by Anita Shreve
“Olympia, fetch me some clean dressings,” he instructs. “There, in that metal cabinet.”
She finds the gauze and torn strips of cloth where he has said she would and hands them to Haskell.
“Contrary to established medical opinion, there is no intrinsic value to pus,” he says, unwinding the filthy bandages and gesturing to the exudation of a purple stump that emits such a powerfully noxious odor that she involuntarily puts the back of her hand to her nose and steps away. “It does but tell us that the patient is suffering and that the wound is infected,” he continues. “I have given orders that any person who walks into the clinic with a malodorous dressing should be seen to at once, but it is sometimes difficult to convince a provincial nursing staff who have been taught otherwise.”
Olympia looks over at Nurse Paquet, whose sullen expression does not change. Olympia watches as Haskell removes instruments from the pots of boiling water. After he has thoroughly cleaned the wound with carbolic acid, he begins to scrape away at the infection. The patient, despite Haskell’s soothing words and deft curettage, cannot keep himself from crying out at the pain. Olympia does observe, however, that Haskell is quick and precise in his gestures and that when the pain seems to be intolerable, he stops and administers laudanum by a teaspoon to ease his patient’s distress — which, miraculously, it does. The man, who ceases his shouting and trembling, lies still as Haskell finishes the job and bandages up the wound again.
That afternoon Haskell sets a broken leg, gives numerous injections, uses a pulmotor on a young man in the last stages of white lung, and treats another man who complains of a parched tongue, fevers in the night, and pain near his nipples. He diagnoses a case of scarlet fever on the basis of a telltale, ash gray patch on the palate, he cleans an abcess, he thumps a child’s back for pleurisy, and he dispenses tonics. One of the boys who fell into the river dies that afternoon as a result of his injuries, and the woman who was grunting in the waiting room is delivered of a healthy girl (though not by Haskell himself).
Through all of this, Olympia is watchful, as though she were being introduced to a second language and must pay close attention. Several times she feels her stomach rise toward her throat, but she is determined to betray no weakness. Occasionally Haskell bids her don a mask in the presence of highly infectious disease, and he constantly reminds her to wash her hands, which she makes nearly raw by the time the afternoon is over. And though she seeks to keep her composure, it is impossible to remain unmoved by the persons who are treated by Haskell, and sometimes she finds herself close to tears. Toward the end of her visit to the clinic, a boy and a woman come in with itching between their fingers, which have begun to bleed rather badly. Haskell diagnoses scabies. But the true malady, Olympia can see at once, is poverty, the likes of which she has never come across before. The woman is inebriated, and Olympia thinks the boy may be, too, although he cannot be more than ten. The woman has on a blouse of faded green silk with a narrow scarf of black wool tied round her neck. Her hair hangs down from a soiled boater in hacked clumps. The boy’s clothes — an old cotton shirt, trousers, and a waistcoat — are so big for him, they have to be rolled and braced. The mother’s black boots are broken, and the boy is barefoot.
When Olympia looks at those narrow feet, encrusted not with sand but with filth, she feels a rush of shame. To have reveled in being barefoot just hours earlier now seems almost unnecessarily insensitive. How can she disdain what so few have? Haskell looks over at her then, and she thinks she must be pale.
And he does look at her this day. He does. Many times. A dozen times, perhaps. He catches her eye, and though no words pass between them — and he does not change his expression nor interrupt his conversation with a patient — each glance to Olympia seems laden with content. These glances are, in an odd sort of way, both disturbing and comforting to her. Several times, under his acute gaze, she is afraid she will simply break apart or disintegrate. But then she collects herself, for all around her there are the sick and the injured who require, at the very least, another’s rapt attention.
Curiously, none of the patients questions her presence. Perhaps it is her gray chemise and navy skirt, or an absence of adornment that causes them to take her for a nurse-in-training or a novice; and it seem to be acceptable to them that she remain in the room during their treatment. What they cannot know, and indeed she can barely bring to consciousness herself, is that though she observes the workings of the clinic, she studies the physican as well. She is a novitiate, but not, as the patients believe, in the nursing arts.
