The Good Doctor (10 page)

— Chapter Fourteen —

She hadn't intended to go
to the lecture, but the crowd seemed to carry her. In the end it was easier to go along than to resist.

Her husband had been fidgety and nervous, waiting for room service to arrive. Experience told her it would be easier for him if she was to take a walk, but once in the corridor she didn't know where to go. The elevator boy stood at the end of the passage, caged door open behind him. She was walking in this direction and saw no reason not to step in.

“Main floor, madam?”

She nodded. Where else could she go unless she were to wander the corridors aimlessly like a hotel ghost? The cage swung closed, and with an oozing sensation, she felt herself fall. Already danger bumped in her chest. Grenfell was at large. His admirers were about and in numbers. He could easily get into the same elevator, breathe the same air.

Throughout the last two and a half decades, his figure had both shrunk in her mind to a pinprick yet expanded to a colossus. She had fancied herself in love all those years ago in London, and, more importantly by far, she had genuinely admired him. If there was a breach of faith, a betrayal of trust, it was over this point rather than the first. Lovers have parted since the world began. They have met and laughed later in life. But this was altogether different, far more momentous than the raging of a young emotion which seems so real at the time but can suddenly turn into vapour and disappear like a dream. This was about who Grenfell was: a shining image—upright, brave, and honest—flipped like a coin, revealing another side—grubby, mean-spirited, and calculating. He had been a fine actor playing a hero on the stage. But his eye was on the audience, and she had merely been the first to be taken in.

Each time some account of his exploits reached her eyes in newsprint or periodical—his descriptions of hunger and exploitation in the northern fishery, his hospital ships, his clinics along the Labrador coast and in St. Anthony, his fishermen's co-operatives—it had been like reading about a mythical character. Like some ancient deity of the classical world, vast moral issues, trouble, and conflict followed wherever he went. She knew he was not real yet was awed by the strength of the myth behind him. Meeting his eye earlier carried some of that sanity-threatening trepidation she associates with seeing the spirit of one departed. It was simply impossible that they could be in the same room together. They had grown into two incompatible worlds, and something quite dreadful would happen if they collided.

The elevator lurched and then stopped. The boy rattled the cage open, then stood to attention, white-gloved hands by his sides as Florence stepped out. Confronting the crowds swirling in the foyer, she felt cold and alone. But when she stepped forward, she felt at one with the travelling herd.

***

She finds herself now in the back row of a rather handsomely appointed lecture theatre. Her chair is firm but comfortable with a rounded back. The carpet beneath her feet is soft and warm. Darkness and several dozen seats ahead protect her from being seen by the animated figure on the bright, plain platform. He stands behind a long desk, water jug and glasses, his arms moving with the current of his story, hands almost juggling the words.

A woman, likely his intended, sits with an intelligent, placid expression. The couple's seats are bookended by two men, one in late middle age, president of some sponsoring institution, the name of which Florence can't for the moment recall. His reddish face twitches with self-conscious admiration as Grenfell speaks. The other man is young, his hair greased and parted, conveying somehow a clerk-like status.

“When did it all start for me?” Grenfell asks, bowing at the hip as though fishing in the rows of the auditorium for an answer. The theatre is full, and there is an electric murmur at the question. “When and where did I decide to devote myself to the service of good so far from my own home?” There is a silent pause. “I was merely a young man like so many others, a humble intern learning his skills in London's East End. What was it that broadened my outlook?”

For a moment Florence lives through their brief time together—the days at the clinic working closely with Willy, the sharp smell of liniment, the comforting certainty of bandage and scissors, the feeling of comradeship between them, the unified purpose. The time before the coin flipped. A wave of pity washes through her for the poor, unsuspecting audience.

