The Dress Lodger (3 page)

Eye walks heavily down the bank. She spies a puddle of blue under the bridge, half in the water, half in the black mud. The dress is dirty. Their landlord won’t like that. When she gets a little closer, she sees the blue rat is not hurt. She is staring intently at something laid out beside her.

A dead rat, about six feet tall, wearing a wool cap, brown trousers, and a mud-stained white shirt. His wide sightless eyes are turned upstream, watching for ships trapped on the far side of Quarantine.

“Look what I found!” Gustine leaps up, clapping her hands. “Let’s go tell Henry!”

Henry says, though perhaps it’s not strictly true, that he frequents the cramped pub on narrow Union Lane for no better reason than its name. Not long after he came to town, he accompanied his uncle, our illustrious Dr. William Reid Clanny, on a scarletina fever case. When they arrived at the flat, they found the young girl tossing in a caul of red rash upon a filthy bed she shared with four other siblings ranging in age from six to fourteen. Their parents and the youngest child slept on flea-infested ticking in the same claustrophobic room; only the day before the mother had given birth and was too weak to stand up. The walls, not having been whitewashed in years, were furred with soot from the clogged fireplace. They had no cupboards in which to store their food, so a month’s supply of rotting potatoes was stashed under the bed. At least they have a floor, Clanny had whispered to his nephew; many here in Sunderland sleep on cold, pestilent earth.

They did what they could for the child with scarletina, who was delirious by the time they were called, and not likely to last the night. Henry ordered the new mother to drink beef tea and wrote her a prescription for tartar emetic that she could get free at the dispensary on Sans Street, knowing full well she would never go. When they finally left the sad, squalid house, Clanny suggested they treat themselves to a drink. A cheerfully painted sign for the public house next door invited them in, its emblem a shovel poised to dig up a smiling skull and above it, its moniker: the Labour in Vain. Henry thought the sentiment about summed up their evening, and in the course of the year he’s been in town, he’s realized the sentiment about sums up his life. Most nights find him here, at least for a pint, sometimes surrounded by his students, sometimes alone with a book. He often amuses Audrey with stories of the characters he meets at the Labour in Vain. She says she would love to come with him, but he’s not that depraved. He doesn’t need to sully the one pure thing in his life.

“Another round, Doctor?” asks John Robinson, the flat-faced, shaggy-haired, hulking proprietor of the Labour in Vain, reaching for Henry’s glass.

Henry passes him the empty and watches the publican fill it with suds. Henry’s bandaged hands, thick with cotton gauze, make it difficult for him to carry the full pint back to his table without spilling.

On a typical night, John Robinson pulls drinks for every sort here. Early on, most of the tables are taken up by good-natured day labourers headed home from the docks. Later, a few butchers might drop by in their crimson aprons and pick the dried blood from under their fingernails while they toss back a couple with friends. The night will wear on, the air will get hotter and the boasting meaner. Just when you’ve decided the room is too full of men and it’s a sorry state of affairs for a Saturday night, a pair of pretty factory girls will switch in, or someone’s Catholic daughter will come to drag her old man home. Then the fun begins. Men who were about to come to blows only minutes before are now showing off, rolling back their cambric sleeves and arm-wrestling for love and honour. The factory girls applaud and are treated to gin and sugar water, while the old man talks his shy daughter into staying for just one more sip. On a typical night at the Labour in Vain, when the hilarity swells and the singing begins, the patrons never notice a couple creep in, install themselves in the corner, and quietly order some drinks. The woman is invariably pale with swollen eyes, gripping her glass of beer as if someone were about to pry it from her; the man rests his elbows on the table, and studies the round white water stains on the wood before him. They will have come in via the Church Walk, like so many other couples before them, leaving someone behind in Trinity’s overflowing graveyard. They will have a single beer and slip out as quietly as they slipped in. It is getting late and the Labour in Vain’s hardworking, hard-drinking patrons will be thinking it’s time to leave. But John Robinson knew what he was doing when he christened his pub. He knew there are no patrons so happy to sit and drink as patrons who are given something to gripe about. Inevitably, on their way out the door, they glance up at Robinson’s cheap wooden sign, the painted shovel and its grinning skull, realize that yes, dammit, they have been working their fingers to the bone, their palms are bloody, and for what, they ask, what? The sign works every time. They sit back down and order another round.

