Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain Read online

  The girl pulled back and regarded him, her brows bent with concern. “Come with me,” she said at last. The warmth of her hand on his forehead brought comfort and peace. He followed her, his steps unsteady, toward his house, their house. Already he knew she was not Madeline. Already he knew he’d been foolish and tired, so tired and drunk. But she had a great gift, this girl of his — a kindness he could not, would never, escape. And for the first time in days, the doctor believed that everything was about to get better.

  READING GRANDPA’S HEAD

  The night Morris’s first letter arrived, Edith returned home late from the Institute. She draped her shawl over Grandpa’s favorite chair, set her notebooks on the end table, and announced her arrival with the single dry cough she’d perfected over her thirty-three years. Had she simply said, “I’ve returned,” Grandpa would not have responded. Her voice would have faded to silence, as it often did when she relayed facts her father knew or would rather not hear spoken.

  Grandpa, knit cap pulled tight over his forehead, emerged from his study. Despite his age, he cured people seven days a week, going door to door with his frock coat pockets full of scissors, metal syringes, lancets, glass bleeding cups, and a handful of licorice suckers.

  “It’s time for you and Letty to make other arrangements,” he said, his tone level and the words evenly spaced. He had clearly practiced the line all day.

  “Oh, Father,” Edith said.

  She and Letty had just moved in to 62 Orchard Street. Not six months had passed since her husband, Morris, set out for the territories leaving Edith and Letty at Grandpa’s doorstep with a promise to call for them soon.

  Letty emerged from the kitchen and stepped forward to hug her mother. At thirteen, she stood as tall as Edith, and she could reach and sweep clean the high shelves where Grandpa hid flasks of foul-smelling brandy. Days, while he made his rounds, she pored over his medical texts, convinced that to be truly moderate, one must eat only fresh fruits and boiled vegetables. She was as strong-willed as Edith had been, long ago, before the strain of illness and cooking and cleaning and caring for three children, two of whom had died in infancy, had dulled her passions.

  “Mother, I ruined Grandpa’s good shirt,” she said. The fire had nearly expired beneath her watch, and the plates from yesterday’s supper still sat on the table. “It caught on the washboard.”

  In days past, Edith would have scolded her daughter, admonished her to exert more care. But now she dismissed the words with a wave. She’d known of her daughter’s inattentiveness for weeks, ever since Letty sat beneath Edith’s inquiring fingers and she examined the bumps and sutures of the girl’s head. “I read that all in your skull,” she said.

  “Really, Edith,” Grandpa said. “You can’t predict what a person will do by the shape of his head.”

  Edith stepped past Grandpa to the fire, which she fed so ineptly that it diminished further. The wallpaper, discolored in places where lamp oil had splattered, peeled around the trim. Hard times had come to New York, and Grandpa had let go the hired help — an old woman and her son — who, Edith suspected, had done little more than steal from her father.

  “You should come with me,” she said. “The demonstrations are breathtaking.”

  “No respectable doctor —”

  “Doctor Ketchum was there.”

  Grandpa folded his arms over his plain black waistcoat. His eyes followed Edith’s hands as she removed her gloves, now tinged gray with ash, and dropped them on top of his seat cushion.

  “Edith —” he began, but Letty interrupted, pointing at Grandpa accusingly.

  “You’ve been smoking.” She peered around him to his study off the back parlor. She’d thrown away a tin of his horrid weed last Saturday, but the old man must have another hiding place. Perhaps he’d pulled forward Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juices again, stashing the tin behind the well-worn pages, or the Gazetteer of England, for which he had absolutely no other use.

  “Clear the table,” Grandpa ordered, but Letty was already searching for the tobacco.

  Edith sighed. Gone were the quiet evenings when her mother managed the house while Grandpa discussed news and medicine with his son — a vain, foolish child who’d run off with the circus years before. Now Edith had to attend to the household; she could not retire, as her heart urged, to review her lecture notes.