For when she finally leaves the clinic that early evening, she will not be the same person she was when she entered. In the space of five hours, she will see more of human pain and suffering and relief than she has in the whole of her life. Yes, her father can tell her about the world, or she can read about it in books, or discuss it in polite conversation at the dinner table, but always at a safe remove. During the course of the afternoon, Haskell shows her something of the real and the visceral. He opens up the seams and makes her look. And in a strange manner, he is preparing her, but not in the way either of them has imagined: It is a rapid and brutal initiation into the ways of the body, a glimpse of what is possible, a taste of future intimacy. Later, she will come to understand that it was as much his nature to initiate her in this manner as it was hers to invite this instruction.
• • •
Toward evening, the clinic begins to grow quiet, as one by one the patients are sent home or are admitted to makeshift wards. After Haskell has seen a small child with measles, he says to Malcolm, who seems to be a general handyman, though the man has evident fluency with the names of the medical instruments and tonics, “I am just going to run Miss Biddeford home, and then I shall return after I have had a meal. Nurse Paquet will be in charge until I get back.”
“Yes, sir,” Malcolm answers, “but before you go, Mrs. Bonneau is asking if you can attend to a young woman who is powerful overwrought with the birthing pains. She says to bring the laudanum, as it is a breech and likely to cause the mother some galling troubles.”
Haskell looks at Olympia.
“There is no need to hurry to take me home,” she says quickly. “My father will not miss me, as he thinks that I am with the Farraguts. And they have almost certainly given up expecting me and doubtless think me at home with my father. So I am, for the moment, in a sort of limbo of freedom as regards my whereabouts.”
This is not entirely true, as she well knows; her father, having woken from his Fourth of July nap, could indeed be looking for her at this very moment. But she also knows that the day itself permits a certain latitude not normally available to her and that if she is clever, and her father has drunk enough, she will be able to excuse her absence to her father’s satisfaction.
Haskell finishes washing his hands and dries them on a cloth Malcolm is holding. Olympia watches him unroll the cuffs of his shirtsleeves and fasten the links, which he has kept in his trouser pocket. He removes his apron, wads it into a ball, and tosses it into a laundry basket in the corner. There is a smear of blood near his shoulder, and his face has lost some of its color with fatigue. Later, she will understand that he is biding his time, thinking hard about the consequences of taking her with him to the room in which Mrs. Bonneau and her charge wait; for he understands, as she does not, that she is about to see something for which no preparation will be adequate and which, once witnessed, can never be erased from the memory.
He lifts his coat from the hook on the back of the door. “There is a satchel of boiled cloths in the cabinet in the next room, Olympia,” he says. “It is not heavy. If you would bring that, we could go now.”
• • •
The light has softened some, and there are shadows on the streets. A cool, damp breeze from the east slips through the narrow alleys and washes over them at regular intervals. The sky is a vivid azurine, unblemished by clouds. It will be a lovely evening, Olympia knows, and even now, on this ugliest of
streets, the light plays wondrously upon the bricks, catching a pane of glass and making it shimmer silver, turning the tops of the leaves of the trees a trembling pink. They walk side by side, saying little, trying to ignore the filth in their path, not only the detritus of the city’s daily life but also the leavings of a holiday’s many revelers: broken bottles, some human waste, articles of clothing shed and not retrieved, puddles of dishwater slung from second-story windows, wrappings of half-eaten food, crockery that reeks of beer. More than once, Olympia fears for her head and wishes fervently that she had a hat. But they reach the designated row house without incident and climb the stairs to the place where the unfortunate woman lives. Haskell opens the door and walks in without knocking.
