Tom Bedlam

by George Hagen

  Did the European families consider the vast disparity between their means and those of the washboys? Rarely. The class divisions of England were replicated by race in Gantrytown. Harris Gantry thought no more about the emancipation of his black butler or cook than a rich Londoner did about his white one. Tom, however, could afford neither a cook nor a butler.

  Two fine educational institutions served the community: St. Peter's School for Boys and St. Ruth's Collegiate School for Girls. When Margaret started attending St. Ruth's, the cost was twelve shillings and sixpence a month. Tom insisted that his children receive the best schooling he could afford—an echo of Emily Bedlam's constant refrain.

  Friends had assured Tom and Lizzy that Gantrytown needed another doctor and a piano teacher, but the suburb already had one of each. Dr. and Madame Wardour were an elderly couple who resided in another stately Victorian house perched on a raised spit of land overlooking the town; they served the community's needs with a brand of old-fashioned severity.

  Old Dr. Wardour spoke from the corner of his mouth—the result of a stroke suffered a few years before. The curl of his lips gave him a curmudgeonly snarl. His French wife was strict. Although Madame Wardour frequently dismissed her students, nobody ever dismissed Madame Wardour. Everyone was terrified of the woman. She wore black exclusively and anchored her hair with a multitude of hairpins to show off her long neck, narrow face, and bayonet-like blue eyes. Lizzy pointed out her beauty to Margaret when they saw her at a fete. “Beauty, Margaret, is a matter of having a good opinion of oneself,” she said. She pointed out that Madame Wardour behaved like a beautiful woman and, thus, was.

  A Masonic temple and three churches—Catholic, Presbyterian, and Dutch Reformed—catered to the community's spiritual and communal needs. When actors or noted musicians performed in town, the Masons lent their temple.

  Tom attempted to make friends with the old doctor at the annual Gantrytown Freemasons' Ball. “My name's Chapel, Dr. Wardour,” he began, “and I believe I have the honor of serving with you in the community.”

  Wardour reacted to this greeting as if he'd been goosed with a pike. “Sharing what? Who the devil are you?” The old man brandished his trowel and, with his shock of white hair and distorted squint, resembled nothing if not Blackbeard's onboard surgeon.

  “Chapel. Dr. Tom Chapel.”

  “Oh, Dr. Chapel, is it?” murmured the doctor. “What kind of a practice have you?”

  “A general practice, sir,” said Tom.

  “Well, good luck to you, Chapel!” said Wardour scornfully. “We must all begin somewhere, eh?”

  Tom's smile faded. “I'm hardly a beginner, sir. I was a surgeon for nine years in Port Elizabeth Hospital, three in the war.”

  “Indeed? If any of my patients care to risk their lives with a youngster, I'll send them along!”

  The pitch and tone of the man's voice marked the Chapels as pariahs in front of their neighbors. Having drawn first blood, Dr. Wardour tucked his trowel into his apron and stalked away.

  Although the residents of Gantrytown were loyal to the cantankerous doctor, they preferred their children to be taught music with sweetness and kind words. Lizzy gathered two students in the first week and three more in the next.

  “You're much nicer than Madame Wardour,” confessed one child to Lizzy, but it was a small consolation to Tom that his wife robbed the Frenchwoman of a few pupils.

  THE BUTCHER-BIRD

  THERE WERE DAYS WHEN TOM SAW NO PATIENTS AND WOULD SIT IN his consulting room, pondering his shortcomings, afraid to show his family that he had nothing to do. Sometimes he would pull a chair to the window and listen to the children as they played on the lawn while Lizzy was with a pupil.

  A stiflingly hot breeze caused an eruption of jacaranda blossoms as Arthur circled his sisters on one such afternoon. It required the efforts of all of them to amuse the three-year-old; when they grew tired and collapsed on the grass with flushed cheeks, they fanned themselves with the hems of their dresses.

  A clumsy, halting melody floated from the parlor window—“The British Grenadiers,” played on the piano, accompanied by Lizzy's claps. The musician picked up speed until it had become a robust marching song.

  The children listened to their mother's cheers with silent envy. Bored, Arthur begged his sisters to chase him around the garden. “Pleathe chathe me. Pleathe!” he cried.

