“Shall I read, Georgina, or will you do the honours?”
Miss Skerry took the book and we pulled our chairs in close around her. I had always loved this poem. I listened as Porphyro stole through the halls of the enemy castle to find his sleeping love, the beautiful Madeline. It was the middle of January, Saint Agnes’s Eve, and when Madeline awakened, Porphyro was bending over her like the prince in Sleeping Beauty.
Miss Skerry did not need the book. She kept looking up and grinning at the three of us, pronouncing the last syllable of the heroine’s name as if she were a French princess and not an ordinary English girl.
Grandmother closed her eyes as Miss Skerry recited the last lines. “Well read. You have outdone yourself.” Then she looked at the clock in the hall and rose to her feet. I was studying the final illustration. In the light of a full moon two lovers raced on the back of a dark steed across a snow-swept field. Madeline was holding Porphyro about the waist, her hair streaming behind them like a cloak. I could almost feel my own legs gripping the horse, my front pressing hard against the boy’s spine.
“Dishes before sleep, Agnes,” said Grandmother, looking straight at me. “No shirking of chores tonight, no matter what your name is.”
“Agnes is the patron saint of virgins,” said Laure, beginning to giggle.
I looked at my lap. Of all the saints with whom to share a name.
“Hush now, Laure,” said Miss Skerry. “I bet you don’t even know what ‘vir-gin’ means.”
The way the governess said it, mimicking Laure, made us laugh, but then Grandmother got up and left, displeased with the conversation. I stayed, eyes glued to Miss Skerry. I did not really understand what a virgin was myself, and I was hoping that she might enlighten me. I knew it had something to do with men and sex. A woman was a virgin before she got married, and after that she was not. If she never married she might remain a virgin forever, which I supposed was the governess’s case.
Laure was in high spirits now that the unpleasantness of the afternoon had been resolved. “Agnes ate too much for it to work,” she teased. “We were supposed to fast.”
“Nonsense,” said Miss Skerry. “Your sister’s name means that tonight she is above the rules.”
“Laure’s right,” I said, vaguely regretting all the tea I had taken. “You’re supposed to retire early on an empty stomach and lie completely still, looking up at the ceiling.”
“At the heavens,” Laure corrected, although in our shared bedroom the ceiling was what we would see. “And then Saint Agnes comes with the man you are to marry.”
“Does she now?” asked Miss Skerry. “You sound like an authority.”
“I do it every year,” said Laure.
“Well then, I should expect to hear your wedding bells ringing any day.” Miss Skerry smiled at the pint-sized virgin who was already dreaming of her marriage. “And you, Agnes?” Miss Skerry asked. “Do you practise this rite too?”
I could feel myself reddening. It was superstition and I knew it. The kind my father had scoffed at. And yet, I liked it. It was a ritual Grandmother had taught us when we were very small. I looked up at our governess and nodded.
“Then I suppose I must try it too,” said Miss Skerry. “If a mind like yours accepts it, it will not do me any harm. Has it worked?” she asked, eyes shining like a girl’s. “Be truthful now,” she urged. “Have you had a vision?”
I could not meet her eye. Someone did come, year after year, hovering like a ghost over my bed in the early hours of my name day, but he certainly was no suitor. His presence was not at all what John Keats had had in mind.
Grandmother reappeared just then from the kitchen with a tray for stacking dishes. “It worked for me when I was young, Georgina. Saint Agnes brought me the girls’ grandfather.” She handed me the tray. “It works for those who want it to. That is the key. It is a question of intention.”
THAT NIGHT I LAY in bed next to my sister, who had the annoying habit of slipping into unconsciousness the moment her head touched the pillow. Laure was on her back in the position Keats had recommended so that her eyes, had they been open, would have been staring heavenward. Her hair fanned across the pillow like spun gold. She could have been Keats’s heroine herself lying there, awaiting her secret lover.
