by M. J. Cates
“You’re too young for that word. Now take out your book, there’s a good girl.”
Imogen took a last lingering look at the picture of bovine meditation, the only movement the twirl of a leaf-shaped ear, the flick of a tail. All but one of the cattle were lying down, front legs neatly folded, back legs outstretched to one side. Dark liquid eyes contemplated the passing train.
An hour or two later, Imogen saw another patch of cows, curled up in similar positions under a similar tree, as if they had just been arranged there for the benefit of the approaching train. Even their expressions were the same.
Imogen printed urgently on her notepad, Look, Mother. Same cows?
Her mother glanced out the window.
“No, dear. Not the same cows. Those other cows must be eighty or ninety miles from here.”
Imogen took the pad back. Flying cows. They just landed.
Her mother gave her a weak smile. “Flying cows. That must be it, dear.”
“Cows don’t fly,” Alice said, “ignoramus.”
* * *
—
“Dr. Lang? Dr. Lang?” A boy of about twelve, wearing the blue uniform of the Adams Express Company, was hurrying through the waiting room carrying two white buckets. Imogen looked around to see which of the moustached gentlemen might answer, before she realized he must be looking for her. He reached the end of the waiting room, pivoted on one heel like a mechanical toy, and started back. The buckets looked heavy for him.
Imogen rose from her seat and signalled him with a gloved hand.
“You have something for me?”
“Are you Dr. Lang?”
“Yes.”
“Okey-doke.” He put down the buckets, and took a receipt book from the leather pouch attached to his shoulder strap. “Just sign here, if you would, ma’am.”
“What am I signing for—a telegram?”
“No, ma’am, but there’s an envelope attached to one of these.”
“Surely you can’t mean the buckets.”
“Why, yes, ma’am—Doctor, I should say—see here?” He pointed to the receipt. “Two sealed buckets. They’re heavy. I’ll fetch a porter for you.”
“No, thank you. I’ll manage.”
“It’s my instructions.”
She signed his book and he tore off a yellow copy and handed it to her.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Doctor. Have a safe trip.”
He lifted his cap, pivoted once more on his heel, and was gone.
Imogen sat down and pulled the buckets closer; they smelled of formalin. She detached the envelope and opened it. The note was from Dean Dodson—a nervous, rabbity, rushing sort of man who always reminded Imogen of the March Hare. But perhaps that was because the name Dodson was so like Dodgson.
Dear Dr. Lang,
Please forgive my burdening you with these two brain specimens. One of the buckets, as you see, is for Professor William Welch, head of Hopkins’ Pathology dep’t, the other (clearly labelled) is for Dr. Ganz. I assure you they will be delighted to receive them, and it will be an excellent way for you to introduce yourself to men whose good opinion cannot be overvalued.
Let me take this opportunity once again to congratulate you on your sterling achievement here at Rush, and wish you continued success in your sojourn at Hopkins and the Phipps. There simply could be no better place to learn the intricacies of modern psychiatry than at the feet of Jonas Ganz. You are a lucky young physician!
With admiration and every good wish, I remain yours truly,
Prof. John W. Dodson, MD
Dean of Students
Rush Medical College
The clock struck four, and the double oak doors swung open. A man in the grey-and-blue livery of the B&O line walked swiftly through the waiting room announcing that Train No. 6 was now boarding. As the men in their bowlers and boaters rose around Imogen, a porter appeared and asked her if he could be of assistance.
“Oh, yes, please.” She stood and pointed to the buckets.
“And the valise, miss?”
“I can manage that. The rest has been checked.”
“Certainly. This way.” She followed him as he plowed through the crowd, calling cheerfully, “Coming through, gentlemen. Lady coming through. Thank you, sir, thank you. Lady coming through.”
The track shed, under its vast arched ceiling of iron and glass, was redolent of soot and smoke and hot metal. Imogen could feel coal dust filming her skin and wished she were wearing a hat with a veil like the more sensible women around her.