  “I'm too tired, Arthur,” Margaret replied, her small nose and freckled chin flushed red. “But if you sit down, I'll tell you a story!”

  The boy turned to Iris. “Will you chathe me, Irith?” he squeaked.

  “Only if you say my name properly,” Iris warned him.

  “Irith.”

  “No, Arthur. Repeat: Iris. Iris. Iris.”

  “Irith, Irith, Irith.”

  She shook her head. “That simply won't do, Arthur.” He began to cry.

  “Iris, you know he can't say your name,” Margaret scolded. “It's hardly fair!”

  “If he can say Margaret,” Iris replied, “he can say Iris.”

  “You're being very unkind, Iris.”

  “I prefer my name spoken correctly,” Iris haughtily replied.

  Desperate, the little boy pressed wet lips to her ear: “Irith, Irith, Irith.”

  “Arthur, that's disgusting!” Iris cried, shaking her golden hair free from him to reveal a high forehead and cheekbones, and her aunt Eve's perfect little mouth. People often remarked that Iris was the prettiest of the Chapel girls. Such a pity, they agreed, that her tongue had the sting of a wasp.

  Now, Arthur cautiously approached his third sister, who lay with her eyes closed, clutching a family of clothespin dolls. Charity had never recovered from Arthur's arrival. He'd claimed her crib, inherited her toys, and worst of all, stolen that which was most dear to her—the glorious doting expression on her mother's face and the welcoming lap of her father, both of which had once assured her that she was worth more than the earth, the moon, and the stars combined.

  When Arthur usurped her position, Charity vowed never to forgive him. Perhaps that was why she clutched her own little “family” so tightly: two parental figures with knobbed wooden heads, and three children— girls, of course—each with a small enameled smile and dotted eyes, drawn by Margaret, and a dress of silk and linen scraps, stitched by Iris. Their faces were worn and brown from years of affection.

  Suddenly little Arthur noticed something about the family. “Mama, Papa, Margaret, Irith, Charity… Whereth Arthur?” he inquired.

  “My family doesn't have an Arthur.” Charity glared. “My Arthur died”

  As the full import of his sister's remark struck, the boy's eyes brimmed with tears. With his pink belly heaving with emotion, he blurted, “Arthur died? Arthur died!”

  Their baby brother's weeping became more than the elder girls could bear.

  “There, there! I'll make you an Arthur doll!” Margaret sprang up from her place on the grass.

  Margaret looked for a clothespin beneath the washing line. Iris clad it with a piece of cotton and drew two pencil-point eyes on its little round head with the knob of pencil she kept behind her ear—she was always scribbling verses on scraps of paper. She had read one to Tom that morning at the breakfast table:

  Young Miss Finger liked to linger

  By the shoulder of a soldier,

  Sang a tune, began to swoon,

  Fell in his lap!

  Lucky chap!

  No longer single,

  She's Mrs. Dingle.

  Charity wandered towards the house, clutching her ideal family to her breast. At the veranda she stopped. A canary cage hung from the eaves, its wire door swinging open in the breeze.

  “There we are, Arthur!” cried Margaret. “He's just like you!”

  Iris finished by drawing a smile on the clothespin. A flash of delight crossed Arthur's face, but then he wept with more calculated purpose. “But,” he sobbed, “I want a whole family—like Charity's!”

  “Of cou
rse you do,” gushed Margaret. “We'll find more pegs.” Like starlings after a shower, the two sisters darted and pecked in the long grass. All the while, Charity watched them. She would have loved to join in, but she was cast as Arthur's tormentor. She turned her back on them, fixing her eyes on the canary cage, where clues to an unspeakable atrocity now caught her attention.

  “That makes six pegs, Arthur. We've a whole family now!” cried Margaret.

  Charity let out a shriek, her finger pointing to where a butcher-bird stood with its long beak clamped around the fluffy yellow head of the family canary. The decapitated remainder of the bird lay on the floor of the cage. “The canary's dead!”

  Margaret groaned. “Again?”

  “How could it be dead again?” remarked Iris, emerging from the house with her mother's sewing box.

  “Another bird bit his head off!” sobbed Charity tottering from one foot to the other in a motion similar to that of the winged assassin on the roof.

  Margaret had Arthur in her lap as she held up the pegs. “Iris, would you please go to her?”

