Speakers of the Dead

by J. Aaron Sanders

  “Why not just leave it alone?”

  “Because Abraham and Lena are dead.”

  The crowded tables at Delmonico’s, where South William Street meets Beaver Street, offer a public kind of privacy. It is an hour past noon. At the back of the room, carvers and cooks work to prepare a ceaseless round of lunchtime orders.

  “I should have known better, Mr. Whitman. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

  “Not at all, Miss Blackwell.”

  She appears disjointed. Strands of hair hang over her face, and her eyes bulge with fatigue.

  “I know you probably have a few questions after what happened back there.”

  “That sounds about right,” Walt says.

  “The first thing you need to know is that Kenneth Barclay was Abraham Stowe’s protégé long before Lena Hathaway. Indeed, it was her arrival that changed everything.”

  “So he didn’t like her.”

  She shakes her head. “In fact, Barclay is the one who discovered Lena’s secret.” Elizabeth pauses here.

  “Secret?”

  “Lena pretended to be a man so she could attend medical school.” She proceeds to tell the story of how Lena Hathaway took on the name of Anson Dunbar. Dressed as a man, she was a medical student for several months before Kenneth Barclay exposed her. “Yes, before Lena came along, Kenneth was the genius upstart surgeon,” Miss Blackwell says. “When Kenneth earned his MD, Abraham deferred to him on everything. Kenneth led dissections, taught surgical techniques, and even took lead in surgery.

  “Then this new student, Anson, arrives, and he is simply better than Kenneth at everything. Kenneth was devastated. When he later discovered Anson’s secret, he thought he would retake his place as Abraham’s right-hand man. But the opposite happened. Abraham and the newly discovered Lena became closer, and you know the rest.”

  “Ah,” Walt says. “So this is why he is so interested in Abraham’s indiscretion.”

  She nods. “But it’s even slightly more complicated than that.”

  The waiter brings their food: Whitman has potatoes and beef, and Miss Blackwell, the chicken and sweet potato.

  “Before I was a medical student at the women’s college, Kenneth and I were engaged to be married,” she says.

  “Married?”

  Elizabeth blushes. “He was different then. He was generous and supportive. He rooted for those around him to succeed. We loved each other very much.”

  “What changed?”

  “Kenneth introduced me to Abraham about a month after Anson arrived, and for a short time, the situation was perfect. We felt like anything was possible, like the medical world was about to explode.” She pauses here, reflective. “But when Anson surpassed Kenneth, he came undone. He turned on Abraham, and he forced me to take sides.” She pauses. “I chose the Stowes, and this is why he is so cold toward me. Soon after, he quit NYU and moved on to work alongside Dr. Quigley.”

  “Eli Quigley? The former coroner?”

  She nods. “And Quigley is, well, it’s hard to explain.”

  “On the fringes, isn’t he?”

  “That’s a generous way of putting it,” Elizabeth says.

  “I read about the body-parts scandal. I know how he operates, and—”

  “He’s reckless and unethical.” She shakes her head. “He’s known for not throwing anything away. He encourages his students to discover new ways of exploring what the human body can do, but his methods are nothing short of horrible. The body-parts scandal is nothing compared to what he’s doing now. He’s a real Victor Frankenstein.”

  Whitman gives her a moment to gather her thoughts. “So Barclay studied with Quigley—”

  “Oh yes, and they deserve each other. Some of my colleagues tell me that Quigley even started performing abortions and then keeping the fetuses for his students to dissect.” She shakes her head. “Some doctors have claimed to see a room full of aborted fetuses kept in jars.”

  “Abortions?” Walt is thinking about the Mary Rogers case now.

  Elizabeth says, “I know it from a few reliable sources that he does, in fact, give abortions. But what does this have to do with anything?”

  “What if Quigley performed the abortion that killed Mary Rogers?”

  “Let’s suppose he did,” she says. “Then what?”

