The Heart Specialist (21 page)

15

APRIL 1900

There were three of them come to visit me for the final tutorial of the term. I had opened my window wide, which under the circumstances turned out to be a mistake. Sunlight was streaming into the room and the air carried a smell of earth and rotting leaves. The chirpings of starlings threatened to drown out my words. Beside me at the table the young men fidgeted and sighed. Academically they were the three weakest boys in their year. They probably ought to have been plucked in their first year but for some reason had been permitted to remain.

The one named Hornby picked dried mud from his boot. Beside him Sean Falconbridge rolled his head on a stubby neck as if he found it too cumbersome to hold upright. Only the third boy, Derek Sloan, looked at his notes, but these were indecipherable so they weren’t much help. Ordinarily I would have made tea but these three cared so little I didn’t make the effort. What was I to do with students like these? Their exam was five days off and they were hopeless, no better now at diagnostics than they had been in September when they had started pathology.

Set out before us on the table were three lab jars, each one containing a heart. I nudged the smallest one toward them as one might push a bone toward a sleeping dog.

This heart was one of my prizes. No bigger than my thumb and mounted to reveal the hidden defect. Howlett’s work. My best pieces came either from him or from my father. In fact, all three hearts we were looking at today had been supplied by them. The donor of this one was an infant who died the day she was born.

I looked at Falconbridge and requested the cause of death.

He shrugged. Derek Sloan said stenosis but didn’t know what it meant. Hornby just stared blankly.

I gave hints. “Think of wires crossing. Think of the arteries.”

They still didn’t know so I explained. It was transposition of the vessels, a problem afflicting about a tenth of infants with congenital defects. The aorta and pulmonary artery switched places, emerging from the wrong ventricle. Newborns with this problem would be blue from head to toe, although their hearts would sound perfectly normal.

The boys were scribbling in their notebooks when Dr. Clarke looked in. They all stood up, showing more energy than they had all morning.

“Good day, gentlemen,” said the dean. He smiled and dipped his head at me. “Sorry to interrupt your work, Dr. White.”

Work was hardly the word for it but I kept silent, especially when I saw that he was not alone. Standing behind him was a dark-haired boy.

I sensed right away that there was something wrong with this person although at first I could not identify what it was. He looked far too young to be enrolled in the medical faculty. Tousled curls that looked none-too-clean extended to his shoulders. His clothes were several sizes too big, accentuating his look of a street urchin. The suit was a decent one, or had once been, but was now so worn I couldn’t help thinking he never took it off. His shirt collar was grimy and frayed. But what bothered me, I finally realized, was his face. It was expressionless, betraying no hint of feeling or emotion. His eyes were active enough. They took in the boys standing by the table and the glassed-in cabinets full of labelled jars. They did not rise to meet mine.

“I want to introduce you to Jakob Hertzlich,” said the dean.

I took the young man’s hand, which was dry and cool even on as hot a day as this. The tip of his middle finger was stained yellow and his jacket carried the stale smell of cigarettes.

“Jakob is joining the faculty,” continued the dean.

I looked at him more closely. He wasn’t as young as I’d first thought. Perhaps in his midtwenties. Too old for a student. Surely he wasn’t a professor. His clothes had been slept in. I was sure of it. He smelled slightly rank.

“At long last, Dr. White, you will have help. Jakob is your new assistant.”

I stared at the dean and then at the young man who was continuing to avoid my gaze. He had reached into his pocket and pulled out an oval tin, which he shook lightly. Then he popped something in his mouth. What a strange person he was. All the time his fingers worked the tin his eyes roved.

“Well,” I said, breaking the silence. There was an irony to this situation, I had to admit. For months I had been pestering Clarke for an assistant but I had imagined someone entirely different from this morose, peculiar boy. I also remembered my own hiring and the way it had been announced to Dr. Mastro. The dean seemed to take pleasure in throwing together people who were clearly incompatible.

