Authors: Laura Wiess
“He believed educating women would be catastrophic, as the body’s energy could only effectively serve one organ at a time, and if a woman was redirecting hers to develop her brain, then her real purpose in life, to bear children, would suffer and her uterus would atrophy.” He shook his head. “Again, old-fashioned perhaps, especially with this fellow Freud going around spouting theories, but who’s to say my late father-in-law’s theory isn’t also valid? Margaret was an innocent, obedient girl when we married, but over the years—coincidentally just about the time she began reading books
and
desiring a child—her compliant nature began to change. Now a stranger stands in her place.”
Dr. Boehm lit the pipe clenched between his teeth, and a roiling cloud of sweet-scented cherry tobacco filled the car. He fell silent, puffing as the sky darkened and the traffic on the two-lane road grew sparse, finally giving way to nothing but miles of thick woods, opossums trundling along the side of the road, raccoons peering out
through the underbrush, and deer crossing ahead, their eyes glowing like tiny moons in the headlights.
It was the sight of a doe and a yearling poised in the center of the lonely road, watching our approach that made me lean forward and breathe, “Oh, look how pretty!”
Dr. Boehm slowed the car and we grew close enough to see the doe’s ears twitch and her muscles bunch as she flipped up her fluffy white tail and, with the yearling behind her, bounded off into the trees.
“Game is plentiful this season,” he said, accelerating. “I intend to bag my limit and improve my taxidermy skills. Have you ever eaten venison, Louise?”
“No,” I said, “but my mother took me to see
Bambi
on Christmas when I was five.”
“Ah, yes, your mother,” he said after a moment, his tone slightly acidic, and so we didn’t speak again until we arrived at my new home.
Nurse met us at the kitchen door and showed me upstairs, past the doctor’s bedroom at the end of the hall, to my room, which had a connecting door—closed and locked now—to Mrs. Boehm’s bedroom.
“I’ve never had my own room before,” I said.
Nurse snorted. “It comes with a price,” she said and muttered a few more things, none of them complimentary, and as I listened, I discovered that if Dr. Boehm was God to Nurse, then Mrs. Boehm was a silly, useless albatross around his neck, a woman who, thanks to her late family’s money, might have been useful once by putting the good doctor through medical school but who had long since become an embarrassing burden with her feminine problems and weak, needy nature.
“Is it any wonder the doctor can’t bear to be in the same room with her anymore?” Nurse said, nodding and closing my bedroom door
behind her, leaving me listening to the heavy, unrelieved silence in the room beyond the connecting door.
Out of all the things Dr. Boehm and Nurse chose to tell me about Margaret Boehm before I was allowed to meet her, what I still find the saddest, even after everything that happened, is that no one told me she was dying of neglect.
When I went downstairs the next morning, I was told that Dr. Boehm had decided to keep me separate from his wife for an incubation period, a safety precaution, as I had, after all, just come from a state home teeming with
outcasts, urchins, the unwanted and unwashed,
and who knew what kind of maladies I’d brought with me.
So instead of tending to the invalid, for the next several weeks I cooked, cleaned, and absorbed the odd, tense rhythm of the household. It was different from anything I’d ever known, this life that revolved around a man, the rush to put him first, to fulfill his requests and obey his demands without question, especially a man who seemed to believe he was well within his rights to
expect
the servitude and, while a part of me chafed under the censorious looks and sharp tongue of Nurse every time I moved too slowly or gave the doctor a questioning look, another part of me was very eager to fit in and very grateful to have a home, even if it wasn’t a happy one.
At first I thought the tension was because of Mrs. Boehm secreted upstairs, but as the days passed, I realized it was Dr. Boehm who was turning out to be more than a little eccentric.
One morning at the end of January he told Nurse to schedule all of his appointments on Mondays only, until hunting season ended, as his health was in sore need of the restorative powers of nature. She
looked at him, eyes lit with wariness, but didn’t argue, only said, “All right, Doctor.”
He wore his surgical gloves everywhere, even to dinner, and had the odd habit of tucking them down between each finger, one hollow at a time, over and over as if to ensure they wouldn’t somehow slide off if he wasn’t vigilant. Nurse would watch, and after two or three go-arounds, she would clear her throat or ask him to pass the carrots or do something to interrupt the habit.
