The Good Doctor

by Paul Butler

  The dogs gather around, the white funnels of their breath creating a fog around him, heating one earlobe, providing an instant of comfort and hope. But there’s no nuzzling, no gentle licking. They’re just curious. He glances from face to face, still gasping. He christened the beasts Moody, Watch, and Spy for a reason. And there is serendipity indeed they should be watching him so calmly now. He will be cleansing the past, wrapping himself in the lurid clothes expected of a hero. Think of Homer, the animal sacrifice in the Odyssey. Think of Abraham with Isaac on the altar. These are the names that resound through history. Fame and faint-heartedness don’t mix. Don’t question, Grenfell. Just act.

  His hand grips harder on the knife and pulls it from the ice. The blade catches the dying sun, and he anticipates the warmth of blood newly shed.

  — Chapter Twenty-Four —

  June 1909: New York

  ***

  The reading is over. Waiting for the expected murmurs—the soft, butterfly hints of approval, confusion, or protest—Grenfell closes the book. But the silence intensifies, seems for a moment a material thing, thick and impenetrable. Then a clap, like a stone falling upon gravel, another pause, and it breaks all at once, spontaneous as a waterfall, a clamour of applause, cheers, and foot-stamping, whoops like air bubbles carried along in the stream of sound.

  He was right to end with the detail of the plaque. As neat and dramatic a finale as could be wished for. Before tonight it had worried him. So much repetition in the story, a frenzy of climaxes: hours of freezing water, plunging off one ice pan onto another, cutting ropes, plunging again, swimming through icy waters, slaying beloved animals and flaying the hides from the flesh, wrapping himself in the fur, drinking their blood for warmth and nourishment. It was all too intense, a trumpet playing upon the same note at too harsh a volume. He knew quiet moments were necessary not only for dramatic punch but also for plausibility. A lull is like a valley which sets off the true drama of the mountain. His writing seemed like peak after peak with no contrasting relief. While in the thick of it, jumping from one sinking ice pan, swimming toward another, a rebel thought danced through his brain: Who on earth could believe all this nonsense?

  He could feel his housekeeper, Mrs. Evans, burrowing up through his narrative, especially when he mentioned the tear-filled faces of his rescuers. Mrs. Evans’s husband, John, did have red eyes when he and others hauled Grenfell aboard. But even at the time Grenfell knew the moisture was likely the result of cold and exasperation, as well as relief.

  Mrs. Evans had said very little to Grenfell during his recuperation, but her manner had changed. A silence had grown between her actions and her words, between the moment she laid his dinner plate in front of him and the question, “Would you like anything else, Doctor?”

  It was as though she was waiting, mother-like, for him to fill in the pause with some explanation, or apology.

  One time, two weeks after his rescue, she was more direct.

  “How is the boy?” she asked, as he picked up his knife and fork.

  “The boy?” he repeated, utensils raised, hot steam from the cabbage blushing his chin.

  “The boy on Brent Island, Doctor,” she said.

  She was an odd figure suddenly, her head titled slightly for his answer, her arms hanging by her sides. Mrs. Evans had always been defined by her actions, her hands always occupied—a broom and dustpan, a serving platter or baking pan. For once, there was not as much as a dishcloth, tea towel, or oven glove. It made her seem redundant and strangely formidable.

  “I’ve had word, Mrs. Evans. Thank you for asking. The boy is doing fine.” Grenfell nodded and coughed, picked up the saltcellar, and sprinkled.

  “False alarm, then,” she said mildly enough, smoothing down her apron. “And when you come to think of what might have happened as a result.”

  “Indeed,” he replied, pronging a potato with his fork.

  “There’s you, my John, the others in John’s boat. They all might have been lost.”

  Grenfell cut the spud in two, nodding again. “It doesn’t bear thinking about, Mrs. Evans.”

  He raised the fork, but halted before it reached his mouth. He looked to the table solemnly, willing her away.

