City of God

by Swerling, Beverly

  “Do you think it’s real?” Addie demanded.

  Lilac’s heart was racing, but she made sure her voice sounded calm. “Where did you get this?”

  “From her. I wasn’t prying, mind. I would never do such a thing. But I do sometimes tidy her room. Out of friendship, you understand. I’m not a servant, not a maid.”

  “Yes, yes. I know. Had she just left it out in her room? In plain sight?”

  “Well, not exactly. I opened the cupboard to put something away, and it fell out at my feet. I couldn’t ignore it, could I? Something like that?” The waiter was coming close. “Put it away!” Addie whispered urgently.

  Lilac made a fist around the extraordinary stone and pushed it back inside the muff. The waiter passed by without looking at them. With her free hand Lilac picked up the tiny glass of coffee and drank it down. Scalding hot, but she hardly felt it.

  “You must tell me what you think,” Addie insisted. “I know it looks like a diamond, but is it real?”

  “How can it be? A thing that big. Where would your Mrs. Turner get something like that?”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking. Where? You don’t suppose it came from that Maria Monk person, do you?”

  “Maria…The one what said she was a nun and had to do terrible things with all the Catholic priests?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “But it was all lies. They said so in the papers. Her mother came forward like they say and explained that her daughter hadn’t been right in the head since she was a little girl.” The stone seemed to be growing heavier in her grasp. Best thing to do was keep Addie talking while she thought out what to do next.

  “Well, people will say anything, won’t they? That doesn’t make it true.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “So what if this Maria Monk gave—”

  “Addie, whether or not that book told the truth, what’s it to do with this?”

  “I don’t know.” Addie was growing impatient. She had come to rely on Lilac Langton’s being more worldly and knowledgeable than she, but this time Lilac wasn’t being much help. “It just seems as if it might be possible. Because of her going into that Catholic church. And if it came from something wicked and sinful like that, babies murdered and buried in the walls, well, it would be my duty to get it right out of the house, wouldn’t it? I couldn’t sleep under the same roof with something so—so evil, could I?”

  Ah yes. Lilac felt tension easing as she saw the way forward. A bird in the hand, as Joe used to say. Quite literally in the hand in this case. “I’m sure you’re right, Addie dear.”

  “Thank you. I feel better knowing you agree with me. But that still leaves the same question, doesn’t it?”

  “What question is that?” Heavier and heavier. And on fire in her hand now.

  “Is it real? A real diamond?”

  “I don’t see how it can be, Addie dear. Diamonds are little things as fits in finger rings. Or earrings maybe. Have you ever seen a woman wearing a diamond as big as a large walnut?”

  Addie shook her head. “No, I’m sure not.” She had not, in fact, ever seen a woman wearing any sort of diamond, but there seemed no reason to say so. “Then it’s not real?”

  “Unlikely,” Lilac pronounced. “But I tell you what I can do. I have a friend, well, more of an acquaintance really. She’s married to a man come over from Russia. Has a shop where he sells fancy things of all sorts. Silver and gold, even pearls sometimes. I can have my acquaintance take me to her husband’s shop and I’ll ask him.”

  “Oh, would you? I don’t want to be any trouble, but it does seem to me to be a very wise idea. I knew I could rely on you, dear Lilac. Now you just give it back to me and I’ll keep it until—”

  “But how is the gentleman to tell me whether or not it’s real unless I show it to him?”

  “Well, then, perhaps we could go to your friend’s husband’s shop together.”

  Exactly what Lilac had expected Addie to say. It all seemed to be happening very slowly now. Giving Lilac plenty of time to figure things out. “Of course we could, except that my acquaintance is a real lady. She would be, wouldn’t she, married to a gentleman like that? And the way I got to know her…” She leaned forward and spoke even more softly. “She was having a problem. Being in a family way, you know.” Addie’s eyes opened wider and she nodded. “Thing is,” Lilac continued, “she once heard me say I knew someone who…you know,” she added for the second time.

