The Heart Specialist (34 page)

26

NOVEMBER 7, 1918

The news came while I was on the train at a station stop between St. Andrews East and Montreal. It had been anticipated for weeks, but war was a time of rumours and I paid it little attention. The war was over. As our train chugged into the city the Allies and the Germans had laid down arms. In the carriages people hugged each other and cheered. It was a party. So much good news in such a short space of time. First the end of the epidemic, and now, two days later, the end of war.

Windsor Station was jammed. I was squeezed between an old man ahead of me carrying a very large portmanteau and a harried woman behind me stepping on my heels. After the stillness of the Priory it was overwhelming. My feet were heavy and slow. Laure was dead. We had buried her the previous afternoon in the Presbyterian cemetery next to the graves of my mother and grandmother. The snow was gone but the ground had been so hard that the grave-digger broke his pickaxe. Besides the minister there had only been two people at her funeral: George Skerry and me.

The crowd pushed forward, carrying me in its current. I allowed myself to be swept through the station’s central hall with its echoing spaces and the disembodied voice booming out gate numbers and departure times.

Outside the station the cold air was a relief, though it was still crowded and noisy. The entire city seemed to have congregated in the streets, even though a sharp wind was blowing from the north. I pulled my scarf over my mouth. On Peel Street traffic had ground to a halt. No one minded. Drivers were smiling and leaning on their horns. Some waved flags, the Red Ensign and the Royal Union. On the sidewalk people stopped to watch as at a parade.

It was the seventh of November, 1918. The war was finally over. Maybe it would be declared a holiday and named
War’s End Day
or something equally hopeful and wrong. Wars would break out again. Violence was part of human nature as much as love and generosity.

In front of me a woman in a bright blue sweater leaned out of a car window to hug a man standing on the curb. He kissed her hands before the car lurched forward out of reach. Then he moved on and kissed another woman. Peel Street was now so jammed that cars and horses could no longer move. People eddied around them. A man tried to grab my hand but I pulled away. Someone else came up behind me and squeezed me but I ducked sideways and escaped. I had nothing to celebrate.

Laure’s death was the latest blow. Dugald had gone days before her. There were the war dead, boys whose names appeared day after day in long lists in
The Gazette
. A dozen of my students were buried in France and Flanders. The Greaves boy, whom I had never actually met but knew from his mother’s stories, was dead, as was Revere Howlett, whose sweet, pale face I would not soon forget. Huntley Stewart had made it back from the war intact, but Samuel Clarke was now on his deathbed. I was rushing to his home right now to say goodbye. How could I hug strangers in the street and wave flags in the midst of such loss?

Dr. Clarke’s house was just below the wooded heights of Mount Royal Park. Jakob Hertzlich met me at the door. I was flushed from the walk and had unbuttoned my coat. Jakob was sitting on the step, smoking. He must have been there for some time, for he appeared half-frozen. The tips of his fingers were yellow again and he looked thin and unwell.

“There’s no rush,” he said, flicking ash over the railing onto a flowerbed rutted with ice. “The body’s upstairs if you want to see it.”

It had happened while I was on the train. As the porters had come through with news of the armistice Samuel Clarke had died. Jakob reported that it had not been painful. Our old friend had slipped into a coma and had simply not reawakened.

I wanted to reach out then, to feel the solidity of Jakob’s body, but I could not move. I stood dumbly, inhaling in the bracing air.

“You’re looking well,” he said.

My cheeks were likely red from the climb to Dr. Clarke’s house. I exhaled a sort of sob. “I don’t think I could be worse.”

“That makes two of us.” He looked away and asked after Laure.

It was the first time I had actually said out loud that my sister was dead. Sadness swelled. When I could speak again I inquired about Jakob’s ailing father.