  At this, Whitman smiles. “Abraham had an affair with Mary Rogers. She ends up dead by botched abortion. When law enforcement fails to find the killer, a rumor emerges that Abraham performed said abortion to keep their relationship secret. Abraham is scapegoated for the Rogers murder, which also happens to protect the body-snatching business. Lena is held responsible for Abraham’s death, and her execution closes the loop.”

  “That’s pretty elaborate.”

  “Yes, but it seems to have worked,” Walt says. “Will you accompany me to Dr. Quigley’s place?”

  “What about everything that’s happened? The students are terrified. They want to go home. Can’t we focus on keeping the college open, keeping the students here?”

  “You have to trust me,” Whitman says again. “Keeping the college open is my main goal.”

  She stares out the window for a moment before she says, “You’ll have to go to Quigley’s without me.”

  “Will you at least look in on Henry?”

  “Henry?”

  “Mr. Saunders,” Walt says. “My new boss. He’s very ill and in bed.”

  Elizabeth smiles. “Now, that I can do.”

  Chapter 17

  In the New York Hospital basement, Walt walks in on three medical students in wrinkled suits and bowler hats, posing stiffly behind a dissecting table. On their dark, stained aprons, they’ve painted their names in white script: MCCRAY, GREY, & SMELHOVEN. A partially dissected corpse is propped up, cross-legged, arms folded in its lap as if it’s waiting for a train. On his head is a bowler hat; on the table, the students have painted We have shuffled off his mortal coil.

  A daguerreotypist holds up his finger. “Steady . . . steady now, boys . . .”

  “Wait!” Grey, a beefy, athletic sort, comes around from behind, takes a half-smoked cigar out of his mouth, and jams it between the jaws of the cadaver. The others laugh as he puts his arm around the cadaver, and the daguerreotypist reminds them to stay still if they want the image to work.

  Whitman waits until the daguerreotypist signals that he’s finished to approach the very average-looking man in charge, watching from across the room. Average height, average weight, neat brown hair, well-groomed beard, and gentle eyes. If you were to see this fellow on the street, Walt muses, you would look straight past him, everything about him suggesting safety and comfort, everything but his bloody apron around which hangs a makeshift holster for variously sized scalpels.

  “Dr. Quigley?”

  The man nods. “At your service.”

  “Walt Whitman. I’m here from the Aurora newspaper, doing a story on grave robbing, body snatching, what comes after, that type of thing.” He breathes deeply. “I understand that some of the bodies end up here.”

  “It’s not illegal to have these bodies, Mr. Whitman.” Dr. Quigley opens his arms as if to include the entire hospital. “It is only illegal for us to acquire them.”

  “I’m not interested in the legality,” Walt says. “I want to know—”

  “I know what you want to know, Mr. Whitman. I’ve read your Aurora article. I’ve read Bennett’s response. I knew the Stowes.”

  “You did?”

  Quigley’s face changes. “Of course I knew Abe. He and I worked together on early drafts of the Bone Bill legislation.”

  Walt doesn’t know what to say.

  Quigley continues: “I’m the one who proposed it to Abe. I want to be able to do my work legally and without the nuisance of dealing with the resurrectionists. Think about the irony, Mr
. Whitman. Medical doctors rely on criminals so they can learn how to care for the same folks who want to lock the criminals up for doing the very thing that allows them to live longer and healthier lives than the criminals.”

  “So have you dealt with Samuel Clement?”

  “Everyone has,” Quigley says. “He’s good at what he does. If you need a body, he will get it for you within a day or two. If all body snatchers were like him, then this would all be a lot easier.”

  Suddenly, a clanging noise sounds from across the room—the rod holding up the corpse’s head has fallen to the floor, and Quigley’s students are laughing. Quigley sighs. “You’ll have to forgive them. They’re just blowing off steam.”

  “I would have thought they’d have had enough of that at Yale.”

  McCray and Smelhoven are holding the body upright while Grey reinstalls the rod beneath its chin. “Don’t forget the cigar!” Smelhoven stuffs it back into place.

