They follow the trolley route into Ely Falls, where the buildings are darkened by soot from the mills. They do not speak much, some pleasantries, which sound strange on her tongue. She tries to attend to the world around her, but her mind remains preoccupied. Both the beauty of the marshes and the bustle of the city seem, as they ride to the clinic, mere scenery or chorus to the real drama at hand: the silent, unspoken one played out by Haskell and her.
The main street of the city is thronged with shops, all decorated with yards and yards of festive bunting: druggists, confectioners, saloons, milliners, watchmakers. They pass a chowder house, a shoe factory: Coté and Reny. Over the shops are more French names and some Irish: Lettre, Dudley, Croteau, Harrigan, LaBrecque. Turning a corner, they come abreast of a parade in honor of the holiday. Olympia notes the men in Napoleonic costumes and the marching bands, the fire brigades on safety bicycles
.
The parade ends, they discover when they are forced to make a detour, at a two-pole big top that seems to have attracted at least half the city.
The mill buildings themselves are massive and dominate the town. Most are brick structures with large windows, stretching all along the banks of the Ely River. Beyond these factories is the worker housing, row upon row of boardinghouses with a drab, utilitarian appearance. Perhaps the blocks of houses once looked fresh and appealing, but it is clear that the buildings, which have neither shutters nor paint, have been left to ruin with few attempts at repair.
They stop before an unprepossessing brick edifice, one of many in a row. Haskell helps her down, and he swings his satchel from the floorboards. She walks behind him to the front door, where he puts his hand upon the latch. He hesitates and looks about to speak.
She shakes her head quickly to forestall his words. “Do not trouble yourself about me,” she says. “It is all right what we have done.”
Although they both know — as how could they not? — that it is not all right. It is not all right at all.
• • •
It is the noise Olympia notices first. In a large room, which she takes to be a waiting room, she can hear a group of small children squealing and shouting as they chase one another through the aisles. Near to them, a woman who seems to huddle into herself is alternately crying and cursing. Men in varying states of dress and undress roughly cough up phlegm, and a mother, in a harsh voice, scolds a group of boys who are trying to crowd all together onto a scale. Olympia hears as well the irritated mutterings of patients who have been kept waiting on the holiday, and the moans of other patients who are clearly in pain: an old woman weeping, and a younger woman, in labor, grunting in a terrible manner. These people sit or lie upon a series of wooden benches that resemble church pews in their arrangement; and the entire gathering seems to her like nothing so much as a bizarre and noisy congregation waiting rudely for its minister. As Haskell strides purposefully through the room, a kind of order begins to descend, as though the patients can already perceive their relief. Haskell speaks immediately with a nurse who has on a starched white muslin cap and a blue serge dress with sleeves Olympia assumes once were white but now are dotted or smeared with blood and other substances she does not want to think about. The nurse holds a sheaf of papers in one hand and a watch chained to her belt in the other. It is an unfortunate posture, as the implication seems to be that she is scolding Haskell for being tardy.
“The holiday is worse than a Saturday night for the drunkenness and injuries resulting from inebriation,” the nurse says to Haskell in an accent of broad vowels that Olympia recognizes as native. “There are seven patients who have come in with food poisoning from a tin of tainted meat, and there are three boys who fell into the runoff from the Falls, and what they were doing trying to cross the river there, I cannot tell you, but they are, as you might say, all battered to pieces. And as we are short-staffed today — well, there is no wonder we are in such a state. Oh, and there is a child, the Verdennes boy, who came into the clinic not an hour ago with the diphtheria croup, and I am sorry to say that he has passed on, sir.”
(The half hour she detained Haskell on the beach, Olympia thinks, with the first of many small shocks of that afternoon.)
Haskell looks disturbed, but not overly so. Perhaps he knows that the child would have died even had he been there.
“This is Miss Olympia Biddeford,” he says, turning to her. “Olympia, this is Nurse Graham,” he adds by way of introduction.
Nurse Graham, who looks to be in her mid-twenties, narrows her eyes at Olympia, but her scrutiny is fleeting. She has other, more pressing matters on her mind.
“I promised my family, sir, that I would be finished at two o’clock,” she says.