He shrugged. “Dead,” he answered. “Like everyone else. Although in his case cancer got him, not the flu.” He was staring straight ahead into the darkness, and I was afraid for a second that he too might cry. He bent a knee up, bracing his foot on the wall. From far below on Sherbrooke Street came the incongruous, celebratory honking of car horns.

Mrs. Clarke was upstairs in her husband’s bedroom, sitting with the body. She was a plump woman with the same kind warmth for which her husband was renowned, but with a deeper respect for Christian rites and practices than he had ever had. She rose to embrace me the moment I entered the bedroom. She held my hands as I told her how distressed I was not to have been present for Dr. Clarke. She calmed me, inquiring about Laure and then expressing gratitude that I had come in my own time of bereavement. She described Jakob Hertzlich as her guardian angel, the epitome of Christian charity, living in her home for the last week, tirelessly nursing her dying husband. Jakob had followed me into the room, and as Mrs. Clarke praised him she reached for one of his hands too, bringing him into our circle. “He is so special,” she said in her kind, fluty voice. “My husband regarded him as a son.”

Jakob did not smile. He looked uncomfortable and slipped out of Mrs. Clarke’s grasp as soon as he could. The ease that he had brought home from overseas seemed to have disappeared almost completely. Mrs. Clarke and I watched him hurry awkwardly from the room.

“He’s a good man,” the widow said as the door closed behind him. “More tender than he would have us know.” She shook her head sadly then turned her attention to me. “Go ahead and approach the body, Dr. White. Don’t be shy. You were also one of my husband’s favourites.”

Samuel Clarke was laid out in a fresh nightshirt. He looked frailer than when I had last seen him, his hair so thin that a waxy scalp showed through the white wisps. His expression stopped me cold. He looked happy. Perhaps it was just the relaxation of his facial muscles or the way the light was falling, but in his expression was something approximating joy. Contrary to what I had expected it was a relief to be in the dead man’s bedroom. The world seemed suddenly less bleak.

Jakob Hertzlich was on the front porch waiting for me when I came downstairs. Light was losing ground to darkness and with it had come silence. Horns no longer blared. In fact the roads seemed to be empty except for trolleys. Jakob had just lit up another of his pungent, hand-rolled cigarettes. He was bundled in his coat and hat now, although his long fingers were still bare. “Bad news,” he said as I closed the door behind me.

I thought he was referring to Samuel Clarke and began to speak about the strange expression on our mentor’s face and how, on the contrary, it had uplifted me.

“I mean the war,” said Jakob.

There had been a mistake. The armistice had not been signed. Apparently the war was still on. I covered my face. I had been making plans, I realized. Even while I had sat upstairs with Samuel Clarke my brain had been almost unconsciously dividing the coming days into tasks to prepare for my crossing to Europe. For that was what the war’s end meant to me — that I would be able to cross the Atlantic.

Jakob took a pensive drag on his cigarette. “Have to put off the crossing.”

I stared at him as if he were a mind reader.

“As soon as the waters are safe,” he said, exuding an acrid cloud, “I’ll be gone.”

He’d been talking about himself. “That makes two of us,” I told him. What did it matter now if I told him my plans? It would probably do him good to be reminded that there were people other than himself in the world. I told him I was off to Oxford.

He cut me off. “To see Howlett?”

The porch was now in almost total darkness. All I could make out was his beard in the glow of his badly rolled cigarette. “Yes,” I said.

Below us the city glittered, a patch of fallen stars. He made a guttural noise in his throat. The animosity he consistently showed Sir William was beyond reason — a primitive response. “There are things you don’t know,” I said quietly. “Sir William has been pivotal in my life.”

“Oh, that I know,” Jakob Hertzlich said. “Believe me, Dr. White. That I know.”

“It’s not what you think,” I added.

“It’s not a question of thinking. It’s as plain as the nose on your face what you feel about him. It’s also plain that there’s no reciprocation. He exploits you and you don’t even see it.”