  “Excuse me,” Quigley says, drifting toward his students. “Smelhoven!”

  “Sir?”

  “I thought I put you in charge.”

  “You did, sir.”

  Quigley angrily yanks the cigar out of the stiff’s mouth.

  “This is a disgrace.”

  The three students exchange looks. Smelhoven looks at Walt.

  “Oh, I see,” Smelhoven says, winking. “This most certainly is a disgrace. We are, all of us, ashamed. Forgive us as we may never forgive ourselves.”

  McCray and Grey nudge each other.

  Dr. Quigley turns his attention back to Whitman. “You’re welcome to stay and watch. We have a newborn today, a very unusual thing. Maybe you’ll learn something about yourself.”

  “A newborn,” Walt says. “What do you mean, a newborn?”

  “When the soul leaves the body, all that’s left behind is the material,” Quigley says. “From that material, we can learn more than you can imagine. Aren’t you the least bit curious to look inside the body of a human so young? Perhaps its organs are not yet fully developed. Perhaps we can determine how and why it died. Perhaps we can save such a baby in the future because we look inside.” Quigley pauses. “And what right do we have to waste God’s gift?”

  Walt follows Quigley to another table, on top of which lies a draped object so small one might mistake it for a loaf of bread, and he can’t help but think of the Stowes’ unborn daughter.

  Quigley rubs his fingers along the canvas sheet before removing it. The baby, a boy, appears like a doll, its eyes closed, its mouth open, and its skin waxy. There’s a familiar quality to the body, one remove away from a living and breathing baby, the difference striking enough to make it seem re-created, like a sculpture. Whitman reaches out but pulls back.

  Quigley notices. “Go ahead.”

  Walt touches the chest, stomach, and forehead. He tugs gently at the short black hair. He runs his finger down the front of the face, tracing the nose and the lips, and over the chin and down to the scrunched-up neck. The body is cramped together and tiny, and though it is dead, it is real, its layers of skin and muscle, bone and sinew, its heart, liver, lungs, veins.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Quigley says.

  It is.

  The body—parsed from its life, its mother and father, its siblings, its house—is art. Its new context is a series of images: the dissection table, the white sheet, the doctor and his averageness, the knife, the students face by face, the brick wall, and the window letting in only a peephole’s worth of daylight.

  Whitman can’t say this to a quack doctor, and so instead he asks, “How did you acquire this corpse?”

  “That is none of your business.”

  Walt asks, “Through an abortion?”

  “Now, where did you hear something so ghastly as that?”

  “I’ve heard that you perform abortions here, then keep the fetuses for your experiments.”

  Quigley shakes his head. “I’m a medical doctor, and I take my patients’ well-being very seriously. I also respect their privacy.”

  “Did you give Mary Rogers an abortion?”

  “The cigar girl?”

  Walt nods.

  Quigley shakes his head. “I understand that what we do might seem repugnant to the uninitiated, but we are”—he gestures to his students—“engaged in a mission to understand the workings of the human body for the improvement of us all. We understand that you would prefer to benefit from what we do while pretending not to know how we do it.

  “But when you come in here and toss out reckless accusations about our connection to unsolved murder cases—that, sir, is unethical. You want to know where we get our corpses? You want to hear me say it? There is not a legal way for us to procure the very thing we need to do our jobs. So we rely on the dregs of society to provide us with what our own government should.” He touches the baby’s head. “But this corpse was donated to us by a heartbroken mother who wants to understand why her son died only moments after his birth.”

  “What about Kenneth Barclay?”

  Quigley’s face darkens. “What about him?”

  “He was your student.”

  “Was.”

  “And you helped him get the coroner job.”

  Quigley nods. “Much to my regret.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Again, none of your business.”

  “Has he ever brought you women who need abortions?”

