The Heart Specialist (29 page)

21

MAY 6, 1915

The pier, to which the black hull of the
Metagama
was roped, was crowded with people. I was standing on my toes, trying vainly to see over the ocean of brightly coloured bonnets. Dugald Rivers, who was standing with Dr. Mastro and a boy I did not recognize, shouted my name and waved. He looked as if at any moment he might lift off the ground. He broke from the group of men and made his way toward me. When he reached my side, arms still thrashing, he bent forward and grazed my cheek with his lips. It wasn’t a kiss exactly because his lips were closed and flat. More like a collision, as if his mind and body could not agree on a common intention.

I tried to smile. He had been acting strangely for the past few weeks, which I had dismissed as nerves. I had decided it wasn’t my place to judge and that I would not take his actions or words personally in the days leading up to his departure. This would be Dugald’s first military stint since South Africa. It would stir memories, I was sure. The news from Europe was not good. Last autumn, when the first Canadian contingent had left, there had been such euphoria. Everyone had been convinced of a speedy victory and quick return, but the Canadian boys, many of whom were from McGill, had spent the freezing winter in a camp on Salisbury Plain in southern England. It had rained for three full months, which had lowered morale and brought on a meningitis epidemic. Several young men from McGill had died without reaching the battlefield. Across the Channel in Belgium and France the news was worse. The Germans were killing the British infantry in horrifying numbers.

Into this nightmare was Dugald sailing. The others too, but they were younger and without experience. For them war was still abstract, a boys’ adventure tale.

Two nights before, Dugald had invited me to dine at the University Club. When we arrived at the grey stone building on Mansfield Street across from campus I had hung my coat and proceeded up the back stairway as usual, the one reserved for waiters and women. I resented this stairway. It was as if the men wished to deny my existence. When I reached the second floor and the main dining hall Dugald was waiting for me. Without so much as a hello he took my hand and pulled me into an alcove near the lavatory.

My relationship with Dugald had never been physical; his reaching for my hand felt unnatural. He sat me down on a window seat. There was nothing spontaneous about the action, which I suspected he had plotted. Before I knew what was happening he presented me with a ring. It was his school ring I realized after the shock had settled, the one he wore on the little finger of his right hand, never removing it for dissections or scrubs.

“As you are aware, Agnes,” he said, avoiding my eyes and speaking in a stilted style, “I must soon leave you. On Monday we set sail.” He held my hand, trying to fit the ring on my finger. “I want you to have this,” he said, straining slightly for it was a size too small for me. “To help you remember me while I’m gone.”

I was taken aback. The last thing I wished to do was insult him. He was a dear friend about to leave for the front. His ring was obviously not intended for engagement. Perhaps it was a sign of his friendship?

Dugald Rivers was one of the most sought-after bachelors in the city. Despite his forty-five years he was really quite handsome and youthful. He had a successful practice and had won four medals in the Boer War. He was an excellent dancer.

But since his arrival in Montreal no woman had managed to captivate him. The previous summer a girl named Barbara, daughter of the railway magnate Dr. Owens, had drawn his fancy for a time. He had danced with her at parties and her father had let it be known that he favoured the match, but nothing had come of it. I was one of the few who had not been surprised. Privately Dugald referred to Barbara Owens as
Babs the Bacillus
and hinted that she was dull, but I suspected Babs’s lacklustre personality wasn’t the real issue. Dugald simply preferred the bachelor life. He was not looking for a woman.

I was one of the few females of the species he tolerated, but this I’d always thought was because I posed no threat. I inhabited a kind of no man’s land separating the territories of the sexes. My training and work made me very much like him. Dugald could talk to me in ways he wouldn’t dream of talking to other women. My emotional accessibility and eagerness to provide tea and food were traits he also enjoyed and had difficulty finding in men. In me Dugald had the best of both worlds. I clearly did not want him for my marriage bed. Until that night at the club I had thought we had a solid friendship.

