The Heart Specialist

by Claire Holden Rothman

  My father, living in Calais. The bearer of this news, for which I had waited my whole life, was the unlikely Jakob Hertzlich.

  “I spoke of you,” Jakob said. “I told him about the heart you had found and also about your article — the one giving him credit for the heart’s discovery.”

  As the initial shock passed I realized something was wrong with Jakob’s account. Sir William knew where my father was. He had sat in Calais in the autumn of 1915 with Honoré Bourret and hadn’t written a word to me. There had to be an explanation. “Are you sure it was the same Honoré Bourret?”

  Jakob smiled unpleasantly. “How many can there be? Especially Honoré Bourrets who are doctors and who once taught in Montreal.”

  I took a deep breath, not wishing to give myself away. “Did he confirm who he was, Jakob? Did he remember the heart?”

  Jakob thought for a second then shook his head. “The meeting was bizarre. He skirted the issue of the heart. He never came right out and said who he was. At the time I thought it was modesty, or perhaps embarrassment, because I recalled a scandal you said had ended his Montreal career. Howlett must have sensed his discomfort. He steered us away from further talk about hearts. Bourret had been his mentor. You’d think they’d have wanted to talk about past glories, but it wasn’t the case at all. It was actually the first time I’d seen Howlett at a loss. He panicked, if you want my opinion.”

  Jakob’s prickliness had given way to curiosity, but I didn’t have the energy to think about him. In my imagination I was already sailing over the Atlantic to find my father. First I would visit England and demand an explanation from Sir William. Then I’d cross the Channel. “I have to see him,” I muttered, ignoring Jakob.

  “You mean Bourret?” he asked, trying to catch my eye.

  “Not Bourret.” My tone was impatient. So much history was involved I wouldn’t have known where to start.

  “Howlett?”

  I nodded. Sir William — the man I had trusted as I would a father.

  Jakob Hertzlich’s eyes emptied of expression. He rose, said nothing more, and before I could stop him was out the door.

  25

  NOVEMBER 1918

  The cold had come overnight to St. Andrews East, along with a first fine powdering of snow. I was sitting in my sister’s rocking chair in the Priory, watching the pink light of dusk pooling on a horizon of barren fields. Through the autumn I had managed to shut my eyes to the signs of winter until November, when I was jolted awake. The air outside was cold now, my lungs seized when I inhaled. I had forgotten what this was like — the pure shock of it and the body’s instinctive contraction. The house contracted too. Timber cracked, pipes banged in protest.

  On the bed my sister had kicked free of her covers. It was cold enough in her bedroom that I had put on double socks and wrapped myself in a duvet, but Laure was flushed with heat. She had run a fever all week. For the last two days she’d been alternately delirious and unconscious. Her lips were cracked from dehydration. Her eyes, when she opened them, had a frightening, glassy look.

  She was still alive, I told myself. Others had been cut down so quickly they had not had a chance to call a doctor. This disease progressed with frightening speed. Within hours of feeling unwell many lost the ability to walk. Their faces turned blue. They bled from the nose or ears and coughed up blood as if consumptive. Laure had been spared these horrors. In her the illness had progressed relatively slowly, and this fact gave me hope. She had survived the flu itself and was now suffering from a secondary bacterial pneumonia.

  People were calling it the Spanish Flu, although it was unlike any influenza I had ever seen. The symptoms reminded me more of cholera or typhoid, and the rate of death seemed to be ten to twenty percent higher than that of ordinary flu strains. Mysteriously it tended to spare the old and the very young. Its most virulent attacks were reserved for those in the prime of life.

  The clock in the hall chimed five. In an hour George Skerry would take over. We had divided the watch into six-hour shifts. At the moment George was downstairs preparing supper. I could smell onions frying. She placed a lot of faith in the healing properties of food and kept offering me pungent broths she swore would keep me well. Despite having been cloistered here throughout Laure’s illness she was still healthy, so perhaps there was something to it.

