by John Brunner
Dorcas was left sitting on an uncomfortable antique bench in a hallway floored with marble, hung with red-and-green velvet drapes, oil paintings in heavy gilt frames on every available wall. A pendulum clock ticked away half an hour.
Suddenly a door was flung open and a very young yellow girl, dressed like Nurse Var, hurried toward the back of the house. While the door stood wide, Dorcas caught a glimpse of the room beyond. On its walls hung medical and scientific engravings: a dissected heart stuck with more arrows than St. Sebastian, an arm showing the muscles separated and named, a head with the phrenological zones in a riot of contrasting colors…
Dorcas shuddered.
The yellow girl returned carrying a device of straps and buckles. The door slammed shut. Another ten minutes passed. It reopened, and Dorcas saw a tall man emerge, ruddy-cheeked, with a bushy black moustache and black hair swept back from a high forehead, wearing a long-skirted black coat and black pants, a white shirt, and a thin black necktie, the sole relief from this chiaroscuro being a gold watch chain.
He was ushering along a lady who had doubtless been very pretty in youth but was now obliged to keep up the color in her cheeks by artificial means. She was muttering querulous complaints. Behind followed a lady’s maid, looking anxious. Dorcas overheard only snippets of what was being said, but she garnered the impression that the woman’s treatment was taking longer than promised, and that the man was Dr. Cherouen in a hurry for his next appointment.
At length he got rid of her, and carriage wheels were heard on the driveway. Turning back, the doctor wiped his forehead in unashamed relief. And caught sight of Dorcas.
A purr entered his voice.
“Who may you be, my dear?” he inquired.
Rising awkwardly, Dorcas tried to explain, but was forestalled by the reappearance of Miss Var with the letter.
“Hmm!” Cherouen said. “The wife of a steamer captain with such a dreadful affliction—a tragedy, a tragedy! I’m sure my methods will afford her much relief!”
But the nurse drew him aside and whispered something. He pondered awhile, frowned, and at last turned back to Dorcas, sounding regretful.
“I’m advised that, owing to pressure of work, I’m unable to take on extra patients. Should her—should her circumstances alter, she’s at liberty to contact me again. For the moment I’m reminded that I’m overdue for a housecall some distance away, and my carriage has been waiting for an hour.”
He hesitated, looking at Dorcas anew, this time with a broad smile.
“I hope to see you again, in any case!”
Nurse Var handed him a silk hat, lightweight coat, and walking-cane; the yellow girl reappeared carrying a black leather bag. Dorcas stood by in frozen horror until the carriage wheels were out of earshot. Then she meekly obeyed the nurse’s order to depart, and found herself back in a world from which she seemed to have been rejected—worse: spewed out.
Buoyed up by her meeting with Fernand, she had briefly been a perfect optimist. Now she wanted to cry for help—and there was no one to listen.
With grim satisfaction Josephine Var closed the front door. The worst part of the day was over. Only during the morning did patients visit the house. In the afternoon Cherouen attended those too unwell to venture abroad. So until his return at about five o’clock she could become what she was: mistress of this mansion. She was entitled to that. After all, she had been the making of its master.
By now half of the people who counted in New Orleans must have heard of Denis Cherouen, and many of the wealthiest had consulted him.
But scarcely any knew the story behind the doctor’s meteoric rise. And, she sincerely hoped, none at all knew the truth behind her own ascent to fame in a slightly—but only slightly—different field.
Graduating from medical school, Cherouen had volunteered as an army surgeon with the Confederate forces. His regiment had been shattered before Atlanta, when his loyalty to the Southern cause had already been eroded by the reality of war. On being captured, he had been invited to give his parole and continue helping the wounded. He had consented, but his cynicism grew ever deeper.
Save in one respect. He talked obsessively of panaceas: marvelous cures still secret in the womb of time that would render obsolete today’s messy improvisations like laxatives and bandages, the scalpel and the cautery. The mysterious forces of electricity and magnetism; new substances as wonderful as chloroform and nitrous oxide, such as in particular ozone which European researchers had found abundant at just those seaside resorts where for generations they had been accustomed to send their convalescent patients—surely there if anywhere must be sought the key to perfect health!
At about the time his assertions began to earn him a reputation as a fanatic, he ran across Josephine Var.
Nominally she was a “free person of color.” That is to say, when she was born her mother was not officially the property of someone else.
Her father was a rich white man, too respectable to admit his responsibility other than by making clandestine gifts, which grew fewer after he married a girl approved by his family, and eventually ceased. Then came the war, and her mother died of a fever reportedly brought by Admiral Farragut’s sailors. Desperate as a result of the monetary crisis following the occupation, she had taken to prostitution rather than let her daughter suffer such a fate. On her deathbed she claimed her fatal sickness was caught from one of her customers.
Orphaned, Josephine obtained work tending wounded soldiers. An officer on Farragut’s staff had been impressed by the work of Florence Nightingale, in the Crimean War, and Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, and aspired to create an American corps of army nurses.