  “No, Doctor,” she said. “And there’s our little daughter, Maggie.”

  “Yes,” he replied, firming up the mask of sadness over his growing impatience.

  “Where would she be if my John were taken from us?”

  “Quite,” he said, focusing on the dwindling trail of steam from the potato.

  Silently, she turned and walked from the room.

  The atmosphere prickled between them like static all spring, never put into words, never abating. He had put her family into danger and she doubted it was necessary. How much had she guessed? There was no way to tell. He couldn’t let her go. Such an action might turn the discomfort of silence into a blaze of living rumour. She did at least seem discreet.

  Who on earth could believe all this nonsense? It was both her voice and his that seemed to skip upon the surface of his heroic narrative. He had to swallow it down with a modest cough and a promise to bring this “egotistic narrative” to a close. It worked, obviously, and far better than he could have hoped. When he reached the solemn, emotional ending, “On a plaque in my hallway in St. Anthony I have memorialized my dear friends Moody, Watch, and Spy, who gave their lives for mine on the ice on April 21, 1908,” the lump in his throat was real.

  He thought of the dogs, of Spy’s crafty-eyed sneer, Moody’s penetrating judgment. Did any part of him mourn them, really? Only Watch gave him a slight pang of regret, and only then because the youngster had once seemed like a canine version of himself.

  Of course, he realized. The grief was not all false. The sentiment rising in his throat was the last-gasp nature of his success. He’d made it, after all. He had to allow himself a moment of weakness, the hint of a tear for the Grenfell who might have been—the one who almost fell into obscurity.

  The story, his publisher told him, was destined to be a bestseller. He’d woven the most spectacular of modern myths from fragments of truth; and, at last, drama—lurid, fantastical drama—was part of the Grenfell story. Everything was coming together like a dream, the foundations of a new administration. Anne Caldwell was his wife. However much she frets away in St. Anthony, especially when he is away as now, she is loyal and hard-working. She builds community among the women, and summons the whole extended society of Chicago and beyond to experience his exploits with so much vicarious, enthralled pleasure he feels at times like a Homeric prince.

  Detractors could act as they wished. Anything they could do or say would be swept away by the power of his growing reputation. Every great man has enemies, after all: the bitter vagrant who tries to interrupt proceedings, the woman who questions the veracity of one’s history. Envy and spite are nothing more significant than the foam rolling from the speeding bow of a pioneering enterprise.

  The applause begins to die off at last. The publisher at his side rises, his face flushed with excitement. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Dr. Grenfell will take just a few questions.”

  Grenfell looks into the rows, sees several hands rising from the darkness. He remembers Florence and smiles inside at the knowledge he can scarcely be touched now. A number of his books hover among audience members, too. The owners must have been following the text as he read. A strong pulse, almost a contraction, goes through him as he sees the ghostly, blue-white pages flutter open and closed. He feels the potency of his message in print. Spoken word and reputation are fine, but they are unreliable. Like water, these elements can seep into the ground and disappear if something more urgent claims general attention.

  In the flapping pages of Adrift on an Ice-Pan he sees the sections of his own Bible, a story not subject to change or dilution. It can be spread and reprinted to mee
t the clamour of demand.

  “How did your other dogs recover from the ordeal, Doctor?” asks a middle-aged man with a bristling moustache.

  “My dear sir,” Grenfell says, “I wrote the account you have heard tonight with the leader, Brin, curled around my feet. Dogs are the most wonderful, faithful, and unquestioning of followers.”

  “Indeed, Doctor!” The man nods, smiling broadly, delighted. “An example to us all!”

  “A few more,” mumbles the publisher, pointing to a frail-looking youngish man with pebble glasses in the front row.

  “Doctor,” the man says, pausing for breath. “I myself have for years suffered from a respiratory ailment.” He speaks slowly and quietly, but the audience hushes its collective breath for him. “And I find your example inspiring. Your determination to help others, your great courage, physical and moral. I hope you provide some information tonight about how to donate to your cause.”

