by Noah Gordon
“Is your father there still?” Holmes asked.
“No, no. Killed by runaway horses when I was twelve.”
“Ah.” That was the moment when Holmes, despite the relatively small difference in their ages, determined to fill a father’s role in gaining Rob admission to the charmed circle of Boston families through an advantageous marriage.
Soon after that, twice Rob accepted invitations to the Holmes house on Montgomery Street, where he glimpsed a life-style similar to the one that once he had thought possible for himself in Edinburgh. On the first occasion, Amelia, the professor’s vivacious, matchmaking wife, introduced him to Paula Storrow, whose family was old and rich but who was a lumpish and painfully stupid woman. But at the second dinner his partner was Lydia Parkman. She was too slender and lacked any sign of breasts, but beneath her smooth walnut-brown hair her face and eyes radiated a wry and mischievous humor, and they spent the evening engaged in a teasing but farranging conversation. She knew some things about Indians, but they talked mostly about music, for she played the harpsichord.
That night, when Rob came back to the house on Spring Street, he sat on his bed beneath the eaves and contemplated what it might be like to spend his life in Boston, colleague as well as friend to Harry Loomis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, married to a hostess who presided over a witty table.
Presently there was the small knock he had come to know. Meg Holland let herself into his room. She wasn’t too thin, he noted as he smiled a greeting and began to unbutton his shirt. But for once Meggy sat on the edge of the bed without moving.
When she spoke, it was in a hoarse whisper, her tone even more than her words striking deep into his spirit. Her voice had a tight, dead quality, like the sound of dried leaves pushed by a breeze across hard, cold ground.
“Caught,” she said.
6
DREAMS
“Right and proper,” she told him.
He couldn’t find the words to say to her. She’d been experienced when she came to him, he cautioned himself. How did he know the child was his? I always wore the sheath, he protested silently. But in fairness he knew he’d worn nothing the first few times, and again on the night when they’d tried the laughing gas.
He was conditioned by his training never to countenance abortion, and he was sensitive enough now to resist suggesting it, aware that her religion was the strongest part of her.
Finally he told her he would stand by her. He wasn’t Stanley Finch.
She didn’t appear tremendously buoyed by the declaration. He forced himself to take her into his arms and hold her. He wanted to be tender and comforting. It was the worst possible moment to perceive that her feline face within a few years would be decidedly bovine. Not the face of his dreams.
“You’re a Protestant.” It wasn’t a question, for she knew the answer.
“I was so raised.”
She was a plucky woman. Her eyes filled for the first time only when he told her he was uncertain about the existence of God.
“You charmer, you scoundrel! Lydia Parkman was favorably impressed by your company,” Holmes told him next evening at the medical school, and beamed when Rob J. said he thought her an extremely pleasant woman. Holmes mentioned casually that Stephen Parkman, her father, was a Superior Court judge and an overseer of Harvard College. The family had begun as dealers in dried fish, eventually had become flour merchants, and now controlled the widespread and lucrative trade of barreled grocery staples.
“When do you intend to see her again?” Holmes asked.
“Soon, of that you can be certain,” Rob J. said guiltily, unable to allow himself to think of it.
Holmes’s ideas about medical hygiene had revolutionized the practice of medicine for Rob. Holmes told him two stories that buttressed his theories. One concerned scrofula, a tubercular disease of the lymphatic glands and joints; in medieval Europe it was believed that scrofula could be cured by the touch of royal hands. The other tale dealt with the ancient superstitious practice of washing and bandaging soldiers’ wounds and then applying ointment—terrible unguents containing such ingredients as decaying flesh, human blood, and moss from the skull of an executed man—to the weapon that had inflicted the hurt. Both methods were successful and famous, Holmes said, because inadvertently they provided for the patient’s cleanliness. In the first case, the scrofulous patients were washed completely and carefully lest the royal “healers” should be offended when it came time to touch them. In the second case, the weapon was smeared with foul stuff but the wounds of the soldiers, washed and then left alone, had a chance to heal without infection. The magic “secret ingredient” was hygiene.
