What Heals the Heart

by Karen A. Wyle

  A familiar voice jarred him from his brooding. “Something wrong with the beer in my place? Or something wrong in your world?”

  Joshua looked up at Mamie and mustered up the closest he could come to a smile. “The beer is as fine as always. I was contemplating an intractable dilemma.”

  “I know. Freida Blum told me.”

  “My God, already?” The exclamation burst out of him before he could frame a more temperate response. And then, of course, he blushed.

  At least Mamie was used to far franker language. She chuckled and patted his shoulder. “I’m glad she did. I may have an answer. I’ve been paying you fifty cents for each of my girls for each visit, right?”

  He held himself back from speculating on where she was headed. “Yes, and welcome it is, too.” It was, in fact, the top of his range of fees, because both of them knew she could well afford it. “Of course, that’s not counting the, uh, other payment.”

  “That’s right. And you know I usually have around a dozen girls at any one time. And you check them over once a month, and tend to any with a particular need in between, that not being a rare occurrence.”

  It was true enough. Girls that chose to be, or ended up as, prostitutes didn’t tend toward careful habits or quiet living. He couldn’t count how many bruises and lacerations he’d treated due to fights between them — though Mamie allowed only one such, followed by a stern warning, before letting a girl go for a second offense. And once in a while a customer would get rough, which usually meant Joshua had another patient after Mamie’s boys got through with him. And then there were the hangovers and drug overdoses.

  “And of course the ‘other payment’ you mention takes time a girl could spend with another customer or two. Time being money, you could say, that adds up some.”

  Somehow he managed not to blush a second time. “And you’re reckoning —”

  “I reckon that over the course of a year, we pay you enough, one way or the other, to take care of that train ticket you’re wanting. East and west again.”

  She couldn’t know that he might need two tickets west. But if he used the cheapest possible type of railroad travel, he could save money for something better on the way home, if somehow events fell that way.

  “So what do you say, Doc?” Perhaps reading him as more easily bothered than usual, she spared him the usual nickname. “I’ll pay you in advance for your services over one year, as best we can figure it. And you can go take care of another lady first.”

  Joshua stood up, the better to grasp Mamie’s hands. “If you are sure this arrangement is fair to you, I gladly accept.”

  She gave their joined hands a shake and let go to slap him on the back. “That’s settled, then! I’ll go to the safe and get your money. And you drink that beer!”

  Striding to his rooms, cash tucked in his waistcoat pocket, he ran through everything he needed to do before he could depart. Along with making arrangements for his patients during his absence, he would need to tell Freida what had happened, awkward as that task might be —

  The thought that came to him stopped him mid-stride, so that he almost tripped over his own feet. Had Freida known what Mamie would propose? Had they even discussed it?

  He shook his head as if he could dislodge the image of such a conference. He could only hope that if it had taken place, Freida would refrain from telling him as much.

  He especially hoped she would not comment on how the new regimen would eliminate his private enjoyment of Mamie’s girls. Unless, of course, he paid for their time out of pocket. But it was hardly likely he would have the cash to spare. Besides which, the thought had somehow, lately, grown less enticing.

  Later that afternoon, he rode over to Rushing and visited the town’s resident doctor, a scholarly-looking man with half-glasses and an ancient but well-maintained frock coat. When the doctor offered Joshua a glass of some sort of amber liquor from a flask in his desk, Joshua considered it politic to accept. Sipping the potent liquor cautiously, he broached the reason for his visit. “I am obliged to make a journey of perhaps two weeks, possibly more, and would like to leave as soon as possible. Would you consent to see those patients in Cowbird Creek who most urgently need a physician until I return?”

  The doctor flashed a saturnine smile. “With a good will. But I do not promise to deliver them back to you afterward, if they are pleased with my services.”

  Next, Joshua went to see Robert. He filled him in on Clara’s departure and its disturbing circumstances, asked him to direct those needing medical attention to the doctor in Rushing, and then made the request perhaps closest to his heart. “Would you look after Major until I return?”

