the impression to onlookers this is a warm and hearty embrace. The young doctor catches the approving smile of a lady passing with a tambourine. “If you followed me,” he says quietly, “then you’re the spy now. You’re no better than me.”

  “I haven’t forged a letter in your name and I don’t spy,” Grenfell replies, teeth gritting under his smile. “I watch. I’m charged with the protection of a young woman who feels very threatened by your antics. In any case,” he says, releasing one hand for as long as it takes to pat the young doctor’s shoulder a tad too hard. “I want to find out what a character like you really gets up to. I never would have dreamed in a million years I would find you in a place like this. I saw you weeping, too. Your eyes are still red.”

  The young doctor has a sudden urge to spit at Grenfell. He sees clearly what he always expected was there: the kind of boy who listens with conspicuous attention to his masters at school, who is rewarded with the title of prefect, and house captain, but all in order to gather the reins of authority to himself, to side with those in charge. In the jungle of the school quad and dorm, this creature—Grenfell and his ilk—was the young doctor’s natural enemy. His only recourse was the sucker punch under cover of the rugby scrum, the secret dead leg to his persecutor. But such revenge was fleeting and ineffectual. The subversive joy it carried hardly lasted beyond the moment, and merely strengthened the hand wielding the cane. More than ever the young doctor feels a desperate need to keep Grenfell from Nurse Mills. There is dirtiness beneath his assumed superiority, a lack of courage and even a lack of honesty in his “uprightness”; it’s all too easy, too smug, and too danger-averse.

  The crowd has filtered away and only stragglers pass them now. “I suggest you take your hands off me now,” the young doctor says, ducking his head, digging his shoes into the turf, getting ready to spring.

  “In a second,” Grenfell replies with another false hug. “There’s one main difference between you and me. You came here to weep and fall on your knees. I came with a clear head. The preacher gives you what he wants to give. I take from him what I want to take. I take. You get taken.”

  He removes one hand from the young doctor’s arm at last and slips a paper from his jacket pocket. The young doctor’s freed hand reaches for it in panic, but Grenfell dodges it with a short laugh. The forged letter; how easily it could be used in evidence! He assumed until this moment that Nurse Mills was still in possession of it. She is altogether too troubled to simply hand it over to Dr. Bleaker. Not so Grenfell.

  A gust of wind circles the tent’s entrance, flapping the paper in Grenfell’s hand. The young doctor makes another grab, and this time his fingertips touch the paper, but again Grenfell keeps it clear, but only with an effort. Grenfell abandons his shoulder clasp and now grips the young doctor’s collar in one fist, still holding the paper high in the air in the other.

  Wrapping his right leg around Grenfell’s left, heel sinking into the turf, the young doctor pulls at Grenfell’s jacket sleeve. He bends his rival’s elbow, bringing the paper closer.

  “Get off me!” Grenfell shouts.

  Another moment finds them falling. Grenfell lands first. He gasps like a sack thrown from a cart. The young doctor falls on top of him. A growl of violence breaks from the knot of limbs and joints. There’s a moment of squirming confusion. Knees and knuckles dig into Grenfell’s chest. The young doctor tries to pull from the fist which twists at his collar. Grenfell’s fingernails scratch at his neck. Head scorching with trapped blood, the young doctor clambers over Grenfell’s ribs to the hand with the paper. He pushes his knee hard onto the centre of Grenfell’s exposed wrist. The hand goes suddenly limp and opens. The young doctor snatches the paper, stands, and takes a quick step back.

  Grenfell spits with pain and, sitting quickly, grips his wrist. Aware now of forms about them, three or four bewildered organizers from Moody’s camp, the young doctor holds back from the kick he wants to deliver. He turns quickly and leaves—the paper hot in his hands.

