Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  Miss Pym appeared to understand, though she did not answer immediately. She held a warm cup to the girl’s lips: “Drink this,” she said.

  Heating had taken the bubbles from the water, and mixed with honey and other flavors came a familiar alcoholic bitterness that reassured Ophelia. She drank, and within minutes she was asleep.

  Chapter 40

  There is a saying in South California that if a man buys water he can get his land thrown in.

  HELEN HUNT JACKSON, “CALIFORNIA,” IN

  GLIMPSES OF THREE COASTS

  The elder branches were white with an unexpected snowfall, so clean they seemed to glow electrically in the intense blue twilight of mid-afternoon. Mother Birgit entered her office in her winter coat, wearing all three pairs of woolen socks that she owned. She had ordered the sisters not to light the hearth in here this winter; it was, she explained, an easy economy to make, since the office was used primarily by just one person. In her own mind it was also a penance, like the hair shirt she had once worn, for the missteps she had taken in the case of a particular orphan.

  Birgit settled herself at the big, plain desk and uncapped the inkwell: It was time to write the letter for which Herr Skatkammer had asked weeks ago. She had promised, and he was an important benefactor—particularly so now that the Queen had opened her Børnehjem, diverting the flow of funds and newborns who might have turned Catholic if the nuns had found them first.

  Words were slow in coming, and Birgit found herself gazing out at the elder, lost in thought, coughing abstractedly. There came an echoing cough in the hallway; if she listened carefully, there were coughs all over the building—the famous Immaculate chest was afflicting nuns and orphans who had already tired themselves out in the early days of Advent. If only it were possible to keep them in bed rather than in the drafty chapel! But of course no nun should ever think as much. And then there was Famke—out there in America with her splintery cough and no one to care for her, unless Viggo had found her by now . . .

  Birgit considered some difficult facts. Above all, she wanted to find Famke, not the alarming painting for which the girl had posed. As far as Birgit knew, the canvas about which Skatkammer had inquired was the only one in existence; if it remained in America and Famke returned to Denmark, she might take up a virtuous life. Even if she stayed in America and married her painter, that country was large enough to absorb the scandal. But in Denmark, a much smaller place, eventually the painting would cause trouble.

  A gentle wind blew through the courtyard, and the elder tree shook loose a fine powder of snow. That tree was like a hand, Birgit thought fancifully, with many fingers reaching up to grab—what? The rising moon? She could not see it, could see only a few of the clouds that had dropped that blanket of snow.

  She forced tree and sky out of her mind and set herself sternly to the task at hand. First she folded a sheet of paper several times, as if the letter were finished. It made a white pad like a bandage—but she must not think of that either, poor Herr Skatkammer lying so badly burned, poor Viggo the day of the soapmaking, poor suffering Catholics everywhere . . . She wrote the address of Skatkammer’s American agent on one of the outside rectangles, blotted it, and opened the sheet again.

  Dear Herr Jensen, she wrote at last, with the sense that she was punishing herself, I am writing at the request of your employer, Jørgen Skatkammer, who has heard of a painting he would like to secure for his collection . . .

  At the same blue hour, Frøken Grubbe sat down in Herr Skatkammer’s parlor to write to Copenhagen’s bishop. She wrapped her right forearm in a sleeve guard and brushed a few distracting hairs from her brow: This letter required the full focus of her energies, and it had to look pristine and professional. It must also read compellingly.

  Dear Holy Father!

  It is with considerable pain that I take pen in hand. But I must inform you that it is time to put stop to an intolerable situation, a disgraceful canker eating away at the body of the Church, destroying your flock as murrain destroys sheep. . . .

  If she wrote quickly, she could put it in the afternoon mail.