He cared for no opinion but his own and spoke cuttingly of the poor and indigent, especially the unmarried women with illegitimate children who always arrived as
Mrs.
Smith or
Mrs.
Jones and left knowing their coy pretenses hadn’t fooled anyone.
The first time he told one of these stories, I kept my gaze on my plate, eyes full of unshed tears, refusing to blink and release them, face hot, soul sick and burning. I felt sure he was mocking my mother and I hated him for his supercilious tone and casual cruelty.
The second and third times, however, I took a deep breath and lifted my gaze, not to him, not yet, but to the window and stared out as if daydreaming, refusing to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d wounded me. After that I listened with no reaction at all and later found out that despite his deep scorn for unmarried mothers and bastard children, he still treated them without charge.
He was a puzzle, arrogant, distant, and unpredictable, a man who spoke of his wife as if she were nothing more than an ongoing medical case and who went weeks without looking in on her but who on one sunny day above freezing, took an hour out of his schedule to show me around the property.
We passed the handyman’s quarters and the shed where the gardening tools were kept, the salt lick near the tree line for the deer, and finally his workshop, a low-slung wooden outbuilding set at the far back end of the property.
It had an uneven cement floor and sturdy wooden worktables—long enough to operate on, he joked stiffly—and three small squirrel hides draped over curved and rusted meat hooks embedded in a support beam.
Against the wall there was a bench that held his scalpels, a box of surgical gloves, and a tool that looked like tweezers with handles that he called an
ear opener,
used to insert and separate the skin from the ear cartilage. He showed me a large assortment of knives ranging from a small paring knife to a skinning knife and beyond, scissors to trim around bullet holes or the insides of paws, and heavy-duty pliers used for skin stretching.
The flesher, an unhappy-looking device for removing layers of flesh clinging to the animal’s skin sat separately, as did the degreaser, clay, a jumble of wire, containers marked with all sorts of noxious chemicals, vats, brooms, cinder blocks, and a ragamuffin pile of furred pieces that, upon closer inspection, contained rabbit faces with limp ears and eye holes, squirrel tails, tiny chipmunk skins with empty, dangly feet, and raccoon masks, again with eyeholes but no eyes.
The place was chilly and smelled as if something had crawled into the walls and died. The main table had deep, reddish black stains ingrained in the top and when he saw me looking at them, hastened to say that his next investment was going to be a steel-topped table or, at the very least, the biggest laminate table he could find.
From there he led me back across the lawn, kicking up snow with each stride, and into his study. I’d never been in here before, never even seen the inside, as when the doctor wasn’t here, the door was kept shut and locked. I paused, gazing at all the bookcases, the tall, pure-white sculpture on his desk of a woman holding a child and the dead animals positioned on every flat surface.
“Come in,” he said, motioning me forward. “Leave the door open.”
I did and, when he indicated I should sit, perched on the edge of
the closest armchair while he traversed the room, stopping at each preserved carcass—a patchy-furred raccoon, a pair of rumpled-looking mourning doves, a red fox whose mouth was twisted in a fierce rictus of what could only be pain or terror, a plaque displaying severed pheasant’s legs, and most unsettling, a tableau of a mother chipmunk lying belly up in a strategically angled bowl of dirt, acorns, and fallen oak leaves, teats turgid and poking through her soft white belly fur, and little pink, hairless baby chipmunks, newborns, frozen forever in the act of squirming toward them to suckle—and told me the abbreviated versions of these, his taxidermy efforts to date.
He spoke with unbridled enthusiasm of his ongoing quest to create the perfect mounted specimen in a replica of life, of making beginner’s mistakes with the raccoon like failing to plug the mortal wound and orifices with rags to prevent the bodily fluids from leaking out and contaminating the fur. He spoke of the difficulty of preparing the doves and how he would not attempt them again for they weren’t worth the trouble. He spoke of hefting the scalpel and incising the fox from the base of her tail and up along the spine, gently working his gloved hands into the incision and peeling her skin loose from the muscles.
