The Heart Specialist

by Claire Holden Rothman

  He wrote that he himself had taken gas. His lungs had been weak to start with but now they barely functioned. He was able to hold a pen, which was encouraging, but I hoped he was not writing from his deathbed.

  “Passchendaele,” I read aloud to Mrs. Greaves, “was like the Somme all over again. It rained relentlessly, turning the fields into a swamp. It was as if not only the men’s morale but the land itself had died. Everything was stripped bare. There were no longer trees or grasses or anything green, just mud rutted by shells, furrowed not for crops but for trenches.”

  “The man’s a poet,” Mrs. Greaves said, dabbing her eyes. “I never would have guessed he wrote like that.” She uncrumpled her hanky and blew her nose.

  As I read descriptions of men left to rot where they had fallen, prey to German bullets and shells, Mrs. Greaves became still. “Their flesh gradually drops away,” I read aloud. “They sit or stand in the trenches amidst the rest of the battle wreckage — steel helmets, rifles, the husks of bombs.”

  Mrs. Greaves began to wave in agitation. “Stop, Dr. White. Please stop. It’s too awful.”

  We finished our tea in silence. Mrs. Greaves had a tight, clenched look about her now for which I felt responsible. She rose as soon as her cup was done. “My Alex isn’t gifted with the pen,” she said suddenly. “Perhaps that’s for the best.”

  I looked away. Dugald’s letter had brought poor Mrs. Greaves no comfort. For some people knowledge is hard to bear. But how could one support one’s son without knowing at least a little of what he was living through? The boys across the ocean could not simply block their ears and shut their eyes. Why should we?

  I felt grateful. Through Dugald’s letters I had been able to understand and experience the war imaginatively. Without his gifts of expression I could never have done this. Not all women were so lucky. But then again, I thought, watching Mrs. Greaves retreating out the door, not all women wanted to be.

  I picked up Dugald’s letter and continued where I’d left off.

  Howlett had taken the train to London to see him. The old man had tried to keep a cheerful front but he’d looked awful. Thin as a stick, Dugald wrote, with a grizzled complexion. He’d been ill all winter with bronchitis. Dugald had been able to do him a good turn. He’d seen Revere just weeks before and could report on his wellbeing. What a burly fellow he’s become, Dugald wrote. Weatherbeaten as an Indian after spending the entire winter and spring out of doors. He’d grown a moustache too, just like his father’s, only less droopy. Howlett wept when I described him.

  The last lines of the letter were much darker. Each of us has taken a hit, Agnes, he wrote in his strange new spiky script. Whether we’re on the battlefield or safe in England we’re all casualties. Poor Howlett is a husk of himself. I doubt Revere will return in one piece and I don’t know if the old man will survive it.

  Nobody can make me go back across that Channel unless I choose to. I’ve got my ticket out, thanks to my lungs. But what is left, Agnes? France and Flanders weigh so heavily on me. I feel like Coleridge’s Mariner, choking on horrors.

  By the time I reached the last line I had lost my desire to be a man. That more than anything else was what war had done for me. From that day until I died I would offer up prayers of thanks for the good fortune of having been born a woman.

  24

  APRIL 1918

  The skull seemed to smile in the hard April sunlight. I was sitting at my desk, trying to picture it as a human face with lips covering the misaligned teeth and eyes in its sockets. The bone structure was delicate; I was afraid it might snap. What would this boy have looked like? Handsome perhaps, but undersized — not fully out of childhood. This was not the only skull in the Canadian Army Medical Museum collection, of which I was now official custodian, but it was one of the more wrenching. Judging from punctures in the bone, death had been immediate. A bullet had entered the left temporal area of the head, ripped through both cerebral hemispheres and exited cleanly on the right. I stroked the smooth cranium; my vision blurred.

  Age was making me soft. For twenty-five years I had resisted sentimentality and now I was shedding tears over my own specimens. A person would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the new collection, particularly this youthful skull. It could be Revere Howlett, except that as far as I knew he was still fighting. It could be the son of Mrs. Greaves, who had died the previous summer after taking shrapnel to the abdomen and head. Alexander Greaves had been nineteen when his life ended. Regardless of whose skull this was, I thought, feeling the contours and heft of the bone, he had been young. His last days of life had been spent in trenches: cold, wet and alone.

