The Heart Specialist (30 page)

22

DECEMBER 1915

The Priory parlour had not changed since my childhood. The upholstery on the chesterfield and armchair was more threadbare and there were more cracks in the plaster, but essentially the room was the same. I had come out to St. Andrews East for the Christmas holidays that second winter of the war as I always did, carting gifts and store-bought treats from Montreal. Miss Skerry said that this winter visit and the two weeks I spent with them each summer were the highlights of the year. She and my sister led their lives sequestered from society. Women from the older, English-speaking families still looked in on them occasionally, bringing compotes and pies, but the French, who had not known our family in previous generations, were not as accommodating. They were frightened of Laure, nicknaming her “
la folle de St. André
.”

Laure was at her best when I came to visit. There was no sign of the rage that Miss Skerry described in her weekly letters. She considered the letters a duty — reports from the front, a precise tracking of the progression of my sister’s illness and her daily battles to contain it. She described in detail the nosebleeds and facial discoloration that accompanied Laure’s fits, the periodic flights into town and ensuing humiliation when Laure was recaptured and returned to the Priory. I had long stopped reading them they were so painful, preferring to let them accumulate on my dresser. When the stack grew too large I put them in a box in my closet. Their real function, I suspected, was to give Miss Skerry the illusion of company.

Miss Skerry had lit a fire in the hearth and she, Laure and I were huddled around it, wrapped in rugs. Over the last decade she had put on weight. Miss Skerry had never been pretty but there had been a time when she had seemed proud of her trim little body. It was as if she’d ceased to care. Her hair, once brushed and glossy, was unkempt. These changes would have worried me had her mind not remained sharp. In the evenings it was a pleasure to sit and converse with her.

But with Laure in the room conversing was not always easy. Tonight we were concentrating on work, not words. The only sounds in the parlour were the periodic hisses and crackles of logs on the fire and the click of our knitting needles. I flipped the toe of the sock on which I was working and laid it flat on my lap. I was slower than Miss Skerry, who had practically finished a thick beige pair. Laure, whose concentration was so frayed she had difficulties finishing a sentence, was nearly done hers as well. Working with her hands seemed to calm her, bringing back a semblance of her former grace. They knitted. They embroidered sheets and tablecloths. They sewed dresses and capes. Prior to the war I had been the beneficiary of their industriousness.

These days, however, the work was socks. For Laure it had developed into an obsession. Since the autumn of 1914, when the knitting drive had begun, she had completed three hundred pairs.

I had little of my sister’s talent. I waved my stump of tangled wool before the governess and laughed. “I’m all thumbs, George.” I felt awkward using this name but Miss Skerry had insisted. We had known each other far too long for me to continue calling her “Miss,” she said. She had been christened Georgina and chopped off the last two syllables. “Like George Eliot,” she’d explained, “and George Sand. As clubs go, Agnes, it’s one of the few I wouldn’t mind belonging to.”

George smiled at my knitting. “You’re already doing your bit, Agnes. Socks aren’t the only way to help.”

It was true. I was doing my bit, though in less direct fashion than keeping the feet of Canadian boys warm in the trenches. I was employed at two Montreal hospitals and my private clinic was overflowing with patients. I had visited Harvard University that fall to give a talk on congenital heart disorders. In the United States the medical schools were flourishing, America being not yet at war. I was one of a handful of foreign scholars still available for American tours. So far Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Pennsylvania had sent me invitations. I had refused everyone but Harvard, as I was too busy with my clinical work.

“Socks are a local specialty,” George said, reaching forward and patting Laure’s leg.

Laure looked up with such pride that I had to laugh. There was great comfort here at the Priory, sitting with my sister and our former governess, concentrating on simple things. It reminded me of the Brontë sisters, shut away on the heath, engaging in domestic work and then rewarding themselves with books and talk in the evening. Perhaps this would be my old age, sitting at the Priory’s hearth, knitting with Laure and discussing with George Skerry. I had hoped for a more expansive life, for relationships extending beyond the circle of my girlhood, but there were worse fates.

