The Heart Specialist

by Claire Holden Rothman

  I had read manuals on intimate relations before. The one used most widely in Canada was Light on Dark Corners, which had a lantern on its cover glimmering against a shadowy background. Despite the title and suggestive artwork it divulged little about sex, focusing more on proper attitudes and comportment for Victorian women when they were in mixed company.

  The Sexual Life of Our Time was different. Its thickness and serious scientific tone promised more substance. I carried it to the bed and thumbed through the pages to the chapter on virginity. Ever since my encounter with Jakob Hertzlich in April a question had been nagging at me. Jakob Hertzlich had not ventured inside my skirts. His hands had remained firmly on my breasts, but his restraint had made little difference. I’d had an orgasm in his arms. I had recognized it at once.

  It astounded me that this could happen without genital contact. His hips had remained a chaste distance from my own. It was just the fingers on my breast, and yet it had happened. He must have realized when I slumped against him.

  To his credit he had not taken advantage, even though at one point after my slump I’d felt the hard length of him pressing from inside his trousers. What I wished to know were the implications. We certainly hadn’t been intimate in the usual sense. Yet I had surrendered. Did that count? Did I still qualify, at least technically, as a virgin? Bloch was mute on the subject. For this expert from Vienna sex was synonymous with penetration. Nowhere was the possibility raised that a woman might find release simply through the stimulation of a nipple.

  The chapter after “Virginity” was “Auto-eroticism.” Here the pages fell open easily. Howlett seemed to have consulted them a few times. What I read here also came as a relief. Touching oneself, which Grandmother had once hinted could damage the brain, was not dangerous after all. “In healthy persons,” Bloch wrote, “moderate masturbation has no bad results at all.” Bloch described how self-arousal was widespread in the animal kingdom. Monkeys in the zoological gardens masturbated freely, “coram publico.” Horses shook their members to and fro until seminal emission occurred and mares rubbed themselves “against any available firm object.” The mares comforted me somewhat. Bloch said the same had been observed in wild deer and in elephants. If it was this common, I decided, it could not be bad.

  The big book was weighing on my chest so I got up again and replaced it on the shelf. I was almost certainly still a virgin. I must be one of a very select group of women to be sexually experienced yet chaste. A vision of Miss Skerry lying alone in her little room off the Priory kitchen came to me then. Perhaps she was a sister in this respect. My eyelids began to grow heavy and I undid the top two hooks of my shift. It was a lonely business this auto-eroticism. Lonely and lovely. My fingers closed on my nipple, exactly as Jakob Hertzlich’s had done that night in the museum seven months ago.

  V

  FIRE

  Sometimes a very small hole may be accompanied by a very loud murmur.

  — MAUDE ABBOTT, “CONGENITAL CARDIAC DISEASE”

  20

  DECEMBER 1905

  I could smell burning all the way from my rooms on Union Street to the McGill campus. It was December, three weeks since I had last set foot in Montreal, a short enough period by any standards but long enough to decimate a life. My ship had docked at two o’clock that afternoon, but it had taken a maddening amount of time for the passengers to disembark. By the time I made it to the pier it was past three and daylight was fading. I’d gone straight to my apartment building, dropped my bags and dashed out the door again.

  I spent the entire return trip sequestered in my cabin worrying. I had no idea what I would find when I reached the museum. Jakob Hertzlich had telegraphed me the day it happened, although he hadn’t divulged any detail. “Fire at faculty” was all the telegraph had said. “Come home at once.” That was it. His name had appeared in bold typeface at the bottom of the sheet.

  I had telegraphed Dean Clarke immediately to ask if anyone had been hurt. His negative reply was the one piece of heartening news. The fire had struck at night when the building was empty. Faculty and staff were all fine. The only casualty seemed to be the janitor’s cat. On the subject of the museum, however, Clarke had been as restrained as Jakob Hertzlich. “Picking up the pieces” were the words he had used.