  “That’s as easy an ask as none at all. Major looks after himself, generally. I’ll give him my scraps and a place by my fire, most happily. But just what do you propose to do?”

  Joshua twisted his hat in his hands. “That depends on what I find. If she’s being ill-treated, I can try to remedy it. If she didn’t go there of her own free will . . . well, I would try to do something to gain her release, though I confess I’ve no present notion how. And at the least, I can give the doctors the information they lack as to what went before.”

  Robert filled and lit his pipe. “Are you planning to introduce yourself as her doctor? I hope you won’t take it ill my mentioning the fact, but you’ve no curly-lettered sheepskin hanging in your office, handed out by some college. Will those Eastern doctors treat you as one of their fraternity?”

  “I don’t take it ill. I’ve been pondering that very matter. But Miss Brook has never been my patient. I can present myself as friend and witness, and whether they see me as a doctor or no, I can try to get them to listen.”

  His final call on Freida proved uneventful. Rachel greeted him prettily, exclaiming about her enjoyment of the local landscape and the friendliness of the townspeople. Freida, possibly due to Rachel’s presence, refrained from embarrassing him with any revelations.

  He of course examined her, removing with her to her bedroom for privacy. With some anxiety, he inspecting her extremities, listening to her heart and requiring her to breathe for him. To his relief, the tincture of foxglove and the diuretic tea seemed to have slowed or even arrested the progress of her symptoms. “May I rely on you to keep to the regimen I’ve prescribed while I’m away?”

  She pretended to scoff. “Regimen, such a fancy word for taking drops and drinking tea! But I’ll do it, I wouldn’t want you to worry while you’re busy.”

  As he packed up his bag, he could see out of the corner of his eye that Freida was studying him, a disquieting look in her eye. He did not want to know what was behind it. He had final preparations to make, and then a train to catch.

  Chapter 23

  The hospital was deep in New England. Joshua had not taken a long train ride since the several trains that carried him to Nebraska. He was underslept enough to worry that he might doze off and miss one of the stops where he had to change trains, but the discomforts of the journey helped him to stay awake. He had brought two blankets, one for warmth in the unheated railroad car and one to pad the bare wooden seat, but they did not substitute for a fireplace or a mattress. Nor did the chugging and clacking and rumbling, the vibration beneath him, and the occasional varying hoots and shrieks of the whistle make slumber easy. How soft he had become, after so often falling asleep in moments on rocky ground, with nothing but a thin blanket wrapped around the tattered remains of a uniform, and in spite of the constant tumult of orders and laughter and cursing and the roar of not-always-distant cannon.

  It was strange and novel to have nothing in particular to do for hours on end. He could have used the time to plan his approach to the hospital, if he had any idea what he would find there. Lacking the same, and having managed to grab a seat near a window, he read the only book he owned that discussed nervous disorders, in the hope of finding either information that might help Clara or jargon that might make him more acceptable to her doctors. When he had finish
ed it, he gazed out at snow-covered fields, farms, barns, cattle, when smoke and steam did not obscure the view; or tried to catch, over all the other noises, the irregular tapping of sleet on the window of the car. And all the while, he pondered what little he knew.

  If only he had a better sense of her uncle’s character, he could make some reasonable guess as to what sort of hospital the man had chosen for her. Would it be a grim asylum with barred windows and shrieking inmates? Or a spic-and-span modern facility?

  Freida had insisted on sending him off with provisions, a roasted chicken and apples and some of her rolled cookies. This bounty did not last as long as she might have imagined, Joshua feeling it right to share it with the passengers beside him. Once it was gone, and except when a news butcher boarded the train to sell stale sandwiches and other sundries, Joshua perforce joined the other passengers in besieging the sandwich vendors at depots during the train’s brief stops, except when the call of nature had priority.

