Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (12 page)

Letty had laid out the good china. Behind her the fire provided light, but not heat enough to prevent the green-brown soup from cooling before the first drops reached the dinner bowls.

“Greens are good for the digestion,” she said, dropping a second ladleful of vegetables into Grandpa's bowl. She'd dressed in one of her mother's old gowns, maroon with lace at the neck and cuffs, and she'd found her deceased grandmother's jewelry chest, from which she'd helped herself to a silver, rose-shaped brooch.

Grandpa gazed at the floor, where his most treasured volume,
An Experimental Inquiry into the Laws of the Vital Functions,
lay carelessly spread. The corner of the upturned page had torn, the paper stained with vegetable pulp. He stirred his stew, unable to bring even a spoonful to his lips.

Edith, who'd eaten across from Fowler at one of the Institute's most romantic lab tables, had no appetite either. Over a slab of sharp milk cheese and a jar of imported pickle, she and Fowler had discussed the human mind in great depth. She still felt submerged in the conversation.

Only Letty devoured the congealing soup, her gusto punctuated with unladylike grunts, which she stated “opened the esophagus and cleansed the internals.”

“Boiled greens in such quantity will certainly interfere with the workings of the large intestine,” Grandpa said, though neither of his companions acknowledged him.

It was he who first saw the letter, folded inside the
New York Observer
. The hand that addressed the envelope, precise yet utterly lacking in beauty, had spelled “Edith” in large letters, without adding “Tucker” beside it, the type of careless informality that only Morris would never think to question. The envelope, battered and torn at the side, had released its contents somewhere between Wisconsin and Orchard Street.

“From your dear husband,” Grandpa said.

Edith, roused from her reverie, reached across the table to take the letter from Grandpa's indifferent fingers. She spread the empty envelope smooth on the table and gazed down as if divining the former contents from the address alone.

“He must be returning,” Grandpa did not trouble to conceal the glee in his voice, “to collect you.”

Letty set down her spoon. Stew stained the front of her dress, and her teeth were patterned with flecks of green. “I will not go to Wisconsin,” she said.

“He should arrive any day now!” Grandpa announced,
setting his
Observer
over his soup. “Wisconsin is a fine place, Letty, a fine place for a girl like you.”

Edith folded the envelope and held it close to her chest. Had the past months changed Morris? Would he be the same man he'd been before he set out?

E
DITH MARRIED
M
ORRIS
Tucker under the lukewarm approval of her family and the utter disregard of his. The two exchanged vows at the courthouse two months after she noticed she'd failed to menstruate, and however brief the engagement, her friends concurred that Edith and Morris belonged together. Morris had such soulful brown eyes. And Edith smiled so sweetly at him. It was high time she married, and she seemed happier with Morris than she'd been with Edmund, though her former suitor was a wealthy banker who would have given her an easier life.

Edith first met her father-in-law two weeks after Letty was born. A frontiersman, Morris's pa left his wife six months before Morris came into the world. He returned to Cayuga County twenty-three years later, after Wild Man Briggs blinded him in a brawl. Though he'd lived in the same four-room house for years, he forgot the distance between the wall and table, and he often fell down the two steps leading to his front door.

“I lived off whiskey and raw bear meat for ten days.” The blind man, thin and angular and bald as a worn-out carpet,
bored Edith with stories of dark-haired Indians, rough living, and rowdy camaraderie. “But when the rains stopped, I speared up a coon with the arrow that got me. Didn't even wipe the shaft off.”

He showed scars on both forearms, from a knife or a long Indian spear — he explained the injury both ways — and bragged that he'd been so far north the water turned to ice in mid-August.

“If I had my eyes,” he said, “I'd be there still.” Men who lived on the edge, men who fought to the death, men who rode hard through the night and slept but an hour at dawn — these were the old man's heroes, a group he'd stood proudly among till he lost his sight. Melancholy still sounded in his voice.

