The Dress Lodger (23 page)

Gustine watches the Eye’s eye for any movement, for the slightest twitch to give away Henry’s arrival. He believes he can save us, she murmurs, kissing the baby again. How that salvation will be manifested is as murky to her as the image of the saviour formerly had been. Perhaps he will hollow out a little area so that the heart might be tucked back in; or maybe he will build a bower of bone above it. Gustine does not pretend to know how the human machine works, but surely Henry knows what to do.

Downstairs, Eye’s eye cuts to the latch, and Gustine rolls onto her back, lifting her baby high overhead. Fly, little baby, fly. His arms and legs flap happily, his blue eyes catch fire in their sockets. He swoops down to kiss his mamma, and then he’s off again—back up into the air, soaring above his mamma’s head, squealing with delight. Shush! hisses a neighbor, but Gustine still holds him aloft. Fly, fly! No one present at his birth doubted that this baby was born merely to soar straight back to Heaven, to molt away his deformed flesh and speed like a liberated bluebird from his mother’s hands. But the fates who spun him so short a thread did not reckon on Gustine for a mother. The only thing she regrets is having had to surrender poor Fos; and if she’d known who Judas was, she’d be feeling thoroughly Judas-like right now. But what must be done, must be done. Give us akiss, little baby. Gustine brings his lips even with her own. Body by body, your mamma is mortgaging a life for you.

out what do all these dreams signify to you, coin-lidded Fos? What do you care for the Eye’s shadowy visions, or the enmity of Thomas Malthus, or the future of a baby whom you will never see again? Is it not an annoyance having the dreams of the living crowd the great storehouse of the Unconscious, making you and the rest of the cramped dead wish for nothing more than morning? Come, Fos, you have earned a little selfishness. Why should you have to concern yourself with anything in this house tonight beyond that soft creak of the floorboards coming toward you.

A careful footfall usually announces one of two types of men: lovers and thieves. You’ve had your lover, don’t deny it, back when you worked on your cousin’s farm in Hartelpool, sleeping in the hayloft during the summer months. You were part of a giggling heap of sweaty breasts and legs back in those days, teasing along with the rest of the girls about babies and how to come by them, taking turns on the outside so that your chosen favorites might visit. But on the night of your turn outside, Ned Turner came so softly upon you, you almost didn’t hear him. He was like an unexpected apparition in the moonlight, a spirit to summon rapture in a stunned devotee before disappearing back into Heaven. The next day he smiled at you in the field, no more, but that acknowledgment has been good enough to live on these thirty-two years hence.

But what if, on the other hand, this is no lover’s footfall at all? What if the creak is a thief? Will not Pink jerk awake and shriek? Can you not depend on the vigilant Eye to leap up from her stool and drive him from the house? Think first to tear Whilky’s daughter away from the furry white lap of her ferret mother, where she has finally fallen into a rare and peaceful sleep. Think then to pierce the drug-induced fog confounding the frustrated, blinking old woman. Never having taken laudanum (or had it visited upon you), you cannot appreciate the profound inertia it insists upon. Eye is no more capable of leaping up to drive away a thief than she is of wrapping the gray shawl that’s slipped to her waist back around her shoulders. She stares angrily at the shadow creeping across the floor, unable to move, conscious of only one thing—if it comes too near the dress, she will find the strength somewhere to hurl her limp body and pin it to the ground.

Unlucky for you, Fos, the creak-shadow stops far shy of the dress. It hesitates before the Eye, wavering and uncertain, then makes a quick wide circle between Pink and your box. The wind blows a sheet of sleet against the house, and the floor trembles. Pink’s cold feet twitch under her faded gingham dress. The shadow stands over your private box for what feels like a very long time before a hand reaches under your back and another slips beneath your knees.

Why am I being taken from this house?

Can you really not yet know, Fos?

Tell me!

We all have a job to do, and ours has been to undertake the telling of this story. Still, there are days in any job when you want to turn away, to leave unfinished what must be done, to leave unsaid what must be known. We will tell you, then, that it is not yet time for you to rest. You have baled hay, you have painted matches, you helped narrate the beginning of our story, but you are being put back to work one last time, Fos. Your body still has some use in it.

