The Dress Lodger (41 page)

And yet he hesitates.

A household divinity. Your anatomist has had the phrase ringing in his skull since the first trespass of shovel to earth back at the Trinity Churchyard. Half of him feels like an impious grave robber, who with the profanation of the divinity’s tomb has invited a curse down upon himself. That trembling half would like nothing more than to return to Trinity; to violate the Pit one last time and restore this pathetic creature to his bed. The fevered half, however, the half that took him to the churchyard in the first place, will hear of no such thing. That half is still furious he ever indentured himself to the dress lodger, letting his relationship to her—with its favors and sick seductions—pervert his judgment. But now it is too late. He was wallowing in swill while his salvation was dying beside him. A household divinity. He lost the living heart, but now with wax and acid, he prepares to preserve its resurrection.

You hear the faint sound of glass chattering against glass, and notice that the little yellow lamp on the table where he works has begun to shudder. At first, irrationally, you think the lamp cannot bear to watch what is about to happen, but then you realize its trembling comes not from fear but from a pounding on the door below. The doctor is so engrossed in the new one that he doesn’t even look up. Had you a voice, you would warn him, but what can you really do, friend Fos: a jumble of rotting parts, tied up in a sheet, forgotten in a corner?

The arm that used to take your arm Is took to Surgeons’ Square And both my legs are gone to walk The hospital that’s there.

I vowed that you should have my hand But Fate gives us denial

You’ll find it there with Dr. Knox In spirits in a phial.

The cock it crows, I must be gone. Dear lover, we must part; And I’ll be yours in death although Damned Oliver has my heart!

“Dr. Chiver, open the door!”

Henry sets down his syringe, listening to the furious hammering from below. He knew she’d come sooner or later; he’s made his peace with it.

Carefully he lifts the infant, takes up the lamp, and descends the stairs, pausing in the foyer, where her pounding is shaking his portrait of Jeremy Bentham crooked on the wall. He pauses only for a moment, though, on his way to the back door and the shovel he left beside it. Outside, the neighbor’s black dog leaps onto the fence, barking in rhythm to the penny ballad Henry can’t seem to get out of his head. He barks the whole time Henry works, and his barking follows the doctor back into the pantry, where he pumps water over his hands and rinses the mud off into the basin. Deliberately, he dries his hands and makes his way down the hall.

Henry unlatches the front door. “Gustine, what are you doing here?”

She pushes past him and takes the stairs two at a time. Before he can catch up, she has the door to his study open and is inside, flinging wide his glass-fronted cabinet, knocking his instruments to the floor. She looks behind his curtains; on her hands and knees, she feels behind his low-stacked woodpile. She spies the tramp’s bundle of Fos in the corner and swiftly undoes the knot, then pushes it aside in disgust.

“Where is he?” she demands.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Henry stands in the doorway, watching her destroy his study. He makes no move to stop her but lets her vent her rage on his books and carefully ordered journals.

“Don’t play games with me,” she snarls. “I want my son.”

“What makes you think I have him?” he asks.

“If you don’t have him, then what is this for?” Gustine takes up the syringe he prepared. “Or this”—she kicks the pot of carefully measured wax and turpentine into the fire. “Why have out your saws and your knives, if not to dismantle my child?”

Outside, the neighbor’s black dog howls. Gustine flings wide his heavy drapes and stares down onto the pocked backyard. “Is it true what they say about you? That when you are through with us, you feed us to your dogs?”

“That’s enough,” Henry says, finally losing his composure. “You have no business here.”

“You had no business taking him.”

She pushes Henry aside, and bolts up the second flight of stairs to his bedroom. It is whitewashed and spartan only so long as it takes her to empty the drawers of the chiffonier, tear through his closet, and rip the bedclothes from the bed. The Austrian cuckoo clock is knocked from its shelf, his grandmother’s rocking chair overturned; in her passion she pauses only long enough to glare at the Sacred Heart he has hanging over his bed before dashing it to the ground.

“That will be enough, Gustine,” Henry orders, growing alarmed at her cold blue fury. “I am deeply sorry for your loss, but this tantrum will not bring him back.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Dr. Chiver,” Gustine pants. “I know you are hiding him here somewhere. Will you tell me where or shall I tear this whole house apart?” Before he can catch her, she has sped by him again, down past the second-floor landing and into the ground-floor parlour. He hears her slamming the piano lid, ripping apart sofa cushions, upturning lamps and tables. He jogs down the stairs behind her. This has gone on long enough.

“Stop it.” He grabs her arm as she lifts a Staffordshire vase to smash it.