“He comes highly recommended,” Clarke told me. “He’s medically trained.”

A muffled snort came from the trio at the table. In my shock I had forgotten them. Falconbridge was pretending unconvincingly to blow his nose into a hanky.

“Well,” said the dean, echoing the only word I had been able to utter. It was a word of so many possible meanings that in the end it meant nothing. It was noise, that was all, in this case intended to cover feeling. Wells were for drawing water. Wells were for wishing. I smiled bitterly. Dr. Clarke had granted my wish.

He cleared his throat. “I’ll leave you to your work, Agnes. Mr. Hertzlich has papers to sign in my office.”

I sat down rather heavily in my chair when they left. Dr. Clarke tended to present matters this way. It had the virtue of avoiding arguments so common among academics but it also made people angry. I thought again of Mastro. Our relationship had improved recently, much to my surprise. After Grandmother died he had come to my office to offer condolences. More astonishingly he had commended my work with his students. Apparently the class average in physiology had risen that year, which he attributed in large part to my tea-party tutorials. He had spoken with the dean and insisted the tutorials be included officially in the curriculum for the following year. Thanks to him I had climbed to the ranks of a sessional lecturer.

My interactions with Dr. Mastro might be improved but I doubted there was hope for this lad in an ill-fitting suit.

“He’s a Jew, Miss,” Hornby whispered.

“Don’t be small-minded, Horn,” said Falconbridge, suddenly alert. “What you really ought to know, Miss, is that he’s loony.”

The other two burst out laughing.

“You know him?”

“Never laid eyes on him,” Falconbridge said. “But I’ve heard of him. He’s a legend.”

Jakob Hertzlich had apparently been a prodigy in the class from several years earlier. He won every prize in his year. Then, in the middle of his training, without word or warning he disappeared. Rumour had it he was institutionalized. The faculty had driven him stark raving mad. Boyish laughter followed the telling of this tale.

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” said Falconbridge, puffed up with pleasure, gathering his books.

I shrugged, unable to hide my impatience with these students, not one of them capable of writing their final exam, let alone winning a prize.

“Good luck with the loony,” Falconbridge said before slipping out the door. His laughter resonated in the hallway.

Luck, I thought. Yes. I had been rather short of it lately. I rose from my chair and walked to the window. The air smelled fresh and full of promise. I could not believe what Dr. Clarke had done, what thought process had led him to deliver young Hertzlich to me. I had told the dean about Laure. Had it been anyone other than Dr. Clarke I would have called this act sadistic. He’d felt sorry. That must be the explanation. Jakob Hertzlich was a misfit, a Jew, and a cut above most people in intelligence, just the sort of individual Dr. Clarke was in the habit of collecting. I had been a beneficiary of the dean’s compassion. Why not this singular boy?

Because it affected me! Because I had quite enough lunacy on my hands at the moment without having to endure it in my place of work. The museum was my refuge. At home I was managing, but just barely. I had thought Samuel Clarke astute enough to understand my situation.

I had installed Laure at the Priory where she felt safe and where Huntley wouldn’t interfere. Not that he was showing much desire in that regard. He seemed relieved to have Laure out of his hair. Miss Skerry had dropped a perfectly good job in the city to come back to St. Andrews East and care for her. Yet Laure was a trial; some days she was herself, others a complete stranger. Just last week she’d thrown a boiling kettle at Miss Skerry, who had had to call in neighbouring farm hands to subdue her.

Here Dr. Clarke expected me to accept this boy with no facial expression and a total lack of grace into my life. What was I to do? A light rattling sound startled me and I whirled around to find the very boy of whom I had been thinking standing less than three feet away.

“What are you doing?”

He didn’t answer and stood with his head bowed. He fidgeted with his hands, working at his mysterious oval tin. At last he opened it and popped something in his mouth. He did not seem nervous. He sucked whatever it was he’d put in his mouth and gazed about in an odd, disconnected way. He might have been contented to stand there forever if I hadn’t interrupted.