  The publisher gives Grenfell a nod.

  It has not been discussed between them, and as this is officially a book launch, Grenfell had not intended to presume, but now feels the rush of another potential success. The “International Grenfell Association” may be only a few years away, after all.

  “I can only say,” the man continues, “that ill as I am, if Dr. Grenfell ever comes to lecture in my modest town, I will be only too glad to pick up my bed and walk!”

  The audience gives a rush of sympathetic laughter and applause as the man sits down.

  “And where, may I ask, is your town, sir?”

  “Portland, Maine, Doctor,” he says, half standing again.

  “I shall be glad to include it on a lecture circuit soon,” Grenfell says, knowing such a thing to be unlikely. The larger centres where he already has allies would yield better results. But this is no time to dampen expectations. Hands go up like doves under a station awning. The publisher shakes his head and smiles. Grenfell feels that at last he is coming home.

  — Chapter Twenty-Five —

  1939: St. Anthony

  ***

  The dust lifts into the blue once more. Dry cinders swirl around Grenfell, specks finding their way up his nose. The breeze, which is uncommonly warm, is not as he remembers St. Anthony’s winds. One might think the sun would feel like a benediction, but it crouches above him, watchful, disapproving. The whole of his life, it seems, has been under a magnifying glass, and the older he gets, the more his failing heart rebels, the more he feels judged by the red monster eye that peers from the other side of the lens.

  Three reporters huddle together like battered scarecrows on the ridge below, their loose-fitting mackintoshes and light overcoats flapping in the wind. Only one, from the St. John’s Evening Telegram, has a camera, and he fiddles with his device, refraining, at least for the moment, from taking any snaps. The three of them seem embarrassed, and look everywhere but at Grenfell.

  He feels his life force draining. It’s as though while he scatters his wife’s ashes, the reporters, through their inattention, are scattering him, so that his own spirit, in turn, drifts away with the dust clouds he creates.

  No doubt he seems forlorn enough to them, an ancient, grieving figure with downturned mouth and bent back. At the moment they would be right; he does feel miserable. When he arrived in St. Anthony a few days ago, he was buoyed by an up-swell of support. Circles of admirers, wives with flapping head scarves, husbands clutching their caps, bony-kneed children all grinned and clapped and even waved homemade paper Union Jacks at him. Waterfalls of triumph churned in his veins. His legacy was firmly implanted here as well as in the institutions and families that fed the International Grenfell Association.

  But something changed this morning when he began to climb Fox Farm Hill, especially when he realized the ragged reporters meant to stop below like his own disconnected shadows. For one awful moment he glanced below and saw in two of them those surly brothers who had assaulted him on the riverbank. He had to outface the sun’s glare to dispel the illusion before continuing his ascent.

  The people of the town have decided to give him privacy, too. He is quite alone as the ashes of his late wife spiral around him. In solitude he feels soiled, misled by his own ambition. It all feels terribly unfair. Everything he has done in his life has followed that simple schoolroom dictate to achieve distinction, to mould something of one’s image into the world into which one is born. Every book he ever opened in his father’s library or in the prep room at school spilled forth the names of those who had successfully risen like ice peaks above the surface of history either by science, politics, adventure, or missionary zeal. Every sports day, every prize-giving, reinforced the fire that has dictated his life’s path. And here he is, checking the flame one last time, and feeling not warmth, but absence.

  He resists a sudden impulse to call the reporters back to their job, to beg them to witness the event, to take photographs and bombard him with questions. Only the obvious and wildly inappropriate nature of such an act prevents him. A puff of his wife’s ashes hangs for a moment, expanding like a balloon as the wind dies. The paleness of the ash reminds him of Anne’s face, the lines of resignation like sled tracks through the snow, determined, stoical, joyless. He holds the memory of her expression, watches her features as he imagines her licking stamps or writing figures in the International Grenfell Association ledgers.

