Lena’s body drops.
—her neck breaks.
—and Walt Whitman collapses on the platform, sobbing now, and waits for his friend and her unborn child to die.
Chapter 2
Whitman’s wrists sting where the skin has abraded, and his spirit is raw. He wants to look away from the gruesome scene, but out of respect for Lena’s wishes, he will bear witness. Before him, her body twitches, and two men with pistols stand guard over him. He watches until she stops moving altogether, her last prayer smothered in its utterance.
At that moment, Coroner Barclay, a tiny excuse for a man, creeps onto the scene and pronounces Lena dead. Little Joe cuts the rope suspending her body midair, and she drops into the back of the coroner’s wagon. Barclay tosses a tarp over her, and drives away.
As Walt stands, restrained, the sheriff finishes up interviews with James Gordon Bennett from the New York Herald and Horace Greeley from the New York Tribune. The fact that Greeley and Bennett, both with readerships in the twenty thousands, are in attendance illustrates the enormity of what has happened, and Walt will add his own account to the Aurora as soon as he can. Before joining the Aurora, with its five thousand readers, he worked as a printer for Park Benjamin at the New World. While there, several of his short stories were published by Benjamin, who later hired him to write the novel Franklin Evans, despite their public disagreements that led to his departure from the New World.
The meeting disbands, and Harris approaches. Walt holds out his hands to be released.
“Sorry, Mr. Whitman. You’ll be coming with me.” He tugs at the heavy metal cuffs. “The newspapers are about to run wild with your antics.”
“But I have an appointment to transport Mrs. Stowe’s body from the coroner’s to the women’s college today.”
“That is the coroner’s responsibility.”
“I promised Miss Blackwell, and Dr. Barclay agreed.”
“Perhaps you should have had this in mind before you attempted to halt the execution.”
The watch house jail stinks like an outhouse, and is as dark. Walt squints to see better but has to rely on sounds—the shuffling, scraping, and breathing of confined men.
The sheriff leads him to a cell near the back of the hallway. With a key larger than his hand, Harris unlocks the door and uses his full body weight to push it open. He nudges Whitman into the cell, where a freckle-faced boy with bright red hair sits on the cell’s one cot. Dressed in socks but no shoes, tattered pantaloons, and a ripped white shirt, he can’t be more than thirteen years old.
“This is for your own protection,” Harris says as he swings the cell door shut.
“Do those words ease your conscience?”
“You rushed the gallows,” Harris says. “You assaulted my men. You should be grateful I don’t lock you up for a year.”
Whitman stands strong and tall until the sheriff is out of sight, then doubles over in grief. He is surrounded by stone and one window, less than a square foot in size and set above eye level, the only break.
The boy catches him eyeing the window. “There’s no way out,” he says. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”
Walt sinks to the floor. He cannot escape this situation, nor his own grief. Lena is gone forever from this world, and he’ll never sit across the table from her or Abraham—no more conversing into the late hours of the night, no more comparing their readings of Emerson, or listening to Abraham and Lena discuss Oliver Wendell Holmes’s latest précis on hygiene and disease.
The boy asks, “You tried to stop the hanging?”
“Of an innocent woman.”
“No offense, mister, but she had good reason to kill her husband after what he did to the cigar girl.”
The boy’s version of events matches popular opinion: Abraham Stowe had an affair with Mary Rogers, the pretty cigar store clerk. She became pregnant, Abraham botched the abortion, and Rogers died. Abraham panicked and tossed her body in the river. Lena found out about the affair and abortion, and killed him. The State of New York executed her. Done.
“I know what has been said about this matter, but the City of New York has made a terrible error.”
The boy leans forward. “You couldn’t find proof that she didn’t kill her husband, could you?”
“It’s an eventuality.”
“But she’s dead. Why not leave her be?”
Walt locks eyes with the boy. “The truth always matters.”
The boy does not pursue the topic further. Instead, he confesses his own crime. “I was arrested for grave robbery.” The boy pauses, then continues. “I tried to dig up the body of my neighbor, Mrs. Abernathy.”
