Tom Bedlam

by George Hagen

  I thought the ceiling would collapse from the sound coming out of his mouth. Then he stopped moving, and there was an awful smell. I knew he was dead, but I couldn't move him off me. I was trapped beneath him.

  For hours I lay there, Tom. Sometimes I woke, then I passed out again. I saw flashes of light on the walls and ceiling, like sticklebacks swimming in a jar, shiny, glittering in the air all around me, and I thought I was dead.

  I woke up in a hospital with two policemen at the door. They spoke harshly; I was called a murderess. I fainted from the pain in my hip. They revived me, but refused to give me anything for the pain until I had answered their questions, so I told them what had happened, and they accused me of tempting Murdick to his death.

  I was charged with murder. They put stories about me in the newspapers. A Temptress in Trousers. As soon as I could walk, I was sent from the hospital to Newgate.

  Oscar found me a lawyer, but warned me that the circumstances of the case were too bizarre for reasonable folk to understand. A woman passing herself off as a man, found half-naked with her victim lying on top of her—it looked terrible, Tom. The prosecutor spent most of his time describing Murdick's fine character, his hard work and recent rise in standing. I was portrayed as a base and lowly parasite. My reward for supporting my family and defending myself against a predator was twenty-eight years in prison.

  I'm learning to walk again. I share a cell with ten other women. We sleep on mats on the floor, which is painful, but during the day I can sit and weave. The wardswoman killed a man too; but she has a bed instead of a mat. She promised me that good behavior will earn me a bed.

  Perhaps there is good in this. The Orfling is growing. He comes to visit me with Mama. He's bright. Perhaps, without me there, he realized it was time. Eloise and Elsie look like young women. They work in a brush factory.

  Oscar thinks I'll get time off for good behavior, and if I show regret for my actions, my term might be reduced.

  Regret? I don't know if I can show something I don't feel. The judge told me my term was compensation for twenty-eight years stolen from the life of Mr. Murdick. So be it, I say. I shall relish each stolen minute, Tom, on behalf of every woman who shall not have to fear that man.

  In the meantime, I take my days as they come, sustained only by the one precious blessing born of my misfortune.

  Your Audrey

  THE IMMIGRANTS

  IN 1889, DR. TOM CHAPEL BEGAN A NEW LIFE IN PORT ELIZABETH Hospital as its resident surgeon. Little Margaret was born the next year. Tom sent a photograph to Edinburgh of the baby—a beatific face with a little shock of hair pricking up from her scalp like a halo.

  It was hard for Tom to reconcile his good fortune with Audrey's tragedy. He had a loving wife, a daughter, and a house overlooking Algoa Bay. Life was precious. Like a tightrope artist preparing for his first step, Tom checked his moorings every morning—first Lizzy, sleeping beside him, then Margaret, snoring in the crib at the foot of his bed—only then did he feel ready to face the world.

  When Iris appeared two years later, they sent another photograph; this one showed a baby wrapped tightly in soft flannel, eyes open and alert, her Buddha lips poised to utter her first remark on the condition of the world before her.

  When no answer arrived from Edinburgh, Lizzy was disappointed but not surprised. “Father doesn't forgive easily,” she explained. “I once buffed his brogues with red shoe polish. He spent weeks trying to get out the color. For years he talked about those shoes.” She sighed. “As for Eve,” she said, “well, she loved you, Tom. I doubt I could have forgiven her if she had taken you from me.”

  “But you're sisters” Tom said, recalling Audrey's devotion to the twins.

  “There are all kinds of sisters,” Lizzy reminded him.

  Charity was born three years after Iris, in 1895. She developed an early passion for lace—she insisted on white socks fringed with lace and wore an enormous lace-edged bonnet that framed her solemn, pudgy face the way paper frills garnish a lamb chop. She would follow her mother around the house, thumb in her mouth, fingers clutching a fold of Lizzy's skirt.