The room is no bigger than the one Olympia sleeps in at Fortune’s Rocks, a cramped chamber with only one window that looks out upon a wall not ten feet away. Though it is still day, there is little light, and it takes a moment for Olympia to adjust her eyesight to the gloom. On the bed, a woman lies in apparent agony, for she writhes and clenches her teeth and then lets her breath out in sharp gusts, calling out words in a French so accented and tortured, Olympia cannot understand her. Her skirts have been rucked up to the tops of her thighs, and even from the doorway Olympia can see the blood on her skin and on the grimy pillow ticking beneath her. Her naked legs, moving and twisting on the bed, are a shock to the senses, and Olympia feels as if she had upturned a rock and come unexpectedly upon a mass of transparent worms, colorless from never having been exposed to the sun.
Olympia breathes shallowly. She fights the impulse to gag and to back out of the door.
In a moment, Haskell has shed his jacket. A quick perusal of the room indicates an absence of a water pump, and she can see him deciding to forgo washing his hands in the interests of time. As he sits upon the bed, his fingers disappear beneath the slim modesty of the thin band of cloth that hides the most private self of the woman, whose name, Olympia learns, is Marie Rivard. Haskell occupies himself thus for a moment and seems to confirm what he has been told. He speaks in French to Mrs. Bonneau, an older woman with a nervous bearing who tells him that she was summoned by one of the woman’s children, who was fearful for her mother’s life. And that this was largely the scene when she arrived. She adds, with much expression and many imprecations, that the young woman on the bed is a recent immigrant. There was a husband, but he abandoned his wife and children some months earlier. Marie Rivard, who must be in her late twenties, Olympia thinks — although it is impossible to give an age to the writhing apparition on the bed — has been unable to find work because she has been with child.
Olympia notices then the other occupants of the room: three children, none of whom can be more than nine years old, sitting on the floor against a wall. All are barefoot and wear soiled dresses of the most distressing cloth, dark and colorless and long wrenched out of shape. It is apparent that the children have not bathed in quite some time. The stench in the small airless cubicle is considerable.
The walls of the room are unpapered and have turned dark and greasy from years of cooking. There is no wardrobe, nor any trunk in the room, merely a shallow pantry; and when its door is opened, Olympia is surprised to discover that it is not crammed full of the occupants’ belongings, but is nearly bare. Although a man’s jacket hangs upon a hook, there are no other signs of a man in residence. A corner of the room, where the floor meets the joining, is burned as though there was once a fire there. Above the encrusted stove are rude kitchen implements: a colander, a knife, a pot. A few garments hang from nails hammered into moldings. She notes that there is no sign of a toy or of a plaything for any of the children. In the recesses of the sill of the window, however, is a tall stack of folded clothing partially wrapped in brown paper. Beside that package is a silver filigree frame of a man and a woman on their wedding day. The bride has on a long white satin dress with a delicate mantilla that falls forward onto her brow. The man, in a heavy woolen suit, stands as though at attention. Olympia looks from the woman in the photograph to the woman on the bed. Can it be that they are the same person? And if so, how is it that this astonishing photograph and frame have escaped being sold for food, as nearly everything else in the room appears to have been?
Haskell loses no time in spooning laudanum into the laboring woman’s mouth. He uses his own utensil and takes care that no drops are spilled. The writhing on the bed lessens, and the unspeakable cries subside into low moans.
“Olympia, give me the satchel.”
She hands over the bag of boiled cloths and watches with curiosity and admiration as Haskell takes a sheet from the bag, makes the bed on one side, rolls the sheet taut, and, with a trick she cannot not quite catch the mechanics of, slips the sheet under the woman and quickly fastens the bedclothes on the other side. Covering the woman’s lower extremities with a white cloth, he and Mrs. Bonneau manage to remove Marie Rivard’s soiled clothing.
“Olympia, would you see if you can find the pump?” he asks quietly and evenly, as though he were merely asking her for a pencil in the midst of contemplating a correction to a half-written paragraph. “Get that pot there, and bring it back full of water. I need to wash the woman.”