It was difficult to maintain clinical cleanliness in District Eight. Rob J. took to carrying towels and brown soap in his bag and washed his hands and instruments many times a day, but the conditions of poverty combined to make the district a place in which it was easy to sicken and die.
He tried to fill his life and his mind with the daily medical struggle, but as he dwelt long and hard on his predicament, he wondered if he was bent on his own destruction. He had thrown away career and roots in Scotland by his involvement in politics, and now in America he had compounded his ruination by entangling himself in a disastrous pregnancy. Margaret Holland was facing the situation practically; she asked him questions about his means. Far from filling her with dismay, his annual income of $350 seemed comfortable to her. She asked about his people.
“My father is dead. My mother was failing badly when I left Scotland, and I’m certain that by now … I have one brother, Herbert. He manages the family holding in Kilmarnock, raises sheep. He owns the property.”
She nodded. “I’ve a brother, Timothy, lives in Belfast. He’s a member of Young Ireland, always in trouble.” Her own mother was dead; there were a father and four brothers in Ireland, but a fifth brother, Samuel, lived in the Fort Hill area of Boston. She asked timidly if she shouldn’t tell her brother about Rob and ask Samuel to keep his eyes open for rooms for them, perhaps near his own flat.
“Not yet. Still early days,” he said, and then touched her cheek to reassure her.
The idea of living in the district horrified him. Yet he knew if he remained a doctor to the immigrant poor, only in some such warren could he maintain life for himself, a wife, and a child. Next morning he regarded the district with fear as well as rage, and despair grew in him that matched the hopelessness he saw everywhere in the mean streets and alleyways.
He began to sleep restlessly at night, disturbed by nightmares. Two dreams recurred again and again. On a bad night, he had them both. When he couldn’t sleep, he lay in the dark and went over the events in detail again and again, so that finally he couldn’t tell whether he was asleep or awake.
Early morning. Gray weather, but with an optimistic sun. He stands among several thousand men outside the Carron Iron Works, where large-caliber ships’ guns are made for the English navy. It begins well. A man atop a crate is reading the broadside Rob J. had written anonymously to bring men to the demonstration: “Friends and Countrymen. Roused from the state in which we have been held for so many years, we are compelled, by the extremity of our positions and the contempt heaped upon our petitions, to assert our rights at the hazard of our lives.” The man’s voice is high and cracks at times to reveal his fright. He is cheered when he is done. Three pipers play, the assembled men singing lustily, at first hymns and then more spirited stuff, ending with “Scots Wha’ Hae Wi’ Wallace Bled.” The authorities have seen Rob’s broadside and have made preparations. There are armed policemen, militia, the First Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, and well-trained cavalry soldiers of the Seventh Hussars and the Tenth Hussars, veterans of European wars. The soldiers wear gorgeous uniforms. The high polished boots of the hussars gleam like rich dark mirrors. The troops are younger than the policemen, but their faces contain an identical hard contempt. The trouble starts when Rob’s friend Andrew Gerould of Lanark makes a speech about the destruction of farms
and the inability of laboring men to live on the mite given for work that enriches England and makes Scotland ever poorer. As Andrew’s voice grows in heat, the men start to roar their anger and to shout, “Liberty or death!” The dragoons edge their horses forward, pushing the demonstrators from the fence surrounding the iron works. Someone hurls a rock. It strikes a hussar, who drops from his saddle. Immediately the other horsemen draw swords with a rattle, and a shower of stones fells other soldiers, spattering blood on blue, crimson, and gold uniforms. The militia begins to fire into the crowd. The cavalrymen are hacking. Men scream and weep. Rob is hemmed in. He can’t flee on his own. He can only allow himself to be swept beyond the vengeance of the soldiers, fighting to keep his feet, knowing that if he stumbles he will be trampled by the terror of the running mob.
