Ship Fever

by Andrea Barrett

  “I don’t like to wear them,” she said, dropping the strand back in the box. “But they’re so pretty to look at…remember these?” She held up a dangling pair of coral earrings.

  “Of course I do,” he said. “Surely you could wear those? They’re very plain.” Her earlobes were just visible below the wings of her dark hair, which was parted in the center and drawn up in a simple knot. The coral drops would look lovely against her hair and skin, he thought.

  She shook her head, but did not object when he crouched across from her and peered into the box. “Your mother dressed so beautifully,” he said. “And that whole house looked like her, somehow—those violet drapes, remember those? I used to think she must have picked them to match her eyes.”

  “She might have,” Susannah said. Her own eyes were closer to gray than violet, and were set unusually far apart. They’d made her look oddly adult when she was a girl. Now they made her look girlish. “I wish I could picture her more clearly. Do you ever have times when you can see all the things around your mother, her clothes and jewelry and furniture—but you can’t see her face?”

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  Then he’d risen hastily, turned his back on her and the mahogany box, and produced the letter that seemed, suddenly, to have soured the afternoon. All because he couldn’t bear to think of the year when Susannah’s parents had died within a week of each other, and his own mother’s life had been extinguished like a lamp within a room he was not permitted to enter. Afterwards he and Susannah had been separated. She’d gone to her aunt and uncle’s house, in the suburb of St. Roch; he’d been shipped off to cousins in Montreal. Throughout those years, and then through his medical training and his postgraduate studies in Paris, he hadn’t seen her.

  On his return to the city of Quebec two years ago, he had rediscovered her: grown and married to Arthur Adam Rowley. How had this happened? But the answer was obvious. She was intelligent and beautiful; Arthur Adam was tall and wealthy and clever. And although she had no more dowry than her mother’s jewel-box, her upbringing set her apart from many of the more frivolous young women in the city. Her seriousness fitted well with Arthur Adam’s ambitions. Already he’d made a name for himself as a journalist, despite the fact that he had no need to earn a living. He liked to make crusades in print, and to outrage his peers by taking up the causes dear to Susannah’s adoptive family. Older men predicted for him a career in politics.

  Lauchlin had grown fond of him, despite twinges of envy. All that energy and enthusiasm, his warm hospitality and vibrant conversation—no, it was impossible that Lauchlin should resist him. And their growing friendship had meant he could see Susannah easily. He could knock on the initialed door, as he had today, and be sure of a welcome. Just now, though, he felt confused. Was it the information contained in the letter that had upset her? Or the fact that the letter had not been written to her?

  “His news made me miserable,” Lauchlin said: both stating a fact and searching for the source of Susannah’s unhappiness. “It’s unbearable, what’s going on over there. And me here, doing nothing—I should be there.” He pressed his forehead against the glass, as if he could push through it to the air.

  “It’s not as though Arthur Adam is actually doing anything,” Susannah said. “He’s watching. He’s writing. That’s what he does. Why does he write in such detail to you, and not to me?”

  “He’s writing articles that move people,” he said, evading her question. “Move them to send clothes, money, food—that’s hardly nothing.”

  “Anyone could do as much…oh, I don’t mean that, I know what he’s doing, how important it is—but I miss him. All the time.” She continued to pace, swishing her skirts against the heavy furniture. “Does he think I wouldn’t be interested? Why can’t I be there?”

  “It’s no place for a woman.”

  She spoke as if she hadn’t heard him. “Stuck here, sorting old clothes and running bazaars…and feeling you watching me all the time. He asked you, didn’t he? To keep an eye on me.”

  “Only the way a friend would ask another friend—to ease his mind, you know. And perhaps to make sure we each have some company in his absence.”

  “That’s how you see yourself? As company?”

  Was she mocking him? The room was stifling. He had taken great pains, he thought, not to let her know the depth of his feelings for her. He had been friendly but no more than that; well-mannered, discreet. Although it was true he fussed over his clothes when coming to see her. Now he sneaked a glance at the oval mirror hanging from a cord on the wall. Bushy red hair as neat as a pair of brushes could make it in this weather; a flush spreading from his cheekbones across his freckled, blocky nose. His new shirt was handsome enough, but for all it had cost it still bunched at the collar as if made for a smaller, daintier man. He sat and extracted a fat, prickly cushion from under his elbow. Then he flushed more darkly as he caught Susannah’s gaze.

