From This Moment (25 page)

The results were not promising.

“His right eardrum is shattered,” the doctor said. “I can see some feeble movement in his left ear, but it is not enough for any hearing to register.”

Evelyn’s face crumpled at the news.

Clyde had been watching Evelyn, not the doctor. “What did he say?” Clyde asked.

Romulus scribbled the doctor’s conclusion as quickly as he could. There was no point in trying to soften the blow. Clyde would want to know exactly what was going on, but it hurt to even write the words.

You are completely deaf in your right ear. Little hope for improvement there. Left ear is badly damaged. Might recover, might not.

Clyde was stoic as his eyes traveled across the page. His mouth turned down, but he gave a brusque nod of acknowledgment.

“Is there anything we can do to help the recovery?” Evelyn asked.

The doctor did not look optimistic. “I am not a specialist in auditory issues, but the inner ear is a delicate mechanism, and the sound waves from that explosion did serious damage. Mr. Brixton is in considerable pain with each additional vibration, and this can’t be good for his recovery. There is a sanitarium west of the city where he can have complete bed rest and as much silence as possible. The less disturbance to his ear, the better. Only after the swelling goes down and his body has a chance to heal will we know if he will regain any hearing.”

Evelyn nodded. “I will take him.”

When Romulus wrote out the doctor’s recommendation, Clyde shook his head. “I can’t leave my men,” he said, but winced before he even finished the sentence. How ironic that although he was stone deaf, the sound waves from his own voice were painful.

Romulus took the time to write out the doctor’s advice. Avoid physical movement, avoid loud noises, avoid anything that jarred his badly damaged tissues. The doctor recommended that Clyde not even be moved for a few days. He left to make arrangements for a bed for Clyde, and from there Clyde would be transferred directly to the sanitarium.

Clyde grabbed the pencil. “What has happened in the subway? I need to examine the damage and get back to work. They need me.”

This was going to be a battle. It was in Clyde’s nature to plow through any difficulty. Romulus wrote a response.

I’ll find out what happened. Wait until we know more. Then we can argue.

A fleeting smile crossed Clyde’s face and he nodded, but given the way he winced, even that simple nod had caused Clyde pain.

Even from a mile away, Stella had heard the blast, and it was all anyone was talking about. A late edition of the
Boston Globe
reported the few known details about the explosion. One of the sandhogs excavating near the six-inch gas main on Boylston Street noticed a crack in the pipe and the smell of gas. He reported it to a policeman, who put in a telephone call to the Boston Gas Company requesting help. Business went about as usual on the street above. Witnesses reported that a trolley took the curve at Boylston and Tremont too quickly, causing sparks to fly from the metal rails and into the nearby pit. The explosion happened moments later.

At two o’clock in the afternoon, a messenger boy came banging on Evelyn’s front door with a message for Stella. It said that Clyde had been injured in the blast and to prepare the downstairs bedroom immediately.

“What’s wrong with him?” she asked, but the boy knew nothing. He was just carrying messages from people at the hospital.

“What about the scene of the explosion? Did you see any of it?”

“Yes, ma’am. It made a real mess of the subway tunnel. Who’s to say if they’ll even be able to fix the damage? My father is a sandhog on the job, and they told him not to come back to work tomorrow.”

Stella was a doctor’s daughter and had often helped at his practice. She snapped into gear, putting fresh sheets on the bed, laying out clean towels and a little bell for the patient to ring. Bridget and the children had left town for a few days, but she ran to the market to buy veal and beef marrow bones for a broth. Her father swore by the nutritional properties of hearty beef stock, and she’d start making it by the vat. She quartered carrots, onions, and plenty of flat-leaf parsley for added flavor and nutritional punch. She didn’t know the nature of Clyde’s
injuries, but sitting here twiddling her thumbs would do no good, and a nourishing beef broth couldn’t hurt.

It was dark before she heard a carriage roll to a stop in front of the townhouse. She sagged with relief when she saw Clyde propped between Evelyn and Romulus, slowly inching his way toward the steps up to the townhouse. He placed each foot cautiously and with great deliberation, but at least he was walking on his own two feet, so surely he couldn’t be too badly hurt.

She was wrong. As Clyde entered the house, she could see he was pale and trembling, barely able to stand upright through the pain. She asked him how he felt, but he didn’t meet her eyes and kept walking at that slow, measured pace.

“I need to get him settled quickly,” Evelyn said. “Every step is excruciating for him.”

Clyde looked like a stranger to Stella. The laughing, reckless grin was gone, replaced by haunted eyes and a mouth clenched with pain. She couldn’t see any obvious injuries, but he moved at a snail’s pace as Evelyn guided him to the back bedroom.

She swiveled to Romulus for an explanation and listened with a sinking heart as he recounted Clyde’s probable deafness. They sat at the small dining room table, a kerosene lantern softly illuminating the room.

She’d never seen Romulus so pensive. “It’s hard to believe it was only last night when we were all stuffing envelopes,” he said. “It seems like a million years ago, but this time yesterday, Clyde was standing at the open window, listening to the Boston Symphony play Brahms. It’s probably the last music he will ever hear.”

She wasn’t used to this level of sorrow from him. Romulus was supposed to be laughing, grappling with whirlwinds, flirting.

“I would trade places with him if I could,” Romulus contin
ued. “Everything I’ve accomplished I owe to Clyde. I owe him more than I can ever repay, but there’s not a thing I can do for him, and it’s killing me.”

“I thought Clyde hadn’t been involved with the magazine for years?”

“He hasn’t. But there never would have been a magazine without Clyde. I would have flunked out of Harvard my senior year if Clyde hadn’t been there to haul me across the finish line.”

Her eyes widened in surprise. “Flunked? I thought you were brilliant at everything.”