Olympia removes the cooking pot from its hook over the stove and walks into the hallway in search of a pump. She knows it must be out in the back of the brick house, but she cannot at first determine how to get to the rear of the building without having to go round the entire block and into the alley. She does finally discover, however, a small door in the basement that leads up and out into a parched garden. The pump in its center is rusty and jerky in its motions; but after several barren tries, Olympia finally gets the water to flow. The stench from the nearby privy is nearly overpowering, and she thinks it cannot have been emptied in some time. Breathing shallowly, she fills the pot, retraces her steps, and climbs the two flights of stairs back to the room she just left. When she arrives, she finds the door shut and the three children waiting out in the hallway. They sit on the floor, their pale legs extended before them, snipping buttons from garments of clothing they lift from the paper parcel Olympia saw on the sill, taking care not to let the cloth touch the floor. With expert motions, they flick their small knives, pop the buttons into the air, catch them easily and toss them into a can they have set in front of them. If the scene were not so haunting in its implications, the skill with which the children accomplish their task, their hands flying almost faster than the eye can see, would be astonishing and perhaps even amusing. But as their dexterity speaks only to the hundreds of hours the children must have spent honing such a skill, any astonishment or amusement Olympia might feel quickly turns to dismay.
From behind the door to the room, she hears a deep guttural cry. The children do not stir. Only the smallest child, who cannot be more than three years old, stops for a moment and sucks her thumb, which the oldest girl almost immediately bats out of her mouth with her hand.
Olympia stands helplessly with the pot in her arms, not knowing what to do for the children. She knocks once on the door, and the old woman opens it. She takes the pot from Olympia and puts it on the stove. When Olympia looks at the laboring woman on the bed, she is confronted with a most extraordinary sight. Haskell has maneuvered Marie Rivard so that she is on her elbows and knees. Haskell kneels with his arms between her thighs, his hands plunged deeply inside her. Olympia’s abdomen contracts with a sympathetic sensation. But she finds that she cannot turn away.
Of the reality of childbirth, Olympia has only the haziest of notions, her knowledge of anatomy inexpert at best. Childbirth is more than just a mystery to her; it is a subject about which no polite person has ever spoken — not even Lisette, who has educated her as to some of the facts of life but who has confined herself to those bits of information absolutely necessary for Olympia to enter the first stages of womanhood. Thus she is both fearful and exhilarated by the sight of a woman’s open legs, her most private place stretched sore and purple, violated not only by h
er physician’s hands but also by the rude life that pushes relentlessly against her and makes her moan in drugged stupor. If Olympia has any conscious thoughts at all those few astonishing moments, it is to wonder at the cruelty of a God who can only with violence and pain and suffering bestow his great gift of children upon mankind.
As she watches, transfixed, Haskell appears to tussle with the infant, as if pulling a stubborn turnip from hard-packed ground. The woman screams, even with the laudanum. Copious amounts of blood spill onto the white bed sheet. But Haskell seems satisfied with the event, even as he withdraws one hand and pushes hard against the woman’s belly, massaging and kneading the living mass that lies beneath. In no time at all, it seems, Haskell abruptly shifts position and gently turns the woman onto her back. He cups his palms like a priest expecting holy water. The slippery purple and blue creature slides out entirely into its new world.
Haskell takes a cloth from the satchel and wipes fluids from the baby’s eyes and nose and mouth. He holds the infant at an odd angle. Olympia sees that it is a girl. Immediately they hear the first cry; and within several breaths, the skin sheds its bluish cast and pinkens. Olympia begins to weep — from relief or from exhilaration or from the shock of the birth, she cannot tell.
Haskell examines the infant’s extremities and orifices and uses the warmed water to wash the child clean. He attends to the mother and extracts further matter from her womb. Exhausted by her labors, the mother falls into a deep sleep that feigns death. He gives instructions to Mrs. Bonneau, who places the clean infant at the breast of the inert mother. Haskell listens to Marie Rivard’s breathing and gives further instructions. It is the first time this day Olympia hears irritation in his voice, and she thinks it must be a result of his own exhaustion or perhaps his dismay and frustration at the appalling circumstances of the impoverished family.
