by Paul Butler
But already things have moved on. “It seems to me, if I may,” a white-haired gentleman at the front says, “we have tied ourselves in rather a knot.” The audience is hushed, and staring faces have turned from Florence to listen to the venerable speaker. There’s an impressive aura about the old man, a sense of the promise of wisdom and insight.
Florence has been backing slowly toward the exit, but she slows down, sensing that the measured tones of the distinguished gentleman may provide some balm to the injustice burning within her. She feels grateful at least that he has already taken the spotlight from her.
“The comparison between hunters and fishermen in the far north and farmers in the eastern seaboard states is quite redundant,” he says. “The real issue illuminated tonight by Dr. Grenfell, the gentleman who interrupted before, and this lady is a simple one.”
Florence feels her face burn with a self-consciousness she has barely felt since she was a child in the classroom, awaiting either reward or censure for an answer to an arithmetic sum, or a Latin translation. Her feet root her at last a yard or so from the exit behind her; it seems too great a disrespect to the gentleman’s white hairs to leave before judgment is passed.
“It is this: How do we react as people when we see goodness? Are we so suspicious, so cynical, that when confronted with devotion and unselfishness we must find some way to invalidate these qualities?” The lady by Grenfell’s side bows her head as though hiding an emotion. When she looks up again quickly, Florence thinks she sees a film of tears on her eyes. “The attacks on Dr. Grenfell,” the old gentleman continues, “reveal to us, I feel, something of our frailty in the face of true idealism.”
The word attacks is like a swift, freezing current in the darkness. It carries her backwards through the exit which has been opened for her; she catches the ironic wave of that obliging gentleman as she moves into the hallway. The lecture hall door swings closed. She hears the white-haired gentleman thanking Grenfell for challenging them all, and making them search inside for the goodness in themselves.
More applause bursts from the room, but the door is thick enough to dampen the vibrations which would have accompanied the sound had she remained. It seems unreal to Florence, like a music box which has been fastened closed yet still emits its mechanical melody. The judgment of the old gentleman smarts inside her like a fire, and she wonders if it can be true, whether her disbelief in Grenfell has come about because of a suspicious nature, her own moral failings, or worse, because of a twenty-five-year-old argument which made her feel first patronized, and then rejected. She thinks about the kind-looking woman beside Grenfell, surely the fiancée. Not English, of course. Not assertive, either, by the looks of things.
A newspaper announced Grenfell’s betrothal months ago, and it surprised Florence that a man who had lived until middle age a bachelor should suddenly feel the need to marry. Was the jolt an unpleasant one? Was there envy when she read about Anne Elizabeth Caldwell MacClanahan of Chicago? Certainly the two of them together—one gathering fame by the year, the other from an old and established Chicago family—were a stark enough contrast to Florence and her husband. Part of her wanted that easy acceptance, that societal interest that both Grenfell and his intended seemed to expect and enjoy. Florence and her husband seemed destined to remain obscure, professionally uncelebrated creatures peeping out from under the legs of such renowned figures. But did she want to take Anne Elizabeth’s place? Surely not.
Yet there, within those closed doors, a white-haired, soft-spoken elder led a crowd of intelligent, educated people in rounds of applause directed at the unflattering difference between Florence and the protester on the one side, and those who were still inside the auditorium on the other. Bible stories with their lessons and admonitions tingle once more in Florence’s imagination. It’s all too easy to find references to miscreants justly cast out while revels and celebrations take place within. She can feel the violent sobs and the gnashing of teeth in the coolish air circulating around her. It makes her wonder why the Good Book is so full of warnings about how to avoid what had just happened but no advice that might instruct one who has already been ejected. She thinks of the poor man who was physically manhandled from the place, wonders briefly whether she might find him. But, of course, those doormen would never have allowed him to stay in the environs.
The finality of it, and the sense of unfairness, is almost enough to set her against the ancient texts. The one constant in the life unravelling behind her is the predictable movement from participant to outsider. And the transition always seems to come whenever she tries to engage her own intelligence and compassion. Her husband was the catalyst who first alerted her to this aspect of herself, but the decisions have always been hers.
She turns from the door and walks the soft-carpeted corridor toward the elevator. The boy meets her gaze with trepidation and worry, as though reading the despondency in her posture. He rattles the cage open and she steps in, thinking of her husband and the glow and easefulness which is likely enveloping him. A modest man who requires so little for solace.
— Chapter Sixteen —
It’s very late and neither of them has slept. From the jangle of bells and the hum of engines, Florence can tell the trams are still running. Her sleepless eyes focus on the oozy V-shaped stripe upon the ceiling, a refuge for all the collected light from the street below. The curtains would not quite close when she tugged them before retiring, and Florence doesn’t want to get out of bed now and try again. Restless though it is, the bed possesses the warmth of a refuge.
