The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  When she looked up after closing Hawkins’s medical journal, the last book, her father was watching her as if he’d been waiting for a fever to break. Hawkins was smoking by the fire.

  “Where are the Moores?” she asked.

  “They went walking, don’t you remember?” Hawkins said. “You were very absorbed.”

  Caroline folded her hands. “I don’t think I quite understand all this.”

  Hawkins seemed to find what she’d said very funny. He made a show of trying to swallow his laughter. Caroline waited with her cheeks burning, though she couldn’t have said exactly why. She looked at her father. Are you just going to let him laugh?

  “Hawkins,” Samuel said.

  Hawkins regained possession. “Forgive me. Forgive me. It’s just that of course you don’t understand, Caroline.”

  “What does that mean?”

  A pause in which he let meanings echo above her head. She felt furious at the life that had put those meanings out of her reach.

  Then, “Oh, only that you’ve been reading very dense medical texts. They aren’t written for a lay audience.”

  “It does all seem fairly full of contradiction,” Samuel said. “Some of these physicians are so certain the cause is physical, and some so certain the cause lies in the psyche, but there doesn’t seem to be much clarity or real specificity in either case.”

  “It’s a complex disorder, still poorly understood.”

  “Which camp are you in?” Caroline said. “I couldn’t tell, from your notes.”

  Hawkins stood and cracked his knuckles—broad, thick knuckles, hair below them and above too, all the way up to those blunt square fingertips. “I’m in the camp of it doesn’t matter. Quite a popular camp in practical medicine.”

  “But that’s—that’s just like something Thoreson would write,” Samuel said. “That contradicts everything we’ve ever—”

  Hawkins sighed. “Oh, Sam, calm down. I’m not making a philosophical argument. Medicine doesn’t deal in souls. We deal in bodies. If a treatment is effective and we don’t know for certain why, that doesn’t mean we don’t use the treatment.”

  We deal in bodies.

  “The treatment, though,” Caroline said. “This massage, this paroxysm. Is it—what part of the anatomy—”

  She did not want to be stammering.

  “All quite proper, of course,” Hawkins said. He turned to Samuel. “Of course, Sam. This is a treatment that in one way or another goes back hundreds of years, thousands.”

  “As does slavery,” Caroline said.

  Her father’s lips pinched together.

  She was seeing before her the girls’ open, mutable faces on her first day of teaching them. When she had stood before them and talked to them about beauty and loss.

  “They’re so young, Papa,” Caroline said. “So, so young.”

  Hawkins said, “That’s why we need to decide for them. The trick is not to tell them too much about it ahead of time, not to give any sort of resistance time to take hold. It’s best for everyone that way.”

  “I don’t know,” said Samuel.

  “Sam, really, there’s nothing at all to worry about. This has been done so many times before, and here it’s clearly indicated.”

  Caroline said, “It seems, Papa, that had we sent them home, their doctors would have been able to treat them after all, if this is all so well established. No life of draughts and darkness.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Hawkins said. “Many practitioners misdiagnose, or implement the treatment unskillfully, or are too squeamish to attempt it. And I do think in this case there’s a special suggestibility that’s set in—if we were to send them home now, each of them would still be thinking of herself as an ill girl, and that’s an idea that can take root and persist, despite treatment, even proper treatment. I’ve seen it happen. You’re doing what’s best.”

  Par-ox-ysm. Caroline tapped her fingers to the pulse of the word.

  She stood. “I’m going for a walk. While you discuss what’s best.”

  * * *

  *

  Outside the earth was hard beneath her feet, her steps dully percussive in the cold. The ground of Trilling Heart had gone to sleep on her, frozen with its back turned.

  Her mind spun and her hands and feet buzzed. It seemed the consensus was that one of those things might be making the other happen. Tricking the other. As if her mind and her body were two different beings, only clumsily attached.

  An animal within an animal. But which inside which?

  That twitching word paroxysm, and their girls, and Hawkins’s big, blunt hands.

  She heard shouting then. She turned the corner from the near field into the far one, and there were David and Sophia, arguing. “But you don’t—” Sophia was yelling. She stopped and took a step back from David when she saw Caroline, and resettled her scarf around her neck.

  “My apologies,” Caroline said.

  “No, we must apologize,” David said. His cheeks were flushed. “I was just explaining to Sophia that she shouldn’t meddle where her understanding is imperfect.”

  Caroline had waited for so long to hear David say something like this about Sophia’s understanding; she couldn’t have imagined she would find the words so unsatisfying. “None of us has perfect understanding here, I think,” she said.

  “Hawkins does. Hawkins does understand it; he’s seen it, he knows what steps to take,” David said.

  “He certainly thinks so,” said Sophia.

  “We’re still deciding what to do,” Caroline said. “I wanted a walk to clear my head. When you get back, tell them I’ll be just another minute.”

  David took Sophia’s elbow and turned her back toward the house, as if corralling a child.