  “I'm busy,” replied Iris. “Besides, that canary never sang or talked,” she added, as if this was clear justification for murder. But Charity kept wailing, and after a second glance from Margaret, Iris stamped over to Charity and embraced her. “Really, Charity, it's only a butcher-bird. You know what they do!”

  TOM ROSE FROM HIS chair, preparing to attend to the matter, when he heard Lizzy call from the veranda. She had finished the lesson and was summoning the children inside. In a moment, she had assessed the crisis, caught Charity in her arms, and sat down with the other children gathered around.

  By the time Tom emerged from his consulting room, Charity's tears had dried, and Lizzy was singing to her in a sweet soprano, her white linen dress spread across the grass. Arthur was in Margaret's lap, clutching his newly fashioned family. The domestic scene was so inviting, so idyllic, and Lizzy so pretty that Tom became inspired with a solution to his problems.

  “You'd make a fine nurse, Lizzy,” he said. “Sometimes I think that's what people really want to see when I pass by. They look at me as if I were an undertaker rather than a doctor.”

  “I could certainly help you on your rounds,” suggested Lizzy, “though I shall have to be at home for my pupils.”

  “Oh, Mama, you'd make such a pretty nurse!” cried Margaret.

  “Oh, Mama, you'd make such a pretty nurse!” mimicked Iris. “Silence, Iris!” replied Margaret in her most mature voice.

  AT THE DINNER TABLE, the strong character of the Chapel children was on full display as a fresh struggle began for Tom's attention.

  “Papa, the canary's head was chopped off by a butcher-bird!” wailed Charity.

  “Quiet, Charity!” cried Margaret.

  “Quiet, Charity!” echoed Iris, mocking her sister.

  Tom struck the table with his hand. There was silence, until Charity burst into tears.

  “Oh, Charity,” cried Lizzy, hoisting her onto her lap again. Tom picked up Arthur, while Iris and Margaret glared at each other.

  “Don't you think Mama would make a very pretty nurse?” asked Tom.

  “Oh, yeth!” cried Arthur.

  “So do I!” said Margaret, for she knew she resembled her mother and wished to be just like her.

  “It's a wonderful idea, Papa!” Iris said, not to be outdone. “Mama, you should sing when you ride with him. You have such a beautiful voice, and I'm sure people will flock to be cured.”

  Now Arthur waved his clothespin family in his father's face urgently.

  “Good heavens.” Tom smiled. “What's this, Arthur?”

  “My fambly” said Arthur. “Mama, Papa, Margaret, Irith, Charity, and Arthur.”

  Tom looked at the clothespins: one was draped like a bride in yellowed lace and reminded him of his father's tightrope act.

  “Boys don't play with dolls, do they, Arthur?” he said.

  Arthur clasped the clothespin family tightly to his chest. “I love my fambly,” he insisted.

  The children were dispatched to bed with breathless efficiency. Margaret read Through the Looking-Glass to Iris and Charity: the Tweedledum and Tweedledee chapter, which Iris knew by heart and insisted on reciting as her sister read it out loud. Papa told nursery rhymes to Arthur. Mama played a lullaby on the piano, and the lamps were turned down.

  Margaret was permitted to stay up a little later; in gratitude she made cups of tea for her parents as they sat on the veranda. She tiptoed between the bougainvilleas, then sank to the ground, folding her legs under her. “I'm so happy tonight, I don't know why,” she said. “Might I be in love?”

  “Is there someone you love?” Tom replied cautiously, for Margaret was about the same age as Audrey had been when she had exchanged lemon tarts for his kisses.

  Margaret took a deep breath, as if to inhale the joy about her, then stood up and pirouetted to the door. “No,” she answered, “but I feel as though I'm going to meet him very soon!”

  “A lucky boy I'm sure,” said Tom.

  “But what will I do when it happens?” said Margaret, her eyes dancing with anticipation.

  Here, Tom glanced nervously at his wife.

  “When the time comes, I'll tell you exactly what to do,” Lizzy promised.

  Margaret smiled, retreated inside, then darted out to kiss her father's temple, her mother's cheek, and disappeared.

  “Poor Margaret,” Tom remarked.

  “Why?”

  “Suppose she pins her hopes on someone who cannot return her love?”