  “Vain boy,” she said. She settled herself in a low chair and poured the tea.

  “I am not.” But even as he protested he found himself oddly comforted by her tone, which brought back the bickering of their childhood. Once, in the garden behind his family’s house, they had argued for hours over a passage in a book.

  She shrugged, spilling tea into her saucer. “I was only teasing.” Then she let out a small, exasperated sigh. “But here I am. And here you are. Both of us wanting to be over there. I wish you’d stuck with your work at the hospital.”

  “But the director wouldn’t let me do anything…bleed, bleed, bleed; that’s all he does, and all he wanted me to do.” He reached for more sugar. “You know that.”

  They’d argued before about Lauchlin’s unwillingness to continue working at the immigrant hospital supported by Susannah’s aunt and uncle. “You’re as prejudiced as your father,” Susannah had said. In Findlay Grant’s eyes, the cholera that had killed his wife in 1832 had come from the Irish immigrants, and since then he’d never had a kind word for anyone or anything Irish. But Lauchlin’s defection had nothing to do with his father, only with the limits his own research placed on his time. He studied the nature and uses of alkaloids, those active principles isolated from plants. A substance as useful as atropine or quinine might reveal itself to him, if he were diligent. He’d thought Susannah understood the importance of this. She’d seemed to agree when he explained, after his second hospital visit, how he wasn’t really needed there, and how the work disrupted his research.

  Now she offered him a biscuit and said, “Of course your own practice keeps you so busy—how is your practice?”

  “The same,” he said bitterly. “As you know.” Why was she being so hard on him? His practice was the least part of his professional life, and the part in which he’d most obviously failed. “Hypochondriacs, asthmatics, rheumatics. And few enough of those. If Dr. Perrault had ever told me that a man with my training would have such a hard time finding patients…”

  “Perhaps you ought to pay attention to that,” she said. “Perhaps you ought to think about other ways to employ your talents.”

  Why were they arguing? All the warmth of their moment over the jewel-box had dissolved into this disagreement, which had surfaced several times since Arthur Adam’s departure. Where Lauchlin had always believed that his dedication to science would serve the world in large ways, Susannah believed in more immediate good works, embracing the recent flood of immigrants as if by doing so she might bring her parents back. During their honeymoon, she and Arthur Adam had investigated the slums of Paris and Edinburgh, and Arthur Adam claimed she’d contributed to his articles. Since he’d left for Ireland, she’d been helping her aunt and uncle gather food and bedding for the sick. But it was not as if Lauchlin had been idle.

  “You’ve made your point,” Lauchlin said. “I notice you don’t seem to mind living in this fine house, though. Even if you’re too good to wear a necklace.”

  Immediately he was ashamed of himself; she had lost both p
arents, where he had lost only one. And the oil portraits in their gilt frames, the piano, and the table with the claw-feet grasping marble spheres were not her choice. Once, when the three of them had been playing whist with another of Arthur Adam’s friends, the friend had complimented Susannah on the new Turkey carpet and she had said, “Arthur Adam picks out everything—congratulate him.” A silence had fallen across the card-table, but later she and Arthur Adam had stood arm in arm at the front door, waving good-bye to the two single men.

  “I’m sorry,” Lauchlin said. “I know you wish I was more like your admirable husband.”

  He’d meant to be sarcastic, but to his horror she didn’t disagree. “So do something,” she said. Her handsome hand, flicking the air in a furious gesture, knocked her cup to the floor.

  And at that, so discouraged and disheartened was he by both her attitude and Arthur Adam’s letter—Arthur Adam, brave and noble, off doing all that he ought to be doing himself—that he set down his own cup and left, his jacket tossed over his arm and the afternoon completely spoiled.