  Caroline went on. She thought about her mother walking these same fields, dying eventually in these fields, and wondered—but no, the best doctors in Boston had called her epileptic and had never once mentioned the word hysteria, not that Caroline had heard. She had been an epileptic and an adulteress but not a hysteric, and thus had no place in current concerns. Her mother was not the point; Caroline’s own mind was not the point, her own hands, her own feet. The point was the girls lined up in their beds upstairs and what those girls would have done to them.

  Caroline would have liked to ask someone who was not Hawkins and who was not her father about how to proceed. Talk to someone who could help her understand what they were deciding before they decided it on the girls’ behalf.

  The fine society girl from Hawkins’s journal, perhaps. Hawkins’s representative patient. She would have things to say.

  Caroline imagined this girl walking beside her, stride for stride, her skirts rustling dryly.

  He says you’re better now, Caroline might say. Are you?

  The girl would lift her narrow shoulders. Pearls would roll across her collarbones. I don’t fall as often.

  Why did you fall?

  I don’t know. I couldn’t understand how everyone else stayed standing up.

  Had your pelvis felt heavy? Had you felt too full of something?

  Another lift.

  Was it because you wanted things you couldn’t have? Had you read about things, and that made you want them?

  I never much cared for reading.

  The treatment—was it all right? Did it help?

  It wasn’t too terrible. I tried not to pay much attention. Afterward I barely remembered anything.

  And now your life is better, now that you’re married, and you have your child? You’re fine now?

  I nearly died, having him. Everything seems different.

  You must love him very much.

  I must.

  Caroline imagined the girl back to her dinner parties and her new health, her son’s nursery; back to the pages of
Hawkins’s case notes. A representative, recovered patient. Who was Caroline to question the fact of a recovery?

  Yet Hawkins’s hands.

  She was walking now by the tree where she’d discovered the trilling heart nest. There it was, still at the base of the tree, where she’d set it again when her father had come out for Hawkins’s telegram. It still held its shape. As she passed, three birds, two females and a male, flew from the woods behind the tree to land on the lawn, to pace and peck.

  Caroline’s eye caught in the dark of the woods. Something about its depth, about the way the birds had flown as if coming from somewhere.

  She changed course, stepping toward the woods, toward the birds.

  She expected them to fly off—scatter before her as they had always done. And they did bounce and lift into the air, but then they landed again, just a bit back from where they’d been before. Arrayed themselves, almost, so she’d have to cross through the line of them to get to what was behind. She walked on, pulled now by a curiosity about how close they might let her get. Just as Eliza claimed to have been pulled, the day of her fainting. Fifteen feet. Slower now. Ten feet. Seven. She hadn’t been this close to any birds except the one that Hawkins had killed back in the summer.

  Then the larger female let forth its high, piercing call, and lifted into the air, and flew at Caroline’s head.

  It was coming for her eyes. Caroline ducked her face low and shielded it with her hands. It would pluck her eyes from her and stud its nest with them, wet twin trophies, weave them right into its fabric, entwine them in branches, twigs, hair, until they were dim and buried, and forever after Caroline would see not black but red, because this blindness would be a red, red sea.

  She crouched, her body trying to sink itself into the ground. She felt a breath of wind from the bird’s wings on the nape of her neck. She flinched farther down and into herself, anticipating the feel of its feet, their clutch, the tearing. Skin—it might want her skin too, to turn into a new surface, to lay as a damp cupping atop sticks and twigs.

  She could feel now on the skin of her neck and cheek the crawling weight of what the birds might lay on it after they’d taken it from her, and the pacing of their taloned feet.

  Now she heard the cries of the other birds and felt their stirrings around her in the air. Flying around her, in front of her, behind her, calling and calling to one another about their imminent theft of her eyes, skin, hair, clothing—all their plans to pick her bare. What they wanted to turn her into.

  She whirled and ran to save every part of herself.

  She ran only for a moment. As soon as she couldn’t hear the cries anymore, as soon as she couldn’t feel the air moving and all the places on her where she might lose something, her fear fell away.

  She stopped, turned around, and looked back at the birds where they were gathered on the lawn still. They were pecking now and not watching her at all.

  We are only birds. What else?

  How fanciful, how absurd, to believe they’d been attacking her with some sort of purpose.

  Thankfully no one had seen. Caroline spun in the cold quiet and all around her saw nothing but space, grass, trees. She’d revealed herself to be a fool only to herself—less righteous and rational than David or Hawkins or her father. But then none of them had been here. She had been. Who was to say the birds had not been trying to take out her eyes? And that her fingers did not hum and tingle? And that all decisions about the girls’ illness were best made by others with more distanced understanding than the girls themselves?

  These girls they were trying to teach to be as sure as anyone and to know when they had seen a thing.

  Caroline turned to walk back to the house—she would walk and not run, she could do this, she had it in her. And there was Hawkins after all, standing just outside the front door, watching.

  How long had he been watching?