Because my hands were cold beneath the sheets, I was thinking about the beadsman from the poem and his numb fingers counting beads on his rosary. I exhaled in the darkness, my breath emerging in puffy clouds. How had Keats put it? “His frosted breath … seemed taking flight for heaven without a death.” I liked that.
I would also have liked to have met John Keats, who had been a sensitive soul. He knew about desire, the kind that would push you toward dangerous things, to risk derision and reprimand. He had been a medical man like my father, a fact Miss Skerry had divulged when Grandmother brought out the book. So it was possible to be a romantic and also to steep oneself in science.
The moon was gleaming like a coin in the frame of my window. How could anyone sleep with such brightness in the sky? Ten years ago, almost to the day, my father had disappeared, leaving my mother, me and a second unborn child who turned out to be Laure. For me, January was, and always would be, the ache of absence. The ache had faded slightly but it still made pastimes like dreaming of suitors and wedding bells misplaced. That was my very last thought before I fell into a deep and visionless sleep.
3
When I woke up the next morning, the bedroom was already light. I had been curled on my side of the bed and rolled over onto something hard — my sister’s doll. Three of them were crammed into the space separating Laure’s side of the mattress from mine. They were from England and my sister loved them passionately. Their heads were carved out of wax and their bodies out of wood. Every night she tucked the sheets tight around them and kissed their translucent cheeks, now greying with age, and every morning the dolls were scattered. I awoke with a wooden hand or foot poking me in the back.
These pokes and pains were forgotten on that particular morning because of other quite novel sensations. Each time I moved my head I felt nauseated. Pain in my belly was forcing me to fold my knees hard to my front. I was actually holding my breath it was so pronounced. My back was turned to Laure and I was looking out the window. Grandmother was already down in the kitchen fussing with the woodpile and pans.
It felt as though someone were prodding around inside me with large, clumsy fingers. The squirrel came immediately into my mind. I had dreamed about it, I realized. On Staint Agnes’s Eve a dead squirrel had been my vision.
Laure gave me a kick. “Will you stop?”
I realized I was rocking and sat up, but it only made the pain worse.
Laure sat up too. “You groaned the whole night, Agnes. Are you sick then after cutting up that animal? Did it make you sick?”
I shook my head and even this small movement made me dizzy.
“What’s wrong?” Laure’s face was scared.
“Nothing.” I was trying to remember what I had eaten the previous night, thinking it might be poisoning. I had been sick once before after eating pork, but the sickness had come right after my meal and I had retched violently and repeatedly until the poison was gone. All I had eaten last night was Grandmother’s freshly baked bread — safe food to which I was accustomed.
Laure’s face was the colour of chalk. “I’ll get Grandmother.”
I shook my head even though it almost toppled me. “I just need to do my business.” I stood up, wobbling a little, then crouched beside the bed.
I dragged out the chamber pot and pulled it to a spot beside the dresser, out of my sister’s sight. I felt like a river as I voided, gushing wildly and noisily. When I hoisted my nightie and peered down though I got the shock of my life. The contents were red.
Maybe Laure was right. Maybe I was cursed. Or maybe I had fallen ill. Blood was often a precursor to death. It had certainly been so with mother, although she had bled from the mouth, coughing up clots, staining
the pillowcases. Laure and I slept on those pillowcases with their faint rusty halos that no scrubbing would ever remove. Pulmonary tuberculosis was the scourge of women in the White family. All three of Grandmother’s daughters had died of it. But White women tended to be willowy and wan, nothing like me. And besides, my blood was coming from the wrong end.
I carried the pot to the window and tossed the contents into the yard. Cold air pushed into the room and Laure squealed. Throwing things from windows was not allowed at the Priory, especially when the things were the contents of a chamber pot. I knew the rules. Every morning I had to carry our chamber pot to the outhouse for emptying. Then I sprinkled ash from the stove into the hole to mask the smell. After that I had to scrub the pot so clean it felt like a sin to use it again.
A bit of blood dribbled down my leg and dropped, bright and wet, onto the floor. I smudged it with my toe then squeezed my legs tight and hopped to the wash basin.