Whitman tries to ignore him, but the boy persists. “Have you ever dug a grave, mister?”
He shakes his head. “Of course not.”
“It ain’t as easy as you might think. The ground is frozen solid, and it took me two hours to break up the dirt.” The boy stands, pretends to dig. His movements are pained, but he perseveres. “I’m shoveling and shoveling. How far down is she? I’m in the hole about waist deep when I finally reach the casket. I’ll chip the lid off the casket and slide her out that way. If I’m still at it by sunrise, I know I’ll end up”—he flashes his biggest smile—“I know I’ll end up in jail.”
“The sheriff arrested you before you could sell the corpse?” Walt presses, warming to his subject. He knows about the resurrection men and their grisly trade in dead bodies.
The boy shakes his head. “Mrs. Abernathy’s brothers were standing guard, looking out for folks like me. They’d slipped away for a couple of pops, and when they returned, I had her nearly out.”
Walt understands this too about body snatching: The burden is on the families to guard their loved ones’ bodies—whether by armed guard or by technology. The Patent Coffin, for one, is made out of wrought iron and lined with spring catches so the lid won’t open. There are cages, straps, or even dead houses—places where loved ones can leave the bodies safely until they are no longer good for dissection. Or, as in this case, the family itself might stand guard—
Suddenly, Walt is concerned about the boy. His face shows no sign of injury, but the way he moves—“And they roughed you up?”
The boy coughs.
Whitman joins the boy on the cot and reaches for his shirt. The boy resists at first, but Walt reassures him with a soft look and a nod. The bruises, deep browns and purples, cover his chest and back.
“Where are your parents?”
He pauses. “Dead, sir.”
Maybe Walt can give the boy a chance, bring him to the women’s college, where they’ll look after him until he’s recovered.
“I’m sorry for your loss, mister.”
Memories of Lena come unbidden, and Walt is flooded with the awe he felt observing her medical lectures, Abraham always in attendance. Her distinguished beauty matched her quick wit. Her strong, confident voice would fill the room, and when the students’ questions inevitably came, she fielded them with a generous tone and a precise logic.
And now he’s crying.
The boy slides close and wraps his scrawny arm around Walt’s neck. “It’s okay, mister. My mother used to tell me that death is not the end but a start to something better, something glorious. Do you believe that too?”
Whitman considers himself a deist with Quaker leanings, a man who believes that death is a curvature of the ringed self, all part of a larger cycle of comings and goings, that the mind and soul are eternal. But the tragedy of Lena’s and Abraham’s untimely deaths has undercut these beliefs. For now, he will have to rely on the boy’s faith. “I do believe that,” Walt says. “Absolutely.”
“We’re all right, then, the two of us,” the boy says.
A clatter of footsteps sounds in the hallway. The key clanks, the chamber turns, and the heavy iron cell door opens to reveal a young
man whose sculpted cheekbones and square jawline are framed by dark shoulder-length hair. His low-crown top hat tilts rakishly toward a wilted pink boutonniere on his lapel.
“Henry?” Walt faces his past.
“You look terrible, Mr. Whitman.”
After a short courtship, the men had parted a few years earlier—Henry bound to his family farm in northern Manhattan, and Walt to teach school in Brooklyn. They had promised to write letters, and while Walt had written several, Henry had written none.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m your new boss at the Aurora,” Henry says, leaning on his chestnut walking stick. “And Mr. Ropes sent me here to bail you out.”
Walt rises to shake Henry Saunders’s hand—his skin is soft and his grip strong. “I’m grateful,” he says, “but the only way I’m coming with you is if you bail out my friend here, Mr.—” He turns to the boy.
“Smith.” The boy stands despite the pain. “Azariah Smith.”
Chapter 3
Walt follows the coroner, Dr. Kenneth Barclay, down a long white hallway that opens up to a makeshift morgue. Once inside, Dr. Barclay removes the sheet with all the flair of P. T. Barnum revealing an exhibition.
