“So someone may have botched an abortion, panicked, and dumped Rogers’s body in the river?”
“Of course.”
“And what about Abraham Stowe? Why was he murdered?”
“Sounds like his wife got wind of his deep and abiding friendships with other women.”
“What do you know about that?” Walt says.
“It’s no secret,” Quigley says. “He was a good man but not a perfect one. Like us all.”
Whitman closes his eyes. He’s been clinging to a particular version of Abraham for so long that he has failed to be objective. He thought the infidelity was in the past despite all the evidence to the contrary. A good but imperfect man indeed.
Quigley says, “You really didn’t know, did you?”
Walt looks up, his eyes watering. “Do you think she killed him?”
“I’m too old to be surprised by much of anything anymore.” Quigley puts his hand on Walt’s shoulder. “Take heart. If it matters at all, I don’t believe Lena killed Abraham. They were fine people. Both of them.”
Walt reminds himself, I’m a reporter, not a copper. I should be otherwise engaged.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, Mr. Whitman, we have work to do.” Quigley pats him on the shoulder again. “You’re welcome to stay. Watch for a while. See what it is that we do in this dark place. I think you will discover, like we have, that the same beauty that belongs in life also resides in death.”
Whitman follows Quigley back into the dissection lab, where the students are waiting with the tiny body. They are trying to read Walt to see what his response was to the specimen collection, no doubt, and he is careful not to betray any emotion in his face. He tries so hard to appear unaffected, however, that he feels exposed anyway. They don’t seem to notice. He’s committed now. He can’t leave, if only to show that he can handle what he’s seen.
The students make room for him around the dissection table, and they listen to Dr. Quigley, who explains the incision he’s about to make in the tiny corpse. Quigley lowers the scalpel into the baby’s belly button, pulls the blade up through the center of its chest, through the top layer of skin and fat, and stops just short of the heart. He puts his hands on either side of the incision and peels back the skin, a few inches at a time, while the students and Walt stand on their toes to see what is inside.
Chapter 18
With the images of the specimen collection still scrolling in his head, Whitman plods along the sidewalk toward Mrs. Chipman’s boardinghouse. The short March day has already lost its light, flickered away, hurtled toward darkness.
Now, that is a titch melodramatic, he thinks.
He hopes Henry is feeling better for having spent the day in bed. He wants to tell him all about his visit to the coroner with Miss Blackwell, his trip to the Museum de Quigley, and the ensuing dissection. Walt had ended up staying through the entire process. The tiny corpse revealed much to the students, but nothing so prescient as the poor thing’s underdeveloped lungs. Dr. Quigley removed the lungs and laid them on the table. With his scalpel, he traced the approximate size of a developed fetal lung in contrast with what these were, and though the difference was slight, it was vital, Quigley explained, and deadly. Whitman was struck by the precision of what had seemed to him before to be a strictly theoretical act—the body is a machine that can be understood by taking it apart—and he wants to tell this not only to Henry but to Abraham and Lena as well. I understand it now, he wants to tell them.
The first floor of the boardinghouse smells like piss and mold. The boarders have taken to relieving themselves in the recently installed shared sinks. The once ornate molding lining the ceiling and floor has begun to rot, and the wallpaper has bubbled, some of it falling away in complete pieces. Everything is falling apart, and he’s overcome with the desire to preserve something that will not die. He can’t explain it other than to say that he understands some of what Quigley is doing is preserving the stuff of humanity. He climbs the stairs to the third floor, knocks on Henry’s door, and to his surprise, it is Elizabeth Blackwell herself who answers.
Her eyes betray her exhaustion, but she smiles to see him.
“You are still here,” Walt says. “I’m so relieved. How is he?”
“I’m fine,” Henry calls out before Miss Blackwell can answer.
She nods, shakes her head, shrugs. “Maybe a little better,” she whispers.
“I heard that,” Henry says, “and I’m doing a lot better.”
Walt steps inside to see for himself. Henry is in bed trying to put on a good face, but it is clear that he is not yet well. Pale, feverish, fighting hard but losing.
“See?” Henry forces another smile. “Better.”
“Let’s ask the expert,” Walt says.
“The bad news is he still has the flu,” Miss Blackwell says. “The good news is he will recover.” She wags her finger at Henry. “But you must stay in bed.”
“Today, yes,” Henry says, “but what about tomorrow? Surely I’ll be able to go to the Runkels with Walt.”
“Tomorrow,” she interrupts, “you will remain in bed.”
“But—”
“And the day after,” Miss Blackwell says. “No buts, Mr. Saunders. Doctor’s orders.”
Henry says, “But women cannot officially become doctors, can they? Which means—”
Miss Blackwell’s face reddens at this, but catches the grin on Henry’s face and relaxes. “It’s true I have no medical license, but what that means to me is that I can experiment on you, try all the things that medicine forbids, all the procedures I’ve been dreaming of.” She pauses, grins herself. “Something to keep in mind anyway.”
Henry lies down. “I’ll remain in bed.”