“Don’tyou dare lay a hand upon me.”

It is the first time he has touched her since their night together, and he instantly pulls back, for her skin, laced with cemetery snow, sears his flesh. Leaving her in disgust, he stalks to the pantry and holds his hands under the pump.

Behind him, he hears the vase hit the wall. She returns to her demolition, not even bothering to search anymore, just mindlessly laying waste to his house. He hears his fire irons hurled across the room into his writing desk, the furious crack of a capsized marbletop table. Let her get it out, he tells himself; she will soon be gone, and he will be done with her forever. He is drying his hands when he realizes that an unnatural silence has fallen in the next room. When he turns, he finds Gustine behind him in the hallway, her eyes fixed upon the muddy shovel leaning against the back door. Henry quickly moves in front of it, but not quickly enough.

“I am glad he’s dead then,” Gustine whispers, reading all she needs to in his flushed face. “He was a child to me, Dr. Chiver, not a laboratory rat you could bury in the backyard when you were through.”

“He’s gone, Gustine,” Henry says, ready to use the shovel against her if she takes a step closer. “I understand you loved him, but if his future is to decay among suicides and murderers, wouldn’t you rather see him of service?”

“When are we ever supposed to rest, Dr. Chiver?” she asks him, tears of rage and exhaustion streaming down her cheeks. “While we live, we shovel your coal and cook your food and spread our legs, and then, when we have the gall to die, you tell us our work is still not done. No, we must toil for you even after Death has set us free.”

“You rest when we’ve cured all the world’s diseases,” the doctor says, as exhausted as she. “Because that’s when we get to rest.”

“All the cures in the world are not worth the afterlife of my son.”

“Do you think I enjoy this?” Henry shouts, finally losing his patience with this maddening girl. “William Harvey dissected his own father and sister after they died. He wept the whole time, but he knew he had a responsibility to science. We would know nothing of how blood circulates, nothing about the heart, without his sacrifice.”

“I pity your future wife, Dr. Chiver,” Gustine says. “You are faithful only to Death.”

“Gustine, I wanted to stop this,” he shouts. “Your child was to be my lifeline out of the graveyard.” Henry’s voice breaks with emotion. “If I could have raised him up and learned from him, maybe, just maybe, I could have begun to atone for a life of murder and deceit. But then you took him away. And here I am back among the damned. I am an enemy to both the living and the dead. Where am I to go? What can I do but continue on this path I seem unable to forsake? And whether its end shall be in Heaven or in Hell, I do not know.”

“I cannot fight you anymore,” Gustine says quietly. “My child deserves better than this. One day, I promise, you will feel what it’s like to sacrifice something you love.”

“If it were for the greater good, I would do so willingly,” he says.

“The greater good?” Gustine shrugs. “Good and Evil are opposite points on a circle, Dr. Chiver. Greater good is just halfway back to Bad.”

There is nothing more for them to say. Gustine has turned her back on him when a rock shatters the front parlour window and skitters to a stop at her feet. “Dr. Henry Chiver!” a voice bellows from the street. “Answer to the people!”

Gustine steps to the window and draws the curtains on the glare of Death, come to accuse the body snatcher of Nile Street. Heralded by torchlight and accompanied by the crashing of tin pans, the East End has risen, armed with Whilky’s posters impaled upon pitchforks and plastered on placards. TYRANNY! the posters cry, balled up and stuffed into a shirt and pair of pants to make a human figure, its head a hobbling pig’s bladder, painted with the features of the gutless anatomist. Give us back our John and Mary, scream the men with picks and axes, their wives swinging clubs and hammers. Release our Louisa, our Tom! In front, that trussed-fustian idiot Robert Cooley, who fought the doctors over Jack Crawford’s body, bangs a spoon upon a pot; beside him the disheveled pug-faced pawnbroker, Mag Scurr, hurls stones at the doctor’s door. And leading the riot from the graveyard across town to the doctor’s door, the wifeless, childless landlord of Mill Street uses today’s newspaper to ignite the effigy of Henry Chiver into a sour, smoking conflagration.

Gustine looks back at Henry, standing in the foyer, at last worthy of a riot of his own. He does not follow her to the window, but stares out the back door, over his seedbed of bones, the harvest he will reap for the remainder of his life.

“You know I didn’t take all those people,” he says resignedly. “It’s been going on as long as the poor have been dying.”

The dress lodger turns back to the sickening thud of shovels and axes splitting the doctor’s wooden shutters like ripe melons. Without another word, she flings wide the door and steps out as the squealing stampede of her fellow citizens races in, snorting over the doctor’s furniture and rooting through his things. She hears them take their axes to his shelves of specimen jars upstairs, turning his study floor into a sick curiosity shop of broken glass and leaking spirits, eyeballs and jellied breasts.

