Gob's Grief (19 page)

Being friendly with Gob was good for Will’s education. Though technically his junior, Gob was farther along than Will; he’d been apprenticed to a respected German physician, Dr. Oetker, for three years before he came to Bellevue. His performance on the entrance exam had so impressed Macready that the secretary had made Gob a junior assistant in the second surgical division.

Under Gob’s aegis, Will was allowed to assist on a surgery with the great Dr. Wood himself. It was a daring procedure, an exhilarating bowel repair. The fattest man Will had ever seen lay on the table. He’d been set on by would-be murderers after a feast, and their stabbing knives had poked three holes in his vast belly. Will and Gob hooked out loops of bowel and held them steady while Dr. Wood, a neat man who sported a boutonniere of violets on his black coat, sewed up the wounds. Will thought of the boy he’d carried over the field at Gettysburg, and how his guts had been similarly exposed.

“So you see, Mr. Woodhull,” Dr. Wood was saying, “how you must put your stitches through the fibrous tunic of the intestine.” He was finished with his suturing, and now he inspected his work from various angles. He took a decanter from another assistant and began to pour oil liberally over the wound. He smiled and said, “A little olive oil will facilitate the return of the bowel to the peritoneal cavity.”

Surgery made Will partial to ether. Assisting Dr. Wood, he was often assigned the role of anesthetist. He’d apply Squibb’s ether to the patient with a cone made of newspaper, a towel, and a wad of cotton. He filched small quantities and brought them home to Fulton Street for use in making collodion, and for sniffing. He liked to sit with all the lights out but the curtains open, and take little whiffs of ether until he passed into a dreamless black sleep.

It was better than hooking arteries or bowel, this ether-duty. Will never got sleepy administering the ether, but he sometimes developed a carefree attitude during the course of an operation. It made him bold.

“Doctor,” he said to a senior assistant during a multiple amputation, “please stay away from the patient’s head. You will cause her to combust.” The assistant had a lit cigar wedged between his teeth.

“She says her mother was frightened by an elephant when she was pregnant,” said Dr. Wood. The blond-headed girl on the table had been born with an extra finger and seven extra toes. Dr. Wood was pruning the girl to a better life. Whenever anyone noticed her finger she had suffered fits of hysterical blindness and St. Vitus’s dance. “What do you think of that, Mr. Woodhull?”

“I think elephants are formidable creatures, sir,” said Gob. “I think it is sensible to fear them.” Dr. Wood laughed too long and too loud. Gob’s hands, dexterous despite the congenital absence of one finger, were educated while Will looked on, wondering if his friend couldn’t take the girl’s extra finger as a replacement for his own. It didn’t seem beyond him. Under Dr. Wood’s tutelage, Gob tied off arteries and sewed up wounds, and once even opened up a skull with a Hey’s saw. Will would have liked to do some cutting of his own, but Dr. Wood seemed unlikely ever to let him. He often looked scornfully at Will’s big mashers and said, “
Those
are not the hands of a surgeon.”

Many nights, Gob and Will would sit up with fresh amputees, watching over their wounds for signs of secondary hemorrhage. The patients would be arranged in their beds in a circle around the two students, with their stumps facing inward. Gob and Will would sit back to back, observing the stumps.

“I think blood is beautiful,” Gob said during one such vigil.

“You wouldn’t,” said Will, “if you’d ever been covered in it for days. It loses its charm.”

“I like it because it is perfect, because it does its work perfectly. A perfect fuel for a perfect machine.” Jolly was walking up and down the ward, not waving or speaking, just turning his head this way and that, regarding everything with sadness and longing. Will looked away from him, his attention drawn to a stump that twitched briefly, and when he looked back Jolly was gone. The spirits came and went like that.

“I hate the smell,” Will said. “And anyhow if I were less tired and more articulate I would argue that we are not perfect, body or soul.” The stump that had twitched began to bleed again, so Will leaned forward to tighten a band of elastic around it, but this was not sufficient. He had to plunge his fingers through the stitches and feel blindly under the flap, seeking to catch the leaking artery between his fingers. The patient was screaming and the sheets were soaking through.