  More surprising was my own continuing health. It was exactly a month since the mayor of Montreal had declared a state of emergency. For thirty days all my waking hours, which included much of every night, had been spent tending to the sick. Because most patients were being quarantined at home I made house calls, trudging through Montreal’s frozen, deserted streets with my black bag. Not that there was any magic pill or cure I could give people. I explained the principles of hand washing and hygiene to the mothers, sisters and aunts tending to ill family members and handed out face masks. I advised people to take cod-liver oil, to avoid crowds, to keep their homes clean and to stay inside. I held their hands. I offered solace. There was no way to prevent the Spanish Flu, nor was there a cure.

  By the time I left for St. Andrews East, Montreal was a ghost town. The first cases of the disease had surfaced in late September; by October it was rampant. Schools shut down. Theatres went next, then churches. Shops had stayed open for a while but people began hoarding staples and soon the shelves were bare. Any house with an influenza victim was forced, on pain of a fine, to post a warning on the door. Within days notices were hanging at every address.

  On the other side of the Atlantic the Spanish Flu was killing soldiers faster than German guns and gas had done. In London Dugald Rivers had succumbed. I received a wire from Dr. Mastro, who was overseas and had attended the funeral. I wired back but that was all I managed. I did not cry; there was no time. For weeks after I received the news Dugald’s death remained abstract. I had been corresponding with him for three years. The face I held in memory was of a man much younger and more innocent than Dugald had been when he died. It was a face, I suspected, bearing little relation to his features in those final days.

  Closer to home, Dr. Clarke was now ill. He had braved the front and returned home unhurt only to contract pneumonia. His wife had telephoned McGill to seek my assistance, but by then I had already left for St. Andrews East to tend to Laure. The day before I had received a wire from Jakob Hertzlich, informing me that Clarke would not survive the week and that if I wished to pay my last respects I should come at once. Clarke’s wife must have begged him for aid when I’d been unavailable. I wired back that I could not travel. My own sister was dying.

  As if she could feel my attention returning to her, Laure opened her eyes. Their colour, even in the fading light, was bright blue like Grandmother’s had been, like the forget-me-nots Laure and I used to pick as girls on the banks of the North River. I said her name and she looked at me, then opened her mouth to speak. I dipped a cloth in water to moisten her lips. I helped her sit up and squeezed a few more drops into her. She took it down so well that I was actually able to offer a glass, holding it while she drank.

  With each swallow my spirits lifted. It was a miracle, a reward for the days I’d spent waiting at this bedside, watching over her, wrestling with my sense of growing despair. She couldn’t speak. Her lungs would not allow it, but she was lucid, remarkably alert. The time had come. I needed to unburden myself.

  Years ago I had stepped into the role of Laure’s protector, assuming responsibility for most aspects of her life. Because of her mental state and the natural docility of her spirit I soon lost the habit of consulting her. Laure did not seem able to discuss or plan or make decisions of any kind, so I felt entitled to proceed on my own. I discussed her needs with George Skerry, or simply forged ahead, doing whatever seemed in her best interests. For weeks now I had been in possession of information that was important to me and my sister. Whatever the result it would be unjust not to communicate it to her.

  “I have found Father,” I said, kneeling by the bed.

 
Laure’s face showed no emotion. The blue eyes stared indifferently into mine.

  “He is in France.”

  She blinked then shifted her glance.

  When Jakob Hertzlich first imparted this news to me the world had stopped turning on its axis. I had been filled with such euphoria, such hope, I had barely been able to contain it.

  “I am going to meet him.”

  A fit of coughing overtook my sister and she sank out of my grasp beneath the sheets. I tried to sit her up again but she kept sliding down like a sleepy child. Although she was still conscious her eyes refused to open.

  “Laure,” I whispered, holding her in my arms. She was impossibly light, her bones weightless as a bird’s. She lived for three more days, but in that time not once did she open her eyes again or make any other gesture.

  26

  NOVEMBER 7, 1918

  The news came while I was on the train at a station stop between St. Andrews East and Montreal. It had been anticipated for weeks, but war was a time of rumours and I paid it little attention. The war was over. As our train chugged into the city the Allies and the Germans had laid down arms. In the carriages people hugged each other and cheered. It was a party. So much good news in such a short space of time. First the end of the epidemic, and now, two days later, the end of war.