Laure was sitting up in bed watching. “What are you doing?”
I did not answer.
“Why are you hopping like that?”
Just then Grandmother called up. “Gi-irls!” One word split in two and sung at the top of her lungs like a song. Her voice dropped midword, as if pronouncing it reminded her of all the effort involved in raising two granddaughters alone.
I wanted to get back into bed and tell Grandmother I was ill but that would have been impossible. Laure had flopped back down in the sheets for the moment, her face thankfully hidden.
I had to get dressed. My winter dress was dark blue, so it would not show the stains. I refrained from moaning for Laure’s sake. I moved my clothes to the side of the bed farthest from my sister.
“How come you’re over there?”
“I’m dressing.”
“Why there?”
One leg was through a bloomer hole. The other leg I did not want to lift. I had used a towel to staunch the blood and was trying to squeeze it in place with my thighs. All of a sudden it was too much and I tumbled face first into the mattress.
Laure crawled over her dolls and stretched out a finger. “What is that?”
My bloody towel lay in full view on the floor. I picked it up and tried to hide it, but I knew that it was futile. Laure’s pupils were already the size of pennies. Her chin was trembling.
“Nothing,” I said hopelessly.
She let out a scream that brought Grandmother and Miss Skerry scrambling up the stairs and into our room.
All the attention went to her, of course. Even after they calmed her down and put her to bed with two teaspoons of brandy, Grandmother refused to talk about my blood. Laure had blathered about it until finally I had to reach under my dress and pull out the towel. Strangely, Grandmother did not blink. She simply folded it and my soiled undergarments in our bottom sheet and handed the offending bundle to Miss Skerry for the wash.
Eventually, after Laure was settled, she brought me to her bedroom and showed me how to use rags to protect my clothes. There were no explanations. The guidance was about rags, nothing else. Grandmother did not mention the need for a doctor, which could have been a good sign or a bad one. Either my condition was not serious enough to kill me or else I was so far gone that medical attention would be futile. This was what had happened to Mother. By the time the doctor was called to examine her, there was nothing anyone could do. I listened to my grandmother’s instructions, allowing my hips to be moved this way and that by her old, dry hands. Her face was closed to questions.
That morning I sat by myself, rising only occasionally to check on the rags. I had retreated to the window seat in the schoolroom and picked up Jane Eyre, which I had already read but liked and found comforting. Around noon the door opened and Miss Skerry slipped inside. “I have been busy with the laundry,” she said, making me blush. “How are you feeling?”
To my consternation I began to cry. I had not realized until that moment how alarmed I was at what was happening. I was lonely and scared, half-convinced that, like my consumptive mother, I was going to die. I had not wanted to cry and I rubbed my eyes furiously, but this only produced a new surge of tears.
“There, there,” she said, offering me a clean hankie. Miss Skerry sat down beside me and took off her spectacles, which she rubbed several times with the pleats of her skirt. “Has your grandmother not explained about your menses?” she asked, holding the frames above her in the dim gaslight and then replacing them on her nose.
I looked up in confusion.
The governess was quiet. She reached for my sketch pad and a pencil and turned to a clean page. The sketches were not proportional, but to me they were better than the paintings in any museum. I had become a woman, Miss Skerry said. What she called “menses,” from the Latin word for month, was not a malady. It was simply discharge from the uterus as it restarted the female cycle of fertility. I was fertile, no different than an animal reaching maturation, or a field become ready for sowing, or the wives and mothers who walked every day on the streets of St. Andrews East. I had come of age.
I did not feel “of age.” I looked down at my body, which had altered drastically over the past year, rounding and softening where it had once been flat and hard like the body of a boy. Now there was blood and an ache in my belly Miss Skerry called menstrual cramps. I was not sure I wanted any part of it. The information was overwhelming, but at least I knew I would live. I was all right.
Miss Skerry communicated all of this as she would anything else she thought I should learn, in language precise and clear. The menses, she said, were a time to stay quiet and think about things. The female body was like a garden, with cycles of birth and growth and death. A woman had to tend and respect it in its various seasons.