Gob put his little hand in, too, and in a moment he’d caught the vessel and pinched it. “Ah,” he said, over the patient’s screaming. “Feel that!” Will put his finger along Gob’s and felt the blood beating. The strength and the rhythm of it did seem like a miracle, just then. “Perfect,” said Gob. “Oh, I wish I could build like
this
.”

Sometimes he’d feel the pressure of eyes on him as he walked, and looking back he would see them. Jolly was always out in front, taking measured, even steps. Will would keep walking, thinking they might go away if only he ignored them, but he never could. He’d look back again and again, and each time there’d be another, until there was a long train of them following him down Broadway or the Bowery or Fulton Street. They stepped fluidly among the living, never touching them even on the busiest streets, while Will, always looking over his shoulder, knocked packages from the arms of ladies, and got tangled in their parasols. “Stop following me!” he shouted, but he knew this would do nothing to deter them, and it did not.

*     *     *

In the lying-in ward, the women waiting to deliver kept busy making shrouds. Will wondered, as he walked among them, how many would lie buried in their work. Bellevue had a reputation as a nest of puerperal fever. Gob had switched to the second medical division after the end of the first term. Dr. Wood offered to make him a senior assistant, but Gob said he felt drawn to the medical wards, to the cholera and consumption and pneumonia. Will shadowed him there, and saw how his patients did better than others. Gob eschewed calomel and tartar emetic in all cases. He dosed the weak of heart with foxglove. He gave calcined magnesia for excessive flatulence, carbonate of soda for dyspepsia, a mixture of turpentine and gin for worms. Patients with intractable dry coughs who got no relief from syrup of squills were healed by a weird elixir. “Moss squeezings, bat’s blood, and death angel,” Gob said, and Will thought he must be joking.

They liked to go around the wards at night. The nurses were untrained and incompetent, sentenced to Bellevue to serve out ten-day terms for public drunkenness. They would find them snoring in a corner, the remains of Friday’s fish dinner smeared on their frocks, while patients called out for assistance or mercy or death. Gob and Will might turn a patient on his side so he could urinate, a veteran with a bullet in his bladder that acted as a ball valve, or sit at the bedsides of cholera patients, measuring out grains of morphine into a cup of hot water. The cholera patients had shriveled fingers. Their lips were blue, and their clammy faces were shrunken.

By January of ‘68, Will had become an assistant in the first medical division. He spent most of his time in the basement, among the alcoholics and the insane. “They are all very unreasonable down there,” he complained, when he came upstairs at night to visit Gob. “You are living the life here on the second floor, let me tell you.” He would sit on a bed and throw wadded-up gauze at a passed-out nurse, saying, “Wake up, Sairey Gamp!” or else assist Gob in taking pulses and listening to hearts and lungs. When the patients were all asleep they would sit in a window, staring at the East River and talking quietly. They both belonged to a not very exclusive club of surviving brothers.

“Sam was the companion of my youth,” Will said one night. “But then we grew distant.”

“I failed him,” said Gob, raising his hand as if to touch the full moon framed in the window. A cold wind was whipping up blue foam on the river.

“How does that happen? He was the only other person in the world, and then he was no one.”

“If I had been with him he would yet be alive,” Gob said quietly.

“He was a stranger to me, when he died,” Will said. “Do you think that’s a crime?” He looked around the room for Sam, thinking that talk of him might summon him. He wasn’t there, but Jolly was pacing up and down the ward, looking at his feet as they walked.

“Help me!” said a cholera patient, sitting up suddenly in his bed. Will was too late with the bucket.

In the morning, they would go for a walk on the hospital grounds, which used to be filled with orchards of peach and apple and plum trees, but now were covered with small and large buildings of gneiss rock and brick. They would wander for a while in the cold, both of them exhausted but neither in a mood for sleep. Gob, Will discovered, had a morbid imagination. It seemed to Will that Gob was becoming a doctor for the wrong reason, not because he loved life, but because he was obsessed with death. Not that it was the right reason, either, to become a doctor at the direction of a spirit.

