“He was ill for the entire honeymoon,” Mrs. Boehm said, toying with the frilly edge of the coverlet and glancing at me from under her lashes. “I didn’t know what to think, Louise, and there was no one I could ask, so I thought I’d done something wrong, that I was too eager or willing, that I should have been more demure and less…” She sighed and shook her head. “Accommodating, I guess. I don’t know.
“Anyway, when we returned from the honeymoon, he carried me over the threshold into our first little bungalow and I thought maybe now we would become husband and wife in more than name only…but he had already instructed the movers to put our things in separate bedrooms. I know that’s old-fashioned, and I said so, but he insisted. He said a physician kept irregular hours and he couldn’t bear the thought of disturbing me every time he had an emergency call. I protested and said I didn’t mind at all but…” Her voice faltered. “I seemed to be the only one disappointed by the plans, and so the arrangement continued.” She looked away. “And continues to this day.”
I studied the carpet, embarrassed by the intimate revelation and not sure what to say.
“I know Nurse considers me a failure as a woman and a wife, but I need him, Louise. He’s the only man I’ve ever wanted. I know the sight of me as I am now is distressing and I try to make myself more attractive, but I so rarely get to see him…. I hear him walk down the hall and my heart, my whole body, just aches….” She took a shaky breath. “You’re too young to understand, but I love him and I miss him, I miss touching him and being a real wife….”
She said more, I know, but I had started singing “Happy Birthday” to my mother in my head and so I missed it.
Nurse was cleaning constantly now, scrubbing, waxing, boiling the bedding, lost in a world of disinfectant and invisible germs, in chewing the skin from her chapped bottom lip until it bled, and often appearing at Mrs. Boehm’s door right after lunch, before I could begin brushing her hair, ordering me from the room, and remaining inside with the door closed and locked behind me.
Dr. Boehm quit shaving and spent his days dressed in stained and unkempt work clothes. He came in from the workshop at night wearing bloody gloves with bits of fat and raw, gray flesh clinging to his sleeves, with boots caked with fetid gore, with his gaze feverish, jubilant, angry, his hands shaking and a finger always worrying a raw sore on the back of his neck near his shirt collar.
He changed his gloves before he ate, though, and before deciding to move the two-foot-tall white plaster sculpture out of his study and onto the middle of the dining table. He would stare at it as if in pain throughout the meal, not even bothering to acknowledge me and Nurse anymore, muttering instead at the statue, a woman with the barest of facial features and cradling a young child in her arms. The child’s head was nestled in the crook of her shoulder, and its arms wound around her neck.
It was a stark, beautiful piece, and while Dr. Boehm was very possessive of it, pausing to stroke the face or turn it slightly toward his place at the table, I touched it, too, when no one was looking because the statue’s tender embrace made me think of my mother.
Nurse and I never questioned the statue’s presence, supposing, I guess, that the centerpiece could have been far worse—the stuffed bodies of any number of animals—and even Peter, allowed inside to move the breakfront so Nurse could scrub behind it, paused when he saw the statue. He reached out, noticed his own dirty hand, and stepped back. Turned quickly away but not before I noticed tears gathered in his eyes.
I never thought of leaving them, of calling the home and trying to explain how they’d placed me in a household that was not what it had seemed. It would sound too dramatic and I could hear the impatience in the ward mother’s tone: “Well, of course Dr. Boehm smells unpleasant after working on his taxidermy, Louise. I would venture he smells the same after leaving the operating room. This is no cause for alarm,” or, “Cleanliness is next to godliness and Nurse should be commended for her vigilance in fighting illness. I wish we had more like her here, as the wards are full of sick children….”
I could have called and begged to be returned anyway, I guess, but the fact remains that I didn’t. I accepted, absorbed, and adapted to the whims of the adults because that’s what a young girl does, especially one desperate to belong to someone, somewhere.
Chapter 29
Hanna
I was in the snack aisle down at 7-Eleven trying to decide between Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch Doritos when a low, easy voice said, “Hey, this must be my lucky day.”