The cure for cramps was heat, which, on that cold January day, came as much from the governess’s smile as from the hot water bottle she prepared and pressed against me. “There,” she said, tapping it lightly so the water inside jiggled. “Being a woman can be painful at times, Agnes White, but I assure you, it is hardly ever fatal.”
4
JUNE 1885, MONTREAL
It is sad but true that people tend to dwell on the troubles of their lives and forget the riches. I am no exception, for in this account of my early days I am skimming over the two years I spent in Miss Skerry’s company out at my grandmother’s farm, which I count among the happiest years of my life. Of course, I did not realize how happy I was while I was living them. Happiness is a strange thing. It is something I tend to recognize only after it has passed, when I realize I miss it.
In Miss Skerry I discovered a companion every bit as intellectually driven as I was. I had not met anyone like her, and it freed me in ways at which I still marvel. Although I could not know it at age thirteen, when she arrived at the Priory to take charge of me she was a mentor, dropping from the sky as Athena did in The Odyssey to guide the fatherless Telemachus. It was Miss Skerry’s idea that I leave St. Andrews East. She instigated the plan and worked tirelessly to ensure its success, even though she knew it meant we would have to separate. The year I turned fifteen Miss Skerry announced she had taught me all she could. There were gaps in her own education — algebra and geometry — which would become gaps in mine if I did not get myself out of the Priory and off to a regular school.
She did not boast about how splendidly she had prepared me in other respects. I was exceptionally strong in natural history. It was our mutual passion. She had also taught me a great deal about literature and history. I read widely in both English and French and was fluent in dead languages — Latin and Greek — which Miss Skerry had learned from her father.
Just before I turned fifteen Miss Skerry discovered an educational institution that she thought would suit me — Misses Symmers and Smith’s School in Montreal. She arranged a visit so I could write the entrance exam. She sat with me on the train, waited three hours in the corridor while I wrote the exam, and, after I had won a full scholarship, presented such a strong case for my enrolment that Grand
mother had to accept.
I found myself in June of 1885 in a tiny room with a crack on the ceiling fanning out at one end like the River Nile, and a girl called Janie Banks Geoffreys snoring in the bed beside me. Janie was lying on her back with her limbs flung out in all directions and the covers kicked to the floor. She mumbled something and heaved a sigh. She was the prettiest, most popular girl in my year at Misses Symmers and Smith’s. I could not stand the sight of her.
For eight long months Janie and I had tolerated each other. We had been assigned to the same room in September on the hopeful theory that she could assist my integration into the school’s social life and that I, with my brilliant performance on the entrance test, could help with her studies. The road to hell is paved with hopeful theories.
Now it was June and both the crack and my roommate would soon be things of my past, a thought that cheered me. We were graduating at noon at a ceremony to which our families had been invited. Grandmother, Laure, and Miss Skerry, who had spent the year tutoring Laure back in St. Andrews East, would attend. Later that evening the four of us would board the six o’clock train departing from Montreal’s Windsor Station, and close this bittersweet chapter of my life.
I checked my pocket watch, a heavy old thing inherited from Grandfather White, and saw it was ten minutes to six. I had slightly more than an hour before the wake-up bell rang, shaking everyone, including my roommate, into some version of consciousness. I put on my glasses, new since Easter, when Miss Symmers realized I could not see a foot in front of me. At first the frames had cut my nose, but I’d bound the bridge with cloth and yanked the ear rails loose. These days I hardly noticed them. And how the world had changed! I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole, stumbling into a garden of delights.
Janie’s face jumped into focus. Even this was delightful in its way. Before my glasses I had always looked down when she was around. Now the face of my roommate, like every other face I came across, drew me like a flame, offering up all kinds of intriguing details. Acquiring glasses had been momentous, similar to the day I had first used a microscope. I would never forget the awe I had felt all those years ago, peering through the eyepiece.
The Heart Specialist Page 3