“Yes, of course,” Haskell answers. “Is there anyone in the back?”
“Yvonne Paquet is here, sir. And Malcolm.”
“Enjoy yourself then,” he says, turning then to survey his flock, who now have fallen mostly silent and are watching him with great interest. Haskell takes in air and holds it, and then lets his breath out in a long, slow sigh.
“Let us begin,” he says to Olympia.
• • •
The clinic occupies the ground floor of what was recently a textile warehouse. It has several rooms, one of which Olympia has ample opportunity to examine, since it is the chamber in which Haskell has set up his temporary office. In it are a desk and a cot and many cabinets filled with medicines, which Haskell frequently asks her, as the afternoon progresses, to fetch for him: quinine, aconite, alcohol, mercury, strychnine, colonel, and arsenic. There is an eye chart and a scale with many weights, an atomizer, a graduated medicine glass, and long metal trays of instruments — knives and needles and scissors. She notes a large glass bell jar, a microscope, and several flannel-covered bags, the purpose of which she never discerns. On a stove nearby are pots of water boiling continuously.
Nurse Paquet, a sallow and sullen girl not much older than Olympia, interviews the patients while Olympia functions as a nurse attendant, fetching bandages and medicines and tonics, cleaning instruments and returning them to the boiling water, and, once or twice, holding a limb or a child’s hand while Haskell goes about his business. The first patient he sees that day is a man who has lost his arm to a spinner, which mangled it up to the elbow some weeks before. Haskell begins to unwind the man’s dressing with the most careful of motions. He speaks in a soothing voice, trying to distract the mechanician with queries and jokes, and Olympia deduces that securing a patient’s trust and cooperation is the first order of business in any treatment. Haskell is, she observes that afternoon, a gentle, not to say tender, physician.
“Olympia, fetch me some clean dressings,” he instructs. “There, in that metal cabinet.”
She finds the gauze and torn strips of cloth where he has said she would and hands them to Haskell.
“Contrary to established medical opinion, there is no intrinsic value to pus,” he says, unwinding the filthy bandages and gesturing to the exudation of a purple stump that emits such a powerfully noxious odor that she involuntarily puts the back of her hand to her nose and steps away. “It does but tell us that the patient is suffering and that the wound is infected,” he continues. “I have given orders that any person who walks into the clinic with a malodorous dressing should be seen to at once, but it is sometimes difficult to convince a provincial nursing staff who have been taught otherwise.”
Olympia looks over at Nurse Paquet, whose sullen expression does not change. Olympia watches as Haskell removes instruments from the pots of boiling water. After he has thoroughly cleaned the wound with carbolic acid, he begins to scrape away at the infection. The patient, despite Haskell’s soothing words and deft curettage, cannot keep himself from crying out at the pain. Olympia does observe, however, that Haskell is quick and precise in his gestures and that when the pain seems to be intolerable, he stops and administers laudanum by a teaspoon to ease his patient’s distress — which, miraculously, it does. The man, who ceases his shouting and trembling, lies still as Haskell finishes the job and bandages up the wound again.
That afternoon Haskell sets a broken leg, gives numerous injections, uses a pulmotor on a young man in the last stages of white lung, and treats another man who complains of a parched tongue, fevers in the night, and pain near his nipples. He diagnoses a case of scarlet fever on the basis of a telltale, ash gray patch on the palate, he cleans an abcess, he thumps a child’s back for pleurisy, and he dispenses tonics. One of the boys who fell into the river dies that afternoon as a result of his injuries, and the woman who was grunting in the waiting room is delivered of a healthy girl (though not by Haskell himself).
Through all of this, Olympia is watchful, as though she were being introduced to a second language and must pay close attention. Several times she feels her stomach rise toward her throat, but she is determined to betray no weakness. Occasionally Haskell bids her don a mask in the presence of highly infectious disease, and he constantly reminds her to wash her hands, which she makes nearly raw by the time the afternoon is over. And though she seeks to keep her composure, it is impossible to remain unmoved by the persons who are treated by Haskell, and sometimes she finds herself close to tears. Toward the end of her visit to the clinic, a boy and a woman come in with itching between their fingers, which have begun to bleed rather badly. Haskell diagnoses scabies. But the true malady, Olympia can see at once, is poverty, the likes of which she has never come across before. The woman is inebriated, and Olympia thinks the boy may be, too, although he cannot be more than ten. The woman has on a blouse of faded green silk with a narrow scarf of black wool tied round her neck. Her hair hangs down from a soiled boater in hacked clumps. The boy’s clothes — an old cotton shirt, trousers, and a waistcoat — are so big for him, they have to be rolled and braced. The mother’s black boots are broken, and the boy is barefoot.