  In the quiet warmth of his own steam-heated office, Edouard Versailles reminded himself that all good beginnings take into account that they are also endings. This would be the beginning of Ophelia’s cure, the end of her illness: poor, memoryless Ophelia, victim of an unknown crisis that had robbed her of that precious storehouse of experience, who couldn’t even recall when the phthisis had begun to manifest itself, and who had no idea how such fevers were born. Who had no recollection, even, of the quest that had brought her here—an attempt to locate a brother whose name she never spoke, but who was the author of the painting that now sat in Edouard’s stable; a quest that had ended in her collapse and subsequent rebirth into the web of health and hope that Edouard was spinning for some lucky patients.

  An unlucky patient’s hand sat on his desk now, deformed by disease and stored in a jar of alcohol. Edouard picked it up and set it at eye level on a bookshelf, where it bobbed along to the left. He fancied it was reaching for a fetus miscarried at seven months, now forever cradled in another thin womb of glass. Chemicals and sunlight had combined to bleach both hand and fetus to a pallor even less luminous than the new patient’s skin . . . Terrible to think what this disease was doing to Ophelia now.

  He turned away from the jars to dig into his desk for an anatomical drawing. He found what he wanted deep in a central pigeonhole: It featured a naked human female, and its contemplation replaced niggling distress with a warm glow of anticipation. His mind supplanted the drawing’s expressionless face with Ophelia’s visage, and he imagined the effects that his success would work on her: the gradual burgeoning of flesh, the bones and eyes sinking back to their rightful places beneath pillows of breasts and delicate shells of eyelids. Her beauty completed, perfected in the eyes of the world; even more intensely gorgeous to himself, who had helped create it. She would far outshine this bland representation of the healthy specimen, a woman who had probably been born into health and never struggled to recreate herself.

  But Edouard also imagined failure: Ophelia’s last sour, soughing breath, the subtle fading of her skin from white to waxen yellow, the grave’s black dirt clouding her hair. And then there was the damage to himself: Failure would label him as crackpot as his father, the immigrant Frenchman who had perversely refused to mine for gold himself but had made a fortune by buying mountains and rivers, for the use of which he charged those who did the digging and sluicing. The man who did not see his wife or son for twelve years but who built this fantastic house in order to give the woman a view of the outside world when, finally arrived in America, she lay suffering just as Ophelia did now.

  Thinking of those awful days, Edouard reflected that it might be time to visit his parents, whose bodies now lay entombed inside a small replica of the Taj Mahal on the edge of the forest. He often went to them at what he thought must be midnight, though the heat and moisture in the house made his clocks unreliable. But then his eye fell on that discarded engraving, and his mind again imposed a picture of that frangible wreck of a girl upstairs, lying in his mother’s bed, waiting for rescue.

  Edouard felt his muscles stretching in an unaccustomed direction. He realized he must be smiling.

  Yes, it was definitely the start.

  Edouard breezed into the bedroom the next morning with an armload of charts and diagrams and tables of facts, lists of substances and behaviors desirable and undesirable. Miss Pym, who had accepted private nursing duty, and the housemaid Precious Flower followed with an assortment of basins, towels, and bottles. Ophelia struggled to sit up, looking expectant and eager.

  Miss Pym hoisted the patient and arranged the pillows in a tall mound at her back. As she did so, a single downy feather floated upward in the air, and Edouard caught it in his fist lest Ophelia should inhale it. The patient murmured something that sounded like “Summer fool,” and Edouard worried that she already considered him a crackpot.
Briskly, as befit a man of medicine, Edouard pulled out a contraption made of two flexible tubes that joined into one and ended at a little metal cup. He anchored the tube ends in his ears.

  His Ophelia did not recall seeing its like before. She was taken aback, then, when Edouard placed the metal cup on her chest and she felt the chill through the gauze of her nightdress.

  “Don’t pull away,” he said, giving a little expert frown as he moved the cup slightly. “This instrument lets me listen to your lungs. It’s called a stethoscope.”

  She determined that there was nothing but science in the way he handled the little cup, but what did that matter anyway? She had agreed to stay here, and she would have tolerated almost any strange behavior so long as it produced the feeling of health and release that he promised.

  “A stethoscope,” she repeated dutifully.

