Lethal Remedies

by M. Louisa Locke

  “Yes, that was my intention…still is. I guess. But I worry that Kathleen, who works extremely hard during the day, will be short-changed in the hours of sleep she gets.”

  “Aren’t you assuming that she would be as easily awakened as you and have as much difficulty getting back to sleep?”

  Annie sat silently and thought about the last time this discussion had come up with Kathleen. Her maid had said, “If I can share a room with Tilly, I can share a room with the baby. I swear, tiny as that Tilly is, she snores like a man. Besides, I can do something about Abigail’s crying, change her, bring her to you, then go back to sleep. Short of knocking Tilly over the head, there’s nothing I can do.”

  Dare I take Kathleen at her word?

  “And your husband, Mrs. Dawson, what does he say?”

  “He says it is my decision.”

  Annie could hear the resentment in her voice. Nate seemed perfectly capable of sleeping through anything, including his daughter’s cries. He even told Annie that when he did wake up, he found the sight of her nursing Abigail quite comforting, so he didn’t mind being wakened.

  But he didn’t have to get up and change the wet diaper, climb back into bed, trying to keep warm while the baby sucked, then take her and put her back into the small crib at the foot of the bed. Knowing that the whole procedure would start all over again in a few hours.

  On the other hand, those days were pretty much over, now that Abigail was sleeping longer and needing to nurse less often. So why was she holding on to her resentment?

  She knew Nate wouldn’t question her if she decided to move Abigail out of their room.

  “Then what is stopping you?” Dr. Brown said, as if she’d read Annie’s mind.

  Annie shrugged. “I don’t know. I understand I will need to move her, eventually. There certainly won’t be any good reason for her to be with us at night once she’s weaned.”

  “Do you think your milk is drying up?” Dr. Brown asked.

  “Not really, although I don’t seem to feel the discomfort I used to feel when she went more than two to three hours between feedings.”

  “That’s completely natural. Just as it’s natural that she will start to depend more and more on solid food,” Dr. Brown said. “In my experience, the child usually knows what’s best. A good number of babies begin to wean themselves starting at this age, if not before. Others can continue to nurse for up to a year or two. Although it may be that in those cases the mother has shifted from nursing to provide their baby with nutrition to nursing to provide comfort.”

  “Comfort for the baby or the mother?”

  Dr. Brown laughed and said, “I suspect both. However, most women can’t afford the time to nurse that long—they have too many other responsibilities.”

  There’s the rub. Everyone, including Nate, seemed to think she should be glad that she had few pressing duties to take her from her responsibilities as a mother. And she was grateful that she had Mrs. O’Rourke, Kathleen, and Tilly to keep the boardinghouse running smoothly. A real blessing during the first months when all she was able to accomplish was to nurse Abigail and then sleep when the baby slept. Her brain had been too fuzzy to do anything else.

  Since then, she had started to pick back up the daily reading of the stack of local, state, and national newspapers she subscribed to so that she could stay up-to-date with all the economic news. This reading was the bread and butter of her business, which was to give advice to clients on how to invest and manage their incomes. However, more often than not, it would take her all day to go through the papers she used to read in just a few hours. She would either be interrupted by something that needed to be done for Abigail, or she fell asleep, right in the middle of a sentence.

  At least she had begun to meet with a few clients again this fall. However, she couldn’t help but notice that most of those former clients who began to make appointments with her again were women. The men had been slower to return, much slower.

  Although, perhaps the fault was her own.

  Once she had moved away from giving advice as Madam Sibyl, Annie’s normal pattern before she became pregnant had been to meet clients away from the boardinghouse as much as possible, at their homes or places of business. After Abigail’s birth, this would have required her either to leave Abigail behind, which she was loath to do, or bring Abigail with her. The few female clients she had started seeing again were amenable to her bringing Abigail with her. However, too many of her male clients already had seemed embarrassed to admit that they were getting business advice from a woman, much less one who was carrying around a child. As a result, most of her communications with male clients since Abigail’s birth had been through correspondence.

