I was one of the few females of the species he tolerated, but this I’d always thought was because I posed no threat. I inhabited a kind of no man’s land separating the territories of the sexes. My training and work made me very much like him. Dugald could talk to me in ways he wouldn’t dream of talking to other women. My emotional accessibility and eagerness to provide tea and food were traits he also enjoyed and had difficulty finding in men. In me Dugald had the best of both worlds. I clearly did not want him for my marriage bed. Until that night at the club I had thought we had a solid friendship.
After the fire Dugald had become an almost daily visitor to the museum. I was all alone now, for Jakob Hertzlich had left. Dr. Clarke was preoccupied with rebuilding McGill’s medical school and had no time to worry about my lost specimens; we spoke less frequently than before. Dr. Mastro spent much of his time with his wife in New York state, as her health continued to decline. Dugald had become my confidant, slipping effortlessly into the position Jakob had once filled. He had been a supportive friend in my time of need, writing to Howlett and then, on Howlett’s recommendation, to the War Museum in Washington to discuss the plight of the McGill Pathology Museum. A donation to McGill of over a thousand specimens had been the result. Dugald’s military background had been of great advantage in this regard. He had opened doors that would not have budged for me. I was indebted to him and I liked him. I had never dreamed he would be interested in a woman, let alone in me.
Now on the pier he was holding my hand and towing me like a reluctant ship through the crowd. He was so glad I had come, he said, his eyes lingering on mine longer than necessary. It was flattering to have this big, lovely man suddenly and publicly attentive, but I didn’t trust it for a second. The whole thing felt artificial, as if Dugald were engaging in a staged performance.
He tugged me right up to Dr. Mastro and lifted my hand. My face went instantly hot. We must have looked ridiculous standing with our hands locked — an absurd permutation of Beauty and his red-faced Beast. At the University Club he’d acted out his little folly in private. Now he seemed determined to flaunt it. Dr. Mastro looked at me with wide, unblinking eyes. A few yards behind us Barbara Owens, who was at the pier seeing off an older brother, stared.
I pulled my hand away and tried to restore normalcy by chatting with Dr. Mastro. He was sailing today as McGill Hospital Unit’s commanding officer and looked more energetic than he had for months. I complimented him and his wide eyes softened. His wife had died and he was hoping the voyage would help him through his bereavement. We began to speak about the faculty but Dugald cut in, tugging me in an awful, proprietary way he had recently developed. I turned, annoyed.
“You will never guess who is here,” he said, eyes darting to the young man standing next to Mastro.
The person in question was no older than sixteen or seventeen. He wore his uniform with the careless abandon of a boy still at school. The buttons were mostly undone and his collar was unfastened. His skin was the colour of milk.
“You’ve met,” Dugald said.
The boy put his hand out but did not smile or raise his eyes. If we had met as Dugald claimed it obviously hadn’t been memorable for either of us.
Dugald could not contain himself any longer. “Revere Howlett.”
The black hair of his father. His mother’s milky skin. I could see it now quite plainly. I did a quick calculation. He would be nineteen years old. Nineteen! I’d last seen him in Baltimore when he was still a child. In Oxford I had missed him, as he’d been away at boarding school when I visited. Now he was going to Picardy as Mastro’s private orderly. Sir William must have arranged it when he heard about McGill’s plan for a hospital unit. It was a convenient, face saving way to avoid conscription into the British infantry, where men were dying in numbers; and Dr. Mastro and the others would keep an eye on him.
“Dr. White is an old friend of your father’s,” Dugald explained.
I blushed. The boy must be subjected to such comments every waking moment of his life. “I came to your home in Baltimore once, years ago,” I said, trying to engage him, “where you promptly did me in with a six-shooter.”
Revere’s face became smooth and thoughtful and I wondered if he were recalling the episode with the heart under the table. It had probably been as traumatic for him as for me. I certainly wasn’t about to bring it up now.