  Windsor Station was jammed. I was squeezed between an old man ahead of me carrying a very large portmanteau and a harried woman behind me stepping on my heels. After the stillness of the Priory it was overwhelming. My feet were heavy and slow. Laure was dead. We had buried her the previous afternoon in the Presbyterian cemetery next to the graves of my mother and grandmother. The snow was gone but the ground had been so hard that the grave-digger broke his pickaxe. Besides the minister there had only been two people at her funeral: George Skerry and me.

  The crowd pushed forward, carrying me in its current. I allowed myself to be swept through the station’s central hall with its echoing spaces and the disembodied voice booming out gate numbers and departure times.

  Outside the station the cold air was a relief, though it was still crowded and noisy. The entire city seemed to have congregated in the streets, even though a sharp wind was blowing from the north. I pulled my scarf over my mouth. On Peel Street traffic had ground to a halt. No one minded. Drivers were smiling and leaning on their horns. Some waved flags, the Red Ensign and the Royal Union. On the sidewalk people stopped to watch as at a parade.

  It was the seventh of November, 1918. The war was finally over. Maybe it would be declared a holiday and named War’s End Day or something equally hopeful and wrong. Wars would break out again. Violence was part of human nature as much as love and generosity.

  In front of me a woman in a bright blue sweater leaned out of a car window to hug a man standing on the curb. He kissed her hands before the car lurched forward out of reach. Then he moved on and kissed another woman. Peel Street was now so jammed that cars and horses could no longer move. People eddied around them. A man tried to grab my hand but I pulled away. Someone else came up behind me and squeezed me but I ducked sideways and escaped. I had nothing to celebrate.

  Laure’s death was the latest blow. Dugald had gone days before her. There were the war dead, boys whose names appeared day after day in long lists in The Gazette. A dozen of my students were buried in France and Flanders. The Greaves boy, whom I had never actually met but knew from his mother’s stories, was dead, as was Revere Howlett, whose sweet, pale face I would not soon forget. Huntley Stewart had made it back from the war intact, but Samuel Clarke was now on his deathbed. I was rushing to his home right now to say goodbye. How could I hug strangers in the street and wave flags in the midst of such loss?

  Dr. Clarke’s house was just below the wooded heights of Mount Royal Park. Jakob Hertzlich met me at the door. I was flushed from the walk and had unbuttoned my coat. Jakob was sitting on the step, smoking. He must have been there for some time, for he appeared half-frozen. The tips of his fingers were yellow again and he looked thin and unwell.

  “There’s no rush,” he said, flicking ash over the railing onto a flowerbed rutted with ice. “The body’s upstairs if you want to see it.”

  It had happened while I was on the train. As the porters had come through with news of the armistice Samuel Clarke had died. Jakob reported that it had not been painful. Our old friend had slipped into a coma and had simply not reawakened.

  I wanted to reach out then, to feel the solidity of Jakob’s body, but I could not move. I stood dumbly, inhaling in the bracing air.

  “You’re looking well,” he said.

  My cheeks were likely red from the climb to Dr. Clarke’s house. I exhaled a sort of sob. “I don’t think I could be worse.”

  “That makes two of us.” He looked away and asked after Laure.

  It was the first time I had actually said out loud that my sister was dead. Sadness swelled. When I could speak again I inquired about Jakob’s ailing father.

  He shrugged. “Dead,” he answered. “Like everyone else. Although in his case cancer got him, not the flu.” He was staring straight ahead into the darkness, and I was afraid for a second that he too might cry. He bent a knee up, bracing his foot on the wall. From far below on Sherbrooke Street came the incongruous, celebratory honking of car horns.