  EARLIER THAT DAY Edith’s mentor, Fowler Corender, had examined a pauper, a frail alcoholic known for falling dead asleep along the Bowery. “Behold!” Fowler cried as he shaved the poor man’s scalp with a flat razor and ran his bare fingers over the pale, nubby skin. “A rather small covetiveness organ, and a large appetite. Is it no wonder the man drinks? And note the prominent protuberance here on the parietal bone. This man was born to live in the streets.”

  A smattering of applause, led by Edith, brought a glow to Fowler’s cheeks. Though he claimed to prefer silence and solitude, he performed public demonstrations three afternoons a week and had considered adding an evening show. Plastered on the wall behind him, a chart demarcated the thirty-three brain organs Doctor Spurzheim had catalogued, as well as the six dozen facilities he, Fowler, had discovered while working in New York. The chart served as a reference for those new to the sessions; Edith no longer referred to it.

  As young Fowler’s apprentice, she took careful notes while he called out observations. Only yesterday, he’d discovered a new organ: solicitousness, which resided in the superior anterior region of the skull and had thus far eluded scientific discovery, he maintained, because of its almost imperceptible size. Of all the eminent scientists, Fowler Corender had the most sensitive fingers, an asset he boasted about often. He removed his jacket when he worked, revealing embroidered suspenders and a single-breasted vest. His feet were small, and looked even more so in pointy shoes. He’d studied abroad, in Edinburgh, where he worked with the finest minds of the century. He’d even met Spurzheim, by chance, in Vienna.

  “And what did he say?” Edith asked when he told her.

  “We discussed Gall at some length.” Fowler often spoke the names of more famous men, and Edith repeated the same names at night, before the mirror, in case the men arrived at the Institute as Fowler promised.

  “What did he say about your head?”

  “Well nothing, of course.”

  “He didn’t read it? You didn’t have him read it?”

  “I’m far too sensitive,” Fowler answered.

  Fowler had examined Edith twice, declaring on the second examination that she did, perhaps, have an inclination toward his noble field. The rise in Edith’s skull above her pronounced occipital bone indicated a well-developed faculty for learning and apprenticeship, and should she apply herself to her studies she would make a suitable companion to a renowned scientist. She had a great love of life, a passion for existence, which Fowler admitted to finding most attractive.

  At night Edith practiced in the privacy of her home: on herself, her daughter, and heads conjured from memory. While Letty cooked supper and Grandpa searched vainly for his tobacco, Edith rediscovered herself by probing the bumps and indentations beneath her thick brown hair. She had a strong sense of color, she learned, a finding that prompted her to boldly match blues and scarlet with a long-treasured mustard scarf from Paris. And she had a great facility for judging time: its passing and relation to circumstance. With skill, she deduced the exact date of her husband’s departure, a Thursday, just past Easter, early that year. She’d not seen Morris since the thirtieth of March.

  AT DINNER GRANDPA sat at the dining table beside a stew pot of boiled cabbage and leeks. He wore his knit cap and regarded Edith in silence. He could no longer demand that she abandon her work, not now that she was grown and married, though in an indirect way his demands — don’t work at the prison, don’t involve yourself in politics or in teaching, my dear, you must marry and have children — had led to the discovery of her new talent. Grandpa had always known what was best for her.

>   Letty had laid out the good china. Behind her the fire provided light, but not heat enough to prevent the green-brown soup from cooling before the first drops reached the dinner bowls.

  “Greens are good for the digestion,” she said, dropping a second ladleful of vegetables into Grandpa’s bowl. She’d dressed in one of her mother’s old gowns, maroon with lace at the neck and cuffs, and she’d found her deceased grandmother’s jewelry chest, from which she’d helped herself to a silver, rose-shaped brooch.

  Grandpa gazed at the floor, where his most treasured volume, An Experimental Inquiry into the Laws of the Vital Functions, lay carelessly spread. The corner of the upturned page had torn, the paper stained with vegetable pulp. He stirred his stew, unable to bring even a spoonful to his lips.

  Edith, who’d eaten across from Fowler at one of the Institute’s most romantic lab tables, had no appetite either. Over a slab of sharp milk cheese and a jar of imported pickle, she and Fowler had discussed the human mind in great depth. She still felt submerged in the conversation.

