Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (19 page)

His ship took twenty-one days to arrive in New York, allowing his father's patients to learn of Abraham's return before the boy set foot in Manhattan. People speculated whether the elder Doctor Steenwycks would disown the boy, or if Hilda, the judge's daughter, would still consent to marry him. Since most of Doctor Benjamin Steenwycks's patients lived in the area and frequented the same barbers and restaurants, even healthy people began to have opinions about what might transpire between their doctor and his son, which is why John's Saloon, which served exclusively cider and tea, was standing room only the day Abraham's ship arrived.

The bar was dingy and cold, and the tables shook whenever John picked up or set down a glass, but the pub's two picture windows faced the Steenwyckses' brownstone on Eighteenth Street and afforded the best view on the street. Nearly fifty people saw blind old Miss Harding race onto the street with her blouse on inside out and her hair undone and falling round her shoulders so that even those who weren't given to imagination could tell that she'd once been quite attractive.

“He's dead! He's dead!” she wailed.

A dozen people raced out to the brownstone-lined street to help her, because although she was blind and not well liked, she wasn't crazy, like Lillian Steenwycks, and if she said someone was dead, someone most certainly was.

“Come here, out of the street,” Hilda said. The judge's girl had been in John's Saloon since eight that morning. She'd painted her lips a pretty red and wore the family pearls in her ears, the ones saved for special occasions. Her shoes were new and tight and no one thought she could run in them. But she reached Miss Harding first and led the blind woman away from the street where automobiles sometimes sped by at such reckless speeds that the neighborhood agreed the machines were the devil's own invention.

“What happened? Who's dead?” John spat out his chewing tobacco — a habit everyone forgave him for because his nature was kind and pleasant — and set down the tea cup he'd been drying. As the proprietor, he took charge while the others, mostly older folks in pinned hats and black garb, owing to mourning, pressed close to hear at least a few words.

“Doctor Steenwycks,” Miss Harding said.

Mrs. Chadwick, who read cards for a living and was used to jumping to conclusions, raised her arms above the crowd and called out. “He's killed him! Killed his own son!”

“Quiet!” John said and, turning to Miss Harding, asked, “Have you seen the body?”

“Seen it? Seen it?” the blind woman asked. “I was with him when he died.”

“Tell us everything. Everything, from the beginning.”

Miss Harding began to cry, her lids shut fast and the
tears appearing to push through skin. “I loved him,” she said. “I adored him.”

“He's been away for so long —” John began, before a realization corroborated by the blind woman's state of undress made him catch his breath. “Doctor Benjamin Steenwycks? Were you with Doctor Benjamin Steenwycks?”

“Dead! He's dead. Died in my arms.”

Were it not for the fact that the good doctor was dead, the excitement over the discovery of his romantic liaison might have drowned out the blind woman's testimony. As it was, those gathered swallowed the revelation like a large chunk of stewed beef.

“Have the police been notified?” John asked. “Have you notified the police?”

“How horrible!” cried Miss Stein, known for feeding every feral cat and dog in the neighborhood.

Others began to comment as well: “And he never laid eyes on his son,” and “It's for the best, poor, dear man,” and “God moves in mysterious ways.”

T
HE
S
TEENWYCKSES' BROWNSTONE
, a three-story structure in which the doctor had lived and practiced for decades, despite his promise to move to the family estate on Orchard Street (a property he coveted but never inherited), at once became a center of activity, with neighbors arriving every few hours with baked hams, loaves of fresh
bread, apple pies, scones, flowers, melons, and, for the young surgeon, a bottle of brandy. The eldest sister, Chastity, presided over each visit with a sad smile and a formality that made everyone uncomfortable and quick to leave despite the unusual circumstances of Doctor Benjamin's death, the newly arrived Abraham, and the mad sister, Lillian, who had always been a source of neighborhood interest.

Chastity, who had her father's firm chin and oddly sloped forehead, appeared withdrawn and noble in a black wool skirt and jacket, which was a little short in the sleeves. She wore her hair in a low bun, and as usual, she'd pulled and fussed with so many pins that not one strand of hair fell over her face where it might have softened her features. Over the course of the ten years that she assisted her father, she witnessed half the block in nothing but smallclothes, leading the majority of patients to dislike and avoid her. She was the only Steenwycks receiving visitors, and therefore an obstacle between the guests and the upper floors, where her more interesting siblings were mourning. Whispered rumors that she was not only severe but also unmoved by her father's passing began to circulate.

