“If only Morris were here,” she said. “If only an hour,” an hour being, she determined, enough time to run her fingers over her husband’s head to learn his true inclinations. She’d discovered much about herself that way, secret talents, unknown faults. Her husband’s head, too, must have much to tell. And now that she could read man’s true nature, she could not stand the thought of Morris running off without her hands first discovering his weakness, and dismissing him as a ne’er-do-well.
Grandpa assured her that Morris would arrive any day.
“You wouldn’t want him to find you in bed,” he said. “What kind of welcome is that?”
Edith was about to respond when a thundering knock drew her bolt upright. She ran her hands over her untended locks, which despite the tangles looked fetching around her pale cheeks. Letty, who had been searching for loose change in the pockets of Grandpa’s desk, ran to the front door.
“Yes?” she said, breathless.
“I’m here for Edith Tucker.”
Dismay arranged Letty’s features in something close to a pout as she received the young Fowler and escorted him to her mother’s bedside. Grandpa regarded the newcomer with irritation. The young man, ostentatiously dressed in a double-breasted jacket, silk cravat, and boots of fine leather, bowed deeply. He stepped forward to present his hand to Grandpa.
“Fowler Corender,” he said.
Grandpa took the hand and, though he scarcely pressed it (a limp handshake being the vehicle through which he expressed distaste), Fowler pulled away.
“My hands are my work,” he said. “Sensitive fingers for sensitive work.”
“You’ve filled my daughter’s head with your nonsense,” Grandpa said, and though Edith tried to dismiss her father with a half-raised hand, he remained firmly beside her.
“Allow me to examine your head, my dear man, and you’ll understand my profession.” Fowler bent forward, his entire body assuming an emphatic nod. “The elderly and the feebleminded are always the last to adopt new ways.”
Grandpa began to redden, his skin noticeably less wrinkled, as if displeasure had inflated his frame. Something changed in him then. Something that had been floating, like rotting wood, sank deep inside him.
“I’ve come to see Edith.” Fowler brushed past the old man to his apprentice, who stared back with adoring eyes. “We’ve missed you at the Institute. What’s ailing you, darling?” He spoke the endearment awkwardly, but with much affection.
“It’s Morris,” Edith said. “He wrote to say he’d be returning … or rather …”
“I’m very sorry,” Fowler interrupted. “It must be terribly difficult, though death comes for us all in the end.”
“Death!” cried Letty, who hovered in the doorway like a curious pup. Even Grandpa raised his brow in surprise.
“I’m not dying,” Edith said.
“Of course you’re not. There’s nothing sentimental about you, Edith. Which is why I deduced that Morris had died. You have no need to explain further! Only death could send a strong woman like you to her bed.” He patted Edith’s hand and reached across the bed to wipe a strand of dark brown hair behind her ear. “But you are also the type to recover,” his lips trembled, “quickly.”
“Such nonsense!” Grandpa turned to Letty, who was crying softly. “Your father’s alive and well and coming to fetch you. Shortly.”
“I didn’t realize —” Edith said. A new understanding crept into her voice. Of course Morris had died. Of course. A woman like her would not find herself bedridden for something so trivial as a mistress. Only death could explain her condition.
TRUE TO FOWLER’S assessment, Edith emerged from her bedroom the next day still pale but with a healthy appetite. Letty served unseasoned beets, claiming that both salt and pepper caused indigestion. The extra place setting was filled now by the dark-haired Fowler, who had called, dressed in his finest jacket and linen shirt, at the surprising request of Grandpa. “Tonight,” the old man had written — a note he carried to the Institute himself — “I would like you to read my head.”
Edith sat at the head of the table, one arm draped over her lap, the other extended and entwined in Fowler’s, who had been so kind as to send flowers, in honor of life and love and the future of science.
“I’m delighted that you’ve agreed to the examination,” Fowler said to Grandpa. “I’ve brought several charts, so as to demonstrate more clearly.”
“Fowler Corender,” Grandpa said, spooning his beets with unprecedented relish. He, too, had dressed for the evening, in a loose tailcoat with a deep red cravat, which had been the rage in London a decade earlier. He even smoothed the few gray hairs poking out from beneath his cap. “I’ve been looking forward to your visit all afternoon.”