“Skinning the vixen’s feet was difficult but her face presented the biggest challenge,” he said, pausing and running a gloved fingertip along the fox’s backbone. “One must coax the skin down off the skull, leaving certain tissue attached around the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. I had some trouble around the eyelids and the tear ducts, but I don’t believe it’s noticeable.”
“No, not at all,” I said faintly.
He went on and on, relating the fleshing process, the debate between dry preservation, pickling, and tanning, the threat of bug infestation in the hide, the old-fashioned use of arsenic and the benefits of oxalic acid, and how unprocessed rawhide was nothing more than desiccated skin and, given an environment with a high enough moisture
content, would rehydrate, breed bacteria, and putrefy like any other.
“Oh,” I said, swaying and blotting my sweaty forehead with the back of my hand. “It’s very warm in here, isn’t it?”
“Put your head on your knees,” he said, and when I could sit up again without reeling, he called Nurse and, with her in attendance, put the stethoscope to my heart, peered into my pupils, and took my pulse. “Do you feel congested? Throat sore? Any aches or pains? Stomach upset?”
“No, I’m fine,” I said, embarrassed.
“Are you menstruating?” he said.
“No,” I mumbled, blushing. “It was just hot in here and you were talking about skinning things and taking out their eyes and putrefaction—”
“All right, that’s enough,” he said coldly. “You may go now, Louise. You have reminded me most emphatically of how useless it is to try and educate a female in the fine art of perfecting and bringing the natural world to life.”
I rose too hastily and had to steady myself against the desk for a moment, then hurried away before the burning words crowding my throat burst out.
Bringing the natural world to life?
Those animals
had
been alive, they’d already
had
life, and no man with a fleshing machine could ever come close to improving on that.
Two mornings later Nurse, apparently deciding I was sufficiently healthy, made a soft-boiled egg, handed me Mrs. Boehm’s breakfast tray, and told me to take it up to her.
“I don’t know about you, but I think this book is weird,” I said, turning off the CD player and glancing at Gran. “I mean, you can
already guess everything that’s going to happen; either his wife is some taxidermied mummy and the orphan girl is next—and I swear if she falls down when she’s running away from him, that’s it, I’m done with this—or the nurse is really his wife or his mother or both and he’s a lunatic or some serial killer or whatever…I don’t know.” I rose, restless, and paced the room. “I mean, I feel sorry for Louise, but she’s not doing anything to get away! Well, not that anything’s really happened yet…and it
is
winter, and okay, yeah, she doesn’t have anywhere to go or anyone to call for help…but still. She must feel like
something’s
wrong there, you know?” I looked at Gran, who was drooping in her chair. “And, yes, you don’t have to say it, I know there’s a plague going on and people are dropping dead, leaving orphans everywhere, and yes, she has no food or money but…oh, hell, all right…so maybe it doesn’t seem as ominous to her as it sounds to us. Or maybe…oh, God, maybe it was so bad back then that it really was better to stay than run away. What do you think? Gran?” I went over to her but she’d fallen asleep, so that left me no choice but to sit down and start my stupid homework.
It was kind of creepy walking home alone through the back acres in the fast-approaching dark, and that was unsettling, because I’d never felt that way about our little woods before. I didn’t know whether it was just a spooky night or if it was coming out of Gran’s with that story on my mind and that horrible image of the doctor cutting open a spine and working his hands into the incision to loosen the skin from the muscle, but holy crap, when a leaf rustled, I took off for my back porch like the hounds from hell were after me.
And later at dinner, I said, “Did you know that electroshock therapy actually makes a person go into, like, an epileptic seizure and that it’s so strong you can break bones and tear ligaments and stuff?”
“I’m eating,” my father said, giving me a look over a forkful of spaghetti.
“Did you know that taxidermists use fleshing machines to—”
“Where are you getting all of this from? Don’t tell me it’s homework,” my mother said, wrinkling her nose.
“No, it’s Gran’s audiobook, and it’s supposed to be a love story, but did you know that doctors used to think that if a woman was educated, all her energy would go to her brain instead of her reproductive organs and her uterus would atrophy and then she would be useless?” I said, trying not to laugh as my father stared down at his plate in dismay.