Only those who arrived in the late afternoon overheard the cries of the mad sister, Lillian. The family had built a special room for the girl on the top floor, where she spent long hours at the one small window singing and gazing at wrought iron railings, well-tended window boxes, maple
trees, and scrawny mutts stretched out on the sidewalk. She never noticed the pairs of old women pointing to her from the street and exchanging quick whispers, or the influx of immigrants and luxury-line passengers who began arriving the day Chelsea Piers opened. The pedestrian traffic enraged the neighbors, who complained of noise and inappropriate dress, though they were mostly interested in themselves: in the fact that Mrs. Chadwick sometimes walked in her sleep or that John's eldest daughter had run off with a drunk or that Hilda had colored her lips a shade too bright.

Lillian herself had lost her color: hair gray and brittle as fish bone, her loose gown white, her cheeks and lips a single shade, pale as the fingernails she refused to have cut. Miss Stein had seen Lillian once and reported that the girl's nails curved round like spirals, so long and heavy she couldn't lift her hands. “That's how they restrain her,” she said, unable to explain, when asked, how the madwoman found her way down two flights of stairs to the doctor's office.

Usually the pillows on the walls and floor muffled Lillian's cries, but Abraham, who had arrived home only hours after his father passed away, had led the girl to the family parlor, where he attempted to explain that Father had died and would no longer bring her chocolates. In fact, Doctor Benjamin had long ago ceased bringing sweets, believing that they excited his daughter and made her more
violent. But Abraham hadn't consulted Chastity before speaking and had no way of knowing either this or the fact that over the ten years he'd been gone, Lillian had grown to detest slow, comforting words and smiles. She became increasingly nervous as Abraham attempted to calm her, and at last she rushed at her brother. Surprised, he fell to the floor, where he suffered the disgrace of calling to Chastity for help. He did not like to depend upon others. Even as a child, he'd preferred to run about with his laces trailing, unwilling to admit that he could not tie them himself.

Chastity excused herself from Mrs. Landers to race upstairs. And though the guest had arrived with a pudding and a tin of fudge, she had to show herself to the door.

“Lillian, stop.” Chastity took Lillian's hand and pulled her up, careful that the girl's feet did not strike the clawed couch leg or the cabinet containing the few remaining pieces of the good china. Her father's French novel lay overturned on the floor along with a spilled glass of brandy dropped in the scuffle.

The madwoman spat. She'd been close to her father, or at least, she appeared to have been, as she often followed him as if she were a pale puff of a duckling and he a feathered ass. The Steenwycks siblings were close as well: Abraham had indeed written Chastity every Sunday for the past ten years, and Chastity had kept her brother's gambling debts hidden from her father, her loyalty remaining with her
sibling and her belief that he would make good his promise to win back the fortune.

“She's far worse than when I left,” Abraham observed from the floor.

“She's excited,” Chastity said.

“Does she often attack people?” A thin red line cut across Abraham's upper lip. He dabbed the blood with a handkerchief he kept in the breast pocket of his suit coat. His luggage had not yet arrived from the port, but he'd shaved with his father's old kit and combed his hair neatly. He regarded Chastity through his initialed spectacles. “I worked with violent patients in Switzerland, as you know. I have acquired a great deal of expertise regarding them.”

“She's rarely violent.”

“She's certainly not sane.” Abraham pushed back the cuff of his left sleeve, revealing a crescent of soft pink scar tissue. “A garden shovel,” he explained, “in the hands of one of Doctor Gottlieb Burckhardt's patients. I've been marked for life — but it was well worth it. Now the patient is fully docile. The last time I showed him my arm, he ran his fingers over the scar with absolute tenderness.”

“Father and I …” Chastity's voice faltered a bit as she spoke. “We've been instructing her in art and music. If you saw her watercolors.”

