The Good Doctor (11 page)

Excitement travels in a wave through the auditorium. Florence hears a single clap, feels a speeding in her own chest of some new convergence of emotions, undefined yet frightening in its violence. She wonders if the place is about to burst into spontaneous applause, but Grenfell stops them in time with a gesture, his hand stretched and calming. “Together with this new food source we will continue each year to add to our small farms in St. Anthony. Our vegetables, rich in vitamins, together with the meat, will combat the diseases of malnutrition and help bring the local population out of reliance and poverty. It is to this end that I ask for your help this evening. The donations you so generously provide will go to those parts of our mission which promote good nutrition, self-reliance, and sobriety.” He glances down to the reddish-faced older man. “I will turn the chair back to Dr. Gains of the Polar Society and thank him for his great generosity in organizing this event, and for your kindness and attentiveness as an audience. Dr. Gains.”

Grenfell sits, and the applause clatters down like hailstones, seats and armrests thunderous with vibrations. The noise envelops and transports Florence, but as a rock might be carried by molten lava, with a spitting force of rebellion and anger.

With all the examples of flawed yet honest efforts at its disposal, she thinks,
this
is what the world chooses to celebrate: showmanship, mendacity, and theft. Grenfell has stolen her husband's experience, most likely misled this silken, furred crowd about the lives of those he claims to help, trampling upon their dignity while elevating his own status. But it's a willing enough seduction, she suspects. Even if she could produce the note Grenfell wrote that night under Moody's tent—and she believes it may still be somewhere in her husband's effects—the clear evidence of his plan to deceive, she wonders if these people would even want to know. She sees herself dragged from the room, shoes thudding along the carpet to the tut-tuts of the audience, and the rainstorm of laughter that would follow.

Dr. Gains rises to his feet, still applauding. “As always, Dr. Grenfell, wherever you speak, you inspire.” He coughs self-consciously and the audience gives them both a fresh round of applause. “Now you will not object, Dr. Grenfell, if we open the floor to questions?”

Grenfell gives a modest nod. A fresh wave of unrest stirs up in Florence's chest; she finds it difficult to breathe. A hand darts up straightaway. Dr. Gains points and nods, and the man, who is in the front row, begins a timid, long-winded question which is barely audible from where Florence sits.

Fragments of old Bible texts spin in Florence's head, exhortations to not bear false witness. They mingle with the stern river of her father's philosophy, which still flows through her—his serious, active, and sometimes uncompromising view. It is not enough, he would say, to
not
do harm, and to stand aside and watch it being done to others. One must act as a positive force of goodness and truth.

She doesn't need to ask her father's ghost. The knowledge of what she must do already burns within her. Already she is annoyed with herself for being in the back row, where so many craning heads and curious glances are bound to meet any attempt of hers to question Grenfell. She has no doubt she was brought here for a reason. Every aspect of her presence in this place seems like a conspiracy of providence: There was no decision on her part, yet she was carried upon a human tide to witness a presentation that only she and the lone protester would know for sure to be full of half-truth and deception. And that poor man has already done his part, with only her to be outraged by his treatment. Without her presence, his humiliation would have gone entirely unwitnessed, with no chance of redress. And she does have both the will and the knowledge to redress it. Her father's voice descends again. This time the message is simpler. God does not expect it to be easy. He does not lay before you tasks that are quick and comfortable. Yet He expects you to act.

— C
hapter Fifteen
—

Florence's ears grow muffled.
Her heart rolls. The man in the front has finished speaking. Dr. Gains goes through it again for the benefit of the audience—the question concerns the unusually high-protein diet preferred particularly by breeds in coastal Labrador, and whether this is because of scarcity of fruit and vegetables, or rather due to an actual physiological difference.

Grenfell begins an answer with a reference to the Eskimo ability to live entirely upon seal meat with a caution that most of the people under his care are not purebred Eskimo. He quickly leaves the question behind and trails off into a tribute of all the people of Labrador and northern Newfoundland, their hardiness, their simple Christian faith and largely Anglo-Saxon blood, as well as the general kindness and goodwill of the Eskimo and Eskimo breeds, and the many difficulties each race is forced to endure. Like an evangelist, his speech goes in circles, repeating the same construction each time with greater emphasis until it reaches a climax that demands another round of applause.

