Fingal O'Reilly, Irish Doctor (22 page)

“I’ll take over from ye then. I’ll be upstairs. Give me a call when ye go.” The door was closed. Fingal got off the stool and as he crossed the floor thought how very decent it was of Phelim to agree to work from noon until tomorrow morning so Charlie and Fingal could play rugby together.

“Sorry about that,” he said as he stopped at the couch and gave Dympna Dempsey a smile. “Let’s start at the beginning about young Jack here? I don’t suppose you’re any relation to—”

“We are, sir. Jack Dempsey the boxer is me oul’ one Casey’s dad’s second cousin.” Dympna was a strong-featured woman who had obviously washed and brushed her long glossy chestnut hair before putting it up in a bun. She was wearing what was probably her best blouse and long skirt for the visit. She smiled. “We never seen him, mind you. The family moved to America. But do you remember him, sir? They called him the ‘Manassa Mauler.’ He was world heavyweight champion from 1919 ’til 1926.”

“You’re related to Jack Dempsey? He was my hero when I started to box. Took the title from Jess Willard in 1919. Lost it to Gene Tunney.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, sir, is that why your nose is a bit out of kilter?”

“Guilty as charged.” O’Reilly guffawed and his laughter made baby Jack start mewling. She picked him up and rocked him, crooning, “Wheest, wheest, wee one.”

“Sorry, Jack,” said O’Reilly. “And what seems to be the trouble with young Jack?”

“Well, sir, he’s been getting awful gurny lately.”

As if to confirm her statement, baby Jack’s little noises moved up in volume to hoarse crying interrupted by sniffs and an occasional yell.

“Probably just teething,” Fingal said, hoping he was going to be able to reassure the young mother.

She frowned. “He’s nine months and my granny says he should have his front ones by now.” She held him to Fingal. Jack screeched and as Fingal peered into the open mouth, Dympna said, “See? Toothless as a feckin’ oyster.”

Fingal frowned. By nine months the lower central incisors and the upper central and upper lateral incisors and even the lower lateral incisors should have, in correct medical terminology, erupted.

“And I could wash his nappies in the sweat coming off his poor wee head.”

That wasn’t simple teething. Jack’s mother had lost a tooth, often a sign of poor diet. “Where do you live?”

“Back Lane off High Street,” she said.

Probably subsisted on the usual appalling diet, and hardly ever saw the sun. A diagnostic idea was beginning to germinate, and her address had made him wonder about something else. As Fingal began to examine the baby’s head, he said, “Do you by any chance know a fellah called John-Joe Finnegan?”

“The cooper? Got hit by a tram? Him and my Casey both have plots at Dolphin’s Barn for growing spuds and a few veggies…”

At least, Fingal thought, they’d be getting iron from the greens.

“Casey looked after John-Joe’s plot while he was in Sir Patrick Dun’s.”

“I saw him in hospital about a month ago. John-Joe told me someone was taking care of his allotment. That was your husband? Small world,” Fingal said as his fingers noted how hot and sweaty the baby’s scalp was. He gently pressed against the parietal bones situated in front of and above the ear. Fingal felt them sink and when he suddenly let go, he noticed how they snapped back into place as a ping-pong ball might if he’d handled it in the same way. That was called craniotabes and happened because the bones were unduly soft. If he was right about the diagnosis he was refining, craniotabes usually appeared in the eighth or ninth month of life of those afflicted. One or two more signs and he’d be sure. “Could you take off his vest, Dympna?”

She did, to the accompaniment of much crying.

“When did he start to sit up?”

“Couple of months ago.” She frowned. “But he doesn’t crawl about much.”

Babies should sit at six months, be crawling by nine, but if their back became sore from sitting, they’d find the most comfortable position and not budge. Another clue. Fingal inspected the ribs, easily visible under the pale skin of the skinny chest. Everyone from the tenements was pallid from lack of sunshine. It wasn’t diagnostic, but the paleness was another hint. A series of rounded bumps ran in an arc from below each nipple to near the tip of the tenth rib halfway to the child’s back. He was looking at a rachitic rosary, knobs caused by a fault in the way new bone was laid down. He’d first seen a picture of it in a most useful little textbook,
Hutchinson’s Clinical Methods,
originally published in 1897. Treatments might have changed since then and more diseases could be recognised, but the signs and symptoms of many, and how to elicit and recognise them, were still useful today. “Get him dressed, Dympna, and come and sit down while I give you a note and a scrip’. I’ll tell you what’s wrong in a sec. And don’t worry.” He crossed the floor, climbed up onto the high stool, and started writing. With a bit of luck, Mister Corcoran, the apothecary, who usually worked until noon every Saturday, would still be in his room.

