Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (11 page)

“Elizabeth,” Doctor Steenwycks rose. For the past few nights, fatigue had prevented him from satisfying his wife's appetites, and he worried that she, too, might now suffer hysteria's effects. He considered the red and blue weave of the carpet. When his daughter married, she would stand on this very rug, just as he had stood beside Elizabeth in her parents' parlor sixteen years before. Elizabeth had looked matronly then in her full brown gown and silver necklaces. She'd promised him guidance and support; he'd promised her comfort and faithfulness. Many marriages survived on less. Perhaps Edith would learn to care for Edmund.
Perhaps she would find health and happiness. He tried to picture his girl, his lovely daughter, beside a man he knew she loathed. If she had an affair, took another lover — later, once she'd regained her health — he'd turn a blind eye. That much he could do, he decided, as the warm glow of brandy made it increasingly clear that some marriages were meant to be broadened.

He did not hear the knock at the front door, only Elizabeth's order that he receive the guest. Didn't she realize that Edmund stood before her, drawing inferences about married life? Didn't she sense that she, not Edith, might frighten the young man away with her sharp, incessant demands? The doctor sipped, swallowed, decided to take a quick stroll and allow the fresh air to soothe his brandy dizziness.

At the door, a wild-eyed man stood with a half-dozen unkempt companions. They wore faded trousers and spent shoes. “Since Edith won't come to the prison, we've come to visit her instead — to thank her for our rehabilitation,” the wild man said.

“I'm afraid —” the doctor began.

“We'd like to thank her for all she's done for us,” a second man offered through a mouthful of chipped and missing teeth. “We were released today.”

For a moment the doctor considered. How would his wife react to the bearded man with the scar etched deep in
the flesh of his lip? Or the lice-ridden fellow in the stained blue shirt? He stepped aside. “Come in,” he said as the men filed past him. “Turn left to the parlor.”

“What is this?” he heard Elizabeth demand. “Who are these men?”

The doctor lingered at the doorway, pondering love and contentment. Or love and joy. Or maybe not love at all, but loathing and compromise.

“Get out of my home!” Elizabeth shrieked. A table crashed against the floor amidst a clatter of breaking china.

The doctor stepped away from the door and into the street. The sky threatened rain. But the brandy brought confidence. He wouldn't just stroll, he'd leave. He was leaving. He had the address in his pocket, the soft-scented note penned in the hand of his old beloved. Scandal, what scandal there was, would trouble Elizabeth more than his absence.

“One should not decide rashly; one should not allow passion to rule,” he muttered. Elizabeth's words, not his. Not anymore, though the thought of his wife brought a heaviness to his head. He felt dizzy. He drew a quick breath. His feet moved beneath him without touching the ground. He was stumbling, falling. The cool, damp street caught him, comforted him. He looked up.

He was facing his doorway, he realized. He'd gotten turned around, or the world had spun. But it didn't matter.
A sudden joy pulled him back to his feet; he stood, transfixed. For there, in front of his house, and not a day aged, stood Madeline, his Madeline. She held a wrapped parcel — clothing most likely — and a leather bag containing her savings. She wavered unsteadily, her gaze upon him, an apparition pulled from the tumulus depths of his dreams.

“You've come to me,” he said, reaching out. “You've come just as I was on my way.”

“I love you,” he said, and added, when the girl remained silent, “Can you forgive me? Can you ever forgive me?”

And then she was in his arms, delicate, sobbing, grateful for his words, he believed, and he pressed his lips against the top of her head.

“Darling, darling,” he whispered. “Madeline, my Madeline, my darling Madeline.” He reached for the wall to steady himself, but his hand met only the air. He was in the street, he remembered, the street in front of his home.

The girl pulled back and regarded him, her brows bent with concern. “Come with me,” she said at last. The warmth of her hand on his forehead brought comfort and peace. He followed her, his steps unsteady, toward his house, their house. Already he knew she was not Madeline. Already he knew he'd been foolish and tired, so tired and drunk. But she had a great gift, this girl of his — a kindness he could not, would never, escape. And for the first time in days, the doctor believed that everything was about to get better.

R
EADING
G
RANDPA'S
H
EAD

The night Morris's first letter arrived, Edith returned home late from the Institute. She draped her shawl over Grandpa's favorite chair, set her notebooks on the end table, and announced her arrival with the single dry cough she'd perfected over her thirty-three years. Had she simply said, “I've returned,” Grandpa would not have responded. Her voice would have faded to silence, as it often did when she relayed facts her father knew or would rather not hear spoken.

Grandpa, knit cap pulled tight over his forehead, emerged from his study. Despite his age, he cured people seven days a week, going door to door with his frock coat pockets full of scissors, metal syringes, lancets, glass bleeding cups, and a handful of licorice suckers.

“It's time for you and Letty to make other arrangements,” he said, his tone level and the words evenly spaced. He had clearly practiced the line all day.

“Oh, Father,” Edith said.

She and Letty had just moved in to 62 Orchard Street. Not six months had passed since her husband, Morris, set out for the territories leaving Edith and Letty at Grandpa's doorstep with a promise to call for them soon.