  Yet, in her years meeting clients as Madam Sibyl, the pretend clairvoyant, she had learned that the information she gained about a person in face-to-face meetings was priceless. Was a client scared of risk? Excited to try something new? Did they prefer investments in something tangible like property? Did they need a rapid infusion of capital or could they benefit most from a longer-term strategy?

  It was hard to learn this sort of thing through a business letter, particularly with a new client. In addition, it was practically impossible to do a company audit from afar. This meant that her opportunities with women clients were also limited. A shame, because doing audits for women who ran their own companies or ran charitable boards had been one of the fastest-growing segments of her business before she had Abigail.

  With a start, Annie realized she’d been silent a long time. She looked up and saw a quizzical smile on the doctor’s face, but Dr. Brown didn’t say anything—a tactic Annie had perfected as Madam Sibyl. It was amazing what a person would say in order to fill a silence.

  Gathering her courage, Annie said, “I guess I’m afraid my life won’t ever get back to normal. I’d been so sure that after the baby came I would be able to take up my business where I had left off. Despite what everyone said. But I’m having trouble focusing, so I don’t get much done during the day.”

  “And why do you suppose you’re having trouble focusing?” the doctor responded.

  Annie laughed and said, “I know, I know, the lack of a decent night’s sleep isn’t helping. But I’m not sure Abigail waking me up is the main problem. Once I am awake, I find myself fretting. And it’s not just the financial worry over what it means if my work doesn’t pick up. My husband’s law practice is doing well, but I hate that he is working such long hours, which means he has little time to spend with either me or Abigail.”

  “If it isn’t concern about your finances, what is it?”

  “I don’t know! That’s the problem,” Annie said. “Everyone keeps telling me how happy I must be, how they envy me, what a joy it must be to be a mother. But I’m not happy, and I don’t know why.”

  Dr. Brown looked down at the papers in front of her for a moment before saying, “Do you know much about my personal history?”

  Annie was startled. “I know you’re married, with children. And I know you got your medical degree eight years ago…it was from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, wasn’t it?”

  Annie had noticed the diploma on the waiting room wall the first time she came to see Dr. Brown, as well as the certificates that stated that Dr. Charlotte Blake Brown was a member of both the California and San Francisco medical societies.

  “Both my father and my brother attended the University of California’s medical school—the one that had been Toland College. But I had to go back east because the University of California wouldn’t permit women to attend the medical school until 1874. By that time, I already had my medical degree.”

  Annie nodded. “My sister-in-law Laura has a friend who has just started at the university’s medical school. I believe she is one of only three women currently enrolled. From what Laura has said, I don’t think Miss Sutton is finding her fellow students, or the faculty, very supportive. I imagine that an all-female institution like the one you attende
d might have been different.”

  “Yes, that was certainly an incentive for me to go there. But what you may not know is that in order to get that medical degree, I had to leave my three children behind. All of them were under the age of five at the time, including my youngest, Harriet, who had just been born.”

  “Oh…”

  “It was the hardest thing I have ever done, and most of my friends and family couldn’t understand how I could leave them…why I couldn’t wait at least until they were older.”

  “That must have been difficult,” Annie said, wondering if she could have done the same thing.

  “It helped that I knew they would be in good hands, being raised by my mother. When she was about my age, she and my father went to Chile as missionaries, taking me with them. She understood that becoming a doctor was my calling, just as being a missionary had been hers.”

  “And she supported the idea of you leaving your children behind?”

  “Yes, she did. She told me that while she didn’t regret her years as a missionary, she felt that dragging me to Chile hadn’t been in my best interest. She was also the one who argued that if I needed to pursue my dream to become a doctor that it was better to do so when my children were very young and less likely to question my absence. More importantly, my mother, who is a very wise woman, told me that a temporarily absent parent was less damaging to a child’s well-being than a mother who was present but unhappy. And I was unhappy.”