Miss Skerry was translating
The Aeneid
, continuing the work in Latin on which her father had commenced her. She enjoyed the language, she said, although she confessed that she had mixed feelings about Virgil. “Too fond of war,” she’d said the night before as we watched embers glowing on the hearth.

I was more like Virgil than I would have cared to admit. Not that I was in favour of killing, but I certainly did yearn to be with the men in the arena of war. I envied my colleagues at the front. I regretted not being in Europe. Dugald wrote weekly, describing scenes of camp life on the outskirts of Dannes-Camiers in northern France, where he and the others from McGill were stationed.

All through that summer and autumn I had received first-hand reports. Fighting on the Western Front had tapered off. The main theatre of action was Turkey. France was relatively quiet. The summer of 1915 had been the driest in living memory. Dugald described long days of sunshine. For me “war” conjured scenes of young men lying half-naked on riverbanks. How I envied them their comradeship beneath the Picardy sun.

McGill’s was one of seven temporary tent hospitals set up on a plain above Dannes-Camiers. It had close to one thousand beds, roughly the same number as those of England, Scotland and France. They had set up in the late spring, just after the Battle of Ypres. Everyone was eager to see action, but beyond a few sniper casualties action did not come. A sort of standoff situation developed, and there was nothing for the hospital staff to do but wait.

According to Dugald Revere Howlett was like a schoolboy on holiday. He sent home almost immediately for his bicycle and spent most days fishing in the streams and rivers near their camp. Jakob Hertzlich was also enjoying himself. He and Revere had become friends. I reread this section of Dugald’s letter with fascination. With regular meals and exercise Jakob Hertzlich had apparently blossomed. He had purchased a rusty bicycle in the village so he could accompany Revere into the countryside.

In September Howlett Senior had crossed the Channel to visit the McGill outfit and see his son. That was the final straw for me. Dugald’s descriptions made me envious. He wrote that Howlett had organized a tour of the front for himself and Revere in a Red Cross car.

The last couple of letters I had received, however, had been more sombre in tone. Over a thousand soldiers from the Battle of Loos had arrived, suddenly the McGill camp was overrun. Dugald worked the first half of October without sleep, treating soldiers whose limbs had been shattered by shrapnel. It tore at the flesh, he wrote, creating jagged, irregular wounds that invited infection. In the filthy, close conditions of war, sepsis was ubiquitous. Patients were dying from the dirt.

This morning I’d received Dugald’s latest letter, which I had yet to open. I pulled it out of my pocket and showed it to George.

She put her knitting down and rubbed her glasses with her hem. “I’d say that man is either in love with you or hasn’t many friends.”

“He’s lots of friends,” I said, and it was true.

“Women friends,” said George, pointedly. “You know what I’m getting at.”

“Well he’s not in love with me,” I said. “He’s not the type.”

Miss Skerry slipped her glasses back on. “Is that so? One has to be a certain type to fall in love?”

My words had come out wrong. “I mean,” I said, “Dugald Rivers is not actually interested in women.”

George’s eyes narrowed.

“He likes me, George. He’s sincere enough about that. But it goes no further.”

“You said he gave you his ring.”

“Yes, but only because all the men were doing it — giving rings and photos with endearments scribbled on the back to their girlfriends. If the others hadn’t done it the thought wouldn’t have entered his mind.”

“So he’s a conformist?”

“No. Just the opposite in fact.”

“I’m afraid I’m not following.”

I inhaled and tried again. “Most of the time Dugald Rivers is himself. And that self is perfectly content to converse and eat tarts in the museum. But the war brought certain pressures. Many of the men have sweethearts to write to. Dugald decided to fit me into the mould of a sweetheart. There’s a certain logic to it. He has such trouble fitting the conventions that he felt obliged to give me that ring. It was so awkward. It felt like play-acting.”

George Skerry raised her eyebrows. “He sounds like an invert,” she said quietly.

Inversion: the crime of sexual love between men. The medical profession considered it a pathology. Yet the book I’d read over in Oxford, the one by Iwan Bloch, had been tolerant of the practice.

“I am not sure what Dugald is,” I said finally. I had never discussed Dugald’s sexual life with him and felt uncomfortable speculating about it, even with an intelligent and sympathetic person such as my old governess. “He’s just himself, George.”