  “I shall be her guide,” Lizzy assured him.

  Tom looked at his wife with relief. “I will rely on you.”

  Lizzy took this remark as license to offer advice. “Tom,” she began, “Charity needs to be reminded that you love her. She's jealous of Arthur. She counts every glance you spare him and tallies it against her own score.”

  “She baffles me,” Tom admitted. “Whenever I'm near her, she seems to be either crying or furiously angry.”

  “You always greet Arthur first when you come home, my darling. It's rather hard on her. She'd cry less if you held her once in a while.”

  Tom acknowledged this, and agreed to make more of an effort. As the evening breeze subsided, the night jasmine became especially pungent. Lizzy added up the week's receipts in a little accounts book; it was she who had the clearest idea of their finances. She was not the insecure and fretful young woman Tom had taken from Edinburgh; he could never have predicted her hardiness, her flexibility or her willingness to do anything to ensure their survival.

  “Well,” she concluded, “we can pay for school this month, with a little to spare. But I'm worried about next month.”

  Tom had been watching her. “Lizzy, do you ever imagine being a rich doctor's wife in London?”

  She closed her accounts book. “Married to Dodo?” She looked amused. “I haven't thought about him in years. And what about you? Eve would have made you a wonderfully successful doctor.”

  Tom shook his head.

  Her forehead creased. “Not a satisfactory answer, darling. Either you have regrets about Eve or you do not.”

  “I have none whatsoever,” he declared.

  She leaned forward and looked into his eyes. “Tell me why it was destined for us to run away together.”

  He frowned. “Well, for one thing, Eve couldn't play the piano.”

  “Neither can I any longer. I'm so out of practice.”

  “But you are a fine teacher,” murmured Tom, “an exceptional mother, an excellent nurse, a best companion, a brilliant and superlative wife, not to mention my harshest critic and least cooperative patient.”

  Lizzy's eyebrows rose with amusement. “Because I ask questions? Because I question your judgment?”

  “I am a doctor.”

  “Well, I am a doctor's daughter,” she sniffed. “I probably know my anatomy better than you do.”

  Tom frowned again. This, he knew, was probab
ly true. “I thought I was supposed to pay you compliments,” he said. “You seem to have taken it upon yourself to do so.”

  Lizzy sighed. “I wonder whether Eve would have been a better wife for you. She was ambitious. You would have been highly placed by now. She would have molded you into a pillar of society.”

  “I didn't want to be molded.”

  “We are all molded, darling, whether we like it or not.”

  “My father never molded me.”

  “He certainly did. The minute you were born he set you on a course by giving you a name and walking out of the door.”

  A dog began to bark in the distance; this caused the parrot next door to echo it. It was an irksome bird; when Indian street vendors walked from house to house offering potatoes, cabbages, lettuce, or bananas, it would take up their cries and repeat them for hours, infuriating the women who would emerge from their houses expecting to buy vegetables or fruit.

  Lizzy's expression became melancholy. “Are we happy Tom?”

  “With children, there isn't time to think about it,” he admitted. “I suppose that means we mustbe.”

  “I'd hate you to feel you had taken a wrong turn. Eve will certainly have made a success of her husband by now.”

  Tom took his wife's hand. “Lizzy, my life might seem a failure by Eve's standards, but I declare myself a happy man.”

  He cast his eyes to the shrinking red sunset. “There's always more work for me when it rains. I shouldn't wish for accidents, but…”

  “Farmers pray for rain, so why shouldn't we?” said Lizzy.

  The couple looked at the horizon but kept their wishes silent.

  THE NEXT TWO WEEKS brought no rain to Gantrytown. But the nurse who appeared on Dr. Chapel's dogcart in white linens created a storm of her own. Perhaps people didlike to see a nurse beside a doctor, or perhaps it was the songs she sang. Lizzy passed the time singing everything from Gilbert and Sullivan to psalms and nursery rhymes. It had never occurred to Tom that people listened to passing traffic, but Lizzy's singing drew everybody—children, the elderly folk, nursemaids, and gardeners— from their houses without hesitation. Tom became busier than he had ever been. With Lizzy in attendance, tea was always offered, questions were frequent, and new patients appeared every day. Soon the doctor found himself with a healthy practice while his wife had to turn away prospective pupils.