With a pencil, Horace scribbled a question in his notebook about infants and the gas, a theory about how much might stop a crying child. In Charley’s first months, Horace and Elizabeth walked the house like ghouls as their son shook the window panes with his shrieks. During teething, the sleeplessness was worse still.
Now the woman was making motions with her hands, the day’s low southern light bright on her fingers, long shadows flitting across the railcar, and when the train leaned into curves, those shadows touched Horace’s lap. He’d seen such gestures when children from the deaf asylum came into Hartford for Sunday services. The hand motions were their language, precise and quick, powerful with intention. Watching the woman, he recalled the beauty of Elizabeth’s hands as she arranged evergreen clippings in a vase, her long fingers so quiet and eloquent.
The girl made a fist of one hand and smacked the open palm of the other. She brushed fingers against her chin. The woman took the girl’s hands and manipulated them to refine the gestures. But these two weren’t deaf, were they? Hadn’t they just been talking? The train leaned into another curve, and the baby leaned with it, the woman gasping and catching the child before it tumbled from her lap. The girl laughed, and the woman did, too, the disaster of the baby on the floor averted, oh happy blessing! The baby wailed as if upset by their giddiness.
When he approached the family, the woman frowned. “She’s not disturbing you?”
Horace smiled an assurance. Now the girl had the rattle in her mouth as if she were a dog with a bone, and she growled to get the crying baby’s attention. When that failed, Horace tongued his lips wet and whistled a passably accurate robin’s call: cheer-y-o, cheer-y-o, cheer-i-up! The baby stopped crying, looked right then left, its face all curiosity. Horace whistled again, cheer-y-o, cheer-y-o, cheer-i-up! The baby grinned. The woman clapped.
She introduced herself as Mrs. William Sidwey of Holyoke, and these were daughters, youngest and oldest. The middle child, deaf since birth, now received her education in Hartford at Reverend Gallaudet’s school. “Our visit done, we’re homeward,” Mrs. Sidwey said. She asked about his family.
“A son,” he said. “No daughter.”
“Mr. Sidwey and I have no son,” said Mrs. Sidwey. She grinned at her oldest and pinched the girl’s cheek. “Perhaps I should trade this one.” Her daughter made a disgusted face with her mouth and motioned a hand response so the mother laughed before asking Horace, “Would your wife like this girl?”
He did not know how to answer. Something jovial was called for, a quip, but this was not a subject about which he could joke. He wondered at life’s capriciousness, how one had a son, another daughters. How some gave birth with ease and grace; how others died. Or nearly did. Cribs and graves.
“Is your baby teething? I’m a dentist. Shall I have a look?”
The train’s brakes rasped, and in the sound he heard echoes of Elizabeth’s confinement. Perhaps the gas could relieve childbirth’s agonies as Elizabeth herself had hypothesized. But his gas annulled pain and only pain—not Death, greasy and long-fingered under the bed. Every miracle, he supposed, had its limitations.
Mrs. Sidwey held the babe toward him, and he probed the mouth. Emerging white pebbles. Teething, yes. “I’ve got some clove oil,” he said. “A small dab won’t harm her.”
As he touched a cotton swab to the baby’s gums, he asked, “How do you suppose it shapes us that our first knowledge of life is pain?”
The woman looked startled, but the conductor called, “Springfield!” and she began to collect belongings, to instruct the oldest daughter, and to hastily thank Dr. Wells for his help.
Buttoned in his warmest overcoat, cravat knotted high on his neck, he waved goodbye to the Sidweys as he stood in the bright sunlight on the platform waiting to continue his trip via the Boston-Albany line. He stamped his feet against the cold, though he wore his warmest boots, lined with wool. Elizabeth had packed in his trunk a few days’ clothing and a pair of dress shoes freshly buffed and wrapped in tissue to wear at his presentation. “I would like to be there to see you,” she had said. “You have earned this happiness.” Amid his clothes he had placed his notebooks so that interested parties might review and invite publication of his science, and around his neck he carried that gift from Riggs, the upper molar yanked on the historic day, now a traveling charm. On his person he also carried an envelope with the reply letter Morton had sent explaining how Horace would make his presentation to Dr. John C. Warren’s class in surgical medicine at the Massachusetts Medical College, and that it would involve an amputation—not a tooth pull. Unnerving, that, because it would be a first, but also thrilling. What better proof?