“Won’t you read me?” Letty asked Fowler.
“Another time,” Edith said. “We don’t want to —”
“Perhaps tomorrow night,” Fowler said. “Or the night after. There is nothing but time, my dear child.”
Letty smiled and noted aloud that Fowler only poked at his beets.
“My senses are heightened by an empty stomach,” he declared, pushing back from the table in an attempt, perhaps, to end the dinner and begin the night’s true entertainment. “I become even more observant, more attuned to the sutures and bumps of the skull.”
Grandpa nodded, reaching forward for a second helping. His spirits remained high when the party adjourned to the front parlor, where he sat in his favorite chair, empty at last of Edith’s garments. The chandelier, lit for the first time in months, cast a warm light over the room. Even the rugs, swept clean, had a soft, welcoming hue.
“You must remove the cap,” Fowler said, a request which Grandpa obliged, his head suddenly small and vulnerable.
From his pocket Fowler pulled a bottle of castor oil, which he rubbed liberally over his fingers. With the confidence of a man twice his age, he pressed his left and right thumb to Grandpa’s cheekbones, running his fingers along the top of his head and over the external opening of each ear.
Letty played a few discordant notes on the harpsichord, which she maintained added drama.
“You have a rather large irritability organ,” Fowler said, eyes closed in concentration. “And quite a developed sense of self-importance.”
Though both Edith and Letty stared at Grandpa, awaiting an outburst from the old man, he remained calm. With his wide grin and gleaming eyes, he looked almost delighted.
“The last man I read with such a large posterior lobe was the finest butcher in New York,” Fowler continued. He moved his hands forward and down, “And here, where we usually find intelligence —” Fowler paused, allowing a frown to possess his usually placid features, “There is a great imbalance. It seems the right hemisphere is much larger than the left. Which might point to a softening, or a lack of acuity, even among those faculties most expressed. Edith, darling, you must feel for yourself.”
Edith accepted Fowler’s outstretched hand, and stepped around to examine Grandpa. Fowler’s invitation — the first ever — to share in a study brought a smile to her lips.
“You’ve deduced all of that from the lines of my head?” Grandpa asked.
“I know more about you than I would had I known you for years.” Fowler ran a hand over the back of Edith’s neck as he continued. “What we can learn of the mind, that mystery, heretofore shrouded, obscure.”
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Edith said, ostensibly to Grandpa, though her eyes were locked with Fowler’s.
“You even determined that Morris is dead?”
“Other scientists might not be so bold as to deduce it,” Fowler said, his voice swelling with confidence, “but that’s where they’re lacking.”
“And you’d stake your reputation on it?”
“My reputation is far too large to wager.”
“My daughter, then,” Grandpa said. “If you’re mistaken, you’ll leave my daughter forever. And my daughter,” he turned to Edith, “will leave m
y house, along with her boxes and bags and Letty.”
“One should never bet against Doctor Corender,” Edith said.
“You agree then?”
Edith had scarcely finished nodding, when Grandpa produced a letter from the pocket of his dinner jacket. Though it was addressed to Edith, he’d taken the liberty of opening it. “From Morris,” he said with a grandiose flourish, presenting the letter not to Edith but to Fowler. “Who is very much alive and well and anxious to reunite with his lovely wife and daughter. To take them away. It arrived today, by post.”
“And what of it?” Fowler dismissed the letter without a glance at its contents. “Edith’s not well suited for that ruffian Morris. If his death was not real, it was certainly symbolic. Their marriage is unbearable. Unthinkable. Anyone would agree that the two must divorce.”
Grandpa’s grin faded, and he brushed Edith’s fingers from his head.
“Besides, Edith has agreed to work with me,” Fowler continued.
“It’s true. Fowler and I were just discussing the Institute. It’s growing rapidly, and we have so much room here.”
“Certainly not,” Grandpa said.
“But of course you’ll allow it.” Edith stepped forward, beside Fowler, who was stretching the rim of the old man’s cap. She brushed her hair back, fingers gliding over the subtle contours of her skull. She had diagnosed her father. When she bent and touched the old man’s shoulder, she, too, spoke with the authority of science. “I read it in your head.”