The second dream is worse.
Amidst a large assemblage again. As many as had been at the iron works, but this time men and women standing before eight gallow trees raised at Stirling Castle, the crowd contained by militia formed up all around the square. A minister, Dr. Edward Bruce of Renfrew, sits and reads silently. Opposite him sits a man in black. Rob J. recognizes him before he takes refuge behind a black mask; he is Bruce Something-or-other, an impoverished medical student who is earning fifteen pounds as executioner. Dr. Bruce leads the people in the 130th Psalm: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.” Each of the condemned is given the customary glass of wine and then led onto the platform, where eight coffins wait. Six prisoners choose not to speak. A man named Hardie looks out over the sea of faces and says in a muffled voice, “I die a martyr to the cause of justice.” Andrew Gerould speaks clearly. He appears weary and older than his twenty-three years. “My friends, I hope none of you has been hurt. After this is done, please go quietly to your homes and read your Bibles.” Caps are placed over their heads. Two of them call farewell as the nooses are fixed. Andrew says nothing more. At a signal it is done, and five die without struggle. Three kick for a time. Andrew’s New Testament falls from his nerveless fingers into the silent crowd. After they are cut down, the executioner chops through each neck with an ax, one by one, and holds up the terrifying object by the hair, saying every time as the law prescribes: “This is the head of a traitor!”
Sometimes when Rob J. escaped from the dream he lay in the narrow bed under the eaves, touching his limbs and trembling with relief that he was alive. Staring up into the darkness, he wondered how many people no longer were living because he had written the broadside. How many destinies had been changed, how many lives were ended because he had projected his beliefs onto so many people? The accepted morality said that principles were worth fighting for, dying for. Yet when everything else was taken into account, was not life the single most precious possession a human being owned? And as a doctor wasn’t he committed to protect and preserve life above all? He swore to himself and to Aesculapius, the father of healing, that he would never again cause a human being to die because of a difference in beliefs, never again even strike another person in anger, and for the thousandth time he marveled at what a hard way it had been for Bruce Something-or-other to have earned fifteen pounds.
7
THE COLOR OF THE PAINTING
“It is not your money that you spend!” Mr. Wilson told him sourly one morning as he handed over a sheaf of appointment slips. “It is money given to the dispensary by leading citizens. The charity’s funds are not to be wasted at the whim of a doctor in our employ.”
“I’ve never wasted the charity’s money. I’ve never treated or prescribed for any patient who wasn’t genuinely ill and badly in need of our help. Your system is bad. It sometimes has me treating somebody with a strained muscle while others die for lack of treatment.”
“You exceed yourself, sir.” Mr. Wilson’s eyes and voice were calm, but his hand holding the slips trembled. “Do you understand that in future you must limit your visits to the names on the slips I assign to you each morning?”
Rob desperately desired to tell Mr. Wilson what he understood, and what Mr. Wilson might best do with his appointment slips. But in view of the complications in his life, he didn’t dare. Instead, he forced himself to nod and to turn away. Stuffing the sheaf of slips into his pocket, he made his way into the district.
That evening, everything changed. Margaret Holland came to his room and sat on the edge of his bed, her place for announcements.
“I’m bleedin.”
He forced himself to think first as a doctor. “Are you hemorrhaging, losing a great deal of blood?”
She shook her head. “At first, a little heavier than usual. Then, like my regular bleedin. Almost done now.”
“When did it begin?”
“Four days past.”
“Four days!” Why had she waited four days to tell him? She didn’t look at him. She sat absolutely still, as if steeling herself against his fury, and he realized she’d spent the four days struggling with herself. “Came close to not telling me at all, didn’t you.”
