My letter of introduction was taken in hand by the English gentleman, a Mr. Turner, who dried his tears and exclaimed, “Ah, Lady Mollie Carew's healer”—at which point the doctor, I observed, graciously excused himself. I was led forward to the bedside, but could only see my patient from behind—the bed had been turned about in the apartment and faced the window for the sunlight.
Many rooms of infirmity give off an odor—of medicine, of physical failing; in this bedchamber, I caught the scent of lavender.
“He's here,” said Mr. Turner to the person in the bed, and stepped aside for me to be greeted, and to greet.
I saw a man in considerable pain, and then I heard a man of unforgettable voice.
“Sir, I have been awaiting your kind skills,” said Mr. Oscar Wilde to me—Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.
I felt shy, but not intimidated—a man of such perfect manners knows how to put one at ease. He bade me sit beside him and began a pleasant interrogation; he asked me a multitude of questions about my journeys, the people I had met, the cures that I had effected, my family. When I told him that my mother came from the same stock as his great playwriting predecessor Oliver Goldsmith, his eyes lit up.
“Dear Noll,” he said. “I was told that he looked like an ape. His appearance was so grotesque that children threw stones at him in the street. I take it that your mother fared better?”
I assured him of her beauty.
Could it be that this remarkable man was to be my patient? His name aroused such passion—of opprobrium and support. He had written one of the most delightful plays in the world, The Importance of Being Earnest, which I myself had seen four times. On the heels of this and other great successes, he had then been tormented in three court trials.
I had long known what he looked like—who could have not? His jowled face, his velvet suits, the tapered alabaster hand holding out a flower to the world—these had been every caricaturist's delight.
I said, “Sir, I hope that I may have the honor to do you kindness; please let me take your hand.”
A patient's touch writes a message to me; a hand says more than a face; a grip will tell more than a frown. Mr. Wilde had an excellent hand, though a trifle cold; more significantly, he did not confine himself to a passing handshake—he took my hand and held it, and I felt the urgency of his appeal.
His face had become mottled and purple; he had not shaved for many days; his great eyes looked at me like carriage-lamps, with the appeal of a creature seeking help in a desperate way.
“I am in terrible pain,” he said, “and I have no money. I cannot tell which of these cuts goes deeper.”
“Where does your physical ache hurt?” I asked.
He gestured. On the side of his head farthest from me and therefore until that moment out of my sight, his ear wore a heavy dressing.
“They say that I am deeply infected,” he said. “And—” He hesitated; I waited. “I miss my children. I have two boys, you know. They are not allowed to see their papa. They are not allowed to remember him. Do you have a son?”
I shook my head. “Sir, I am a bachelor. Not through wishing to be, but I have not yet found a true love.”
“A bachelor is a man with no children to speak of,” said Mr. Wilde, and we laughed.
That moment of first inquiry with a patient has a powerful importance. It enables the healer to ask questions that nobody else can broach; it permits the necessary familiarity—intimacy, even—that allows a confidence essential in healing to pass from one to the other and back again.
“Sir, perhaps you will be good enough—if it doesn't tire you too much—to tell me the history of this ailment.”
“You know, I do not think that I have ever before seen a man with actually yellow hair,” he said. “I assumed it belonged only in mythology.”
With that, Mr. Wilde and I began our treatment.
He told me that he had fallen on a stone floor, and that in the fall he had cracked his head. Next morning, he had felt a “whirling” in his ear, and next night it had begun to ache unendurably. I asked what treatments he had so far received, and he said that the only potion he had valued possessed opium, “for dulling all my senses, including pain.”
We then talked of his food and drink; he said that his enjoyments had lately shrunk, and that he might accommodate truffles, but “the season and the economies” currently ran against him. Wine still agreed with him—he liked a light southern white wine.
“And to my astonishment,” he said, “I find that I like German wines. Do you?”
“Some,” I said. “A hock here and there.”
“Oh, I like that,” he said. “A hock here and there.”
I began to take notes.
