The Dress Lodger (19 page)

Henry smiles at the old man and puts his feet up on the bags of bran they have warming before the fire. Clanny likes to blame everything from gout to broken collarbones on the weather. Henry’s seen the long, cramped; lists he keeps in his office here in the Infirmary, pages and pages rilled with discourses on climate—Saturday, the 1 $th: much lightning, windjrom the
WSW
. Sunday, the 16th: cloudy and mild. Henry would not deny carbon might well play a part- -it’s as good a hypothesis as any other—but he can’t help feeling it’s exactly the sort of ungrounded, theoretical guess a doctor of Clanny’s sort would make. He and his uncle were trained so very differently, after all. Clanny, studying to become a high-paid physician, took most of his education from books. He read the classics, observed in hospital wards, studied his materia medica to prescribe pills. If he took any anatomy at all, it consisted of sitting once or twice in a lecture hall while a demonstrator held up a brain and pointed to the medulla oblongata. Henry, coming up fifteen years behind him, took a radically different course of study. He knew he would never make as much money training as a surgeon, but he couldn’t help feeling anatomy was the way of the future. You would not expect to know how a clock works merely from studying its face; you would need to open its door, examine the complex interaction of springs and gears, observe how, in the telling of time, it releases its tightly wound tension. But you might take a million clocks apart and have no one weep for them. Taking apart a poor man was another matter.

“Mr. Cooley?” Henry turns around in his chair. “Would you like to join us by the fire?”

Mr. Cooley looks up startled. Neither of them have said a word but to yell at him for the past eight hours. Why the sudden pleasantry?

“I’d like to sit with my friend,” he says at last.

“You may stand by the tub,” Clanny consents. “But don’t say a word that might disturb him.”

The awkward man in his fustian jacket and too tight knee breeches struggles down from the observation benches and walks over to his friend. Jack’s naked body is dim under the water, but thin—as thin as Starvation himself. If Bob hadn’t come in here with them, he would’ve sworn the sawbones had swapped his mate for this horrible old man in the tub. His skin is wrinkled and an awful mottled color; his hands, dangling over the edge, are turned in on the wrist and clenched into claws. His eyes are closed, but his lids are so weirdly sunk, you might see the very hollowness of the sockets like them that’s on the skeletons hanging about this awful place.

Aw, Jack. First Reg taken from old Mag Scurr’s down on the Quay, and now you. Who’s left for a man to lift a pint with?

“There’s no need to cry, Mr. Cooley,” Clanny says, coming over. “You must stay optimistic. Doctors are always optimistic; it’s why we rarely catch the diseases we treat.”

The old doctor slips a thin tube of glass under Jack’s tongue and studies his pocket watch. At the prescribed time, he removes the glass and squints at it.

“It’s barely come up five degrees,” he announces sadly. “And he’s chilled the water. Let’s get him under the bags.”

“Mr. Cooley.” Henry taps the woebegone friend on the shoulder. “You may be of help by ferrying those sacks of bran from in front of the fire. When we lay your friend on the table, place them immediately on top of him.”

The doctors reach into the tub and lift the slippery eel of a hero out and back onto the table. Obedient Robert carefully covers him with hot bags of bran, while Henry retrieves the rest and builds a steaming barricade around him. Working beneath the bags, the doctors bind Jack’s still twitching calf muscles with clean white handkerchiefs and apply a mustard poultice to his chest. Like shall cure like, says Clanny, feeding him his hourly dose of ipecacuanha in brandy to induce vomiting and expel the poison more quickly.

“It’s time to bleed him again,” he says. “Maybe there will be some change.”

The tiny lancets they used to prick him stick like feeding metal mosquitoes in the tabletop. Henry tugs one out and prepares to make a small incision in the vein that runs from the left leg to the abdomen. As bloodletting is one of medicine’s most powerful remedies, and hemorrhage one of its worst calamities, this important art must be exactingly executed. A patient should be bled to the point of fainting syncope without accidentally being brought to dissolution. He must never be bled in a horizontal position, but always upright, for as long as the head remains above the heart, fainting will occur before cardiac failure, and thus alert the surgeon that enough blood has been taken. Take too little blood and nothing is gained; take too much and the patient sinks even unto death.