A conductor glanced at her ticket and helped her onto the step. “On your left, miss.”
The porter followed.
“Miss, have you rode this train before today?”
“Only once. When I was a child.”
“Oh, you’ll find lots of changes then. I speck you’ll be most comfortable. Next on your right, miss, that’s it, let me get the do’ for you.”
He slid the door open and followed her in. He took her valise and set it on a fold-out rack in the miniature closet, and stowed the buckets under one of the seats.
Imogen tipped him and, after he was gone, stood for a while watching the passengers and porters hurrying by to their various cars. She picked up a folder tucked into the windowsill and read that dinner would be served between 5:30 and 7:00, breakfast from 5:45 to 8:30 a.m. Central Time.
She slid the folder back in place, removed her hat and gloves, and set them on the upper rack in the closet. Her seat was comfortable, its plush wings marked with the B&O trademark. She rested her head against one and closed her eyes, gathering herself. She had been keyed up for more than two weeks, what with all the planning and packing. She opened her eyes to check the platform for any member of her family but no one had come to see her off.
The train whistle shrieked and a jolt shuddered through the cars, the hitches adjusting like so many iron vertebrae. As the train rounded the first curve, Imogen looked back to watch the dome of Union Station receding. Warning bells clanged as the train crossed intersection after intersection, pedestrians covering their ears or averting their faces from the flying smoke and cinders.
Imogen had never been particularly fond of the city’s skyscrapers, but in leaving them behind she felt as if she were venturing beyond the safe confines of a frontier fort. The thought caused a sudden ache in her throat. She got up and went into the tiny bathroom. The china fixtures had the miniature exquisiteness of dollhouse furniture and immediately cheered her. She washed her face, and held a cool face-cloth to her eyes.
When the conductor came to punch her ticket, she asked what time they would reach Baltimore, although she knew the answer.
“Ten thirty-seven a.m.,” he said, and slid the door shut again behind him.
Her compartment was meant for two passengers and Imogen soon found herself wishing for company, someone devastatingly interesting—perhaps one of those muckraking journalists one heard so much about. Or a New York psychiatrist, someone she could pepper with questions on Kraepelin’s categories or Charcot’s lectures on male hysterics.
It was at times like these Imogen found herself wishing for the one sister who could never be with her. She opened her bag and took out her wallet. From this she extracted a much-folded, much-weathered slip of newsprint not much bigger than a postage stamp, a death notice her parents had clipped from the Tribune some sixteen years past. Laura Rose Lang, born May 3, 1894, died Friday, June 24, 1899, of a cruel illness which she endured with a Stoicism far beyond her years. Mourned by father Josiah, mother Rose, sisters Alice and Imogen. Private burial at Oak Park cemetery.
Imogen fingered the slip of paper that was softened, almost moist, with age and handling. She pressed it between her palms for a few moments, then put it back in her wallet and put the wallet away.
She spoke to her reflection in the window, in a whisper, “And what do you have to say about all this?”
“Careful,” Laura said. “You could end up in on
e of those buckets, if you keep talking to your dead sister.”
Imogen pulled the buckets out from under the seat. According to the laboratory tags, one was an example of a degenerative disorder. The other was a female with dementia praecox. Imogen wondered how old she had been, how long she had been an asylum inmate. Dementia praecox cases could be admitted at age eighteen or twenty and spend the next forty years on a back ward. Nobody knew what caused it, and so far there was no cure.
“I just imagine you,” she thought, looking back at her reflection. “It’s not the same as hallucinating.”
“Still,” Laura said, “what would your two buckety friends make of it? Is there such a difference between you hearing the dead and a schizophrenic hearing voices?”
“There is a vast difference,” Imogen thought, “because I know you’re not really here.”
She pulled the blind down and regarded the two buckets, imagining the brains still capable of thought, imprisoned in that darkness. She could not help them now and never could have. But maybe someday, if she worked hard.
