Lake in the Clouds

by Sara Donati

  “Look, Josie.” An old man wrapped in a striped blanket turned to his neighbor. “An Indian princess come to the poor-house. Maybe she’ll want to share your bed, eh?” And he let out a huffing laugh that quickly turned into a cough.

  There was a raised desk at the far end of the room, and next to it a row of children standing patiently with bundles clasped to their chests. The oldest of them, a boy, held a crying baby that seemed to be covered from scalp to toe with a scaly rash. The porter was making notes on a pile of papers with a ragged quill, and he didn’t look up until Hannah stood directly before his desk.

  He was maybe thirty, with a shock of greasy hair that fell forward over his brow. His fingers were ink stained and so was his chin with its few dark hairs, which he was stroking in a distracted way. When he looked up at her he smiled with only one side of his mouth, drawing attention to the cleft in his lip, poorly hidden by a feathery mustache.

  “May I help you?” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the crying baby.

  Hannah introduced herself and asked for Dr. Simon.

  The porter’s stained fingers stopped wandering through his chin hairs while he looked at Hannah more closely, taking in the plain gray wool work gown and apron in an old-fashioned cut, the cloak of boiled wool and her medical bag.

  “The new assistant?”

  “Yes. For a short time, anyway.”

  The oldest of the children raised his voice to ask a question in a language Hannah didn’t recognize. He had eyes the same shade of gray as Elizabeth.

  “Irish orphans,” said the porter. “Both parents died on the passage over. They want to know if you have a war club in your bag.” He translated this question as if it were perfectly reasonable, but not especially interesting.

  “You speak Irish, Mr.—”

  “Chamberlain. I do. My mother is Irish.”

  “You can tell them that I carry no weapons. Tell them that I’m a doctor.”

  One corner of his mouth jerked, but he did as she asked and got in return another, much longer question from the boy.

  “You’re the first Indian they’ve ever laid eyes on, miss, and the first woman doctor. You can see by the look on his face that it will take more than my word.”

  The boy was looking at her expectantly, and so Hannah opened the bag to show them that it contained nothing more than her medical instruments, her notebooks, two full-length aprons, and the food that Mrs. Douglas had packed for her when she refused breakfast. The smallest of the children put his head so far inside that his hair fell forward and Hannah could see the lice crawling on the back of a dirty neck. When he looked up again his eyes were perfectly round.

  “Arán.”

  Hannah gave the porter a questioning glance.

  “It’s the bread he’s looking at.”

  “They’re hungry?”

  He nodded. “They always are. As soon as I get the paperwork finished they’ll go off to the bathhouse and then the kitchens. And then Dr. Simon will want to see them in the Kine-Pox office.”

  Hannah took out the bread wrapped in a piece of linen and handed it to the oldest boy. “Tell him to divide it evenly. Now where do I find Dr. Simon?”

  The children had fallen over the bread and paid no more attention to Hannah.

  “Somewhere in the sick wards, most likely.” He reached under the table and a shrill bell rang twice, once short and once long.

  “Mrs. Sloo will show you the way.”

  A small woman had appeared at Hannah’s elbow, as quick and silent as a shadow in spite of the fact that she was easily as wide as she was tall. Under a startling white mobcap perfect iron gray curls were lined up in a row across her forehead. Dark brown eyes huddled close around a tiny fist of a nose, and below that was a full-lipped mouth perfectly shaped, but no wider than a spoon. Both sides of that astonishing mouth were turned up in a smile that showed a line of perfectly white and even teeth, as small as a child’s, in gums the color of ripe cherries. It was a face of contradictions, but with a quick, intelligent, and clearly impatient expression.

  “The new assistant, I take it.” Mrs. Sloo looked Hannah up and down. “I’m the housekeeper, twenty years now, old place and new. Mr. Sloo’s the keeper of the bridewell, not the gaol, mind, but the bridewell. Expect you passed by there on your way uptown.”

  Then she was off, walking at a rolling pace that defied her size, her skirts snapping around her.