I do not understand.

If you will know, then, look ahead with us an hour. See that clumsy black dog digging furiously under the fence separating two backyards on Nile Street? He scratches down a few inches, thrusts his muzzle in to measure, paws more red soil, snorts into the hole he’s made. It is too much to ask of a dog that he remain indifferent to fresh meat, especially when his master is out of town and the servant boy forgot about his dinner. He scratches and scratches until the hole is big enough—see how he wriggles through and ranges about the yard? A few perfunctory sniffs take him straight to a plot of fresh-turned, shovel-flattened earth. The dog spins in a frenzied circle once, twice, three times, then turns up his snout and howls ravenously up at the moon. At the sound, a doctor, upstairs in his library, pauses before his glass-fronted cabinet, where he has just selected his largest saw.

What does any of this have to do with me?

Ah, Fos. You will learn soon enough.

“… the heart is the beginning of life … it is the household divinity.”

—William Harvey,
The Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals

“Dod bloody damn!” Whilky Robinson roars into the empty coffin. “Where is she?”

Pink’s eyes fly open. From where she fell asleep before the fireplace, she scents red-eyed, sour-stomach danger in the room, but not fast enough to outrun it. Danger has her by the hair and has smashed her face against the coal bin in the time it takes to say “eek.” Pink knows; she tried to say it. But the word drowned in a thick gulp of blood.

“I ask one thing! One thing!” he shouts down at the ball she’s curled herself into, and kicks at its spine. “Watch a bloody dead woman. So, where is she?”

Pink inches herself toward her corner. She’s never seen her Da so mad; even Mike, hissing under the table, is afraid of him. She glances up at the tin clock. Quarter to five; time for them to light the fire and fix coffee. It’s coming back now. Dreaming of her mother. Fos in her coffin. But how could it be that Fos is gone?

“Did she come back to life?” Pink asks anxiously.

“Did she come back to life?” her father parrots. “Did she come back to life? Of course she didn’t come back to life, you stupid little bugger. She’s been stolen! From my very own house! While you were supposed to be watching her.” Whilky rears back a heavy-booted foot and kicks a splintery hole in the flimsy Sunderland Parish coffin.

A crowd of sleepy, tousled lodgers, roused by their landlord’s shouts and Pink’s screams, has gathered at the top of the stairs. Whilky spots Gustine near the front, the only one among them who looks well rested.

He lunges for the dress lodger, catching hold of her wrist and pulling her down the last three stairs. “This is your fault!” he shouts.

“What are you talking about?” Gustine struggles against him. “What’s happened?”

“You know damned well what’s happened. That doctor who was here last night looking at your abortion of a baby came back and took—” He sputters unintelligibly at Fos’s coffin. “I ordered him out—goddamned bloody body snatcher!”

“How could that be?” Gustine wrenches her arm away. “How could he have gotten in? Even if Pink fell asleep, the Eye was here. She would have stopped any doctor, and you know it.”

Gustine’s words bring Whilky up short. His fury had been so leveled at Pink, he’d almost forgotten about the blinking fixture on her stool. But Gustine is right: the Eye was here, and the Eye never sleeps. He walks over to where she sits, in her same place, dogged beneath the blue dress. He screws up his face and tries to summon the courage to shout at her.

“What did you see?” It comes out a whisper.

But in all the years he’s never seen Eye sleep, he’s never heard her talk, either. She sits with her feet wide-planted, her heavy ape arms on her knees. Her eye fixed on the floor, she sees again the rat’s shadow creep out with the cheese. Poison, she thinks thickly. Eye. Have. Been. Poisoned.

“What in the hell am I asking you for?” Whilky slams his fist into the wall beside her head, startling a shiver of plaster from the ceiling. “A bunch of traitors and morons, that’s what I keep in my house!” He whirls around, rushing the lodgers on the stairs. “Get out of my sight, every last one of you!”