  Annie watched as the doctor seemed caught in her own—sad—memories.

  Dr. Brown sighed, then she smiled and said, “You see, I had discovered that, while I wanted to work in a profession where I could help keep other people’s children healthy and happy, most of the mundane tasks that went into raising my own young infants bored me to tears. I love my children; I really do! And now that they are older and I can engage with them more, I find I have more patience. But overall…well, perhaps you know what I am talking about.”

  Annie burst into tears.

  Minutes later, after wiping her eyes and taking a long drink from the glass of water Dr. Brown had poured for her, she said, “Do you think there are other women who feel this way?”

  “I assure you there are. Probably far more than would ever admit it.”

  “I just don’t understand why I get so irritated with Abigail when she cries. Even Nate, coming home from a twelve-hour day at the office, has more patience with her.”

  “I suspect that for your husband, after a long day of work, spending time with Abigail is a pleasant break in his routine. In addition, he knows as soon as he gets tired of her or she gets too fussy, he can hand her over to you without a bit of guilt.”

  Annie nodded. This would help explain why she felt so resentful as she lay awake at night, listening to his peaceful breathing, angry at his easy ability to sleep. This, in turn, made her feel even more guilty, even more unworthy as a wife and mother.

  Dr. Brown said, “I’m not suggesting you should run off to the East Coast, and as long as you are nursing—the one thing you can do for her that no one else can—you shouldn’t push yourself too hard. I do think that you could move Abigail into the nursery and let Kathleen, who is a born nurturer if I ever saw one, take over more of the responsibilities caring for Abigail. Then you can go about rebuilding your business.”

  Suddenly feeling as if a great weight had been lifted off of her chest, Annie said, “If I started making more money, then I could afford to raise Kathleen’s wages, to compensate for her extra duties. Dr. Brown, you have no idea how much better I feel. How can I possibly repay you?”

  “Well, Mrs. Dawson, there is one thing you could do for me.” Dr. Brown hesitated, fiddling with the papers on her desk.

  Finally, she said, “Now that I know you’re anxious to get back to work…it really does seem fortuitous that you came by today. You see, the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children, an institution that is near and dear to my heart, is facing a problem…a problem that I think you may be able to help me solve.”

  Chapter 3

  Wednesday evening, February 22, 1882

  O’Farrell Street Boardinghouse

  * * *

  “Nate, Dr. Brown wants me to do an auditing job for her,” Annie said as she scooped up a small spoonful of porridge and slid it into her daughter’s mouth. She was sitting at the round table by their bedroom bay window with Abigail in her lap. Her husband sat across from her eating his late dinner—a roast beef sandwich, with a side of pickles and a handful of fresh oatmeal cookies.

  Nate had arrived home only a few minutes earlier, late again, from the law offices of Hobbes, Cranston, and Dawson. Hobbes was his Uncle Frank, his mother’s brother and the senior partner of the firm who specialized in property law. Cranston was Abel Cranston, one of the most sought-after criminal lawyers in the city. Nate was the third partner in the firm, and he was making his own name as a successful divorce attorney.

  As the junior partner, her husband was expected to do most of the routine scut work, deeds of property, execution of wills, simple trusts. It paid the bills, but it was boring and time consuming, which was one of the reasons he got home after eight most evenings, just as Annie was getting Abigail ready for bed.

  After her conversation with Dr. Brown, Annie decided to move their daughter into the nursery, only not tonight. She wanted to make sure Kathleen was really going to be all right with the change. With a pang, she realized this might be the last night she would go to sleep to the sound of her daughter’s snuffles and gurgles. She’d miss that, but she had to admit it would be nice to start spending the early evening hours talking to her husband in a normal voice, instead of practically whispering so as not to wake the baby.

  Taking a swallow of cider, Nate said, “That’s splendid news about the job. You’ve never done an audit for a physician before, have you?”