“You came to Oxford too,” he said slowly, “only I was away. You got sick or something.” His accent was more Oxford than Baltimore.
I nodded, embarrassed. I was probably something of a family legend. The ship’s horn blew, making us all jump. Men in naval uniform were ordering the women to move back. Boarding would soon commence.
Dugald Rivers made a final, mortifying lunge at my hand, which he lifted to his lips in full view of all. I pulled away from him and neglected to say a proper goodbye to Mastro or Revere Howlett in my haste. I didn’t get far, for a solid wall of women blocked my way. There was no way to break through or to get around so I was forced to join the bonneted throng.
It seemed like the entire university was shipping out that day on the Metagama: three medical classes and just about every faculty member who hadn’t signed up with the First Canadian Contingent when the initial call for troops had come the previous autumn. I would be the only one left. Well not the only one. I glanced around me. The women would stay. Some were crossing as nurses but their numbers were small.
Again the ship’s horn blared. A hush fell over the crowd as the men began to climb single file up the boarding plank. I felt like weeping. It was a mistake to be standing here on shore waving my colleagues goodbye. There were a dozen practical reasons why I could not go. The city had been emptied of medical practitioners. The only doctors left were either French or long past their prime. My services had been sought out by the Children’s Memorial Hospital and also by the Montreal General. And there was Laure. Who would care for her if I went to France? Miss Skerry was a stalwart, but she couldn’t pay our bills. My salary from McGill might have been laughable but it was better than soldier’s pay. If one were a family man, one had to have means like Dr. Mastro to enlist.
My gaze found another face in the winding line of men. Huntley Stewart, laughing with a gang of newspaper cronies. They were not paying attention and a hole opened as the line moved forward without them. Huntley was the first to see it. He pointed, making a cartoon face of horror then rushed ahead to rectify things. His newspaper cronies followed like sheep.
Huntley Stewart had enlisted. Already I’d noticed there were fewer men in Montreal. On a streetcar the other day the driver had her hair done up with pins. Women driving streetcars — what would be next? In Verdun a munitions plant had recently opened and the Herald reported most of its workers were women. The pay was thirty-five cents an hour, a better wage than I was getting at McGill.
Laure had no idea Huntley was leaving. In theory they were still married. In practice they hadn’t spoken in years.
A photographer from the Herald was taking pictures of the waving women. He picked out one especially pretty girl in a bright yellow frock standing right beside me and came over for an interview. “What do you feel,” he asked, shouting above the noise, “watching the men pull out?”
The girl came up with some banality about the king and the sacrifices people had to make. Such were the platitudes people spouted — lines straight from the newspapers or lifted from politicians’ speeches. The girl was now speaking about her knitting club. Since October she’d finished twenty pairs of socks for the men overseas. Every person had to do his bit, she said.
“Are you here for someone special?” the reporter asked.
The girl blushed. She nodded.
“You’re not afraid for him?” He was flirting with her, setting her up so the right words would come tumbling out.
Fear was not the point, said the girl, as if on cue. She was so sure of her rote pronouncements, so naive, she couldn’t imagine the young man she fancied ma
imed or dead.
The reporter swung in my direction. “And you … do you have someone in the line?”
The ship’s horn sounded, sparing me the need to answer. With the rest of the crowd I looked toward where the last of the men were boarding. A familiar hunched back stopped me short. He was dressed like the others — army-issue boots and a mud-coloured jacket — but even in uniform he did not blend. At the moment he seemed utterly concentrated upon his cigarette. The others were bantering, talking with animation as they waited in turn to lug their kits up the gangplank. Jakob Hertzlich stood among them still and silent, but not of them.
I closed my eyes. It had been a decade. I was forty-six now so he must be thirty-eight. Old for a soldier, but a surprising number of the recruits were past their prime — even Dugald. Jakob and I hadn’t spoken in years. He was working in a different building at McGill. Our paths rarely crossed.