To a degree he succeeded. But to a greater extent he destroyed his own plan. He made available within reach of soldiers, most of whom were away from the control of parents and ministers for the first time, a supply of women who were not camp followers—women to be raped because they would not yield.
They court-martialed the man who stole Josephine’s maidenhead. But that was too late to prevent her winding up in the care of Cherouen, who cleansed her, dressed her injuries, and held her hand while she wept away the worst of her agony.
Therefore she grew interested in this doctor, whom she had known only from a distance, an issuer of orders who was forever in a hurry.
And finding in her a listener, Cherouen talked.
For lack of anything better, he was plying her with heroic doses of the tincture of cannabis used to relieve women of periodic and labor pains. The raw ache in her loins receded; her body became almost unreal, while the words and images floating through her mind took on the aura of transcendental truth. Abruptly she had an insight. Her mother had been tutored by Marie Laveau. She had been raised under the protection of chants, charms, and symbols; she understood the power of faith. That was what could cure. For all his talk of gases and machines, there was small difference between this educated doctor and his counterpart in the black community with his goofer dust and High John de Conquer’ root.
But when she struggled to tell him what she had realized, he soothed her like a nurse calming a feverish child.
Growing angry, she sought another way of convincing him. Shortly she found one, when he spoke of the money he needed to prove his theories. What fortune could a man in his predicament look forward to, reduced by the war to a sawbones and stitcher-up of sword-cuts and, moreover, working for the wrong side? This was toward the end of hostilities, when everybody who had rashly abandoned plans for the future fell prey to sudden doubts and fears.
Recovering, Josephine had been able to nurse the wounded again, and he came to rely on her, even take her advice. Therefore he was prepared to listen when she proposed a means of raising the money for his research. She contrived to make him jealous of old ugly men in stinking huts who received incredible payments in cash or in the form of jewels and other gifts. What was their secret? It was no secret at all.
They were simply believed in by the proper pe
ople.
Who were the proper people to be told about a young doctor with brilliant radical ideas?
The rich, of course. Ideally the very rich and somewhat ill, fidgeting under the notion that their money could not purchase them immunity from bodily afflictions, obscurely convinced that it should be possible for them to cheat death, even if nobody else did.
Now that peace had opened up opportunities in the South for those who had done well out of the war, there was no lack of people newly drunk on affluence. They would be ready to credit that some breakthrough in medical research could stave off the Grim Reaper—for a lucky few.
And, as Josephine persuasively argued, what counted most was for someone other than herself to believe in him, for she was poor, unknown, and—worst of all colored.
Recently, so it was claimed, scientific means had been devised to minimize this last handicap. She had sent to New York for a preparation fashionable there, designed to lighten the complexion—without informing Cherouen, for it contained arsenic, one of the minerals he invariably condemned, although mercury, antimony, and such substances formed the mainstay of the pharmacopoeia. Possibly in this instance he was right; so far Josephine had observed no benefit from her expensive investment.
Accordingly they set about making sure that Cherouen and his ideas were heard of. The social climate was perfect. Two years saw them installed here, in a house built by a now bankrupt slave dealer for his eldest son. Attired in a uniform based on the one evolved by the famous Miss Nightingale, and overseeing a staff of half a dozen girls—colored, because almost all their patients were white women used to undressing in front of slaves as though there were no one else in the room—Josephine Var was the éminence grise…
No: the éminence noire of the whole operation.
All was not without flaw. There was another reason why all the girls working here were colored and very young. Cherouen had preferences. She had seen how his eyes lit up at sight of Dorcas, and that was typical; she was glad that her research among the nouveaux riches of New Orleans had enabled her to warn him that the Parburys were down on their luck. But finding girls at once bright enough to carry out their duties, and docile enough to endure Cherouen’s more personal demands, was growing ever harder.
Yet it had better be done. So far he had only made advances to Josephine twice. The first time had been before the end of the war, and she had rebuffed him easily because he knew how fresh her horrible experience remained in memory. But the second had been quite recently, in a fit of drunken depression that made him so violent she scarcely managed to divert his attention to one of the young nurses, whom afterwards she had to dismiss with a fat bribe.
There must not be a third time. Her sexual favors were reserved for ceremonies where white folks had no part, and if she ever bore a child it must be at the behest of her dark lord. Accordingly she set about conjurations in which her mother had carefully rehearsed her. Today was a most propitious day, the date of the autumn equinox. What human beings devised in the way of machinery and gases was doubtless all very well after its crude fashion. But what had been created by the lord who sometimes answered to the name Damballah was far more ancient, and since people too had been created by him…
It followed logically, and she stood convinced.
Why otherwise should there always be more and more money paid secretly and in darkness, in exchange for luck charms to be worn by people she had never come into closer contact with than receipt of a lock of hair, a nail clipping, or—in the frequent case of a man worried about his virility—semen caught on a scrap of rag?
Sometimes she felt that those who patronized her services regarded her as having occupied commanding heights in enemy territory. What enemy? The churches? White folks’ medicine?