She opened her satchel and took out Pierre Janet’s Histoire d’une idée fixe, along with a Petit Masson, and tried to read a chapter. After half an hour of frustration, and to cheer herself up, she reached into the satchel again and took out the crisp envelope with the Johns Hopkins letterhead and once more read the letter that had thrilled her—and had changed her life—back in May.
Dear Dr. Lang,
I am most pleased to inform you that your application for a staff assignment here at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic has been accepted. Your Bachelor of Science degree will set you in considerable measure above most of your colleagues, who will have MDs but lack your pure science background.
Most of your contemporaries, certainly those coming from within Johns Hopkins, will have had at minimum a semester of psychobiology, at least one rotation in an asylum, and some a good deal more. For your own benefit, I advise you to read Kraepelin’s Psychologie, Charcot’s Leçons du mardi, and Janet’s Histoire d’une idée fixe before you arrive.
I note that you have only high school French and as far as I can tell no German. Acquiring both is simply essential if one is to keep up with the advances coming out of Zurich, Vienna, and Paris, as the journals are not available in English, and I warn you away from translated books as they are never current. Kraepelin in particular revises himself so thoroughly that each edition of his Psychiatrie is radically different from the previous one.
I have reserved a place for you beginning September 1, 1916. However, if there would be any prospect of your coming East before that I should be very glad to see you and to talk over the plans of work more specifically.
I look forward to our meeting with keen anticipation.
Yours truly,
Jonas Ganz, MD
Director, Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore Md.
At seven o’clock she went to the dining car, where a steward showed her to a table, and pointed out the menu. A highly efficient waiter brought her a basket of fragrant rolls and took her order. The elegance of her surroundings—the carved wood, the gently swinging lanterns, the sparkling glass and silver—was soothing. She enjoyed every bite of her cucumber salad and cutlet of capon, every sip of her chilled Chablis.
When she returned to her compartment the sleeping berth had been lowered. She sat on the seat opposite and pulled out her volume of Kraepelin but didn’t open it. It was sad, really, having no one to share all this with: the beautiful service, the rippling hills that seemed like the landscape of another planet after the flatness of Chicago, not to mention her destination—a great university, where she would study under the man whom everybody called the dean of American psychiatry.
Night began to pool in the valleys of the Adirondacks. Patches of woods rushed up to the windows and as quickly receded. Fences whipped up and down. High on a hillside, in the last ounce of daylight, a herd of cows lay flicking their tails.
“Flying cows,” she said softly.
She put Kraepelin aside and pulled the compartment blind as low as it would go. A small night lamp gave just enough glow that she could see to change into her nightdress and lay her clothes out for morning. She climbed into the berth and plumped two pillows, planning to read. She lay back, thinking of all she had to do and of her upcoming meeting with Professor Ganz. She thought of Laura, and how stupendous it would be if there really were two of them heading off to Johns Hopkins instead of just one.
She turned on her side and for a few moments indulged morbid thoughts about the contents of those buckets. Buckets of mad thoughts, mental storms, bolts of lightning in the cortex. For a few moments she pictured herself working with patients, calming those mental storms, making discoveries in the lab. And then she was asleep.
3
A few months after Vimy, a new lieutenant was brought in to replace his predecessor, who had been killed, not by Germans, but by the influenza virus. Lieutenant Pegram, like so many of the Canadian officers, had a crisp British manner and the wispy officer’s moustache that had become de rigueur—the wispier the better. He had only been in place for a week when he summoned Quentin to his dugout.
“I’m told you’re American.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What the hell are you doing fighting for George the Fifth?”
“I volunteered, sir.”
“Says here you attested into the 97th in Windsor, Ontario, of your own free will.”
“That’s correct, sir.”
“And then got shuffled into the 10th.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Got any special talents?”
“Talents, sir?”
“Skills. Useful abilities.”
“I write pretty well, sir. And I’m an excellent typist.”