At four o'clock I returned. With permission from the hotel kitchen, I mixed some herbs in a pot, added a powder of my own devising, which contained alum and potassium (I am not permitted to disclose other ingredients), and set it to cool upon a window-sill. My treatment would commence with an application of this mixture to Mr. Wilde's ear. If I could begin to dry the suppuration, which the dressings scarcely absorbed, then I could address the underlying ailment. I believed that he had suffered an internal perforation in his fall and, due to his unfortunate notoriety, he had been attended to carelessly or not at all.
By the time my mixture had cooled, Mr. Wilde had awakened. The nursing gentleman, Monsieur Hainnen (of whom, regrettably, more later), began to change the dressing, and this afforded me the opportunity of applying my treatment. With great care, I poured the lotion into Mr. Wilde's ear, asking him what, if anything, he felt. Other than a cooling sensation, he told me, he felt nothing. I allowed the lotion to rest a moment or two; he still felt nothing, and I directed M. Hainnen to apply a new dressing.
Mr. Wilde turned to me in a mood of great beseeching.
“I feel no better,” he said in a disappointed voice. “And I have such high hopes of you.”
“It seems to me,” I said, “that in the interest of not adding to your discomfort, I may have under-strengthened the medicine. In the morning, if you feel that no efficacy has taken place, I shall think again. This may take some time.”
He took my hand again.
“Cyril and Vyvyan,” he said. “Those are my boys. Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“I have a brother named Euclid,” I said.
“Oh, splendid!” cried Mr. Oscar Wilde. “Euclid O'Brien! Splendid.”
He was the shooting star of his day, and he streaked across the sky from Ireland to England. His father, Sir William Wilde, a Dublin ear, nose, and throat surgeon, after fathering numerous bastards had married an unusual woman, Jane Francesca Elgee, who became a political activist writing under the name Speranza. Oscar was born in the small conduit street of Westland Row in October 1854, the second legitimate child of his father.
Brilliant in school, he shone ever brighter at university, and soon became a student legend. Once, a professor asked him to recite, from the Gospels in Greek, an account of the crucifixion of Christ. Oscar rattled it off—and kept going. The professor repeatedly attempted to interrupt: “Thank you, Mr. Wilde, you have amply demonstrated your knowledge of the text.” But Oscar pleaded, “Oh, do let me go on—I want to see how it all ends.”
He was too aesthetic for the hearty athletes in Oxford, who came to his rooms to “rag” him; but at six feet three he threw them down the stairs. And later he coshed with a beer mug American miners in a frontier town who'd assumed that the man in the velvet suit reciting verse from the stage of the saloon was a sissy.
Oscar's brilliance flamed through nineteenth-century London. Those who saw him in action at dinner remarked upon the gold of his language, the silver of his tongue. He became a big man in every sense; his appearance matched his performance. He dressed with a dandy's power. A heavy and sensuous face, with a purse of the lips, was overlooked by dense eyelashes, which prodded a later poet to write of his “bees-wing'd eyes.”
Energetic as perpetual motion, he turned
out poems, plays, articles, and stories of great charm and insight. He could sketch a heart or a garden in a phrase. Devoted to his wife, Constance, and their two small sons, commanded and inspired by his dominating mother, he stood out in the landscape like a pillar of brilliant glass—which shattered.
Oscar had an underlife, in which—perhaps, innocently enough to begin with, and for sheer delight in beauty—he vociferously expressed romantic love for the young Lord Alfred Douglas. “Bosie” was as seductive as silk. He led Oscar down the darker alleyways of London, where rent boys lurked and orgies burned like secret fires in the night.
Bosie's father was the tempestuous Marquis of Queensberry (famous for drafting the safety rules in professional boxing). One day, scandalized by the talk of his son's antics, he left a card in a gentlemen's club, calling Oscar a “somdomite.” Perhaps as much for the misspelling as anything else, Oscar sued for libel, then withdrew the case—too late.
He was criminally indicted under the laws of indecency that governed all homosexuality at the time. The jury disagreed, but he was prosecuted yet again and received a merciless two-year sentence in jail. On the railway platforms, as he was transported in chains from London to Reading Gaol, the public spat in the face of this gilded man, whose soul had previously set the world alight.