  Annie Taggert watched Lauchlin leave. She had overheard most of this conversation; she had also, as Susannah suspected, listened to him read Arthur Adam’s letter. But the letter didn’t keep her from wishing the emigrants arriving here would all stay home. They were like Sissy, she thought. She bustled back into the sitting room and swept up the fragments of broken china while her mistress stared out the window. Too pathetic to help themselves, more and more of them flooding this country: like Sissy, whom Mrs. Heagerty had hired last fall in a moment of weakness. Filthy and stupid and good for nothing. Making a mockery of the people already here.

  Down the stairs she went to the kitchen, balancing the heavy tray and already anticipating all that Sissy would have done wrong in her absence. Annie had left Ireland almost twenty years ago; she remembered her fellow passengers as poor but respectable. Men who found work immediately, on the docks or in the forest, cutting timber. Women like her, who went into service with a knowledge of what it meant to do their part in keeping up a household. Nothing like the new arrivals. She noted a small puff of slut’s wool on the stairs; Sissy, again. And in the kitchen she found Sissy crying as she peeled parsnips.

  “What’s with her?” Annie asked Mrs. Heagerty, the cook. “What’s the girl sniffing about now?”

  Mrs. Heagerty was filling and trimming the lamps, which marched across the table in tidy rows. The room was fragrant with the pies cooling on the range. “I went across to see Mrs. Mullaney,” Mrs. Heagerty said. “Just for a minute, you understand. And what do I find when I come back? Our lazy girl here, sleeping under the table like a dog.”

  “What can you expect?” Annie said. She and Mrs. Heagerty had an old and firm bond; they had both worked for Arthur Adam’s parents for years, in one of the finest houses in the city, before coming here to set up this new household. They knew how things should be done. “The stairs are a horror, you know. You saw the filth she left in the corners?”

  “No,” Mrs. Heagerty said. “Really?” They turned to weeping Sissy and shook their heads. Annie piled the crockery near the sink. “Don’t you be smashing these when you wash them,” she warned Sissy. “Mrs. Rowley’s already done enough damage for one afternoon—and the good china, too.” She turned to Mrs. Heagerty. “Swept a cup right to the floor, she did. She was that angry at the doctor.”

  “What was he wanting?” Mrs. Heagerty asked.

  “He had a letter,” Annie said. “From Mr. Rowley. I heard him read part of it. Terrible goings-on over there. If you could hear the things he writes—a stone would cry.”

  “He’ll cry,” Mrs. Heagerty said darkly. “When he gets home. If someone doesn’t have a word with that wife of his.”

  “They had a fight,” Annie said. “I think that’ll be the end of our doctor—you should have heard the tone in her voice.”

  “He’s a useless creature, isn’t he? I heard from Mrs. Mullaney that whole days go by when he isn’t called to a decent house.”

  Annie agreed, although she was not sure what it was she wanted the doctor to do. No one could emulate Arthur Adam Rowley, and the idea of the doctor joining in Mrs. Rowley’s dogooding was hardly better. Annie disapproved of her mistress’s actions almost entirely. Exposing herself to filth like that, walking through low parts of town with only a Quaker woman for a chaperone—no, it was not appropriate. Although it was just what you might expect from a woman brought up so irregularly. Mr. Rowley’s mother would never have done such a thing.

  Sissy sniffed. “I heard,” she said, in a quavery voice just audible to Annie.

  “You heard what?” Annie said sharply. “Speak up.”

  “I heard,” Sissy repeated, “from Margaret—you know, at the Richardsons’—that a patient of his died because of something he did. Mrs. Sewell, it was. She had the dropsy. And Dr. Grant wouldn’t bleed her, Margaret says. She says Mrs. Sewell swolled up like a great pig and died, because Dr. Grant wouldn’t bleed her.”

  “You heard,” Annie said angrily. “You heard. You know better than to repeat that sort of gossip.” But to Mrs. Heagerty she said, “What can you expect of a man like that? Learning here isn’t good enough for him, he has to go to Paris, France. Then he’s surprised when he comes back here with his fancy theories and finds no one to welcome him but our generous Mr. Rowley.”

  Mrs. Heagerty made a sour face and picked up the first pair of lamps. “And his generous wife.”

