by Paul Butler
One night in the fall, weeks after they put up the “for sale” sign and began packing in anticipation of a quick departure once the deal is made, someone knocks hard at the rear of their house. Florence dries her hands quickly on a tea towel and opens the door. A farm labourer she knows by sight—a young man with startling blue eyes and broad shoulders—holds his pregnant wife high in his arms. The sky is clear, so she knows right away the wetness of her hair is due to perspiration, fever, or pain. She calls to her husband while the man carries the patient through to the living room and lays her silently and without effort on the couch. He has somehow managed to slip off his shoes while still holding his load. As he now steps back from his wife, lips tight with worry, he snatches his hat from his head and clasps it to his chest. Florence is struck by his simple good manners and humility, even when extremes of emotion must be whipping up a storm inside him.
Her husband arrives from his study, trailing, to her relief, no fumes of spirit. As he bends toward the woman, checking her pulse, then moving up to her eyes, the man begins flapping his hat in apology. “I had to bring her here, Doctor,” he says. “Dr. Abbott wouldn’t take her. I had to leave work before the end of the harvest and I got no pay.”
Unable to catch the doctor’s attention, he looks to Florence with a kind of terrified appeal. The doctor is on his knees now and feeling around the woman’s belly. Instinctively Florence moves forward for instructions.
“It’s breeched and she’s in labour,” he mumbles. Then he glances up at the man.
“Carry her upstairs.”
***
It isn’t an especially difficult birth, as it turns out. A little massage and patience, and the baby comes, head first, fists tight and waving, little blue vein disappearing under a swath of black hair.
When Florence skips downstairs to report on mother and child, the young man stares at her from within the tight confines of an armchair. A faint, moist-eyed smile forms, and then, with no warning at all, his head drops into his hands and his broad shoulders begin to wrench up and down like a bull stuck between gateposts. As his sobs become louder, Florence retreats back upstairs. Despite the fact that she has been married for several years now, a physical expression of grief by a man still terrifies Florence. Her father never cried in front of her. Even her brothers became too proud and stoical to shed tears by the time they returned from their first terms at school. The sight of man unprotected was deeply shocking because man, himself, is supposed to protect others.
***
Later that same day, at the farm worker’s own insistence, mother, child, and father leave the doctor’s house. By Florence’s insistence, she sees them home. Their house is a tiny, bare-board shack. A bundle of soiled linen, a few cupfuls of flour, and mothers’ milk will be the sole support for this new baby and her family until payment in kind or in cash can be arranged from his employer, who also owns this meagre habitation.
Two small children, hair bleached and skin freckled by the sun, scamper in from nowhere as mother settles on the floor to nurse her baby. Brother and sister stare with wonder as their mother eases her nipple into the baby’s open mouth. The boy’s cheekbones protrude, making his face seem too old for his three or four-year-old body. His sister’s tongue wets her cracked lips.
As Florence turns to leave, the man stops her, his fingertips touching her wrist. “Please,” he says.
His big hands hold several shrivelled potatoes, white shoots poking through the gaps in his fingers. He eases them carefully into the bag that hangs over Florence’s arm. She knows enough not to refuse him.
***
Back home, Florence and her husband sit in silence for hours gazing at the fire. The landowner who employs all the farmhands is the one who dispatches Dr. Abbott or his nephew to the sick. The fees are either taken from their wages or paid by the patients directly. But there are always some who are out of grace and itinerant workers who have no credit with any employer.
As the windows blacken slowly and the night breezes stir outside, destiny chooses Florence and her husband. No words are spoken, but when they rise to go to bed, Florence absent-mindedly takes a towel from one of the packed boxes. The doctor pulls out an old pair of shoes from the same box and polishes them. When she wakes the next morning and looks out of the window, Florence sees her husband has already taken down the “for sale” sign. She goes into the kitchen and peels the potatoes their patient’s husband gave them.
They are needed here. This is half the requirement for a satisfying life. The other half, how to prosper or survive, will have to sort itself out in time. A few shrivelled potatoes yield a passable mash, and this will do for now.
***
One day far in the future, Florence will try to explain to a young reporter how fate had decided for them. And as it turned out, they survived well enough through the years and always with a sense of purpose. Compared to those of his profession, the doctor’s income remained very modest, but they had reconciled themselves to a vocation that was tailor-made to their environment. Prudent management when money came in and the ability to adapt when it did not saw material realities slowly improve. When middle age came to them, quite suddenly, it seemed, with stiffening joints and slackened skin, they still felt they were the centre of their own universe; sufficient harmony existed between them to ensure some of the warmth of that blessed and glowing state had remained. They had no reason to question the course their lives had taken.
— Chapter Thirteen —
January 1908: New York City
***
Florence catches sight of the man’s face as soon as she and her husband are through the hotel’s revolving doors. Wounded is the word that comes to her mind. Shades of her husband’s personality lie within that face, though she scarcely cares to admit this even to herself. With his straggly half-beard, dark skin, moist eyes, and dishevelled hair, he seems less human than beast. In his face there is pain and anger. It must be the contrast, she thinks. The city of grand hotels, washed stone, liveried porters, tuxedoes, doormen, and honking motor cars has rendered emotion obsolete along with unshaven faces.
