Robin Oliveira Read online

  From outside came the distant rumble of a train rushing through Patroon Canyon: the New York City Railroad’s night train to Buffalo. Briefly, he wondered whether at the Sutter house the thunder was a nightly reminder of Nathaniel’s absence. His mother would have taken it so. The Blevens family had lived north of Manhattan City on a stretch of farmland the Hudson River Railroad would bisect within the decade. James had lived with his father, mother, two older brothers, and the ghosts of two dead babies, for his mother was a woman who could never forget. The family worked the fertile land and never once ventured southward into the large city that occasionally spat weary residents northward seeking respite from the grime. The family was aware of its good fortune: the land was good, their lives filled with work, and despite the occasional lamentations of their mother, the boys, immune to the hazards of maternal grief, lived a life unremarkable except for its lack of want. A life sublime, as lives went in those years; across the globe, good fortune was scarce. In Ireland, the potato crop had failed and famine was spreading; in Mexico, war was raging; in France, Napoléon III was escaping from the fortress of Ham.

  But all of that changed one night in the middle of the spring thaw of 1846, when James was thirteen years old. Drawn by a strange noise, he left his sleeping brothers behind and opened the door to the dark hallway, where his father stood breathing like the bellows in a blacksmith shop. In a high rasp, his father said, “Get your mother.”

  Skirting his father, James shook his mother awake. Together they coaxed his father back to bed, and only when he would not lie down, when he fought to stay sitting up, did his mother understand that what her husband was suffering from was no latent fever.

  She whirled on James. “Get out! Get out!”

  Terrified, he backed into his room, climbing into the bed he shared with his brothers. He lay awake, listening to his mother’s tearful entreaties for his father to take water, to take anything, to breathe, to try. The night crept on, dark and moonless. James nudged one of his brothers awake and tiptoed behind him to stand horrified at the door. Now both his mother and father lay slumped against the headboard, gasping and feverish. The lamp sent leaping shadows against the wall. James rubbed at his face with the back of his hand, wiping away his tears, looking to Jonathan, who always knew what to do: how to skin a deer, clean a musket, set a rabbit trap deep in the tangles of brush where the hares thought they were safe. But in the dim light of the lamp, Jonathan’s face had turned bloodless.

  For the next two days, James did not eat. He sat at the doorstep of his parents’ room. Even in their suffering, his mother refused him entry, but James would not leave, not even at night, when he curled up in a quilt and dozed at their door. When their end came, two days later, there was a rattle, a snake-like, intermittent hissing. And then silence. He entered the room, pulling his quilt around him. He lit the welled sperm oil that had long ago smoked out. He touched his mother’s curled, gray hand. Her eyes, blunted and staring, her head at an angle, twisted. Her mouth, open. And across the back of her mouth, a thick, clotted, gray curtain.

  His father’s throat was similarly occluded. Later, James would learn to recognize diphtheria in an instant, but that night he sank onto the bedclothes, still twisted and damp with sweat, and thought, Why would the body grow something that would kill it? The thought consumed him, even as he helped to bury his parents and incinerate the ruined bedclothes.

  His parents’ deaths altered his sense of balance. James began to fear that life made no sense at all. It was not as if he was unacquainted with death. The soil had already accepted two brothers that his mother could not save from mumps. But a membrane? Made of what? And to what purpose had it grown? There was no doctor for miles, no one to explain the myriad vagaries that presented themselves. The tangle of life and death, so closely associated, fascinated him. He caught rabbits in the field and dissected them before he cooked them. He observed his brothers, watching for signs of mysterious, random assaults on their health. He collected dead animals and made a museum of them in the barn until his brothers, fed up, flung them out with a shovel and made him bury them.

  In the winter of 1851, the year James turned eighteen, he sold a plow and left the crisp air of the country for the city. He took a room in a boarding house near the East River in Manhattan City and asked for directions to a hospital.

