The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (168 page)

They took a carriage from the station to Palmer’s Illinois House Hotel, where Rachel’s attorney had reserved a room for her. Shaman registered there too, and was assigned a room on the fifth floor, 508. He saw her up to Room 306 and tipped the bellman.

“Would you like anything else. Some coffee, perhaps?”

“I don’t think so, Shaman. It’s getting late, and I’ve a lot to attend to tomorrow.” Nor did she want to join him for breakfast. “Why don’t we meet back here at three o’clock, and I’ll show you Chicago before dinner?”

So he told her that sounded fine, and he left her. He went up to 508,
got his own things unpacked into the bureau drawers and hung up in the closet, and then walked down the five flights again to use the privy behind the hotel, which was encouragingly clean and well-tended.

On the way back up he paused for a moment on the third landing and looked down the corridor toward her room, then climbed the other two flights of stairs.

In the morning, directly after breakfast, he sought out Bridgeton Street, which turned out to be a workingman’s neighborhood of attached wooden houses. At number 237 the tired-looking young woman who answered his knock was holding an infant, while a small boy clutched her skirts.

She shook her head when Shaman asked for the Reverend David Goodnow. “Mr. Goodnow’s not lived here for over a year. He’s very ill, I’m told.”

“Do you know where he’s gone?”

“Yes, he’s in a … kind of a hospital. We never have met him. We send our rent to the hospital every month. That’s the arrangement his lawyer made.”

“Could I have the name of the hospital? It’s important that I see him.”

She nodded. “I have it written down in the kitchen.” She left, but she was back in a moment, trailing her son and holding a slip of paper.

“It’s the Dearborn Asylum,” she said. “On Sable Street.”

The sign was modest and dignified, a bronze tablet set in the central column rising above a low wall of red brick:

Dearborn Asylum

For Inebriates

And the Insane

The building was a three-story mansion of red brick, and the heavy iron gridwork on the windows matched the ironwork pickets that topped the brick wall.

Inside the mahogany door was a lightless entry containing a pair of horsehair chairs. In a small office off the entry, a middle-aged man sat at a desk, making entries in a large bookkeeping ledger. He nodded when Shaman made his request.

“Mr. Goodnow hasn’t had a visitor since Lord knows when. Don’t know as he’s ever had one. You just sign the guest book, and I’ll go ask Dr. Burgess.”

Dr. Burgess appeared a few minutes later, a short man with black hair and thin, fussy mustaches. “Are you family, or a friend of Mr. Goodnow’s, Dr. Cole? Or is your visit professional?”

“I know people who know Mr. Goodnow,” Shaman said carefully. “I’m in Chicago only briefly, and I thought to visit him.”

Dr. Burgess nodded. “Visiting hours are in the afternoon, but for a busy physician we can make an exception. You will follow me, please.”

They climbed a flight of stairs, and Dr. Burgess knocked at a locked door, which was opened by a large attendant. The burly man led them down a long corridor, where pale women sat against both walls, talking to themselves or staring at nothing. They stepped around a pool of urine, and Shaman saw smeared feces. In some of the rooms off the corridor, women were chained to the wall. Shaman had spent four sad weeks working in the Ohio State Asylum for the Insane when he was in medical school, and he wasn’t surprised at the sights or the smells. He was glad he couldn’t hear the sounds.

The attendant unlocked another door and led them down a corridor in the men’s ward, no better than the women’s. Finally Shaman was conducted into a small room containing a table and some wooden chairs, and instructed to wait.

Presently the doctor and the attendant returned, leading an elderly man dressed in work trousers with buttons missing from the flies, and a filthy suit jacket worn over his underwear. He needed a haircut and his gray facial hair was wild and untrimmed. There was a small smile on his lips, but his eyes were elsewhere. “Here is Mr. Goodnow,” Dr. Burgess said.

“Mr. Goodnow, I’m Dr. Robert Cole.”

The smile remained the same. The eyes didn’t see him.

“He can’t speak,” Dr. Burgess said.

Nevertheless, Shaman got up from his chair and moved close to the man.

“Mr. Goodnow, were you Ellwood Patterson?”

“He hasn’t spoken in more than a year,” Dr. Burgess said patiently.

“Mr. Goodnow, did you kill the Indian woman you raped in Holden’s Crossing? When you went there for the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner?”