  ***

  He listens for the tread of footsteps behind him, watches for the elongated V of a warning shadow cutting the gaslight, but there is nothing. Relief subsides as he turns a chilly corner close to the London wall, and a new curiosity bubbles. The paper still crumpled in his fingers seems softer, and of thicker bond, than the letter he folded into the envelope this morning. Even during the panic outside the tent, he was vaguely surprised by the bluish hue of the note Grenfell brandished. The paper he used last night had an anemic cream finish.

  He slows his pace, afraid to look down, feeling a sickly new wave of worry. If this isn’t his forged letter after all, it must be something else. And if it is something else, Grenfell has the forged letter still.

  — Chapter Six —

  The jagged V in the young doctor’s pane hisses with the dawn breeze. He knows he should try to get a few hours’ sleep, but Grenfell’s fussy, too-neat handwriting has him skipping over words as a caged mouse scampers over the rungs of an exercise wheel.

  September 23, 1883

  Memoranda — Moody’s Method — Aspects to Reuse

  A moment of spiritual revelation — the more commonplace and modern the setting, e.g. Moody’s shoe store, the better. . . . Most importantly everything must be different from that moment onwards.

  Establish I was once a skeptic, especially when it comes to religion, its rituals etc—an effective way of diffusing cynicism.

  Falling under the influence of a “Great Man” if only for a short time. Advantages: absolves one from suspicion of boasting, the greatness of the moment belongs to another. One can accept one’s own part in the story with modesty and awe.

  Humble beginnings, e.g. Moody’s story about preaching in an abandoned railroad car, then a deserted saloon. Note: I can already use the East End.

  Being among and seeking the company of those who are low in status, being like Jesus without actually saying so.

  Travelling vast distances. Advantages: mystique, exotic stories, no verification possible or necessary.

  Preach not in your own country. A prophet is never etc, etc.

  Make sure the organization I establish bears my own name. Note: might take some time.

  Exaggerate hardships, both my own and those I work among—be “among the lepers.”

  Tell the same stories so many times I start to believe them.

  Find a devoted and compliant wife like the poor creature sitting so patiently next to Moody (not English—English women far too assertive e.g. Nurse Mills)

  He smoothes over the page once more with his palms. This has to be important, incriminating as it would be in the eyes of Nurse Mills. Yet it doesn’t solve the problem of his own forged note. Unemployment and ruin are still a mere step away.

  The V in the window sighs again. The glass has become milky with dawn.

  Nurse Mills.

  “Please,” she said, her features tight, tears coming close. “Please let me alone, at least for now.” She was thawing. He could hear the crack of ice and the slosh of meltwater.

  His mind races again, the exercise wheel rattling. Would he be up at the top or down at the bottom? The object of his love may not be as completely unattainable as she was, but how does a sacked intern support even himself, let alone a wife? He sees a possible future, Nurse Mills and he covering in a condemned hovel, under garbage tip blankets, a roof open to sky and racing clouds, the sound of breaking glass just footsteps away.

  He closes his eyes to the scampering inside his brain, willing himself into the skin of a respectable intern with nothing to hide
.

  — Chapter Seven —

  1940: Springfield, Massachusetts

  ***

  Beyond the doctor’s shoulder, through the window, a thin elderly woman wrestles with a gardening stick. She tries to poke one end into the earth close to the stem of a rose bush.

  Catching the direction of Judy’s gaze, the doctor smiles. Unable to turn his head far enough, he raises himself from his chair, turns a half-circle, and stares out of the window. The stick drops to the ground. The bush shivers. Red petals fall and dance along the lawn. The woman starts again, picks up the stick once more, and prods it into the earth.

  “Your housekeeper?” Judy asks.

  The doctor doesn’t answer straightaway, and some dim instinct tingles around Judy’s shoulders; the question, she thinks, might be more pertinent than it seems.

  “My wife,” he says.

  A question burns on her lips. She doesn’t know how to phrase it.

  He turns to her and nods. “We’ve talked about her already.”

  “No,” she whispers.

  “Yes.”

  “Nurse Mills?”

  “These days we are not so formal. I call her Florence.”

