The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  Abigail and Rebecca were lying on their beds. They propped themselves on their elbows. Rebecca’s hair had tufted above her braid on one side where she must have been leaning against her pillow. Caroline looked at her face, trying to see it as Hawkins had in choosing her: for its softness, maybe, or the quietness in the set of the mouth.

  “You’ll be pleased to know, ladies, that I have diagnosed your ailment,” Hawkins said.

  “You have?” said Abigail.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Rebecca said.

  “Just as I suspected—nothing more than a…call it a nervous tension.”

  Abigail’s eyes darted to the arc of teachers in the space between the beds and back to Hawkins. “What do you mean—hmm—call it that?”

  “Miss Smith, please,” Samuel reprimanded, though he had been the one to teach her that the names for things mattered. Caroline wanted to say this to him, but she found she couldn’t speak. Just like that night in the woods when she’d been unable to step out from her hiding place and say anything, when she’d been too afraid to act and Eliza had not.

  But she wasn’t hidden now—she was right here in front of them. Why was she only watching them with polite concern, like a person who didn’t even know them? Why was that all she could do?

  “I mean it is that,” Hawkins said. “And nothing I haven’t seen a hundred times before. You will be unaware, of course, of the many precedents for your symptoms.”

  “You’ve treated people who—hmm—make noises without meaning to?” Abigail said.

  “And the tipping over, just falling? It happened again on my way up the stairs,” said Rebecca. “Meg caught me or I’d have broken my neck.”

  “How can it all be—hmm—from feeling nervous? I don’t feel nervous.”

  “The nervousness is in your body—you might not even be aware of it,” Hawkins said. “I’m sure it all seems extraordinary to you, but not to a physician of my long experience. And the treatment is quite uncomplicated, quite effective.”

  “What treatment?” said Abigail.

  “A simple pelvic manipulation, leading to hysterical paroxysm.”

  Abigail squinted at him. “Hmm,” she said, as if agreeing. Rebecca tilted her head.

  “If you’re waiting for him to be clearer, you have a long wait coming,” Sophia told them.

  “Really, there isn’t any need to trouble yourselves, girls,” Hawkins said. “It won’t hurt.”

  Their eyes grew.

  “Miss Smith, if you could please wait outside.”

  “Can’t I stay?” Abigail asked.

  Run, Caroline wanted to tell her; Abigail didn’t know how close she’d come to being first.

  “Yes, please, I want her to,” Rebecca said quickly.

  Both of you, run.

  But the arc of the teachers would have arrested them. And here Caroline was, part of it. She could feel her polite expression still stuck in place.

  “Miss Smith will have her own treatment shortly,” Hawkins said. “There’s no reason at all for concern.”

  Abigail reached out, took Rebecca’s hand, and pressed it between both of hers, wincing with seriousness. Then she stood up to leave, her face reluctant but her legs young and healthy and adamant about carrying her from the room. Caroline and her father moved apart at the shoulders to let her through, then closed in again. Whatever was in charge of Caroline’s body did this for her.

  Hawkins unfolded the plain white sheet that had been draped over his arm. “All right, Miss Johns, you may lie back on the bed.”

  She did. He wafted the sheet down and over her, the material of it so horribly like skin, like bloodless, untethered skin—as if they were remaking her and this would be her new surface—and Caroline thought of the trilling hearts and the theft she had expected of them, and of her mother’s skin over hers in the post office.

  “Now,” said Hawkins, “you’ll need to remove your drawers and loosen your corset. It won’t be necessary to remove your dress.”

  Rebecca flushed all the way up to her hairline. “What?”

  Samuel flinched slightly. On her other side, David angled his attention away, toward the wall. Sophia caught Caroline’s eyes with hers, and then they both looked back at the girl on the bed. Caroline imagined the visitors’ couch lined up against one wall, Mr. Thoreson on it, watching.

  Allow us to show you the current phase of our project.

  “You can just shift the skirts up, that will be all right,” Hawkins said.