Three blue-suited doormen create a triangle around the offending creature but hesitate before closing in. A swift intelligence passes between them. One, the elder, approaches; the others stay where they are, several yards off. The senior doorman speaks to him; Florence can’t catch the words, but she thinks she hears the answer from the dark-skinned man. “Grenfell,” he says.
The doorman lifts up a warning finger. “Stay away,” he says. “You hear?” He turns and leaves the man, companions following at his heels.
Florence pulls her husband along. The doctor’s reactions have become rather slow of late and she doesn’t want to create a belated audience to the poor man’s humiliation. Neither does she want her husband to dwell on the man’s answer in the unlikely circumstance he might have heard it. This is a rare holiday for them, and Florence feels her husband needs to breathe new air, have the jolt of fresh experience. Ancient ghosts would be most unwelcome.
The habitual bustle and steady murmur of guests seems louder and more frenetic than usual as Florence and the doctor make their way to the elevators. Clumps of men and women move in eddies from the left corridor into the lobby’s main expanse. Others overtake Florence and the doctor as they scurry past. Beneath the lofty ceiling—cathedral-like in its vastness—fur coats bristle. Close by Florence, the glassy black eyes of a stole catch the light from the overhead chandelier, giving the impression of sudden, primal excitement, a simulated thunderstorm about to break in an artificial forest. Frequent exclamations and laughs spill from these groups, and Florence becomes aware of a figure in evening dress in the centre of the largest gathering. Though his back is turned, something about the shoulders, broad yet compact, and a vaguely familiar stance lock her gaze as she moves towards the elevators.
A porter pu
lls open the elevator cage and an instinct, as subtle as the twitch upon a spider’s thread, keeps Florence’s eyes from leaving the man in evening dress. She has heard his name already, or thought so. It could be him.
They step into the elevator, her husband for once slightly ahead, and the elevator boy inside pulls the cage across. Now the stranger, as though aware of the same spider thread instinct, turns, and for a second his eyes meet Florence’s and flicker with recognition. Willy Grenfell, puffy-faced as before, but greying and lined like a child’s toy bear, aged into the very picture of benign authenticity. There was no warning of an event when they checked in, but this is a huge hotel with two lecture halls, and many scheduled lectures and presentations. There is no doubt now the crowd in the lobby has come here to listen to Grenfell.
The outer door closes and the elevator rattles into motion. Of course, thinks Florence. She’s painfully aware of her husband’s distaste for men who hold court, who move in finely woven suits through the conference rooms of great hotels, accepting congratulations and the backslapping of peers and admirers. Now this distaste—which always seemed rather vague and laced with possible envy—comes full circle; her husband was at least self-aware and consistent enough to recognize such a character in embryo. This is why he had so heartily disliked the young Grenfell.
She pulls her husband’s arm closer and gives it a squeeze. He reciprocates distractedly. She knows he didn’t see Grenfell, had already sensed the tightening of his self-protective shell and a dropping of his gaze almost as soon as they came into the lobby. This is his standard withdrawal when he encounters large groups, especially when there is the hiss of silk cravat and the shimmer of fur.
It is only when they arrive at their own floor, when the cage rattles open and the smiling elevator boy pockets the coin the doctor gives him, that Florence wonders at Grenfell’s expression, which seemed to comprise a wave of unhappy memory and a kind of shifty-eyed embarrassment—but very little surprise.
As they reach the door to their suite, the doctor fumbles for his key and Florence shivers. Pulling the squirrel collar closer around her neck, she gazes down the broad, silent corridor with its lush chandeliers and sparkling electric lights moulded ironically into the shapes of candles. The steady flames seem as sharp as knives and the stillness seems unnatural and threatening. As her husband gets the door open on the second attempt, Florence resists an urge to push him in or out of the way. He steps aside at last, and Florence enters with one more glance down the corridor. Irrational as it seems, she fears that Grenfell may have followed. She comforts herself not with the simple, obvious fact that he would have no reason to do so, but rather with the observation that he was too surrounded to break away. It’s as though she has been plunged back a quarter of a century, believing that these two men may at any moment begin to follow each other afresh, that a new scuffle will break out, leaving one with a bruise mark upon his swollen wrist and another with scratches upon the neck. It’s an odd, tingly feeling that the past should be so close to them.
Her husband shuffles over the threshold after her and closes the door, a faint smile on his pink face. He helps her off with her fur, his hands trembling only slightly. At the feel of his warm fingertips on her shoulders, she has a wish to tell him that she loves him, that she appreciates the great efforts he has made so far this holiday abstaining from the warmth he found only in alcohol. The wish hangs in a smile that he acknowledges only vaguely. Neither of them has ever quite learned the lexicon of intimacy.
The ache remains. She knows her husband well enough to expect that seeing Grenfell will be a great challenge for him, one that will shake the delicate balancing act that has kept him from the bottle during the last two days. Should he come face to face with his ancient rival, the delicate fibres of his soul will be exposed to every failing the world sees in him.