I tried to imagine Jakob Hertzlich with a gun in his hands. Perhaps he would not touch one if he stayed inside a hospital. Some men were made for the battlefield, others most decidedly not. I wished I’d seen him earlier; even though we’d avoided each other for so long I would have liked to say goodbye and wish him safety.
“Ma’am?” The reporter was still at my elbow.
I shook my head. On the dock Jakob Hertzlich was grinding his cigarette under the heel of his shiny boot. He shouldered his bag and then unexpectedly looked out at the crowd. For a fraction of a second our eyes met. I broke away first, turning briefly left and right to see if there was anyone else at whom he could be looking. But to my left was the slogan girl in yellow and to my right was the reporter. By the time I found Jakob again his back was to me and he’d begun the slow climb up the gangplank.
22
DECEMBER 1915
The Priory parlour had not changed since my childhood. The upholstery on the chesterfield and armchair was more threadbare and there were more cracks in the plaster, but essentially the room was the same. I had come out to St. Andrews East for the Christmas holidays that second winter of the war as I always did, carting gifts and store-bought treats from Montreal. Miss Skerry said that this winter visit and the two weeks I spent with them each summer were the highlights of the year. She and my sister led their lives sequestered from society. Women from the older, English-speaking families still looked in on them occasionally, bringing compotes and pies, but the French, who had not known our family in previous generations, were not as accommodating. They were frightened of Laure, nicknaming her “la folle de St. André.”
Laure was at her best when I came to visit. There was no sign of the rage that Miss Skerry described in her weekly letters. She considered the letters a duty — reports from the front, a precise tracking of the progression of my sister’s illness and her daily battles to contain it. She described in detail the nosebleeds and facial discoloration that accompanied Laure’s fits, the periodic flights into town and ensuing humiliation when Laure was recaptured and returned to the Priory. I had long stopped reading them they were so painful, preferring to let them accumulate on my dresser. When the stack grew too large I put them in a box in my closet. Their real function, I suspected, was to give Miss Skerry the illusion of company.
Miss Skerry had lit a fire in the hearth and she, Laure and I were huddled around it, wrapped in rugs. Over the last decade she had put on weight. Miss Skerry had never been pretty but there had been a time when she had seemed proud of her trim little body. It was as if she’d ceased to care. Her hair, once brushed and glossy, was unkempt. These changes would have worried me had her mind not remained sharp. In the evenings it was a pleasure to sit and converse with her.
But with Laure in the room conversing was not always easy. Tonight we were concentrating on work, not words. The only sounds in the parlour were the periodic hisses and crackles of logs on the fire and the click of our knitting needles. I flipped the toe of the sock on which I was working and laid it flat on my lap. I was slower than Miss Skerry, who had practically finished a thick beige pair. Laure, whose concentration was so frayed she had difficulties finishing a sentence, was nearly done hers as well. Working with her hands seemed to calm her, bringing back a semblance of her former grace. They knitted. They embroidered sheets and tablecloths. They sewed dresses and capes. Prior to the war I had been the beneficiary of their industriousness.
These days, however, the work was socks. For Laure it had developed into an obsession. Since the autumn of 1914, when the knitting drive had begun, she had completed three hundred pairs.
I had little of my sister’s talent. I waved my stump of tangled wool before the governess and laughed. “I’m all thumbs, George.” I felt awkward using this name but Miss Skerry had insisted. We had known each other far too long for me to continue calling her “Miss,” she said. She had been christened Georgina and chopped off the last two syllables. “Like George Eliot,” she’d explained, “and George Sand. As clubs go, Agnes, it’s one of the few I wouldn’t mind belonging to.”
George smiled at my knitting. “You’re already doing your bit, Agnes. Socks aren’t the only way to help.”
