Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (13 page)

T
RUE TO
F
OWLER'S
assessment, Edith emerged from her bedroom the next day still pale but with a healthy appetite. Letty served unseasoned beets, claiming that both salt and pepper caused indigestion. The extra place setting was filled now by the dark-haired Fowler, who had called, dressed in his finest jacket and linen shirt, at the surprising request of Grandpa. “Tonight,” the old man had written — a note he carried to the Institute himself — “I would like you to read my head.”

Edith sat at the head of the table, one arm draped over her lap, the other extended and entwined in Fowler's, who had been so kind as to send flowers, in honor of life and love and the future of science.

“I'm delighted that you've agreed to the examination,” Fowler said to Grandpa. “I've brought several charts, so as to demonstrate more clearly.”

“Fowler Corender,” Grandpa said, spooning his beets with unprecedented relish. He, too, had dressed for the evening, in a loose tailcoat with a deep red cravat, which had been the rage in London a decade earlier. He even smoothed the few gray hairs poking out from beneath his cap. “I've been looking forward to your visit all afternoon.”

“Won't you read me?” Letty asked Fowler.

“Another time,” Edith said. “We don't want to —”

“Perhaps tomorrow night,” Fowler said. “Or the night after. There is nothing but time, my dear child.”

Letty smiled and noted aloud that Fowler only poked at his beets.

“My senses are heightened by an empty stomach,” he declared, pushing back from the table in an attempt, perhaps, to end the dinner and begin the night's true entertainment. “I become even more observant, more attuned to the sutures and bumps of the skull.”

Grandpa nodded, reaching forward for a second helping. His spirits remained high when the party adjourned to the front parlor, where he sat in his favorite chair, empty at last of Edith's garments. The chandelier, lit for the first time in months, cast a warm light over the room. Even the rugs, swept clean, had a soft, welcoming hue.

“You must remove the cap,” Fowler said, a request which Grandpa obliged, his head suddenly small and vulnerable.

From his pocket Fowler pulled a bottle of castor oil, which he rubbed liberally over his fingers. With the confidence of a man twice his age, he pressed his left and right thumb to Grandpa's cheekbones, running his fingers along the top of his head and over the external opening of each ear.

Letty played a few discordant notes on the harpsichord, which she maintained added drama.

“You have a rather large irritability organ,” Fowler said, eyes closed in concentration. “And quite a developed sense of self-importance.”

Though both Edith and Letty stared at Grandpa, awaiting an outburst from the old man, he remained calm. With his wide grin and gleaming eyes, he looked almost delighted.

“The last man I read with such a large posterior lobe was the finest butcher in New York,” Fowler continued. He moved his hands forward and down, “And here, where we usually find intelligence —” Fowler paused, allowing a frown to possess his usually placid features, “There is a great imbalance. It seems the right hemisphere is much larger than the left. Which might point to a softening, or a lack of acuity, even among those faculties most expressed. Edith, darling, you must feel for yourself.”

Edith accepted Fowler's outstretched hand, and stepped around to examine Grandpa. Fowler's invitation — the first ever — to share in a study brought a smile to her lips.

“You've deduced all of that from the lines of my head?” Grandpa asked.

“I know more about you than I would had I known you for years.” Fowler ran a hand over the back of Edith's neck as he continued. “What we can learn of the mind, that mystery, heretofore shrouded, obscure.”

“Isn't it wonderful?” Edith said, ostensibly to Grandpa, though her eyes were locked with Fowler's.

“You even determined that Morris is dead?”

“Other scientists might not be so bold as to deduce it,” Fowler said, his voice swelling with confidence, “but that's where they're lacking.”

“And you'd stake your reputation on it?”

“My reputation is far too large to wager.”

“My daughter, then,” Grandpa said. “If you're mistaken, you'll leave my daughter forever. And my daughter,” he turned to Edith, “will leave my house, along with her boxes and bags and Letty.”

“One should never bet against Doctor Corender,” Edith said.

“You agree then?”

Edith had scarcely finished nodding, when Grandpa produced a letter from the pocket of his dinner jacket.
Though it was addressed to Edith, he'd taken the liberty of opening it. “From Morris,” he said with a grandiose flourish, presenting the letter not to Edith but to Fowler. “Who is very much alive and well and anxious to reunite with his lovely wife and daughter. To take them
away
. It arrived today, by post.”

“And what of it?” Fowler dismissed the letter without a glance at its contents. “Edith's not well suited for that ruffian Morris. If his death was not real, it was certainly symbolic. Their marriage is unbearable. Unthinkable. Anyone would agree that the two must divorce.”

Grandpa's grin faded, and he brushed Edith's fingers from his head.

“Besides, Edith has agreed to work with me,” Fowler continued.

“It's true. Fowler and I were just discussing the Institute. It's growing rapidly, and we have so much room here.”

“Certainly not,” Grandpa said.

“But of course you'll allow it.” Edith stepped forward, beside Fowler, who was stretching the rim of the old man's cap. She brushed her hair back, fingers gliding over the subtle contours of her skull. She had diagnosed her father. When she bent and touched the old man's shoulder, she, too, spoke with the authority of science. “I read it in your head.”

“Truth is nothing but a path traced between errors.”

—F
RANZ
A
NTON
M
ESMER

T
HE
B
AQUET

There's a fool out on Neglect Pier,” Parkhurst said, pointing over crowds of dockworkers to the old wharf across from Salton's anchor and tackle shop.