Dympna, with an unhappy Jack wrapped in the fold of her shawl, sat and looked at Fingal expectantly.

“I’m glad you brought him in when you did, Dympna—”

“Is it bad?” Her eyes were wide, her voice high-pitched. She snuggled Jack to her.

“Not yet.”

“It’s not—it’s not…” She glanced around and lowered her voice to a bare whisper. “It’s not consumption?”

“Certainly not.”

“Thank the Lord Jasus.” She crossed herself.

Tuberculosis was rampant and so feared in the tenements that even its name was only uttered in a whisper, and women would swear blind that their husbands were in “The Joy,” the Mountjoy Gaol, rather than admit he was in the Pigeon House sanitarium at Ringsend, staffed by nuns and often the last stop for what were described as “terminal sufferers.”

“He’s got rickets, and you’ve caught it early before it gets any worse.”

“Rickets? It gives people melodeon legs and funny-shaped heads, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Fingal said, knowing that when fully opened, the bottom of the bellows of a button accordion, a melodeon, was markedly curved, making it an apt description of bowed legs. “And sometimes they get what we call kyphoscoliosis, but that’s a fancy name for a hunched back.”

“Like your man Quasimodo in that there film about the one in Notre Dame in Paris? I seen it at the Carlton Cinema on O’Connell Street, but it’s gettin’ knocked down and a new one built.” She looked down at a now-sleeping Jack and dropped a light kiss on his forehead. “What can I do, Doctor?” She smiled. “Mrs. Costello, she lives across our street, boils the backbones of skate fish and uses the water to rub on her kiddies’ legs to keep them straight.”

“I think we can do better than that,” Fingal said, knowing that that home cure was utterly useless, but recognising that it didn’t help to criticise. “Rickets,” he said, “is caused because the bones need calcium. We get most of that from dairy products.”

“Milk and cheese?” Her lip curled. “About as plentiful as feathers on a feckin’ frog where I live.”

“I know,” O’Reilly said, “and we need vitamin D to help us absorb the calcium. The sun helps us make the stuff in our bodies.”

“Sun? In the Coombe? The houses is so close together you’d get more feckin’ light down a coal mine.”

He sighed. “I know that too. And I’m sure you’ll not be eating salmon and trout much either, nor egg yolks, and they all have lots of calcium too.”

“Salmon’s for the toffs who can afford to catch dem or spend a week’s wages for the likes of me at the fishmongers.”

He thought guiltily of the poached salmon sandwiches he’d left uneaten the day Doctor Davidson had operated on the now fully recovered Jane Carson.

“We do eat fish on feckin’ Fridays, the church says we have til, but it’s mostly herrin’s or salt cod.”

Neither provided the necessary nutrient. “Ah, but,” he said, “there’s more ways of killing a cat than drowning it in cream.” He handed her a prescription, a form, and a letter. “That’s for cod liver oil. It’s stuffed with vitamin D and has vitamin A too. All you need to do is give wee Jack three teaspoonfuls every day. And I’ve put some calcium tablets there too, and if you could manage to buy some condensed milk? Not all Jack’s bony changes that have already begun will go away, but it will prevent any more happening.”

“Wonderful, sir. And we could stretch to a few cans of Carnation every month.” She smiled. “Do you know the poem about Carnation, Doctor?”

“No.”

“Carnation Milk is the best in the land,” she started in a singsong voice,

Here I sit with a can in my hand

No tits to pull,

No hay to pitch,

You just punch a hole in the son of a bitch.

O’Reilly’s guffaws started young Jack mewling again.

“My daddy learned that from an American doughboy in France in 1918.”

“I think from what I read,” Fingal said, “we’re soon going to be learning more than just funny ditties from the Americans. They’re a very resourceful lot.” He returned to the immediate task. “Now let’s get you seen to. Give the scrip’ to Mister Corcoran if he’s still here, or come back on Monday if you’ve missed him. Another couple of days won’t make any difference. This here’s,” he handed her the form, “so Jack can have an X-ray at Sir Patrick Dun’s, just to be sure I’m right.” And to establish a baseline so if Jack’s condition deteriorates, I can assess by how much, Fingal reasoned. “They’ll send me the results. And this,” he gave her the letter, “is so he can have weekly sun-lamp treatments for a month in the Light Department at Temple Street Hospital. It’ll build up the vitamin D in his body too.”

