The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  At one table, near a platter of odorous cheeses, Horace brushed away a fly, though it returned. The woman, noticing, smiled his way. A moment later, when he glanced up from a tray of crackers, she, across the table, raised her head. Horace and the woman each explored in polite bites (a fork of cake, a dried apricot, a finger of cheese). After a while only Horace and the woman sampled from the table, and he wondered whether they were violating some custom, eating ahead of a dinner bell or a blessing. He decided to ask as she drew close enough to speak, but she questioned him first, in English, accented by French.

  “Are you the American dentist?”

  He admitted it. Her face was wide, clean as polished marble, features small except for her dark eyes, which were large and delicate as a newborn fawn’s. Her brown hair was gathered in a chignon, held by a jade comb. She introduced herself as the Comtesse d’Haussonville, and she accepted his kiss on her proffered hand, the red silk of her gloves a luxury to his lips. In a small voice, she asked about his discovery, and listened with one arm across her waist, the other raised so a red-silked knuckle touched her lips. He thought, She’s flirting with me, and felt a warm expansion in his chest. When he asked how she came to speak English, she leaned near, and because good manners gave him an excuse, he leaned nearer, too. So close to his ear he could feel the tickle of her lips, she whispered, “I am the Paris that wants to be remembered.”

  He smiled. “You know my friend, Brewster?”

  Her breath again, warm in his ear. Her perfume, vanilla and bergamot.

  Had she spoken again? He couldn’t tell. She finger-waved au revoir, then slipped, easy as mist floats, down a nearby staircase to vanish into the crowd.

  Then a waiter with a tray handed him a glass. Champagne was new to Horace, and he liked it. An enchanted drink for an enchanted kingdom. A fine example, this one, a sip of sweet air. A good argument for the time-tested vices.

  On the main floor he gave his empty glass to a passing waiter and took another, but his right hand, holding the flute, started to tremble. Shoving that hand in his pocket, he drank with his less adept left, so dribbled on his chin. Bumping along, ignorant of conversations, he could not decipher whether a smile directed his way meant good will or something else: even, perhaps (as on that man’s face there), a plea. So many visages to read, so much noise to interpret. He marked how with a tilt of his head a grin could be a grimace, and for the first time the festivity struck him as vaguely sinister. He sensed an ancient despondency, unacknowledged but permeating the crowd, as if this ball were not a celebration but instead an elaborate machine meant to conceal some dissatisfaction.

  Still no sign of Brewster or the comtesse. But someone shouted, applause followed, and Horace turned to see at some distance a raised platform, and atop that two golden statues: gymnasts, classical in their depiction. One statue stood as if a pillar; the other struck a one-armed handstand atop his partner’s shaved head. Shouldering his way amidst the onlookers, Horace saw that each nearly nude figure was muscled in ideal proportions, and had he the language, he would have commented to the man beside him regarding the sculptor’s skill. Then the smaller figure in his handstand began—almost imperceptibly—to bend at the waist. Jot by jot, he lowered himself in a slow ballet. Legs rigid. Bare toes pointed. Horace tried not to blink. Long seconds passed, and somehow, without disengaging, the statues shaped themselves into a new pose: a fusion of one’s spread-eagle and the other’s push-up. Neither seemed to have breathed. They showed no sign of exertion. In their new pose, they once more stiffened into statues.

  Horace pressed closer. He studied knees, faces, spines, fingers. At last he noticed the slightest tremor in the larger one’s wrist.

  They were men, after all. Inspired—but not magic, not a trick. How marvelous.

  Then, the golden men leaped upright, fully animate, chests rising and falling with their heaving breaths, arms raised to welcome applause, and Horace clapped loudest. He could not himself bend stiff-kneed to buckle his shoe, yet he warmed with an affinity for these two acrobats, felt a vague fraternity, some secret shared. Horace clapped and found that when he did his right hand no longer trembled.

