by Dennis Bock
He sat before his entire life and waited to die as I sat beside him. Perhaps he’d raised his hands in supplication to his murderers, beseeching them, and then the katana, in a swift arc of reply, had cut through the air.
After he died, I crossed his arms over his chest and placed his hands there, curled, still clasped. Then we mounted our animals and started off once more.
*
Ho has joined me now. I do not usually write during daylight hours. There’s never enough time. But today I have completed my rounds and performed three surgeries and managed to eat a bite and still there’s light in the sky. I sat down and was just about to begin when Ho came to my door. Seeing my typewriter he retreated deferentially, but I got up and pulled him inside and asked him to sit. So here he sits, watching and waiting.
Last night I dreamed you came to me here. You were a child. “Go,” I said. “The war will be over soon, and I will come for you.” You looked at me and your smile revealed you were missing two teeth. You knew nothing of the horrors of this world, only its perfect beauty. I took you in my arms and carried you outside to a pasture with a stream and a bright light falling from the blue heavens and majestic oaks thrumming in the breeze. I set you down in the grass and went back inside.
Ho is a patient lad to sit here like this. Why do I invite him in here? Is it that I, too, am alone?
To keep him occupied I handed him a sheaf of pencil drawings I’ve been working on, with no words but the title. The most recent is “Burn Injury of the Left Arm with Surgical Amputation.” He nods enthusiastically.
*
I’ve been thinking lately about matrimony—mine, to be precise. A strange preoccupation in the middle of a war. I have been thinking about you finding happiness with a good and patient man. Does that mark me as sentimental? Well, so be it. Perhaps he’s leaning over your shoulder as you read this. I find that thought comforting. No union in life is as dear as marriage, and though I may have been more susceptible than most to the frailties of the heart, I still believe it. None of us is so different in that regard. We all harbour an abiding belief that even after failure there can be hope for the future. That is our greatest resource, I think, eternal hope. Some basic truths bear repeating, and this is one of them. I can tell you that the mystery of our loves is the deepest mystery we have, the most beautiful and ennobling, too, and the most deserving of our ceaseless energies and wonder. I imagine you will know by the time you read this that a first love is not often successful. I discovered this when I was younger, that one failure might strengthen you for another. The name of the woman who helped me to become that better man your mother fell in love with was Frances Penney. She became my wife, and two times I left her, walking back into my lonely life.
The Great War had ended and I had begun writing and painting again. I had found employment at Number 23 Great Ormond Street, London, working with children. One evening, in the fall of 1920, I met with an Australian friend, Clifford Ellington, at a pub in Soho. We were talking over a number of my poems and having a glass of beer when a group of four young women entered the pub. One was glamorous-looking, very beautiful. Her large eyes darted around the bar, and she produced a cigarette from her purse. She made much of this simple act. It was very much worthy of the pictures, I remember thinking.
Her dark hair was cut short, bobbed, as all the girls were wearing it then. She crossed her legs under her chair, then leaned into the middle of the table and remarked upon something that made her friends laugh. The four of them looked inelegantly in our direction as they did so. “A flock of parakeets mocking the baboons,” Ellington said. The server spoke with the young ladies and returned behind the bar, where we were standing. She busied herself with polishing a glass while the barman prepared their drinks. My left elbow was damp from leaning on the bar where someone had spilt a beer. My heart thumping, I asked the server “Would you please mop this up for me?”
We returned to our discussion, Ellington arguing that I should refrain from sending my poems out. He held the sheaf of poems in his hand, waving them as he spoke. They were, he said, childish and morbid, vain and self-important. Very nearly offended, I suggested he didn’t have an ounce of creative or critical blood in his veins. “Bethune, this is not poetry,” he said, or something along those lines. He was an intelligent man and a very good doctor, and I enjoyed his company immensely. But I found it difficult to take his criticism seriously, though foolishly I’d asked for it. I never really liked his poems, greatly inspired by a fashionable Australian poet of the day who for good reason had yet to be discovered anywhere else in the English-speaking world.
“Norman, you’re a charming drunk and a gifted doctor,” Ellington said, “but I would advise you to hold off with these. They make you seem a bit pathetic, really.”
I was pleased to change the subject. “For the sake of keeping the peace, let’s concentrate on the parakeets over there.”
“I don’t know why you wouldn’t write about that. You know women almost as well as you understand the lower intestine.”
“You are vaguely pathetic yourself, aren’t you.”
“After you,” he said.
“No, after you,” I said, but we didn’t move.
“I suppose we’ll be bachelors the rest of our lives,” Ellington concluded.
Well, those girls took the initiative and soon we were shaking hands all around, drinking and having a grand time. Later, after we’d visited a number of pubs, I stopped dead in my tracks. I had left the sheaf of poems somewhere. Perhaps Ellington was right about them being a bit vain, for I was less a gifted poet than a confessional one. They served as a journal, a diary in verse, so to speak, and without them I was lost. Abruptly I excused myself and left the party. Ellington saluted drunkenly, not the least bit concerned. Why would he be? I retraced our footsteps and in each locale my mood grew darker. I was stricken. I’d neglected to make carbons of the pages, and they were such long poems that I’d committed only a few of them to memory.