Through their disgruntled midst carrying his sloshing beer goes Henry Chiver, tolerated if not exactly welcomed at the Labour in Vain. The men know he is a doctor, which makes them suspicious, and they see how the factory girls eye him—as if they were simply dying to run their fingers through the disheveled young man’s whorls of sable hair. What could they possibly see in him? Sure, he’s smart-looking, dressed in his London fashions with choking collar and cravat, sporting those tight trousers all the swells are so fond of, when corduroy knee breeches have always done a workingman fine. But they couldn’t say he is handsome inside those expensive clothes, for his nose is large and his dark eyes are set too wide apart and his overlapping teeth war each with the other for supremacy in his mouth. Worse than all of this, the doctor is possessed of a single trait that is almost unforgivable to the workingmen of the Labour in Vain: Henry is skinny. Everyone knows he could afford to walk into any restaurant in Sunderland and order the menu; yet he is thin by choice.

“Make room, boys,” says Henry, and waits for his four students to adjust their chairs. He takes a seat himself and wipes his moist bandages off on his coat.

Little is known of the new Dr. Chiver beyond what the town gossips could collect, and we can tell you very little more. He studied at St. Thomas’s in London with one of the nation’s most acclaimed surgeons, Sir Astley Cooper. He graduated top in his class, and was handpicked by the even more famous Dr. Knox to teach anatomy at his extramural school at i o Surgeons’ Square, Edinburgh. About two years ago, Henry left under a cloud, which for all the town’s expert seeding has not been made to precipitate the truth. Prominent wives have invited Henry’s uncle Clanny to dinner and hinted at all the usual doctor disgraces: back alley abortions, drug addiction, a rich man dead on the operating table; but he, discreet soul, has calmly chewed his mutton and kept his silence. So no one knows for sure why Henry left Edinburgh two years ago. Though it does seem odd his exit coincided exactly with his mentor Dr. Knox’s implication in the Burke and Hare murders.

So here he sits on another Saturday night, leaning on a rickety table whose broken legs are trussed with string, sipping beer that tastes brewed from old rags and soda bread. He has lived almost a year in Sunder land, rescued from his mother’s house in London, where, for all of the previous year, from the time he left Edinburgh to the day his uncle called, he barely left his room. He is trying to start over in our town; his uncle found paying students for him and advanced him the money to convert his house. Audrey has been his saving grace, loving him so openly and unconditionally, he is almost embarrassed by it. It has been a healing year, a back-slapping-get-back-on-that-horse-my-boy year. He’s immersed himself in teaching, helped his uncle in these anxious cholera-expectant times, even found a moment to get engaged, and yet, the only thing true about this year, he thinks, the only times that he has been completely honest with himself are on the nights he’s spent here. Only among this crowd of the failed has he felt comfortable living inside his own defeat.

Uncle Clanny might not see him as a failure. Audrey certainly doesn’t, but Henry’s four students—Bishopwearmouth boys who have met him here tonight, as they do at least once, sometimes twice a week, looking always out of place no matter what old, don’t-mind-if-it-gets-stolen jacket they’ve pulled out of the closet to wear—are, without a doubt, onto him. Oh, they pretend. Redheaded Bietler, mechanically reaching into his pocket and cracking sunflower seeds between his squared-off horsy teeth, pretends to read the Sunderland Herald, recently founded to champion Reform. Grose, the Tory, whose father is a vestryman, and who refuses to read such radical trash, subscribing instead to the musty Sunderland Gazette, where there is no talk of Reform except to bemoan it, pretends to read that. Short, bespectacled Coombs looks over Grose’s shoulder, catches perhaps two or three words a page. Even gentle Mazby, who with his girlish complexion and long lashes is perhaps the brightest of the bunch, distractedly thumbs a month-old copy of The Lancet. They are staring at the words but deep down each is waiting for Henry to speak. Will tonight at last be the night? Will Dr. Chiver finally make good on his promises? Henry looks from boy to boy, dreading having to tell them that once again he has nothing for them, but annoyed that they have begun to assume it. They brought newspapers instead of their kits; at least, up until now, they have made a pretense of bringing their dissection kits.