  Rebecca’s lips trembled. “Can I talk to Eliza first?”

  “Not just now, I’m afraid,” Hawkins said. He turned to the teachers. “Quite common for there to be this resistance.”

  Though that was something the books hadn’t mentioned, not the body books, not the mind books, and not Hawkins’s notes. Had he needed to chase the fine society girl around his examination room, pin her to the table?

  “Come now, do it yourself or we’ll do it for you.”

  “I only just remembered something I need to ask her. Please,” Rebecca said.

  “It can wait,” said Hawkins, moving in, but she shrank away to the wall. Again he turned to the teachers, expecting perhaps that one of them would make Rebecca lie still. When none moved, when Samuel and David wouldn’t even look at him, Hawkins sat at the foot of Rebecca’s bed.

  “Miss Johns, you’re making this much more difficult than necessary. You seem like a reasonable sort of young lady to me. I’m sure your father has always been proud of you for being so sensible and reasonable. Hasn’t he? Did you know that I know your father, Miss Johns? He handles one of the accounts for my practice. Very decent man, Stephen Johns.”

  At the sound of her father’s name, Rebecca’s brow wrinkled.

  “I can tell you’re the sort of young lady who can understand the best thing to do. If you lie still as I ask, this will all be over very quickly. You’ll be astonished how much better you’ll feel.”

  “I don’t want to,” Rebecca said.

  “I wouldn’t want to have to write your father a letter and explain how you’d behaved.”

  She sat up straight. “Please, don’t tell him.”

  “I wouldn’t like to, of course.”

  “Please,” Rebecca said, easing off the wall. She lay down on the bed and adjusted the sheet over herself. Beneath it she made some movements. Caroline heard Hawkins breathe in and settle, her father beside her breathe in and settle, David on the other side.

  Hawkins stood up. “Good girl. There you go now,” he said.

  Rebecca was loosening her stays underneath herself and bunching her skirts up around her waist. She lifted her hips to slide down her drawers and the movement dislodged the sheet, showing her body, almost blue in its paleness, blue-purple veins running like strings over the jut of her hip bones, the small mound of her pubis with its dark, downy hairs. Caroline looked away while Hawkins pulled the sheet back down. When she glanced back Rebecca’s eyes were closed, and Caroline hoped the girl hadn’t noticed about the sheet and would never know.

  “All right. Some pressure now,” Hawkins said. He worked one hand up under the covering. He adjusted the fabric with his other hand, then put it on Rebecca’s lower belly and leaned down. The hand beneath the sheet was doing something. The elbow began to work.

  For a few minutes, it seemed that nothing else was going to happen.

  Then, slowly, Rebecca’s face began to take on a distance. She opened her eyes and directed them at the ceiling, and her feet and legs began to shudder.

  “A fit?” Samuel asked.

  “Shh,” Hawkins said.

  The movements were smaller than a fit, though there was that violence to them, and that sense that they weren’t of Rebecca’s own doing, as if she were being puppeted on threads suspended from the ceiling.

 
Paroxysm.

  Rebecca watched and watched the ceiling while her body moved like something separate from her.

  Rebecca stopped twitching. Hawkins withdrew his hand and wiped it on his pocket handkerchief. “Very good, Miss Johns. You’ll feel better soon,” Hawkins said.

  Rebecca made no move to rearrange herself beneath the sheet. “I saw things,” she said. “A big light sky, and the way our garden looked as I went back and forth on my swing when I was small. I don’t understand. What happened?”

  Since that word paroxysm had gripped her, Caroline realized, she had been expecting to recognize this treatment from her own dreams. The movements themselves had looked familiar. But Rebecca’s face, its lostness, did not—had nothing to do with the dreams’ thrill through the core of her, that sense of taking into herself the whole world.

  “You’ll feel better soon,” Hawkins repeated. “You may cover yourself now.”

  When she had, Hawkins took the sheet and folded it and asked her to please go and send Abigail in, and wait outside.