Walt gulps back tears.
Lena’s dark eyes are open, her mouth twisted halfway between a smile and a scream. Walt attempts to close both her eyes and jaw—her skin is cold and greasy—but they won’t stay shut.
“I’m afraid that’s physically impossible.” Barclay places his hand on Walt’s. “I could have had the body delivered to spare you this sight.”
Whitman backs away. “I made a promise.”
“Very well. I’ll need just a moment with her.”
The coroner reviews the autopsy report, comparing his notes to the body, spending most of his time in the neck area. “I knew the Stowes well.” Barclay breaks the silence. “Abe was my colleague at NYU. He and Lena invited me to dine with them several times. I admired them greatly.”
Barclay waits for Walt to respond. He doesn’t.
“I could have never imagined it, Lena killing Abraham.” Barclay glances up from his work. “But after what he did to Mary Rogers—”
“They are innocent.”
“Innocent? Oh, Mr. Whitman, we must face the truth.”
“What do you know about the truth?”
“I saw Abe with Mary Rogers,” Barclay says. “And she was only one of many women Abe seduced, his students among them.” Barclay forces eye contact. “What Lena did breached morality, but she was driven to the brink. Abe betrayed her with woman after woman, and then the Mary Rogers affair?”
“She didn’t kill him.” Walt gathers himself, recalling Lena’s vow to preserve her marriage in spite of her husband’s infidelity: We are stronger now than before.
Barclay folds the autopsy folder shut, puts his finger to his chin. “Jealously is powerful motivation.” He packs his pipe with tobacco, lights it, takes a puff. “At first, Mr. Whitman, I too believed she was innocent.” Pipe smoke laces the frigid air. “But I examined the evidence. Abraham becomes involved with this Mary Rogers. She gets pregnant. He administers the abortion. Something goes wrong and she dies. So what does he do? He bludgeons her body to make it look like murder and dumps her in the river.” Barclay takes another puff, then blows the sweet tobacco smoke in Walt’s face. “Gruesome.”
Whitman stanches the verbal assault: “Abraham did not kill Mary Rogers, and Lena did not kill Abraham, and I will prove it.”
Barclay scoffs. “You will prove it? What can you possibly know that the sheriff has not already investigated?”
Walt shoots back, “The sheriff is not infallible.”
“How do you explain the arsenic found on Lena, the same arsenic that killed Abraham?”
“Obviously, I cannot, or she wouldn’t be dead on your table.”
“Crimes,” Barclay says, placing his hand on Lena’s shoulder, “are not sensible. That quality is for writers like Mr. Poe to explore in his stories. Poor, poor Lena.” The coroner traces his finger along her stomach. “And her poor child.”
“That is enough!” Walt grabs Barclay by the collar and lifts him off the ground. “Is Mrs. Stowe’s body ready?”
Barclay nods, a twinge of fear in his eyes.
“Good.” Whitman drops the coroner to the floor. “Because I wish to take leave of this place.”
Chapter 4
Walt Whitman drives the horse-pulled flatbed freight wagon he borrowed from Dr. Liston, Abraham Stowe’s colleague at New York University, through the hundreds of New Yorkers who have lined the route to the Women’s Medical College of Manhattan. Men, women, and children of all social classes, craning for a glimpse of the body. They are eerily silent now, and Walt fights back the urge to tell them they are partially responsible for his friend’s death.
He directs the horses onto Centre Street, leaving the white light of the gas lamps and the parade of New Yorkers behind. Poorer streets like these are marked by the absence of light. And sound. The Broadway omnibuses are barely audible from a few streets over, the drivers preferring to remain where the money flows.
The Women’s Medical College of Manhattan comes into view, and along with it the protestors. A group of twenty or so gathered in front of the college the day after Abraham’s murder and has since grown into the hundreds. Their leader, the antidissectionist Father Allen, stretches his arms toward the sky like some Old Testament prophet: “Dissection stops the resurrection!”
