Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  It was on perhaps her tenth visit, perhaps her twelfth, that the ice woman put those hot pink hands into her patient’s hair and wormed them in deep, next to the scalp. Once there she began to press and press, as if to crush the skull, to pop the eyes from their sockets, to push blood from the nose and mouth and ears. She bent close and whispered, “Pair of aces. Full house, spades. Royal flush, hearts, with three pretty portraits.”

  As if those words were magic, another world came rushing in. The ice woman vanished; the patient’s eyes fluttered, she looked into a darkness slightly less deep than that she was used to, and her ears heard several voices at once:

  “Raise you ten.”

  “. . . bluffing.”

  “Call!”

  She tried to call, she did. But her lips were still frozen. She heard a slap-slap sound, as of wings, and there was a smell of sweet smoke that reminded her of a room brimming over with light; a faraway room in which she had been naked and cold, but not as cold as now.

  “Sham!”

  “Bastard!”

  There was laughter, and the sound of wings again. She wondered if she were in some kind of heaven, or perhaps purgatory, with the angels laughing over her. But how could she have found heaven when she was naked? And who would have thought heaven could be so cold? She tried to sit up and look at the angels, but her limbs were too heavy. Arms, legs, and waist were oppressed with heavy bonds, and all she could move were her eyelids. She wanted water badly, but she could not draw the breath to ask for it; and since she was also sleepy, she let her eyelids droop again.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Something coughed.”

  “Someone, you mean?”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “Wasn’t m—”

  “One of them, must be . . .”

  “Tarnation!”

  “Which one?”

  This was interesting enough to make one fight to stay awake. And it was the fluttering eyelids that eventually drew the voices, and the hot hands—many of them—about her body.

  “She’s alive!”

  “I knew she—”

  “Untie her.”

  The hands unknotted some bonds, and a pair helped her sit halfway up. Weak yellow light shone all around; she caught glimpses of faces—hairy, plain, masculine faces—and someone held a glass to her lips and let the water run into her mouth and over her chin. Despite the cold, her fingertips burned as if she’d been playing with hot coals. She discovered she was not naked after all but wearing a thin white shift.

  She coughed, a good long cough, and someone held a handkerchief before her lips.

  “Where am I?” she whispered. It was a strange pleasure to hear her own voice.

  “What did she say?”

  “Was that English?”

  She realized she’d misspoken, that there were words these ugly angels would understand and words they wouldn’t. With the effort she might use to push open a heavy door, she thought hard and came up with the right ones: “Where am I?”

  Someone said words she thought were “debt hospital,” but that voice was quickly hushed. Someone else laughed, nervously. The third voice said, speaking very slowly, “You are in the Anteroom.”

  “Hvor?” She was too sleepy to make sense of it. She was almost sure that her fingers were on fire, but she could not see them.

  Another voice said, “The Anteroom of Hygeia Springs Institute for Phthisis.”

  Words she could not understand; but they were words, and the very sound of language comforted her. She closed her eyes and slept, hearing dimly: “Who are you—miss—what is your . . .”

  Chapter 39

  Such beauty could not be were it not for the highly reflective qualities of the pure translucent waters which serve as a polished mirror of French plate glass.

  “THE GLOWING LANGUAGE OF A MUCH TRAVELED AUTHOR,”

  QTD. IN STANLEY WOOD,

  OVER THE RANGE TO THE GOLDEN GATE

  No one looked beautiful in the middle of dying, Edouard Versailles thought as he stood over the new arrival. She lay sleeping in an effervescent bath, emaciated and whiter than the chalky tiles around her, losing her hair and scarcely breathing. And yet he found traces of loveliness in this patient’s face—the cheekbones, the prominent brow, the eyes that must still be bright when her sleep ended and the whisper-thin lids peeled back. About her figure it was impossible to tell; not much to it but bones, with the barest hint of swelling around the nipples and a startling froth of red hair where he had known no woman to have red hair before, between two hipbones that reminded him of plucked chicken wings. It was no wonder that, when she was found waiting in the Springs Hotel for a stage that never came, the nurses had taken her for dead and put her in the Anteroom.

  They told him she’d had no pulse then, and that her breath had left no trace on a mirror, but now she showed the signs of life common at the Institute: the rattling in the lungs, the pulse hammering visibly between neck and shoulder. Already one miracle had occurred; if Edouard had time to apply his special cure, she might yet live.

  “It is a great thing,” he said, as if to himself, “that we included the Anteroom in the architect’s plans.”

  The single nurse on duty here merely nodded. She was working too hard to speak, guiding the heavy rubber hose to fill the patient’s bath. Sweat and water coated her and Mr. Versailles in a light spray, and tiny bubbles clung to the sleeping woman’s body, for the mountain water was naturally carbonated. Dr. Beachly had prescribed a series of baths, increasing in temperature, to get her blood flowing and to wash away the taint of near-death, and Edouard Versailles would trust no one but himself to supervise. This patient must be cherished, not least because he had suddenly realized she was the means of establishing his hospital’s reputation and his own: She could be his first private patient.