  * * *

  *

  The sheet was folded and unfolded, wafted down on top of each girl. Abigail cried, before, during, and after. Livia jerked theatrically. Meg, before Hawkins could cover her, bared and poked at her rash, great red streaks now all down her legs, but during the treatment she lay as if enervated.

  “How many will we treat today?” Caroline asked Hawkins. Her voice grated in her throat; she had up until now been so silent.

  “We ought to get them all in,” he said.

  But they adjourned to eat something and allow food to be brought up to the girls. Hawkins ate his cut of pork, then pushed back from the table and went into the other room—to write up case notes, he said. Caroline suspected him of wanting to gather himself before approaching Eliza.

  The four teachers looked at one another across the table, whose plane warped in Caroline’s vision. She blinked, blinked.

  Sophia pushed her plate away. “I thought I could eat, but I can’t eat,” she said.

  “This isn’t the time for theatrics,” David said tiredly.

  “No, we’re much too busy, aren’t we?”

  “I must ask you, Sophia,” said Samuel, “to either say clearly what you want to say or stop speaking.”

  “I will say it.” Sophia’s lips trembled but her voice was loud. “These treatments are wrong. They are—they are making these girls feel—feel womanly things. Things only for marriage.”

  “Sophia!” David said.

  “That is quite absurd,” Samuel said. “These girls are receiving a medical treatment. That is all. There is no penetrative instrument.”

  Caroline’s father was wearing his best teaching face, the one that put even Eliza in her seat and that made him the equal of those busts on the shelves in the barn, as immovable and as certain.

  “But—”

  “I have to insist you stop now, Sophia,” David said. “To suggest such a thing of a respected, established physician—”

  Sophia whirled on Caroline. “You must see,” she said.

  Now Sophia’s face too was full of lostness. Caroline planted her humming hands on the bending tabletop and thought, If I say I don’t, who will I be?

  “Yes. I question this treatment,” she said. “I think it might be…pulling something out of them.” That was how it had looked to her, as if something were being yanked forth. “I think we need to pause and consider their age, consider our role.”

  “Their age is only some three years younger than your mother was when she married me,” Samuel said.

  “Hawkins isn’t proposing to marry any of them, is he?”

  Samuel rose. “Unless one of you has become a physician without my knowledge,” he said, “I think we must bear in mind that Hawkins knows rather more than either of you.”

  Yes, from reading all those books, books, books, no girls anywhere in the words, no room for the meat of them.

  “Papa—”

  “No, please, excuse me. I find I am greatly upset, Caroline. I would not have expected this of you.”

  Caroline’s face burned. I wouldn’t want to have to write your father a letter and explain how you’d behaved, Hawkins had said to Rebecca.

  “I will see you when it is time for us to resume,” Samuel said.

  The door closed behind him.

  Sophia stood. “All right. I’m going home.” Her lips trembled.

  “What do you mean? What do you mean, Sophia? You are home,” David told her. “You’re with your husband.”

  “You know what’s in my heart, but I can’t stay here. I’m going back to Mama’s. I can’t watch this.”

  David’s mouth, his chin, worked.

  “Please don’t start it all, not again,” Sophia said, though Caroline didn’t think David would have managed to say anything even if she hadn’t stopped him. “I don’t understand everything, I know that, but I understand enough.”

  This was true, Caroline realized. She looked to David, but his eyes were directed at the tabletop, so that it almost appeared they were closed.

  Sophia moved toward Caroline now and took her hands. Caroline could only barely feel the touch of her fingers. “I don’t think you should watch it either. I think you should go too.”

  “I have to stay. I can’t leave the girls,” Caroline said. This was also true.

  And one last terrible truth: in all her life, Caroline had never left her father.

  “I can’t,” she said, and Sophia nodded and dropped her hands.

  * * *

  *

  “My wife isn’t feeling well,” David told Hawkins as they made their way back up the stairs.