Letty emerged from the kitchen and stepped forward to hug her mother. At thirteen, she stood as tall as Edith, and she could reach and sweep clean the high shelves where Grandpa hid flasks of foul-smelling brandy. Days, while he made his rounds, she pored over his medical texts, convinced that to be truly moderate, one must eat only fresh fruits and boiled vegetables. She was as strong-willed as Edith had been, long ago, before the strain of illness and cooking and cleaning and caring for three children, two of whom had died in infancy, had dulled her passions.

“Mother, I ruined Grandpa's good shirt,” she said. The fire had nearly expired beneath her watch, and the plates from yesterday's supper still sat on the table. “It caught on the washboard.”

In days past, Edith would have scolded her daughter, admonished her to exert more care. But now she dismissed the words with a wave. She'd known of her daughter's inattentiveness for weeks, ever since Letty sat beneath Edith's
inquiring fingers and she examined the bumps and sutures of the girl's head. “I read that all in your skull,” she said.

“Really, Edith,” Grandpa said. “You can't predict what a person will do by the shape of his head.”

Edith stepped past Grandpa to the fire, which she fed so ineptly that it diminished further. The wallpaper, discolored in places where lamp oil had splattered, peeled around the trim. Hard times had come to New York, and Grandpa had let go the hired help — an old woman and her son — who, Edith suspected, had done little more than steal from her father.

“You should come with me,” she said. “The demonstrations are breathtaking.”

“No respectable doctor —”

“Doctor Ketchum was there.”

Grandpa folded his arms over his plain black waistcoat. His eyes followed Edith's hands as she removed her gloves, now tinged gray with ash, and dropped them on top of his seat cushion.

“Edith —” he began, but Letty interrupted, pointing at Grandpa accusingly.

“You've been smoking.” She peered around him to his study off the back parlor. She'd thrown away a tin of his horrid weed last Saturday, but the old man must have another hiding place. Perhaps he'd pulled forward
Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juices
again, stashing
the tin behind the well-worn pages, or the
Gazetteer of England
, for which he had absolutely no other use.

“Clear the table,” Grandpa ordered, but Letty was already searching for the tobacco.

Edith sighed. Gone were the quiet evenings when her mother managed the house while Grandpa discussed news and medicine with his son — a vain, foolish child who'd run off with the circus years before. Now Edith had to attend to the household; she could not retire, as her heart urged, to review her lecture notes.

E
ARLIER THAT DAY
Edith's mentor, Fowler Corender, had examined a pauper, a frail alcoholic known for falling dead asleep along the Bowery. “Behold!” Fowler cried as he shaved the poor man's scalp with a flat razor and ran his bare fingers over the pale, nubby skin. “A rather small covetiveness organ, and a large appetite. Is it no wonder the man drinks? And note the prominent protuberance here on the parietal bone. This man was born to live in the streets.”

A smattering of applause, led by Edith, brought a glow to Fowler's cheeks. Though he claimed to prefer silence and solitude, he performed public demonstrations three afternoons a week and had considered adding an evening show. Plastered on the wall behind him, a chart demarcated the thirty-three brain organs Doctor Spurzheim had
catalogued, as well as the six dozen facilities he, Fowler, had discovered while working in New York. The chart served as a reference for those new to the sessions; Edith no longer referred to it.

As young Fowler's apprentice, she took careful notes while he called out observations. Only yesterday, he'd discovered a new organ: solicitousness, which resided in the superior anterior region of the skull and had thus far eluded scientific discovery, he maintained, because of its almost imperceptible size. Of all the eminent scientists, Fowler Corender had the most sensitive fingers, an asset he boasted about often. He removed his jacket when he worked, revealing embroidered suspenders and a single-breasted vest. His feet were small, and looked even more so in pointy shoes. He'd studied abroad, in Edinburgh, where he worked with the finest minds of the century. He'd even met Spurzheim, by chance, in Vienna.

“And what did he say?” Edith asked when he told her.

“We discussed Gall at some length.” Fowler often spoke the names of more famous men, and Edith repeated the same names at night, before the mirror, in case the men arrived at the Institute as Fowler promised.

“What did he say about your head?”

“Well nothing, of course.”

“He didn't read it? You didn't have him read it?”

“I'm far too sensitive,” Fowler answered.

Fowler had examined Edith twice, declaring on the second examination that she did, perhaps, have an inclination toward his noble field. The rise in Edith's skull above her pronounced occipital bone indicated a well-developed faculty for learning and apprenticeship, and should she apply herself to her studies she would make a suitable companion to a renowned scientist. She had a great love of life, a passion for existence, which Fowler admitted to finding most attractive.

At night Edith practiced in the privacy of her home: on herself, her daughter, and heads conjured from memory. While Letty cooked supper and Grandpa searched vainly for his tobacco, Edith rediscovered herself by probing the bumps and indentations beneath her thick brown hair. She had a strong sense of color, she learned, a finding that prompted her to boldly match blues and scarlet with a long-treasured mustard scarf from Paris. And she had a great facility for judging time: its passing and relation to circumstance. With skill, she deduced the exact date of her husband's departure, a Thursday, just past Easter, early that year. She'd not seen Morris since the thirtieth of March.

A
T DINNER
G
RANDPA
sat at the dining table beside a stew pot of boiled cabbage and leeks. He wore his knit cap and regarded Edith in silence. He could no longer demand that she abandon her work, not now that
she was grown and married, though in an indirect way his demands — don't work at the prison, don't involve yourself in politics or in teaching, my dear, you must marry and have children — had led to the discovery of her new talent. Grandpa had always known what was best for her.