When Lady Carew summoned Charles O'Brien, Oscar and his friends had already tried many avenues of medicine. Penicillin would have cured him, but it still hid in the future. The ailment proved insusceptible to any medical treatment, and thus Mr. O'Brien was clutched at as, veritably, the last hope.
His description of that first encounter may have been discreet as to the true appearance of Oscar Wilde. All other eyewitness accounts tell of a once-gorgeous man now bloated, jaundiced, a ruin; Oscar was forty-six.
Incidentally, the doctor in question was Dr. Maurice a'Court Tucker, an English doctor in Paris sent, as Mr. O'Brien discovered, to Wilde's bedside by the British ambassador to France.
It will not, I hope, compress my account unacceptably if I tell that, over the next week, I attended Mr. Wilde every day, twice a day—once in the morning to assess the effects of the previous treatment, and again later on to apply a new measure.
On the second Tuesday of our acquaintance, matters disintegrated suddenly and regrettably. As usual, I called upon him in the morning, and now I found him truly desperate. In the previous days, he had become more and more distressed in himself and, wincing with anxiety, he had begun to implore me for different treatments, better results. In the kitchen of the hotel I mixed my strongest potion yet.
Came the afternoon. The morning had already had its difficulties; nobody had told Dr. Tucker that this healer from Ireland had called on Mr. Wilde every day. Although I had seen the doctor on my first visit, I had not yet been introduced to him. He always arrived after I had gone. To be plain, educated physicians do not like herbal artists such as myself— to them I am a quack, a charlatan—and this was the first occasion on which Dr. Tucker and I attended our patient at the same time.
I became vaguely aware that today he had brought with him from the British Embassy a young woman; I believe that I heard him murmur to someone, “Mr. Wilde's new companion.”
As I approached the bed, Mr. Wilde was being assisted by the nurse, M. Hainnen. This unpleasant and self-important man with pale gray skin had a stiff way of standing that made him look like a dead tree. He now helped the ailing giant into his braided, wine-colored velvet smoking jacket, which looked incongruous over the nightshirt that billowed underneath it. I said that I needed to apply my treatment, and M. Hainnen waved me away. But Mr. Wilde heard me and called out, “In a moment, Mr. O'Brien. We shall do it when I am in my chair.”
I stepped back as Dr. Tucker and Mr. Turner then assisted Monsieur Hainnen; and they all half-carried Mr. Wilde to the large chair that gave him a view over the roofs of Paris.
As Hainnen stood aside, having removed Mr. Wilde's dressing, I stepped forward with my flask, ready to pour. I asked the nurse, fairly cheerily, “How's the patient?” and he looked at me coldly; he had bitterly opposed my ministrations of the past days.
“Maladroit! Imbécile!” And having hissed his insults (too cowardly to speak them aloud, lest Mr. Wilde come to my defense), he huffed past me like a train leaving the station. As he did he jolted into me and knocked the flask from my hand to the floor. It did not break—but it did spill the potion I had mixed, which then began to spread across the carpet in a wide smear. Indeed, the nurse had proved the maladroit one.
Hainnen now rushed forward, as did Dr. Tucker, as did Mr. Turner, who skidded a little on the spilt mixture, which, because it had a sulfur base, began to burn a smoking hole in the carpet. Mr. Turner staggered against the wall and put out a hand to save himself, thereby dragging out of true a picture hanging there. All persons, except Mr. Wilde and myself, became alarmed. I retrieved the flask from the floor, but he waved me away.
“I am too ill today, Mr. O'Brien. Come back tomorrow.”
Mr. Wilde then gestured to the askew picture; and the young person of whom I had been but dimly aware darted forward. She stepped quickly onto a low chair—and that is how I first gazed upon the woman who became my beloved. Swiftly and with assurance, she adjusted the picture, looked straight into my eyes—I was no more than two few feet from her face—stepped from the chair, and returned to Dr. Tucker's side.
Mr. Wilde assessed the corrected picture, nodded his approval, settled, began to a breathe a little easier—and Dr. Tucker stepped forward.
“Mr. Wilde, you will recall that I offered you some excellent company. May I present her?”