Her husband groans and moves, causing the bedclothes to slip off her, exposing her bare feet to the cool air. She lies still for a moment until she feels the prickle of a few stubbly hairs on her shins.
“Do you know what time it is?” she asks.
Her husband grunts, pretending to have been disturbed. But he’s merely disgruntled, she thinks. He wanted to sink into oblivion, and her story about Grenfell and the lecture pulled him back to reality.
He turns onto his back and sighs. She takes the opportunity to haul the covers back over her legs.
“No. Can’t you sleep?”
“No. You?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
A bell, continuous and rising in pitch, scoops downtown toward the financial district. A fire perhaps.
“What for?”
“For stirring us both up by going to the lecture.”
“It doesn’t matter. I was . . .”
He stops suddenly.
“What?”
“I was thinking about something else.”
“Hmm?”
“The waiter who brought my drink.”
“Yes?” The sheets hiss against her skin with each small movement.
“He mistook me for Grenfell.”
Now she stills herself, listening.
“He was rather nervous, overly respectful, I thought. He poured my drink like a rich person’s valet. Then he bowed as he backed toward the door. At first I thought he was making fun of me. But then, as he opened the door to leave, he said, ‘Enjoy your stay, Dr. Grenfell.’”
Florence gives a dry laugh, but something in her is stirring. She has the vague but tangible feeling that the universe has just revealed something about its design, that the incidence has greater meaning than its surface might suggest.
“So, you see, I was thinking about him anyway.”
“That’s quite a coincidence.”
There’s another ring from the street below, this time short and sharp, maybe a tram. It seems to echo the word ‘coincidence,’ such an inadequate word, and one that always seems to shield something important from view. She feels again the gnashing of teeth in the corridor outside Grenfell’s lecture, hears once more the applause within. Coincidence, she thinks, is a lazy word. It’s for those who are d
isinclined to meet the universe on its own terms and accept its portents as living entities, charged with significance, trailing a known history behind them. The modern world eviscerates all such meanings; we are all supposed to believe in a random creation. Yet Florence was brought up with the Bible, and her own life has mirrored the tales of oppressed people and nations, of power and intrigue, disguises, prophecies, and rewards for blind faith. There was a pattern to it all, crystalline, intricate, and even symmetrical. There was nothing random about it at all.
“Do I look like him?”
Florence considers, placing the faces side by side in her imagination: Grenfell’s smiling visage tilted toward the unknown questioner; her husband’s face, downcast as he shuffles through the hallway.
“You have grown to look somewhat alike, perhaps. You are the same height, a similar build.” She doesn’t go on to compare Grenfell’s puffy, padded features, his deep-set eyes, with those of her husband, because she knows the disparity in cause would not flatter her husband. Grenfell’s thickened skin comes through years of experience of outdoor life and the cold. Her poor husband’s face is bloated and reddened through drink. But it is quite remarkable, she thinks, how two opposite lifestyles have created basically the same effect.
“Huh, maybe I should exploit that!” he says, and moves uncomfortably onto his side, facing her.
“I’m sure we could put all that fame and the money to better use if we did.”
Something catches in her throat and she coughs. She turns to face him. The blue light on the ceiling has faded slightly and the night intensifies. Florence has the strangest feeling that some thin but vital membrane between so far unconnectable thoughts has suddenly been breached, releasing all manner of possibilities both terrifying and exhilarating. She daren’t for the moment put them into words.
“What do you think he does with it all?” her husband asks.
“The money?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I’m sure he builds his hospitals and funds his expeditions.”
“Well, what’s the problem with it, really?”
She thinks about it for a moment. Well, what is the problem? She sees the poor man dragged from the auditorium again, his feet scuffing along the carpet. She hears once more her husband’s story told as through Grenfell’s lips. And she tunnels back through quarter of a century to Grenfell and her outside Dr. Johnson’s house in London, to his admitted desire to build a monument to himself.
“It’s just wrong,” she says. “He’s an imposter.”
She has to acknowledge the profound irony of it. She’s talking to the same man who followed her and Grenfell through the London night, and later forged a letter in Grenfell’s hand. Once he was the ultimate imposter. Now he seems honest to the point of self-defeat. The reversal of her perceptions seems almost universal. She thinks of the people in the auditorium tonight and realizes how much she thinks as her husband thinks; she sees the suits of woven silk, fox furs, and mink coats as the very garbs of deceit. They were all imposters, every one save her and the other protester. None of them, save she and he, came within a mile of understanding the meaning of human dignity. The trapper from the north, the very subject of the lecture, was dragged by force from the theatre.
She remembers the drunken, middle-aged sailor she and Grenfell had treated twenty-five years ago and her future husband’s objections when Grenfell tried to lecture to him; he had a right to his own philosophy, her future husband had said. It surprises her that it has taken her so very long to completely understand his words.
“Aren’t we all imposters?” he asks gloomily, just when she believes he may have fallen asleep.