  “Yes. It tells me your rattle is not too pronounced; your lungs aren’t completely hollow.” He sounded almost disappointed, as if he’d wanted her to be sicker than she was. He pulled back the covers and began prodding her legs; she decided to let him.

  “Not much swelling here,” he said, again with that jarring note of disappointment. “Perhaps no swelling at all. Tell me—how painful are your joints?”

  “My joints?” she asked, the repetition this time signifying not passivity but confusion. As far as she could recollect, a joint was a cut of meat.

  “Here”—he clasped her knee—“where your bones join together. The disease can settle in them as well.”

  “Oh. Not bad.” She paused as he rustled with the bedclothes, covering her up again.

  He twitched at the quilt, trying to make it lie perfectly straight. “And where did you come from? Have you remembered anything? You don’t speak with a native accent.”

  “Nor do you, I think.”

  “I was born in France.”

  “I believe I was born somewhere else as well,” Ophelia said meditatively. “But I cannot say exactly where.”

  “I know you have a brother,” said Edouard.

  Her face did not move; it was as if carved from marble. “I do?”

  “And he is a painter. You came here to look for him.” Her expression still did not change, and with a guilty sense of relief Edouard nodded to Precious Flower, who placed a chair behind him. He sat and pulled out a diagram. “Perhaps you will remember as your health improves . . . This,” he said, changing subject rapidly, “is what a diseased lung looks like.”

  It was horrible, yellow-pink tissue spotted with grayish holes, looking like spoiled cheese. How disgusting to think that was how she looked inside.

  “And this”—he produced another drawing—“is what is making you sick.”

  “This” looked like a bubble, somewhat elongated and slightly fuzzy around the edges, utterly empty inside. Involuntarily she clutched at her chest.

  “Oh, it is very tiny,” he hastened to assure her. “So small that you can’t see it without a special instrument known as a microscope. Doctors did not discover these little organisms—they are called bacilli—until three years ago. The discovery completely changed the way we think of this disease. Bacilli are alive, you know, and we must kill them to make you better.”

  Edouard pointed from one artist’s drawing to another. He was finding it much easier to speak now that he had a clear role to play in the conversation. It occurred to him that the role even required a certain tolerance from those with whom he spoke; doctors were often abrupt, absorbed in their scientific calculations. So: “Each bacillus creates a tubercle in the flesh—these little holes here and here. That is why advanced medical men now call your disease tuberculosis.”

  She appeared never to have heard those words before; to Edouard, it was just as well, for he derived some comfort from saying them aloud. He elaborated at length, pulling out more drawings, diagrams, and cross-sectional illustrations. The girl’s eyes glazed over, and she began to cough uncontrollably—or not so uncontrollably, he thought, for wasn’t it his clearest mission to cure that cough? He passed her one of the black-bordered handkerchiefs and continued talking.

  Precious Flower, standing behind him in her dark gray uniform, thought that the tubercles looked like grains of rice; only of course they were not grains of anything, but hollow spaces where nothing but these bacilli could exist. Tiny spaces, like the crib in Chinatown where she had lived like a bacillus herself, singsonging out to men as they passed: “You want nice China girl? Two bits lookee, four bits feelee, eight bits fuckee . . .” Until Edouard Versailles had bought her, as he had bought two of her singsong sisters, and commenced the process of bringing them back to apparent good health (Ancient Jade and Life’s Importance were still clapped, but they managed to hide the periodic outbreaks) and morals. The process which, she thought as she passed him a pad of paper and a pen, had rendered the girls themselves completely invisible at last.

  “I have developed a theory,” Edouard said, writing the name Ophelia at the top of a page and feeling deliciously like a real doctor as he did so, “a theory that I believe will cure you completely, as it has done for me. It is based on the principle of flushing . . .”

  “Flushing?” The patient looked toward the little room to her right.