Aching at the elbow, feeling the vibrations of the applause upon either side, Florence raises her hand so that it might already be visible when the clapping dies down.

Dr. Gains sees her straightaway, and his forefinger hovers uncertainly between the brightly lit platform and the darkness over the seats.

“We have a lady in the back row, Dr. Grenfell, who wishes to ask a question. Yes, please, madam.”

Grenfell tilts his face pleasantly into the darkness; Florence knows that for the moment she must be beyond recognizing.

The beginning of many questions form like snakes' tails in her mind, slithering beyond her reach into a mass of patterned coils. Only one point of entry hangs before her, a swift allusion to that night long ago when Grenfell claims to have been chosen by his vocation.

“Dr. Grenfell,” she says, her voice surprisingly calm and clear. Someone flaps a leaflet a row in front, then becomes still. The audience is quiet, attentive. “You say you were converted to God's work under the tent of Moody, the evangelist.”

Grenfell's head still tilts into the darkness, but the pleasant smile may have slipped into something more mask-like. It's difficult to be sure from this distance. Only a muted cough or two disturbs the attentive atmosphere.

“My husband had almost exactly the same experience at the same time.” Now agitation creeps into her voice, and she feels a tickling in the back of her throat. Her panic floats her away from herself. She seems to hover somewhere in the fuzzy darkness above her own shoulder. “He is a doctor, also, although he practises here in the United States, among the poor farming communities of Maine.”

The audience is still motionless, still silent, but she can feel a communal twitch of discomfort like the stirring of a moth's wing in the seats beneath her. She's amazed she did not work out precisely what she was going to say before she put up her hand. This is something her husband would have done, something he did once do, in fact, to trick himself into acting when timidity would otherwise have kept him silent. The note, and the meeting outside Dr. Johnson's house; these are the acts of a man who forces himself to jump. The similarity between herself and her husband feels like a comforting kind of solidarity. It's exhilarating, too. She's glad, at last, that she can share the burden of standard-bearer, that for once it's she who'll be riding into battle first.

“I wonder, Dr. Grenfell,” she says more boldly, returning to herself and anchoring there, “how your audience would react to photographic slides of dire poverty and starvation among farmers in the New England states? Would it seem, perhaps, less glamorous, more threatening, and closer to home?”

Now the place comes alive with murmurs and shuffling. A man two rows ahead turns and glares, the dim blue of the auditorium catching in his eyes, giving his stare enough steel to let Florence know it will not leave her until she is quiet.

Grenfell gives a forced smile and sits back, with his hands locked over his chest as though considering.

Dr. Gains colours deeply and coughs. “So your question to Dr. Grenfell is about grades of hardship, about whether the conditions and homes of the white fishermen and native trappers in Labrador are worse than those of our own American farmer in the New England states?”

Florence suspects he does not mean this ironically, but the comparison draws guffaws and from certain areas of the auditorium. Then a more general laughter spreads as though it were an accepted fact that Dr. Gains has made a joke.

“My question,” Florence says, “or, rather, comment, is that hardship and hunger exist right here in the affluent heart of eastern America and that Dr. Grenfell did not need to go to the frozen north, where some of the people seem to feel misrepresented by his work.”

A circle of groans rises around her like an overflowing moat. The gloved woman flaps her
Polar Society
pamphlet at Florence to sit down.

“Let's have something else!” bellows a man's voice closer to the stage. More voices rise and the sound buoys her at the elbows, making her feet light upon the ground.

There's the feeling, if not the physical reality, of a scuffle. In the darkness and confusion, Florence can't be quite sure, but she feels herself either moving or being moved from the space directly in front of her seat toward the aisle two places away. Knees and hands graze against her, perhaps nudge her along. In a moment she is in the openness of the aisle, unsure as to whether she has been forced there or not.

But already things have moved on. “It seems to me, if I may,” a white-haired gentleman at the front says, “we have tied ourselves in rather a knot.” The audience is hushed, and staring faces have turned from Florence to listen to the venerable speaker. There's an impressive aura about the old man, a sense of the promise of wisdom and insight.

