The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist

by Michael Downs

  “If I may say so, you’re a more sober man, Dr. Wells.”

  “I’m trying.” He took off his hat to scratch the top of his head, which shined in the sun, then put the hat snugly back in place. “I’m reminded,” he said. “Did I leave a top hat aboard ship? I’ve missed it since London, but I thought I might have lost it earlier.”

  “Not that I’ve heard,” Mr. Benson said. It was not the first lie he’d ever told, but for Mr. Benson it broke a trust he believed they’d just fashioned. Another craven act added to his history.

  “Is there a lost and found?”

  Mr. Benson gave the clerk’s name.

  “I’d like to see the engines sometime,” Dr. Wells said. “Could you arrange that with the ship’s engineer? I’m interested in how machines work.”

  Mr. Benson nodded, said, “Watch that hat. The wind has yet to blow its hardest.”

  The next day, after he’d left Dr. Wells with the ship’s engineer, Mr. Benson slipped a key into the lock of No. 17. Given the sea’s pitch, the lamp swung in his hands, throwing a net of shadows here, then there. He latched the door open so that passersby might see him clearly snooping about Dr. Wells’s cabin. Legitimate business here. A complaint, he’d say. Too much whistling from the porthole.

  Dr. Wells’s quarters looked pin-perfect, the berth made up, sheets snapped straight, razor kit hanging from a hook near the wash basin. He’d arranged his shoes in the corner side by side. The tidiness made it easier for Mr. Benson to find the dentist’s satchel and inside that a collection of bottles labeled Chloroform. He’d read enough in the newspapers to know that some—like Dr. Wells—favored nitrous oxide, while others preferred ether or chloroform. Ether, Dr. Wells had said, might be dangerous. He’d given no such warning about this chloroform.

  He could not steal it. Dr. Wells would notice, and given the hat question, Mr. Benson did not want to raise suspicion. A quick sniff was all he wanted. He uncorked a bottle. A little sweetness, yes, and a hint of something happening. Mr. Benson sat on the berth, breathed in until his nose tingled and lungs—

  When Horace noticed the familiar odor of chloroform in the hallway outside No. 17, he wanted to rush toward the bottle and feared to. He’d been searching for Mr. Benson to thank him for arranging the engine tour, but he hadn’t expected to find him here or sprawled this way, the man’s coat soaked and an empty bottle of chloroform rolling across the cabin floor.

  Lord, don’t let him be dead.

  He checked Mr. Benson’s neck for a pulse. Weak, but there. Spilled the whole bottle, Horace noticed. Emptied all over himself. His clothes exuded vapors.

  If he shut the door the vapors would concentrate in the tight space, but he needed privacy. Horace opened the porthole, felt the cold air like a brick to the face, then locked the cabin door.

  He had refrained from any vapor since Paris, but now, as he pulled Benson out of his coat, he could feel an itch in his lungs. The man’s shirt was wet, so he unlaced that, too. As he pulled it over Benson’s head, the first mate flopped, arms bent at the elbows, fingers curled back on the palms as though wanting to hold something. Even as Horace thought dead fish, the space between this and the chloroform world began to shrink. His head filled with silken bubbles, each carrying away a burden or a grief or an insight. As if he had no choice, he lifted the shirt to his face, breathed deeply. The ship rose, and the window swung shut, and Horace tumbled onto his berth.

  He saw Benson’s head loll with the ship’s pitch. His small head. A bubble burst, let escape its grief. “You stole my hat,” Horace said.

  Mr. Benson didn’t answer. Horace closed his eyes and felt himself fly with the Hibernia’s rise and fall, seagulls careening toward him and away, teaching him how to make the most of the bubbles in his brain. The birds wore top hats.

  He sat on the floor.

  “You stole my hat!” he yelled at Benson.

  The first mate woke. He looked at Horace with heavy-lidded eyes. “I came to fix your porthole,” he said. “It whistled.”

  Mr. Benson couldn’t make sense of things. His stomach crunched and expanded, and he smelled something pungent. Not the chloroform, no. He shivered and missed his coat. He fingered his crotch, the warm wetness there, wiped the tips of his fingers on his naked chest. What would the captain do with all this? He remembered, vaguely (as he sometimes remembered the outline of shore after weeks at sea), the pleasure of the dentist’s bottle. But now that was gone, and in its place a grayness wide as all dead water.

