“Philadelphia!” she exclaimed. “But that’s so far north, and in Yankee territory! Why ever would you go there?”
“There’s only a few other dental schools in the country—Baltimore, New York—but Dr. Frink says Philadelphia’s the best. He says, with my grades and experience workin’ with him, I shouldn’t have any trouble gettin’ in. It’d be an honor for me to go there, Mattie, a real honor. Don’t be angry, please . . .”
But when she turned tear-filled eyes toward him, he realized that it wasn’t anger that she was feeling after all, but sadness at his leaving, and he was touched to the heart.
“Ah, Mattie,” he said gently, “I won’t be gone all that long. It’s only a two-year course, and I won’t even be leavin’ until next fall. I need to work some first, to help out with the tuition and all. Fact is, I didn’t know myself until just now that my father was gonna let me go. When I told him about it, he just said it was a fool idea and too expensive, like he says about everything I want to do. But somethin’ changed his mind, I guess . . .”
He didn’t tell her what he believed was true: that his going was only to get him out of the way for a new son to be born. Tender-hearted Mattie would never understand anything so cool as his father’s cold affections.
“But you will be comin’ back, won’t you, back to Georgia?”
“Do you want me to come back?” he asked.
“Well, of course I do, you’re family, after all. Family should be together.”
“But do you want me to come back, Mattie?”
She hesitated a moment before answering, then looked up at him with a face full of affection.
“You know I do!”
He didn’t bother asking for permission as he put his arms around her, bending his head to hers and feeling the chill of the November evening on her face as he kissed her quickly. And like that other night, when he’d kissed her in the barn behind her parents’ house, she leaned up toward him and kissed him back, and her willingness told him what he wanted to know: that Mattie loved him as he loved her. Then, arms still around her, another question came to his mind.
“Whatever happened to that South Carolina soldier of yours, Mattie? The one your father wanted to marry you off to?”
She pursed her lips as if in disgust. “He married a rich widow lady—a Yankee widow lady! My father said it was good riddance, that he was obviously not a gentleman, after all, and no great loss to the family.”
“And no great loss to you, either?” he asked.
“He was a dream, John Henry, just a girlhood fantasy. I never even knew him.”
“But you know me.”
“Yes, I do. I know you to the heart,” she said. And when she laid a hand against his chest, he bent his head and kissed her again.
“Philadelphia!” she said when their lips parted, “It’s so far away! You will write me while you’re gone, won’t you?”
“Of course I will. And you can write me, too. You can write me every day.”
“Writing paper’s too expensive for that!” she said with a laugh. “But I will think of you every day, and pray for your safe return.”
“My safe return?” he asked, amused. “Whatever could happen to me in prim old Philadelphia, anyhow?”
But Mattie wasn’t laughing anymore, only looking up at him with those loving eyes of hers. “You know how I’ve always tried to look after you, ever since we were children. Now you’re goin’ so far away, I won’t be able to watch out for you anymore. So I suppose God will have to watch over you for me.”
“Ah, Mattie!” he said, touching his hand to her face, like ivory silk in the moonlight, “I’ll come back safe, I promise. And will you promise to be waitin’ for me when I do?”
“Yes, John Henry,” she said, the tears welling up again. “I promise!”
The newlyweds left that night on the late train out of Atlanta, bound for a honeymoon trip to Tennessee. As at the wedding, they both looked like fashion plates in their going-away clothes, and even the telegram delivery boy, bearing the best wishes that had come across the wire, stopped to admire them.
The Holliday cousins all escorted them to the depot, then stood together in a cloud of steam on the platform, waving them off as they left, the first of their generation to go into marriage. And watching the train as it steamed off into the night, John Henry had an idea of how he might raise some money for dental school. The Atlantic & Gulf Line Railroad in Valdosta was always looking for workers, smart young men who could learn the complexities of the railroad schedule and handle the ticket taking and selling. He’d never thought before of inquiring after the job for himself, busy as he was with school and his afternoons at Dr. Frink’s office. But now that he’d finished at the Valdosta Institute, he’d have time to work two jobs and make some real money. Besides, he’d always loved the railroads, ever since he was a boy growing up near the tracks in Griffin. To him, the railroad had always seemed a romance and an adventure . . .
“What are you ponderin’ on, John Henry?” Mattie asked, slipping her arm through his as she stood beside him on the depot platform.
“Adventure,” he replied. “Life is full of adventures, and I aim to have me some.”
Mattie just smiled, understanding.
Though Henry Holliday had changed his mind about John Henry’s attending dental school, that didn’t mean he was willing to offer much support. He was only permitting his son’s professional plans, not paying for them, and he expected John Henry to raise most of the money for his schooling himself—which turned out to be a blessing in a way. For busy as John Henry was between his days assisting Dr. Frink and his evenings and weekends as a station clerk for the Atlantic and Gulf Line, he had little time to spend at home. So when Rachel’s pregnancy ended too early, like all the others had, John Henry didn’t have to be around much to hear her weeping—or offer condolences he didn’t feel. In truth, his only real concern was that without a baby on the way, his father might have another change of heart about his schooling and not let him go after all. But Henry seemed resigned to sending his son off to Philadelphia, and as the time came close, he even seemed to be looking forward to taking him there.