The doctor takes off his own coat, gives a mock shiver, and rubs his hands together in a gesture that used to announce the pouring of a stiff drink but which is now usually accompanied by a sad, ironic smile. He hangs her coat and his upon the rack.
“Why don’t you ring down and order yourself a drink?” Florence says.
Her husband looks at her, his puffy eyes almost apologetic. It’s a kind of defeat. She can see this from the lowering of his head, but his body is instantly more relaxed, like that of a patient suddenly released from a gnawing pain.
No decision forewarned Florence of her suggestion, just a great heaving sadness for him. Here he is on holiday, pretending to look at the sights: the rising iron girders which form partial skeletons of skyscrapers yet to be completed; vast blocks assembled beneath; the Metropolitan Museum with its artifacts of ancient Egypt and its European masters. But he is a mere shell, a walking burden, empty of joy, struggling, always struggling. He deserves some kind of relief.
— Chapter Fourteen —
She hadn’t intended to go to the lecture, but the crowd seemed to carry her. In the end it was easier to go along than to resist.
Her husband had been fidgety and nervous, waiting for room service to arrive. Experience told her it would be easier for him if she was to take a walk, but once in the corridor she didn’t know where to go. The elevator boy stood at the end of the passage, caged door open behind him. She was walking in this direction and saw no reason not to step in.
“Main floor, madam?”
She nodded. Where else could she go unless she were to wander the corridors aimlessly like a hotel ghost? The cage swung closed, and with an oozing sensation, she felt herself fall. Already danger bumped in her chest. Grenfell was at large. His admirers were about and in numbers. He could easily get into the same elevator, breathe the same air.
Throughout the last two and a half decades, his figure had both shrunk in her mind to a pinprick yet expanded to a colossus. She had fancied herself in love all those years ago in London, and, more importantly by far, she had genuinely admired him. If there was a breach of faith, a betrayal of trust, it was over this point rather than the first. Lovers have parted since the world began. They have met and laughed later in life. But this was altogether different, far more momentous than the raging of a young emotion which seems so real at the time but can suddenly turn into vapour and disappear like a dream. This was about who Grenfell was: a shining image—upright, brave, and honest—flipped like a coin, revealing another side—grubby, mean-spirited, and calculating. He had been a fine actor playing a hero on the stage. But his eye was on the audience, and she had merely been the first to be taken in.
Each time some account of his exploits reached her eyes in newsprint or periodical—his descriptions of hunger and exploitation in the northern fishery, his hospital ships, his clinics along the Labrador coast and in St. Anthony, his fishermen’s co-operatives—it had been like reading about a mythical character. Like some ancient deity of the classical world, vast moral issues, trouble, and conflict followed wherever he went. She knew he was not real yet was awed by the strength of the myth behind him. Meeting his eye earlier carried some of that sanity-threatening trepidation she associates with seeing the spirit of one departed. It was simply impossible that they could be in the same room together. They had grown into two incompatible worlds, and something quite dreadful would happen if they collided.
The elevator lurched and then stopped. The boy rattled the cage open, then stood to attention, white-gloved hands by his sides as Florence stepped out. Confronting the crowds swirling in the foyer, she felt cold and alone. But when she stepped forward, she felt at one with the travelling herd.
***
She finds herself now in the back row of a rather handsomely appointed lecture theatre. Her chair is firm but comfortable with a rounded back. The carpet beneath her feet is soft and warm. Darkness and several dozen seats ahead protect her from being seen by the animated figure on the bright, plain platform. He stands behind a long desk, water jug and glasses, his arms mov
ing with the current of his story, hands almost juggling the words.
A woman, likely his intended, sits with an intelligent, placid expression. The couple’s seats are bookended by two men, one in late middle age, president of some sponsoring institution, the name of which Florence can’t for the moment recall. His reddish face twitches with self-conscious admiration as Grenfell speaks. The other man is young, his hair greased and parted, conveying somehow a clerk-like status.
“When did it all start for me?” Grenfell asks, bowing at the hip as though fishing in the rows of the auditorium for an answer. The theatre is full, and there is an electric murmur at the question. “When and where did I decide to devote myself to the service of good so far from my own home?” There is a silent pause. “I was merely a young man like so many others, a humble intern learning his skills in London’s East End. What was it that broadened my outlook?”
For a moment Florence lives through their brief time together—the days at the clinic working closely with Willy, the sharp smell of liniment, the comforting certainty of bandage and scissors, the feeling of comradeship between them, the unified purpose. The time before the coin flipped. A wave of pity washes through her for the poor, unsuspecting audience.
It’s curious, she thinks, how easily she could have recognized the man on the stage despite all the intervening years. She almost forgets the way he looked at twenty, so thoroughly has this new Willy Grenfell superimposed himself onto her memory. It’s the whiff of mendacity, not his physical appearance, which seems new. They had had no contact with each other after the incident with the note; Dr. Bleaker had farmed Willy off to another clinic, so she has never until now watched him with the knowledge of so much calculation going on beneath the surface.