“Truth is nothing but a path traced between errors.”
—FRANZ ANTON MESMER
THE BAQUET
There’s a fool out on Neglect Pier,” Parkhurst said, pointing over crowds of dockworkers to the old wharf across from Salton’s anchor and tackle shop.
“Birds won’t even land there.” Quimbly swallowed the last of the apple he’d stolen on Canal Street, throwing the core into the Hudson, whose foamy scum consumed it. Whoever the Fool was, he’d stepped over the log barrier. Unperturbed by the stench of rotting wood and fish, he’d unfolded a long table covered in angular gold symbols.
“Looks like he’s gonna preach something.” Parkhurst stepped closer, his freckled face pink from too much sun. A small crowd had gathered around Neglect Pier: burly men in brown trousers and open cotton shirts, and dozens of redheaded foreigners, traveling cases in hand, too new to figure north from south. Quimbly had so stood months earlier, at last striking out along the river, past cast-iron fences, docks, junk shops, warehouses, and sail lofts, till he found the shantytown near Thirty-seventh Street. He’d met Parkhurst and the others — Cobb, Phineas, and John Bovee — crouched around a fire with a live chicken and not the first clue how to pluck it. Under the moonlight and the glaring red of the foundries, Quimbly cracked the bird’s neck, and he’d fallen in with the boys ever since.
“C’mon,” Parkhurst said. Crowds meant easy money, and Parkhurst had a knack for picking pockets. He’d killed a man, too, kept the bloody knife, wrapped in a lady’s silk scarf, back at the hideout as proof. Quimbly was the better listener. He would discover which ships were coming in, what cargo each carried, and when they would dock. He liked to think of himself as an ear to Parkhurst’s criminal mastermind. Being ears was much easier than baling cotton, carting chickens, or digging canals, all of which he had tried over the two years since he’d run away from home.
The Fool threw a gold velvet cloth over the tabletop and turned to reveal that there were not one but two people out on the pier: the Fool and a woman who wore pearls in her ears and a fur-trimmed red satin gown.
“If they fall through, we’ll nick that chest.” Parkhurst nodded toward the blue travel trunk from which the Fool plucked a wondrous jacket, silver and gold and pink and yellow in shimmering vertical stripes. He tossed it around his shoulders, made a cone with his hands, and called out.
“Greetings.” His voice had a musical quality, and even this simple word had a melody. The catfish cart wheeled closer, old Sal stepped away from his bait store, and the bird lady, who spent each afternoon feeding the pigeons, stopped throwing crumbs. Parkhurst winked and slipped into the crowd.
“You gentlemen look like a healthy lot, but that doesn’t mean you don’t know someone sickly. Don’t know a poor hopeless soul. Perhaps you’ve been told that there’s no cure for Grandmother’s madness? For your uncle’s bad back? For your wife’s, or lady friend’s, private disease?”
On most days, the furious pace of waterfront traffic — coaches and hacks laden with cotton and reckless omnibuses tearing through narrow streets with thundering horse hooves and angry cries — would have drowned the Fool’s words, left him standing unheeded in the midday sun. No traveling salesman could compete with the local hawkers, men who spoke as loud as gunshots and drove hard bargains for boot blacking or flavored ice. But the Fool had managed, and Quimbly pushed toward the log barrier. Of his shantytown companions, he was the best traveled, and he prided himself that he alone had seen three states, dairy farms and countryside, mountains and beaches, a woman with two heads, a man who dressed up like a lady, and two sets of identical twins. But the Fool was something entirely new. He and his lady companion, whose dark eyelashes and dangling pearls appeared even more beautiful as Quimbly neared, had a special charisma.
“I’m Doctor Steenwycks, and this is my assistant, Ada.” The Fool no longer cupped his hands, and his voice traveled unaided across the waterfront, luring sailors from as far as three piers away. “What we’re here to tell you is that your doctor hasn’t the vaguest understanding of his art. What we’re here to tell you is what men like Charles Dickens already know, what great men like Uldericus Balk and Maximilian Hell preached for years: animal magnetism.”