  Picking up the pieces. Twice aboard ship I’d awoken in a sweat, my heart pitching, a leaf on the waves. I’d wondered if I was going into cardiac arrest but each time I had survived into the morning. I was in the grip of dread I finally realized.

  I entered campus through the main gates and could now see the medical faculty across the open field. I felt like Jane Eyre returning to Thornfield Manor after the madwoman had torched it. The facade of the building was still intact but through the upper windows I could see patches of sky. Flames must have ripped right through the roof. Even at a distance the air was heavy with the dark, charred odour of ruin. As I got closer I could also see that someone was out front, sitting on the stairs. It was so dark by this time that I had to get quite close to make him out. All I saw was a dark lump huddled in the cold, the glow of a cigarette lifting occasionally like a beacon.

  I recognized his voice before I could make out his face. He had heard my ship had landed he said as soon as I was close. He had known I would come immediately to the medical faculty.

  “How bad is it?” I was still weak from my illness. My whole body was trembling.

  Jakob paused, considering. “You might say hello.”

  “Hello,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t really.

  “Apology accepted.” He tossed his cigarette into the snow and ground it beneath his heel. “Come,” he said, sticking out his hand for me to hold as if I were a child. “I’ll show you.” The hand was bandaged I noticed with alarm, bound in gauze from fingertip to wrist.

  “You’re hurt?”

  He nodded. “The jars exploded in the heat. I got cut up.”

  I clung tightly to the gauze. The walkway was treacherous from the water used to put out the fire, now frozen into an irregular slippery sheet.

  “There’s only one entrance,” he said, leading me around to the back of the building to a basement door. The stairs were covered with a thick layer of bumpy ice. “Hang on to the railing and go slowly,” Jakob warned, releasing my hand and stepping down himself.

  The smell was so strong I had the urge to flee. It was like stepping into a crypt. I didn’t think I had the strength, but then Jakob encouraged me, telling me it was all right and I must continue. The darkness swallowed him whole but his voice was there as a guide. Unable to stand the thought of being left alone in the ruins I grabbed the railing and plunged downward.

  “You’ve got to proceed slowly.” He caught me as I slid down the last steps.

  This time it was I who reached for his hand without any invitation. I clutched at the rough gauze.

  Jakob Hertzlich allowed himself to be clutched and we shuffled forward blindly, stumbling through the debris. I was unfamiliar with this part of the medical building. What would I have done, I wondered, had Jakob not been waiting here to meet me? He led me to a large room, which, I finally realized, must be the main storeroom, a place I had visited many times. It was here we kept all the materials for the labs — test tubes, specimen bottles, preservative, Bunsen burners and sealant. I came down here often to replenish my supplies.

  A match scraped on brick and suddenly Jakob’s face wavered in front of me. He lit the wick of a lantern and the room filled with the thick smell of oil. The light spread an uneven glow. Jakob Hertzlich was smiling but for the first time I saw how exhausted he was. He looked pale and ghostly, spreading his arms in sad humour. “Welcome home.”

  Something wet dropped on my head. I ducked, brushing it from my hair before I discovered that it was only snow. There was no roof to protect us. In certain spots I glimpsed the sky.

  The storeroom seemed to be the only part of the place still moderately intact. As my eyes grew accustomed to the light I saw
that much work had been done here to re-establish order. The shelves were lined not with supplies but with jars — brand new intact specimen jars filled with formaldehyde and carefully sealed. Some of them were labelled.

  “It’s the best I could do,” said Jakob Hertzlich. “A surprising number of your specimens were salvageable.”

  “So you got through to the museum?”

  Jakob nodded warily. “I did,” he said slowly, “but it’s not easy. Officially we’re not allowed. The floors are bad.”

  “But it’s possible?”

  He nodded. “Although for a lot of the stuff I didn’t have to climb at all. Things fell through from the upper floors. I just rummaged around down here and gathered them for rebottling.”