After their walk they might seek out Dr. Gouley, to assist him with an autopsy, Gob weighing livers or kidneys or brains while Will measured the thickness of a heart. Dr. Gouley, a lonely man, was happy for their company. “You work well together,” he said to them on more than one occasion. Sometimes he invited them to put on loupes and do a detailed dissection. Gob liked to pull on the tendons of a flayed hand and make it beckon invitingly to the other corpses. When the organs were all removed, and there was nothing left in the late person but watery blood pooling in the gutters alongside the spine, Dr. Gouley would stare lovingly into the body and put his hands into the pink fluid, lifting it and holding it in his palms until it ran through his fingers. “My boys,” he would say. “Do you see how we are vessels?”

The spirits followed Will to a place called the Pearl, a saloon run by a woman of the same name. It was a hideous dive. A white-painted glass ball as big as a head hung over the door. Inside, it looked at first glance like any other saloon—dim and smoky, with sawdust on the floor. But there was a door in the back, and if you went through it you found yourself, not outside in the alley, but at the top of a staircase, and if you took those stairs down you entered a bagnio, a maze, in whose secret recesses prostitutes reclined expectantly.

Will went downstairs without looking back to see how many followed. At the bottom of the stairs, he opened the door to the maze. Down there it was musty, and it stank of fish. What might once have been stored there he never knew, but it seemed like a place that must once have held bones. Along the twisting, turning way there were recesses, hidden by thin curtains, where couches sat. Some of the curtains were drawn, and if there were lights inside they threw copulating silhouettes onto the hanging fabric. Grunting cries rang off the low ceiling.

There was something he liked about these seedy, curtained places. He had enough money from portrait-taking that he could visit a nice house, someplace on West Twenty-fifth Street, where the girls were pretty and all the fornication was done amid the trappings of purity. He might visit every one of the Seven Sisters’ houses, or dress up in his finest clothes for a visit to Josie Woods’s. He’d heard about those places—white sheets and soft beds, girls with clean hair and shining faces who dressed up in old-fashioned hoop skirts and spoke with great refinement—but he had never visited one. The glass house had made him honest in his debauchery; when he wallowed he wallowed like a pig.

He went in through the first open curtain he found. There was a girl sitting on a green couch piled with blankets. She was reading a book by the light of a lantern hung on the wall. A pair of cracked spectacles were balanced on the end of her nose.

“Close the curtain, darling,” she said, without looking up. “I never like to put on a show.” Already, a cloud of witnesses was crowding inside, jostling him with their cool flesh. Jolly’s and Sam’s were the only familiar faces, though there were a dozen or more with him. He couldn’t meet Sam’s eyes, but he couldn’t leave the place, either, couldn’t go home and read, couldn’t even content himself with rubbing up against some pretty, unsuspecting lady on a Second Avenue stage, as a more restrained fiend might do.

He had whiskey with him, and she asked to sip it from his mouth, so he took some and he kissed her. She would not take off her glasses and they bumped against his face. She lifted her dress, really just an old and stained shift of silk, put her book down gently on the couch, and lay back, putting one arm behind her head. Pushing her glasses up high on her nose, she told Will to take down his pants. He opened up his jacket and his shirt so he could press his skin against hers. She was clammy and cold, and her breasts were pimply, but he kissed them as if he loved them.

After a while, the girl gave a little titter. Will thought it was because his work was unsatisfying and ridiculous, but in fact she was laughing at some bit of humor in her book, which she had picked up again, and was reading over his shoulder. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked down at her.

“What, darling?” she asked. “What? It’s Mr. Dickens. I can hardly put it down. Not for anything. So go on. Just go right on with it.” The spirits, crowded close, were nodding avidly, and their mouths were moving as if to say,
Yes, do.

*     *     *

“Hold still,” Will said, because Gob would not stop fidgeting. “You’ll ruin the photograph.”

“Sorry,” said Gob, but he kept moving his eyes and his head to look at the pictures around the studio. Will had brought him to Brooklyn for a complimentary portrait, motivated by friendship and by Jolly. Will was thrilled to be able to teach Gob the photographic process, because he’d learned as much about medicine from Gob as he had from their professors. And as they walked on South Street one day, Jolly had pointed repeatedly at Gob and then at Brooklyn, making it very obvious that he wanted Will to take him there.

“I’ll bind your head to the stand,” Will said.