For the first time that evening, a bit of humor lightened his eyes. “I am. That doesn’t mean I can’t be a grand idiot on occasion. Two months before graduation, I set off on a course of destruction from which it was almost impossible to recover. Clyde and Evelyn came to my rescue.”

Over the next few minutes, Romulus told her the entire story, sparing himself none of the embarrassing details. He’d struggled throughout his years at Harvard, continually changing programs of study and delving into academic obsessions for a brief time before getting distracted by something else. The only constant throughout his four years at Harvard had been a girl named Laura. Even the reverent way he spoke Laura’s name made Stella sit up and take note. Laura was everything to him. She was laughter and beauty and inspiration, and he hoped to marry her immediately upon graduation. It didn’t work out that way. In February of his final year, Laura had abruptly severed their relationship, sending him into a spiral of despondency.

“I quit going to classes,” he said. “I stayed in my room, got drunk, and wasted two months of my life blubbering over Laura in an inebriated fog. Clyde was in his final year at West Point, but when he heard that I was on the verge of failing, he hightailed it to Harvard and spent the next week getting me
sober, tutoring me in trigonometry, and pounding some sense into my head. I needed to score a ninety-seven on my final trigonometry exam in order to pass the class. I was always lousy at trig, but Clyde had a way of explaining it that made sense. I got a perfect score on the test and passed the class. I wouldn’t have graduated were it not for Clyde.”

Stella’s smile was gentle, but Romulus hadn’t finished speaking.

“What I didn’t know . . . what I was too drunk and despondent to realize . . . was that during that week while he tutored me, Clyde was absent without leave from West Point. There are consequences for things like that. He ended up getting expelled from college. Instead of graduating and joining the Army Corps of Engineers as an officer, he was required to serve two years as an enlisted soldier. He never did earn a college degree.”

“Oh,” Stella said, overwhelmed by the sacrifice Clyde had made on Romulus’s behalf. It was a heroic act of love, humbling in its magnitude. The quality of a friendship was not shown during the sunny days, but in dark times of trouble. In that act of sacrifice, Clyde had proven himself a true friend. Romulus was somber as he told her more.

“That’s why he and Evelyn were so poor during their first years of marriage, but between the three of us, we were still able to buy that dying magazine and turn it into something great.”

She nodded, feeling strangely proud of him. She had no part in the success of
Scientific World
, but she applauded the creative inspiration behind the endeavor and the three people whose harmonizing strengths combined to make it happen. She was honored to be associated, however obliquely, with such a publication. “Whatever happened to Laura?”

“She married a doctor a few years ago. I spent a humiliating few years trying to win her back, but nothing ever came of it.”

“Is she the reason you’ve stayed a bachelor all these years?”
It was a terribly personal question, but from the moment she’d met Romulus, they had formed a bond, a sense that they had no secrets from each other. He did not seem to mind the question.

“No. I’ve simply come to accept that I would be a terrible husband. The problems between Laura and me were entirely my fault. Even though I was obsessed with her, it came in bursts. For a few days, she was all I could think about, and I showered her with devotion, gifts, and praise. But then something would snag my attention and I’d go off hiking in the Adirondacks to study conifer trees or become fixated on training to win a title in a boxing championship. That summer when we created the habitat for the hummingbirds in Evelyn’s greenhouse was a perfect example. Laura invited me to the annual Harvard–Yale regatta with her parents, and I entirely forgot about it. It was the week we installed a fountain for the hummingbirds, and that took all my energy. Laura was incensed. She said I was unfaithful and incapable of commitment.”

“Did you step out on her?”

“Constantly. With boxing competitions and experimenting in the laboratory. One summer I became infatuated with learning to play the cello and could concentrate on little else.”

“Did you step out on her with another
woman
?” she asked pointedly.

He looked appalled. “Of course not! My father was never faithful, and I had a front-row seat to witness what that does to a woman. No, I never cheated on Laura, but she still thought I was disloyal. The final straw came in February of my senior year. We went to see the opera of
Tristan and Isolde
. She was dazzled by it and decided I’d never be able to love her the way Tristan worshipped Isolde. I couldn’t give her the sort of constancy she needed, and she cut me free.”

Stella thought that might indicate a problem with Laura
rather than a failing from Romulus, but she wasn’t in a position to judge. “It seems rather drastic to condemn yourself to bachelorhood just because of an unhappy love affair.”

A faint smile hovered on his face as he peered at her through curious eyes. “Have you ever been in love?”

The question took her aback, and she hoped he didn’t notice the sudden blush heating her face. Her feelings for Romulus grew by the hour, and she didn’t want to talk about it, but she could hardly clam up when he’d been so forthcoming.

“No, I’ve never been in love, but I hope to be someday. My parents have a remarkable marriage, one for the ages. They both come alive when the other walks into the room, and it’s as if the air suddenly carries an electrical charge. Do you know how difficult it was to grow up in a house like that? There were times when my parents couldn’t keep their hands off each another. My sister and I had to cover our eyes and run shrieking from the room.” Her smile faded. “It was rather sweet, actually. They don’t behave like that anymore.”

Her throat closed up. Nothing remained the same after Gwendolyn died. Her father managed to find his footing and begin pulling the pieces of his life back together. Not so her mother, who still seemed to be drifting in the shadowlands.

She shook off the bleak memories. “Anyway, I want a marriage like my parents have. I want that kind of friendship and inspiration and challenge. I want a strong husband who can pick me up when I stumble, and I want to do the same for him when he falters.”

She looked at Romulus, whose face had softened with tenderness while he listened to her ramble. He was such an affectionate man, with a big heart and boundless sense of energy. It seemed a shame that he would let a single tainted experience with love sever him from a normal family life.