Dr. Burgess and the attendant stared at Shaman.

“Do you know where I can find Hank Cough?”

But there was no answer.

And again, sharply, “Where can I look for Hank Cough?”

“He’s syphilitic. Part of his brain has been destroyed by paresis,” Dr. Burgess said.

“How do you know he’s not pretending?”

“We see him all the time, and we know. Why would someone pretend in order to live like this?”

“Years ago, this man took part in an inhuman, terrible crime. I hate to see him escape punishment,” Shaman said bitterly.

David Goodnow had begun to dribble from the mouth. Dr. Burgess looked at him and shook his head. “I don’t think he has escaped punishment,” he said.

Shaman was led back through the wards and to the front door, where Dr. Burgess tendered him a polite good-bye and mentioned that the asylum welcomed referrals from physicians in western Illinois. He went away from that place, blinking in the bright sunlight. The stinks of the city were good smells, by contrast. His head swam, and he walked several blocks deeply lost in thought.

It felt to him like the end of a trail. One of the men who had destroyed Makwa-ikwa was dead. Another, as he had just witnessed, was caught in a living hell, and the whereabouts of the third man were unknown.

Miriam Ferocia was right, he decided. It was time for him to leave Makwa’s killers to God’s justice and to concentrate on medicine and his own life.

He took a horse trolley to the center of Chicago, and another horse trolley to the Chicago Hospital, which reminded him at once of his hospital in Cincinnati. It was a good hospital, and large, with almost five hundred beds. When he asked for an interview with the medical director and explained his errand, he was treated with pleasant courtesy.

The physician-in-chief brought him to a senior surgeon, and the two men gave him their opinion about the equipment and supplies that a small hospital would need. The hospital purchasing agent recommended supply houses that could offer ongoing service and reasonable deliveries. And Shaman spoke to the head housekeeper about the number of linens needed to keep each bed in clean sheets. He wrote busily in his notebook.

Just before three o’clock, when he returned to Palmer’s Illinois House Hotel, Rachel was seated in the lobby, waiting for him. The moment he saw her face, he knew her day had gone well.

“It’s over, the company is no longer my responsibility,” she said. She told him the lawyer had done an excellent job of preparing the necessary documents, and most of the receipts of the sale already had been placed in trust for Hattie and Joshua.

“Well, we must celebrate,” he said, and the gray mood that had been established by his morning activities was banished.

They took the first hansom carriage in the line at the curb in front of the hotel. Shaman didn’t want to see the concert hall or the new stockyards. Only one thing about Chicago interested him. “Show me the places you knew when you lived here,” he said.

“But that will be so dull!”

“Please.”

So Rachel leaned forward and gave directions to the driver, and the horse moved off.

At first she was embarrassed as she pointed out the instrument shop where she had bought strings and a new bow for her violin, and had had the pegs repaired. But she began to enjoy herself as she identified the shops where she had bought her shoes and her hats, and the shirtmaker’s where she had ordered some dress shirts for her father’s birthday present. They rode for twenty blocks, until she showed him an imposing edifice and told him it was the Sinai Congregation. “This is where I played with my quartet on Thursdays, and where we came to services Friday evenings. It isn’t where Joe and I were married. That was the
Kehilath Anshe Maarib
synagogue, where Joe’s aunt, Harriet Ferber, was a prominent member.

“Four years ago, Joe and a number of others broke away from the synagogue and founded Sinai, a congregation of Reform Judaism. They did away with a good deal of ritual and tradition, and it created an enormous scandal here. Aunt Harriet was furious, but it didn’t cause a lasting rift, and we remained close. When she died a year later, we named Harriet after her.”

She directed the driver next to a neighborhood of small but comfortable homes, and on Tyler Street she pointed out a house of brown shingles.

“There is where we lived.”

Shaman remembered how she’d looked then, and he leaned forward, trying to fit the girl of his memory into this house.

Five blocks away there was a cluster of stores. “Oh, we must stop!” Rachel said. They left the carriage and went into a grocery that smelled of spices and salt, where a ruddy-faced white-bearded old man, fully as large
as Shaman, came toward them, beaming as he wiped his hands on his grocer’s apron.

“Mrs. Regensberg, how good to see you again!”