Miss Skerry smiled. “Fair enough. Besides, he writes gems of letters.” She made a few more stitches before looking up again. “Aren’t you going to read it?”

I opened the envelope, which bore a November postmark. Mail took excruciating lengths of time to reach Montreal, having first to cross the U-boat-infested Atlantic and then be put on a train in Halifax. The letter began “My beloved,” a fact I decided not to share with Miss Skerry or my sister, who was beside us on the sofa clicking steadily with her needles.

Dugald’s first paragraph was devoted to rain. The Picardy sun was apparently in retreat. The most pressing medical challenges now were rheumatic fever and pneumonia, which had ravaged the beleaguered hospital staff. Dugald himself was suffering from asthma. Although the hospital was now empty of wounded soldiers the medical staff had been instructed to stay on until further notice, no matter how bad conditions became.

Their tents were in tatters. They had been a gift from India, a country whose tent makers had no idea how dismal a French autumn could be. They had begun to disintegrate in the first autumn rains. The cotton ropes anchoring them shrank, pulling the pegs out of the earth. The canvas split. Mud oozed through the floorboards and rain poured in, soaking bedding and clothes. “They’ve closed the hospital!” I exclaimed, looking up. “It was deemed unfit for habitation!”

Dugald had decided to leave for the front. Most of the young men, including Revere Howlett, wanted to do the same. Jakob Hertzlich, who was older, had opted for England, where he was trying to get work as a hospital orderly. No one, it seemed, considered the possibility of returning home.

“They’re throwing away their lives,” said George Skerry.

I stared at her. Hers could be an irritating frankness.

“It’s true,” she continued. “Bad enough some countries force their men to fight. These young men are leaping to their deaths of their own free will.”

“I’d leap too if I could,” I replied.

George Skerry looked at me. “Nonsense. Don’t you see how blessed we are? Don’t you see that war is one of those rare times when womanhood is a privilege, not a curse?”

She gave me pause. The war had been good to me professionally, it was true, but it had almost destroyed my personal life. Aside from George Skerry there weren’t many women whose company I enjoyed. I was often lonely. I missed Dugald Rivers, Dr. Clarke, even Mastro. I missed my students, and — I couldn’t believe I had been so reduced — I would even have been pleased to see Jakob Hertzlich again.

“Look at us,” George went on, “warming our feet by the grate while our young men are dying on foreign soil.”

Laure looked up blankly from her stocking. I had to smile.

“Agnes,” Miss Skerry said briskly. “Our work is for the first time in history valued and in demand. Look at yourself, my dear. Think of all you have accomplished in the past year. Without the war Harvard would not have invited you.” She paused, seeing the look on my face. “Not for want of talent. You know that. But under normal circumstances Harvard would invite a man. The war has offered you opportunities. You have seized them and shone.”

I glanced at the socks lying on George’s lap. They were expertly knitted, not a stitch loose or out of place. Some boy George Skerry had never met would likely die in them. She rewound what was left of the skein to replace it in the knitting box. Her argument fell down with her own life. She couldn’t claim that the war had benefited her in any way. She was living out her best years in seclusion with Laure, knitting socks for corpses.

That night after we had put Laure to bed I stopped her, putting my hand on her sleeve. “You’re not bored here, are you George?”

We were in the upstairs hall outside Laure’s room. George drew back physically. Bathing Laure or even restraining her was one thing — it was part of her job — but a gesture of intimacy between equals was a different story. “Boredom is for boring people,” she said hastily.

I sighed. She occasionally slipped back into being my governess, distancing herself with aphorisms. I tried one last time as we headed down the stairs. “Don’t you dream of more?”

She looked up, eyes magnified by her lenses. Her gaze was so direct I had to drop my own. I moved toward the stairs, giving my old friend a moment to collect herself. In the parlour the fire had shrunk to a heap of ash-covered coals. George Skerry knelt beside it and blew, coaxing out a flame. It was obvious that she did not wish to speak so I went to the bookshelf. The number of books had grown since Miss Skerry had moved back. My old governess picked up her edition of Virgil and sat down on the sofa. She was wading through Book IV, the incendiary passions of Queen Dido.