  It would be fair to say that Tom and Lizzy leaped headlong into family life. The ship's captain who had married them had issued a cryptic admonition before sealing their vow: “A hasty departure yields an ill-equipped voyage.” The Chapels' marriage, however, was founded on affection and respect. Thus “equipped,” they appeared quite prepared for the challenges of parenthood. Though a nurse present at Margaret's birth warned them that “children are quite capable of ruining a perfectly good marriage,” Tom and Lizzy enjoyed their children, and considered the attendant chaos and emotional upheaval a blessing and an adventure. It was only when Tom declined an offer to become head doctor that Lizzy wondered if he would one day regret the demands of his family.

  “Eve would have insisted that you take such a position,” she said.

  “That's why I married you, my dear,” he replied. “The head doctor must spend three of his evenings at meetings in the hospital. Three nights a week away from my family? That would be like skipping three in seven installments of The Pickwick Papers. I'd miss so much.”

  For that reason, Tom and Lizzy were not seen among Port Elizabeth's polite society. They missed dinners to admire sunsets, skipped balls to play Igloo with the sofa cushions, and spent afternoons dressing the children in togas and war paint instead of attending teas. Tom saved his money and bought Lizzy a Bechstein piano for her birthday. Babies, music, and domestic bliss—that was the life they chose.

  THE CHAPEL GIRLS were spoiled; not with extravagant clothes and playthings but with the approval of their parents. Tom and Lizzy believed this to be the best sort of spoiling—it formed their daughters' characters, which were strong and unapologetic.

  Margaret, at nine, was as long-limbed as her mother and imitated Lizzy's drawn shoulders when she begged for tea at the breakfast table. She wished to be as beautiful, and as wise, as her mother—she certainly possessed her mother's high cheekbones, freckles, and auburn curls— and helped to care for her younger siblings. Margaret was vain, to be sure, but it was in worship of her mother, which was probably why Lizzy forgave it. Margaret prided herself on her maturity. She raced through Pride and Prejudice and carried the book with her for many weeks afterwards as a badge of her achievement.

  Iris, by then seven, had limp blond hair and a small frame. Envious of Margaret's role as caretaker, Iris often challenged her sister with fast wit and mockery. She loved a rhyme and a grand show. When a production of The Mikado came to Port Elizabeth, she rocked in her seat, mouth agape at the glorious pageantry of the costumes.

  In 1899, when the Anglo-Boer War broke out, Tom could not ignore the headlines; the British expatriates in the south were building forces to take on the two Boer provinces. All of Tom's professional acquaintances joined the British Army—it was the required thing to do—and when he was invited to serve as a surgeon lieutenant, he was assured that he would never be called to duty. His weekends, however, were dominated by drilling and tactical training. Lizzy tried to compensate for this break in the family routine by taking the children to see their father marching in his uniform.

  Iris loved to watch the soldiers on parade, adored the khaki uniforms, their accoutrements, the glittering grandeur of the commanding officer's polished brass medals, and the unintelligible cries of the sergeant. To her it was theater.

  “What's happening, Mama?” she asked.

  “The privates are being inspected, darling.”

  Shortly afterwards, Tom saw his daughter march naked through the house with two of his belts strung bandolier-style across her chest. She came to a halt and dropped a hand mirror upon the floor.

  “Good heavens, Iris, what are you doing!” cried her father. Iris squatted over the mirror and announced in a gravelly voice, “Just inspecting my privates, Papa!”

  WHEN TOM WAS PROMOTED to surgeon captain in the Prince Alfred's Guard regiment, he was ordered to the
northern Cape to serve under General Roberts.

  Little Charity peppered her father with increasingly anxious questions. “Will you fight? Will you be shot? Will you die?”

  “I shall be quite safe,” Tom assured her. “Doctors don't die in wars, my sweet. Their job is to tend the wounded soldiers.”

  “But what if a doctor is sick? Who heals him?” Charity asked with an intense stare.

  At a loss for an explanation, Tom replied, “The doctors take care of the soldiers, and God takes care of the doctors!”

  Lizzy urged Tom to send notes with little pictures home to Charity, assuring her of his safety. The little girl adored them and counted the days to the arrival of each one. She was the only one who took to saying prayers at bedtime.

  AT ABOUT THIS TIME Tom lost his faith in God. It happened in Koeps-burg, shortly after he joined the staff of the army hospital.