While his uncle arranges the warm bran sacks to support the head, Henry feels about for the vein. He cuts sure and deep, holding the cup to catch the spurting fountain of red. But to Henry’s astonishment, where he’d expected warm blood to gush, only a black trickle weeps from the cut. The blood that does flow from the vein wanders in two streams, side by side. One, dark as treacle, is thick and tenacious; the other, bright and of thinner consistence, runs along with greater velocity. Henry has never seen anything like it

“Take these off!” Jack Crawford startles them all by suddenly lashing out at the hot bran bags that cover him. He kicks so hard, Henry’s lancet flies through the air and clatters across the wooden floor. What strange turn is this? The hero of Camperdown, only moments ago in a complete state of collapse, is struggling off the table, trying to get to his feet. He is striking out at Henry, at Clanny, who rushes over to calm him. “I feel fine,” Jack rasps. “Is there nothing to eat in this bloody place?”

“Jack!” Robert Cooley pushes the old doctor aside and gathers his friend in his arms. “Ach, God, I knew you’d get better.”

“Help me home,” the old man begs.

“This is a trick of the disease,” Clanny declares, trying to draw the patient back onto the table; but Robert Cooley has gotten his shoulder under his friend’s armpit and is pulling him toward the door.

“You tried, you bloody burker,” shouts Robert, supporting the weak-kneed hero. “You tried to kill him. But he is too strong.”

“Look at his eyes,” Clanny shouts back. “Look at his tongue.”

The corneas of Jack Crawford’s dry eyes are albumin-dull and cloudy, it is true, and the red vessels frizzing out from the iris are engorged with blood. The veins terminate abruptly, having no network, just a tangle of crazed dead ends. When Clanny grasps his chin and forces his mouth open, the old hero’s tongue is woolly with white fur. Still, would a dying man cry out for a pork chop as Jack does now? Would he bellow for a pint of beer? Robert will not risk it.

“You will kill him for sure if you move him!” Henry rushes the pair, but Robert Cooley throws out a fist that sends him sprawling.

“C’mon, Jack,” he whispers to his friend. “We’ll get you to yer own bed, andget’cher wife t’fry up a chop or two. You’ll be better inno time.”

“Mr. Cooley!” Clanny shouts, but the man has already dragged his friend through the door and halfway down the cold marble hallway. Clanny snatches up a lamp and runs after them. Henry grabs his bag and is fast on his uncle’s heels.

The hallway is as cold as a tomb and smells of lemon oil and sawdust— and something else that bothers Robert Cooley as he rounds the corner and searches for the marble steps to the first floor: the fresh iron smell of blood. He knows the smell; his house overlooks the slaughterhouse on Queen Street where the still pumping hearts of cattle are cut from their chests and sold, wholesale, to the sugar refinery. Does blood fill every one of these rooms? he wonders, turning away from the dark lecture chambers that open off the main hallway and branch off into more raked amphitheatres. The evenly spaced wall sconces shine only enough light into the rooms to coax operating tables into the shapes of wild beasts whose hearts beat to the rhythm of Robert’s frantic footfall. Come on, Jack, he thinks. Help me. You are too heavy.

But he knows it—even before he finds the steps and jolts his friend down to the first landing—he knows as the naked body slides from his arms, as white and languid as the snow settling on the windowpane beside him: the doctors have won. His friend hardens upon touching the ground, like a puddle of warm white spittle turned instantly to ice; his legs snap straight, his arms strain to break their bones, even his cock—Jesus Christ—stretches like a piece of India rubber, explodes onto his belly, and quivers back into place. The doctors have won.

Clanny sets the lamp on the landing and both men fall to work on the old hero. Clanny is fumbling in a leather bag, pushing a set of bellows into Jack Crawford’s mouth and making his chest inflate and deflate, inflate and deflate like a jerky machine. Henry is listening. Listening. Goddamn it. The man probably would have died anyway, but at least he wouldn’t have to die naked in a stairwell like some raped and abandoned housemaid. After a few minutes more, Henry lifts his head from the old man’s straining chest.

“He’s gone,” Henry says, kneeling helplessly back. Robert Cooley watches, also on his knees, his fists pressed against his mouth to keep back that low wail building up inside him.

As for Jack Crawford, he’s had about as much playacting as he can stand. He’s sick to death of performing his part over and over for this meagre audience. Here he is again clinging to the mast while cannons fire all around him. The admiral’s blue flag snaps in his face, is nearly ripped from his hands by the fury of the wind. He doesn’t want to climb; his thighs cramp fiercely from grasping the pole, his arms are in knots from clutching the marling spike. All he wants is a pint. But Admiral Duncan’s second in command has a musket trained on him—They shot away our mast, lad. We mustn’t let] the Dutchies think we’ve hauled down our colors. We are no cowards!