Steam from the train’s engine hung low and obstructed Horace’s view on the way to Boston. With the toe of his boot, he tap-tap-tapped the traveling trunk sitting on the cabin floor, considered the bladder inside, and the gas. Curious, this tug. Like the slightest hunger. He’d always been a man to snack, to steal a shred of bread or crunch an apple between meals, answering a bodily desire he saw no reason to resist. This was the first time he’d felt so about the gas, and when he considered why, he thought about waves and ease. A breath or two would do it. But on a train? Among his fellow passengers? There was no law against such a thing, yet he felt a vague reluctance. It seemed bad manners or something. So, as a distraction from that gas-hunger, he amused himself by imitating the gestures of the Sidwey mother and daughter, inventing movements and giving them invented meaning: drawing lines on the palm of one hand with the other’s thumb (to say I’m sorry) or wiggling fingers near his skull (to mean imagine). Imagine, he thought, and did: Elizabeth with daughters.
He rubbed his eyes. He’d not meant for his thoughts to arrive here, reminding him of the oath by which he had spared Elizabeth another birth, an anguish she might after all want. He knew his vow was no kindness. He understood the cost, that after all these years some part of their marriage had dampened.
Yet she lived.
Miles ahead of the train’s arrival, Horace smelled Boston. He could not say how much of the stink was rubbish burning and how much was hog butchery, nor could he say what part was excrement or cat urine or shoe black. It was all of a piece, so pungent that even through the train’s closed windows it punched him in the nose, gagged him into a cough. Familiar, that smell, and with it came an old wariness. Twice the city had hurt him, when he lived there as an apprentice and again with that Morton business. “Do not trust Morton,” Riggs had said before this trip began, a concern Horace waved aside. Morton he could depend on; the man was predictable in his vices. Horace could divine his smells, perhaps too well. But Boston confounded him.
This time will be different, he decided. This time, Horace Wells brings a discovery to change the world.
Morton met Horace at the Boston station, and he’d brought along a chemist, for what purpose he did not explain. None of the men shook hands, but stood stiffly, a quick nod their warmest greeting. In the days since Horace and Morton had met at Coles Barber Shop, the latter had grown a beard in the manner of a Nantucket whaling captain, chin and cheeks covered but the upper lip shaved, and the chemist wore the same style, though with eyeglasses. A Boston fashion, Horace decided. On Morton, the beard suggested an underhanded banker, especially when combined with that sharp nose and his underbite. On the chemist, however, the beard seemed an accident, a failure to shave properly. The chemist’s eyes, magnified behind his lenses, seemed always to look where Horace was not. “My home is humble,” Morton was saying, arguing for Horace not to stay at an inn as he’d planned. Morton bent over to retie a length of twine that kept the sole of his left shoe from flapping. “Cats scrap nightly over the alley trash, but the lodgings come at no cost to you. More importantly, my Elizabeth insists.”
Later, in a tavern over a lunch table, Horace leaned toward Morton and the chemist and their beards, gesturing with a chicken leg, explaining his discovery. The chemist frowned. By now Morton had explained that this man, Charles
T. Jackson, had at one time been Morton’s landlord. He served Boston’s top medical men, so had the associations by which Horace’s exhibition had been arranged—though Jackson anticipated failure. Never had the chemist heard of a gas to annul pain. “Nitrous oxide has been studied for decades,” he said. “If it works as you say, why has no one else realized your discovery? I formulate nitrous oxide, Dr. Wells. Nothing in its makeup suggests an application as you describe. Tuberculars inhale it to stimulate their lungs, you know. It creates excitability, not insensibility. Surely you’ve read Davy on the subject.”
Horace remembered that Colton had also mentioned Davy. Upon return to Hartford, he decided, he’d find and read the man’s papers. But to Jackson he said nothing to reveal his ignorance, only leaned back in his chair and spread his arms, as if welcoming whatever Jackson might say next. Jackson took the bait.