Walt is struck by the realization that Henry is now firmly a part of his world, and he worries for Henry’s health as he would for a family member. How strange to become so close in such a short time, and how grateful he is Henry decided to return.
“Thank you, Miss Blackwell, for looking after him.”
“When will you call me Elizabeth as I’ve asked?”
“Elizabeth, then,” Walt says.
She smiles. “I’ll see you back at the college?”
“Certainly,” Walt says, “but right now I need to be here with Mr. Saunders.”
“I understand, and perhaps you’ll fill me in on the details of your visit with Eli Quigley when I next see you.”
Walt turns. “You were right about him.”
“I was?”
“An entire room full of specimens.”
“My God.”
Whitman nods. “But it was more complicated.”
“Complicated? Whatever do you mean?”
Whitman shifts his stance, forming a triangle between the three of them so that Henry is a part of the conversation too, and then he tells them about the room—he’s careful to inflect his description with words that complicate Quigley as a physician rather than reduce him to a quack. Henry shows little emotion as he speaks, but Miss Blackwell’s mouth tenses, and her natural expression of indifference turns into rage. She’s not persuaded.
She’s shaking her head now, and Walt decides that this is quite enough, so he leaves out the fetal dissection altogether. He waits for her to speak, but she says nothing. “Am I to infer from your gestures that you are not convinced?”
“You are right to infer such an idea,” she says.
“Might I ask why?”
“How are we ever going to make real medical progress with such an ethos as Eli Quigley’s? I don’t disagree with his notion of beauty and materiality, as you’ve put it, but we are in the minority. It is our job to convince a skeptical majority that anatomical dissection, and its accompanying issues, is a worthy price to pay for medical progress, and keeping a museum of body parts is not the way to do this. The inside of the body i
s beautiful—it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen—but we must be mindful how all this appears to the uninitiated.”
Walt cannot disagree with Elizabeth’s point of view, but he also remains convinced by Quigley’s, and he’s wondering then about beauty and its long tentacles, good and bad, and how they reach out into the world. He yearns for a way to articulate beauty’s expansiveness, its cathartic pricking of the soul and its gross fecundity of decay. It strikes him that this might be why Henry prefers his poetry to his prose. Poetry has the capability, like a painting, to capture an object without the constraints of linearity. Walt feels as if something inside him is opening up, and he’s able to see the complexity of beauty through Elizabeth Blackwell’s careful and political respect for the human body and through Eli Quigley’s reckless admiration for its beauty in all phases of life and death, the way the body demands attention of all our senses.
“Mr. Whitman?” Elizabeth says. “Did Dr. Quigley have any useful information about Abraham and Lena?”
“Oh, right.” Walt relates what he learned about the many abortionists, about Quigley’s work with Abraham on the Bone Bill, and his belief in the Stowes’ innocence. But Walt doesn’t reveal his own naïveté regarding Abraham’s infidelities.
“That’s good to hear,” Miss Blackwell says. “I’m not so foolish as to turn away allies.”
Whitman helps her with her coat, holds the front door open for her as she leaves. “Good night, Elizabeth.”
“Good night, Walt,” she says, then starts down the stairs.
Walt shuts the door, sits on the chair next to Henry’s bed.
“She’s a dear woman,” Henry says. “She’s been here for several hours taking care of me. I’m glad we are helping her.”
Walt likes hearing this, and he likes hearing Henry use the word we almost as much. “She is fond of you too.”
Henry coughs, and his entire body shakes.
Walt places his hand on Henry’s shoulder. “Take your time,” he says.
When Henry finally stops, he looks exhausted.
Walt tells him not to worry about speaking now, to instead focus on recovery.
And so while Henry rests, Walt brews tea and recounts the news of the last two days. He pays particular attention to the revelations about Azariah’s servitude to Rynders, and he watches as Henry’s eyes widen with astonishment.
With tea in hand, Walt puts his arm around Henry, holds the cup up to his lips—Henry’s hands are shaking—and helps him drink. When Henry has had enough of the tea, Walt dumps the remaining kettle water, which is still warm, into a washbasin. He finds a cloth, which he drops into the water, and then he washes his friend’s neck and face and arms just as Henry did for him a couple of nights before, all the while reminding Henry to relax, to do what it takes to get better, and saying that when he has, the two of them will finish what they’ve started.
While Henry sleeps, Walt straightens up the room, washing and putting dishes away, folding up stray clothing, careful to sort out those that need laundering. It’s difficult to explain, but he feels at home here. He feels a part of something, and the best part is he knows Henry feels the same way.
Walt turns up the lamp next to the bed. Henry’s color is better. His forehead is dry. He appears to be cycling out of the illness. Whitman allows his mind to spool out of the moment, to a time when the two of them might go to the opera together, ride the Brooklyn ferry, or just walk the Bowery. His happiness is so great he simply cannot sit still. He goes to the window, but there’s nothing to see except the gas lamps a block away, burning in the haze, and he’s reminded of Emerson’s transparent eyeball. Walt wishes that he too could see all, be part and parcel with God. Emerson writes that in such a state “the name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental,” but there is only one name on Walt’s mind. Emerson wants expansive truth, wants to find God, wants the currents of the Universal Being coursing through him—
—but all Walt wants is Henry.