We are no cowards, thinks brave Jack Crawford, trembling around the pole. He shimmies higher and higher, until he’s above the smoke and can. see the enemy ship parallel to them. Dutchmen swab the mounted cannons and load them with heavy nicked balls. OfBcers raise their sabres andi shout commands. Fire! Down below, the world seems so dark and confused, but up here above it all, the sky is an improbable brilliant blue. It is a crisp October afternoon, one that back home might have inspired a long, walk to Fulwell’ s Windmill and a lazy picnic beneath its white canvas wings. He should be lifting a bottle of beer to his lips right now, looking up through the slowly revolving panels at the empty sky, thinking about his next bottle of beer and the chuckball game on Sunday. If only the smoke would not obscure the blue, everyone might think of home, and point their cannon-balls at the sea. But this flag is meant to replace the sky. It is what the men will see, when wearily they look up; the admiral’s colors instead of God’s blue heaven.

What am I doing up here? Jack suddenly wonders. He looks down at the two doctors and his friend Bob kneeling on the deck of the
HMS
Venerable; then they are lost in the fog of cannon fire. Why am I still holding on? What’s to keep me from letting go—like this—and falling, falling through the sky, past my friend Bob and those two befuddled doctors? What’s to keep me from dropping—like this—into the comforting bosom of the blue sea below?

The wintry waves take the old hero’s breath away as they break over his naked head. It’s colder than he thought, this sea, but it was good to let go. Who gives a bloody rat’s ass for some rich admiral’s colors, anyway? Left up to Jack Crawford, he’s just as happy to surrender.

It is dark again by the time Henry rolls over in his childhood bed on the third floor of his rented house on Nile Street. His grandmother’s cane rocking chair sits by the window, his mother’s chest-high chiffonier rests against the wall by the door. Besides an Austrian cuckoo clock (an engagement present from the Clannys), the only ornaments hung on the whitewashed walls are two framed engravings. A stern line drawing of reformer Jeremy Bentham, Henry’s hero, is fixed at eye level by the door, so that his might be the first face Henry sees upon waking; and above the bed, protecting him like the crucifix he discarded years ago, hangs his childhood Sacred Heart. He has grown so accustomed to that old picture that he scarcely sees it anymore. Certainly, when he’s married, he will have to stow it away with this single bed and the rest of his familiar boyhood things. Audrey will rock their first child in his grandmother’s chair, where he has spent hours by the window intently reading his medical journals. Won’t he resent her sitting in his seat by the window, sunlight falling upon an infant forehead rather than a clean white margin? Won’t he want to pick up a medical saw and grate her bowed head from her very shoulders?

Jesus Christ! Henry starts awake to the mechanical bird ducking in and out of the cuckoo clock. Seven o’clock? He sits up confused. Seven o’clock at night? His valet must have come in, for the trousers he wore to the theatre a full twenty-four hours ago are neatly folded over his chair and his jacket hangs from a peg by his hat. He fell asleep in his stained shirt and tightly wound cravat, which would explain the fitful feeling of choking he had all night. He promised Audrey he would go see her charity family on Mill Street and instead he’s slept the entire day.

The wood-plank floor is freezing cold when he sets his bare feet upon j it and scurries over to the basin and jug of water his servant left on the ? dresser. Henry tries not to go to bed with other men’s blood on his body, \ but studying himself in the pier glass, he sees that his face and hands are | streaked with Jack Crawford’s. As if losing him to that illness weren’t bad 1 enough, they spent an even more harrowing time trying to persuade Rob-I ert Cooley to relinquish his friend’s body for autopsy. They scolded. They 1 threatened. It is of the utmost scientific importance, they pleaded, tugging 1 on the old hero like schoolchildren would a puppy. You saw how horrible the disease is—how are we to find a cure if we cannot learn how it attacks? But nothing would move red-faced, grief-stricken Bob. He clung to the corpse ferociously, shaking his head, sobbing more pitifully than Henry had ever seen a grown man. In the end, nothing they could say would persuade i him. He threw the naked hero over his shoulder and ran screaming from Ť the hospital like a madman.