  For a brief period, the war had made everything simple. The British fought like gentlemen, costumed in orderly rows upon the battlefield, while the Boers wore civilian clothes and conducted midnight raids and ambushes in small parties without a front line. Generals Kitchener and Roberts adapted to this brand of warfare by ordering a scorch-and-burn policy, destroying Boer homesteads with their crops and livestock to prevent them supplying aid and support to their fighters. The families of the Boer soldiers were then interned, having lost their farms and livelihood.

  When Tom's duties were expanded to care of the sick women and children at the Koepsburg internment camp, he was glad that his family remained in Port Elizabeth. His first sight of the place was a grid of dusty tents in a green valley, like a grand picnic, but as he drew nearer he saw the harshly weathered faces of children and women, old and young, eight to ten in each tent. The stink of overflowing sewage invited vast columns of flies and mosquitoes to hover, bearing disease in clouds more toxic than Todderman's smokestacks. In the frigid evenings when frost graced the canvas tents like confectioners' sugar, there was the stench from the refugees' fires, which they fed with spare clothing, shoes, and excrement. Tom found himself caring for five hundred women and children, all undernourished and ill. What God could permit such misery? he wondered. Certainly not a God he could believe in.

  Tom learned his most bitter lesson from a twelve-year-old Boer boy with open sores across his face. “Have you a pet?” he inquired, trying to distract the child while he dressed his inflamed cheek.

  “General Kitchener killed my dog,” replied the boy. Then, without condemnation or irony, he added, “General Kitchener burned my father's farm, took our sheep and pigs, and sent me and my sisters here to rot in shit.”

  “Where's your mother?”

  The boy indicated a figure wrapped in a blanket on a wagon; flies spun in a column over the body.

  The boy lasted two months before he came down with tuberculosis. Tom spoke at his funeral. Only one sister was well enough to attend, a girl of eighteen: her body had the emaciated proportions of a starving eleven-year-old.

  Tom lost 10 percent of his patients to disease in the first year. By the time his son was born, his moral outrage had overwhelmed his sense of allegiance.

  A fellow doctor argued the case for Kitchener. “These men don't fight by the rules. They hide, raid the innocent! They don't behave like proper soldiers!”

  “If this was your land, how would you defend it?” argued another. “They're killing thousands of our soldiers by fighting this way. War is war. The entire notion of morality in warfare is absurd!”

  When his requests for more doctors, nurses, supplies, and improved conditions were ignored, Tom fell sick of a disease common to those with a thankless task—despair.

  To heal the doctor, his commanding officer agreed to bring Tom's family to Koepsburg to be near him. The Chapels were given a house in the center of town on a green where a military brass band gave concerts under a pretty white pavilion. This merely enhanced Tom's doubts about the war's legitimacy. He would sway with his fretful newborn son on the veranda as the band played “The British Grenadiers.” The local residents resented the British occupation, and there was constant tension between the townspeople and the army personnel. Tom's daughters were taunted by the children of one Boer family.

  “You should speak to their mother,” Lizzy demanded.

  “And say what?” said Tom. “‘Be polite to us, even though our soldiers have slaughtered your relatives’?”

  One evening during dinner, the Chapels' front window was broken. A cobblestone had been tossed through the glass. A delicate cabinet that had been sent by Lizzy's aunts from Edinburgh as a wedding present was ruined.

  Tom's neighbor, Captain Shaunnessy offered to “grab a few soldiers and hunt down the hooligans.”

  Tom declined the offer with a weak smile.

  “What can be so damned funny, Chapel?”

  “Just that word, hooligans”

  He imagined Mr. Phibbs, pounding his stick upon the rafters and addressing a contingent of British and Boer soldiers as he had the boys of Hammer Hall.

  IT TOOK THE CHAPELS months to choose a name for their fourth child.

  “Why not Tom?” said Lizzy.

  “No, Lizzy, I'm not proud enough of my accomplishments to let my child bear that name.”

  “Well, I named Margaret, Iris, and Charity, so this one shall be your choice, darling.”

  That evening Tom paced the veranda with his sleeping son in his arms. He asked himself what he expected of fatherhood and immediately thought of William Bedlam.

  “Very well,” he said to the infant. “Let us be clear on this. I don't expect your gratitude. It is a dubious privilege to be brought into a world like this one.”