From the window, the earth recedes from Walt into the night, and he sees that it is beautiful, and he sees that what is not the earth is beautiful.
He turns from the window, from the vastness of the city to the particularity of his friend. Henry’s chest rises and falls. Inside, he will resemble the corpses of Lena and the baby, but his insides also contain that thing which animates them all. Emerson misses this, Walt thinks. He is looking for God outside of himself, looking for God in nature, looking for God instead of looking for light within, and this is what the Quaker Elias Hicks understood: The light is inside all of us, living or dead.
Walt tosses a blanket onto the floor next to the wood-burning stove. He stokes the fire, tosses in another piece of wood, leaving the door open long enough to make sure it will burn. Then he lies on the floor, his coat folded up as a pillow again, and he dreams in his dream all the dreams of the other dreamers.
Chapter 19
The next day, the air is mild as it often is before a good snowstorm, and ten thousand vehicles careen through the streets of the affluent. Inside one omnibus is Walt Whitman, en route to the Runkels. Both he and Henry Saunders slept late this morning, and for the first time in several days, Walt actually is feeling like himself. He wishes he could say the same thing for Henry. Though he has improved, Henry still has a fever and body aches. He has recovered some of his appetite, and so before he left the room this morning, Walt made a breakfast of eggs, toast, and ham. Henry ate as he hasn’t in several days, and he was eager to change into fresh clothing. Walt helped him with that too. Last of all, he made sure the fire would continue to burn for a few hours, and then he left for the Aurora, where he produced the day’s edition in record time. If Henry felt better tonight, they planned to eat supper at the Pewter Mug, where Walt has promised to fill him in on what he learns today.
Broadway Ike swings the omnibus around the corner, the dividing line between rich and poor, and sputters to a stop, waits for Whitman to hop out before swerving back into traffic and disappearing around the bend. Walt stretches his legs and buttons up his coat. His beard itches under the wool scarf, and his chapped lips sting.
The streets and buildings breathe people. Heads stick out of windows, men and women move in and out of open front doors, and children bounce through it all. The noises travel in and out of each other with no beginning and no end—dogs chase pigs in gutters clogged with sewage, chickens squawk and flap their wings as if they can fly. And the pungent odors created by the marshlands nearby hover oppressively, as if the entire neighborhood has spoiled.
In the long row of tenements before him, each building appears more dilapidated than the last. Most are two stories high; some are three; a few single-story buildings remain. Many of the windows have been broken or removed. Those that remain intact have gaping holes between the frames and the walls around them so that residents have to battle the cold air that rushes in on every floor and in every room.
The wooden staircase to his left is barely functional. Each of the remaining steps, nothing more than slabs of wood, bow in the middle, and the space between them is dangerously large.
He bends down to see three barefoot children sleeping huddled together. A girl with sunken eyes and cheeks, the oldest, leans into the corner, and uses her hat as a pillow against the brick wall. A smaller boy next to her wraps his arms around her torso and presses himself into her while another even younger boy lies in their laps. Their tiny bodies expand and contract together in one mass.
He wonders where their parents are, if they have any at all. When Walt was growing up, the Whitmans never had much money, and his father squandered most of what did come in, but it was never this severe. Every New Yorker knows about the thousands of orphans around the city, but to see them like this is different, worse. Whitman often spends his nights at one of the beer halls one street over, oblivious to their suffering.
They are only childre
n—what chance do they have? He kneels. “Excuse me,” he calls out to the sleeping children.
They don’t stir. So he finds a few coins in his pocket and tosses them down. They land on the ground in front of the children, nearly roll into a grate he hadn’t noticed. Now he understands. They sleep there for the heat that comes from tunnels below, their bare feet strewn across the metal bars.
Walt backs out of the alleyway and from where he stands, he has a view of the Old Brewery, once the famous Coulthard’s Brewery built in 1792 and now a ramshackle dwelling for several hundred people. The five-story building was painted yellow long ago, but that paint has peeled away, taking down many of the clapboards with it. When he looks closer, the faces of at least fifty people loom in the broken windows. Like the others in the alleyway, they only stare at him, their eyes lit up like funeral candles.
That is where he has to go.
As if the living spaces are part of some elaborate, multifloored theater, humans fill the space in every imaginable way, in rooms without doors—one woman in a frayed orange shawl stirs a pot of what looks like potatoes on a stove while in the room next door a couple copulates, he with his pants pulled down and she with her dress pushed up. A barefoot baby in a blue nightgown sits on the ground next to them and plays with an iron key, thick and rusted. They pay Walt no attention as he makes his way up the stairway to where the Runkels live.
On the second floor, at least in this wing, conditions improve. Fewer people lie in the halls. Some of the rooms have walls and doors, but no numbers. So he counts from left to right, from one to eight, and on that door he knocks.
The door opens. “You found us.” Harriet wipes her hands on her apron and shakes his hand. “Where’s Mr. Saunders?”
“He came down with a fever,” Walt says. “He sends his regrets.”
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