It's curious, she thinks, how easily she could have recognized the man on the stage despite all the intervening years. She almost forgets the way he looked at twenty, so thoroughly has this new Willy Grenfell superimposed himself onto her memory. It's the whiff of mendacity, not his physical appearance, which seems new. They had had no contact with each other after the incident with the note; Dr. Bleaker had farmed Willy off to another clinic, so she has never until now watched him with the knowledge of so much calculation going on beneath the surface.

But there are other differences. Willy was never a showman. He seemed proud then, too proud to perform for a crowd. As a youth there had been an almost brittle haughtiness about him. There is something undignified, even perverse, in the more obvious aspects of his play-acting now, though the impressive hush of the audience suggests no one else can see through it.

“It was a September night twenty-five years ago,” Grenfell says quietly. “I trudged through the blackened East End streets after a maternity case, feeling tired and worn down by the sights and smells of poverty, haunted by the knowledge I had just delivered a new babe to a family with no means of support in the smallest and dingiest corner of a city slum. In an open wasteland that lay between the sooty, crumbling houses, I noticed a tent rising, shimmering beneath the autumn moon, its canvas yellow with burning lamps, Arabesque with spires and dune-like dips.”

Florence feels something blunt yet intrusive moving through her, like a travelling knife wrapped tight in cotton. She has read this account before in some of the periodicals and she knows Grenfell doesn't intend to touch upon
her
story, or that of her husband. She knows they will not even figure in the background of his tale. But like a composer who knows his tune has been lifted by another, she feels the invasion. Inverted, altered, played backwards and out of sequence though it is, this melody belongs to her and her husband. She feels its power like a dimly remembered nursery rhyme, and heat rises in her at the sound of it on Grenfell's lips.

“Despite my tiredness, the idle curiosity of youth drew me toward the entrance. Once inside I instantly breathed the pure, fresh air of faith. Although hundreds of eyes fixed on him, the man on the podium commanded my attention like an osprey catching the shimmer of a tail fin far below. He gave a nod of recognition, a special kind of challenge glistened in his eyes. What did he say that night to claim my energies for the unsentimental service of my fellow man?”

Again he leans forward at the hip, placing one hand behind his back in the manner of a conjurer about to produce a bunch of paper flowers. “In truth,” he continues, “I hardly remember. But the energy and the sincerity emanating from the man I would later come to know as D. L. Moody, the great evangelist, was palpable. It was a fresh and sober energy, delivered not with a murmur and not from a dilapidated, sherry-soaked priest but in a fine, strong voice and from a man whose physical power and presence matched his words. And his message was timeless. It was simply this: come follow me.”

He pauses, and a movement, almost a gasp, ripples through the auditorium. The young man with the greased hair moves shyly from behind the desk and tiptoes down the stairs to a projector, which stands in the main aisle. Grenfell nods at him and moves to the side. Florence notices properly for the first time that behind Grenfell is a white canvas screen.

“Forget about the pomp and sham of religion,” Grenfell continues. “Forget the hollow ceremonials. Come to the poorest and hungriest places on earth and once there lend your talents to the service of humanity.”

The stage light disappears and casts the room in blackness, but a bright square appears in the centre of the canvas. By the time the audience has exclaimed at the sudden loss of illumination, the collective attention has been claimed by the image before them. A profound silence falls.

A small rickety structure, like the kind of hideout used by partridge hunters in England, nestles among tall pines. But the state of neglect suggests long disuse. Standing by, in a little clearing, is a dark-skinned man dressed in a tunic which bulges at the buttons and seems too small. He has hollow cheeks and he meets the camera with a vacant, half-smiling gaze.