  The Hygeia Springs Institute for Phthisis was several months from opening its doors to business, but already there was a clear need for certain specialized chambers such as the one in which this woman had wakened. The invalids who had somehow heard of the water’s astonishing properties had filled the town to overflowing: all to the good, for there would be many beds in the new Institute’s three hexagonal towers, and meanwhile hotels and rooming houses were doing a brisk business. The independent sufferers busied the doctors already on staff. Unfortunately, deprived of the particularly salubrious arrangements of air and water that the Institute would provide—and most of all unable to take advantage of the special electrical cure by which Edouard swore but that even the most sophisticated doctors felt would require at least a gradual introduction—many of those patients were dying. The hillside above town was pockmarked with new black graves, and even before the rooms could be plastered and painted, a few had been pressed into service as operating theaters, intensive nursing wards, a morgue, and, finally, the Anteroom.

  Edouard did not know that the nurses privately called the place the Death Hospital. It was there that they sent patients who appeared to have expired but for whom one of the doctors stubbornly clung to hope. The sturdier nurses hoisted these likely corpses onto wheeled gurneys and settled them in one vast room, where a woman was charged with daily pricking their feet with needles and holding matches to their fingers, until the patient either woke screaming in pain or achieved such an advanced state of decay that there was nothing for it but to slide the body quietly into one of the chutes that fed directly into the cellar morgue, thereby releasing such an odor of misused flesh that the chief mortician, Dr. Rideaux, often swore he’d seen the other cadavers flinch in horror. No body had ever wakened before.

  Edouard had been most surprised to recognize this miraculous patient as the visitor who had disturbed him some days ago, who had made him even more dissatisfied with his Hygeia than before—who had, in fact, almost convinced him to destroy it. After her visit, he had imagined the ranks of the afflicted filing in, wheeled in wooden chairs or carried on comfortable stretcher
s, beneath the thick nose and limbs of that painted goddess; she was likely to make them abandon hope, and he was tempted to abandon her to the glass house’s furnace. That he had not done so was entirely due to the exertions of his butler, Wong, who had become enamored of the painting and had dragged it out to the stable for safekeeping until his master reconsidered.

  But now Edouard forgot about the picture as, staring down at Famke, he thought that there could never be another patient such as this one: a woman whose funereal beauty seemed to call into question the capacity of art to represent anything at all.

  “Sir?” Dr. Beachly, the Institute’s chief physician, entered the room and signaled to Miss Pym to close the tap. “Her warmth is nearly restored. What do you want to be done with her?”

  Edouard blushed, remembering he was in the presence of others. Until this moment, he had not been embarrassed to be gazing upon this naked woman, for her eyes were closed. What troubled Edouard Versailles, as always, was the living and conscious.

  He had to address two such people now: Lesley Beachly and kind, stout Miss Pym, one of a few female nurses on staff, who had just left to fetch soaps and creams.

  “Do we know who she is?” he asked at last, a simple question; one he should have asked the woman herself when he had the chance. He could remember only that she had claimed some relationship to the painter of that ill-begotten canvas.

  “We think her name is Fanny,” the doctor told him. “She has said it, or something like it, twice in her sleep. She claims to remember nothing, not even her name or where she was born. She had only six dollars in her purse, along with some clippings from the newspaper and a filthy paper that might once have contained writing. All we know is that she is consumptive and . . .” He coughed delicately. “She is not a virgin.”

  Edouard gazed down at the white figure sunk in the tub. For the moment, her lack of virginity was of no consequence to him. Still, looking at the wounded fingers and feet, and at that surprising red tuft waving in the water, he realized there was one question he did have to ask.

  “Has she been violated?”

  “Not as far as my investigations have shown,” the doctor said.

  “She could be married,” suggested Miss Pym, coming back in with a tray.

  “Perhaps.” Beachly reflected that the woman’s fingers were so white that they showed no difference where a ring might be, nor was the flesh indented there; but he did not need to point to these facts. “She does not seem to have produced any children.”

  Miss Pym knelt to wash the stranger’s hair with a French soap that Versailles planned to put in all the Institute’s cells. She began at the scalp and worked her fingers in, worrying the skull from side to side so that sometimes the stranger’s face appeared lovely and vital; at other times, a leering death’s head. As she worked, she had to keep taking her hands from the suds to pull away the strands that clung to her fingers; long strands of red clotted the surface of the water and the foam drifting there.

  Edouard thought of a print his father had bought long ago, a beautiful red-haired woman floating among flowers in a pond. “I think we should call her Ophelia,” he said out loud. “Or Miss Ophelia.” It was important to maintain an appropriate formality between doctor and patient.

  As if she recognized her name, the woman opened her eyes. They were every bit as blue as he remembered, but she looked at him only a second before she shuddered and they closed. He saw her eyes moving nervously beneath the lids.

  Edouard had to remind himself that he was at the door of a great venture, and that this nameless woman—Fanny, Ophelia—might be the key. He cleared his throat. “My—er, Miss,” he said, remembering manners that had fallen into disuse. “I have an experiment—an opportunity to propose to you . . . a cure . . .”