  “You sick?” the clerk asked, snatching the pen away. “We don’t want no sick here.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  The suspicious clerk looked him up and down before he spat out directions to the New York College of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital. It took a week of haunting the hospital entryway for James to learn the names of the surgeons who were taking apprentices. One, a Dr. Stipp, seemed more inviting than the others. He was thirty-five, maybe, with a neat, combed beard and glasses perched on the end of an aristocratic nose. James followed Dr. Stipp home, running to keep up with his carriage, darting through the rain-swept streets, pulling his inadequate coat tight around his chin while he dodged the trash-filled gutters.

  The housekeeper let James in when he knocked, dripping clothes and all, and retrieved Dr. Stipp from his brandy to come see the insistent boy at the door. The doctor led James to his study and sat behind his desk with a pipe in his hands and his eyebrows raised. The office, full of leather-bound books and a desk as wide as a kitchen table, was a room of such warmth and civility that James nearly did not pull from his sodden coat the dead cat he had just collected from the alley. It was newly deceased, dead of one of the many diseases that regularly slayed them. He unwrapped from its protective chamois cloth the butchering knife he had also hidden under his cloak, spread a newspaper across the doctor’s desk, and before the doctor could stay his hand, slit the cat open from chest to pubis.

  Dr. Stipp lay down his pipe and pushed away from his desk, protesting.

  “Before you stop me, if you would please just show me,” James said, expertly separating the jiggling yellow fat, carefully slitting the taut, opaque membrane, letting it curl back to reveal the organs underneath, so carefully arranged, a genius of a puzzle.

  “Here,” James said, pointing the knife tip at the gizzard-like organ lying behind the stomach. “What is this? I think it must be for digestion, but I can’t imagine what it does.” He lifted the stomach with the knife. “You see, just under there? It has a tube, or a duct, and it feeds into this coil of gut here.” He looked up then, because Dr. Stipp had not spoken. The doctor’s hand had retreated to his vest pocket, but he was leaning over his desk, holding his smoking pipe aloft.

  “Why, it’s the pancreas. A little different from ours, but not much.” The doctor moved closer. “And there, the liver. But that’s obvious.”

  “But what does the pancreas do? Why is it there?”

  The doctor stepped back, pursing his lips. “How many times have you done this?”

  “Enough. I’ve got it pretty well figured out. But I don’t have any books.”

  The doctor leaned over the table. “It’s easier if the animals have been dead longer, but this will do.” He poked his finger at the stomach. “Make the cut there. It will expose the organ without ruining your understanding.”

  James made the cut.

  “Yes, that’s it, but for God’s sake, don’t saw,” the doctor said.

  They worked into the night, breaking for a dinner of beefsteak and potatoes and whiskey, served in the doctor’s elegant dining room by a maid wearing an apron of snow-white cotton and a cap of lace on her head. She and the doctor’s wife, Genevieve, seemed unfazed by this strange, wind-torn guest and his project in the front room. Afterwards, under the wavering flame of a single sperm lamp, the doctor and James worked until the digestive system of cats was no longer a puzzle for him.

  Dr. Stipp installed James in an attic room in his home next to the East River. James’s education began the next day, and continued for a year. In addition to following the doctor from house to house, learning what he could, James twice attended the
six-month run of courses at the medical college. It consisted of lectures in anatomy, with a cadaver on a table and the professor making cuts and explaining to the students, kept at a distance in their seats, what each revealed organ did. There were other courses in Surgery, Chemistry, Theory and Practice of Medicine, Institutes of Medicine and Materia Medica, and Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children. Never once, however, did James perform a surgery. Never once did he see general patients, at least not under the auspices of the college. That possibility presented itself only because James was apprenticed to Dr. Stipp. James was, by far, one of the luckiest, for not everyone taking the courses was given the opportunity to see a doctor in actual practice.

