City of God

by Swerling, Beverly

  The other man was still attempting to convince himself. “And there is the matter of your grandfather, Andrew Turner. One of my predecessors, wasn’t he?”

  Andrew Turner, who died in 1818, had taken on the job of director of Bellevue (then known as the City Hospital) before the Revolution and had continued for a decade after.

  “Indeed,” Nick said. “Also my three times great grandfather, Christopher Turner.” In colonial times Christopher Turner had made his reputation for brilliant surgery at the first Almshouse Hospital, which stood where City Hall was now. Nick had been taken to see the spot when he was a lad on a visit to Grandfather Andrew.

  “I’m aware,” Grant said, “that you have a distinguished medical lineage, sir.”

  “I shall try to live up to it.”

  “Very well, you shall have a tour. Then I shall ask again if you’re quite sure this post is for you.”

  “And I am quite certain I shall tell you again that it is.” Nick had already given instructions that his house in Providence was to be sold.

  Grant smiled and stood up. Nick did the same. He was at least a head taller than the man who would be his superior. And while Tobias Grant, though bald as a cue ball, cultivated a full beard, Nick Turner was clean shaven. He had the Turner family red hair, and it always seemed to him that a redhead with a beard looked like a pirate.

  “You can leave your bags,” Grant said. “Presuming your response remains that you will take us on, I’ll have someone bring them to your rooms.”

  The place was wretched beyond belief, filth and disarray and misery past any normal man’s ability to imagine; in truth Nick had expected as much. He had not foreseen black magic.

  The dispensary was in the basement, an evil-smelling dungeon hung about with ropes and pulleys and winches and lined with huge barrels and flagons and beakers, some bubbling atop coal stoves and others fitted with hoses that dripped strange fluids slowly into an assortment of pails. Along with all the chemical odors it stank of dead rodent, and there were mouse and rat droppings everywhere. Nick suspected Jeremiah Potter the chief apothecary might actually encourage the vermin. Eye of newt and toe of frog, that sort of thing.

  Potter was wizened and old, with tufts of hair sprouting from both ears, and blind, or near enough as made no difference. A monocular was screwed in place in his left eye. The right was missing, and in its place he’d inserted a white ball painted with a fantastic and exaggerated black eyeball.

  “Don’t need to see. Been here forty years. Know where everything is,” he’d told Nick the first time they met. “Do it all by touch and taste and feel.”

  “I’d be careful what I tasted if I were you,” Nick said. “Now tell me what’s available. I don’t suppose you have a written list.”

  “Don’t have time to write nothing down. Don’t need to. Docs come down and tell me what the symptoms is and I give ’em what’s needed. Never have no complaints. Anyway, report directly to the director, I do. Nothing to do with the Senior Medical Attendant. Jeremiah Potter, Chief Apothecary, runs his own department.”

  “Quite. I’m also told you charge me and the resident doctor and the medical students for whatever you prescribe.”

  “Course I do. How else am I going to pay for all what’s needed down here?”

  “From the hospital budget I imagine.” He had ignored the apothecary’s snort of derision. “Leaving myself out of it, how are the other doctors supposed to afford your”—he’d started to say rubbish, then decided there was no point in making Potter an enemy—“the medicaments you concoct. They can’t afford it. I can’t afford it.” His salary was a hundred eighty a month augmented with room and board, though so far most of the food he’d been served was inedible. He’d taken to having his main meal of the day at a nearby farmhouse where a widow cooked for a few locals. The resident got a hundred, and the students—a changing roster of two or three from either the school of medicine at Columbia College or the one that was part of the new University of the City of New York—were supposed to pay ten dollars a week for the privilege of working on the Bellevue wards, three dollars of which had long been a perquisite of the Senior Medical Attendant, skimmed off before he turned the balance over. Nick had already informed the students that he would waive his bonus; they could pay only seven dollars a week as long as in return they promised conscientious execution of their duties. To further make the point he’d established a series of fines for lateness and other signs of slacking.