  The first change of trains meant a farewell to the seat by the window, with the silver lining that he felt no need to leave one of his blankets as a place marker and risk the loss of it. The change meant less time during the day when he could read, and more time to brood about what awaited him.

  What he found, when he had reached the final station and walked a mile, was a pastoral setting and a stone structure pleasing to the eye. As he approached the front walk, a uniformed nurse was escorting a man around a pond, encouraging him to keep up a good pace. Other patients were seated on benches here and there, bundled up against the chill and presumably so placed for the value of fresh air.

  No one seemed particularly surprised or alarmed to see him strolling up. Inside, another nurse sat behind a large desk. A nook to one side held a smaller desk and a man, in garments of a somewhat more martial character. Behind the nurse was a large lobby, and sounds came from beyond it suggestive of a dining hall, the clinking of cutlery on china, the murmur of voices and shuffling of feet. A large spiral staircase rose from the lobby to one or more upper stories. Clara’s immediate family might be simple farmers, but either her uncle or some other connection must have sufficient means to keep her in such an establishment.

  But he could not stand about gawking. Doing his best to assume a confident air, he approached the nurse and began his inquiries.

  It was a doctor who led him to a small sitting room where Clara would shortly be brought. He studied Joshua as if trying to piece him into a puzzle. “After your visit, I would much appreciate it if you would come see me in my office.” He pointed to a closed door in the corridor through which they were passing.

  All the better, so long as he was allowed to do more than respond to interrogation. “I would appreciate that opportunity as well.”

  The room looked out on well-maintained lawns and paths. The sunshine that had graced Joshua’s earlier walk was yielding to clouds. The gloom suited his apprehension. Would he be granted enough time with Clara to assess her state of mind? Would the doctor heed what he had to say? Would he be allowed back for a second visit, or a third?

  What could he hope to accomplish, and what failure could he withstand?

  Then a nurse was escorting Clara in. “We will, of course, leave this door open. I’ll return for the patient in thirty minutes.” The heels of her sturdy shoes click-clacked as she headed back down the hall.

  Clara was indeed too thin, painfully so. But she had color in her cheeks, and her expression was not so haunted as Joshua had expected. Maybe this place had been what she needed, after all. Maybe his journey had been not just quixotic but utterly unnecessary.

  Still, she held out her hand to him with something like eagerness. And she spoke first. “I thought I wanted to see no one from home. But I was thinking of family. I’m glad to see you.”

  He returned her firm hand clasp — he could hardly do otherwise — and then let go. He gestured to the two easy chairs by the window; she took his suggestion and sat, as did he. “You look . . . less unwell than I had feared.”

  Her smile had some bitterness to it. “I scarcely dare to be unwell, with all my uncle is paying for me to live in luxury.” Then she shook her head as if in self-reproach. “I do believe the serenity here, and the absence of obligations, has lessened the turmoil in my spirit. What is that new word? I am on vacation, and somewhat the better for it. . . . So your diagnosis is encouraging?”

  He pursed his lips, considering his answer. Her frankness suggested she would not easily take offense. “I would like to see you less thin.”

  “So would the doctors and staff. They do their best to fatten us like princes. You should see the meals — meat three times a day, eggs, cocoa . . . . And fresh vegetables, which I do appreciate, whether or not I actually consume them. I’m sure you remember how hard it was to come by anything of the sort, during the war.”

  Joshua shuddered in recollection. “I remember all too well what we were given instead, sometimes — the desiccated vegetables issued to us, that tasted and smelled like something ladled out of the latrines.”

  Had he offended Clara by speaking so bluntly? Apparently not — she grimaced in agreement before returning to her account. “And all the drink they urge on us! Rum, sherry, port, stout — some medical authority has apparently decided that disordered nerves are best addressed with large quantities of alcohol. And morphia.” She shuddered. “I resisted the morphia. Forcefully. It made for rather an unpleasant scene.”