  Then cymbals crashed, and Moors paraded past playing bells and strings and reeds. A white horse followed their clamor, its headgear decorated with peacock feathers, a bare-breasted, brown-skinned woman astride its back. Horace’s pulse quickened, his skin tingling pleasantly. He imagined trying to explain this vision of steed and woman to Elizabeth and Charley. Beyond comprehension!

  Ball-goers swirled ’round the musicians, followed in their wake, and Horace with them. By golly, he was almost dancing. As he’d almost danced in London, a few days after the Hibernia docked. Quite the crowd then, too, for the queen’s procession to parliament, an event he’d stumbled upon, his head foggy with ether. He recalled beggars and their jigs, how he shuffled his feet at their invitation to “Dance, you Yankee! Dance!” how their women tugged his sleeves, coughing croupy breath his way, their missing limbs and toothless grins, the tumors they displayed. The coins he gave away.

  “Perhaps it was just the neighborhood …” He was relating the account to the comtesse, curious as to how she’d found him again in the vast hall, how he’d come to hold a fresh champagne glass. “… but London seemed to be the poorest city on earth.”

  Now, by hand, she was leading him away from the beau monde, up a narrow corkscrew of a staircase. Dizzy, he was glad for any quiet someplace.

  “This was a standee spot, near the palace,” he was saying. He told her about the queen and her equipage leaving the gates, Prince Albert seated beside her, and how he’d thought the queen pretty, especially given what he’d always heard. The comtesse turned her head, fawn eyes focused on his, and she smiled in such a way he felt unnerved. They’d arrived at a pocket door, for which she had a key. “The horses,” he said, “I couldn’t count them. I swear, the carriage was forged of gold. The queen’s crown? Half as high again as her own head.”

  Behind the pocket door was a four-poster bed with a high mattress and diaphanous fabrics swathing the posts. Squat candles burned from every ledge, and a gilt-framed mirror hung in such a position as to reflect whoever lay upon the bed. He noticed the flask of chloroform in his coat pocket gaining weight, a curious thing, and he cradled it with his free hand. The comtesse had placed a glass of wine in his other.

  The day after the queen’s procession, he told her, he’d gone to see the crown itself displayed at the Tower of London. “They told me it cost five million dollars,” he said. “Five million! And I had given money to beggars. Where is the queen while her people struggle? I ask you.”

  “Sleeping comfortably,” said the comtesse, “in a bed much richer than this one.” She touched the draped fabric, let it caress her cheek.

  He liked the wine’s taste, rough, with the sweet smoke of a berry, if a berry could be burned. Drowsiness pressed his brow from within, tipped him toward the bed.

  “Those starving people.” He spoke into the bowl of his glass. “Sick. Suffering.”

  She undid his neck tie, lifted his shaking hand to kiss the palm, though the hand felt separate from him as if her lips had grazed another man’s skin. “But here you are,” she said, “a guest of France’s king, living off his abundance. Our poor starve, too, you know.” Her eyes opened rounder in false, teasing surprise. “We reconcile ourselves to these realities. What’s this?” She tapped a fingernail against the flask in his breast pocket. “Your discovery?”

  Her hand insinuated itself inside his coat, then she set the flask on a bedside taboret. Reflected candlelight flickered in the metal.

  “Brewster says I shouldn’t.”

  “Shouldn’t what?”

  She pushed one glove down her arm, rubbed herself against him.

  There. He sensed it again. The despondency.

  “I can’t seem to stand straight. My head keeps floating off without me.”

  “You don’t need to stand.”

  She
tugged the cork from his flask, waved it under her nose, shivered at what she smelled, her lips shaping an o, red and petite.

  He said, “Don’t you want the poor to be happier?” But he knew he’d not paid those beggars to make them happy. He’d only wanted them to take their pain elsewhere.

  “I want me to be happier,” she said. “And right now, I want you to be happier.”

  She stepped behind him, grazing his belt with the edge of her hand. He heard the pocket door slide shut. Her fingers played in the hair curled at his shirt collar.