After the fire Dugald had become an almost daily visitor to the museum. I was all alone now, for Jakob Hertzlich had left. Dr. Clarke was preoccupied with rebuilding McGill’s medical school and had no time to worry about my lost specimens; we spoke less frequently than before. Dr. Mastro spent much of his time with his wife in New York state, as her health continued to decline. Dugald had become my confidant, slipping effortlessly into the position Jakob had once filled. He had been a supportive friend in my time of need, writing to Howlett and then, on Howlett’s recommendation, to the War Museum in Washington to discuss the plight of the McGill Pathology Museum. A donation to McGill of over a thousand specimens had been the result. Dugald’s military background had been of great advantage in this regard. He had opened doors that would not have budged for me. I was indebted to him and I liked him. I had never dreamed he would be interested in a woman, let alone in me.

Now on the pier he was holding my hand and towing me like a reluctant ship through the crowd. He was so glad I had come, he said, his eyes lingering on mine longer than necessary. It was flattering to have this big, lovely man suddenly and publicly attentive, but I didn’t trust it for a second. The whole thing felt artificial, as if Dugald were engaging in a staged performance.

He tugged me right up to Dr. Mastro and lifted my hand. My face went instantly hot. We must have looked ridiculous standing with our hands locked — an absurd permutation of Beauty and his red-faced Beast. At the University Club he’d acted out his little folly in private. Now he seemed determined to flaunt it. Dr. Mastro looked at me with wide, unblinking eyes. A few yards behind us Barbara Owens, who was at the pier seeing off an older brother, stared.

I pulled my hand away and tried to restore normalcy by chatting with Dr. Mastro. He was sailing today as McGill Hospital Unit’s commanding officer and looked more energetic than he had for months. I complimented him and his wide eyes softened. His wife had died and he was hoping the voyage would help him through his bereavement. We began to speak about the faculty but Dugald cut in, tugging me in an awful, proprietary way he had recently developed. I turned, annoyed.

“You will never guess who is here,” he said, eyes darting to the young man standing next to Mastro.

The person in question was no older than sixteen or seventeen. He wore his uniform with the careless abandon of a boy still at school. The buttons were mostly undone and his collar was unfastened. His skin was the colour of milk.

“You’ve met,” Dugald said.

The boy put his hand out but did not smile or raise his eyes. If we had met as Dugald claimed it obviously hadn’t been memorable for either of us.

Dugald could not contain himself any longer. “Revere Howlett.”

The black hair of his father. His mother’s milky skin. I could see it now quite plainly. I did a quick calculation. He would be nineteen years old. Nineteen! I’d last seen him in Baltimore when he was still a child. In Oxford I had missed him, as he’d been away at boarding school when I visited. Now he was going to Picardy as Mastro’s private orderly. Sir William must have arranged it when he heard about McGill’s plan for a hospital unit. It was a convenient, face saving way to avoid conscription into the British infantry, where men were dying in numbers; and Dr. Mastro and the others would keep an eye on him.

“Dr. White is an old friend of your father’s,” Dugald explained.

I blushed. The boy must be subjected to such comments every waking moment of his life. “I came to your home in Baltimore once, years ago,” I said, trying to engage him, “where you promptly did me in with a six-shooter.”

Revere’s face became smooth and thoughtful and I wondered if he were recalling the episode with the heart under the table. It had probably been as traumatic for him as for me. I certainly wasn’t about to bring it up now.

“You came to Oxford too,” he said slowly, “only I was away. You got sick or something.” His accent was more Oxford than Baltimore.

I nodded, embarrassed. I was probably something of a family legend. The ship’s horn blew, making us all jump. Men in naval uniform were ordering the women to move back. Boarding would soon commence.

Dugald Rivers made a final, mortifying lunge at my hand, which he lifted to his lips in full view of all. I pulled away from him and neglected to say a proper goodbye to Mastro or Revere Howlett in my haste. I didn’t get far, for a solid wall of women blocked my way. There was no way to break through or to get around so I was forced to join the bonneted throng.