  “A cure,” she repeated in a whisper, still refusing to look. She was too weak to move away from Pym’s efficient fingers, which made her head shake on its stalk but nonetheless, for the moment, kept her looking more alive than dead.

  “Do you want to be cured?” asked Edouard.

  “Yes,” she whispered back, as if it were an odd question—as indeed it was.

  “Shall you mind an unusual treatment? Free of charge? I assure you it is most effective—I have benefited from it myself . . .”

  She made a small mewing sound and fell asleep again. Miss Pym held her head out of the water.

  Edouard tried to curb his excitement. “I think we shall move Miss Ophelia up to my house tomorrow,” he told his staff, referring modestly to the wonder of iron and glass that the villagers called the Palace. “She shall be my private patient and occupy my mother’s old suite.”

  Dr. Beachly and Miss Pym avoided each other’s gaze. Surely, if the Institute’s owner wished to take a penniless stray into his own home, where both his parents had succumbed to the disease he had made it his mission to cure in his own most peculiar way, that was his business and no one else’s.

  Ophelia’s progress up the mountain the next day would have honored a queen of Egypt or Amazonia. She lay on an oversized stretcher, her body wrapped in wool blankets, her back propped with pillows—hexagonal, she noticed, and rather harder than pillows usually were. With Dr. Beachly leading the way like some high priest, four male nurses carried the stretcher, and as many lady nurses followed with the various bags and bottles they considered necessary to promote a recovery. It was a beautiful, cool, sun-drenched afternoon, and Ophelia felt as if she were in a painting come to life. Within the cocoon of blankets she even pinched herself, just to make sure she wasn’t caught in another fever dream.

  She had to pinch herself again once the glass house came in view, rising like a glittery moon over her feet. Surely this place was part of her dreams—but, no, Dr. Beachly opened the lacy white front door, and the nurses trooped her over the threshold and through the foyer. The palm fronds and flowered vines closed in around her, and the nurses began a shivery trip up an iron stairway.

  She almost forgot she was ill. Everything was white and green and very, very bright. There was even a vine twining up the banister, its tiny star-shaped blooms filling the air with a sweet heavy scent.

  “Jasmine,” said a nurse, when the patient sniffed. “Mr. Versailles’s”—she pronounced it Versles, as the villagers did—“father, who built this house, was very fond of it.”

  Jasmine made Ophelia dizzy. But her room was airy and relatively free of plant life, and so big that the doctor and all the nurses could fit comfortably inside. The ceiling was a gentle dome of glass, and just now it was uncovered; she could stare straight into the sun if she wanted to.

  “These are the cords for drawing the shades,” said one of the men, demonstrating. “You give a pull here and the drapes will cover the ceiling.”

  “Or you may ring for a maid to do it,” added Miss Pym. “Although Mr. Versailles believes the light will speed your cure.”

  So she was to have a maid—a fact that fled her mind as she watched the shades cover the sky. They billowed like white sails, stretching by means of a system of wires hidden against the iron framework. This was indeed a marvel, but in turn it was quickly forgotten in the curiosity of wooden furniture, deeply carved and once very elegant, warped and bleached now to the color of old ivory. The bed and a few other pieces were wrought of white iron, but the chest of drawers into which the nurses began stowing her possets and rubs, and the wardrobe in which they hung a few simple white gowns—these furnishings were of necessity made from lightweight materials, and they had absorbed the sun and steam until they cracked. She wondered at a man who not only insisted on living in a house of glass but was also willing to destroy what had obviously been expensive furnishings in order to do so.

  The nurses wiped Ophelia’s lips and lifted her into bed, where the sheets and blankets were paper-white. Out of nowhere, it seemed, there materialized a lovely quilt composed of little velvet hexagons painstakingly stitched together. Most of them had faded, too, so that what had been crimson and emeral
d and gold was now shades of dove-gray with gentle underpinnings of color.

  “Grandmother’s Flower Garden,” said Miss Pym, running her hand over the softness as she tucked it around the patient’s hard little bones. “That’s what this pattern is called. Some woman did fine work here.”

  One of the younger, sharper women laid another gleaming cord across the pillow. “If you need anything, pull on this—once for us, twice for a maid. As a rule we’re to keep out of sight.”

  “Why is that?”

  No one replied; but of course she already knew the reason. The rule that servants should never let themselves be seen till absolutely necessary was doubly important in a glass house. And how well she knew the system, too, although her hand had never before held the silken cord for any purpose but to clean it. She exerted herself to give this one a couple of tugs now and was delighted to see a slender, silent China girl appear in the doorway: hands folded into the sleeves of her cotton tunic, face made perfectly smooth, awaiting instructions.

  “Fanden!” Ophelia exclaimed admiringly.

  Miss Pym nodded dismissively to the maid, then opened a door in the right-hand wall. There was a gleaming flush toilet, its tank and pull-chain suspended from a reinforced ceiling. “This is your water closet. You may use it when you are stronger.”

  Somewhere downstairs, a parlor clock chimed high and spidery, five times. The nurses exchanged another glance.

  “We’ll leave you now,” Miss Pym said, with a final tuck to the quilt.

  “Where are you going?” the patient asked, suddenly afraid of being on her own in this strange place.