  He had not told it right, about the beggars. If he had told it correctly, she would understand. He had left something out. The beggars were only part of the story. He knew this because it was a story he’d been trying to tell for so long—since he was a boy. About his father’s death and later about Charley’s birth. About a girl shackled to a chair, a tooth’s root dug from its socket, a mutilated dog. About need. About pain. He had wanted to tell the story to Nan that shameful day in his office, he knew that. But everything had become confused.

  “You Americans,” the comtesse said. “You work so hard to save us all. But you never consider the consequences.” She sniffed again at the chloroform, tilted her head back with the pleasure of it and showed her powdered neck. “Or the inevitable corruptions.”

  The room shrank and darkened, the edges of his vision blurred. Though he couldn’t see it, he sensed pain nearby, perched, patient, called by that word corruptions, and how she’d said it, as if it were a cream pastry on her tongue, something to swallow. Pain, that slippery thing. So clever, so quick.

  She handed him the flask. The sweet odor filled his nose and mouth, and he wanted it and understood that he would always want it, desire so keen it hurt. Pain and need—that story would never end. He’d never be able to tell it, not even to Elizabeth, with whom he had lived it. This time, though, he wanted no confusion, no lingering stab of guilt. He replaced the stopper, slipped the flask into his coat pocket.

  From below he heard muffled laughter, a horn and a cello, the clinking din of plates and glasses. The comtesse nestled among the bed’s pillows. She yawned, gloved hand over mouth, then, as though surprised at herself, whispered an apology.

  He rested his hand over the flask, over his heart, and he felt warmth there. “Here’s to happier,” he said. As he opened the pocket door, he read in her modest smile that she understood, their evening was ended—roles performed aptly, no ill will. Then she asked him, please, before leaving, to snuff the candles.

  More than a month earlier, in Liverpool, Mr. Cyril Benson, first mate on the Hibernia, found a buyer for the dentist’s top hat. With that money, added to a bit saved on his own, he visited a gunsmith with hope of purchasing a pistol.

  The gunsmith had lost a leg to grapeshot and amputation while fighting with Pakenham at New Orleans, and though the surgeon had told him he’d feel a ghost ache where the flesh and bone had gone missing, he’d decided he wouldn’t. He hadn’t, and would go into the earth at St. James having never. With formidable will and a great pride, he’d taught himself never to use crutches in public. On the overcast day Mr. Benson visited, he hopped from cabinet to cabinet gathering pistols, impressing Mr. Benson because from waist up he appeared to be walking, albeit with a limp. He showed Mr. Benson a range of bargains: an ugly percussion-cap derringer that looked as if it had been assembled out of parts made in a prison; a finer Birmingham model with a varnished handle and a pleasing Damascus pattern on the barrel; and a set of German dueling pistols with ebony stocks. Mr. Benson pretended to aim each as if his were an expert eye. In the end he chose the Damascus-pattern derringer. “Can’t do better than a pistol from Birmingham,” he bluffed.

  “Fifty caliber,” explained the gunsmith, who took the ignorance of amateurs as an offense against himself and all true-blooded men. “Black powder. One shot’s all it’s got, one shot’s all you need. Nice little gun for the wife.”

  Mr. Benson smiled. The captain’s abuse had taught him that insults to one’s manhood were never subtle. He spent some moments moving the pistol hand to hand, learning its balance, feeling the clean barrel oil on his fingers, wondering whether he’d have the courage to blow out the captain’s brain.

  This is how Mr. Benson came to possess the dentist’s top hat:

  In port, after the passengers—including the dentist—had disembarked, Mr. Benson instructed the deck hand cleaning No. 32 to bring him anything unusual found there. He’d hoped for that liquid and its vapors, but instead the deck hand returned with the top hat. Two weeks passed in dock while the company refitted the Hibernia, during which time Mr. Benson read the newspapers and learned that the dentist was famous, caught up in this controversy about vapors and gases and who’d discovered what. Journalists placed him in Paris, so Mr. Benson took the hat to the Liverpool market and returned with the derringer tucked into his boot.