At the corner of Nile and High Streets, Gustine stops and turns to watch the effigy burn—Dr. Chiver’s ghostly twin, twisting from the branch of an overhanging tree. She stands alone and helpless beneath the naked flame of a broken gas lamp, knowing that nothing the crowd can destroy will make him feel the pain she did in losing her child. Oh, God, she rages against the cold night fog, Who will help her make this doctor suffer? God has given her the will, but with what weapon is a poor girl supposed to fight?

There is no question put to the Sunderland fog that it does not thoughtfully consider; but just as God supplies even his most devoted disciple with a displeasing answer from time to time, so the fog responds with what Gustine wants least in the world to see. Unsteady on her feet like a weaving drunk, the dress lodger’s lost shadow lumbers up High Street. Oh please, no, thinks Gustine, shutting her eyes in despair. She thought the old woman was gone for good. But why would she ever imagine she could escape her fate? In her heavy arms, the Eye carries a familiar bundle Gustine recognizes even from a distance as the neatly folded clothes her sailor was to deliver to the Place residence in the morning. What is she doing with them?

The old woman stops beneath the shining lamp, and like a disaffected magus holds the bundle out to her. You desired a weapon, she seems to say; I present you with one. Take up the true arms of poverty. Claim the contamination you were born to.

Onstage when two enemies finally meet to draw swords and battle to the death, there is always a moment like this—a mutual recognition of the same fixation, an acknowledgment of what locked them in opposition in the first place. We are enemies, yes, but in all the world, we alone understand each other. The Eye, in stealing Captain Place’s contaminated clothes, in handing them off to Gustine, surrenders the battle without a blow. Gustine sees in her enemy’s face everything she never thought to find there: compassion, pity, sadness, regret. I pass the sword to you, her face says. Use it to defeat our mutual enemy.

Why? wonders Gustine. Why help her now, when the Eye’s whole life has been set in opposition to hers? But then, as if sleep has been wiped from her eyes and she is suddenly, for the first time in two years, fully awake, the dress lodger sees and understands.

“You loved him, too? Didn’t you?” Gustine asks. “You loved my child.”

And in acknowledgment, the shadow, of her own free will, disengages forever, turns, and walks away.

Oh! Marrow, Oh! Marrow, Oh!

What dost thou think?

I’ve broken my bottle and spilt all my drink

I’ve lost all my shin splints among the great stones

Draw me to the shaft, lad, it’s time to go home!

In the second story of the leaning house on Little Villiers Street, a blown robin’s egg spins on a scarlet thread. And there, between two cobblestones, crushed by a cart into deep blue mortar, a dropped nosegay of violets. And over there, in the solemn procession of cattle led to slaughter on Queen Street, tied around the neck of that one cow whose wide eyes and white flanks are her only parts visible, while her black spots disappear into the night sky as if someone had already taken a bite out of her, a blue ribbon dangling a bell. Now that she’s cut loose from the dress, the Eye sees blue everywhere. In the spores of a moldy slice of bread fought over by seagulls, in a young girl’s hair, in the aureole of a streetlight. When did her vision narrow? she wonders. When did she start to see blue only in the body of a dress?

Oh! Marrow, Oh! Marrow, Oh! As to the robin’s egg and the violets and the cowbell, like a distracted child the Eye is drawn to the bright navy neckerchiefs worn by a handful of unemployed pitmen singing down by the river. Her thirty colliers used to sing that song as she pulled them to the surface, back when they called her a genius of vision, when her eyesight was so sharp she could see their very words condense against the iron bars and drip back into the hole. Down by the river, a new group of colliers sing, twanging a Jew’s harp and slapping their thighs. She watches them leap and clap in the orange light of burning barrels, hauntingly clean from weeks of unemployment. Come along and jig with us, Mother, shouts a pitman, catching sight of the exhausted old Eye. He lays claim to her arm, fitting it into the crook of his, and spins her dizzily around. What dost thou think? I’ve broken me bottle and spilt all me drink! At his touch, Eye blushes to the roots of her grizzled hair, for she has never had even the limited awakening of most old maids, whose fantasies might at least fall upon their fathers’ best friends or their golden-throated parish priests. Until now, Eye’s circumscribed life has not even admitted the hope of human contact, much less a pitman’s hand on the small of her back or his thigh against hers in the pivot of a figure. Kick up your heels, Mother, laughs the pitman. We’re dancing away the cholera morbus.