  Jeremiah Potter was not concerned with any attempt to improve the quality of care at Bellevue. “Not my lookout how much money them student doctors has,” he’d insisted on Nick’s first visit. “They pays me and gets it back from the patients. That’s how it’s supposed to be done.”

  “Good Christ, man, the patients are paupers. If they were not, they wouldn’t be here.”

  “Not my lookout,” the old man repeated. And he’d walked away.

  After five days at Bellevue, Nick intended this second encounter to end differently. “We need tincture of calomel on all the wards. Not as a purge.” It was common practice to dose the constipated with mercurous chloride as calomel was scientifically known, but Nick had his doubts about the wisdom of that. “To treat flea bites and other skin lesions. I want four quarts at least delivered to my office every morning, including Sunday. It’s a work of mercy. No preacher alive could object.” The apothecary closed shop on Sunday, saying he was busy with his devotions.

  “I’ll send up double the supply on Saturday,” Potter said now. “Cost you three dollars a fortnight. Payable in advance.”

  “Tell the director what you’re owed. It’s a basic necessity of running the medical service. It should come out of general funds.”

  “You tell Grant whatever you like. I’ll deliver your calomel just as you say, long as I’m paid in advance. Don’t matter to me where the money comes from.”

  “But—”

  “You are wasting your time arguing with him,” a woman’s voice said from somewhere over Nick’s left shoulder. “He is a venal old devil who cares for nothing but his purse. Dr. Turner isn’t it? The new senior attendant?”

  Nick turned to the voice and found himself face to face with a lady, decently dressed and clearly respectable. She was the first such he’d seen in this place, where the only nurses—male and female—were a few unfortunates assigned from the prison wing. She carried a basket over her arm, covered with a clean white cloth. Clean cloths of any color were as rare in the almshouse as respectable women.

  “You are correct, madam. Dr. Nicholas Turner,” with a small bow. “And may I know who you are?”

  “Mrs. Turner, as it happens.” She shifted her attention to the apothecary, putting an assortment of walnut-sized half-cent coins and tiny half-dimes as well as two English shillings on the scarred wooden counter. “I will have a jar of tansy cream and a beaker of spring tonic.” Then, turning back to Nick, “Mrs. Joyful Turner. My late husband was your second cousin once removed. At least that’s as near as I can work it out. He had that same fiery red hair.”

  She was tall and slender, somewhere in her forties, Nick judged. Had to have been a beauty in her day, though now the hair that showed below her bonnet was more gray than gold and there were lines of tiredness and care creasing her face. “Joyful Turner. Yes, of course. My Grandfather Andrew spoke of him.”

  He remembered now. Grandfather had written of the tragedy when it happened. Cousin Joyful and his infant twin boys dead of the yellowing fever in the epidemic of 1816. The old man had taken it hard, died himself two years later. And Nick’s father, Andrew’s son, the year after that in an influenza epidemic. Nick had been a lad of fourteen at the time, and since his mother had died bearing him and his father never remarried, he’d felt himself painfully bereft. What must it have been for this woman to lose husband and children together? “Cousin Manon,” he said with a small bow.

  “Cousin Nicholas.” She smiled and he saw a flash of the old beauty. “A full b
eaker, you old rascal. I’ll not be cheated.” This directed at the apothecary who was siphoning a green and viscous liquid into a glass receptacle.

  “But what are you doing here?” Nick asked.

  “I come as often as I can to nurse the women. I was planning to visit the parturition ward today. Is that acceptable, Dr. Turner? No one has objected before, but of course if you—”

  “No, no. Of course not. It’s very good of you. And I take it,” he nodded towards the coins the apothecary was just now sweeping from the counter into a canvas money bag, “you are paying for these supplies out of your own funds.”

  She shrugged. “I’m a widow, and childless. I do not need much. I’m happy to share what I have.”

  “What about this tincture of calomel you’re wanting?” The apothecary was impatient with their talk. “Three dollars a fortnight, like I said. In advance.”