When Olympia looks at those narrow feet, encrusted not with sand but with filth, she feels a rush of shame. To have reveled in being barefoot just hours earlier now seems almost unnecessarily insensitive. How can she disdain what so few have? Haskell looks over at her then, and she thinks she must be pale.
And he does look at her this day. He does. Many times. A dozen times, perhaps. He catches her eye, and though no words pass between them — and he does not change his expression nor interrupt his conversation with a patient — each glance to Olympia seems laden with content. These glances are, in an odd sort of way, both disturbing and comforting to her. Several times, under his acute gaze, she is afraid she will simply break apart or disintegrate. But then she collects herself, for all around her there are the sick and the injured who require, at the very least, another’s rapt attention.
Curiously, none of the patients questions her presence. Perhaps it is her gray chemise and navy skirt, or an absence of adornment that causes them to take her for a nurse-in-training or a novice; and it seem to be acceptable to them that she remain in the room during their treatment. What they cannot know, and indeed she can barely bring to consciousness herself, is that though she observes the workings of the clinic, she studies the physican as well. She is a novitiate, but not, as the patients believe, in the nursing arts.
For when she finally leaves the clinic that early evening, she will not be the same person she was when she entered. In the space of five hours, she will see more of human pain and suffering and relief than she has in the whole of her life. Yes, her father can tell her about the world, or she can read about it in books, or discuss it in polite conversation at the dinner table, but always at a safe remove. During the course of the afternoon, Haskell shows her something of the real and the visceral. He opens up the seams and makes her look. And in a strange manner, he is preparing her, but not in the way either of them has imagined: It is a rapid and brutal initiation into the ways of the body, a glimpse of what is possible, a taste of future intimacy. Later, she will come to understand that it was as much his nature to initiate her in this manner as it was hers to invite this instruction.
• • •
Toward evening, the clinic begins to grow quiet, as one by one the patients are sent home or are admitted to makeshift wards. After Haskell has seen a small child with measles, he says to Malcolm, who seems to be a general handyman, though the man has evident fluency with the names of the medical instruments and tonics, “I am just going to run Miss Biddeford home, and then I shall return after I have had a meal. Nurse Paquet will be in charge until I get back.”
“Yes, sir,” Malcolm answers, “but before you go, Mrs. Bonneau is asking if you can attend to a young woman who is powerful overwrought with the birthing pains. She says to bring the laudanum, as it is a breech and likely to cause the mother some galling troubles.”
Haskell looks at Olympia.
“There is no need to hurry to take me home,” she says quickly. “My father will not miss me, as he thinks that I am with the Farraguts. And they have almost certainly given up expecting me and doubtless think me at home with my father. So I am, for the moment, in a sort of limbo of freedom as regards my whereabouts.”
This is not entirely true, as she well knows; her father, having woken from his Fourth of July nap, could indeed be looking for her at this very moment. But she also knows that the day itself permits a certain latitude not normally available to her and that if she is clever, and her father has drunk enough, she will be able to excuse her absence to her father’s satisfaction.
Haskell finishes washing his hands and dries them on a cloth Malcolm is holding. Olympia watches him unroll the cuffs of his shirtsleeves and fasten the links, which he has kept in his trouser pocket. He removes his apron, wads it into a ball, and tosses it into a laundry basket in the corner. There is a smear of blood near his shoulder, and his face has lost some of its color with fatigue. Later, she will understand that he is biding his time, thinking hard about the consequences of taking her with him to the room in which Mrs. Bonneau and her charge wait; for he understands, as she does not, that she is about to see something for which no preparation will be adequate and which, once witnessed, can never be erased from the memory.