  “You’ll want to know your way around,” she said, putting back her head to throw her voice up toward the ceiling. “This is a big place, easy to get lost. Mr. Furman’s office there, the superintendent. A devil for detail is Mr. Furman. Mr. Cox, purveyor. You’ll want to stay out of Mr. Cox’s way of a morning till he’s had his coffee. He’s a right bear without his coffee, is Mr. Cox. This hallway takes you out to the kitchens and bake house. Breakfast at six, dinner at noon, supper at six is how we working folk do it. I expect you’re used to breakfast at eleven and dinner at four, but you’ll adjust or go hungry, like everybody else. That way to the washhouse and beyond that’s the workhouse, that’s where you’ll find all the able-bodied men from seven till six. The able-bodied work here or they don’t eat. Cobblers, hoopers, what have you. Two carpenters do naught but make coffins. Most of them we use ourselves and the rest Mr. Cox sells or barters. A fierce man in a barter is Mr. Cox.

  “Out that way you’ll find the cow barn and the gardens. We raise most of our own vegetables or we did anyway when we weren’t so crowded. We’ve got them sleeping and eating in shifts these days.

  “It’s Mr. Cox’s business to scare up whatever it is we can’t grow or raise. Keeps him busy. That there’s the records office, where Mr. Eddy does his work. The indenturing and so forth, where orphans come from and where they go, the vessel book, papers enough to bury a standing man. Last year he found masters for forty-three of our young ones. Joiners and butchers and what have you, the girls in service.”

  She pivoted around suddenly to look up at Hannah. “You’ll have seen two of our girls, went into service at the Spencers’ on Whitehall. Amanda Blake and Bertha Dawson. Good strong girls, know their place and their work too. Bertha was born in the old place, on a Tuesday. Girls born in the poorhouse of a Tuesday—the ones that live long enough—are all called Bertha. What day of the week were you born?”

  Hannah was so taken aback by this question that she stopped. “I don’t know.”

  Mrs. Sloo sniffed and continued her strange toddling walk. They had come to a set of double doors and she opened these inward to a large room where thirty or more women were at work. “Mostly spinners and weavers in this room. Used to have the oakum pickers in here too, but the creosote stink got to be too much. Can’t have the girls sicking up into the flax.”

  She shut the doors just as suddenly as she had opened them, before Hannah could get any feel for the place or even make eye contact with the children who were bent over flax combs.

  “That there’s where the seamstresses work, the tailors next to them. We don’t hold with men and women working in the same room, not here. This stairway goes up to the dormitories. Men on the third floor, women and children on the second. Eight hundred and seventeen all told, with the two new ones born in the night still living. And these doors will take you into the sick wards.”

  She stopped just short of the double doors and knotted her red chapped hands together as if to keep herself from touching them.

  “This is as far as I go.” Her tone had shifted from the businesslike to something else, and Hannah saw that the tiny mouth had set itself hard. “You’ll have to find your own way from here.”

  “I think I can manage,” Hannah said.

  Mrs. Sloo leaned forward, her round face tilted up to Hannah’s as if to examine the color of her eyes. “If you know what’s good for you you’ll turn around and go home.”

  Hannah stepped back in her surprise.

  “You think I can’t read a newspaper? I know all about you. Not even twenty years o
n you, and there you stand. I’ll tell you this. Latin won’t do you any good beyond those doors. You’re no use in the lying-in ward as nobody will want a red woman to midwife, and the sick wards are no place for a decent female, nor not even for a Mohawk princess who fancies herself a doctor. No good can come of it, that much I promise you.”

  “Newspaper?” Hannah echoed.

  Mrs. Sloo sniffed loudly, turned on her heel, and trundled her way back down the hall.

  On the other side of the double doors the short hallway looked much the same, with pale green walls and an uneven floor of wide oak planking. Doors lined both walls, and on each of them was a carefully polished brass plaque: Visiting Physicians, Suspended Animation Rescue, Apothecary. A line of people, men and women both, were waiting quietly outside this last door, all of them dressed in linsey-woolsey, most of the men in heavy clogs. One of them held a bloody rag to one eye while the other, bright blue, stared at Hannah in open disapproval. The apothecary door stood open, and Hannah had a glimpse of shelves lined with bottles and jars. A man stood with his back to her bent over a mortar, a small woman waiting to one side with her hands folded in front of her. The apothecary’s hair stood out in a halo of frizzed curls around his head, backlit by the sun.