“Birds won't even land there.” Quimbly swallowed the last of the apple he'd stolen on Canal Street, throwing the core into the Hudson, whose foamy scum consumed it. Whoever the Fool was, he'd stepped over the log barrier. Unperturbed by the stench of rotting wood and fish, he'd unfolded a long table covered in angular gold symbols.

“Looks like he's gonna preach something.” Parkhurst stepped closer, his freckled face pink from too much sun. A small crowd had gathered around Neglect Pier: burly men in brown trousers and open cotton shirts, and dozens of redheaded foreigners, traveling cases in hand, too new
to figure north from south. Quimbly had so stood months earlier, at last striking out along the river, past cast-iron fences, docks, junk shops, warehouses, and sail lofts, till he found the shantytown near Thirty-seventh Street. He'd met Parkhurst and the others — Cobb, Phineas, and John Bovee — crouched around a fire with a live chicken and not the first clue how to pluck it. Under the moonlight and the glaring red of the foundries, Quimbly cracked the bird's neck, and he'd fallen in with the boys ever since.

“C'mon,” Parkhurst said. Crowds meant easy money, and Parkhurst had a knack for picking pockets. He'd killed a man, too, kept the bloody knife, wrapped in a lady's silk scarf, back at the hideout as proof. Quimbly was the better listener. He would discover which ships were coming in, what cargo each carried, and when they would dock. He liked to think of himself as an ear to Parkhurst's criminal mastermind. Being ears was much easier than baling cotton, carting chickens, or digging canals, all of which he had tried over the two years since he'd run away from home.

The Fool threw a gold velvet cloth over the tabletop and turned to reveal that there were not one but two people out on the pier: the Fool and a woman who wore pearls in her ears and a fur-trimmed red satin gown.

“If they fall through, we'll nick that chest.” Parkhurst nodded toward the blue travel trunk from which the Fool plucked a wondrous jacket, silver and gold and pink and
yellow in shimmering vertical stripes. He tossed it around his shoulders, made a cone with his hands, and called out.

“Greetings.” His voice had a musical quality, and even this simple word had a melody. The catfish cart wheeled closer, old Sal stepped away from his bait store, and the bird lady, who spent each afternoon feeding the pigeons, stopped throwing crumbs. Parkhurst winked and slipped into the crowd.

“You gentlemen look like a healthy lot, but that doesn't mean you don't know someone sickly. Don't know a poor hopeless soul. Perhaps you've been told that there's no cure for Grandmother's madness? For your uncle's bad back? For your wife's, or lady friend's, private disease?”

On most days, the furious pace of waterfront traffic — coaches and hacks laden with cotton and reckless omnibuses tearing through narrow streets with thundering horse hooves and angry cries — would have drowned the Fool's words, left him standing unheeded in the midday sun. No traveling salesman could compete with the local hawkers, men who spoke as loud as gunshots and drove hard bargains for boot blacking or flavored ice. But the Fool had managed, and Quimbly pushed toward the log barrier. Of his shantytown companions, he was the best traveled, and he prided himself that he alone had seen three states, dairy farms and countryside, mountains and beaches, a woman with two heads, a man who dressed up like a lady,
and two sets of identical twins. But the Fool was something entirely new. He and his lady companion, whose dark eyelashes and dangling pearls appeared even more beautiful as Quimbly neared, had a special charisma.

“I'm Doctor Steenwycks, and this is my assistant, Ada.” The Fool no longer cupped his hands, and his voice traveled unaided across the waterfront, luring sailors from as far as three piers away. “What we're here to tell you is that your doctor hasn't the vaguest understanding of his art. What we're here to tell you is what men like Charles Dickens already know, what great men like Uldericus Balk and Maximilian Hell preached for years: animal magnetism.”

Quimbly felt a girl's breath on his cheek — Bettine, standing so close he could smell her — fried egg, sweat, boiled spinach. Why did she follow him? Out of all the boys? She and her mother, a stern German woman who seemed too old to have a daughter, had moved to a tagrag hut between Eleventh Avenue and the rocky, corncob-strewn shore of the Hudson a few days ago. Neither spoke English. Now the girl spent her days following Quimbly. She smiled, teeth small and even. Her eyes were hazel, he realized, big as quarters. He'd never seen her up close before. She was pretty. Oddly pretty and just his age, he guessed, thirteen.

“Animal magnetism,” the Fool repeated. He took a long sip from a glass Ada offered. “There must be one among you with an illness of some sort. Headache? A disorder of the eyes?”

From behind, Quimbly heard, “I've got a headache,” and he turned to the unshaven sailor in short-torn trousers. He would fall through the pier, he must know. His bare calves had more muscle than most men's shoulders. But the sailor stepped over the rail without hesitation.

“A headache, you say?” The Fool directed the man to lie down on the velvet-clad table. The wharf creaked and listed to the left, but the Fool proceeded, running his hands over the sailor's forehead.

“What most doctors don't know is that the universe is fluid. That air, and water, sand, even solid wrought iron, have fluidity. Different degrees. And man can act on these fluids, force his will upon them. You see, my friends, this matter I speak of is not complex. In fact, if you listen, if you understand, you'll find your life far simpler. Far more manageable. How do you feel, my friend?” The Fool spoke to his patient, but the audience responded, overlapping cries of “grand” and “swell.”