She didn’t answer, but he understood. Despite his being strange, a handwashing Protestant, he had been an opportunity for her eventually to escape the prison of her poverty. Having been forced to peer into that prison at close range, it was a wonder to him that she’d been able to tell him the truth at all, so that instead of anger at her delay, what he felt was admiration, overwhelming gratitude. He went to her, lifted her to her feet, and kissed her reddened eyes. Then he put his arms about her and held her, patting her gently from time to time, as if comforting a frightened child.
Next morning he wandered, light-headed, at times his knees weak with relief. Men and women smiled at his greeting. It was a new world, with a brighter sun and more benevolent air to breathe.
He took care of his patients with his usual attentiveness, but in between each case his mind was racing. Finally he sat on a wooden stoop on Broad Street and contemplated the past, the present, and his future.
For the second time he had escaped a terrible fate. He felt he had received a warning that his existence must be carefully, more respectfully used.
He thought of his life as a large painting in progress. Whatever happened to him, the finished picture would be of medicine, but he sensed that if he stayed in Boston the painting would be rendered in shades of gray.
Amelia Holmes could arrange what she called “a brilliant match” for him, but having escaped an unloving impoverished marriage, he had no desire to cold-bloodedly seek out an unloving rich one or to allow himself to be sold on Boston society’s marriage market, medical meat at so much per pound.
He wanted his life to be painted with the strongest colors he could find.
When he was through with his work that afternoon, he went to the Athenaeum and reread the books that had so captured his interest. Long before he finished them, he knew where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do.
That night as Rob lay in his bed, there was a familiar small signal at the door. He stared up at the darkness without moving. The scratching knock sounded a second time, and then a third.
For several reasons he wanted to go to the door and open it. But he lay without moving, frozen into a moment as bad as any of those in the nightmares, and eventually Margaret Holland went away.
It took him more than a month to make his preparations and resign from the Boston Dispensary. In lieu of a farewell party, on a brutally cold December evening he, Holmes, and Harry Loomis dissected the body of a Negro slave named Delia. She had labored all her life and the body had remarkable musculature. Harry had demonstrated a genuine interest and talent in anatomy and would replace Rob J. as docent at the medical school. Holmes lectured as they cut, showing them that the fimbriated end of the Fallopian tube was “like the fringe of a poor woman’s shawl.” Every organ and muscle reminded one of them of a story, a poem, an anatomical pun, or a scatological joke. It was serious scientific work, they were meticulous about every detail, yet while they worked they roared with laughter and good feeling. Following t
he dissection they repaired to the Essex Tavern and drank mulled wine until closing. Rob promised to stay in touch with both Holmes and Harry when he arrived at a permanent destination, and to call on both of them with problems if the need should arise. They parted in such fellowship that Rob was regretful about his decision.
In the morning he walked to Washington Street and bought some roasted chestnuts, bringing them back to the house on Spring Street in a twist of paper torn from the Boston Transcript. He stole into Meggy Holland’s room and left them under the pillow of her bed.
Shortly after noon he climbed aboard a railroad car, which presently was pulled out of the train yards by a steam locomotive. The conductor who collected his ticket looked askance at his luggage, for he had declined to put either his viola da gamba or his box into the baggage car. In addition to his surgical instruments and clothing, the trunk now contained Old Horny and half a dozen bars of strong brown soap, the same kind Holmes used. So though he had little cash, he was leaving Boston far wealthier than when he had arrived.
It was four days before Christmas. The train glided past houses in which wreaths decorated doors and Yule trees could be glimpsed through windows along the track. Soon the city was left behind. Despite a lightly falling snow, in less than three hours they made Worcester, the terminus of the Boston Railroad. Passengers had to transfer to the Western Railroad, and in the new train Rob sat next to a portly man who promptly offered him a flask.
“No, thank you kindly,” he said, but accepted conversation to take the sting from the refusal. The man was a drummer of wrought nails—clasp, clinch, double-headed, countersunk, diamond, and rose, in sizes ranging from tiny needle nails to huge boat spikes—and showed Rob his samples, a good way to while away the miles.