I was perhaps even more despondent the next day. On my way home from the hospital I stopped in at the Pig & Clover, where Ellington and I had started the previous evening. The pub was filling up but I was in no mood for socializing. I noticed a pretty young woman reading at the other end of the bar, a half-pint of Guinness before her. I couldn’t help but smile when she glanced up. I saw something romantic about a pretty woman reading alone in a bar. I was not so different from her, I thought, craving solitude and seeking company in a book. This spoke of the sort of quiet desperation I often felt, and which most others chose to conceal.
When she turned the page I saw what she was reading was held in a sheaf. I rose quickly. “Excuse me,” I said, “that belongs to me.”
“You wrote these?”
I closed the booklet.
“I’m sorry. I thought it was a menu. I saw it here,” she said, pointing, “wedged up against the wall. I think they’re quite beautiful.” She glanced at the cover. “H. Norman Bethune?”
“Yes.”
“Frances Penney,” she said, offering her hand. “Will you publish these?”
“One day, I’m hoping.”
“I liked the one about the British Museum. It was very sad, somehow. You won’t mind my asking who Agnes is?”
“I made her up.”
“May I?” she said, reaching for the sheaf. I eased off my hand. She flipped through and found the page. She read the poem aloud.
I have carried it with me in memory all this time.
Nurse Agnes of Cambridge Visits the British Museum with Limping Soldier
He had never considered the souls
buried within the clay and gold,
the distant stone and iron brow
that held their long gaze
found so properly housed
in the greatest museums of the age;
They were just masks, he’d thought
,
pretty things set out for display
on any afternoon of
any given day.
What are they though, she said that
afternoon, but reminders that you shall see
that same look of death looking
back at thee?
In a future exhibit entitled Post
Post Byzantium of the Long Lost Apocalypse
entry 5 shillings
the one expression we least of all deserved
will represent our age
and all its men
forever preserved.
Save your money, sir, and take a walk instead;
any good nurse will tell you more
about Nephthys of Egypt
than the old curators of the dead.
Her soft Scottish voice stayed quietly between us. Frances was, I decided right then, a remarkable beauty. When she finished reading she did not lift her eyes. She stayed like that, leaning slightly forward into the page. She might have been reading through the poem again, looking for some key to slip into a lock I had fashioned without any conscious intention. She might have been stalling, searching for kind things to say. I was ready to pounce on any interpretation she might offer, as I’d been the night before when Ellington had offered his thoughts. At most I’d thank her for recovering my poems, then leave. I waited, growing more uncomfortable by the second. She seemed so entirely lost in the page and unaware of me that I was free, nervous though I was, to let my eyes roam over her. She wore her striking dark hair cut short and parted on the left side, the tips of it curling in to her face just below her ear. Her eyes gleamed as they moved back and forth in the dirty half-light of the pub.
“But did you love her?” she finally asked, looking up at me.
The question came as a surprise. “It’s make-believe,” I said.
“But you can’t invent emotions.”
“Not if they’re genuine, I suppose.”
“Did the young man love her, then?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
*
I saw her again the following week. That is when she first called me her Poet-Doctor. I didn’t mind. In fact I was thrilled. She brought me books of poetry: Donne, Shelley, Byron. While I had read most of them, I happily accepted these gifts inscribed with lovely notes. We nosed about the old bookshops on Charing Cross Road, and naturally I took her to the British Museum. I introduced her to Ellington, as she did me to her girlfriends, Norma, a pretty secretary at one of the larger law firms in the city, and Eunice, a student at Chelsea College. At the time I was a solitary creature, riddled by my own romantic impulses and irked by crowds. In solitude I was safe, but not happy. Frances cured that in me.
As a young doctor I was used to sharing myself with the sick and the dying, perhaps because their solitude and complete dependence on me made it all but impossible that I might be slighted or denied. There is comfort to be taken in the fact that a brash young doctor is never pushed away, for he brings hope in times when it is most precious. Young love is a different matter entirely. At first what I felt for Frances was confusing, often painful and always difficult. As I said, I was solitary by nature, and no single individual could change that. Frances, of course, devoured the company of others. She encouraged me to share my dreams and emotions. I painted portraits of my young love and praised her in my poems. Though cautious, I was an idealist, I can see that now, for those oblique paintings and colourless poems were at least a young man’s attempt to understand and glorify this new world he’d recently entered. But soon enough those efforts revealed my deficiencies. We didn’t talk about the war. We shared our food and friends. With me she shared her money, for she’d been left a fair bit by her wealthy father, and with her I shared my ambition and hunger for the world.