The girl stepped forward, to be in Mr. Wilde's full view. When I saw her face and her entire being I began to feel a strange force around my heart and my eyes. As from a great distance, I heard Mr. Wilde say to Dr. Tucker, “How kind of you to bring me not only beauty but young beauty.”
My heart began to thump, my eyes began to blur, and my breath began to catch, as though a hundredweight pressed upon my chest. Mr. Wilde waved a hand to distribute everybody around him. Dr. Tucker introduced a hassock and obliged the girl to sit on it—at Mr. Wilde's feet, so to speak.
“What is your name, child?”
“April Burke.”
“Child, one must always ask a lady her age—it thrills her to be given an opportunity to lie.”
“I fear that I am no more than eighteen, Mr. Wilde.”
“Ahhh!” He sighed like a bellows organ. “Only the young fear being young.”
“May I make you comfortable in some way?” she asked. “Shall I read to you?”
Mr. Wilde reached forward, took her hand between his, and reflected.
“Burke?” He played with the word. “Irish, yes? A Norman? A de Burgo was among the first Normans to land in Ireland.” He paused, thought for a moment. “You know—I knew of a Burke, an actress. She was as tall as you, though not so blond nor so composed. And her name, her name—” He paused, as if in wonder. “Do you know, child? I believe that her name was also April Burke. Yes! She was”—he spoke it slowly— “Mrs.—Terence—Burke. Yes. But I do recall that her name was April. Oh, my Lord! She vanished, you know—she disappeared. Yes. April Burke. I met her. She was beautiful. As are you, child.”
The girl leaned forward to claim his attention. “I believe, Mr. Wilde, that my grandmother was an actress who disappeared.”
That afternoon Oscar Wilde gave his last performance. Delivered in private, it changed two people's worlds forever, and the echoes have been resounding across my life for the decades since.
In 1900, Queen Victoria was still on the throne. The British Empire had redrawn the map of the world. And the name Oscar Wilde remained a synonym for disgrace. Other than the two agonized masterpieces inspired by prison, De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde scarcely wrote again.
After his release, he became a lumbering, pained wanderer. He turned up in towns and villages across Europe, approaching people for free
meals in return for telling them what he called “the extraordinary story of my life.” And he never condemned the man who brought him down, Lord Alfred Douglas, the dreadful Bosie, disliked by all who knew him— except, fatally, Oscar.
When Constance Wilde discovered that, after prison, Oscar had once again had a meeting with Bosie, she divorced him. She changed their children's surname to Holland—and she died, of spinal cancer, in 1898, a few months after Oscar was released.
Oscar fell like Lucifer tumbled out of Paradise. This was a man who had changed the meaning of the word “style.” He believed that creativity applies all across life. If one is artistic, he insisted, one should not be afraid to let the world see it—in dress, actions, household, presence. That was “style.” Now he lay in a room whose decor he famously disliked, desperately seeking any kind of help to stop his body from closing down, and having a last fillip of glory from nothing more than the memory of an actress he had once fleetingly met, and theatrical gossip he had once heard.
Oscar gave all the time—he gave in talk, in story, in money, in suffering. His impact on the theater and its practitioners was enormous, and continues. The world still flocks to Lady Windermere's Fan, to An Ideal Husband, and above all to The Importance of Being Earnest. Any English-speaking school that attempts drama has been bound to consider him in its repertoire. Many of his plays have had more than one production for the screen.
Those who knew him said that Wilde seemed incapable of being dull (which was, of course, his greatest fear). Before he died, distraught and reduced as he was, he could still have a profound effect on those around him. Charles O'Brien saw that, and said as much: Oscar's “last performance,” he observes, “changed two people's worlds forever.” To this day, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde affects all who consider him. Largely redeemed by history, and liberated in the huge advances of moral tolerance, he became even more influential after his death.
The great man became animated; he sat higher in his chair. Dr. Tucker smiled in approval at his young protégée; this was exactly what he had hoped she would do—cheer up the patient by listening to him, encourage him, attend him with her eyes and ears.
Tipperary Page 9