It was Jesse and he was with another guy, both of them wearing dusty jeans and battered work boots. Jesse had on a mason’s T-shirt and an open flannel under his denim jacket and his dreads were pulled back into a ponytail. He looked tired and grubby and gorgeous, cheeks pink with cold, dark eyes warm, and that delightfully plummy bottom lip curved in a mischievous smile.
“Hi,” I said, and I don’t know how long we would have stood there gazing at each other if his buddy hadn’t reached past him, grabbed a bag of pork rinds from the rack, and said, “You ever eat these things, man? They’re great, but Christ, they make you fart.”
Jesse blinked, snorted, and turned away, shaking his head.
“That’s it,” I said, laughing and grabbing my own bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos. “I’m outta here. See you, Jess.” I walked around the rack and was heading for the register when I heard Jesse say, “Nice timing, asshole.”
“What’re you talking about?” his buddy said, sounding puzzled.
I paid and left and you know what’s interesting?
Every time I see Jesse, he always leaves me glad I did.
There’s not a lot of people I can say that about.
Grandpa was just finishing up cleaning Serepta’s litter box when I finally got there.
“She’s not so good today,” he said in a low voice. “Watch her close, all right?”
“Oh, Grandpa,” I said and, crumbling, hugged him. Not long—he hugged me quick and put me aside, wiping a shaky hand across his eyes, and then grabbed his crossing guard gear and hurried out.
I looked at Gran. “He loves you a lot, you know.”
I waited, but she didn’t answer, of course, so I gave her a sip of water and hit play.
How It Ends
The snow melted and the sun returned, coaxing daffodils, then tulips and azaleas into blooming and brightening up the soggy, muddy yard.
Mrs. Boehm wasn’t doing well; the pain and increased medication made her vague and moody, at times lucid and sweet, and at others backbitingly bitter. She insisted on sitting in the chair by the window when I brushed her hair, despite the fact that she was often in agony, saying she wanted to see spring arrive but actually watching the door of the workshop, stiffening whenever it opened and Dr. Boehm strode out, catching her breath, leaning forward, and placing her fingertips on the glass in a ready wave that he apparently never looked up and saw.
She was rail thin now, and worried, I asked Nurse if I could vary her diet and cook her special, tempting treats, but Nurse, busy scrubbing the bathrooms, said no, Doctor had put her on a specific diet and we must stick to it.
Mrs. Boehm’s appetite waned even further, and her wedding ring began slipping off her bony finger while she slept, causing us a daily search among the bedding. Usually it was somewhere up amid her pillows, but the last time it wasn’t, and I was forced to search further, to peel back each layer of quilt and blanket until I found the ring laying near her hip atop a stained mattress pad and giving me my first horrifying look at her bare, mottled thighs, twin sticks riddled with raging, weeping sores beginning at her knees and disappearing up beneath her silky blue nightgown, blackened, bone-deep holes with edges eaten raw and surrounded by necrotic tissue.
“Oh my God!” I blurted, dropping the sheet and backing away from what I then thought were the worst bedsores I’d ever seen.
Struggling, she pulled down her nightgown and cried hoarsely, “Don’t look at me like that! Stop it, Louise. Stop i
t! Don’t you dare turn away and pretend you didn’t see! Sit down!”
So I sat, paralyzed by the shocking strength of her anger, ashamed at how quickly I’d turned away, at how desperately I hadn’t wanted to see what festered beneath the beautifully flowered covers.
“I’m thirty-eight years old, Louise, and the simple fact is that I’m dying,” she said, disregarding my stricken gasp and sliding the ring back onto her scrawny finger. “I have made less than five decisions of any importance whatsoever in my entire life and while it would be useless for me to regret them now, I have paid a heavy price for allowing others to decide my fate.” A flash of annoyance crossed her face. “You look at me as if I’m speaking a foreign language. Is this so hard to absorb?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “Please, Mrs. Boehm, don’t excite yourself. I don’t want you to die!”