  The April sun, which graced the museum throughout most of the afternoon, slipped suddenly behind the clouds. I stood up, straightening my crumpled coat. The skull would go on the shelf reserved for crania and I would get on with my day. I was exhausted. As usual there was too much to be done. In December I had been offered the commission to catalogue and mount the Army’s medical collection, which I had accepted. It would be prestigious for me and for McGill, and government pay was higher than what the university could offer, even with the course in pathology I was now teaching. The workload was immense. Few of the Army’s specimens had been labelled and many had been poorly stored. I’d had to toss out a good number and remount the rest. It was tedious work and it took a toll on my back and eyes. The Army’s representative was helpful, but only up to a point. He was stationed in Ottawa and came to Montreal twice a month.

  I had taken on the job in part because I had been promised a technician, but so far nothing had come of it. I was reminded of my first days at McGill, when the museum had seemed nothing more than a chaotic mess of bones and bottles. I had lost my courage then as well, but Howlett had urged me on. Now I had no one to guide me.

  “Alas, poor Yorick.”

  I wheeled, the skull still in my hands. A man was standing in the doorway, wearing a long and stylish coat. His eyes, which were so black I couldn’t see where the irises left off and the pupils began, were narrowed in a squint. His cheeks were thick with black bristles, while the hair on his head was shaved close. It was the ears that tipped me off when he finally removed his hat. They were red and cold looking.

  For several seconds I could not speak. “I can’t claim to have known him, Jakob,” I finally said, lifting the skull high and turning its empty eyes toward him, “but the grin does suggest a fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy.”

  Jakob Hertzlich laughed. At least I think he did, though what came out sounded more like a groan. My former assistant’s mouth twisted into an unconvincing smile. I couldn’t believe he was standing before me, the first back. So eager for overseas news was I that Jacob Hertzlich, with his prickly complexities, was welcome. He looked good — paler than before, but stronger. The beard made his eyes seem bigger. If anything he seemed to have grown more youthful. If I was forty-nine, he was forty-one.

  He crossed the room, laid his hat on a stool and, to my complete surprise, put his arms around me. I could feel his body, solid beneath his coat. My free hand wrapped around him too, moving up his back to trace the scapulae, the slightly curved thoracic vertebrae. Jakob Hertzlich was home, I thought, giving him a squeeze. He stood perfectly still, eyes shut and hips so close to mine that the skull of the unknown boy, which I was clutching with my other hand, ground into both our bellies.

  “Let me look at you!” I exclaimed, an excuse to step back, which I instantly regretted. He would look at me too, of course, and I hated to think what he would see. My hair was now quite grey. I had celebrated my forty-ninth birthday a month ago, but unlike Jakob I had lost weight. Without teas to prepare for friends and students, and pastries brought into the museum for afternoon snacks, eating had lost much of its appeal. I rarely prepared a meal anymore, preferring to take sandwiches on the run and a piece of cheese or sausage without fuss at night in my kitchen. I must look like a grandmother, I thought with alarm. My skin was sallow fro
m a winter of indoor toil. Fortunately I was wearing a lab coat because the dress I’d put on that morning hung on me like a sack.

  “You look fine,” he said after a moment’s scrutiny. “A bit thinner, but fine.” To my surprise there was no hint of irony. His face shone with a childlike look of appreciation. Nor was there any trace of an accent. Some of the men were returning with England in their speech, but Jakob Hertzlich sounded exactly like he had always sounded. “Suits you, Dr. White.”

  I smiled, even though I knew he was lying.

  It’s impossible to say who began. I was embarrassed to cry and in the confusion and blindness of tears didn’t notice much. I knew how ridiculous I looked when I wept. My eyes swelled up, my nose ran, my face turned ugly and mottled. I was so concerned with myself that it was some time before I realized Jakob Hertzlich was crying too. He wasn’t making any noise, which I found at once odd and endearing.