“If Davy didn’t find that nitrous oxide annuls pain,” he said, “then it doesn’t.”
Horace fingered beneath his collar, showed them the chain with the molar. “My own tooth—,” he said, “and I felt nothing. Not a prick!”
“Perhaps you managed a tooth pull,” said Jackson, “but what is that compared to a leg amputation? Imagine it, Dr. Wells. Would you inhale nitrous oxide and submit yourself to the saw?”
“No reason to consider it. My limbs require no alteration.”
Morton helped himself to a chicken leg from Horace’s plate and gnawed at it, and Horace again marked that old suspicion on Morton’s face, a permanent expression that said, We are an earth full of devils and antagonists. Morton swallowed. “Warren doesn’t believe your claim, either,” he said. “He is as mighty a skeptic as God ever made.”
Horace dropped a bone and the tin plate rang. He wiped grease from his fingers on the napkin tucked into his shirt, then scratched at his cheeks. “You believe it, though, don’t you, Will.” He hoped not to sound questioning, but definitive, master to apprentice.
“You were my teacher, so I asked Jackson to arrange things. But we are scientists here, and our profession requires proof. Your claim—”
“It is no claim,” Horace said. “It is a discovery.”
Jackson rapped his soup spoon against the tabletop, and Horace looked to him, but the man’s eyes stared left toward a table of solicitors.
“Horace,” said Morton, “out of respect for our shared history, I’m asking you. We’ve not advertised this event. If you return to Hartford and your practice, no one will know. Your reputation remains intact.”
“I’ve read your essay on teeth cleaning,” said Jackson. “A career can stand on such work.”
Horace placed a bit of chicken from his own plate on Morton’s. A gift. He smiled. “Your pessimism is misplaced. Your imaginations are limited. A world that is no vale of tears—how can anyone argue against such a thing?”
Jackson covered his smirk with a fist. “A painless world? Don’t you study history, Dr. Wells? Even if your method relieves all pain, someone else will invent new ways to inflict it.”
That evening, Horace was reacquainted with Morton’s Elizabeth, her eyes shrouded in melancholy as always and her dress still tightly laced. Once she had been Miss Elizabeth Whitman of Farmington, Connecticut, daughter of Mr. Edward Whitman, a farmer widely admired for his lack of humor. She had met her future husband when she brought her bad tooth to him in Hartford. Though Morton healed her mouth, she steadfastly refused to smile, as if she’d inherited the family aversion to gaiety, a trait that seemed to appeal to Morton as much as did her pretty brunette ringlets and the dresses she wore immodestly low off the shoulder. It was because their wives shared a first name that the men, to avoid confusion, referred to “my Elizabeth” and “your Elizabeth.” In a playful moment, Horace had once joked that Morton seemed eager to replicate Horace’s life detail by detail. “First you take my knowledge of dentistry, then my manner of managing a practice, then a woman with the same name as my wife! When your Elizabeth bears you a son and you name him Charles and move to Lord’s Hill, then I’ll know that I’ve never been more than half my true self—and you the other part.”
The hour was late, candles tossing light across the plates left greasy after the day’s last meal, though when Horace yawned it came from nerves rather than fatigue. A thrilling and daunting day, traveling from Hartford, and then a Boston ramble, including a scouting trip to the Massachusetts General Hospital (“Where history awaits you,” Morton had said, grinning), and to a post office so Horace could mail a letter to his Elizabeth. Then back to Morton’s apartment, where now Horace with his host and hostess each quaffed rum from mugs.
Morton’s Elizabeth grasped Horace’s coat sleeve, canted her head toward him, her movements liquid and lazy. “Take me home with you,” she begged, a little whine in her plea. “Boston will kill me yet. How can people endure such crowds? And the stink! A little rose-scented oil dabbed under my nose and the city becomes bearable, but only that. I miss Farmington. Air is breathable there. Please, Wells, take me home when you go.”
“You stay with me,” Morton said as his arm encircled her, pulled her so she nearly tipped her chair, and her laughter was a squeal. Her skirt bunched, and Horace let himself look at her ankles, the flex and turn. Morton spilled his mug of rum into her lap.