The fancy luggage was a gift he hadn’t expected. Henry presented it to him on the night before they left Valdosta, saying that a young professional man needed to have proper traveling cases. But the black leather satchel and matching train trunk, both fitted with shiny brass fastenings and bearing the gold-embossed initials JHH, were more than just proper. They were fine enough for a rich man’s son, and had surely set his father back a bit, though Henry said nothing of the expense. He only reminded John Henry that morocco leather needed to be well-cared for, and that he would have to keep an eye on the porters and bellboys who carried his things.
If John Henry hadn’t known better, he would have thought his father had finally come around to being proud of his going off to dental school. For with uncharacteristic generosity, Henry hardly complained at all about the price of their train fare from Valdosta, or their hotel accommodations in Savannah, or even their stateroom on the steamship bound for Philadelphia. And though they were five days at sea before the ship turned inland and sailed up the Delaware River, not once did Henry remind him that he could have become a doctor and done his studying closer to home at the Medical College of Georgia. And not being chastised seemed almost a sign of affection, coming from Henry.
Chapter Eight
PHILADELPHIA, 1870
THE CITY CELEBRATED HIS ARRIVAL WITH FIREWORKS AND CANNONADES and a torchlight parade through the cobblestone streets. At least that was the way John Henry liked to think of it, not learning until later that the festivities were presented by the Philadelphia Fire Association in honor of a visiting fire brigade from New York, and he’d only happened to arrive on that same late August night. The timing still seemed a serendipity enough to make him consider the celebration partly his own as well.
He had plenty to celebrate with the start of his professio
nal training and his first taste of big city life both coming at once. And what a city it was! With a population of nearly three-quarters of a million, Philadelphia was the second largest city in the country. Compared to it, Atlanta with its twenty-thousand was just a town, and Valdosta where John Henry could name almost every one of the three-hundred residents was nothing but a bump on a backwoods road.
From Penn’s Landing on the Delaware River, Philadelphia stretched for seven miles north and south, spread west for two miles to the Schuylkill River, and reached for another four miles past that into the Pennsylvania countryside. Even the city market was enormous, covering eighteen whole blocks from the Delaware to 18th Street. And with buildings as old as the Revolution and some even older than that, there was an air of steady importance about the place, as though Philadelphia had always been there and always would be. Not like Georgia, where everything was either raw and new or tumbling down from disuse. Georgia was still half frontier; Philadelphia was civilization.
His father had arranged a room for him near to the dental school in the boarding house of Mrs. Christina Schrenk on Cherry Street. The house was a typical Philadelphia dwelling place, two stories tall but only one room wide with a narrow staircase taking up most of the front hallway. The room Mrs. Schrenk gave him was smaller than his old bedroom in Valdosta, but it had a window facing out onto Cherry Street and the use of a water closet down the hall—and the novelty of indoor plumbing made it seem like real luxury to John Henry. Back home in Georgia, most of the houses still had no plumbing at all, and bath water had to be carried in from wells out in the yard. Even his Uncle John’s new house in Atlanta, elegant as it was, still had an outhouse out back. And to his mind, having the use of a flushing toilet and a bath with running water was final proof that Philadelphia was truly civilized.
His father warned him, however, about letting the luxuries of city life spoil him.
“You’re here to study, not lay around in the bathtub all day,” Henry said as he helped John Henry carry his heavy traveling trunk up Mrs. Schrenk’s narrow stairs and into his newly rented room. “Though for the price of this place, you ought to get as much washing in as you can. Fifty dollars a month for room and board! At least the gas light should help you get through that crate of readin’ material, anyhow.”
The gas was another of the luxuries of life in Philadelphia as the city had been illuminated since the 1830’s, with gas lamps at every street corner and gaslights in nearly every house as well. With just the turn of a key and the strike of a match, John Henry would be able to study all night long without having to worry about a candle burning down or an oil lamp running out. And he had plenty of material to study in his newly purchased library of medical books, required reading at the dental school.
“I don’t reckon I’ll have much time to lay around in the tub, Pa,” he replied. “I’ll be lucky to get through this reading at all.”
“You’re lucky just bein’ here, John Henry, and don’t you forget it. I’ll be expectin’ to see top marks when you come home next summer.”
His father hadn’t changed any since John Henry’s first days at the Valdosta Institute. Henry still believed that getting an education was a privilege and good grades were proof of proper gratitude. But John Henry was prepared to be grateful, and he did indeed feel lucky to be getting away from the provincial life of south Georgia. Let his father warn and reprimand all he wanted; his own spirits were too high to take offense.
“Don’t worry, Pa. I’ll bring home good grades like I always did. Besides, Dr. Frink says I have a natural aptitude for dentistry. ‘Good hands,’ he calls it, just like you used to say about my shootin’. So I reckon I’ll do all right. I won’t shame you.”