“What is that?”

“What?” His voice was lower than I’d imagined, definitely not a boy’s.

“The thing you just put in your mouth.”

“Oh,” he said, extending the box to me. “Licorice bits. From Holland. Would you like one?”

I took the tin and shook one into my palm. It was tiny and hard, tar black.

“I’m trying to quit cigarettes. My mouth misses them.”

“When do you start?” I asked neutrally as if we were talking about a job at the market and not a position in my museum.

“Now.” He popped another licorice bit in his mouth.

There was no way out of it. The licorice bit made me realize I was thirsty so I offered Jakob tea, which he accepted and then lingered over as if it were a special treat to be savoured.

When I had recovered my spirits I assigned him a task. Nothing difficult: sorting work to start with. I’d test him over the next few days, I decided, build up the challenge in increments. If he slipped up even a little, even once, the dean would hear about it. Looney was one thing. Incompetence I would not tolerate.

After an hour or so he walked over to where I was sitting. He’d been so quiet in his corner I’d actually begun to get work done myself. “Finished already?” I asked, knowing this couldn’t be the case.

He shook his head. “I’ve noticed something.”

His bluntness was sweet but unnerving. He was looking at the wall. “Over there.”

I looked too. His gaze was directed at a labelled drawing of a heart I had tacked up to hide a crack in the plaster. I’d never been fond of it. The aorta, pulmonary artery, atria and ventricles were painted a garish petunia pink.

“It’s wrong,” he said simply.

“Excuse me?”

With hands plunged into his pockets he now looked like a professor about to expound. “I was a student here once,” he told me. “I know that poster and it’s always bothered me. In my day it used to hang in the library.”

“The colours are dreadful,” I agreed in an effort to sympathize.

“It’s not the colours, even though it is a crime to put that pink next to the green veins.”

I laughed. Jakob Hertzlich had a sense of humour.

“It’s worse than that. Look at the pulmonary artery.”

I squinted.

“Not only was the artist colour-blind, he was standing on his head.”

Sure enough. The thoracic aorta was where the pulmonary artery should have been. I looked back at him in wonder. How many months had I worked in the museum beneath this poster and failed to notice the glaring error? The illustrator wasn’t the only one with eye problems.

16

SEPTEMBER 1900

That autumn, just as the new term was starting at McGill, I bumped into Dr. Rivers outside the professors’ lounge in the medical faculty. He’d won a fellowship in pathology, which allowed him to teach at McGill and work at the Montreal General Hospital. His bearing was even more military than the last time we’d met. His hair was shorn right to the scalp and his shoulders, surprisingly narrow in a man so tall, were ramrod straight. He had just come from a year fighting the Boers with the D Battery of the Canadian Field Artillery, he told me in his funny, high-pitched voice.

I had read about the Boer War in the newspapers and about protests among French students across Montreal. I had to confess that my sympathies were with the protesters. What did Britain think it was doing, sticking its nose into the affairs of a country as far away as South Africa? Why was it recruiting Canadians such as Dugald Rivers to risk their lives on such distant soil? Rivers saw no problem with it. When he announced his rank it was a boast, although I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what it meant. “Battery” sounded violent and “field” made me think of the farms around St. Andrews East. I cut short the soldier talk and invited him to tea. He was welcome at the museum any day of the week, I said, any hour. “Please send what specimens you can from the Dead House. Keep an eye out for me.”

Dr. Rivers’s first visit came at the end of September, a particularly warm day, which made everyone forget winter was about to descend. I opened the upper half of the big window in the museum and sunshine poured in, turning the interior a dusky gold. Pigeons cooed from their perches beneath the eaves. Rivers showed up with a pastry box in one hand and a pail in the other. He stepped over my threshold and then took a step back when Jakob and I turned, realizing he hadn’t yet been invited inside. I rose immediately to welcome him.