Four paltry students, Henry thinks with a sigh—and they are far more difficult to handle than the huge crowds that came to Surgeons’ Square in Edinburgh. Before Burke and Hare, Dr. Knox was so popular he would draw on average five hundred students a session. His anatomy theatre held only two hundred, so he and his assistant, Henry Chiver, taught in three shifts a day: morning, afternoon, and just past dinnertime. How many evenings did Henry choke down a capon and a mug of beer in Dr. Knox’s dining room, knowing their subject was laid out upon the table in the next room, just as Dr. Knox had left it at the end of the previous lecture; the abdomen opened first and viscera removed, as they decompose quickest; the torso opened next, the head removed and packed in ice for study the next day? How many evenings, as he ripped into his drumstick, would he imagine the ropy tendons of the body’s dissected hand left pinned in place with the point of a compass, so that two hundred students might shove past and make a quick sketch before heading off to their own dinners? Some afternoons when Knox and Henry ran late, they would eat their cold sandwiches over the opened corpse while they argued a point of procedure: what to dissect next? Knox always lobbied for the brain, Henry was obsessed with the heart. The room was kept purposefully cold during the Winter Session to preserve the bodies, and Henry would stomp his feet to warm them, listening with his hands pressed against his armpits as crotchety, atheistic Knox went on about the glories of that most perfect human organ, the unknowable brain. It is the seat of all reason, he would say, the true heart of man, far more so than that muscle in the chest. It is mysterious yet desirous to plumb its own mysteries; it is the Grand Usurper to the throne of impotent old King Soul and its reign defines our modern age! Yes, but, would say Henry. Yes, but—Henry cannot forget the painting of Christ’s Sacred Heart perpetually bursting into flame over his boyhood bed. Against a triumphant fire, bright, sentimental cherubim lifted high that red and blue holy pump; the aorta wide open like the mouthpiece of a trumpet, the four chambers shadowy beneath a venous pink pericardium. It was an anatomical heart, a scientist’s heart, enlisted in the aid of Christ. He knew he was meant to see his savior’s humanity in this isolated organ, and yet by the time he was old enough to enter medical school, the torso of Jesus that faith should have wrapped around it had never materialized; and Henry was left instead worshipping a deified heart. These students are not atheists like you, Henry would argue with Knox. What better way to demystify, what better way to put power into their hands and let them know they have a right to understand the human body, than to have them claim for their own the most ancient symbol of Man’s very Self, his passionate heart? It is easy to intellectualize the body when you are able to take it for granted, thinks Henry, watching his four students fidget over their newspapers here in the Labour in Vain. Since Burke and Hare, he will never again allow himself to take anything for granted.

“Listen to this,” says Bietler, who has the annoying habit of reading aloud every manner of trivial news. “They opened an Asylum for Female Penitents in Newcastle last month. It’s already full.”

Mazby glances at Henry to mirror his reaction, but their teacher is impassive.

“I went to a whore in Newcastle once,” volunteers Coombs. “She was so grimed with coal she looked like a Negress.”

No one encourages him to continue, but he does so just the same.

“I also had a whore in Paris.”

Grose has shouldered Coombs away and now he can no longer even pretend to read. The student looks around the pub and lights on the staircase leading up to John Robinson’s second story. A smirking keelman pulls a factory girl along by her wrist and disappears up the steps.

“I wonder if she’s one,” he says.

“Corn’s up because of the Quarantine,” reads Bietler.

“Do you think the Quarantine is doing any good?” Mazby asks, hoping to draw Dr. Chiver into a conversation. He’s been so quiet tonight.

Yesterday, at his house on Nile Street, Henry had his students inject a pregnant dog with blue prussiate of potash, then extract and study her organs. Though they had made only one injection, the pancreas, the salivary glands, the kidneys all had turned blue. The prussiate turned the placenta blue, too, and through it, the veins of the fetus had absorbed the color, tingeing the puppy inside a deep hairless sapphire. One small prick here, and an entire body is conquered. A city is like a body, my boys, thinks Henry. It circulates, it shares, it absorbs. Let cholera but prick our pathetic Quarantine and you will soon witness the miracle of circulation.