Tipperary (12 page)

Mr. Egan introduced me. “Mr. O'Brien, come here till you meet my friend and colleague Mr. Juniper Singh.”

The man smelt of coconut, and he had a delightful smile. I learned that he supplied Mr. Egan with powdered juniper, whose efficacy contributed much to Mr. Egan's repute; it often proved satisfactory in the release from “the stone.” Many Irish people build stones in their kidneys; Mr. Egan takes the opinion that it comes of drinking too much milk.

Juniper Singh agreed: “Yes, very definitely, very very definitely. Much too much milk. And we must not forget—much too much cream.”

I shall refer again and again to my seven years with Mr. Egan—they proved enchanting. At the end of it my father said, “Hippocrates is up against it now” and then added, “And so, by the way, is King Croesus.”

At which I smiled ruefully, and thanked him mightily, told him that I would prove a credit to him. He said that I already was, that he had been hearing details from all around the countryside as to what a kind healer I was turning out to be, and that several people believed that they owed to me some great improvements in their lives. It was true that I had visited many homes—always, of course, with Mr. Egan. We saw myriad patients with myriad illnesses; some we cured utterly and some less so.

Especially satisfying to me were those cures, as with my ringworm, where everything else had failed. A man in North Cork approached our booth at a cattle fair one day and asked whether we could help cure his throat ailment. He opened his mouth; Mr. Egan looked in, recoiled a little, and then said to me, “Mr. O'Brien, I'd much appreciate your opinion.”

I looked in too, and this poor fellow's throat was shining-red raw— how he spoke I do not know. Mr. Egan looked at me inquiringly, and we both pondered for a little time.

“Do you swallow much?” I asked the gentleman. “I mean—outside of when you are eating or drinking?”

Later, Mr. Egan confided that he thought me brilliant for thinking of such a question.

“I have a nervous disposition,” said the man. “I swallow a lot even when my mouth is dry, and it's a bit of a habit with me now.”

“You mean—when something threatens you or makes you feel uncertain, you swallow.”

“And swallow again,” said the man. “My wife is a bit on the harsh side.”

“Therefore,” I deduced, “if you have nothing to swallow, you merely rub the sides of your throat against each other.”

So I devised a small piece of iron for him, to keep in his cheek until he recovered from the habit. In other words, I replaced his fears with a greater fear—that of swallowing the iron, which, I told him, he should never be able to pass through his system, and that it would therefore live in him and rust in his body's waters and cause severe illness.

Then we gave him a sage-and-chamomile powder, told him to make it as if making tea, and to gargle with it. Mr. Egan lastly sold him a lavender-and-eucalyptus oil, which the sufferer must rub into the skin of the throat. He went on his way a pleased man and, as the word spread around the fair, we spent the rest of that day overwhelmed with people seeking our skills.

On the easy pathway to his “career” decision—love of the countryside, the wish to discover his nation, the desire to heal—Mr. O'Brien omitted one colorful detail. In his youth he would have seen interesting travelers arrive at his home. Nineteenth-century rural Ireland abounded with itinerants of all kinds. Every country fair, parish, town, and village had a traveling somebody-or-other—herbalist, singer, peddler, storyteller, troupe of actors. Many of these, such as Juniper Singh, had an exotic whiff.

Peddlers, often with their goods on a brightly colored tray or in a gaudy tin box, sold hairpins, bootlaces, cotton thread on reels, cards of elastic, needles, and pins, decks of playing cards. Juniper Singh (whom it has proven impossible to trace) was almost certainly an Indian peddler who got to Ireland via London and Liverpool, and whose exotic appearance formed part of his commercial style. Other itinerants, dressed like Gypsies, told fortunes. “Cross my palm with silver,” they said, and, naturally, the more silver coins, the rosier the future.

The healers sold magical oils—hair restorers, “vigor potions” for men, elixirs of love and life. More seriously, they brought cures, which would be discussed long after they had departed. Some claimed to specialize, such as in settling rheumatism or, in Mr. Egan's case, curing ringworm, which was widespread in the rural communities.

Renown went according to efficacy, and fame was available. Certainly the arrival of a healer with a reputation brought an audience. To this day, certain healers—admittedly of the more mystical kind—will pack the halls in some Irish counties. A seventh son of a seventh son is still thought to possess extraordinary powers.

Charles O'Brien made no such quasi-divine claims. He served his time to a man who at least had tried to understand how herbs worked in various treatments. Formal medicine had not been available to the dispossessed Irish peasantry. Therefore, their reliance upon nature and its blessings continued, in part, far into the twentieth century.

His brevity at that moment in his text arose from his great passion. At a point when he might have been expected to write expansively of his healing works and his interest in curing people, he proved impatient to get down on paper what he saw as the main event of his life. Whether from a desire to share it with his putative readers or from a need to objectify it by writing it down and then viewing it, he fairly races to it.

In effect, he withholds the experiences and observations of several years of traveling around Ireland (and major information about his own place in history) in order to begin describing what he considered the crucial moment of his existence.

It is time to introduce the first accounts of the enduring passion at my Life's core. This madness, this obsession, began (as I have earlier stated) in 1900, on a November afternoon in Paris, and it endures to this day, more than twenty years later.