  “Yes, very well. Here’s the first payment.” Nick reached into his pocket and brought out two silver dollars, and a paper bill issued by the state of Rhode Island.

  “Don’t hold with paper money,” the apothecary said.

  “You’ll take it and like it, old man. It’s what I have.”

  The apothecary picked up the bill and held it close to his monocular. “Rhode Island, eh?”

  “Yes. And backed by the same gold as backs the paper money of any state in the Union.”

  The bill and the two coins disappeared into the apothecary’s canvas bag, and the two men spent another moment discussing the strength of the tincture Nick required. When Nick turned around, Manon was gone.

  She was, however, waiting for him in the corridor beside the narrow and twisting stairs that led to the hospital wards above. “You can’t go on simply buying medicine for every ward of the hospital out of your own pocket,” she admonished.

  “I believe that’s what’s known as the pot calling the kettle black.”

  “That’s as may be. But I am here only two or three times each week, and I spend a few coppers on what might be useful for half a dozen patients on a given day. You are responsible for all of them every day. It’s a different matter entirely.”

  “You’re right, of course. I shall speak to the director.”

  She made a face. “You will have no joy of Dr. Grant. Don’t waste your breath.”

  “The senior attendant before me…”

  “Was as venal and greedy as Grant himself. To be allowed to continue here the students had to pay him an extra dollar a week beyond the customary three. And he spent his time in a lucrative private practice in the town and only came to Bellevue to collect what he could.”

  He’d wondered why his rooms, though a quite decent suite at the top of the building, had the air of not having been lived in for some time. “I see. What do you suggest I do, then? It all sounds rather hopeless.”

  “The only solution is to go over Grant’s head to the Common Council. But you can’t do so publicly. Grant would sack you at once. He has the power to do that.”

  “Then…”

  “You have one possibility. I have considered it myself, but there is an old and bitter quarrel standing in the way.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “Samuel Devrey,” Manon said. “He’s a more distant cousin, but a cousin nonetheless. And he has a seat on the council.”

  “But if the Turner and Devrey family feud still counts for anything, and if you, a Turner by marriage, can’t see him, why should I be—”

  Manon shook her head. “I’m not referring to that ancient trouble. I don’t even know what it was about. The unpleasantness between me and Sam Devrey is something entirely different.”

  After Joyful died and she heard about the opium (as inevitably she did), she’d gone to Mr. Astor to plead against the scheme, just as Joyful would have done. Her arguments counted for nothing. The profits were going to be enormous, Jacob Astor assured her. Young Sam Devrey had it all in hand, and Astor would see she had her fair share; he was, after all, an honorable man. She had, of course, refused any share in the money, and despite other interests they might have been said to have in common, she had not spoken to Astor or Sam Devrey again.

  “What’s between Cousin Samuel and myself doesn’t involve you,” Manon said. “But if anything is going to be done about Bellevue, it is the council that must do it. They can get rid of Tobias Grant for a start. See him, Cousin Nicholas. See Cousin Samuel. It’s the only thing to do.”

  “Starting to snow,” Sam Devrey said. “Middle of March and apparently winter’s not yet done with us.” Idle chatter to fill the awkward silence until this Dr. Nicholas Turner got around to saying what he’d come for.

  The two men faced each other across a mahogany writing table in Sam’s private office. The table was pristine and gleaming. The paperwork of Devrey Shipping was done in the hurly-burly of the outer room where half a dozen clerks stood behind tall desks. Even in here with the door closed there was a persistent hum from the activity outside.

  “Not quite the end of winter yet,” Nick agreed. He looked out the window; the snow seemed to have stopped. The ground floor of the Devrey counting house was a few feet above street level. Most buildings in New York were so constructed; the intent was to keep the smell of horse manure at a distance. It also meant that all Nick could see beyond the window were the tops of men’s stovepipe hats bobbing along Little Dock Street. There were no bonnets among them. The press of commerce had driven the ladies from what the locals referred to as the down the town thick of things. It had driven away much else besides, Nick knew. Old two-story counting houses like this one were fast becoming obsolete. “I hear Devrey’s is to have new premises, Cousin Samuel.”