  He remembered Mr. Limpkin and Audrey's efforts to take his place. “Be loyal to your family” he added, “but allow yourself the right to live your own life.”

  Then the specter of Bronson Mansworth and his son, Geoffrey, came to mind, and Tom made one final request of his son. “Be a decent fellow,” he said, then corrected himself: “At least try to be a decent fellow.”

  It was dark now, and the houses flickered with the orange light of their paraffin lamps. The distant skirl of bagpipes sounded from the barracks across the green.

  The baby woke and stared up at his father. It was an expression of astonishing clarity—neither judgmental nor demanding. Here, he seemed to say to Tom, we begin with a clean slate, as equals. Suddenly Tom realized there was only one possible choice for a name. Rather than setting the boy a challenge, he decided to set himself a mission as his father. The name would acknowledge the brother Tom had lost and serve as a vow to raise his son with all the love, generosity, and selflessness denied him by William Bedlam.

  “All right, then,” he said. “You'll be Arthur,” he whispered. “Arthur Chapel.”

  This said, the baby closed his eyes, satisfied for now with the terms of this covenant. Across the green, the bagpipes were playing “Mist Covered Mountains,” and the crickets' chatter seemed to swell with applause.

  DR. AND MADAME WARDOUR

  BY THE BRITISH VICTORY IN 1902, TOM WAS HAPPY TO PUT HIS uniform in mothballs. War had changed everything, however. When he inquired about his old position, Tom was gently advised by his former colleagues not to return. It appeared that his post had been filled by a doctor who not only had secure allies at the hospital but gladly attended evening meetings. So Tom chose to move to the Johannesburg suburbs and establish a practice of his own.

  In Gantrytown, he found a house for his family on an acre of land. There was a stable, a coach house, and a shack suitable for a consulting room. Now he faced the delicate ritual of introducing himself to the community. A doctor had to be accessible, generous, but not desperate. Through acquaintances in the army and colleagues in Port Elizabeth, he gained introductions to a few prominent folk in Gantrytown who promised to pass his name along.

  Dr. Chapel made house calls in a dogcart—a small lacquered carriage that had room for two seats in front and two in ba
ck. He wore a bowler hat, a black jacket, and gray striped trousers. A beautiful black gelding drew him past the rows of imported weeping willows that graced Gantrytown's suburban streets.

  The property magnate Harris Gantry had founded the suburb in 1880 and built his own mansion in the more affluent neighborhood of Belgravia. It was in the Victorian style, with magnificent floors of broad-planked Oregon pine and verandas edged in cast-iron shipped from a Glasgow foundry. He donated a park to Gantrytown and commissioned a statue of himself to stand at its entrance; displeased by the likeness (he declared it “diminutive, fat, and uncharismatic”), Gantry dismissed the artist and commissioned a new statue of a tall, slim, commanding figure that bore little resemblance to him but satisfied his opinion of himself.

  In the shade of the statue, Tom would examine the lunch Lizzy had prepared for him—usually an odd mix of items: dried and salted meat, or biltong; an avocado pear; and some pancakes from breakfast, which quickly congealed into a doughy wad. He would cast the pancakes into a rhododendron and watch a bird dive in the greenery to retrieve them. Nothing was wasted: ants scuttled away with the scraps of biltong that landed between his shoes, and a lizard lapped at the avocado pear, which had been softened into a pulp by the fierce heat.

  In the park, Tom saw the black women in their white head scarves who tended his neighbors' children. And with too much time on his hands, he lamented his small practice and the expenses incurred by a family of six.

  By 1903 Gantrytown was a thriving suburb of middle- and working-class families. Horses pulled the trams, and paraffin lamps were the lighting of choice—though there was much envious talk of the electric lighting in Harris Gantry's mansion. Every backyard had an outdoor water closet; under the seat a pail with a trapdoor opened into the sanitary lane. At night, Africans manning carts replaced the full pails with empty ones. Tom often passed these foul-smelling carts when he attended a late-night birth. Coal fired the stoves on frosty mornings. Ice was delivered to those who could afford it, and laundry was collected by muscular “washboys,” as the Zulu men were known: each balanced his burden upon a white-turbaned head, steadying it with a stick in one hand.