  Mrs. Clarke was upstairs in her husband’s bedroom, sitting with the body. She was a plump woman with the same kind warmth for which her husband was renowned, but with a deeper respect for Christian rites and practices than he had ever had. She rose to embrace me the moment I entered the bedroom. She held my hands as I told her how distressed I was not to have been present for Dr. Clarke. She calmed me, inquiring about Laure and then expressing gratitude that I had come in my own time of bereavement. She described Jakob Hertzlich as her guardian angel, the epitome of Christian charity, living in her home for the last week, tirelessly nursing her dying husband. Jakob had followed me into the room, and as Mrs. Clarke praised him she reached for one of his hands too, bringing him into our circle. “He is so special,” she said in her kind, fluty voice. “My husband regarded him as a son.”

  Jakob did not smile. He looked uncomfortable and slipped out of Mrs. Clarke’s grasp as soon as he could. The ease that he had brought home from overseas seemed to have disappeared almost completely. Mrs. Clarke and I watched him hurry awkwardly from the room.

  “He’s a good man,” the widow said as the door closed behind him. “More tender than he would have us know.” She shook her head sadly then turned her attention to me. “Go ahead and approach the body, Dr. White. Don’t be shy. You were also one of my husband’s favourites.”

  Samuel Clarke was laid out in a fresh nightshirt. He looked frailer than when I had last seen him, his hair so thin that a waxy scalp showed through the white wisps. His expression stopped me cold. He looked happy. Perhaps it was just the relaxation of his facial muscles or the way the light was falling, but in his expression was something approximating joy. Contrary to what I had expected it was a relief to be in the dead man’s bedroom. The world seemed suddenly less bleak.

  Jakob Hertzlich was on the front porch waiting for me when I came downstairs. Light was losing ground to darkness and with it had come silence. Horns no longer blared. In fact the roads seemed to be empty except for trolleys. Jakob had just lit up another of his pungent, hand-rolled cigarettes. He was bundled in his coat and hat now, although his long fingers were still bare. “Bad news,” he said as I closed the door behind me.

  I thought he was referring to Samuel Clarke and began to speak about the strange expression on our mentor’s face and how, on the contrary, it had uplifted me.

  “I mean the war,” said Jakob.

  There had been a mistake. The armistice had not been signed. Apparently the war was still on. I covered my face. I had been making plans, I realized. Even while I had sat upstairs with Samuel Clarke my brain had been almost unconsciously dividing the coming days into tasks to prepare for my crossing to Europe. For
that was what the war’s end meant to me — that I would be able to cross the Atlantic.

  Jakob took a pensive drag on his cigarette. “Have to put off the crossing.”

  I stared at him as if he were a mind reader.

  “As soon as the waters are safe,” he said, exuding an acrid cloud, “I’ll be gone.”

  He’d been talking about himself. “That makes two of us,” I told him. What did it matter now if I told him my plans? It would probably do him good to be reminded that there were people other than himself in the world. I told him I was off to Oxford.

  He cut me off. “To see Howlett?”

  The porch was now in almost total darkness. All I could make out was his beard in the glow of his badly rolled cigarette. “Yes,” I said.

  Below us the city glittered, a patch of fallen stars. He made a guttural noise in his throat. The animosity he consistently showed Sir William was beyond reason — a primitive response. “There are things you don’t know,” I said quietly. “Sir William has been pivotal in my life.”

  “Oh, that I know,” Jakob Hertzlich said. “Believe me, Dr. White. That I know.”

  “It’s not what you think,” I added.

  “It’s not a question of thinking. It’s as plain as the nose on your face what you feel about him. It’s also plain that there’s no reciprocation. He exploits you and you don’t even see it.”

  A cold, bright moon hung above us, winking down through partial clouds as if the whole scene were a joke. “There’s more to it than that,” I said. I was close enough to hear the agitation in his breath. The moon winked again, and then suddenly it hit me. Jakob Hertzlich was jealous.

  I could not make him out in the darkness but it didn’t matter. I could not believe I hadn’t seen it before. It was not as if he’d hidden his feelings. For years he’d been trying to attract my attention. I had chosen not to see. I blushed, remembering the night of the aborted party; our unconsummated physical tryst had meant far more to him than I had ever imagined.