Florence has been backing slowly toward the exit, but she slows down, sensing that the measured tones of the distinguished gentleman may provide some balm to the injustice burning within her. She feels grateful at least that he has already taken the spotlight from her.

“The comparison between hunters and fishermen in the far north and farmers in the eastern seaboard states is quite redundant,” he says. “The real issue illuminated tonight by Dr. Grenfell, the gentleman who interrupted before, and this lady is a simple one.”

Florence feels her face burn with a self-consciousness she has barely felt since she was a child in the classroom, awaiting either reward or censure for an answer to an arithmetic sum, or a Latin translation. Her feet root her at last a yard or so from the exit behind her; it seems too great a disrespect to the gentleman's white hairs to leave before judgment is passed.

“It is this: How do we react as people when we see goodness? Are we so suspicious, so cynical, that when confronted with devotion and unselfishness we must find some way to invalidate these qualities?” The lady by Grenfell's side bows her head as though hiding an emotion. When she looks up again quickly, Florence thinks she sees a film of tears on her eyes. “The attacks on Dr. Grenfell,” the old gentleman continues, “reveal to us, I feel, something of our frailty in the face of true idealism.”

The word
attacks
is like a swift, freezing current in the darkness. It carries her backwards through the exit which has been opened for her; she catches the ironic wave of that obliging gentleman as she moves into the hallway. The lecture hall door swings closed. She hears the white-haired gentleman thanking Grenfell for challenging them all, and making them search inside for the goodness in themselves.

More applause bursts from the room, but the door is thick enough to dampen the vibrations which would have accompanied the sound had she remained. It seems unreal to Florence, like a music box which has been fastened closed yet still emits its mechanical melody. The judgment of the old gentleman smarts inside her like a fire, and she wonders if it can be true, whether her disbelief in Grenfell has come about because of a suspicious nature, her own moral failings, or worse, because of a twenty-five-year-old argument which made her feel first patronized, and then rejected. She thinks about the kind-looking woman beside Grenfell, surely the fiancée. Not English, of course. Not assertive, either, by the looks of things.

A newspaper announced Grenfell's betrothal months ago, and it surprised Florence that a man who had lived until middle age a bachelor should suddenly feel the need to marry. Was the jolt an unpleasant one? Was there envy when she read about Anne Elizabeth Caldwell MacClanahan of Chicago? Certainly the two of them together—one gathering fame by the year, the other from an old and established Chicago family—were a stark enough contrast to Florence and her husband. Part of her wanted that easy acceptance, that societal interest that both Grenfell and his intended seemed to expect and enjoy. Florence and her husband seemed destined to remain obscure, professionally uncelebrated creatures peeping out from under the legs of such renowned figures. But did she want to take Anne Elizabeth's place? Surely not.

Yet there, within those closed doors, a white-haired, soft-spoken elder led a crowd of intelligent, educated people in rounds of applause directed at the unflattering difference between Florence and the protester on the one side, and those who were still inside the auditorium on the other. Bible stories with their lessons and admonitions tingle once more in Florence's imagination. It's all too easy to find references to miscreants justly cast out while revels and celebrations take place within. She can feel the violent sobs and the gnashing of teeth in the coolish air circulating around her. It makes her wonder why the Good Book is so full of warnings about how to avoid what had just happened but no advice that might instruct one who has already been ejected. She thinks of the poor man who was physically manhandled from the place, wonders briefly whether she might find him. But, of course, those doormen would never have allowed him to stay in the environs.

The finality of it, and the sense of unfairness, is almost enough to set her against the ancient texts. The one constant in the life unravelling behind her is the predictable movement from participant to outsider. And the transition always seems to come whenever she tries to engage her own intelligence and compassion. Her husband was the catalyst who first alerted her to this aspect of herself, but the decisions have always been hers.

She turns from the door and walks the soft-carpeted corridor toward the elevator. The boy meets her gaze with trepidation and worry, as though reading the despondency in her posture. He rattles the cage open and she steps in, thinking of her husband and the glow and easefulness which is likely enveloping him. A modest man who requires so little for solace.