Whitman has met the opportunist priest before, and has observed his skill at wielding human vulnerability, drawing on the fear of a public that believes a dissected corpse cannot rise from the dead. Walt assesses the mood of the crowd, recalling that only a month ago, a mob in New Haven burned down the medical school lab and lynched one of the young medical students.
The college is housed in a black-shingled granite-slab building accessible by a wooden staircase that leads to a porch. Just over the second-floor door, a single window stares like an eyeball. He recalls his first visit to the college a year earlier for an article in the New World, and how he got along with the Stowes straight away. They welcomed him in like family, and it was as if he had known them for years. He half expects Abraham and Lena to emerge in the entryway right now, holding hands, as they always did.
Walt steers the wagon right into the midst of the protestors, and stops in front of the stairs.
With Lena in his arms, Whitman keeps an eye on the priest, who at the crucial moment gestures his followers to remove their hats, bow their heads, and make way for him. A sliver of humanity in the madness.
Walt nods his gratitude as he passes.
Once inside the college, his eyes adjust to the gaslight shining from each corner of what was once a dining room. Anatomical drawings on butcher paper hang from the walls over rows of chairs and desks.
He carries Lena past the bar turned lectern, the chalkboard behind it, and the dangling skeleton. To get into the dissection room, he has to walk underneath the sign painted in blue script: She must mangle the living, if she has not operated on the dead.
Walt lays Lena on the very dissection table where only two weeks earlier Abraham was murdered. He straightens the tarp so that it covers her from the shoulders down. A wave of emotion hits him, and he wipes his eyes with a handkerchief. He needs to be strong for the students.
Upstairs the students begin to stir. Whitman can’t bear the thought of them seeing their instructor’s lifeless body. They appear on the landing, one by one, each of them wearing the same black dress and white apron as Lena. They approach, place a hand lovingly on their teacher, their faces haggard and raw.
He knows each of them by name. Marie Zakrzewska, or Miss Zacky as the other students call her, is from Berlin. An ethereal redhead, she escaped a pogrom that killed her parents, two sisters, and three brothers, then she studied medicine
in Europe and, as a midwife, ran a maternity ward in Switzerland. It was her dream to learn from the Stowes.
Blond-haired and blue-eyed Karina Emsbury, from Hartford, was disowned by her pastor father for studying medicine, then connected to Abraham and Lena through her school’s headmistress and Abraham’s cousin, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Olive Perschon, short and mousy, from Philadelphia, is the daughter of abolitionist parents supportive of her medical aspirations. And Patricia Onderdonk, a tall, powerful woman from the Netherlands who claims to have been orphaned in a coastal flood.
Elizabeth Blackwell, the Stowes’ most loyal supporter and handpicked successor, breaks the silent procession. “This is madness.” She shakes her head, squeezes her hands into fists, her British heritage evident in every syllable. “How could they?” She clenches her square jaw and thin lips. Her dark hair is pulled in a tight bun at the back of her head. Miss Blackwell will display her determination but never her devastation in front of her students.
Walt and Miss Blackwell will keep the medical college going. The students need Elizabeth to be strong. So Whitman takes her by the hand, and they form a prayer circle around the body. Our Father who art in heaven, he begins, and for once he lets someone else’s words do what his own simply cannot.
When the last of the amens has echoed through the chamber, he steps back. Watching grief seize their young faces and shatter their confidence, he vows to honor the family circle Abraham and Lena provided for them here at the college.
As they had done for him.
He wants to stand on the table, call them to arms. We will fix this injustice, we will storm the city, crash their homes, shout from the rooftops. His army, these strong young women and their new leader, Elizabeth Blackwell. But now is not the time. He will stand down, he will let them cry, and he too will cry.
Miss Blackwell joins him at the back of the room. “Your friend, young Mr. Smith, is resting upstairs,” she says. “We blocked off a corner for him.”
Speakers of the Dead Page 2