  Later, from Dugald Rivers and Mastro, I learned the true story. How Jakob Hertzlich had not slept for three entire days following the fire; how he’d been the first person other than firefighters to enter the building; how he’d toiled without respite, defying orders to stay out of the upper storeys; how he had continued to salvage the museum throughout the week, working on adrenalin after everyone else had given up, refusing to sleep or slow his pace. Dugald said he was like a man possessed. Mastro spoke of him with awe, especially after he’d dared to climb up to a second-floor office and retrieve a soggy, carbon-stained manuscript, the fruit of years of Mastro’s research, which would otherwise have been lost.

  Wind pushed in through holes in the walls above us. A sprinkling of snow and soot fell, dusting our heads. I could see my breath. “It’s freezing in here, Jakob. It’s a wonder you haven’t fallen sick.”

  “I’ve got Bunsen burners,” he said. “I’ve become quite adept at brewing test-tube tea.”

  I smiled at him, even though my heart was breaking. A quick scan of the shelves showed that much of the collection had been lost. Jakob Hertzlich had worked valiantly but he’d managed to salvage perhaps a quarter of the specimens. I couldn’t believe so much was gone.

  “You must take me upstairs,” I said.

  He peered at me, the whites of his eyes flashing in his dark face. “I knew you’d say that.”

  “I have to see it, Jakob.”

  “Things could fall,” he said, then paused. “We could fall.”

  In the end he kept me right behind him, showing me where to place my feet at every step. He held the lantern in front, then swung it back so I could see. It took half an hour to mount three flights.

  The firefighters had smashed most of the windows with their axes, and what man and fire hadn’t destroyed wind and snow were now at work on. A large, charred hole had been blown through the roof, leaving a third of the museum exposed. I looked up to see stars glittering in a vast, uncaring sky. The floor, or what was left of it, was strewn with shards of glass and shrivelled human remains. I poked around, feeling the boards with my toes to make sure the way was solid before transferring my weight.

  Jakob stood near the doorway watching me. “I believe I’ve taken everything there is to take, Dr. White.”

  In places flames had stripped the paint off the walls. Jakob’s drawings were nowhere to be seen. “Good thing we sent your sketches off to Howlett,” I said, running my hand down the wall where several of his works had once been tacked. “We lost only a few.”

  He shrugged.

  My favourite one — the earliest sketch I’d commissioned just after Jakob Hertzlich had joined me at the museum — was hanging safely on my bedroom wall. I smiled as I thought of it, but the smile dissolved as I glanced over at my desk. That corner of the room was relatively undamaged. The ceiling above it was still intact, as were the floorboards. I made my way toward it. The blotter was still in one piece. It was covered with ash and looked more grey now than green, but the flames had not touched it. I pulled open the main drawer. A stack of paper sat inside unsinged. My pens were still there. I wrote my name on an unblemished sheet. It was probably all right then. If pens and paper had survived, surely it had survived too. I cleared my throat. “You found the Howlett Heart?”

  Instead of answering Jakob Hertzlich looked away.

  “My pens still work!” I laughed, showing him my name on the sheet. “But the heart, Jakob. Surely it’s still intact.”

  “A lot was lost,” Jakob said vaguely, refusing to look at me.

  I had a sudden urge to march over and twist his head my way, but given the state of the floor marching was out of the question.

  “The heat was too much,” Jakob explained. “Many of the jars burst.” He waved his bandaged hand as a reminder.

  He was telling me it was gone. I took a deep breath. Then another. It was only after we had regained the relative safety of the basement that he gave me the other piece of news. By that time I was so disoriented I could barely take it in. I listened in a kind of daze, as if he were telling me what tomorrow’s weather would be like.

  “I guess this marks the end of things.”

  I nodded, not at all sure of his meaning but sensing something important crouching behind the words.

  “I’ve done all that I can,” he said, gazing at me.

  “You’ve done so much, Jakob,” I said, “far beyond the call of duty.” It was true. He’d spared nothing, risking his health and his life in the effort.

  “I don’t see what else I could possibly do.” And then it spilled out, all in a rush. “It’s over, isn’t it? There’s nothing left but to resign.”

  When I said nothing he looked startled. Then his face closed with resolve. “You can be cold, Dr. White.”