Morris didn't note the many contradictions. He sat on the floor, half a yard from his pa's bent knee, wide brown eyes rimmed with his mother's long lashes, pale arms folded around his soft torso. “The great wild's all been done,” he said later, as Edith tried vainly to lull Letty to sleep. The Tucker house had more draughts than windows, and it reeked of smoke and burnt porridge. “My pa did it,” Morris continued, “and now it's done.”

For several weeks afterward, Morris sought adventure, usually with a bottle of whiskey in hand and a rumpled jacket slung over his shoulder. Insurance didn't suit him, he said, though he did well enough in that profession to support
his wife and daughter for the next twelve years, even to pay for music and voice lessons. Every few months he'd announce, “We're moving to the territories” or, “Us and Letty, we'll raise hogs and grow apples” or, “There's Indian wealth, the land. It's all been discovered, but we have it to settle. That's ours.”

Edith was not about to leave New York for a remote town in the wilds where men still battled Indians. And since Morris would not plead or negotiate, the family stayed in their small house on Bleecker Street, where they would have remained had the elder Tucker not passed on.

The second time Edith saw Morris's pa, just under a year ago, the old man lay stretched out in a wooden box with his gun wrestled into the lifeless fingers of his left hand and a cowhide cord strung round his neck bearing a letter, penned in his uncertain, blind hand: “I sees you now.”

Morris held the pall, front right, and he walked straight and proud until the boys at the rear pressed forward and he lost his footing and went down, right beside his pa's open grave. Edith screamed, thinking the old man and his box had killed her husband, but Morris stood up. He had a shiner the size of a clockface the next day, but that afternoon he gave his speech, speaking of his pa as if the old man had coddled him since the day he was born.

From then on Edith couldn't decide if the falling coffin had damaged Morris's brain or if, somehow, old Tucker's
dead thoughts had slithered from the coffin and found a home in her husband's head. As soon as the family returned from the funeral, he stopped going to work, and he wouldn't respond when Edith scolded, entreated, promised butter cake and brandy, and at last, reached the end of her wits.

He spoke only to say that he was heading south to Texas to enlist in the militia. He wore his father's grin when he spoke of it, and he closed his eyes as if he were already blind, though more likely he imagined: the fights, the dust, the men who lived by cunning, not law, who drank beneath the morning sun or evening stars. He bought himself a rifle and a pair of black army boots. When Edith refused to sew him a jacket, he went out and bought one from the general store along with a hip flask and a canteen.

Edith burned the first jacket, stole the cap of his flask, removed his bootlaces. If she could delay him, she thought, for a week or two, his madness would pass. He would return to his insurance profession, for which he was well suited, as evidenced by the promotions he'd received over the years. He would support his family, who, though they did not yet feel the pinch of hard times, would rapidly descend into destitution without his salary. Besides, Morris had never shot a gun in his life, at least not to Edith's knowledge.

But the weeks passed and Morris only grew more determined. He'd lost his sense of hearing, didn't listen to a word
Edith said, until she brought up the territories. “What about Wisconsin?” she asked in a final attempt to dissuade him. “What about our plans to settle out west?”

“Letty and I will move in with Grandpa,” she continued. “Just till you call for us. I know he won't mind.” The fact that her father's house had thrice the rooms of the one she and Morris shared, as well as a generous yard, had not escaped her attention.

Morris agreed to head out west instead of south so quickly Edith might have thought he'd feigned his interest in the Texas militia to make her compromise. But, she knew, he'd just lost some part of his mind, that something in his head changed the day his father died. Did he need time? Could she turn him around? She asked her father, who assured her that the young man would benefit from a stint in a hyperbaric chamber — the pressure of submersion, especially in deep salt water, increased circulation, he said. Edith, who cared little for water and less for the ocean, decided to search for a cure herself. The first time she went to Fowler Corender's Institute, which promised to teach the only true science of the mind, she hoped she could learn enough to help Morris when he returned for her. She had not expected it to change her life.

F
OR DAYS AFTER
the empty envelope arrived, Letty prepared radishes, squash, and burnt apple for four.
She insisted that a place be set for her father, maintaining that a warm meal upon arrival would convince him to remain in New York.