  At first, James was just charged with carrying the doctor’s instruments in their leather case, but about a month after Dr. Stipp had taken him into his practice, he found himself ducking and darting down Worth Street, following Dr. Stipp on a call. Everything about Manhattan City—the noise, the filth, the traffic, the wailing of its street denizens—had battered James in the month since his arrival. An argument could be made that he was beginning to find his feet in this strange, clamoring place where the air bore no resemblance to the sweeter perfume not thirty miles north, but here in Five Points the dirt and crowding overwhelmed. The streets veered off at angles and the ramshackle tenements were peppered with advertisements for tailors, painters, oiled clothing, and every manner of commerce. Broken windows were stuffed with newspapers and rags against the cold. Grog houses, tanneries, bakeries, and houses shouldered up against one another; wooden stairs jutted from their windows to zigzag down to the street. Dr. Stipp avoided a block and tackle, its hook swinging wide out into the street, the crowds screaming and ducking, the children gleeful, running shoeless in the muddy puddles that collected in the sunken cobbles, the origin of which was best not contemplated. James dodged the great fishhook and scuttled after the doctor, surprised by the older man’s agility and confidence among the hustlers and harlots who thronged the streets. Over coffee that morning, Dr. Stipp had been eager: What you’ll see today, you’ll see nowhere else; disease has an affinity for the broken. After navigating a sinuous, seemingly nonsensical path—James was now hopelessly lost—Dr. Stipp darted down a narrow alley, where from the windows of a tavern drifted a plaintive Irish song. Five Points, for all its faults, was Ireland transplanted, absent the dales and green hills of which the patrons now sang melancholy and gorgeous tribute.

  The groggery before them was tumbledown, and James could not understand why they were now stationary after so much activity. Dr. Stipp opened a door hidden under a slantwise post, and they descended a stairwell to a dark basement, where they arrested momentarily to let their eyes adjust in the gloom. The cellar’s stone walls leaked mud. Small rivers of murky water collected in buckets positioned at strategic points; billowing sheets hung from the ceiling simulated rooms. The effect was of a small sailing ship, marooned underground, doomed. Someone, or some thing—an animal?—was crying. The noise drew James’s gaze, and he peered into the filtered light shed by one rectangular, thick-paned window high in a corner. Under it, a girl of indeterminate age was bending over a cradle tending a mewling child.

  When she saw them, she righted and said, “Mother died a week ago. He’s been crying since she died.”

  Her accent was thick with the sound of Ireland, though the family couldn’t have been new to the Five Points, because no immigrant could afford such a treasure as this falling-down tenement. It could have been a century since her family had come over. It would have made no difference in how she talked. A round of “Danny Boy” sifted through the floorboards from above, as if to magnify her tragedy, though the girl did not cry or even register any great disappointment. Her message delivered, she bent back over the child, as if she assumed that absent their ailing patient, the doctor and his guest would now leave her, but Dr. Stipp crossed the muddy floor, leaned over, and lifted the crying child into his arms. His voice was as kind as James had ever heard it when he said, “I am so sorry, Sarah. I wish you’d let me know.” But when he turned to James, his voice came in telegraphic pedagogy: “The mother was a tubercular. Rusty sputum. Cough like a storm.” He renewed his attentions to the child and the girl, who could not have been more than eighteen, but whose breasts James now assessed as plump enough to confer womanhood, whatever her age.

  “How old is the boy again, Sarah?” Stipp asked.

  “He was born two years ago. February, I think it was? Or maybe January.”

  If this date was truly the child’s birth date, then he was far too small for his age. Listless, he whimpered as Dr. Stipp bent his head to his chest. The boy’s fingers were blunted and blue with cold and his chest thrust in and out in his efforts to breathe. Whether the girl was aware of the child’s danger was difficult to tell, for she had about her the air of someone quietly resigned. After some time had passed—time in which Sarah continued to gaze at Dr. Stipp with a dazed, apprehensive, exhausted look reminiscent of cows that James remembered from home, the doctor lay the child in its bed and touched the girl’s elbow.

  “Sarah, I’m going to speak to your father now.” He left James behind as he climbed the stairs to extract the father from the grog house to tell him he would lose another family member within the week. Sarah’s gaze drifted over to James, then back to the ailing child in its bed. She placed a longing hand on the cradle’s wicker frame and began to rock the bed back and forth. The song from above roused to a stomping jig, one James would later learn was a marital melody designed to incite a groom’s desire, and which came to a dwindling halt as the news was delivered. James could think of nothing to say to the girl, who finally leaned against the moist cellar wall and shut her eyes.