It seemed like the entire university was shipping out that day on the
Metagama
: three medical classes and just about every faculty member who hadn’t signed up with the First Canadian Contingent when the initial call for troops had come the previous autumn. I would be the only one left. Well not the only one. I glanced around me. The women would stay. Some were crossing as nurses but their numbers were small.

Again the ship’s horn blared. A hush fell over the crowd as the men began to climb single file up the boarding plank. I felt like weeping. It was a mistake to be standing here on shore waving my colleagues goodbye. There were a dozen practical reasons why I could not go. The city had been emptied of medical practitioners. The only doctors left were either French or long past their prime. My services had been sought out by the Children’s Memorial Hospital and also by the Montreal General. And there was Laure. Who would care for her if I went to France? Miss Skerry was a stalwart, but she couldn’t pay our bills. My salary from McGill might have been laughable but it was better than soldier’s pay. If one were a family man, one had to have means like Dr. Mastro to enlist.

My gaze found another face in the winding line of men. Huntley Stewart, laughing with a gang of newspaper cronies. They were not paying attention and a hole opened as the line moved forward without them. Huntley was the first to see it. He pointed, making a cartoon face of horror then rushed ahead to rectify things. His newspaper cronies followed like sheep.

Huntley Stewart had enlisted. Already I’d noticed there were fewer men in Montreal. On a streetcar the other day the driver had her hair done up with pins. Women driving streetcars — what would be next? In Verdun a munitions plant had recently opened and the
Herald
reported most of its workers were women. The pay was thirty-five cents an hour, a better wage than I was getting at McGill.

Laure had no idea Huntley was leaving. In theory they were still married. In practice they hadn’t spoken in years.

A photographer from the
Herald
was taking pictures of the waving women. He picked out one especially pretty girl in a bright yellow frock standing right beside me and came over for an interview. “What do you feel,” he asked, shouting above the noise, “watching the men pull out?”

The girl came up with some banality about the king and the sacrifices people had to make. Such were the platitudes people spouted — lines straight from the newspapers or lifted from politicians’ speeches. The girl was now speaking about her knitting club. Since October she’d finished twenty pairs of socks for the men overseas. Every person had to do his bit, she said.

“Are you here for someone special?” the reporter asked.

The girl blushed. She nodded.

“You’re not afraid for him?” He was flirting with her, setting her up so the right words would come tumbling out.

Fear was not the point, said the girl, as if on cue. She was so sure of her rote pronouncements, so naive, she couldn’t imagine the young man she fancied maimed or dead.

The reporter swung in my direction. “And you … do you have someone in the line?”

The ship’s horn sounded, sparing me the need to answer. With the rest of the crowd I looked toward where the last of the men were boarding. A familiar hunched back stopped me short. He was dressed like the others — army-issue boots and a mud-coloured jacket — but even in uniform he did not blend. At the moment he seemed utterly concentrated upon his cigarette. The others were bantering, talking with animation as they waited in turn to lug their kits up the gangplank. Jakob Hertzlich stood among them still and silent, but not of them.

I closed my eyes. It had been a decade. I was forty-six now so he must be thirty-eight. Old for a soldier, but a surprising number of the recruits were past their prime — even Dugald. Jakob and I hadn’t spoken in years. He was working in a different building at McGill. Our paths rarely crossed.

I tried to imagine Jakob Hertzlich with a gun in his hands. Perhaps he would not touch one if he stayed inside a hospital. Some men were made for the battlefield, others most decidedly not. I wished I’d seen him earlier; even though we’d avoided each other for so long I would have liked to say goodbye and wish him safety.

“Ma’am?” The reporter was still at my elbow.

I shook my head. On the dock Jakob Hertzlich was grinding his cigarette under the heel of his shiny boot. He shouldered his bag and then unexpectedly looked out at the crowd. For a fraction of a second our eyes met. I broke away first, turning briefly left and right to see if there was anyone else at whom he could be looking. But to my left was the slogan girl in yellow and to my right was the reporter. By the time I found Jakob again his back was to me and he’d begun the slow climb up the gangplank.