  An ocean chill frosted his soul when he imagined the captain dead. He worried that the iciness meant cowardice. His great fear was that an elaborate plan to kill the captain would lead to a final moment of weakness when he could not pull the trigger. So he held the derringer in reserve and trusted that his temper teetered on the edge of rage, and at some moment an action or insult would spark violence. In his fantasies the captain slandered him in the galley, in the engine room, at dinner, and dozens of times a pistol shot exploded the captain’s bone and blood. Mr. Benson understood there would be consequences, but those had no relevance for him; he needed the captain dead. This way, he prepared himself. Murder began to feel inevitable.

  He was in the midst of such a fantasy one March day, even as he checked the Hibernia’s manifest against those passengers coming aboard for the trip to New York. When the dentist appeared at the front of the queue, Mr. Benson startled.

  He wore a replacement top hat. To Mr. Benson’s untrained eye, it looked twice the value of the old one. Maybe even more.

  “Hello, Mr. Benson,” the dentist said. “Number thirty-two again?”

  Relying on his professional training, Mr. Benson forced himself to look the dentist in the eyes and to smile. He hoped his initial expression had betrayed neither his hope for more of the dentist’s potion nor Mr. Benson’s fear of being fingered as a hat thief. He paged through the manifest. “Not this time, Dr. Wells. We’ve got you in seventeen. You’ll like it. It’s farther astern. A smoother ride when we hit rough seas. You paid for a single this time?”

  Dr. Wells laughed in a sad way, and Mr. Benson sensed he did not want to acknowledge their shared history. “You’re busy now,” the dentist said. “Later, I have a question about a hat.”

  Dr. Wells was no recluse as he had been on the first crossing, but his appearances were rare. Now and then, when the sun reached its high point, he’d show for a stroll above deck. Nightly, he joined other passengers in the galley for dinner but never lingered for dessert. He even sat for an impromptu whist tournament, though he seemed pleased to be eliminated in the first round. Still, Mr. Benson found it impossible to catch him alone when either he or Dr. Wells might be more comfortable suggesting a go at the vapors.

  At the end of the first week, on a day when warm southern sun cut the wind’s chill, Mr. Benson recognized Dr. Wells and his new top hat near the ship’s stern. The dentist stood alone, gazing into the blue cold. Only an hour earlier, with mock concern, the captain had made Mr. Benson unlace his shirt to show whether cowardice had tainted his skin yellow. The insult had not provoked rage and murder as in his fantasies, so now, abashed and glum, Mr. Benson hungered for consolation of the type Dr. Wells had once provided.

  The men greeted each other. Mr. Benson noticed that the dentist’s intensity, so evident on the first crossing, had been displaced by sobriety, as if he had seen a part of himself into the grave and now sat at his own wake. The men stood a while in silence, as do those who sense in each other a separate sorrow, offering comfort without words. Mr. Benson let the ocean spray his beard, and he licked the salt from his lips. Dr.
Wells kept his coat buttoned to the collar.

  “The cook’s planning beef steaks for tonight,” Mr. Benson said at last, “to celebrate the end of the first week. It’s his custom.”

  Dr. Wells nodded. “Good news.” A gust prompted him to steady his hat.

  “Watch that or you’ll lose it overboard.”

  “It’s from Paris.”

  “Yes, I’ve read about you in the newspapers.”

  The dentist’s smile struck Mr. Benson as one tinged with regret. “It will be a year before the societies make any decisions. So I’m told.”

  “I don’t read the medical journals, but the papers favor Morton.”

  Dr. Wells turned to take the sun full in his face, and he closed his eyes. “That’s the common talk, based on the assumption that nitrous oxide doesn’t work. Even some of the medical men say so.”

  “But that’s not true, is it?” Mr. Benson asked, though he knew nothing of the science. It was his empathy demanding he try to cheer the dentist. “A few more experiments, and you’ll prove that.”

  A seagull rounded close in front of them, then careened starboard out of sight.

  “I’d try a whiff again,” said Benson, “if you need a subject for testing. It sure worked on me.” He laughed.

  “That wasn’t nitrous oxide. You inhaled ether. It’s likely to be dangerous. I shouldn’t have encouraged you, and I apologize.”