The envelope itself took on meaning. The fact that it came after so many months of silence, without a surname, became evidence to Edith that Morris had taken up with another woman: a buxom girl with prairie dirt pressed deep in her skin.

Edith began to clean. She rearranged the boots and gloves and stockings in such a way that Grandpa could never find what he needed, and when he inquired, she admitted that she herself had forgotten. She swept the front porch six times a day, dusted the trim in the entryway, scrubbed the table and chairs, and at last, exhausted, failed to rise from her bed. “I'm happier without him,” she said. Grandpa diagnosed her with a case of nerves, possibly even hysteria, for which he'd treated her on several previous occasions. He prescribed a dilute copper mineral solution, which Edith dutifully took four times a day, confident that her father's remedy would eventually cure her.

“If only Morris were here,” she said. “If only an hour,” an hour being, she determined, enough time to run her fingers over her husband's head to learn his true inclinations. She'd discovered much about herself that way, secret talents, unknown faults. Her husband's head, too, must have much to tell. And now that she could read man's true nature, she
could not stand the thought of Morris running off without her hands first discovering his weakness, and dismissing him as a ne'er-do-well.

Grandpa assured her that Morris would arrive any day.

“You wouldn't want him to find you in bed,” he said. “What kind of welcome is that?”

Edith was about to respond when a thundering knock drew her bolt upright. She ran her hands over her untended locks, which despite the tangles looked fetching around her pale cheeks. Letty, who had been searching for loose change in the pockets of Grandpa's desk, ran to the front door.

“Yes?” she said, breathless.

“I'm here for Edith Tucker.”

Dismay arranged Letty's features in something close to a pout as she received the young Fowler and escorted him to her mother's bedside. Grandpa regarded the newcomer with irritation. The young man, ostentatiously dressed in a double-breasted jacket, silk cravat, and boots of fine leather, bowed deeply. He stepped forward to present his hand to Grandpa.

“Fowler Corender,” he said.

Grandpa took the hand and, though he scarcely pressed it (a limp handshake being the vehicle through which he expressed distaste), Fowler pulled away.

“My hands are my work,” he said. “Sensitive fingers for sensitive work.”

“You've filled my daughter's head with your nonsense,” Grandpa said, and though Edith tried to dismiss her father with a half-raised hand, he remained firmly beside her.

“Allow me to examine your head, my dear man, and you'll understand my profession.” Fowler bent forward, his entire body assuming an emphatic nod. “The elderly and the feebleminded are always the last to adopt new ways.”

Grandpa began to redden, his skin noticeably less wrinkled, as if displeasure had inflated his frame. Something changed in him then. Something that had been floating, like rotting wood, sank deep inside him.

“I've come to see Edith.” Fowler brushed past the old man to his apprentice, who stared back with adoring eyes. “We've missed you at the Institute. What's ailing you, darling?” He spoke the endearment awkwardly, but with much affection.

“It's Morris,” Edith said. “He wrote to say he'd be returning … or rather …”

“I'm very sorry,” Fowler interrupted. “It must be terribly difficult, though death comes for us all in the end.”

“Death!” cried Letty, who hovered in the doorway like a curious pup. Even Grandpa raised his brow in surprise.

“I'm not dying,” Edith said.

“Of course you're not. There's nothing sentimental about you, Edith. Which is why I deduced that Morris had died. You have no need to explain further! Only death could send
a strong woman like you to her bed.” He patted Edith's hand and reached across the bed to wipe a strand of dark brown hair behind her ear. “But you are also the type to recover,” his lips trembled, “quickly.”

“Such nonsense!” Grandpa turned to Letty, who was crying softly. “Your father's alive and well and coming to fetch you. Shortly.”

“I didn't realize —” Edith said. A new understanding crept into her voice. Of course Morris had died. Of course. A woman like her would not find herself bedridden for something so trivial as a mistress. Only death could explain her condition.