  Judy feels herself blush and coughs down her incredulity.

  He smiles at her again. “But you knew I wasn’t alone in Portland,” he says. “You knew I had a partner.”

  “We knew the imposter had a woman accomplice, that’s all. A secretary. Grenfell mentioned to a friend that he thought the fake doctor might be you. That was all we had to go on.”

  “Fake doctor?” His eyes show surprise, but his face is sad.

  “Fake Grenfell, sorry.”

  He shrugs. “You didn’t know for sure when you came here?”

  “No.”

  He turns back to the frail figure and the quivering bush. “You’re surprised she fell for me.”

  “Your own account made it all seem so unlikely.”

  “Miracles are unlikely.” Petals go scattering with a fresh gust of wind. “You have, no doubt, noticed, Miss Agar, that at twenty years of age I had very little idea of women, how to read their moods, how to gauge their likes and dislikes.”

  “Yet you seemed so confident in some ways. I thought you merely ignored their likes and dislikes and soldiered on regardless.”

  “I was unmothered and unsistered,” he says, still gazing through the glass. “You know, literature is a terrible thing.” He turns now, the odd playfulness returning. “You should be careful with your words, Miss Agar. They can do real damage. I searched for mother, sister, and future wife in the books and plays that I read at school. Do you know how many stories and poems teach a young man to feel encouragement where they should feel defeat? Love, I noticed, never revealed itself until the very last chapter and often disguised itself as distaste, hatred, contempt, anything but its true self until those final pages. So it was with me and Nurse Mills. I had jumped from the cliff and dared the air to catch me. I had been led to believe in the nobility of such rashness. I gambled everything on her.”

  They both stare through the glass at the old woman. She tethers her rose bush at last.

  “She knows what we’re talking about?”

  “Of course.”

  The stalk and twigs tremble with each revolution of twine. As she ties a knot, her face a study in concentration, the old lady no longer seems frail in the least.

  “It’s her story now,” he murmurs.

  ***

  Judy raises the dainty, rose petal china cup to her lips. Even with its straight-backed chairs, oak table, and the dresser’s immaculate display of porcelain, the kitchen is somehow more comfortable than the doctor’s sitting room, his sumptuous chairs and spidery plants. This is a place of industry, and Judy can feel its wholesome energy in the gleaming taps and polished wood.

  Judy turns back the pages of the woman before her. Beneath the grey hair, thin lips, and bony shoulders, there once lurked a rather pale, delicately featured red-haired woman, a “pre-Raphaelite beauty,” she might have been called then, with an earnest, morally centred personality to match.

  “The doctor told me about the note he forged, the one in which he claimed to be Grenfell.”

  “Yes.” There is a studied lack of emotion in her tone as she raises the pot and fills her own cup.

  “You went to meet . . . Grenfell outside Dr. Johnson’s house, but he met you instead.”

  Her gaze flicks up to Judy’s as she lays down the pot.

  “My future husband, yes.” A warning note, perhaps.

  “He said something to you . . . said several things. . . . Do you remember?”

  Judy aches to pick up the notepad and pencil next to her cup, but a politeness she has never before felt in an interview prevents her. She first needs to establish trust.

  “Yes,” Florence replies. She picks up her cup slowly, takes a sip, and keeps it raised, warming her lips with the steam.

  Judy lays her hand upon her notepad.

  Florence fans one hand toward the pad in a “go ahead” gesture and takes another sip.

  Judy picks up the pad, opens it, and points her pencil toward the paper.

  “’Mercy,’ he said. I remember that.”

  “He asked you for mercy?”

  “As you must already know.”

  “And that was enough?”

  Florence lays down her cup. “Enough?”

  “To influence you?”

  “He told me I would never find a man more in need than him.”

  “So?” Judy scribbles hard.

  “So,” Florence replies as though this were a conclusion.

  “There must be more,” Judy says. “He says you seemed distressed by all this.”