They flee upstairs, hurriedly dressing, not caring if they reach work fifteen minutes early and have to wait outside for the gates to open. This proves it, rages Whilky. The infernal partnership between doctors and tyrants. Frog eggs were not enough—now the Government wants us to know we are not even safe in death. Why, even as he is standing here, the Tories are lobbying for a bill that would hand the bodies of them that die in the workhouse over to the surgeons for dissection. It’s not enough the Government has taxed the poor man into the workhouse in the first place, has stripped him of his dignity so that he is ashamed to consort with his former friends. Now, if he dies alone and no one comes to claim him right away— or even if they do come to claim, but cannot afford a funeral—he is considered unwanted, unloved, and no more than fodder for the surgeon’s knife. Used to be only executed murderers were dissected, as punishment for the most hateful of crimes. But now it is a crime simply to be poor.

But are the bloody sawbones satisfied with a bill? No! They are so greedy they will steal into a man’s house and take the dead from their very coffins! One was in here last night, prying through Whilky’s things, touching his possessions. God bloody damn! The landlord of 9 Mill Street ranges about his parlour like a lost child, touching his carefully chosen artworks, picking up his Wearmouth West View 2^-Year Commemorative milk pitcher and placing it woefully back on the mantel.

Pink notices the change in her father from where she crouches behind the coal bin. Mike too senses it, and creeps slowly out from beneath the table. Whilky Robinson cocks his big square head and turns his palms up to Heaven, and (oh God, gasps Pink, tears!) fat tears ooze from his stinging hungover eyes. I am not safe, even in my own house, he thinks. If They can just come in here and take whatever they please, what is left for us? He drops heavily onto his stool, surveying what used to be his kingdom but which has turned overnight into a pathetic hovel fit only for a pathetic, powerless man. They have gone too far this time, he whimpers. They have gone too far.

Sucking the blood from the tooth her father knocked loose, Pink inches around the coal bin to marvel at this stranger sitting on her father’s stool. He has Da’s red hair and wears Da’s jacket covered with medals, but where is Da’s bluster? Where is his pride? Mike rears back on his hind legs, gingerly sniffing, as if he shares Pink’s confusion.

She creeps out a centimetre more, and abruptly her father’s gaze turns to her.

“Comfort me, Pink,” Whilky Robinson wails, reaching out his arms to his dazed and bleeding daughter. “Yer Da has been violated.”

Dr. Henry Chiver saws through the sternum along the median line, taking care not to nick the soft organs beneath, and skirts the bottom of the rib cage. This one’s bones are frail, he thinks as the saw goes in, not much more trouble than cutting into a large dog’s chest. Setting aside his saw, he takes up a scalpel and divides the intercostal muscles, separates the costal cartilages on each side from their ribs, and carefully cuts through the pleura, which he will have his students examine in a moment. By his separating the two halves of the sternum and raising the cartilages on each side down to the diaphragm, they will be able to see the internal mammary artery, the intercostal nerves, and the three serous sacs of the thoracic cavity, one for each lung and one for the heart. The lungs, Henry sees, are strangely shrunken in their sacs and lie farther back as if pressed against the spine. Cholera lungs.

“Each sac is divided into a visceral and a parietal portion,” he says, pointing with his scalpel. “The visceral portion lines the exterior of the organ, while the parietal adheres to the cavity that contains it. Both surfaces are constantly lubricated with serum so that no friction might impede the movement of the organ.”

Four heads block his light and he has to ask them to step back again.

“Notice the pleura. It acts like the skin of the inner cavity. It proceeds from the sternum all the way back to the spinal column. It forms a septum, here; and here it adheres to the pericardium. Here it gathers around the root of the lung from which it extends, forming the pleura pulmonalis. This middle section, from the upper thorax, bounded by the sternum, vertebral column, and diaphragm below, is designated the ‘mediastinal space.’ You should be looking, Mazby, not writing.”

Andrew Mazby sets down his notebook with a blush.

“These two shiny gray bands running through the middle of the mediastinum are the phrenic nerves.” Henry plucks them lightly with the back of his scalpel. “They communicate with the diaphragm and the pericardium. As we go deeper into this woman’s body, you will learn the inescapability of symmetry. Nature does not provide one nerve without pairing it to a second. She invests us with two lungs, two kidneys, two eyes, two ears. Even the singular brain is divided into identical hemispheres. Even the heart has two corresponding auricles and ventricles. We are paired creatures. If you take nothing else away from your lessons, understand that. We cannot exist in singularity.