“Ah!” she cried. “Will nothing civilize a man from Ohio?”
Horace looked for a towel or rag to clean the spill, but stopped when he saw that Morton and his Elizabeth ignored the mess. Instead, Morton nuzzled his wife’s neck. “Pshaw, girl,” he said. “I’m ill-mannered but not a bad man. And you know it, too.” Then he pointed across the room at the bladder Horace had unpacked. “What do you say, Wells? Shall we? Better than my Elizabeth’s Farmington air from what I hear.”
So this was why Morton had wanted him to stay here rather than at the inn. Horace did not want to share, no. But in the letter to his own Elizabeth he’d confessed fears of failure, admitted how moment by moment his heart lunged between despair and exhilaration. The gas, he knew, could settle him.
“I’ll leave you men to your science,” said that other Elizabeth, who kissed each on the cheek and retired to the apartment’s bedroom. Horace followed Morton behind a dark blanket hung as a curtain across a doorway and into a space a bit smaller than the pantry at Lord’s Hill. Two short stools, a circular table not much broader than a stool, cabinet shelves crowded with journals and books and half a dozen human jawbones, teeth intact. “Models for my plates,” Morton said. “Too ghoulish for the office. The patients would rather not know.” Roaches scurried as Morton pushed aside a tin plate littered with cheese rinds and peeled egg shells. He motioned for Horace to put the bladder where the plate had been.
Horace said, “Jackson’s cock-eyed way of looking is disconcerting, isn’t it?”
“He’s an odd one, sure. Do you know, he insists he had the idea for the telegraph? That on some cruise to Europe he met a fellow passenger. Gave him all the details of his theory. ‘That passenger was Samuel Morse!’ he told me. ‘Stole my invention!’ He’s mad. I’m convinced he’ll die in an asylum. But he’s a top-notch chemist. I pay him for the materials I need for my solder and plates. He thinks you’re daffy, too, with this theory about nitrous oxide.”
Horace checked the bladder’s faucet, touched his lips to its spigot as does a man testing a pipe. “I wouldn’t have come if painless surgery were only a theory,” he said. “I’ve proven it on man, woman, child, portly or emaciated, Congregational or Episcopal.”
“Episcopal? Then let’s toast the sanctified genius of Horace Wells! Tomorrow’s eve, all Boston will be alight with bonfires celebrating you.”
One of Morton’s dependable vices: to mock another’s better qualities so they seemed shameful. But Horace paid no mind. Instead, he calculated the number of inhalations needed for the next day’s exhibition, and given the volume of gas per bladder, arrived at a sum they could breathe this night. “Three each,” he said, “should do.”
Not long afte
r, Horace found himself strolling through his house on Lord’s Hill feeling the weight of his full bladder, more concerned with where to relieve himself than how he found his way from Boston back home. He opened doors in a long hallway—a dream hall, he knew—but none led to the closet where he could piss. One door opened to the bedroom he and Elizabeth shared, and behind another lay the Boston office where he and Morton had argued about a woman in Morton’s dentist chair and liberties taken. Behind a third door, he found his father at a sink basin shaving his cheeks clean, and his father said, “Tell no one. It’s our secret.” He opened doors to Charley’s bedroom and to the workshop and, at last, to a water closet. The closet had three windows, and through each he saw a bright blackness, a darkness that somehow illuminated. He pissed in a pot, and the ringing in the pot became a tune he recognized. He sang along:
Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony
Stuck a feather in his hat
And called it macaroni.
Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy.
Father and I went down to camp
Along with Captain Gooding
And there we saw the men and boys
As thick as hasty pudding.
And singing along with him there in the water closet was Charley, who gestured to him as the girl on the train had gestured. And Charley’s gestures made perfect sense to Horace, who understood that what the boy was both motioning and singing was a song about his mother, about Horace’s Elizabeth.
Father and I peeked in the room
where mother was in labor,
she breathed the gas and felt no pain
“A girl!” cried out the neighbor.
Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with my girl be handy.
The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist Page 10