  On an evening two weeks later, the only lamps lit at Lauchlin’s house were in the kitchen, where he had no place, and in his crowded office. He shared this house with his father in theory, but in fact his father was not around for more than a few weeks a year. In his absence, Lauchlin had let go all the servants but one housemaid and the housekeeper and the housekeeper’s nephew, who slept in the stables and did part-time duty as gardener and groom. Lauchlin could hear them laughing downstairs, by the warm range.

  His room was cold. He sat on the floor, in front of the fire, with a glass of Bordeaux beside him and a plate of food congealing on the arm of his chair. Slowly, meticulously, he pried the top from a large crate and began to unpack the shipment of books he’d been awaiting all winter. Henle’s General Anatomy, which he handled reverently and then set on the shelf beside his earlier work, On Miasmata and Contagion. Chadwick’s Sanitary Report, which he placed next to Southwood Smith’s Treatise on Fever. Thick books bound in smooth calfskin, containing knowledge he’d begun to think he would never use.

  In Paris, where he’d studied with the famous Dr. Pierre Louis, he had learned to be suspicious of excessive blood-letting and over-zealous purgation and to seek scientific explanations for disease. He had learned percussion and auscultation and how to use a watch with a second hand for the counting of the pulse. In Paris human dissection was legal; he had not had to rely on demonstrations but had explored scores of bodies himself. Here, though—here the doctors were old-fashioned, even ignorant. Although they’d admitted him to the Quebec Medical Society, no one agreed with his methods and no one sent patients his way. His research had yielded nothing so far and his practice was dead. He might be better employed doing almost anything.

  Susannah’s right, he thought. I’m useless. Still stinging from her sharp tongue, he’d called a few days after their argument on his father’s old friend, Dr. Perrault, and mentioned his desire to find some way of combining his interests in research and preventive medicine with patient care. To his surprise Dr. Perrault had responded enthusiastically, although he hadn’t had an immediate solution.

  “Public health,” Dr. Perrault had said. “It’s the emerging field—think about Mathew Carey’s study of yellow fever in Philadelphia. Or Dr. Panum’s handling of the measles epidemic last year in the Faroe Islands. In his report he proved beyond doubt the efficacy of quarantine and the fact that measles is not miasmatic but purely contagious in character. The most rigorous, mathematical epidemiology and investigation of underlying cause, combined with
patient care and social policy—good science combined with good medicine. Or so it seems to me. You might keep your eyes open to opportunities here for similar work. It’s a shame to waste your kind of training.”

  The conversation had sent him back to his books and, even more than Susannah’s apparent scorn, had made him think perhaps he should reconsider his direction. He had not gone to see Susannah these past two weeks; no more evenings playing cribbage, no long talks over tea. Since their argument he had felt himself to be a scuttling little creature: a rodent, say. Or a louse. His desk was piled with unpaid bills and he’d have to draw on his father’s account again. The house needed repairs, after this long harsh winter. Gutters needed patching, stonework repointing, the shrubberies were a mess; workmen had to be organized and plans drawn up. He had more than enough time to attend to all this, but the idea filled him with an overwhelming boredom. Surely, surely, this was not how he was meant to spend his life.

  He finished shelving his new books and then methodically broke the crate into kindling and stacked the pieces beside the fire. Nothing to do now but face the mail. Bills, a heap of medical journals, some of them from the States; a letter from Bill Gerhard in Philadelphia and one from a Dr. Douglas.

  He opened the letter from Gerhard first: the usual list of triumphs and enthusiasms. In Paris, Gerhard had already been established as Dr. Louis’s prize student when Lauchlin arrived, and they’d overlapped just long enough to establish a friendship. Since his return to the States, Gerhard seemed to have done everything that Lauchlin wished he’d done himself. An appointment at the prestigious Pennsylvania Hospital; an enormous practice; an investigation into epidemic fevers that resulted in a series of brilliant papers in which he differentiated typhus and typhoid in terms of their distinctive lesions.

  Increasingly I lean toward the theories of Henle, Gerhard wrote, after giving the news of his family. These fevers must be due to some sort of pathogenic microbes; and not, as the miasmatists contend, to noxious exhalations given off by filth. But I have to admit I have had no success in finding these microorganisms.