  I was indeed cold. It was as if winter had climbed under my skin and was now sitting inside me. The museum was in ruins, my life’s work destroyed. My mind was reeling with this and also with a smaller thought, the irony of which had not escaped me. I had left for England determined to fire Jakob Hertzlich and purge him from my life. This disaster had revealed my short-sightedness. He was absolutely dedicated to me and to the work I held so dear. The lantern’s flame trembled, but when I looked up from my thoughts I was alone.

  VI

  WAR

  Short days ago

  We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

  Loved and were loved …

  — JOHN MCCRAE, “IN FLANDERS FIELDS”

  21

  MAY 6, 1915

  The pier, to which the black hull of the Metagama was roped, was crowded with people. I was standing on my toes, trying vainly to see over the ocean of brightly coloured bonnets. Dugald Rivers, who was standing with Dr. Mastro and a boy I did not recognize, shouted my name and waved. He looked as if at any moment he might lift off the ground. He broke from the group of men and made his way toward me. When he reached my side, arms still thrashing, he bent forward and grazed my cheek with his lips. It wasn’t a kiss exactly because his lips were closed and flat. More like a collision, as if his mind and body could not agree on a common intention.

  I tried to smile. He had been acting strangely for the past few weeks, which I had dismissed as nerves. I had decided it wasn’t my place to judge and that I would not take his actions or words personally in the days leading up to his departure. This would be Dugald’s first military stint since South Africa. It would stir memories, I was sure. The news from Europe was not good. Last autumn, when the first Canadian contingent had left, there had been such euphoria. Everyone had been convinced of a speedy victory and quick return, but the Canadian boys, many of whom were from McGill, had spent the freezing winter in a camp on Salisbury Plain in southern England. It had rained for three full months, which had lowered morale and brought on a meningitis epidemic. Several young men from McGill had died without reaching the battlefield. Across the Channel in Belgium and France the news was worse. The Germans were killing the British infantry in horrifying numbers.

  Into this nightmare was Dugald sailing. The others too, but they were younger and without experience. For them war was still abstract, a boys’ adventure tale.

  Two nights before, Dugald had invited me to dine at the University Club. W
hen we arrived at the grey stone building on Mansfield Street across from campus I had hung my coat and proceeded up the back stairway as usual, the one reserved for waiters and women. I resented this stairway. It was as if the men wished to deny my existence. When I reached the second floor and the main dining hall Dugald was waiting for me. Without so much as a hello he took my hand and pulled me into an alcove near the lavatory.

  My relationship with Dugald had never been physical; his reaching for my hand felt unnatural. He sat me down on a window seat. There was nothing spontaneous about the action, which I suspected he had plotted. Before I knew what was happening he presented me with a ring. It was his school ring I realized after the shock had settled, the one he wore on the little finger of his right hand, never removing it for dissections or scrubs.

  “As you are aware, Agnes,” he said, avoiding my eyes and speaking in a stilted style, “I must soon leave you. On Monday we set sail.” He held my hand, trying to fit the ring on my finger. “I want you to have this,” he said, straining slightly for it was a size too small for me. “To help you remember me while I’m gone.”

  I was taken aback. The last thing I wished to do was insult him. He was a dear friend about to leave for the front. His ring was obviously not intended for engagement. Perhaps it was a sign of his friendship?

  Dugald Rivers was one of the most sought-after bachelors in the city. Despite his forty-five years he was really quite handsome and youthful. He had a successful practice and had won four medals in the Boer War. He was an excellent dancer.

  But since his arrival in Montreal no woman had managed to captivate him. The previous summer a girl named Barbara, daughter of the railway magnate Dr. Owens, had drawn his fancy for a time. He had danced with her at parties and her father had let it be known that he favoured the match, but nothing had come of it. I was one of the few who had not been surprised. Privately Dugald referred to Barbara Owens as Babs the Bacillus and hinted that she was dull, but I suspected Babs’s lacklustre personality wasn’t the real issue. Dugald simply preferred the bachelor life. He was not looking for a woman.