The Heart Specialist (26 page)

I was slicing cucumbers for sandwiches when Mrs. Greaves materialized in the doorway. Mrs. Greaves was the dean’s secretary, a formidable woman whose blue-tinted hair was drawn back tightly from her forehead. The blue head rotated slowly, taking in the swept floor, the white cloth, the food laid out in an attempt to turn the museum into a banquet hall. When finally her eyes came to rest on me she gave a grim smile. “A call just came through for you, Miss White,” she said.

Howlett had telephoned. The portrait sitting was taking longer than foreseen. High tea would have to be postponed until November at Oxford. He hoped there was no inconvenience. All of this was delivered in Mrs. Greaves’s toneless voice. When she finished her lips flattened into a straight line. “Looks like there has been inconvenience,” she said, tilting her head at the table. “What a lovely spread.”

I couldn’t speak.

“Do you want some help putting things away?” Mrs. Greaves offered, seeing how upset I was.

I shook my head and moved to my desk where I unbuttoned my lab coat. I did not look up again and at some point she took the hint and left. Half an hour later I was still sitting at my desk, chin propped on one palm. There were papers in front of me — Jakob Hertzlich’s papers — so anyone who glanced in the door might think I was working. But my mind wouldn’t focus. I was simply staring at the white sheets and the contrast they made with my green felt desk pad. My body felt almost numb.

Dugald Rivers stuck his head in the doorway. “I bumped into Greaves,” he said quietly. “It’s a shame about the party.” His eyes made a tour of the room and returned to me. “Look at the trouble you went to, dear Agnes!”

To my intense annoyance my chin began to quiver.

“There, there,” said Dugald, standing awkwardly beside me, his eyes big with sympathy.

“I’m sorry,” I said, drying my eyes on my new dress. “It’s not important, really.”

He gave me an awkward pat on the back. His face was flushed and shiny. “It is,” he said, his voice mounting even higher than normal with the difficulty of this intimacy. “Believe me, Agnes, I understand.”

I nodded and pointed at the platter of sandwiches. “You want them?”

Dugald sniffed appreciatively. “Cucumber?”

I nodded again with more assurance. “Take them, Dugald. Please.”

My reward was a peck on the cheek. “Stiff upper lip, White. You’ll survive.” He made off down the hall, the platter on his flattened, upturned palms.

After he had gone I began to sort through Jakob’s notes. He’d done a considerable amount of work while I’d been navigating the fruit stands and I decided to pick up from where he had left off, copying Howlett’s notes onto cards, which Jakob would eventually type for the catalogue. It was painstaking work, not creative in any way, but utterly consuming — exactly the antidote I needed. I barely noticed when the bell in the hall rang at three o’clock, then at four and again at five, the hour Jakob Hertzlich chose to return.

“I heard,” he said simply, taking a sheaf of foolscap from my desk so that he too might help transpose. His tone was no longer hostile. “Too bad.”

I said nothing. The work was carrying me and I didn’t dare stop. I could not face further comments from Jakob. I kept scribbling and sorting, creating order out of the mess in front of me. It kept me from thinking and, most importantly, from feeling. Every so often I let out a sigh.

Jakob shut the window and turned on more lights. I realized I’d been working in near darkness. Outside I could see the wavering reflection of a gas jet. The building was silent. Not a single step echoed in the hallway. After a considerable time a bell rang, making me start. I pulled out my pocket watch and saw to my astonishment that it was eight o’clock.

Jakob had sat down at the table again and taken up his pen. His eyes were on his pages but I had a feeling he wasn’t reading. His skin looked yellow in the glare from the overhead light and there were dark smudges under both his eyes. His shirt was so big I couldn’t make out the contours of the body inside it. He probably hadn’t eaten today but had smoked those damned cigarettes.

“What do you say to some food?”

He watched neutrally as I unwrapped the cheese and crackers. There were no plates but we used the starched linen napkins inherited from my grandmother. Jakob spread his out to its full size on the table and began stacking.