  Afterward I made a pot of tea and as we waited for it to brew he told me he’d made a life for himself in England. For the last two years of the war he’d worked in a military hospital in Colchester. One of the doctors there had noticed his artistic skills and had introduced him to a publisher of medical texts. One thing had led to another and he’d quit his orderly work to establish himself as an anatomical illustrator.

  “Don’t tell me we’ve lost you,” I said, arranging cups and saucers so I could pour our tea. The thought of his leaving Montreal for England was painful to me. It was an absurd reaction, of course, given that we had barely spoken for over ten years before he left, but he was the first man back, the first piece of my old life to return.

  He looked at me through the steam rising out of the cup I had just handed him. “I still have ties to Canada,” he said. “My father’s ill. That’s why I made the crossing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I am too,” he said. “He’s worse in sickness than in health.” He looked at me strangely. “Truthfully, Dr. White, don’t be so polite. Losing me to England will not be so bad.”

  I had to place myself in his shoes to see things from a perspective other than my own. To answer truthfully would be selfish. “Perhaps not,” I replied carefully. He had always dreamed of being an illustrator. Colchester sounded like an opportunity, even if it were an ocean away.

  His expression changed. I had insulted him. I had tried to be sympathetic but as so often happened with Jakob I had failed.

  We sipped our tea in silence, which I finally broke by apologizing for the lack of food. I was unused to company I explained. When McGill had emptied I had no reason to keep my cupboards stocked.

  He shrugged and said it didn’t matter. “You heard about Revere Howlett.” Was it question or statement?

  I shook my head.

  “Howlett hasn’t written you?”

  I shook again, reddening slightly. For the past two years my letters to Sir William had gone unanswered. For reasons I couldn’t fathom I seemed to have slipped from the great man’s favour. I tried not to dwell on this fact, and most days I succeeded.

  “He’s dead,” he said simply. “Not far from Ypres. His battery was moving onto a ridge and a shell got him.”

  I put down my cup.

  “He took shrapnel in the chest but didn’t die immediately. They got him to a field hospital.”

  I gestured to him to stop. “Jakob, please.” Revere Howlett, the child who had played cowboys and Indians, was dead. I couldn’t grasp it.

  Jakob stared at me.

  “Poor Sir William.” As I said his name I began to cry.

  Jakob Hertzlich’s eyes were hard. Maybe he was ashamed of his initial outburst of emotion and now felt he had to compensate for it. Or perhaps he hated me for my softness. I made a half-hearted effort to dry my face and ask for more news.

  At Jakob’s feet was a satchel. “I visited the Howletts in Oxford before sailing home,” he said, pulling out a pad of paper. “I wanted to give them these.”

  The paper was of high quality, but the sketches had an amateurish quality that surprised me. The first ones were of hands. One holding a fork, another a pen. Following these was a series of still-life drawings from the military barracks — a canteen on a table, a pair of boots drying in the sun. Then came portraits — boys’ faces reading or napping. Sometimes their torsos were included, crosshatched in areas of shadow. It was not unlike the portfolio from a beginner’s art class.

  Folded between the last pages were two sketches of a different quality altogether. The dead boy was immediately recognizable with his dark hair and secretive eyes. The style was assured and masterful.

  “I was teaching Revere to sketch at Dannes-Camiers,” said Jakob.

  We gazed down at him. In one sketch he was standing in uniform, eyes hidden by an oversized military cap. In the other he was on a riverbank, half-naked. Dannes-Camiers, that first summer — I had been so jealous of them.

  “The portraits are yours? They’re wonderful, Jakob. You’ve captured him.”

  Jakob’s fingers played with the edges of the fine paper. They were no longer stained with yellow, I noticed, and the smell of tobacco no longer clung to him. “He got rather good near the end,” he said.

  “Sir William didn’t take this?” I said, tapping the sketch pad. It was hard to believe a father could refuse such a treasure.

  “Just before my ship left I went up to Oxford but I never saw him. That wife of his is quite something. She wouldn’t speak to me.”