  “Benson! You stole my hat!”

  Yes, but I pissed myself. And where is my coat? Where, for that matter, is my shirt? So sad. Opium had been too much like this. Thoughts turned to mush, as if two paddle wheels churned his brain. “One more chance,” the captain had said after the last opium den. Now Mr. Benson would be fired at best, chained in the hold at worst. He imagined humiliations the captain would devise before turning him over to the authorities. The slanders he’d tell. And if Benson outlived those, he knew another captain waited for him. And another. The earth was lousy with captains, each wanting his own Mr. Benson to abuse. There wasn’t enough opium or chloroform to erase them all.

  He retrieved the pistol from his boot, waved it near his head, the barrel’s end tracing a path around his face, an erratic insect looking for a spot to land. The cheek. The jawbone. He’d begun to sob. There was nothing quiet about how he felt. A violence shook his chest, churned in his stomach. He kept drawing his legs up, one after the other, then stretching them again, trying to slow-kick his shame away from him.

  “One shot’s all you need,” said Mr. Benson. The pistol barrel settled at his temple. “Here?” he asked.

  Horace could not think where to stand. Where would Benson fire? At himself? At Horace? Was this the chloroform again? He laughed.

  “Here?” Benson moved the barrel into his mouth.

  “No,” Horace said, trying not to grin.

  “If I blow my brains on your walls, they’ll give you another cabin.” Mr. Benson laughed. “Probably they’ll refund your fare.”

  “I’ll take the gun.”

  “They’ll give you whatever you want.”

  “I’d like the gun. In trade for the hat.”

  “Which is the braver thing to do, do you think?”

  Ear. Chin. Point of his nose.

  “You give me the gun. We don’t speak of this again. You never return to my cabin. You never ask about the vapors.” Stop smiling, Horace!

  Jawbone. Roof of the mouth.

  “I’ve never believed that men could be just.”

  Bridge of the nose.

  “Death is not like the …” Horace stopped. Stared into a fog of words. “… the gas. The allure is … similar. But death? You can enjoy it only the once. Be prudent.”

  Left eye. Right eye.

  Mr. Benson leaned and set the pistol on the floor before him. Straight up again, he sniffed the barrel oil on his fingertips, wiped it on his trousers.

  When Mr. Benson left he forgot to take his shirt and coat, so the chloroform fumes lingered, and silken bubbles still floated in Horace’s head, though fewer now. Horace wrapped Benson’s shirt inside the coat, unlatched the porthole, and stuffed the bundle through, not watching as it caught wind and opened and fluttered to the waves. Then he locked the door, returned to his berth, and huddled on the mattress.

  In his hands, Benson’s derringer. His now, with all its possibilities.

  The next time Mr. Benson saw Dr. Wells, the Hibernia was two days from New York City, with a hard wind off port making the going slow. The sea was in a petulant mood, and Mr. Benson’s job was to clear the deck of passengers. Most had gone below; he found only one. Near the prow, he wore his fine French top hat and a good coat, and he had a bucket from which he threw fistfuls of kitchen scraps at the gulls—an entertainment. Mostly, the birds chased the bits to the water, but now and then a skilled one snatched a morsel from the air. Wind swirled about the deck, so hard the black smoke from the stacks
twisted with it. One moment you thought you’d hid from it, and the next your eyes would smart from a face full. It was an attacking thing, the wind, smarter than you.

  “Come below, Dr. Wells!” Mr. Benson shouted. “Captain’s orders!”

  The dentist threw another fistful of fish guts into the air. Mr. Benson thought the wind’s roar and the crash of waves against the prow might make it hard for the dentist to hear, so he started to approach.

  As he did, a gust pushed so hard he had to quick spread his legs or fall. He saw the dentist lose his footing and reach for the rail, and his hat lifted from his head, this time somersaulting into the air, up where the gulls rose and dived. The dentist didn’t reach for it as a man is wont to do when the wind takes his hat—no snatching at the empty air, no chasing. He turned a little and watched it snapped by wind, off far to starboard, and then to the deck, skidding against a far wall.