When my seven-year apprenticeship with Mr. Egan matured and when I—or, rather, my father—had purchased from him my rights to use his many secrets, Mr. Egan and I parted company in a most amicable way and I set out on my own. I was in my twenty-eighth year.

My mentor and teacher had kindly allotted to me many of his patients, some of them ill indeed, and I began my journeys here, there, and everywhere to see them. Mr. Egan and I had undertaken to avoid conflicting our interests at fairs and suchlike—we reached an arrangement whereby I would practice in the North and West in the winter, the South and East in the summer; in his travels, Mr. Egan would reverse this. We joked that we might meet in Athlone, the very center of the country, at the equinoxes of mid-March and mid-September.

My visits seemed to fall out, turn and turn about, in the homes of the native Irish and the Anglo-Irish. They continued in this fashion for a decade—a decade of enjoyable travel and mostly rewarding attention to the ill and the frail. People recommended me to their friends and relations, and often I found myself being handed around in a circle of appreciative connection.

One such circle, when my fame, such as it is, had spread, led me to attend—with great success—Lady Mollie Carew in her summer home at Bantry. (For obvious reasons of taste and discretion, there will be many occasions when I do not reveal the nature of what I was required to address.)

Lady Mollie was a well-traveled woman and a
gourmande;
my herbs and powders allowed her to continue her enjoyment of food on the epic scale that had become her way. During August 1900, I spent a most enjoyable few days with her; we sat on her lawns and watched seamist roll up from the Atlantic Ocean on evenings of great balm; she seemed most contented, and we knew great fondness for each other.

In November 1900, then, I received a letter from her, sent to my parents' home in Tipperary. (Fortunately, I had been in Kilkenny and intended to call and see my family, from whom I had been away that year for several months.) She had written to ask urgently whether I could, with my “great powers,” discreetly help her “dear friend.” If I would journey to Paris, she would provide for me “to meet this great person and I only pray that you shall arrive in time.”

For Lady Mollie I would undertake any obligement, and I know that she would be the first to agree that many mutual appreciations have passed between us—but she spurred me further with the name of her friend, which caused me intense excitement. I left home immediately and traveled in a welter of anticipation. By nightfall I was headed to the coast, thence to England, thence by train to Dover, and thence (with a short delay occasioned by fog in the English Channel) to Calais—and at last Paris, where, one morning at eleven o'clock, I presented Lady Mollie's letter of introduction and met my patient.

I was the fifth person in the room that noontide—and one of us became immortal. The visiting doctor, from Her Majesty's Embassy, went home to take luncheon with his wife. Another English gentleman, his face turned away from the rest of us, wept freely—in anticipation, I suspected, of the mourning to come. A nursing attendant came and went, sour as a sloe. And I? I had come to heal the man who grew immortal.

My letter of introduction was taken in hand by the English gentleman, a Mr. Turner, who dried his tears and exclaimed, “Ah, Lady Mollie Carew's healer”—at which point the doctor, I observed, graciously excused himself. I was led forward to the bedside, but could only see my patient from behind—the bed had been turned about in the apartment and faced the window for the sunlight.

Many rooms of infirmity give off an odor—of medicine, of physical failing; in this bedchamber, I caught the scent of lavender.

“He's here,” said Mr. Turner to the person in the bed, and stepped aside for me to be greeted, and to greet.

I saw a man in considerable pain, and then I heard a man of unforgettable voice.

“Sir, I have been awaiting your kind skills,” said Mr. Oscar Wilde to me—Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

I felt shy, but not intimidated—a man of such perfect manners knows how to put one at ease. He bade me sit beside him and began a pleasant interrogation; he asked me a multitude of questions about my journeys, the people I had met, the cures that I had effected, my family. When I told him that my mother came from the same stock as his great playwriting predecessor Oliver Goldsmith, his eyes lit up.

“Dear Noll,” he said. “I was told that he looked like an ape. His appearance was so grotesque that children threw stones at him in the street. I take it that your mother fared better?”

I assured him of her beauty.

Could it be that this remarkable man was to be my patient? His name aroused such passion—of opprobrium and support. He had written one of the most delightful plays in the world,
The Importance of Being Earnest,
which I myself had seen four times. On the heels of this and other great successes, he had then been tormented in three court trials.

I had long known what he looked like—who could have not? His jowled face, his velvet suits, the tapered alabaster hand holding out a flower to the world—these had been every caricaturist's delight.

I said, “Sir, I hope that I may have the honor to do you kindness; please let me take your hand.”

A patient's touch writes a message to me; a hand says more than a face; a grip will tell more than a frown. Mr. Wilde had an excellent hand, though a trifle cold; more significantly, he did not confine himself to a passing handshake—he took my hand and held it, and I felt the urgency of his appeal.

His face had become mottled and purple; he had not shaved for many days; his great eyes looked at me like carriage-lamps, with the appeal of a creature seeking help in a desperate way.

“I am in terrible pain,” he said, “and I have no money. I cannot tell which of these cuts goes deeper.”

“Where does your physical ache hurt?” I asked.

He gestured. On the side of his head farthest from me and therefore until that moment out of my sight, his ear wore a heavy dressing.

“They say that I am deeply infected,” he said. “And—” He hesitated; I waited. “I miss my children. I have two boys, you know. They are not allowed to see their papa. They are not allowed to remember him. Do you have a son?”