  “No, but this isn’t for her private practice. It’s for the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children. Dr. Brown and two other female doctors, Dr. Wanzer and Dr. Bucknell, founded this institution six or seven years ago. I know I mentioned this to you when I first started seeing Dr. Brown.”

  “I remember,” Nate said as Annie speared a slice of pickle from his plate. “You told me that this Pacific Dispensary is a place where poor people go to get medical care and that its permanent staff is all female?”

  Annie thought how fortunate she was to have a husband who actually listened to her. From what many of the women she advised confided to her, this was a rare quality in a spouse.

  “That’s exactly right. While there are a good number of other medical facilities in the city that specialize in women’s health, like the Lying-in Hospital, all the others are staffed primarily by male doctors. Dr. Brown is very proud of the multiple roles their institution plays, both as a dispensary where poorer women can walk in and get free medical care for themselves and their children, but also as a hospital. The hospital wards take in children up to the age of twelve, maternity patients, and women who have severe illnesses. They also perform surgeries, often on wealthier women who don’t want to go to one of the larger hospitals and prefer to be treated primarily by women. These paying patients help subsidize the charitable work the Pacific Dispensary does.”

  “And Dr. Brown wants you to audit their books?”

  “Yes, their treasurer suddenly resigned this morning. One of the things she was supposed to have done, but didn’t, was hire a professional auditor. The dispensary by-laws say that there needs to be a financial report given at their annual board meeting, which is to be held March 15.”

  “That’s three weeks away. Shouldn’t be difficult for you to complete. Their finances can’t be all that complicated. And you’ve done the books for several charities before. I can’t imagine this one is much different.”

  “That’s what I told Dr. Brown, but she said that the dispensary books are in a bit of a mess. Dr. Brown wasn’t specific, but she implied that Argenta Branting, the treasurer who just resig
ned, was highly unorganized. To make matters worse, the woman tended to take offense if anyone asked her about the dispensary finances. Something I can very well believe.”

  “You know this Mrs. Branting?”

  “Not personally, but I got a glimpse of her leaving Dr. Brown’s office. I must say she seemed an unpleasant woman. And Dr. Brown didn’t think that she would be willing to answer any of my questions, which will make the job more difficult. In addition, Dr. Brown and Dr. Wanzer, a co-founder of the dispensary, are leaving this weekend for a tour back east of other female-run dispensaries. They won’t return until just a couple of days before the board meeting, so I can’t depend on them for help.”

  Nate abruptly leaned over and wiped his daughter’s chin with his napkin. Annie looked down and saw that Abigail had managed to push most of the porridge back out of her mouth with her tongue, and the glutinous cereal was everywhere.

  “Oh, Abigail, what a mess! Here, let’s see if you can keep this spoonful in your mouth long enough to swallow some of it.”

  This time, Annie put a thumb gently up to her daughter’s mouth, pushing the porridge back in as quickly as Abigail tried to expel it. Abigail chuckled, clearly seeing this as an excellent new game. Once Annie felt she got her to swallow enough of the cereal, she took off the bib and used it to wipe off her daughter’s chin.

  Handing Abigail over to Nate, she said, “Time for you to entertain her. I’ll take your plate and her bowl down to the kitchen. I need to ask Mrs. O’Rourke about tomorrow’s order for the grocers. When I get back, I can tell you the rest. Because to solve the dispensary’s problems, Dr. Brown may need your services, not just mine.”

  Nate couldn’t get enough of gazing at his wife and child together. Annie had just finished nursing Abigail, and the baby’s curls mingled with his wife’s own as his daughter lay against her mother’s shoulder. As Annie patted the baby gently on her back, she quietly sang “I Gave My Love a Cherry,” which called up Nate’s own childhood memories of his mother singing that lullaby to his younger sister, Laura. All the tension he’d been holding in his shoulders simply drained away.