  “Not feeling hysterical, is she?” Hawkins said, chuckling.

  “Oh no,” David said quickly.

  Caroline’s father wouldn’t look at her. He stood as far from her as possible.

  Julia trembled before Hawkins ever touched her. Tabitha kept making sounds, and when the treatment was finished, she vomited on the floor.

  “Not unusual,” Hawkins said. “The inner rearranging this provokes can cause some passing nausea.”

  Mrs. Sanders was sent for and went in to clean up as they were all going out.

  In the next room waited Eliza, sitting up in her bed, her hair gleaming down on her shoulders as if it were sucking the life out of her.

  “Hello,” she said. Her head bobbed to the side, righted itself.

  Caroline sat down on Felicity’s desk chair, unsure her legs would hold her, craving and dreading her father’s eyes—had he ever withheld them before? It seemed spiteful in a way she wouldn’t have believed of him. She wouldn’t have believed so much of this.

  “Ah, my old haunt,” Hawkins said. “This was my room when we lived here, did you know?”

  “I didn’t,” said Eliza.

  “Well, Miss Bell.” Hawkins seated himself on her bed. “In your particular case, before we begin the treatment itself, I’ve been thinking we might benefit from a bit of discussion.”

  “What would you like to talk about?”

  “I suspect—we suspect—that some of the tension from which you in particular are suffering stems from your ideas about your time here. Yours and perhaps also your father’s.”

  “What about my father?” Eliza said. Her voice was still cool but color began to stain her cheeks.

  “You may be glorifying him in your mind, idolizing him. And in turn reading all kinds of significance into his book, with its very specific mood, in terms of your own experience at this school. In ways you yourself aren’t fully conscious of, even.” Hawkins was making himself comfortable, shifting, extending his knees. “All understandable, of course, but not, I suspect, very good for your own health. So I thought Mr. Hood and I could tell you a little about what your father was like.”r />
  “They claim not to remember much.” Eliza nodded toward Caroline and her father as if they were one person.

  “How mysterious.”

  Caroline thought of the last thing Hawkins had told her about Miles Pearson. Beside her, she saw her father’s face tighten too, and there it was, confirmation, had she needed it. How could she not have seen and known all along, from a hundred small moments like this?

  How? By believing, always, her father above herself, even when this belief required averting her attention, suspending her judgment, putting out of her mind what she had seen, deciding she had not, after all, understood anything.

  “Well, I do remember. Would you like to hear?” Hawkins said.

  Would you like it if I gave you what you’ve most wanted your whole life, Miss Bell? What’s eluded you even as you walked where it once was? Even as you’ve tried with everything you have to catch it and draw it close to you?

  “Yes,” Eliza said, the word cracking.

  “Of course, when he was with us, Miles was very young. From across the room he was one thing: so tall, with all that dark hair, an intimidating sort of look. But up close he was different, especially once you began to talk to him. He had all these ideas. Sam, how would you describe Miles’s ideas?”

  As her father looked at Eliza, Caroline watched layers of feelings twist in his face. Here was a soul in pain, a fatherless girl, and he wanted still to help her, steer her, soothe her. But beneath that generosity was a desire too to punish. Because here she was, the poison seed.

  “I would call them naive,” Samuel said.

  “That’s generous,” said Hawkins. “Your father, Miss Bell, had a blindness about the world.”

  “Blindness?” Eliza said. “He can’t have been blind. He wrote a book so many people love—he saw plenty.”

  “The adoration of crowds is not perhaps the most useful proof of any kind of vision,” said Samuel.

  Eliza narrowed her eyes. “You’re only jealous of him. That and you don’t like what he wrote about you.”

  “Of course I don’t,” Samuel said. “It was hateful of him to imagine in such a direction. I’m sure anyone in my position would say the same. As for the other charge, I have been guilty of many sins in my life, but here I think I may safely exculpate myself. Never, not once, have I envied either your father’s writing or his insights about the world.”