He lifts his coat from the hook on the back of the door. “There is a satchel of boiled cloths in the cabinet in the next room, Olympia,” he says. “It is not heavy. If you would bring that, we could go now.”
• • •
The light has softened some, and there are shadows on the streets. A cool, damp breeze from the east slips through the narrow alleys and washes over them at regular intervals. The sky is a vivid azurine, unblemished by clouds. It will be a lovely evening, Olympia knows, and even now, on this ugliest of streets, the light plays wondrously upon the bricks, catching a pane of glass and making it shimmer silver, turning the tops of the leaves of the trees a trembling pink. They walk side by side, saying little, trying to ignore the filth in their path, not only the detritus of the city’s daily life but also the leavings of a holiday’s many revelers: broken bottles, some human waste, articles of clothing shed and not retrieved, puddles of dishwater slung from second-story windows, wrappings of half-eaten food, crockery that reeks of beer. More than once, Olympia fears for her head and wishes fervently that she had a hat. But they reach the designated row house without incident and climb the stairs to the place where the unfortunate woman lives. Haskell opens the door and walks in without knocking.
The room is no bigger than the one Olympia sleeps in at Fortune’s Rocks, a cramped chamber with only one window that looks out upon a wall not ten feet away. Though it is still day, there is little light, and it takes a moment for Olympia to adjust her eyesight to the gloom. On the bed, a woman lies in apparent agony, for she writhes and clenches her teeth and then lets her breath out in sharp gusts, calling out words in a French so accented and tortured, Olympia cannot understand her. Her skirts have been rucked up to the tops of her thighs, and even from the doorway Olympia can see the blood on her skin and on the grimy pillow ticking beneath her. Her naked legs, moving and twisting on the bed, are a shock to the senses, and Olympia feels as if she had upturned a rock and come unexpectedly upon a mass of transparent worms, colorless from never having been exposed to the sun.
Olympia breathes shallowly. She fights the impulse to gag and to back out of the door.
In a moment, Haskell has shed his jacket. A quick perusal of the room indicates an absence of a water pump, and she can see him deciding to forgo washing his hands in the interests of time. As he sits upon the bed, his fingers disappear beneath the slim modesty of the thin band of cloth that hides the most private self of the woman, whose name, Olympia learns, is Marie Rivard. Haskell occupies himself thus for a moment and seems to confirm what he has been told. He speaks in French to Mrs. Bonneau, an older woman with a nervous bearing who tells him that she was summoned by one of the woman’s children, who was fearful for her mother’s life. And that this was largely the scene when she arrived. She adds, with much expression and many imprecations, that the young woman on the bed is a recent immigrant. There was a husband, but he abandoned his wife and children some months earlier. Marie Rivard, who must be in her late twenties, Olympia thinks — although it is impossible to give an age to the writhing apparition on the bed — has been unable to find work because she has been with child.
Olympia notices then the other occupants of the room: three children, none of whom can be more than nine years old, sitting on the floor against a wall. All are barefoot and wear soiled dresses of the most distressing cloth, dark and colorless and long wrenched out of shape. It is apparent that the children have not bathed in quite some time. The stench in the small airless cubicle is considerable.
The walls of the room are unpapered and have turned dark and greasy from years of cooking. There is no wardrobe, nor any trunk in the room, merely a shallow pantry; and when its door is opened, Olympia is surprised to discover that it is not crammed full of the occupants’ belongings, but is nearly bare. Although a man’s jacket hangs upon a hook, there are no other signs of a man in residence. A corner of the room, where the floor meets the joining, is burned as though there was once a fire there. Above the encrusted stove are rude kitchen implements: a colander, a knife, a pot. A few garments hang from nails hammered into moldings. She notes that there is no sign of a toy or of a plaything for any of the children. In the recesses of the sill of the window, however, is a tall stack of folded clothing partially wrapped in brown paper. Beside that package is a silver filigree frame of a man and a woman on their wedding day. The bride has on a long white satin dress with a delicate mantilla that falls forward onto her brow. The man, in a heavy woolen suit, stands as though at attention. Olympia looks from the woman in the photograph to the woman on the bed. Can it be that they are the same person? And if so, how is it that this astonishing photograph and frame have escaped being sold for food, as nearly everything else in the room appears to have been?