  He was told the dust was symbolic. It might be her, but could just as easily be the coffin or the previous occupant of the crematorium incinerator. And yet the stillness of this last cloud seems to possess her spirit. She always had a placidity and patience which mystified him. Month after month, year after year, in St. Anthony, detailing finances in her tight, controlled hand, writing to her influential friends for funds or to be her surrogate in Chicago, Michigan, or New York as a new IGA event is planned, managing from afar the mission’s Dogteam Tavern in Vermont when in truth she likely wished she had never left the American mainland at all.

  From her desk in St. Anthony she set up her bursary for students from Newfoundland and Labrador to study in New England. She organized fresh tours, ensured a minimum commitment from her benevolent organizations back home. All this accomplished with the mild tilt of her head and the constant flicking of her wrist.

  She seemed a thwarted woman, and at first the guilt had pained him. But slowly, by degrees, and because there was a lack of any sudden emotional crisis he had half expected, he got used to it. She was unhappy, but she didn’t complain. Only once did he dare open a door he had always meant to keep shut. His words came without warning, even to himself.

  “Perhaps you’d like a holiday in Chicago, the whole winter if you like.”

  She had been staring into space as though in a trance, the pen suspended in her hand. He wondered even as he heard the unprecedented words on his lips whether he was using them ironically, trying to chastise her, as a schoolmaster chastises a daydreaming student. But the undercurrent in his voice was closer to panic than sarcasm.

  She seemed confused rather than stung, her eyes narrowing, her shoulders bending toward her task.

  “I can’t,” she said. The irritation in her voice was real, and he had remembered their first meeting, the way her fingers reached and held onto the stem of her glass, the way she had leaned into the table and toward him and used the language of ownership—“one’s faith,” not only his, but hers. At once he saw it: she wasn’t here merely to help him. The reason she had subordinated her life to his was because she saw in it something greater than herself, and something greater than him, too.

  She had faith; she was its rightful owner. The boys from coastal Labrador and Newfoundland who might gain a thorough grounding in the classics, in European and American history, were real to her. The knowledge made his insides shrivel. He had become used to congratulating himself for choosing well and for making a missionary of his wife. She had learned to sacr
ifice, he had told himself, and somewhere in his mind lurked the belief that she was sacrificing for him, for his faith, his mission. But this was not the case. Her mission had predated his and she surpassed him in faith. She wanted nothing in return, not glory or thanks, not even happiness.

  The swirl of Anne’s cloud curls around him now as the breeze returns. Faith: the word to him is like dust falling in his hair, touching down on his earlobe. Florence and his rival enter his mind, he isn’t sure why. More than thirty years ago, soon after Florence heckled him at the lecture, a man and a woman were found to be impersonating himself and his wife.

  The descriptions that appeared in the newspaper were sent to him also independently in a letter from one of his supporters. Together they made him almost certain the imposters were Florence and her husband. The act of imposture had unsettled him more than the heckling; there was something so deeply invasive about it. His supporters expected him to be angry, hinted that lawsuits might be advisable.

  Finally he was shown a photograph. Perrin, an author and a mutual friend of his publisher, had invited him to dine in a New York restaurant. Perrin passed the picture to Grenfell during coffee, and Grenfell had immediately recognized the face, the startled, puffy eyes and the moustache like his own. The rival, Florence’s husband, looked much as he had that evening when Florence gate-crashed his lecture. Grenfell glanced at his companion, squinted at the photograph, held it at arm’s length, and dabbed his lips. The imposter appeared to be in an elevator, the cage half-drawn.

  “This is the man,” said Perrin. “Does he look familiar?”

  But it was too late to tell the truth; Grenfell had already play-acted confusion at the image. “We have a name—a doctor who studied with you for a while in London. We think it’s the same person.”