  “Lady Kitty?” I said. “She’s not so bad when you get to know her.”

  “She was like a watchdog. Apparently the old man is at death’s door.”

  The smile froze on my face. A few months earlier I’d heard that he was ill, but I had discounted it as a winter grippe. I had been in England in the wintertime. I had picked up a grippe there myself. But an Oxford winter exacerbated by the news of Revere’s death was probably more than he could bear.

  Jakob watched me, smiling almost cruelly. “It’s the fashion these days, Agnes.”

  I took off my glasses to wipe them but also to blur his face. “Please, Jakob.”

  “Howlett isn’t the only man to have lost a son, nor will he be the last. The entire Western world is grieving, Agnes. It’s like the last act of Hamlet,” he said, jerking his chin in the direction of my specimen. “Corpses everywhere.”

  “For God’s sake, Jakob,” I pleaded.

  He said nothing more. He rose to his feet and stood over me, shifting his weight from one boot to the other. The awful smile he wore to hide his feelings was gone. “You didn’t know Howlett was ill?” he asked. “You’ve not been corresponding?”

  Jakob’s eyes glistened. “You’re still stuck on him.” He was staring at me hard. “After all these years you’re still stuck.”

  He turned to go but I restrained him, asked him not to leave so soon after so long an absence. His face now wore a dangerous expression and his mouth remained clamped shut, but he stayed. I talked about my life in Montreal since the spring of 1915. I spoke of the deserted campus and city streets. I told him about knitting socks and my lectures in Boston and New York. I talked about Dugald Rivers and how his letters had been my only steady link to friends and colleagues overseas.

  At length Jakob relaxed enough to tell me he had seen Dugald Rivers recently. He was in London and not doing well. This much I knew for he still wrote almost weekly, a habit begun at the start of the war, when they were all at Dannes-Camiers. “I envied you when you first went to Picardy,” I confessed. I mentioned the bicycle he had bought.

  Jakob laughed. His laugh was real this time, unlike his first attempt. “What a time we had,” he said. “Revere used to take me cycling. I’d never done that before, you know. I’d never learned as a kid. We’d ride into the countryside. He was a fine young man. Better than his father,” he added unnecessarily. “The old man came to visit us at Dannes-Camiers. Did Rivers tell you that?”

  I nodded. It had been September of 1915, when civilian travel across t
he Channel had still been possible.

  “He came in sort of like the king, which I personally didn’t care for, but it seemed to rally everyone else,” Jakob said. “He did rounds in the morning with the entire McGill group trailing on his heels, lapping up his every word. Rivers led the pack, as you can imagine. Rivers has no idea how he diminishes himself. Not that Howlett notices as long as he gets his daily dose of reverence.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t afford to given Jakob’s volatile humour and the fact that I wanted to hear more. Because he’d befriended Revere Jakob had apparently been invited to accompany father and son on a tour of the front lines. At first he had refused. He had thought it too dangerous. The towns near the front were under fire. Why seek out trouble in the middle of a war? Sir William explained they would do it safely. He arranged for a Red Cross car, which the Germans left alone, to carry them along secondary roads.

  Jakob went along. It was harvest time. When they crossed to the Belgian side peasants were in the fields in great numbers, working between the trenches. The landscape was also full of graves — rows of crosses in country graveyards, standing in testament to the young men who had fallen. They doubled back to France to sleep that night, which Jakob could not understand as it took them out of their way. But Sir William had reasons. The inn at which they stopped in the town of Montreuil was where Laurence Sterne had slept on the first night of his Sentimental Journey. The next morning they resumed what Jakob had since come to realize was Howlett’s own sentimental journey, and drove north to Calais.

  “And here, Dr. White,” Jakob said, “the expedition took a sentimental turn not just for William Howlett, but for you.”

  It turned out that Sir William knew someone living in Calais, a man he had befriended years ago while a student. The group went to an inn not far from the town’s ramparts to meet him. “The world is small, Dr. White,” Jakob said. “Can you guess who the man was?” He paused, but I could not guess. “Honoré Bourret.”