  “I thought we’d moved past this,” he says. “This is not an abortion factory, Mr. Whitman. I have helped a handful of women who had nowhere else to turn. I have used the remains to learn about the development of the human fetus, something I don’t expect you to understand.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m trying to be helpful here.”

  “Is it true that you keep a room full of fetuses?”

  Quigley shakes his head. “Everything I do, and all anybody knows about is that?”

  Walt says, “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “It’s insulting that my life and career are reduced to that one thing. I’m not Dr. Frankenstein.”

  Walt looks up.

  “I’m not an idiot,” Quigley says. “I know what people say.”

  “But why would you?”

  “You want to see it? You want to be titillated by the scandal of it? Well, then, sir, follow me.”

  Whitman is aware of the medical students watching them as the two men leave the dissection lab for a smaller room next to it. But Walt doesn’t care about them—he’s like Leontius in Plato’s Republic, who cannot look away from the heap of executed corpses. But for Walt, it’s even more than compulsion and curiosity; it’s as if he needs to see the human artifacts to confront that thing deep within his soul, the myth of heaven, of peace and night, of beauty.

  And so he follows.

  The room is dark and dank. Whitman can’t see a thing until Quigley lights the lamp, and they come into view. Shelves and shelves of jars containing various body parts and organs. Hearts and lungs and livers, hands, feet, eyeballs, and a jawbone, its teeth still intact. A man’s head, cross-sectioned in two beakers displayed side by side, pickled in yellow fluid, the brain, esophagus, nostrils, and eye sockets arranged like a painting; an intestine coiled neatly in a jar like a thick worm; and a fetus, whole, pressed up against the glass like an odd-colored flower before it blooms. There’s a hanging skeleton, its flesh not so neatly removed, scads of flesh and blood, shiny and gristled, still attached, and a bleached fetal skeleton, with two club feet, sitting in the corner, its eye sockets disproportionately large in its fist-size skull.

  “Indulge yourself, Mr. Whitman. Tell the world about my ill-gotten collection. Sensationalize my commitment to medical progress. Give your readers something they not only cannot understand but refuse to consider. These are my specimens. These are my teachers. And from every one of them I have lea
rned something that may keep you alive.”

  The sheer enormity of the collection overwhelms Walt. He looks away, but there is no away in this room, and he has to confront these objects, and so he regards them as they are, their colors and shapes, their escarpments and edges, their flesh and fluid, grimy and gelatinous, rigid, flaky, sharp, and he feels pulled at by their odd beauty, their untranslatable state, and he is overcome with the sense of his own decomposition, his flung likeness, coaxed to vapor and dusk, and he gives himself to the image of his impending death, to the dirt where he will grow among the grass he loves, to this odd pulchritude.

  “I know you see it,” Quigley says.

  “But it’s unnatural.”

  “No, you’re wrong.” Quigley swings his arm. “They are the most natural things here. This building, the clothes we’re wearing, our pretense—these hold us back. These are unnatural. We are moving away from what we are. We should all become more natural, as Mr. Emerson has written.”

  “You read Emerson?”

  “Contain your shock,” Quigley says. “You and I are more alike than you want to admit.”

  Whitman is thinking about what the doctor said, and then he’s thinking about the doctor, and he’s looking at this very average man in front of him, and he’s wondering how the hell he ended up in this room with these things, and how it is that the doctor has begun to sound rational. Walt shakes his head, and reminds himself why he’s here. The rest of it, natural or unnatural, is not relevant.

  Walt gathers himself, restarts. “What do you think happened to Mary Rogers?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think Abraham botched an abortion that led to her death?”

  He shakes his head. “He was a good man.”

  “Are there other abortionists out there who might have?”

  “There are more than you think,” Quigley says. “Do you realize how difficult life is if you’re a woman? Men take advantage of you repeatedly and then when you become pregnant as a result—That’s your problem, life is sacred, train up a child in the way he must go. There are those among us who understand this, and we will do what we can to help these women retain even a modicum of control over their own lives in a world that barely recognizes them as anything other than property.”