  Gripping the rail, his feathery hair whipping around his head, Dr. Wells worked his way to the side where the hat had flown. When at last he turned, hat snugged down to his ears, his shoulders fell as if he’d exhaled a deep breath or sighed. He came near on his way below, and Mr. Benson saw that the dentist’s eyes were damp, stung perhaps by the icy wind and exhaust. The dentist smiled what seemed a true smile, as if the hat had been something he’d wanted dearly to keep.

  VII

  HARTFORD

  The woman whimpered, grief rocking her left and right on the sofa where she sat, Elizabeth beside her and rubbing a hand across the woman’s broad back. This was a bitter cold morning in late November 1847, one of those days each week when Elizabeth visited at the Hartford Retreat, in an office cheerful with yellow-and-blue wallpaper. A sunbeam through a frosted window lit upon a loose thread in the woman’s dress collar, and because there was so little comfort to offer, Elizabeth tucked the thread into its hem.

  “Maggie loved this life, but she could hurt herself so badly,” said the woman, the retreat’s matron. Her name was Mrs. Cornish. This office belonged to her. On the walls, framed, hung inspirational scriptures she herself had embroidered.

  Rejoice evermore.

  Pray without ceasing.

  In every thing give thanks.

  “My husband pulled that girl’s tooth, once,” said Elizabeth, “but I haven’t seen her since.” In Elizabeth’s memory it had been November, then as now, but a warmer day, the roads not hard-packed to biting ice. Then, the girl wore leg shackles and worried a ribbon tied ’round her finger. Now, the girl was dead.

  “You wouldn’t have,” said Mrs. Cornish. “We keep you Samaritans away from the frenzied patients. Never know when they might bite.” Her fingers, blunt and warm, kneaded Elizabeth’s. The women had known each other several years; they had shared baking recipes. Earlier, when Mrs. Cornish had waved an invitation to her office, Elizabeth thought there might be a new crumb cake to taste, but then she saw the matron’s face, her twisted mouth.

  For six years, Mrs. Cornish said, they’d kept the girl safe, alert for scissors and sewing needles and bricks. But then, as if they’d saved the moth from flame only for the toad to snatch it, death came not from Maggie’s own hand but from a malady no doctor could explain. Attendants come to fetch her for breakfast had found her shivering with fever, the flesh of her right hip hardening, red and hot to the touch. Lay a finger on the spot and Maggie screamed as if tortured. Anything she ate or drank she vomited right back. The doctors iced her leg, then sliced the skin to relieve the pressure, and she bled long enough that she grew calm, sleepy. But that fever never broke, the affliction inflamed her groin, then her abdomen.

  I am the vine, ye are the branches.

  Elizabeth knew Mrs. Cornish to be a pleasant woman who seldom remembered names so called most everyone “good heart,” as in “Dry your eyes, good heart. If you cry for one, you’ll cry for them all.” Now, eyelashes damp, she said, “Maggie’s mother visits, but so infrequently. We’ve no idea where she lives. I don’t judge. It’s not easy, a daughter this way. The woman’s got no money, in any event. So Maggie will go down to a pauper’s grave once the ground thaws. There’s no shame in that, but I don’t like her to go without an escort to the churchyard. There’ll be the chaplain and Mr. Cornish and myself. Would you join us?”

  She remembered the mother, too, Elizabeth did, the woman who huddled against a wall rather than beside her ailing daughter. Not worth Elizabeth’s attention then, nor later at the cattle fair where she had cavorted with rude, drunken men.

  “We’ll try,” Elizabeth said. “Dr. Wells keeps a busy schedule.”

  “Him, too?” said Mrs. Cornish, her voice pinched with surprise.

  “No one need doubt my husband’s compassion,” Elizabeth told Mrs. Cornish, then hoped she did not sound too prickly. She took no insult. Most in Hartford still knew Horace’s disposition to be all eggshells and tempests. But Horace had come home from Paris a better man—his best boyish qualities mixed suitably with those acquired in maturity. “My nature improves in your company,” he told her, then gave her reasons to believe. He now slept through most nights and spent more time with Charley, helping the boy learn to balance one-legged on a fence rail or to nurture a foxglove seedling into bloom as a gift for Aunt Dorothy.