  Innocent as she was, Addie did know. The women in the almshouse talked about such things all the time. “I think so, yes. But that’s wicked.”

  “Of course it is. But we can’t be responsible when people make bad choices, refuse to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, as Reverend Finney always says. Not our fault, is it dear?”

  Addie shook her head. “No, it’s not.” That’s how she managed to go on working with the Society for Poor Widows and Orphans. Kept reminding herself it wasn’t her fault if other people made bad, sinful choices.

  “That’s what I think as well. But with this business…if we both show up at this man’s shop along with his wife, he’ll think it mighty odd, won’t he? His wife having two women friends he’s never heard of. And neither of them married women she might have met somewhere doing her duty as his wife. It might cause him to ask more questions. I can’t ask her to help me if it’s going to make her husband ask embarrassing questions. That’s quite impossible.”

  Addie agreed that it was. And that the stone, which was anyway probably just a piece of pretty glass, would remain with Lilac Langton until such time as she could get the husband of her acquaintance to tell them whether, against all the odds, it might just be a real diamond.

  “It’s ether, sir. Sorry to burst in, but I was sure you’d want to know.”

  Nick was in his shirtsleeves, standing at his laboratory bench, bent over his microscope. “What is ether? Listen, Ben, these slides you prepared of the tissue surrounding that boil are first rate.”

  “Somnus, sir. It’s a chemical compound called sulfuric ether. Here, I wrote down the formula.”

  Nick straightened and took the piece of paper Ben offered: CH3-CH2-O-CH2-CH3. “Where did you get this?”

  “From someone I knew when I was at the university, Dr. Turner. He’s a chemist. I brought him the canister. You’d left it up here, sir, and since we both thought it was empty…I suppose I should have asked, but I didn’t want—” He broke off, suddenly looking sheepish.

  “Come along, speak your mind. What didn’t you want?”

  “To encourage your hopes, Dr. Turner. I knew how disappointed you were when we couldn’t get any more.”

  “So I was. Please go on.”

  “Well, it occurred to me that since we could still smell the stuff when we took the cork out of the canister, there might be enough Somnus left for a chemist to analyze. There was. And it turns out sulfuric ether can be made in any laboratory. My friend says there can’t be any patent on it because it was discovered hundreds of years ago. That’s why—”

  “Why we had no luck tracing Somnus through the patent office. You’re a genius, Benjamin Klein. And so is your friend the chemist. Come!”

  “Where are we going, sir?”

  Nick was pulling on his coat and running his fingers through his hair since he didn’t want to spend the time to find a comb. “To see Dr. Tobias Grant. We are going to strike a deal with the devil, Ben. In the interests of medical science.”

  “What makes you think I might be interested in your proposal, Dr. Turner?”

  “Because, Dr. Grant, I believe you see some profit in being the place where painless surgery is first performed.”

  “Profit?”

  “For Bellevue, of course. I’ve no doubt your motives are entirely selfless, Dr. Grant.”

  Nick and Ben Klein stood in front of Grant’s desk in the room he called his study in the luxuriously appointed house known, with a good deal of understatement, as the director’
s cottage. “Your guest, Mr. Morrison,” Nick continued, “he was a reporter, was he not? You invited publicity, so I must presume you hoped the hospital, the entire almshouse perhaps, would benefit from it.”

  Grant had lately affected the exaggerated muttonchop side whiskers that were the current fashion. He tugged at the left one now, meanwhile leaning back and regarding the two men. “So now that you know what this Somnus is, you are prepared to write up what has happened here for a medical journal. Why now and not before?”

  “Because,” Nick explained, “for a professional journal to be interested we must replicate our results as science demands. We must do two or even three painless operations. Now that we know what Somnus is and that we can make more of it, we can and we will.”

  “Replicate your results,” Grant said.

  “Exactly. There’s bound to be a great deal of interest, even excitement, among men of medicine. It will reflect enormous credit on Bellevue Hospital and the council will surely consent to build—”

  “You’ll write an article. In a professional journal.”