“Imagine a far and windswept land,” says Grenfell, “peopled in part by descendants of hardy English fishermen isolated for two centuries or more. Imagine they are living among the primitive Eskimo, and Eskimo half-breeds. Imagine all these people of varied heritage clinging for survival to the hostile coasts in summer and to the even wilder and more unforgiving interior land in winter.” Pockets of sound—mumbles and gasps—rise and fall in the darkness; avoiding direct comment about the subject of the slide only hauls the collective attention more completely into the image. “This,” says Grenfell with a backward tilt of the head, “is man reduced to his essentials, the poor, bare, forked animal who has never known the luxury of a featherbed, a modern stove, a bath, a book—indeed, he has never learned to read—or a nutritious meal. He toils through the summer in the fishery and usually ends up in debt to the merchant. He has no choice but to eke out a meagre existence through the winter bringing his starving family to the traplines. When he sells his furs, he will have no choice but to accept the price quoted to him by the sole buyer in the town.”

A yell—violent and unexpected—bursts from a dark corner to Florence's right. The women and men in front of Florence and to either side crane their necks to see, but nothing is obvious and for a moment there is a sense that the noise was nothing, the yelp of buckling wood from some unseen beam below the carpet. Then it comes again.

“Lies,” says the voice. “This is a lie!” Florence sees him now, the man with the unkempt beard and the wounded eyes, the man she had seen in the foyer.

People hush him, but the sound merely accentuates the disturbance in the same way a rush of white foam draws attention to the bow slicing through water. A hand tugs the hem of his jacket, but he persists.

“Trappers do not bring their families to the line.” His eyes glisten blue in the dim reflected light of the projector. He gesticulates wildly with one hand, and something in the movement strikes Florence as sad and helpless, like an appeal he knows already to be hopeless. “Nobody lives in that hut. It was given up years before.”

Grenfell, at the front, shakes his head regretfully, hands now on his hips. Already doormen make their way seat by seat toward the protester, audience members obliging them by standing and narrowing the space between the chairs.

“Grenfell is a liar,” the man calls rather weakly as white-gloved hands come upon him, one around his elbow, and another under his arm. He does not resist but goes stiff like a mannequin as the doormen manoeuvre his body over and around the seats to the aisle behind the last row, then march him swiftly toward the exit. His shoes scuff along the carpet, either because he is trying to obstruct progress or because the doormen are walking too fast for him to get his footing.

The door is hauled open, then swings closed after them, scattering orange light briefly over the faces of the audience—a bemused smile here, a frown there. In that lost instant, Florence searched expressions for a reflection of the pain inside her, the empathy she feels for the disgraced man. But already hope is fading. Laughter follows, not the embarrassed, nervous laughter that follows acute awkwardness, but easy, mirthful, mocking laughter.

She thinks of her poor husband, alone in their hotel room, nursing the only medicine that works for him. For a second time tonight, a great sadness moves within her, as tangible as a boulder in her chest, and her pity spreads to the stranger just ejected. Anger flares as she realizes that pity is an unjust emotion for him. He was merely pointing out a fact already known to her, that Grenfell is a liar. The man doesn't need pity; he needs respect and support.

The attention descends once more upon Grenfell, this time intensified by a murmur of apology for him, for the rudeness of the interruption, for the indecorousness of it all. “Such pride, my friends, is always understandable. I am not the kind of missionary who complains about the mouth that bites its helper. This is his world, after all, his family, his reality.” He gestures toward the image on the canvas once more. “But relief from such hunger is our subject tonight, relief that will prevent such hardship and render outbursts of misdirected pride quite unnecessary.”

He waits for a moment, and the image of the hut slides from the canvas to the wall and disappears. Another takes its place, that of a handsome reindeer with antlers reaching high. Beside the beast stands a smiling man in an exotic-looking double-flapped hat. His head comes only to the animal's shoulders. “At this very moment, ladies and gentlemen, a herd of reindeer is making its way to northern Newfoundland, accompanied by several Lapp families who will nurture them. This is my long-term plan to ensure a steady year-long diet high in protein, a source of milk and of cheese. Like Alaska, which is now awash with herds of reindeer, we will make the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland and southern Labrador a place of bounty. My hope is to eradicate the settlers' complete and utter reliance on both the merchant and the trapping lines, and in time for this benefit to extend to both the Eskimos and the roving Indians of the interior.”