“What sort of things do you write?”
“Stories, sir. And I’m working on a novel.”
“Anything published?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“I’m concerned about morale, Goodchild. The men need entertainment, humour, light moments. I’m dismayed to find this battalion has no newspaper.”
“Newspaper, sir?”
“Lot of the battalions publish their own newspaper. Strictly unofficial, you understand, but a chance to whine and moan a bit—all in good fun. Why don’t you write up a first issue and bring it to me? I’ve got a couple of samples you can look at.”
“Is that an order, sir?”
“Does it have to be?”
“No, I—”
“Fine. Consider it an order. Forty-eight hours enough time? Make it Tuesday, just before lunch.”
The sample sheets Pegram gave him were the kind of juvenile, jokey stuff Quentin would never pen himself. He tried a more literary approach, while including actual news such as the battalion honour roll, and entertainment plans for the upcoming training period.
“No, Goodchild, this will never do,” Pegram told him. “You write a good sentence, but we can’t have a serious discussion of the war. You have to make it funnier.”
Quentin took another run at it, abandoning all literary ambition, and banged out several pages in a couple of hours. He took the new version to the lieutenant.
“That’s it exactly, Goodchild,” Pegram said. “You’ve hit the tone exactly. The men will love it.”
Such was the birth of the 10th Battalion’s Dead Mule Gazette.
The latest edition was to include an important interview.
BOCHES APOLOGIZE!
Yes, it’s true. The moment we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived. In an exclusive interview with the Mule, Gerhard Goetheimer extends a heartfelt apology to all the Allied Forces, but in particular to the 10th Battalion, 1st Canadian Division.
The interview took place at the Mule offices [location classified but easily locatable by the odour of expired mule]. Captain Goetheimer arrived looking tired but dapper in his customary whites, his k
nobby features softened by a rakish goatee. He declined the offer of tea but seemed to enjoy his evaporated milk. “It’s been 18 months since I saw one of these in Germany,” he said, taking a bite out of the tin. He proceeded to answer our questions with great good humour, in his accented English.
DM: You’ve been with us now six weeks, Captain Goetheimer.
GG: Please. Call me Gerhard. I’m not a captain anymore. I renounce all association with the German army.
DM: All right, Gerhard. Six weeks you’ve been with us. What would you say are the principal differences between Canadian troops and the Germans?
GG: Oh, your use of toilet paper. The Germans, as you know, refuse to use it on the grounds that it would be unmanly.
DM: Anything else?
GG: Your policy on the equitable treatment of goats. I wish more countries would adopt it but I don’t see it happening anytime soon. I imagine women will get there first.
DM: All right, let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?
GG: By all means. I love tacks. Upholstery tacks, carpet tacks, really anything except gas attacks.
DM: Let’s talk about those, Gerhard. What were you thinking?
GG: I suppose we thought it would be kinder than bullets and bayonets. No bloodshed. We thought you’d be grateful.
DM: Grateful for poison gas.
GG: You fellows use gas too, you know.
DM: Not mustard gas. Burning? Blistering? You think that’s fair play?
GG: Well, it wouldn’t have been my choice. I don’t even like mustard on my bratwurst.
DM: Gerhard, you seem like a nice goat. Why did you start the war?
GG: I had a feeling you’d ask me that. I know it’s been something of an inconvenience.
DM: Inconvenience!
GG: All right, a bother then.
DM: A bother! You do realize you’ve upset our hockey schedule for three years running?
GG: I know. It’s regrettable.
DM: And more than a few of us have been forced to alter our vacation plans.
GG: You boys in the 10th?
DM: Of course us boys in the 10th!
GG: Well, I’m sorry. I—[pauses, apparently moved] I’m so sorry. Let me apologize right now—sincerely and without reserve—for interfering with your sports schedule. If we’d had any idea, honestly, we would never have started this little punch-up. Listen, may I ask you a question?