And though any other father might have taken the offered opportunity to say that he was not ashamed of his son, was proud even of his past accomplishments and his bright future, Henry made no reply. His only comment was that it was getting on toward suppertime, and they’d best be finding somewhere to eat unless Mrs. Schrenk had enough for an extra plate.
What Henry Holliday lacked in private emotion, however, he made up for in patriotic spirit on his tour through the old Colonial capital of Philadelphia. Though Henry’s patriotism had put him on the losing side in the last War, he remained proud of his ancestors who’d fought and won the War of Revolution against the British and helped to create the United States of America. After all, it was on Revolutionary War bounty lands, won for service at the Battle of Kettle Creek, that his own grandfather, William Holliday, had made his first home in Georgia. So it was with some personal feeling that Henry took his son to Chestnut Street to see the old State House called Independence Hall and the great brass bell that had rung out the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The bell still hung in the rotunda of the dusty hall, displayed behind a wrought iron fence that kept visitors from trying to ring it. But as John Henry and his father paid their respects to that emblem of American freedom, he couldn’t help but think of the irony of its history, noted on a large bronze plaque. When it was first cast in England and shipped over the ocean to the Pennsylvania Colony, it was called the Province Bell. During the Revolution, when it rang out meetings of the Continental Congress, it was called the State House Bell. It was only when a group of nineteenth-century Boston abolitionists took it as the symbol of their own cause that it gained the name Liberty Bell, for its inscription from Leviticus, Chapter 25, Verse 10: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto the inhabitants thereof.” But the bell cracked soon after that, proof, as far as John Henry was concerned, that the abolition movement had cracked the country apart; North and South, Yankee and Rebel. And that was the one unfortunate thing about Philadelphia: it was still a Yankee city, through and through. Even though the War Between the States had been over for five years, the name “Rebel” still clung to anyone with a Southern accent. But the South was still rebellious, as far as the North was concerned, refusing to ratify one Constitutional Amendment after another until forced to do so by Martial Law. And where, John Henry wondered, was the liberty in that?
But there were other, less troubling, sights to see in Philadelphia: Betsy Ross’s home where the first American flag had been sewn, Christ Church where George Washington had prayed and Benjamin Franklin was buried in the churchyard near the old city wall, the ingenious water-works that supplied the whole city with fresh drinking water, Fairmount Park with its miles of lush green preserve along the Schuylkill River. And by the time Henry had taken him around to see it all and readied himself for his return to Georgia, John Henry was almost sad to see his father go. To his recollection, he’d never had so much of his father’s attention, cool-tempered or not.
But Henry had his own business to attend to back in Georgia and could only stay long enough to see his son settled at the boarding house and registered at the dental school. For in addition to operating his Valdosta Buggy and Carriage Company, Henry was planning on running for Mayor of the town in the coming November election. It would be a tough campaign to win, as his opponent was Sam Griffin’s father, owner of the only general store in town and owed money by nearly everyone in Valdosta at one time or another—and money owed meant votes in the ballot box. So it was probably the election, not John Henry, that Henry was thinking of when he shook his son’s hand and wished him well, then boarded the Steamship Wyoming, sailing back to Savannah.
The Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery was located in a four story brick building at the corner of 10th and Arch Streets, across from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacology, and the two schools shared more than just a street address. For with both courses of study including an anatomy laboratory, it was convenient for both to share laboratory cadavers as well. The dental students took the heads for dissection, the pharmacology students took the rest of the bodies, and where the remains went from there no one would say—though there was rumored to be a hundred-foot deep pit in the basement of the Medical College of Pennsylvania where used bo
dy parts were thrown.
Grisly as it was, cadaver study in the anatomy lab was a vital part of the dental school curriculum. A dentist couldn’t very well treat a patient if he didn’t know the physical structures underlying the teeth and gums: how the muscles of the mandible connected to the skull, where the nerves ran under the skin, how the arteries and veins carried blood to the tissues and bones. Once John Henry got over the initial shock of slicing into dead flesh and handling torpid bones and tissues, he found the work fascinating. The only really disturbing aspect of Anatomy Lab was that it was held during the noon hour, between Clinic and Lecture, and the students often brought their dinner to the cadaver table with them. Seeing a dental student reaching into an open cranium with one hand while holding a bite of bread and cheese in the other was far more unsettling than the lab work itself.
The students couldn’t be blamed for trying to get two things done at once. With the demands of the dental school schedule, there was little time for anything but study. Mornings from eight until noon were spent in the dental clinic treating patients under the watchful guidance of the clinical professors. Afternoons from one until four were spent in lecture classes learning the medical sciences of anatomy, chemistry, histology, pathology, and physiology. Evenings from suppertime until dusk were spent in the dental laboratory learning to refine and alloy precious metals, fashion artificial teeth from porcelain and gold, and make dentures from the newly patented vulcanized rubber. Finally, from dusk until dawn, the students were free to relax and study for the next day’s work. Most nights, though, John Henry fell asleep at his reading and woke in the early hours to find the gaslight still burning and his back aching from slouching over his books.
Southern Son Page 17