  “Not now, Mr. Furman!” he thundered without turning around, and Hannah went on.

  Another set of double doors opened into a very different kind of room, one as wide as the building itself and lined with beds, each of them occupied by a man, all of whom were looking directly at her. She saw yellowed skin and sunken eyes and swollen joints, a face overwhelmed by carbuncles, a belly swollen as large as a woman on the verge of childbirth. Each of these men was sick unto death; Hannah could see it in their faces.

  She said, “I’m looking for Dr. Simon and the Kine-Pox Institution.”

  This got her nothing but more stares, and so she stepped farther into the room. “Dr. Simon is expecting me.”

  A door swung open at the far end of the ward. The man who appeared there was tall and angular, with quick dark eyes underscored by shadows, a strong nose and chin, and hair that had been cut so short that it showed every curve of his skull. “Miss Bonner?”

  “Yes.” Hannah let out a great sigh of relief.

  “Dr. Simon’s office is this way.”

  As soon as the door was shut behind her Hannah said, “Are there no women on the wards at all?”

  He cast her an unapologetically curious glance. “Mrs. Sloo tried to scare you off, eh? Never mind, she does it to everybody. There’s women enough coming into the men’s ward, day in and day out. Visitors and the cleaning women, and Mrs. Graham comes with the charity ladies once a week at least, with broth and bible pamphlets.”

  His way of talking was both dismissive and a little forward, but Hannah had expected as much. He was testing her, of course, to see what she was made of. Hannah wondered if there would be anyone in this whole place who might welcome her without giving voice to their misgivings.

  “I expect they’ve never seen an Indian here.”

  “Oh, they’ve seen Indians, but not dressed like you are.”

  Before Hannah could decide whether to be insulted or curious about this comment, he continued.

  “Most of them didn’t talk to you because they can’t. A good sixty percent of the inmates have only Irish or German. Just two Americans on the ward right now, and you won’t get much out of either of them.”

  “And why not?”

  He stopped to look at her. “Blue Harry—the man with the swollen abdomen—is stone-deaf, and Old Thomas doesn’t talk to anybody except Mrs. Sloo, or so they say. I’ve never heard it, myself. That’s the lying-in ward, there. Six beds, all of them full. We could do with twenty and still keep them filled. Here’s Dr. Simon’s office.”

  He opened the door with a flourish. “He’ll be right in, Miss Bonner.” There was a moment’s hesitation while he studied the door frame. “Have you read the newspaper this morning?”

  The question took her by surprise. “You are the second person to mention the newspaper to me. I haven’t read it. Should I?”

  He shrugged again, shoulders moving abruptly under his coat. “I would, if I were you.”

  Irritation slid down Hannah’s back and straightened it. “You are very mysterious, Mr.—”

  “Dr. Savard. I’m Dr. Simon’s assistant.”

  “Dr. Savard. What newspaper are you talking about?”

  “It’s there on the desk,” he said. “The New-York Intelligencer. You can’t miss the article, it’s called ‘Red Prodigy.’”

  Chapter 22

  New-York Intelligencer

  April 20, 1802

  We have both seen and heard of such examples of extraordinary acumen in the Aborigines of this country as caused us to deplore the unhappy fate of the Indian tribes. It seems to us that no civilized nation of Europe has yet produced any individual—much less one of the gentle sex—of the same astonishing powers as were exhibited yesterday at the New-York Dispensary by a young lady of the Mohawk. We were present when the esteemed physicians of that institution met with the young lady, who presented herself as a student, wishing to learn the methods of Dr. Jenner’s vaccinations against Smallpox, that she might carry this skill with her to the frontier.