Sometimes she felt guilty of an obscure betrayal, for those who could afford her prices could not be the worst afflicted by fate. But when a story caught her attention, she would slave for days to perfect a single trickenbag. Her best ever had gone to a man who sent a rotten tooth. She had suffered face ache far too often; into that one charm she had sunk a week’s effort, though all he could pay was a pittance.
And sometimes she felt as though people who ought to be her allies were marshaling against her.
When today’s necessary rituals were finished, she decided, she would gut a rooster and try to learn their identity from its entrails.
By four o’clock Hamish Gordon was presiding avuncularly over a game of cards in the Plott’s cabin, calling constantly for wine and whiskey to keep his companions’ glasses full. After a few hands of bezique, they had settled on vingt-et-un. There was little money on the table, and Stella and Louisette won suspiciously often when Gordon was the dealer, but the bank was changing hands with unusual rapidity and considerable tension was being generated.
This being an excursion boat, there was no strict division of the cabin into fore and aft areas, with ladies confined to the latter; even so, the presence of the girls attracted more and more attention as more and more passengers retreated from the deck to escape the sun. Some of the onlookers were hostile, making sour faces and whispering behind their hands, or urging the children away from this device of Satan. Far more, however, grew as involved as any bystanders at the Limousin, and when at last a match for serious stakes developed between Gordon, Arthur, and Hugo Spring—who had rejoined the group with Stella after luncheon—a few young sports were sufficiently caught up in the excitement to begin laying side bets.
Gaston, standing nearby, felt his face growing longer and longer. Maybe he should have given up this idea of an excursion; during an attack of melancholia he was rendered not less but more depressed by the sight of others enjoying themselves.
Nonetheless he had forced himself to come aboard, trusting that the pleasant weather, the views, and the majesty of the river would work their normal magic on him.
On the contrary, he had been cast down by the sight of so much commercial busy-ness at the ocean port, for where was there a fane for the Muses among these temples of Pluto, these forges of Hephaestus?
Wandering into the cabin, thinking he might find genteel company, he had discovered instead that everyone was obsessed with the card party: either fascinated by it, or horrified. Two distinct factions had formed, but all was decorous so far. One of the boat’s officers, glancing in, decided there was no cause for worry and went out again.
Matthew was rocking on his heels a short distance from the card table. The heat and the gentle lulling motion were conspiring to make him doze off. Therefore, glad of distraction, he answered in detail when Gaston requested information concerning the players.
Gaston’s heart leaped. A financier! Maybe a millionaire! Had chance brought him into contact with the person who could rescue him from his plight? Eagerly he asked whether Monsieur Gordon was a patron of the arts—looking, perhaps, for a conductor who could recruit and direct an orchestra? A small one to commence with, bien sûr, a mere chamber group, but conceived with a view to expansion. It would be a most generous gesture for someone in his position, and an enduring memorial into the bargain!
For a few seconds Matthew pondered, anxious neither to disappoint this polite stranger nor to decry his master. Finally he said, “Well, he never talked to me about music. But I guess he may like it, for as we came aboard we heard the calliope, and I saw he tapped his foot in time to it.”
Gaston’s face froze. His hopes dashed, he bowed and turned to stare out the window. It was not just— It was not reasonable—it was not right for this great nation to be so heedless of the culture which was all that tipped the scale between a civilized community and barbarian tribes!
First to lose interest in the cards, about the time the steamer reached the end of her upriver journey, was Stella. With a sigh Hugo escorted her back on deck, even though swarming flies made it pleasanter to be inside. One of the bystanders received license to play in Hugo’s stead.
That came as a grateful respite to Joel. He had borro
wed some money from Louisette, bet cautiously and lost only six dollars, but he could ill afford even so small a sum, whereas Arthur and Gordon were already staking in twenties.
But there were two or three other watchers debating whether to buy in, so his departure would not spoil the game.
Muttering a feigned excuse, he headed for a quiet corner near the stern where he could organize the data he had collected about Gordon into a coherent article. It wouldn’t be easy. The financier remained as mysterious as ever. It was as though he used a screen of verbiage to protect his inner self.
His—?
A crucial insight hovered on the brink of awareness, and was quashed before it could take on words. Louisette had come to join him. She dropped into a chair and gave him a dazzling smile.
“Dear Jewel!” she said. “How much more like your old self you’ve been today! Why have you been avoiding me? Why didn’t you come to my last birthday ball?”
Joel hesitated, then said gruffly, “Was I invited?”
“Of course you—!” She broke off, tensing. “Jewel, Mama said you had declined. But, come to think of it, I never saw your reply.”
“There wasn’t one.” A waiter was approaching; Joel caught his eye and looked at Louisette; she shook her head and he waved the man away.
Meditatively Louisette said, “Joel, what do you think of Mr. Gattry?”
“I can scarcely judge on such a short acquaintance, can I?”
“Of course not.” All the sparkle had suddenly gone out of her. Producing a phial of eau de cologne, she dabbed her wrists and forehead.
“Excuse me, I think I’ve had too much wine… Oh, Joel! I wish I didn’t hate my parents so much!”
“Now that’s pretty strong language! What makes you say that?”
“Because sometimes I think I ought to get married, and then the next day I get frightened about how long a married life can be!”