“You’re not,” she says and doesn’t elaborate. But she thinks of his work. As a doctor he still does his very best, and still accepts payment in kind from almost half of his patients with no overarching charity to support his work or the sick for whom he cares.
“Well,” he says. “I would be an imposter if I thought it would do any good.”
The words take her aback, partly because they imply a lack of judgment against Grenfell, an acceptance of his methods, but mostly because they correspond to the images scattering through her own thoughts.
“You would act like Grenfell?” she says.
“I wouldn’t beg on behalf of my own patients. I’d be a more complete imposter.”
“How do you mean?” The sheet sighs against her nightdress once more. She stills herself.
“I’d take all the risk myself. I wouldn’t expose my real patients to ridicule or judgment.”
“Your real patients?”
“I’d pretend to be some fellow like Grenfell collecting for a mission far away, for faceless people who won’t be blamed for taking charity. But I’d be collecting for the people I treat already.”
Florence is afraid to speak, afraid that this plan—subversive, brilliant, and at its heart noble—might fizzle into the hypothetical world if prodded too hard. Doesn’t the Bible say somewhere that no moral act is free from the risk of imprisonment?
Her blood races with the possibilities and she waits for her husband to sleep, praying silently that he remembers the idea in the morning.
— Chapter Seventeen —
1910: Portland, Maine
***
The slide show has captured the audience as it usually does, dispelling the doctor’s feeling of unease. The rhythmic wheeze of an unseen audience member disturbed him a while ago, made him think of a wounded animal in the darkness, a malign and vengeful presence.
Florence presses the switch again and a little communal gasp sounds as the audience views the close-up image; shrunken flesh stretching impossibly over a man’s ribs, clavicle and scapula protruding like the bones of a half-eaten chicken. The doctor nods at Florence. She presses the switch once more. And this time shrieks of horror rise from the darkness. He lets the outrage work for a moment.
“And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the same young trapper’s son. As you see, we have protected the identities and shown only the torsos of these poor starving people. Though they may be a thousand miles away, we think it important to use only the images we have permission to use, and to protect the privacy of those afflicted by poverty and want.”
He remembers the boy and his father well enough. They had originally come from a thousand miles away but from the south, not the north. They had been domicile in the New England states too long, however, to blame Dixie for their half-starved condition. The family, mother now dead, made the mistake of believing that farm life for half-breeds would be better in Maine than in Carolina, and so they had harvested the wheat and the corn, slept in leaking barns, and, becoming sick, had been laid off. Moving from one farm to another, they had clung to one another, not noticing the slow degeneration of clothes into rags, sinewy shoulders into skeletal shapes.
The boy’s consumption was terribly advanced already. His father’s thinness was so far the result of hunger rather than disease, though disease would surely follow. As he set up the equipment to take their picture, the doctor watched the child cough into a blood-purpled rag he had long been using as a handkerchief. He caught a longing tug in the look from child to man. The boy wanted reassurance that he was merely the younger version of his father, that the blood was some rite of passage.
The doctor had to turn from them and busy himself with the camera and stand until the thought passed, but Florence came up behind him with the flash, saw the moisture in his eyes, and gave him a sad smile.
“I’m not going to include your heads in my photographs,” the doctor, head buried under the cloth, said. “I wish to preserve your anonymity.”
The man’s eyes, yellowed in the corners, seemed to question, but he didn’t speak.
“Now hold it,” said the doctor. Florence flashed. The doctor removed one plate and put in another. “
One more time. This time the boy. That’s right.”
A second flash.
“Doctor,” said the man, his voice stronger, more resonant than would have seemed possible from such an emaciated body. “Who will you show these pictures to?”
“To people in the cities,” the doctor replied, busying himself by removing the second plate. “So they may see the terrible hunger and disease that exists.” He hated lying, hated the idea of adding “in America,” or “in this very state,” and avoided doing so by allowing the hearer to infer it.
“Isn’t there also hunger and disease in the cities?”
There was the hint of a smile, sardonic and wise, on his face now. He has tried the factory circuit, too, of course. He knew as well as anyone.
“There is,” said the doctor, handling the slide carefully, passing it to Florence, “but people are disinclined to notice the hunger that lives among them. It’s easier if it’s someone else’s fault.”
“You can do what you like with the photographs, Doctor,” he said, rising from the seat, taking his boy’s hand. “You treat us for nothing. We’re grateful.”
He caught the eyes of the man’s son. They were soulful, confused, yet hopeful. Inhalations could not cure him and the thought of it seemed unbearable when placed next to the hope of a child. Father and son shuffled wifeless and motherless toward the kitchen and the back door beyond. Florence whispered encouragements while she led them, but the words and the soft rustling tone seemed to promise something of the next world rather than the one they were in.
***
Florence clicks again and again. The trick, they have found, is to start slowly, and then accelerate through the photographs, an assault to the senses leading to thankful darkness. A moment more and the slide show is over.