  Even the late Mrs. Wollstonecraft, whose little volume on the Rights of Women shocked and perturbed so many, would have been surprised to see her philosophy bear fruit so soon, and in one so young, for the lady in question is a mere eighteen years of age. She is tall for her sex, and her proportions are equal to that of those exquisite models of art which the genius of antiquity has left as a standard for modern taste. It is true that her complexion is of a dark copper shade, but her eyes are entirely destitute of the ferocity which is a general characteristic of the Indian tribes, and of the Mohawk in particular. They are quick and penetrating and at the same time have the placid regard which always fascinates and attracts attention. This young lady shows all the advantages of being raised in a civilized home. Her speech and dress most especially (she wore a simple but elegant, if somewhat outdated, lawn gown with a sash, bodice scarf, and shawl embroidered in green) display a taste uncommon to savages. But her mental talents surpassed even the considerable charms of her person.

  The physicians gathered to interview the young Mohawk in the modest meeting room of the Dispensary. They began by asking her to recount her training in medicine. She complied in an unadorned, most refined language, and in doing so recounted a history that rivals Herr von Goethe’s astonishing tale of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. In her short life her teachers have included such diverse personages as her own grandmother and great-grandmother, both healers and clan mothers of the near defunct Mohawk nation, Dr. Richard Todd of Albany and Paradise, whom she has served in an informal apprenticeship for the last three years, and Hakim Ibrahim Dehlavi ibn Abdul Rahman Balkhi, a Musselman physician of great repute who visited with this city’s physicians just ten days ago.

  Dr. Valentine Simon, the gentleman responsible for so much of the good work among the poor of this city and the founder of the Kine-Pox Institution, asked her a number of questions. On the treatment of burns, cramp colic, fevers, and a number of other common complaints the young Mohawk lady answered to the general satisfaction of the physicians. A larger discussion ensued on the topic of the treatment of malignant quinsy, which she had occasion to see and treat in her own village last summer, and of consumption, which Dr. Todd of Paradise has been treating with revolutionary methods from abroad. The physicians asked detailed questions, which she answered as concisely as she had answered all others.

  A dispute broke out among the physicians on the subject of the Bilious or Yellow Fever, sometimes called the American Plague, which has struck so cruelly at our cities in the last ten years. While the physicians argued the questions of origin, contagion, and treatment, the young lady listened politely without interruption. Dr. Ehrlich, visiting from Philadelphia, then asked her opinion on the subj
ect, to which the young Mohawk replied that she knows the disease only by its reputation and conflicting reports, and found herself therefore unable to express any opinion at all. Dr. Ehrlich pressed her on the issue of Dr. Benjamin Rush’s regimen of large doses of cathartic, specifically mercury and jalap, followed by copious bleeding.

  At this the young lady hesitated, and then replied that she was predisposed to the opinion of a Dr. Powell of Boston, who claims that ingestion of mercury is far more damaging than the disease it is meant to cure. She added in assured tones that she was disinclined to excessive bloodletting, especially in the case of such a debilitating disease. In response to such strong opinions Dr. Ehrlich suggested that her unorthodox and incomplete education in medicine had overlooked the teachings of the immortal Hippocrates, who advocated for extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure. The young Mohawk woman replied to Dr. Ehrlich with more of Hippocrates but now in Latin: Primum est non nocere. First do no harm.

  It is our opinion that nature rarely combines such prodigious talent, self-awareness, and magnetism in an individual, and we are aware of no other case in which such rare gifts have been bestowed upon an Indian or even a lady of such great personal charms. We join the physicians of the New-York Dispensary in welcoming this phenomenon to our city, and wish her the best of luck in her work.

  Chapter 23

  The strangest part, Hannah thought to herself when she had read the article twice, was that the journalist—Henry Lamm, she reminded herself—that Mr. Lamm had meant to praise her. Others would read what he had written and call it complimentary, and in fact she could not point to any factual errors or exaggeration. She had surprised him with the simple fact that she could speak an articulate sentence, and that was the problem exactly: people expected things from her that she could not provide, and she had no choice but to surprise them. In the end there was no way to respond to such a sly combination of praise and censure; Hannah understood somehow that to reject what Mr. Lamm would surely think kindness and generosity would make an enemy of him. The well-to-do most often reacted badly when their charity was closely examined.