Quimbly felt a girl’s breath on his cheek — Bettine, standing so close he could smell her — fried egg, sweat, boiled spinach. Why did she follow him? Out of all the boys? She and her mother, a stern German woman who seemed too old to have a daughter, had moved to a tagrag hut between Eleventh Avenue and the rocky, corncob-strewn shore of the Hudson a few days ago. Neither spoke English. Now the girl spent her days following Quimbly. She smiled, teeth small and even. Her eyes were hazel, he realized, big as quarters. He’d never seen her up close before. She was pretty. Oddly pretty and just his age, he guessed, thirteen.
“Animal magnetism,” the Fool repeated. He took a long sip from a glass Ada offered. “There must be one among you with an illness of some sort. Headache? A disorder of the eyes?”
From behind, Quimbly heard, “I’ve got a headache,” and he turned to the unshaven sailor in short-torn trousers. He would fall through the pier, he must know. His bare calves had more muscle than most men’s shoulders. But the sailor stepped over the rail without hesitation.
“A headache, you say?” The Fool directed the man to lie down on the velvet-clad table. The wharf creaked and listed to the left, but the Fool proceeded, running his hands over the sailor’s forehead.
“What most doctors don’t know is that the universe is fluid. That air, and water, sand, even solid wrought iron, have fluidity. Different degrees. And man can act on these fluids, force his will upon them. You see, my friends, this matter I speak of is not complex. In fact, if you listen, if you understand, you’ll find your life far simpler. Far more manageable. How do you feel, my friend?” The Fool spoke to his patient, but the audience responded, overlapping cries of “grand” and “swell.”
The sailor sat up, his eyes partially closed, lids floating over an unfocused stare. He held his right hand open, palm raised to the Fool and said, “I feel well.”
Ada clapped, her fingers flashing with diamond rings, and the audience roared with delight. Quimbly’s palms burned from applauding, which he could no longer remember beginning. He turned to find Bettine, to share the thrill with a smile, but she no longer stood beside him.
“He feels well!” the Fool sang, the words tumbling like a blessing from his lips. The day seemed brighter and warmer. Ada held forth a
blue silk bag into which the sailor emptied the contents of his wallet. Her smile broadened. She held the crowd between her lovely red lips.
“Help us spread the cure, the truth,” she cried. “Help us build the baquet.”
The Fool spun beside her, his dazzling stripes blurring to form a blanket of color. “Help us build the baquet!” he echoed. “We need your help to build the baquet. Tomorrow. Tompkins Square. Tell your friends!”
The silk bag passed before Quimbly, but he had nothing to slip into it, and he looked away as Ada swept by. He had never seen a baquet, didn’t even know what one looked like, but the urgency of the Fool’s request filled him, and he, like the rest of the onlookers, recognized the importance of the thing. The Fool and the sailor were shaking hands now. The pier shook.
“Quimbly, chum!”
Quimbly turned, recognizing Parkhurst as if for the first time in many months. His friend wore a new beige scarf and carried a lady’s handbag.
“If you made off with half what I did …” Parkhurst pulled two leather wallets from an inside pocket of his jacket along with a gold chain and an engraved locket. “And better still,” he bent close to whisper, “I heard the Sea Witch is docking two days hence. Loaded with gold from California!”
THAT NIGHT QUIMBLY was the last to arrive at the hideout, a rocky stretch of shore protected by a dozen yards of abandoned dock. Parkhurst had already begun outlining plans, and Cobb, Phineas, and John Bovee sat round him, eager to learn the nature of the coming crime. The darkness hid their faces and the color of their clothes, but Quimbly could tell them apart: John, the fat one whose back sloped like the shell of an egg; Cobb, who claimed to be eleven, though he stood no taller than a six-year-old, and Phineas, Cobb’s older brother, who at fifteen was the oldest of the lot. The River Gang, they called themselves, and beside them, their upturned rowboat looked much like the surrounding boulders.
“Password?” Parkhurst said, and Quimbly knew that his friend’s pale blue eyes had found his shadowy form. The Hudson met the dock post with burps and splatters of cold water that on windy nights rose high enough to catch even Parkhurst, who always sat on the largest rock.
Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain Page 9