“T’anks very much, sir,” she said. “And I know you’re in a rush so we’ll be going.”

He slipped off the stool, bent, and picked up his hold-all full of his rugby gear. “Don’t hesitate to bring Jack back if you’re worried. Otherwise, take him to see one of the midwives in a couple of weeks.”

“I will, Doctor.”

He held the door for her and Jack and pointed to the apothecary’s hatch, which was still open. “You get the cod liver oil and calcium into him and in another twenty years maybe he’ll be as good a fighter as the other Dempsey. If I’m passing Back Lane in the next few weeks I’ll pop in. See how he’s doing.”

That brought a smile. “T’anks again. Do you know, John-Joe was right? You are a good skin, Big Fellah.”

Fingal nodded, accepted the compliment, yelled up the stairs, “I’m off, Phelim,” and headed for his bike. As he crossed the yard, he recognised how in a very short time he’d stopped railing about the God-awful conditions in the tenements that brought on diseases like Jack’s rickets, a completely preventable disease. He thought he’d come to terms with his own role; fighting a rearguard action, patient by individual patient, and letting the city fathers get on with the necessary slum clearance. And he wasn’t going to worry about it today.

Today was the first chance he and Charlie had to show what they were made of in a friendly rugby match between two carefully selected Wanderers’ teams. It would test fresh club members against old stalwarts to see if the new boys should play for the second fifteen, the not-quite-excellent-yet squad, or at the highest level, the first fifteen. There was no doubt that Charlie, who was already an international player, would be picked, but Fingal would have to prove himself. When he’d asked Phelim if they could swap weekends, the little doctor had refused. But before he could be reminded of his promise, he’d said, “We don’t need to swap. I have a dispensary committee meeting Saturday morning, but I’ll take over at noon for ye. Play a good game and see yer lady friend in the evening and ye do Sunday on call from nine.” He’d brushed aside Fingal’s thanks with a curt snatching off of his wire-rimmed glasses and a snapped, “Och, wouldn’t ye do the same for me if I asked ye? Wouldn’t ye? Course.” A decent man, Doctor Phelim Corrigan.

Fingal pulled his secondhand Raleigh from the bike rack, slung his leg over, and pedalled away. It wasn’t far, a little over two miles, to the grounds on Lansdowne Road. He joined the ranks of other cyclists, motorcars, and drays, taking pains to avoid the tram tracks. The sun, weaker now in September than it had been on some of August’s sweltering days, warmed him, and inside Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly felt a warm glow too. He’d just finished another week of doing a job he loved and now he was off to pursue his other loves. Rugby with Charlie, popping home to see Ma, and an evening with the delightful Kitty O’Hallorhan. For no very good reason, he started pedalling faster and gave a great “whoop” that so startled a nearby cyclist that the man had to stop and put one foot on the ground. Fingal ignored the man’s yell of “Watch where you’re going, yeh feckin’ big bollicks” and tinkled the bike’s bell long and loud to clear other riders from his path.

21

In a Slither of Dyed Stuff

“Excuse me, sir. A wee word please?” The voice was low and vaguely familiar.

O’Reilly turned to a small, grey-bearded man with a Homburg pulled low over his grey hair and green eyes. “Yes?” To secure a good spectator’s spot here at the finish line O’Reilly had left Kitty in the car park with Lars, chatting to a local Portaferry friend. Already, racegoers were jostling for positions because the first race would be starting soon. O’Reilly frowned. “Do I know you?”

The stranger grinned and exposed a set of buckteeth.

O’Reilly started. “Thundering Jasus, Donal?”

“Aye, but keep your voice down, sir. I want for til see the fun, but I don’t want anybody til recognise me. Me and Bluebird’s here indognito, like.”

O’Reilly grinned. Was Donal making a clever play on words or was this yet another example of what Fingal, in deference to Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop, was beginning to think of as Donalapropisms. “Where did you get the—”

“This get-up? Aggie Arbuthnot. You know she’s in the Ballybucklebo Strolling Players?”

“I saw her in
Philadelphia Here I Come
last month. They were very good.” O’Reilly remembered how Aggie’s usually auburn hair had been done up in a grey bun for her part as the middle-aged Madge.