  Nick wished the man would stop repeating everything he said like a trained parrot. “Sir, if you’ll just consider—”

  Grant held up his hand and rose and walked to the window. “Today is March fifteenth. The Ides of March,” he said. “A date to beware, according to Shakespeare.” He turned to face them. “And today on Wall Street Joseph and Company collapsed.”

  It seemed to Nick, to whom one Wall Street firm was pretty much like another, to be a complete non sequitur. Ben Klein said, “But Joseph is the American agent for Rothschilds. Surely a firm of such—”

  “You mistake my meaning, Dr. Klein. I refer to the physical building. The premises of Joseph and Company fell to the ground earlier today. Brand-new and built entirely of granite after the fire. I suspect, gentlemen, that it presages the kind of financial disaster Dr. Klein thought I referred to. The price of cotton has plummeted in Europe, and the New Orleans cotton merchants are defaulting in droves. Those who have given them credit are, as I’m sure you’re aware, all here in our city.”

  “But what has that to do with Bellevue?” Nick knew it would be wise to understand a bit more about the world of finance, but money bored him. “The poor in this place can’t get much poorer, whatever happens on Wall Street.”

  “My dear Dr. Turner, if the bankers and brokers and factors are beggared, so must be the city treasury.” Grant returned to his place behind the desk and took his seat, flipping up the skirt of his stylish full-skirted knee-length coat as he did so. “This institution will be allotted less money by the council, not more. So your research laboratory, this place where you and young Dr. Klein here may do God knows what, does not seem to me likely to be funded, whatever you might publish in some professional journal.”

  “Dr. Grant, surely however dire the financial consequences of the affairs you describe, they will be temporary. Even I know that such things always are.” Nick put his hands on the desk and leaned forward, pinning the other man with a direct gaze. “Disease is always with us, and crushed limbs and kidney stones are a commonplace, as much for the aldermen of the Common Council as for the rest of humanity. Do you honestly think, whatever passing financial constraints they might face, they would ignore the immediate and personal benefits they might gain from such progress as this? Painless surgery, Dr. Grant. The philosopher’s stone, the holy grail. Good God, man, to go under the knife and feel nothing. It’s possible. You know it is. You saw it with your own eyes.”

  “So I did. You have made my point, Dr. Turner.”

  “And what point is that?”

  Grant leaned back, tented his fingers, and stared over them. “The point that seeing, gentlemen, is believing. If your scheme is to have a chance of success, Dr. Turner, you must put aside all talk of publishing in a professional journal. Once you do, I expect dozens of doctors will be using this ether to achieve the same results. It will become a commonplace.”

  “As well it should.”

  “Yes, Dr. Turner. Of course. But if Bellevue Hospital is to benefit from it having been discovered here first, we—”

  “Introduced,” Nick corrected. “It was discovered hundreds of years ago.”

  Grant sighed. “Very well, introduced. No, let us say put to use for the first time here at Bellevue. If that is to be to our advantage, the introduction must be much more awe-inspiring than simply publishing an article in some dreary journal read only by the medical profession.”

  “I take it you think the penny press would—”

  “I know it would. If we make it dramatic enough to avoid being pushed aside by a bunch of fishwives clattering on about the price of flour.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “A live demonstration, Dr. Turner. Precisely as you provided for me.”

  “With due respect, sir, that was never my intent.”

  “But it was your effect, Dr. Turner. I am listening to you right now because of it. And if we go to City Hall and let them see an operation—”

  “City Hall! I am not a performing monkey, Dr. Grant. Neither are my patients to be sacrificed for the entertainment of idiots who—”

  “Calm yourself, Dr. Turner. I thought the sacrifice of patients was exactly what we were seeking to avoid. The aldermen are to witness a surgery conducted in the most peaceful way possible, with the patient sound asleep and feeling nothing. What can be wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong is that you’re making medical care a traveling circus. I won’t—”

  Ben Klein cleared his throat. Then did so a second time. Nick and Tobias Grant stopped shouting at each other and turned to him.