It was true. I was doing my bit, though in less direct fashion than keeping the feet of Canadian boys warm in the trenches. I was employed at two Montreal hospitals and my private clinic was overflowing with patients. I had visited Harvard University that fall to give a talk on congenital heart disorders. In the United States the medical schools were flourishing, America being not yet at war. I was one of a handful of foreign scholars still available for American tours. So far Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Pennsylvania had sent me invitations. I had refused everyone but Harvard, as I was too busy with my clinical work.
“Socks are a local specialty,” George said, reaching forward and patting Laure’s leg.
Laure looked up with such pride that I had to laugh. There was great comfort here at the Priory, sitting with my sister and our former governess, concentrating on simple things. It reminded me of the Brontë sisters, shut away on the heath, engaging in domestic work and then rewarding themselves with books and talk in the evening. Perhaps this would be my old age, sitting at the Priory’s hearth, knitting with Laure and discussing with George Skerry. I had hoped for a more expansive life, for relationships extending beyond the circle of my girlhood, but there were worse fates.
Miss Skerry was translating The Aeneid, continuing the work in Latin on which her father had commenced her. She enjoyed the language, she said, although she confessed that she had mixed feelings about Virgil. “Too fond of war,” she’d said the night before as we watched embers glowing on the hearth.
I was more like Virgil than I would have cared to admit. Not that I was in favour of killing, but I certainly did yearn to be with the men in the arena of war. I envied my colleagues at the front. I regretted not being in Europe. Dugald wrote weekly, describing scenes of camp life on the outskirts of Dannes-Camiers in northern France, where he and the others from McGill were stationed.
All through that summer and autumn I had received first-hand reports. Fighting on the Western Front had tapered off. The main theatre of action was Turkey. France was relatively quiet. The summer of 1915 had been the driest in living memory. Dugald described long days of sunshine. For me “war” conjured scenes of young men lying half-naked on riverbanks. How I envied them their comradeship beneath the Picardy sun.
McGill’s was one of seven temporary tent hospitals set up on a plain above Dannes-Camiers. It had close to one thousand beds, roughly the same number as those of England, Scotland and France. They had set up in the late spring, just after the Battle of Ypres. Everyone was eager to see action, but beyond a few sniper casualties action did not come. A sort of standoff situation developed, and there was nothing for the hospital staff to do but wait.
According to Dugald Revere Howlett was like a schoolboy on holiday. He sent home almost immediately for his bicycle and spent most days fishing in the streams and rivers near their camp. Jakob Hertzlich was also enjoying himself.
He and Revere had become friends. I reread this section of Dugald’s letter with fascination. With regular meals and exercise Jakob Hertzlich had apparently blossomed. He had purchased a rusty bicycle in the village so he could accompany Revere into the countryside.
In September Howlett Senior had crossed the Channel to visit the McGill outfit and see his son. That was the final straw for me. Dugald’s descriptions made me envious. He wrote that Howlett had organized a tour of the front for himself and Revere in a Red Cross car.
The last couple of letters I had received, however, had been more sombre in tone. Over a thousand soldiers from the Battle of Loos had arrived, suddenly the McGill camp was overrun. Dugald worked the first half of October without sleep, treating soldiers whose limbs had been shattered by shrapnel. It tore at the flesh, he wrote, creating jagged, irregular wounds that invited infection. In the filthy, close conditions of war, sepsis was ubiquitous. Patients were dying from the dirt.
This morning I’d received Dugald’s latest letter, which I had yet to open. I pulled it out of my pocket and showed it to George.
She put her knitting down and rubbed her glasses with her hem. “I’d say that man is either in love with you or hasn’t many friends.”
“He’s lots of friends,” I said, and it was true.
“Women friends,” said George, pointedly. “You know what I’m getting at.”
“Well he’s not in love with me,” I said. “He’s not the type.”
Miss Skerry slipped her glasses back on. “Is that so? One has to be a certain type to fall in love?”
My words had come out wrong. “I mean,” I said, “Dugald Rivers is not actually interested in women.”
The Heart Specialist Page 22