  Given her likely associations with the drug, he could well understand it. “But the meals? You resist them as well, it seems. Why?”

  Clara hesitated. “It is not so much deliberate resistance as . . . I look at the bountiful repasts, the clean table linen and sparkling-clean tumblers, and see as if overlaid on it a muddy field drowning in rain, and cold rations in my hand. The same can occur without warning when I take my prescribed walks on well-raked paths or close-mown grass. I hear nothing but the murmur of distant voices, birdsong, breezes in the trees, and I am disoriented by the absence of other sounds, of gunfire and artillery and the anguished shouts of men.”

  His conscience smote him. She would not be suffering to this extent if he had not drawn her into a scene so much like her wartime experiences. Though she had answered the summons before he received his own, and had not refused it . . . . “Do the doctors know your history?”

  Her eyebrows lifted, and her mouth twisted in what was barely a smile. “I do not recall them troubling to ask me for it. They spoke to my uncle at some length, but I was not privy to the conversation.”

  Disdain of highly credentialed doctor for mere patient? Or of man for woman? “Would you allow me to enlighten them?”

  She laughed outright. “Only if you inform me, after, of whether they appeared chagrined at their ignorance.”

  She turned to look out the window, then back at him. “What feelings does this place inspire in you?”

  He gazed out the window at the bucolic landscape. “The peace of it is soothing.”

  “And if you had the opportunity, as it appears I have, to stay here for weeks or months, would that proposal appeal to you?”

  He considered the matter. “A week, perhaps, or even two. But I believe I would then repine. The idleness of it would make me restless — and perhaps increase the difficulties I myself face from time to time.”

  Her eyes widened briefly — not, he guessed, at the fact of his condition echoing her own, which she had had the opportunity to observe, but at his admission of it.

  The approach of purposeful footsteps heralded the nurse’s return. Both of them arose. Joshua said, bowing, “I will visit again, if I may.”

  She caught and held his gaze. “I hope you will.”

  “Should I fail to do so, please believe that the indulgence of your . . . caretakers has diminished, rather than my own will.”

  Clara gave the nurse no very cordial look, then appeared to consider the imprudence of showing hostility and instead assumed a blank expression the nurse
seemed to take for granted. As the nurse led Joshua away, he asked her to convey him to the office previously shown to him. The doctor, however, was elsewhere. The nurse installed him in the straight chair opposite the doctor’s desk and went in search. Joshua would have liked to get out his pipe, but for all he knew the doctor disliked smoke. Instead, he sat and fidgeted.

  After what might have been ten minutes, the nurse reappeared, doctor in tow. He nodded at Joshua with no apologies for his absence and sat down behind his desk. “I wanted to discuss your . . . friend’s diagnosis.”

  Joshua sat up straight. “As did I. Would you permit me to begin that discussion by providing some information of which Miss Brook’s family are unaware?”

  The doctor narrowed his eyes and said curtly, “Proceed.”

  Wondering at the almost-hostility in the doctor’s manner, Joshua summarized what he knew of Clara’s wartime experiences and the events that would have called them freshly to mind. He decided to leave unmentioned his own claim to physician status, which was not, strictly speaking, relevant, and might have moved his listener to be contrary.

  The doctor did, as Clara had predicted, look somewhat nonplussed. When Joshua had finished, he leaned back in his chair. “Miss Brook’s uncle had provided us with a somewhat different explanation of her melancholia. Or, according to you, her neurasthenia. He had believed her to be suffering from a disappointment in love. And his description of the man who had spoken to the patient just prior to her departure is a tolerable portrait of yourself.”

  Joshua felt himself flush, and flushed more from the annoyance of it. “I did indeed speak to Miss Brook at the train station, and to her uncle as well. But our acquaintance has never been . . . tender in quality. I respect and admire her abilities, and find her a pleasant conversationalist. And the lady has never shown any signs of any particular interest in me.”