  “It’s only a suggestion, sir,” Ben said, “but perhaps Dr. Grant could bring the members of the Common Council to us. They could witness an operation performed under ether right here in Bellevue Hospital.”

  “I’ve asked Dr. Turner if I may bring you, Addie, and he says I may. Since members of the public are in any case being admitted to watch.”

  “The aldermen, you said.”

  “That’s right, Addie.” Manon went on with her darning while she spoke. “Along with you. Because Dr. Turner said you may.”

  “But why would I want to? I don’t want to go back to the almshouse.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Addie. You’re not going back to stay. Only to observe an operation performed painlessly. It’s truly remarkable.”

  “Even if it is, I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I mentioned about that little girl. At church.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “About her sleeping right through having her leg sawed off. I told Reverend Finney and some of the others.”

  Manon bit through a length of thread and rolled it into a knot with her thumb and forefinger. Addie Bellingham frequently drove her mad, but the woman had nowhere else to go, and having taken her on, Manon could see no way to get out of being responsible for her. Addie must be incorporated into her plans for the dispensary which, Manon realized, Addie already knew about because she listened at keyholes. Nonetheless, it would be best if she was convinced it was in her best interest. Manon saw herself giving up these rooms and living in the dispensary once it got started, so Addie must live there as well. “And what did they say at your church, Addie?”

  “That man is meant to suffer. That it’s God’s law. That the little girl had to have been paying for her sins, and that we shouldn’t be trying to change everything to suit us rather than God.”

  “Well, leaving aside the matter of a six-year-old paying for her sins, suppose you do as I ask and come along and watch. Just this once. Then you can decide for yourself what you think to be the law of God.”

  According to Tobias Grant seven aldermen had consented to attend, so the director’s room off the lobby wouldn’t be large enough. “Leave that to me, Dr. Turner. I will arrange a proper location for your demonstration. You just select the patient.”

  Nick al
ready had. He was Patrick Shaughnessey, a porter thrown out of work by the fire. He had a growth on his shoulder so big it reached almost to his ear and forced him to hold his head to one side all the time. By the time the town’s recovery had made work for porters plentiful, the tumor had become so unsightly no one would hire him.

  “Observe, gentlemen,” Nick had told the other doctors and the medical students the first time he examined Shaughnessey, “this tumor, if such it is, is movable.” He could shift it slightly with his fingers. “That means it is not an osteosarcoma. What would it be if it were? Can one of you students tell me?”

  “A cancer,” one of them said.

  “Exactly. Cancer from the Greek for crab, karkinos, because of the swollen veins resembling the legs of that creature. ‘Osteo’ is also from the Greek, from osteon for bone. But here on Patrick Shaughnessey’s shoulder we have, as you can see, no swollen veins, simply a rough-textured and blackened series of bumps that have formed themselves into one ugly whole. And since the thing moves enough for me to all but get my finger underneath it, it cannot be connected to the bone. It is not properly speaking a tumor, gentlemen, it is a cyst. A sac attached to muscle and skin that is filled with sebaceous matter, fatty stuff produced by the body itself.”

  Nick leaned over his patient. “What do you say, Patrick? Will you give me permission to take off this thing?” He didn’t need to ask permission. Nick could administer any treatment he thought necessary for a resident in the almshouse. Still, on this occasion he’d rather not have Shaughnessey dragged kicking and screaming to the operating table. “I can promise you won’t feel a thing.”

  “Sure and it’s hard to think how much worse things could be, Dr. Turner. If you can get this thing off me neck, I’d think meself blessed by all the saints, however much I suffered in the doing of it. If it’s to be painless, well…”

  Nick had already taken a brief whiff of the canister of sulfuric ether supplied by Ben Klein’s friend the chemist. It was Mr. Grave’s Somnus, no question. “Absolutely painless, Patrick. You’ll sleep through the entire thing and wake up with the lump gone and only a bandage on your neck. I guarantee it.”