“Oh, Louise,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “Please, don’t try to stop me from speaking my mind for once in my life. It’s difficult enough to try and find the words for the things I most urgently want to tell you, but to know that you, too, would rather I took this poison to my deathbed just to maintain this ridiculous façade is truly more than I can bear.
“So I’m going to speak and you’re going to listen. You will not leave here armed only with the fairy tale that those who will someday love you will always act in your best interest and, because of that love, you don’t have to think about your own future. You will not.” She paused, breathing hard, jaw clenched with pain, and then told me of a betrayal that has haunted me my whole life.
“My father was a brilliant physician and a kind, generous man but an arrogant one who believed men were superior and all else on Earth existed only to serve them,” Mrs. Boehm said. “I was raised to be a good girl, to speak softly and be pleasing to the eye, to be gentle and innocent and agreeable, to be able to run a household and embroider and arrange flowers, and to never question a man’s decision as I could not possibly understand the issue, anyway. I was not allowed to raise my voice for any reason other than a house fire, or be openly angry or state my wishes directly, as those behaviors were considered unbecoming in a female.
“I could, however, ask nicely for things, and the sweeter the smile or more submissive the voice, the more I was rewarded with approval. If, however, I asked bluntly or stated an opposing opinion, if my father thought my request was unnecessary or unseemly, I was simply not allowed to do it, whether it was looking something up in one of his medical books or having a second serving of tapioca pudding at dinner.
“I realized that my father loved me most when I was what he wanted me to be and was the most disappointed in me and the least loving when I exerted my own small will or did not do as he expected.
“So I learned early to put my own wishes aside and tend to him first, to believe that I could not make a decision because I was only an uneducated, overemotional female, subject to the whims of my reproductive organs—yes, I am finally saying that aloud!—and would ruin my life had I ever the misfortune to gain control of it.” She stopped, pressing a hand to her mouth.
“Are you all right?” I said, half rising in my chair. “Should I make tea?”
“No, stay,” she said hoarsely and reached for my hand. “Oh, Louise, I did love my father dearly, and I feel like a traitor saying these things, but they must be said. They must if you are ever going to gain from them.”
I took her hand, sat back down, and steeled myself to listen, because if it was true, if she was dying, then I didn’t want to be left once again with questions but no answers.
She told me that despite her father’s attempts to limit her exposure to the harsher side of life, he was a physician, a man who possessed fascinating stories, and she a curious child with a penchant for wending her way around the rules, so while she couldn’t come right out and ask to hear the intriguing stories of his day, she did find another way.
“My father never knew I knew this, but after hours, once I was supposed to be long asleep, he and Cook—never Nanny, because she didn’t drink—would meet in his study, pour snifters of brandy, and discuss the events of the day.” She gave me a speaking look. “Naturally this was highly irregular, but I’m assuming my father was lonely for female companionship, as he never did remarry after my mother passed….” She fell silent a moment as if pondering, then shrugged.
“I discovered, purely by chance you understand, that if a person tiptoed into the spare bedroom, got down on her hands and knees and was very quiet, she could hear everything they said through the heating grate.”
“Smart,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said with a dignified nod, and then resumed her story. “The night my father brought Thaddeus home, he said Thad was to be given a bath and put in the spare room off the kitchen. I knew from the look on Cook’s face that she was going to have a few things to say that night, so I waited till Nanny had fallen asleep and then tiptoed into the spare room…” Mrs. Boehm paused, frowning, and glanced at the closed door.
“What?” I said, following her gaze.
“Nothing,” she said after a moment. “I thought I heard something. Would you check, please?”
I rose, unnerved by her sudden stillness, and quickly crossed the room. Threw open the door and looked out into the empty hallway. The smell was there but the smell was in here, too, and Dr. Boehm’s room was just down the hall, so I honestly couldn’t tell if it was fresh or lingering from earlier. I sniffed again but didn’t smell Nurse’s telltale disinfectant anywhere, so I just shook my head, closed the door, and sat back down.