We did not speak. I hadn’t eaten that day, not even breakfast as I’d left the flat so early. The inside of the brie flowed out the moment Jakob pierced the rind with his knife. We scooped spoonfuls onto crackers and ate them down. After his fourth or fifth cracker Jakob paused, scanned the room and went over to the sink. He didn’t even ask, just pulled the bottle from the pail of mostly melted ice and unscrewed its wire top. Seconds later the cork sailed over our heads, smacking the wall above the door, rustling the streamers of decorative crepe I’d tacked there as it dropped to the floor. There was a spout of froth and I ran to him with teacups.

“Cheers,” he said, spilling some of the champagne. “It’s a little more lively than tea.”

I raised my cup and we clinked. Jakob Hertzlich had never drunk champagne before. He told me this later, after we’d eaten our fill of cheese and preserves and imported crackers. Jakob Hertzlich had never drunk anything alcoholic, he confessed. Jews didn’t as a rule, except for the wine they served on the Sabbath. That sickly sweet stuff could turn a person off spirits for life. “But this,” he said, raising his teacup dramatically, “is the stuff of life.”

I had drunk it only once before myself, and then barely a sip, when Dean Clarke had invited me to his home on New Year’s Eve for a party. All I remembered were bubbles going up my nose and making me itch. I jiggled my cup, creating a golden maelstrom. The taste was so light it didn’t seem of this world. I poured us a second round.

Jakob told his story, which stretched back to include tales of his father Otto Hertzlich and his mother Craina. “We lived in Berlin,” Jakob explained, “where the Hertzlichs had been in the tobacco trade for several generations. My father manufactured fine cigars and sold them throughout the Continent. He was a big success, but then something happened.”

Jakob was not entirely clear on the details but somehow Otto Hertzlich had lost a great deal of money and creditors began hounding him. “I was only three at the time,” said Jakob. “I remember leaving our house in the middle of the night, sneaking away down to the docks like thieves so that we could board a ship. On the way down there someone recognized us. My first real memory is of a man running toward our cab in a dark Berlin street, his face blazing with anger, shouting insults.”

I was engrossed by the tale. Many immigrants had stories like this tucked away in their trunks in the attic — stories of leaving the old country, usually in haste and physical danger. It informed the people who lived here, made them perhaps a little hardier than elsewhere and certainly more appreciative.

From the very start Otto Hertzlich had loved his new home. The land on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River was ideal for tobacco farming, and with Montreal’s port and a burgeoning population he knew he had stumbled onto a very good thing.

“My father is a clever man, Agnes. He learned English quickly, even if he never completely got the accent down. He’s charming. He uses old-world expressions and kisses women’s hands. He was never entirely accepted by the Montreal elite, but he certainly was noticed. My mother too. She was beautiful, dark and petite. My parents,” Jakob concluded, pausing for a sip of champagne, “had everything in their new life that a young couple could wish for.” He put his cup on the table and looked at me. “Everything, that is, except a suitable son.”

I didn’t know what to say. This was clearly painful but it was equally clear he wished to talk. All I could do was listen.

“When I was born my father had counted on a son like himself, someone to follow in his footsteps, to take over the business when he grew old. I was a timid child and a dreamer. My father and I were very different in temperament. He and Craina tried to have more children but for some reason they couldn’t. When I was seven or eight my father turned his attentions fully on me.

“I suppose I ought to treat it as a compliment. He refused to give up hope that I could become what he envisioned. But the hope had very little to do with who I was. My father was a businessman, Agnes, and if his work had taught him anything it was that obstinacy paid off. He made me work summers at the factory, trying to inculcate some sort of practical sense in me. He paid for boxing lessons. Boxing lessons, Agnes! Can you imagine me in a ring? I must have looked like a character from the funny papers with those gloves hanging from my wrists. When all of this failed, as was inevitable, he pushed me to study science. Medicine was a field in which a Jew might get ahead, just as my father had in business.”