  “Of course, he’d made a direct challenge to my vocation. I was duty-bound to at least give it some thought.”

  “I see.” Judy gives a short cough, covering her mouth. “But it can’t be enough to change a person’s mind, can it?”

  “I believed in helping humanity, Miss Agar. Do you understand belief? It doesn’t change direction to oblige our every desire. It runs straight like an arrow. Our wishes must change to accommodate belief, not the other way around.”

  Judy’s face burns. Sitting before a woman who would sacrifice everything for one man’s need, she feels as soiled as an old dishrag.

  “But you were being courted by a man who would go on to build hospitals, taking medical knowledge into the darkness of poverty and want. And you ended up with a man—”

  “My husband,” Florence interrupts. This time the warning is clearer.

  “What about Grenfell?” Judy asks.

  “Dr. Grenfell is of no consequence.”

  The tense change is subtle enough, but the reporter notices it. Every event, save for Grenfell’s irrelevance, has been in the past. She feels like pointing out that the subject of an imposture could hardly be of “no consequence,” least of all to the party who has perpetrated the fraud.

  She tries to lock eyes with the old woman but finds her gaze slipping to her notepad. She doesn’t fight it; she needs to get back to the narrative, anyway. “I know Grenfell and your husband had a fight very late outside Moody’s tent. This was later the same evening after he met you at Dr. Johnson’s house and asked for mercy. Grenfell must have known he had been followed. He also knew about the forged note.” She feels her face burn. It sounded like an accusation. “So you must have confided in Grenfell.”

  “Yes,” Florence says calmly.

  Judy is aware that during the short exchange the energy between them has altered radically. The pristine kitchen, the gently ticking wall clock, the china cups, the displays of shining crockery, the polished taps, and gleaming brass drawer handles, all these things seemed to amoun
t to a cozy and reliable domesticity when Judy first sat down opposite the old lady. Now she sees the kitchen, with its displays of shining crockery, its polished taps, and gleaming brass drawer handles the way a would-be invader might view a wall of shield and armour.

  “That must have felt awkward,” Judy says, tight-lipped and scribbling.

  “Awkward, yes,” Florence replies.

  “Would you tell me about it?”

  “Of course,” she answers lightly.

  — Chapter Eight —

  1883: London

  ***

  The young doctor’s pleas sting Florence’s ears as she hurries through the street. It was an ambush, primitive and unfair, and she would like to dismiss him with fly-swatting ease. But she has not been brought up to ignore suffering or injustice. In the young doctor’s words she can hear her father’s voice.

  Reverend Mills’s favourite cautionary tale is that of Cain and Abel, and, more specifically, Cain’s refusal to acknowledge that he is responsible for the fate of his brother. The reverend had good reason for his choice of lesson. Florence has sisters and brothers aplenty—four of each. Her mother died young. Under their father’s watchful, guiding eye the sons and daughters quickly learned to be dependable.

  One day Florence will marvel that Bible stories ever held such power, such influence, over her conscience. She will see how times have changed. People will be more capricious, less rooted, not because their forebears were morally superior, but because for her generation there were fewer distractions: no moving pictures to gaze upon, no glamorous lives that were not their own; no radio to draw a multitude of voices into the confines of a family home. In the days of Willy Grenfell and the young doctor, she will think, the lessons of childhood—Bible stories, fairy tales, sermons—were woven indelibly into dreams, nightmares, and day-to-day life simply because there was so little to oppose them.

  When she draws close to her lodgings which are hidden in a grey brick mews, she sees Willy. His heels scrape restlessly on concrete, his head tilts to where he imagines her window might be. Although he has spent some time with her nephew, Malcolm, and her sister, Isabelle, he has never met the two women with whom she lodges. The sight of him; his manful stance, compromised subtly by some instinct he might be trespassing upon propriety; then, as he sees her, his swift turn and embarrassed grin, are all as welcome to Florence as a soft, feather nest would be to a bird injured on its first exploratory flight.