“All right,” she said, shifting in bed. “Now, where was I? Oh, yes, eavesdropping on my father and Cook the night Thaddeus arrived. It was so frustrating, Louise, not to be able to ask who he was or why he was so filthy or what had prompted my father to bring him home…. So frustrating to be patted on the head and told to run along, that Thaddeus would be living with us now and I could always visit with him later but not to pester him with questions.” She shook her head. “Is there any torment on Earth worse than questions without answers?”
“No,” I said, and meant it.
“Well, I heard Cook say, This boy has seen a hard life, Doctor. He’s been beaten and badly used and I doubt he’s ever taken a real bath in his life. He is…unclean. Unclean! A word that could mean anything. Useless, Louise. Utterly useless.” She gazed past me into yesterday, seeing things I could never see. “I heard my father give a heavy sigh, and then he told her what had prompted him to remove Thaddeus from his home….”
Her father, she said, had sipped his French brandy and told Cook he’d been called down to a wretched section of town, tenements and slums, outhouses with wells right near them, a place where typhoid and diphtheria had once flourished and, based on what he’d seen, surely would again.
The hovel requiring his services had been the worst he’d ever seen. The man of the house was little more than a drunken, breathing, syphilitic shell sitting slumped against the wall, a bottle of whiskey in his hand, his forehead and most of his cheek eaten away by a runny, ravaging gumma.
“But, Cook, as astounding as it is, he wasn’t the reason I’d been called out,” he’d said.
The reason was a woman lying on the bed surrounded by filthy, scabby, spotty children, siblings, he’d later discovered, but none bearing any resemblance to the other. They were watching their mother, scrawny, deplorably filthy, covered with seeping sores and attempting to deliver yet another child.
“I shooed them all away except for the oldest boy, who I asked to heat some water,” the good doctor said. “The rest of the children were cretins with dull eyes and deformed limbs, but this lad seemed aware and hastened to assist me.
“I wore gloves, of course, two pairs, as I made my initial examination of the woman, expecting to find her dilated and near to delivering the next poor bastard; however, she was not dilated, there was no fetal heartbeat, and she would not stop thrashing and moaning, so I had to
ask the lad to restrain her. He did, crying, and she screamed, Help me, Taddy, it’s eating me alive, which of course was an inappropriate thing to say to such a young boy who should never have been witnessing such an unhappy scene anyway, but I bypassed this because she was so obviously out of her head.
“The boy begged me to help her, but I couldn’t deliver a baby that wasn’t there, so I examined further and determined it was a very large malignant tumor of the womb and, given her malnourished state, the active syphillis she’d no doubt suffered her whole life, her irregular heartbeat, and the strain on her faltering body, measured out a dose of morphine and informed him that I was giving her something to ease her pain.”
“And it did,” Cook said.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Her heart stopped while I was explaining the nature of her illness to the brood, how it was inoperable and would continue to consume her, causing untold agony and a slow, miserable death. Only the boy seemed to understand any portion of what I said, or even cared.
“They had no telephone, of course, so I pronounced the time of death and packed up my things, intending to go and call the coroner, when the boy caught my eye. He had washed his hands and tried to comb his matted hair and was standing by his mother’s body, weeping. He looked at me and said, ‘My ma is dead.’
“I know, lad,” I said. “I’m sorry.
“He looked past me and spotted my stethoscope on the table where I’d left it and returned it to me even though he could have sold it somewhere and probably gotten enough money to feed the whole wretched lot for a month. It was at that moment, Cook, when he handed it to me, that he said, ‘I want to be a doctor, too, sir,’ and it touched me so deeply, given his hopeless circumstances, that I…” He cleared his throat. “Well, you see what I’ve done. If he turns out to be mentally defective or his contagious legacy destroys him, then I’ve gambled on the wrong horse. If not, then perhaps he will defy his birthright and follow in my footsteps.”