  “We are, Dr. Turner.” True, they were cousins, but most of the blood they shared was bad. Sam preferred not to acknowledge the relationship. “But somehow I don’t think our new premises are what you’ve come to talk about.” The new building would be five floors of white marble on prime land further up the town, Broadway and Canal Street. A temple raised to celebrate success, and Jacob Astor to get all the credit for it. The thought lodged in Sam’s belly like a half-digested meal he could neither vomit up nor shit out. He kept his face and voice neutral, however. “You arrived from Providence, did you not, Doctor? A few weeks back?”

  “Not quite two weeks, in fact.” He was making a hash of this, Nick decided, and taking too long. Men of business were always in a hurry. Science, on the other hand, demanded patience and thoroughness. Since he’d decided that an appeal based on science would be better than one calling on human fellow feeling, it was up to him to bridge the gap. “I’ve been working at Bellevue since I came to New York.”

  “Ah yes, the almshouse hospital.” Sam had presumed the visit would be about money. Now he knew what for.

  “We are woefully underfunded, Cousin. Since you’re a member of the Common Council I thought you might—”

  “I’m afraid I have little influence over council business. Frankly, I doubt anyone has. Too many men with too many different agendas.” Damned council nattered on about one thing or another at least twice a week. Sam didn’t manage to attend more than one meeting in six, and those only because Jacob Astor insisted on it. It was he who had decided it was appropriate that the manager of Devrey’s have a seat on the town’s governing body; so, of course, it was arranged. But as far as Sam knew, Jacob Astor had no interest in the Bellevue Almshouse. “Frankly, Dr. Turner, I believe we appropriate quite enough of the taxpayers’ money to the care of sick and deranged paupers. I think it unlikely the council will entertain the idea of any increase.”

  “Then they are the most short-sighted men in this city, sir.” Damn! Nothing would be served by losing his temper. “Cousin Samuel, allow me to explain. It’s absolutely in the best interests of New York’s taxpayers to—”

  Sam raised a forestalling hand, snapped open his pocket watch, and laid it on the table between them. “Nearly four. I can give you five minutes more, Dr. Turner. Th
en you must excuse me. I have urgent matters of business.”

  His dinner more likely, and not to be disturbed by discussions of diseased paupers. “I take it that’s five minutes exactly, Cousin Samuel. By your watch. To decide on who in this city of two hundred thousand should live and who should die.”

  “Actually, Dr. Turner, it is now four minutes and fifty seconds. And don’t you think your characterization of the matter a bit extreme?”

  “No, sir. I do not.” Nicholas had conceived the plan in the few days since Manon Turner suggested he come here. Ask for money for something they would see as beneficial, then siphon some of it into the day-to-day care of the ill. “I’m suggesting we immediately inaugurate a program of scientific research at Bellevue. If we do so, we can learn ways to shorten the healing time for many diseases. Perhaps most. We can begin to understand the causes of the epidemics that so frequently lay waste to this city. Yellowing fever, typhus, the worst attacks of cholera…” Two summers earlier cholera had claimed almost four thousand lives. “If we understand these evils, I promise we can eventually cure them. Surely every taxpayer in the city would judge that an excellent use of his money.”

  Devrey’s face remained impassive, but at least he was interested enough to ask a question. “How much money are we discussing, Dr. Turner?”

  “Two thousand a year.” Not very much in terms of the city budget the council oversaw.

  “Two thousand a year, and we can cure diseases such as yellowing fever and typhus and cholera. That’s your promise?”

  “Not a promise. Nothing in science can be that certain. But I believe it to be a reasonable hope.”

  “I see. Well, for my part, Dr. Turner, I believe it to be totally unreasonable. Mankind has suffered these ills for all the years since Adam. Now you propose to cure them. With two thousand a year.”