  Dr. Stipp returned and pulled a vial from his bag. “Tincture of opium to give to the boy when he struggles too hard. Give it all,” he said, saying without saying that the opium would kill the child, and that she was to be the merciful executioner.

  She took that vial with slender, beautiful fingers. It was impossible to know if she understood; she displayed neither gratitude nor reluctance, merely the same cowed resignation.

  Once outside, Dr. Stipp took James by the elbow. “Breathe deep to cleanse your lungs when we leave this place. This part of the city will kill you.”

  But James returned to the slum the next week, and the week after that, reluctantly drawn by a place—and a person—mired in helplessness. Ostensibly, he went instead of Stipp, to provide encouragement where there was clearly none to be found. The ruse was not remarked upon by the girl, who accepted James’s lurking sympathy. (Was that what it was, sympathy? Or perhaps instead, voyeurism?) She only marked his presence with a numb and tolerant patience that he interpreted as gratitude. The predicted final week passed, followed by another, and then another. Every time James arrived in the cellar, he expected to find the boy dead and the girl destroyed, but remarkably, the boy still breathed. Looking at the boy’s puckered blue lips, his feeble claim on life, James fell in love. The child’s achievement was somehow heroic, and for one uncomfortable moment cast James’s parents’ failure to breathe after contracting diphtheria as somehow a failure.

  For several hours at a time he cradled the child in his arms while the fatigued Sarah slept on a musty mattress. In those hours, James felt as if his father and mother were dying all over again. It was not grief that kept him returning, not consciously at least, but instead a sense of utility that he had not been able to give his parents; though armed only with two months of medical lectures, any help he offered now was rudimentary at the most. From time to time, he cleared the child’s throat of phlegm. He would lay the child over his knee and gently pound his lungs to loosen the tenacious stuff that soon required another round of clearing. Through all these ministrations, the child, withdrawn and passive, peered at him with eyes the color of a pale Irish sky and did not once protest. Such calm acceptance and perseverance evoked in James an admiration and devotion he had never summoned for anyon
e since his parents’ death, so that when the boy died a month after his mother had succumbed, finally hastened by Sarah, who, having spent night after night walking the dark cellar tormented by the boy’s wheezing resolve, ended it all by dropping the whole of the opium in a draught of whiskey and forcing it down the boy’s throat, James grieved far more than she did.

  James would not ascribe what happened afterwards to pity. Rather, as he held the girl’s hands and vowed before the same gaggle of guests as had attended the boy’s funeral the day before that he would love, honor, and cherish her, he truly thought that he would. He took Sarah to live with him in his room at Dr. Stipp’s, a situation viewed by Stipp as an ironic and unexpected turn of events for his gifted student, and by his wife Genevieve as romantic, but suspect. Immediately it was apparent that the marriage was not a great success. Separated from her father, adrift in a part of the city where no one reminisced about County Cork or hailed one another with a slapping of backs and an invitation to drink, Sarah dwindled like her younger brother, until James was fraught with worry. Fearing illness, he took her on day trips on the Hudson River Railroad to the north end of Manhattan Island for the fresh air. They wandered over the hills and rocks and perched themselves on the bluffs overlooking the Hudson, picnicking on sausages and cold potatoes. She soon rallied, and on those afternoons they tried to find common ground besides the death of her brother. But Sarah was not interested in microscopes or disease; neither had she had any schooling, and her speech turned so thick with brogue that at times James couldn’t even understand her. Free now from her grief, she would ramble on, relating raucous, at times unintelligible stories of life in the slums, the breeze off the river forcing them to huddle close to one another, even as James began to realize that it was lingering love for the dead child and not the living, mercifully murderous sister that had captivated him. And now there loomed the inevitable, irrevocable tie of children. Only two months into their marriage, he resolved to withdraw from lovemaking, or at least, when that proved intolerable, to withdraw early during the act, an insult that the newly bold Sarah could not tolerate.