  “That was quite something, Caroline,” he said.

  She squared her shoulders. Until she came close to him, she did not allow herself to alter her pace. “They startled me, that’s all.”

  “I could see that,” Hawkins said. “Are you often startled in that way?”

  “No, I find it takes something like birds flying at my head to do it,” she said.

  “Well, they’re birds. They do fly. And you were walking toward them.”

  “It was only a reaction.”

  “Have you been feeling nervous lately?” Hawkins asked.

  Hysterical?

  “We’ve all been feeling nervous—how else should we feel?” Caroline said.

  She walked past him, through the door.

  Just inside stood Samuel. “I’ve just told David and Hawkins,” he said. “We were coming out to meet you. I’ve had time to consider now. I think it’s best we begin the treatment immediately.”

  “What? Papa, I’ve been thinking.” Hawkins came in behind her. “I’ve been thinking, and I’m really not sure we can.”

  “Of course we can,” Hawkins said.

  “We’d be deciding for them, and we aren’t their parents.”

  “Their parents have entrusted them to us,” Samuel said loudly.

  “But to take this sort of action? What if it harms them?”

  “Harms them?” Hawkins said. “I understand this has been a…trying time, Caroline. But really, how could it harm them?”

  Caroline looked only at Samuel. “You wanted to shape their souls,” she said. “I thought that’s what we were doing.”

  “Of course we are. But now their souls are ailing, in particular, specific ways that Hawkins has seen before and that have nothing to do with our project—other than that they must be addressed before the project can continue.”

  “Addressed?” she said.

  Her father and Hawkins looked at her.

  Are you being hysterical, Caroline?

  But his fingers, she wanted to say. But his hands. But those words in those books, so tight and small, no room there for an actual girl.

  She would have said it all, in a different room, in a different life. She knew she would have. In this one she did not trust her voice or the body it came from.

  “We’ll try it,” Samuel said in his best reasonable tone. “We’ll try it for one round of treatment, and we’ll see how they do. Just one, Caroline.”

  One for Abigail, one for Tabitha, one for Livia, Meg, Julia, Eliza, Felicity, Rebecca. One, one, one. Animals inside animals inside animals, all of them made to lie down.

  15.

  TREATMENT

  “Sometimes so many presences afflict me I am sure I shall come asunder,” she cried.

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 360)

  Hawkins said they should all attend the treatments. “At times the change is almost instantaneous.” He snapped his fingers. “How often do you get to see instantaneous change? Not like teaching.”

  Not like teaching, no.

  “Oh, I—I don’t think…,” Samuel stammered.

  “Yes, surely not,” said David.

  Both of them cringing, slinking away from the idea.

  “Please, gentlemen. This is nothing troops of medical school students haven’t seen,” said Hawkins. “Far less, actually. Then we’d even have the coverings off to show how it’s done.”

  “They’ll be covered?” David asked.

  “Ah,” said Samuel. “That seems—that seems more—yes.” He fiddled with the heavy round orb of clear glass that was always on his desk to weigh down his papers, against the possibility perhaps of a great whirling wind inside his study.

  Sophia was looking back and forth between the two of them, David and Samuel, as if she’d never seen them before.

  “With whom should we begin?” Samuel asked.

  “Not Miss Bell, of course,” Hawkins said. />
  “Why not?” Sophia said. “Why not, if she’s sickest?” She sat quietly beside David on the sofa and yet somehow gave the impression that at any moment she might leap up screaming. Screaming what? Caroline wondered. If she knew, she might scream it herself.

  Though when had Caroline ever stopped a thing in her life?

  “In her case the ailment and the belief in the ailment are worn in so deep it will take some doing to dig them out,” said Hawkins.

  “I don’t understand,” Sophia said. “Is she sick or isn’t she?”

  “Of course she is,” Hawkins said. “And we will treat her. But it’s an unusual kind of illness. The patient’s approach to treatment can make quite a difference in that treatment’s effects. In the event she’s resistant I would prefer to have already made some progress with the others.”

  “Abigail, perhaps?” Samuel ventured.

  “Or Meg? Meg might be better,” said David.

  Which features were they evaluating? They seemed to be discussing the girls themselves, not their particular symptoms. Which attributes? Times when the girls had held their eyes? Dropped them? Spoken loudly, quietly, not at all?

  Hawkins’s face pursed as if he were considering a particular taste.

  “Rebecca,” he said.

  * * *

  *

  Caroline wasn’t sure who moved her body up the stairs behind her father and David and Sophia, Hawkins leading them at the front of the line. It did not seem to be her. She did not feel as if she were really present. The world tilted and straightened as the group progressed—they were like that troop of medical students after all—but whatever was moving her feet didn’t mind. It didn’t mind either about the faint sibilation of the soles of those feet as they all stepped toward the door of Abigail and Rebecca’s room, as Hawkins knocked. As if the house were hissing but none of the others could tell, and even Caroline couldn’t tell, only her feet could.