  “Yes, flushing out these tiny, evil creatures.” He motioned to Precious Flower, who poured a glass of fizzing water from the pitcher and handed it to him. He, in turn, gave it to the girl in the bed. “They cannot live in the light, and once we flush them from the body’s cavities, they themselves die. This flushing must be accomplished on both physical and mental levels, for a weakened mind weakens the body and allows the bacilli to prey. We accomplish the first by means of copious liquids and purges, the second by creating an environment of calm. And finally, there is a galvanic device I have been developing—”

  “Calm?” she said, staring at the hissing glass. She did not care for the bubbles now. “Evil?”

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “Only someone at peace with himself can truly come free of this disease. A calm mind lulls the bacilli into stasis so they may be the more easily flushed. Now drink, and then I shall have the nurse bring up my machine.”

  He watched, with mounting excitement, while she drank.

  Chapter 41

  Why, Coloradoans are the most disappointed people I ever saw. Two-thirds of them came here to die, and they can’t do it. This wonderful air brings them back from the verge of the tomb, and they are naturally exceedingly disappointed.

  P. T. BARNUM,

  LECTURE

  Mæka was like a dream, Viggo thought, a dream of a world that could not possibly exist—but that could not be a dream, really, because who would ever imagine those vast plains of sand with their thick, prickly plants; the even stranger salt flats, where nothing grew and salt lay crusted like ice over swampy earth—the mountains? No one who had not already seen such places could believe they existed, wild places more fantastic than anything in a fairy tale or martyr’s history.

  Snow and other weather permitting, he spent the winter on the move, posting handbills, painting corpses, following the trail of canvas that he was sure would one day lead him to Famke. He was very aware of the money in his right boot, which had now callused his foot not quite to the point of insensitivity; with every step he took, that money reminded him of why he took steps at all. When the trail faded away, he patiently returned to the last place of certainty and began again, asking about paintings and about “Albert Castle, the painter,” in town after town until he was as well known as the artist himself.

  It wasn’t till Mirage, Colorado, that Viggo’s method slipped, and he asked merely for “Mr. Castle, the painter.” The Luder to whom he’d addressed that question answered it with another: “Do you mean Albert or Dante?”

  Thus Viggo, who had begun to identify himself as the model’s brother for the sake of her reputation, learned that the painter had a brother as well. When he asked for a description of Mr. Dante Castle, the picture that his interlocutor pa
inted with words excited him so much that he himself nearly became a candidate for the services of a chthonic artist. He spent a febrile, heart-thumping hour drawing rapid conclusions, and he realized what the fancy girls had not: Dante Castle was a fiction; Dante Castle was Famke; Dante was following Albert; and if Viggo followed Dante, he would find Famke. He hoped to do it before Albert did.

  So, methodically, Viggo rode back to Denver and retraced his steps. This time through, he discovered that the peculiarities of the paintings he’d seen along the way—the penumbras around certain figures, the elevation of some girls on the plane of the canvas, the occasional visibly clumsy thick layers of paint—were the work of a revisionist, of the “brother” who had followed Albert around, not the original artist’s design. This made the paintings all the more precious to Viggo, and he recognized a fierce desire to own one of them, or all—these tableaux that not only represented Famke’s face and figure but also showed the actual work of her hands. He felt a kinship with the women in the paintings; they had been cut and reassembled and permanently marked by the object of his quest and dreams.

  On his second trip to Leadville, he was able to fulfill his longing in a small way. Whereas his first visit had yielded him nothing, this time some more persistent digging led him to a Twilight of the Muses—unaltered—by Albert Castle, in a house inhabited by a very congenial young lady who had once worked for someone called Dixie Holler.

  “Dante?” she said meditatively, her breath hot and intimate in Viggo’s ear. “Yes, he came by, the night the Dynamite Gang blew Mother Holler’s house away. Vanished that very same night . . . So far as I’m aware he never came back, neither, though Bertie did—just a day or two after the explosion. Said he wanted to sketch the . . . the destruction of the imperfect . . . And he wanted to see what Mother Holler would erect in its place . . .”