I will admit to being a bit of a dandy in those days. You would probably laugh if you could see how I went about town wearing a wing collar, black tie, gloves and homburg, smoking a Dunhill pipe with an aristocratic French-turned bowl and carrying in my right hand a silver-tipped cane. I must have looked ridiculous, though it was all in keeping with the finer tastes and fashions of the day. I recall with some amusement now that I was asked to attend a number of dinners and parties at the great houses of many famous people, to whom I was introduced as one of London’s most promising medical men. Some of these individuals were recognized as pioneers in their chosen fields—whether fellow physicians, business tycoons or professors—while others were famous only for the company they kept. I was not easily swayed or impressed by these social functions, though they were, as I say, an entertaining and pleasant diversion from the demands of establishing one’s practice. In October 1923 I became the house surgeon at Great Ormond Street and gave myself over completely to my duties at the hospital. I withdrew almost entirely from the exciting if shallow demands of “society.” Of course, Frances and I were in greater demand as a result of my heightened prospects, but I was happily consumed by my work at the hospital and Frances herself had little time for socializing.
We were a pair to behold in those days. We shared our money with the old antique dealers of Portobello, the young painters of Soho and whoever else sparked our appetites, from the bohemians of Marble Arch and Brick Lane to the fine restaurateurs of Covent Garden and Piccadilly. In the hospital at Great Ormond Street I didn’t think much about Frances, but once returned to our parallel world, I shared with her a grand opulence in our decision to marry, and then with the men who drove our horse cabs through Paris and Rome on our honeymoon we continued to share what money we carried, and with the waiters and barmen in Vienna, too. We shared first-class cabins with American tourists and stopped with them in somnolent French villages and at the boisterous Italian seasides. We amused ourselves with these travelling strangers until it was time to resume our own journey, always with names and addresses scribbled into dime-store novels and on train-ticket envelopes. This wealth and freedom provided us with a world of friends that soon, as in all romantic comedies they must, trickled to nothing when shortly after our return, our inheritance and optimism fell flat. Once the old man’s money was used up we waited in London for a change for the better. Surely it would come.
We sojourned on Sunday mornings and drank champagne, trying in vain to recapture that sense of effortless motion, and the following year we made the decision so many were making then. North America was heaped before us like an unclaimed ante, and we would avail ourselves of it.
On the ship over, we took a modest cabin. We were a handsome couple, still finely dressed in cashmere and silk, now relegated to steerage. Much of the crossing we spent reading and playing cards. I might have written a poem or two. In the windowless cafeteria that served our class, we supped on bread and lentils, watched the old men at their dominoes, and waited.
The winter snows were heavy on the ground when we made port at Montreal, From there we journeyed to the small town of Stratford, Ontario, a sad forgery of the inspired original, where my sister had lived since marrying. We did not linger there. After a dreary car ride into Quebec scuppered the idea of settling in that small European outpost, we felt stranded in a wilderness bigger than France itself, and it became clear that the marriage would not last in this Precambrian waste.
We drove southwest and crossed the border into Michigan. We found an apartment at 411 Seldon Street, near the ravenous centre of Detroit. There, where I believed I would earn my fortune, I gained my first true understanding of the underclass—Southern Negroes, Hungarians, Italians, Yugoslavs, Poles, Russians, migrant workers from Mexico, all second-class citizens lured there by the promise of opportunity, as I had been, so few of whom would ever rise out of their impoverished and diseased neighbourhoods. What did I do? Still bewitched by the dream, I opened my practice to the richest of that city, determined to make my name and become rich myself. But it was to the needs of the poor that my heart began to be pulled.
On the
fringes of this wealthy city lived people whose only means of survival was luck, guile, criminality or some combination of the three. Detroit soon seemed to me a Petri dish for the doomed experiment of Capitalism. I remember well the night I spent at the railyard, working to save a Mexican labourer’s baby. The families gathered outside the boxcar in the dark waiting for word about the mother and her newborn. The small fires they’d built along the edge of the tracks glowed and flickered. The men slowly passed a bottle among themselves. I told the husband to close the boxcar door, and then he knelt again beside his wife and began muttering his prayers. I knew this man, who cleaned the office building across from the Seldon Street apartment. The baby was in the breech position. When I delicately attempted to turn the baby around, the mother fainted from the pain. Her husband kept praying. “Dios,” he said again and again. Perhaps he was praying for the American Dream to shine down on his family and rescue their child, or maybe for enough money so his wife could deliver his child in a regular hospital, like the white people whose offices he cleaned. Filled with sleeping bags, utensils, paper bags and backpacks, the boxcar was home to the families waiting outside in the switching yard. He spoke some English, and I told him, “Do not watch this.” I removed a blade from my bag. “Do not watch this.” I cut the woman’s abdomen, down through the skin and fat and muscle and into the membrane of the uterus, then scooped their baby boy out of his mother’s suffocating womb like a blind blue fawn.