“Thank you, Mr. Freudenthal. It’s good to see you too. I want to get some things to carry back home to my mother.”

She bought several varieties of smoked fish, black olives, and a large square of almond paste. The grocer cast a keen glance over Shaman.

“Ehr is nit ah Yiddisheh
” he observed to her.

“Nein
” she said. Then, as if an explanation were called for, “
Ehr ist ein guteh freind.
”

Shaman didn’t have to understand the language to realize what had been said. He felt a flash of resentment, but almost as quickly he realized that the old man’s question was part of the reality that came along with her, like Hattie and Joshua. When he and Rachel had been children in a more innocent world there had been few dissimilarities to deal with, but now they were adults, and the differences had to be faced.

So when he accepted her packages from the grocer, he smiled at the old man. “Good day to you, Mr. Freudenthal,” he said, and followed Rachel out of the store.

They brought the packages back to the hotel. It was time for dinner, and Shaman would have settled for the hotel dining room, but Rachel said she knew a better place. She took him to the Parkman Café, a small restaurant within walking distance of the hotel. It was unostentatious and moderately priced, but the food and service were good. After dinner, when he asked her what she would like to do next, she said she wanted to walk along the lake.

The breeze blew in from the water, but there was a reversion to summer warmth in the air. The sky held bright stars and the last phase of the harvest moon, but it was too dark for him to see her mouth, and they didn’t talk. With another woman this would have made him anxious, but he knew Rachel took his silence for granted in the absence of visibility.

They walked along on the lake causeway until she paused beneath a street lamp and pointed ahead at a pool of yellow light. “I hear wonderfully bad music, lots of cymbals!”

When they reached the lighted place they saw a curious sight, a round platform, large as a milking parlor in a barn, on which painted wooden
animals were fixed. A thin man with a seamed and weathered face turned a great crank.

“Is it a music box?” Rachel said.

“
Non
, it is
un carrousel
. One chooses an animal and rides upon it,
très drole, très plaisant,
” the man said. “Each ride twenty cents, mistaire.”

Rob sat on a brown bear. Rachel rode a horse painted an improbable red. The Frenchman grunted, turning the crank, and at once they began to whirl.

In the center of the
carrousel
a brass ring hung from a pole, beneath a sign that said that a free ride would be awarded to anyone able to seize the ring while seated on a steed. Doubtless it was well out of the reach of most riders, but Shaman stretched his long body. When the Frenchman saw Shaman trying for the ring, he turned the crank faster and the
carrousel
speeded up, but Shaman snatched the ring on his second try.

He earned several free rides for Rachel, but soon the proprietor called a halt in order to rest his arm, and Shaman got off his brown bear and took over the turning of the crank. He cranked faster and faster, and the red horse went from a canter to a gallop. Rachel threw her head back and screamed with laughter like a child as she passed him, her white teeth flashing. There was nothing childlike about her attraction. It wasn’t only Shaman who was spellbound; the Frenchman stole fascinated peeks as he busied himself, preparing to close down. “You are the last customair of 1864,” he told Shaman. “It is
finis
for the season. Soon will come the ice.” Rachel stayed on for eleven rides. It was obvious that they’d kept the proprietor late; Shaman tipped him when he paid, and the man presented Rachel with a white glass mug on which a cluster of roses had been painted.

They got back to the hotel windblown and smiling.

“I had such a good time,” she said at the door of Room 306.

“So did I.” Before he could do or say anything else, she had kissed him lightly on the cheek and her door had opened and closed.

In his own room he lay on his bed for an hour, fully clothed. Finally he got up and walked down the two flights of stairs. It took her a little while to respond to his knock. He almost lost his courage and turned away, but at last the door opened, and she was there in her robe.

They stood and looked at one another. “Shall you come in, or shall I come out?” she said. He saw she was nervous.

He went into her room and closed the door.

“Rachel—” he said, but she covered his mouth with her hand. “When I was a young girl, I used to walk down the Long Path and stop at a certain perfect place where the woods dipped away to the river, just on my father’s side of the boundary between our lands. I told myself you were going to grow older quickly and build a house there and save me from having to marry an old man with bad teeth. I pictured our children, a son like you and three daughters to whom you’d be loving and patient, allowing them to go to school and live in their home until they were ready to leave.”