  Even when they sold their imported French paintings to a gallery at deep financial loss, Horace didn’t, as he said, “go to the birds.” In fact, it was Elizabeth who wept. “It isn’t the money,” she told him. “It’s the injustice to the paintings and their artists.” The two stood before Elizabeth’s favorite among the canvases, a landscape by Madame DeNoie, out of its crate and propped against a wall in the cottage. “So much life,” she said, “and no private collector wanted it.” Horace squeezed her hand, kissed her damp eyes. “That inspired work goes unappreciated,” he said, “makes the work no less vital.”

  That was the man he’d become. He still argued his priority in newspapers and journals, and waited too eagerly each day for a decision from Paris societies. Debt yet shackled the household. But he sought income by plying exhilarating gases to patients of Hartford’s better medical surgeons, proving himself able to annul the agonies of amputation and tumor excision. Because he experimented less frequently on himself, life on Lord’s Hill seemed less fragile and had even acquired, perhaps, a whit of grace.

  Later that morning, Elizabeth played word games with the retreat’s residents and helped them fold laundry. Only now and then did she consider the girl who had died, a hesitation as she combed a knot from Cecilia’s hair or with Edie scattered stale bread across the snow for pigeons and squirrels. That hesitation never lasted more than a moment, as if she’d heard a plop on a pond’s surface, saw the ripple dissipate, then wondered how to feel.

  On her way home, she stopped at a dry goods market for flour and sugar. There she chatted with a clerk about the healing properties of certain comfits, then bought half a pound, because it seemed a good day to spend money on hope.

  At last, during her solitary trudge up Asylum Avenue to Lord’s Hill, she opened herself to the dead girl’s company, let the girl catch up and walk alongside. As in Elizabeth’s memory, the girl wore a ribbon on her finger. But now she carried a wedge of watermelon, though it was winter, and she took slurpy bites and spit black seeds.

  The road roughened here, on Hartford’s outskirts, all frozen hoofprints and wagon ruts. Snow of at least a foot would need to fall before the sleighs could run again. Elizabeth staggered up the hill, listing with the weight of her sacks. The girl, a nimble spirit, kept pace, seeming at ease, giggling.

  You’re happy now, Elizabeth thought. That’s good.

  The girl skipped ahead, back and forth across the width of the road. She sang some children’s song, though her voice sounded so distant Elizabeth couldn’t be sure of any sound but the crunch of snow and ice underfoot. She wanted to undo the girl’s braids and brush her hair, to wipe the watermelon smear from her chin, to cut a piece and share.

  Thirteen years old, and gone, just so; such
an ailment could strike Charley. Elizabeth told herself not to think that. But it could.

  Squinting against the low, tenacious sun, she again considered the girl’s mother. Propriety called for Christian sympathy, but Elizabeth had none to offer a woman who had abandoned her little girl. Not when some had no daughters. And others never would.

  About halfway to the cottage, the burdens became too much. Though Elizabeth had climbed this hill hundreds of times—and with heavier loads—her legs refused to take another step. Her lungs ached with cold fire. The flour and sugar sacks slipped from her hands. She lay an open palm over her belly. Since Boston, she had been hopeful, and Horace, too. For months, they had shared disappointment.

  If you cry for one, good heart—

  Elizabeth retied the scarf over her hat, tucked her mittened hands under her arms against the wind. The girl skipped around to face her, those saucer eyes and feverish cheeks familiar as Elizabeth’s own. Then the girl laughed, tossed the watermelon rind into the air. She launched herself headlong toward the city, rushing downhill and with each stride catching the slope before she might tumble, and by not tumbling seeming to glide, past Elizabeth and onward, arms spread wide as wings, hat come loose, bright hair trailing, then farther still, and then out of sight.

  The girls that live, the girls that die, the girls that never will be.

  Outside the house, Elizabeth set herself on the threshold to rest. She could hear Charley somewhere inside counting in a loud voice. A chill wind stung the back of her neck, and she huddled into her shoulders. Back from where she’d come, back where the girl had vanished, a dull sky spread over the fields and road, all ugly-wet with winter.

  I will walk with you again, she told the girl. You’ll not go motherless to the grave.

  She found Charley on a sofa, on his back with legs lifted straight to the ceiling, balancing a collapsed umbrella across the soles of his socked feet.

  “I’m counting how long I can keep an umbrella in the air. I’m at eighty-four.”