  Only Letty devoured the congealing soup, her gusto punctuated with unladylike grunts, which she stated “opened the esophagus and cleansed the internals.”

  “Boiled greens in such quantity will certainly interfere with the workings of the large intestine,” Grandpa said, though neither of his companions acknowledged him.

  It was he who first saw the letter, folded inside the New York Observer. The hand that addressed the envelope, precise yet utterly lacking in beauty, had spelled “Edith” in large letters, without adding “Tucker” beside it, the type of careless informality that only Morris would never think to question. The envelope, battered and torn at the side, had released its contents somewhere between Wisconsin and Orchard Street.

  “From your dear husband,” Grandpa said.

  Edith, roused from her reverie, reached across the table to take the letter from Grandpa’s indifferent fingers. She spread the empty envelope smooth on the table and gazed down as if divining the former contents from the address alone.

  “He must be returning,” Grandpa did not trouble to conceal the glee in his voice, “to collect you.”

  Letty set down her spoon. Stew stained the front of her dress, and her teeth were patterned with flecks of green. “I will not go to Wisconsin,” she said.

  “He should arrive any day now!” Grandpa announced, setting his Observer over his soup. “Wisconsin is a fine place, Letty, a fine place for a girl like you.”

  Edith folded the envelope and held it close to her chest. Had the past months changed Morris? Would he be the same man he’d been before he set out?

  EDITH MARRIED MORRIS Tucker under the lukewarm approval of her family and the utter disregard of his. The two exchanged vows at the courthouse two months after she noticed she’d failed to menstruate, and however brief the engagement, her friends concurred that Edith and Morris belonged together. Morris had such soulful brown eyes. And Edith smiled so sweetly at him. It was high time she married, and she seemed happier with Morris than she’d been with Edmund, though her former suitor was a wealthy banker who would have given her an easier life.

  Edith first met her father-in-law two weeks after Letty was born. A frontiersman, Morris’s pa left his wife six months before Morris came into the world. He returned to Cayuga County twenty-three years later, after Wild Man Briggs blinded him in a brawl. Though he’d lived in the same four-room house for years, he forgot the distance between the wall and table, and he often fell down the two steps leading to his front door.

  “I lived off whiskey and raw bear meat for ten days.” The blind man, thin and angular and bald as a worn-out carpet, bored Edith with stories of dark-haired Indians, rough living, and rowdy camaraderie. “But when the rains stopped, I speared up a coon with the arrow that got me. Didn’t even wipe the shaft off.”

  He showed scars on both forearms, from a knife or a long Indian spear — he explained the injury both ways — and bragged that he’d been so far north the water turned to ice in mid-August.

  “If I had my eyes,” he said, “I’d be there still.” Men who lived on the edge, men who fought to the death, men who rode hard through the night and slept but an hour at dawn — these were the old man’s heroes, a group he’d stood proudly among till he lost his sight. Melancholy still sounded in his voice.

  Morris didn’t note the many contradictions. He sat on the floor, half a yard from his pa’s bent knee, wide brown eyes rimmed with his mother’s long lashes, pale arms folded around his soft torso. “The great wild’s all been done,” he said later, as Edith tried vainly to lull Letty to sleep. The Tucker house had more draughts than windows, and it reeked of smoke and burnt porridge. “My pa did it,” Morris continued, “and now it’s done.”

  For several weeks afterward, Morris sought adventure, usually with a bottle of whiskey in hand and a rumpled jacket slung over his shoulder. Insurance didn’t suit him, he said, though he did well enough in that profession to support his wife and daughter for the next twelve years, even to pay for music and voice lessons. Every few months he’d announce, “We’re moving to the territories” or, “Us and Letty, we’ll raise hogs and grow apples” or, “There’s Indian wealth, the land. It’s all been discovered, but we have it to settle. That’s ours.”