A cold, bright moon hung above us, winking down through partial clouds as if the whole scene were a joke. “There’s more to it than that,” I said. I was close enough to hear the agitation in his breath. The moon winked again, and then suddenly it hit me. Jakob Hertzlich was jealous.

I could not make him out in the darkness but it didn’t matter. I could not believe I hadn’t seen it before. It was not as if he’d hidden his feelings. For years he’d been trying to attract my attention. I had chosen not to see. I blushed, remembering the night of the aborted party; our unconsummated physical tryst had meant far more to him than I had ever imagined.

Jakob Hertzlich had loved me for years. It felt strange, realizing I was loved. So strange I had not recognized it. For the briefest moment tenderness welled inside me. The skin around my eyes went tight.

In the darkness Jakob Hertzlich saw nothing of this. He picked up his satchel and before I could say a word marched down the icy walk to the street.

VII
THE CROSSING

Starting a long way off the true point,

and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then

arrive just where we ought to be.

— GEORGE ELIOT,
MIDDLEMARCH

27

DECEMBER 1918

It was the seventh day of the trip, a fact I’d learned in the mess hall that morning from one of the other passengers. Seven days of squall and storm, the ship tossed like a leaf on the swells. I felt like I had died. Seven days or weeks or months — I could no longer say how long I’d been at sea. The hours melted into each other, endlessly protracted and so cold that I couldn’t stay outside for more than a few minutes. It was late December, the worst time of the year for an Atlantic crossing. I had taken a ship to England once before in winter, but the weather had co-operated and I’d been able to spend a good part of it on deck. This was a completely different experience. I’d been sick from the instant I stepped on board.

When I had told people about my plan to cross in December they tried to warn me. Miss Skerry thought winter crossings unsafe. Samuel Clarke’s widow spent an entire morning attempting to dissuade me. The crossing would be hard, she said, but Europe would be worse. My former students, many of whom had only just returned from overseas, were more categorical. Winter crossings were to be avoided at any cost. I would be confined to my cabin by a cold more intense than any I had experienced in Canada. Europe was still reeling from the war. Even the ship’s agent from whom I had purchased my ticket had said it would be wise to postpone my travels until the spring.

I could not wait. As soon as the armistice was signed on November 11, in a railway carriage in the forests of northern France, I began to mobilize. Passenger ships had started crossing again even before the ink was dry on the peace agreement and I was able to book a berth for the Christmas period. I was not scared off by the warnings of my students and friends. I thought I knew what winter crossings were like, and after four years of war-time confinement in Montreal I was itching to brave the open seas.

Open Arms was shuttered, its gate closed to visitors even though this was the Christmas season. The walk from the curb to the front door was icy, and I proceeded with care. I had taken the train from Portsmouth and found an inn not far from the Howletts’ house, but even today, a full twenty-four hours after stepping onto dry land, I was still feeling the effect of the ship. I kept tilting to the left as though the world had skewed slightly and I was the only one to notice. The nausea had stopped. I must have lost a full stone in weight; my clothes hung off me. I was weak and exhausted, but I was here, safe and more or less sound.

I knocked on the Howletts’ door and waited for a minute or so, peering through a little strip of frosted glass. I couldn’t see anything inside the house except that it was dark. It was only ten o’clock in the morning, too early for Sir William to be out visiting. I got worried then. There had been so many deaths back in Montreal I suppose that worry was a natural response. I rapped again, more insistently, and kept rapping until a shadow filled the pane.

Lady Kitty poked her beautiful patrician head through the crack between the door and the door jamb. When she saw me she drew herself up like a long-necked bird and shook her elegant head. She still towered above me, but posture alone couldn’t hide her alteration. Her mouth was pulled down almost clownishly and her eyes, once so bold and unblinking, would not meet mine. Although she was attempting to stand tall her shoulders appeared hunched; she was carrying a load so heavy it was about to break her back. She shook my hand, saying what a pleasant surprise it was to see me so soon after the armistice.