As it turned out medicine was a profession Jakob Hertzlich could handle. Despite the quotas for Jews at McGill he was accepted into the faculty. He worked hard, winning prizes and the respect of all his teachers. He fulfilled his father’s expectations to the letter, but no matter how hard he worked, no matter how many plaques or specially bound books he accumulated, Otto Hertzlich was not satisfied.

“One morning I woke up,” said Jakob. “It was as if a blind inside me suddenly snapped open. My father would never be pleased.” He took another sip of champagne. “That day I slept in, and the day after. A doctor came and prescribed sedatives and told my parents how the strain of study might be too much for a boy as delicate as I. My mother believed it was a breakdown. My father, obstinacy. But I,” said Jakob with a measure of pride, “know it as the day I finally woke up. The day my life began.”

I could not imagine giving up medicine, especially when one had been accepted at McGill. “You would have made a brilliant doctor. You were almost through.”

Jakob Hertzlich laughed, draining the drops from his cup. “It wasn’t the path I was supposed to be on,” he said quietly. “I rather think it’s for the best, even if others don’t see it that way. I wouldn’t have ended up where I am today.” He was staring at me with intensity, his face suddenly serious. “And you, Dr. White? What stories do you hide under that cloak of efficiency? You owe me one.”

“I’m a terrible storyteller.”

Jakob’s mouth pulled down in neat folds and I had to laugh. The champagne was making us both silly. I placed the teacup on the table, moving with exaggerated care as I no longer quite trusted my hands.

“There’s no story of a father or a mother?” he persisted.

I shook my head. “I am an orphan.”

“There’s drama in that, surely!” Jakob exclaimed. “Tell me the story of a parentless child.” He was leaning forward, eyes gleaming.

Before I knew it I was spilling secrets. Not spilling, exactly, but releasing them one by one as champagne releases its bubbles. I found myself talking about my father, how he had been a doctor, brilliant by all accounts. I did not say where he had worked, nor did I give away his name. I described his departure when I was very small. I told Jakob about my mother, who had died of grief and pulmonary tuberculosis soon after the abandonment; and about my sister, who was physically beautiful but frail. Jakob’s face was so close that I could smell his breath — sweet and at the same time sour from the wine. A bead of champagne clung to a bristle on his lip and I had an impulse to stick out my tongue and lick it clean. The thought vaguely horrified me. I realized I was drunk.

In my mind’s eye was another face with bristles on its upper lip — my father’s face, with his mouth pulled down by sadness. It was so close, so real, that I reached out and pulled it toward me. Part of me knew that it was not my father. Part of me knew this could not be but still I pulled the scruffy head toward me.

Jakob was unsurprised. That was what woke me up. His eyes remained cool, watching mine until finally I stopped his scrutiny by kissing him on the mouth. His lips were as sweet and sour as his breath had been, but also comforting in a way I would not have suspected from looking at him. Our lips remained together. My eyes stayed closed and there was a sudden surge, like electricity.

But then it changed. My eyes sprang open as I felt the thrust of his tongue in my mouth. I stepped back but he stepped with me, his mouth still on mine. His eyes were closed now as if he were asleep, yet his tongue probed, and suddenly I was afraid. Is this what people did? He was like a fish trying to swim inside me. I clamped down and pushed him off.

I stood there, weaving my fingers in embarrassment, unable to look at him. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He reached for me and this time I didn’t resist. I hadn’t been touched, I realized, not ever. I’d been starving and never known it until that day. The champagne I had bought for Howlett sang in my veins. Jakob’s hand moved up beneath my dress, beneath the bodice, fumbling with the complex, interlocking system of buttons and hooks.

To my astonishment I felt no shame. I had spent a lifetime regretting my stubby body, hiding it away beneath dissimulating layers, but I no longer cared. I helped him release the hooks. His fingers closed around a nipple and it was as if he had opened a switch. Swept away was my awareness of the hand, of the face bending over me, and of any regrets I might have in the future.