  Edith was not about to leave New York for a remote town in the wilds where men still battled Indians. And since Morris would not plead or negotiate, the family stayed in their small house on Bleecker Street, where they would have remained had the elder Tucker not passed on.

  The second time Edith saw Morris’s pa, just under a year ago, the old man lay stretched out in a wooden box with his gun wrestled into the lifeless fingers of his left hand and a cowhide cord strung round his neck bearing a letter, penned in his uncertain, blind hand: “I sees you now.”

  Morris held the pall, front right, and he walked straight and proud until the boys at the rear pressed forward and he lost his footing and went down, right beside his pa’s open grave. Edith screamed, thinking the old man and his box had killed her husband, but Morris stood up. He had a shiner the size of a clockface the next day, but that afternoon he gave his speech, speaking of his pa as if the old man had coddled him since the day he was born.

  From then on Edith couldn’t decide if the falling coffin had damaged Morris’s brain or if, somehow, old Tucker’s dead thoughts had slithered from the coffin and found a home in her husband’s head. As soon as the family returned from the funeral, he stopped going to work, and he wouldn’t respond when Edith scolded, entreated, promised butter cake and brandy, and at last, reached the end of her wits.

  He spoke only to say that he was heading south to Texas to enlist in the militia. He wore his father’s grin when he spoke of it, and he closed his eyes as if he were already blind, though more likely he imagined: the fights, the dust, the men who lived by cunning, not law, who drank beneath the morning sun or evening stars. He bought himself a rifle and a pair of black army boots. When Edith refused to sew him a jacket, he went out and bought one from the general store along with a hip flask and a canteen.

  Edith burned the first jacket, stole the cap of his flask, removed his bootlaces. If she could delay him, she thought, for a week or two, his madness would pass. He would return to his insurance profession, for which he was well suited, as evidenced by the promotions he’d received over the years. He would support his family, who, though they did not yet feel the pinch of hard times, would rapidly descend into destitution without his salary. Besides, Morris had never shot a gun in his life, at least not to Edith’s knowledge.

  But the weeks passed and Morris only grew more determined. He’d lost his sense of hearing, didn’t listen to a word Edith said, until she brought up the territories. “What about Wisconsin?” she asked in a final attempt to dissuade him. “What about our plans to settle out west?”

  “Letty and I will move in with Grandpa,” she continued. “Just till you call for us. I know he won’t mind.” The fact that h
er father’s house had thrice the rooms of the one she and Morris shared, as well as a generous yard, had not escaped her attention.

  Morris agreed to head out west instead of south so quickly Edith might have thought he’d feigned his interest in the Texas militia to make her compromise. But, she knew, he’d just lost some part of his mind, that something in his head changed the day his father died. Did he need time? Could she turn him around? She asked her father, who assured her that the young man would benefit from a stint in a hyperbaric chamber — the pressure of submersion, especially in deep salt water, increased circulation, he said. Edith, who cared little for water and less for the ocean, decided to search for a cure herself. The first time she went to Fowler Corender’s Institute, which promised to teach the only true science of the mind, she hoped she could learn enough to help Morris when he returned for her. She had not expected it to change her life.

  FOR DAYS AFTER the empty envelope arrived, Letty prepared radishes, squash, and burnt apple for four. She insisted that a place be set for her father, maintaining that a warm meal upon arrival would convince him to remain in New York.

  The envelope itself took on meaning. The fact that it came after so many months of silence, without a surname, became evidence to Edith that Morris had taken up with another woman: a buxom girl with prairie dirt pressed deep in her skin.

  Edith began to clean. She rearranged the boots and gloves and stockings in such a way that Grandpa could never find what he needed, and when he inquired, she admitted that she herself had forgotten. She swept the front porch six times a day, dusted the trim in the entryway, scrubbed the table and chairs, and at last, exhausted, failed to rise from her bed. “I’m happier without him,” she said. Grandpa diagnosed her with a case of nerves, possibly even hysteria, for which he’d treated her on several previous occasions. He prescribed a dilute copper mineral solution, which Edith dutifully took four times a day, confident that her father’s remedy would eventually cure her.