Lillian's paintings hung all over the doctor's office: bright green landscapes, each with a dog or two — usually a large,
mangy mutt. She described light with spirals of color and never concerned herself with shadow, so that each image had a haunting quality, a flatness, a sort of impossibility.

“She lives in a prison,” Abraham said.

Lillian opened her mouth and silently scraped the dirt from the underside of her long, but not spiraling, fingernails. For some moments she stood, lips parted. At last she spoke: “Fly, fly, fly away home.”

Abraham shook his head sadly. “I can help her,” he said. “I know a surgery — Doctor Gottlieb Burckhardt performed it some half-dozen times. I can show you his papers on it. He removed merely the front part of the brain. Just bits of the frontal lobe, and —”

“Let's go to your room.” Chastity, skin blotchy from the tears she wiped away each time a visitor arrived, reached forward to take her sister's hand.

To her brother, she added what her father — who'd read Doctor Gottlieb Burckhardt's papers and knew that two of six of his patients had died — would have said: “You will not experiment on Lillian.”

P
EOPLE SAID THAT
if Doctor Benjamin Steen-wycks hadn't died in the throes of ecstasy, his son would never have remained in New York nor performed the Swiss surgery on his sister, and none of the siblings' troubles would have started. Even clear-thinking folks like Mr. and Mrs.
Landers who ran the pharmacy said so, folks who knew that the troubles really started not when the doctor died in the arms of blind Miss Harding, but twenty-four years ago, when Lillian was born and it was obvious from her smile and dull green eyes that she was mad. Other troubles followed: the Macy's clerk Doctor Steenwycks killed by accident with his curative magneto, the death of his wife, the loss of his fortune. Mostly people liked to talk about the doctor's death, and only the doctor's death, because they didn't care for Miss Harding, mainly because she asked the neighborhood boys for assistance and never once paid them a cent, and they liked to hold her accountable for all the Steenwyckses' troubles.

After the funeral, attended by well over two hundred of Doctor Benjamin Steenwycks's former patients and colleagues, Abraham took over his father's practice. Nearly every one of his father's old patients came by with complaints of toothaches and ingrown nails in order to get a good look at the boy, now a man, who had gambled away a fortune. Abraham treated each ailment with confidence, diagnosing conditions and prescribing cures before his patients finished relating their symptoms. He was a fine doctor, the clients agreed, better than his father. The opinion spread rapidly and found its way back to Abraham within days. Chastity continued to work as the practice's nurse; Lillian remained in her upstairs quarters, her condition unaltered, for her
brother would not perform the surgery for some months yet. She appeared more often in the young doctor's office, and it was rumored he released her from her pillowed room so as to better study her. Once the girl even made her way to the street, where she terrified a pair of stray dogs as she ran after them.

Weeks passed and might have continued to pass in a similar balance were it not for the death of Letty Tucker, the siblings' great aunt, who had lived to eighty-six on a diet of boiled vegetables.

Letty left the siblings the large estate at 62 Orchard Street, which had been in the family for four generations, though Letty occupied it for two, outliving her young cousin and the siblings' father, who had vainly awaited his inheritance. She'd tended to the upkeep of the property herself, which is why the roof had leaks, the walls and floors water stains, the garden paths mangled roots and upturned tiles. The closets contained hundreds of gray larvae that seemed disinclined to become moths; the ground floor reeked of decaying rat and mildew, the curtains faded from blue to off-white; the wallpaper, where it still adhered, appeared more gray than colored. The house had once been used as a phrenology institute, and framed articles cut from obscure medical journals still proclaimed that the bumps and curves of heads could reveal the deep secrets of personality. Now the building stood as the sole
single-family residence in a neighborhood of deteriorating tenements.

Chastity had never been moved by physical things before, but she loved the old house the moment she set eyes on it. She felt a sudden and overwhelming content, imagining herself in the garden, the house with fresh cream paint, new roof and chimney — one of the four had fallen, leaving behind only a stump of brick. She had fantasies of roast lamb and buttered potato cooking in the kitchen, the
Moonlight
Sonata playing on the old harpsichord in the sitting room. In her fantasy, a fire warmed the hearth, despite the fact that the property had fallen to the siblings in late July and the heat and humidity nearly prevented her from venturing out to visit 62 Orchard Street at all.