Someone Like You (19 page)

“Oh, another letter to Boston,” she said, looking at the envelope. “That reminds me! You got something…” She turned around and sorted through a bundle of letters. “Here we are.” She handed him the envelope.

“It’s from your family.” His look must have made her think he thought she had been prying, for she added, “I know it’s from your family because I read the name on the envelope.”

He took the letter and tucked it in his pocket. “Thanks.”

“It’s always a pleasure, Mr. Garrett.”

Reed tipped his hat and bid her good day, then walked out of Buck and Smith.

Across the street, he saw Tate Trahern step out of the Roadrunner Saloon, two cowhands with him. Tate’s mouth tightened into a grimace, then he leaned over and spat in Reed’s direction.

Reed ignored Tate and his gesture. Nonchalantly, he untied his horse and climbed up, then rode out of town as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

“Hello, Daisy.”

Daisy jumped and spun around in midair. “Tate Trahern! You scared the daylights out of me! What on earth are you doing in here?”

“Why, I came to see you.”

“Humph! Tell that to someone who believes it. I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays. What brings you around now?”

“Aw, Daisy, don’t be so hard on me. I’ve been real busy, but even then, I sure did think about you a lot.”

Daisy’s face brightened. “You did?”

“Sure I did, honey.”

“What are you doing in town so early in the afternoon?”

“I wanted to see you. I thought you might want to go to the prayer meeting on Thursday.”

She scowled at him. “You don’t ever go to prayer meeting, Tate Trahern, and you know I know it.”

“A sinner can always repent.”

“I’d sooner believe that pot-bellied stove over yonder would get up and walk.”

“I sure have missed seeing you.”

“Shhhh, don’t talk so loud. Do you want Mr. Smith to hear you?”

“I don’t care who hears me.”

“Well, I do!”

“Then don’t be so standoffish. I told you I rode all the way into town just to see you. Can I help it if I wanted to see my girl?”

Daisy wanted to believe him, but doubted she could. “What do you want, Tate?”

“I want to see that letter Reed Garrett mailed.”

“How do you know he mailed a letter?”

“I saw him come in here, and he didn’t carry anything out.”

Daisy glanced around the store nervously, then whispered, “I can’t let anyone look at the mail. I’ve told you that before. It’s government property.”

“Honey, I don’t want you to give me the letter, just let me see it.”

“Shhhhh! Don’t talk so loud. Do you want me to lose my job?”

“Okay, I’ll be quiet,” he whispered. “Now, give me the letter. I’ll give it right back.”

“You promise?”

“I said I would, didn’t I?”

Daisy didn’t look convinced. Tate sighed, trying not to let his exasperation show. “I promise. Now, let me have a look at that letter.”

She went to the bag that contained the outgoing mail and rummaged through it. “Here it is.” She handed Tate the letter.

He glanced down. The letter was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. R. Alexander Garrett II, in Boston. “Give me something to write on, will you?” Daisy handed him a piece of paper. Tate copied the name and address from the letter. He folded the paper, put it in his pocket, and handed the envelope back to Daisy. “You see? No harm done.”

She glanced around the store. “I sure do pray you’re right, Tate.”

He gave Daisy the kind of seductive look that usually brought her around. “I’m always right, Daisy. Calm down. Nothing is going to happen. Nobody noticed a thing. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Tate, you aren’t going to do anything to get me into trouble, are you?”

“Don’t worry your pretty head about nothing.”

“Tate…”

Tate blew Daisy a kiss and left. He went directly to the office of the
Bluebonnet Weekly.
The editor, Jefferson Holt, looked up.

“You wouldn’t, by any chance, know the name of a newspaper in Boston, would you?” Tate asked.

“Well, there’s the
Boston Herald
…”

“That’ll do,” Tate said. “Much obliged.” Tate left Jefferson staring curiously at him and headed on down the street. He was whistling when he walked into the office of Western Union.

Chapter Seventeen

Susannah watched her aunts on an evening stroll and sighed fondly. No one knew how to be old as well as her aunts.

Her reverie was broken when Reed suddenly appeared on the porch steps. She picked up the bowl of black-eyed peas she was snapping, intending to leave.

He quickly came to her and put his hand on her arm. “Don’t go. I want to talk to you.”

“I’ve got work to do.”

“You are going to have to face this sooner or later. You can’t ignore me indefinitely. I know you’re concerned about my talk with your aunt and that you’re angry.”

She clutched the bowl against her. “I never get angry at Aunt Vi.”

“All right, then you’re angry at me.”

“You had no business prying.”

“I can’t undo what has happened any more than I can change the fact that I know about your past, but I can make things even.”

She cast him a skeptical look. “And how can you do that?”

“Fair is fair. I can tell you about mine.”

“I doubt you have anything as colorful.”

“You might be surprised.”

Susannah stared at him for a minute, trying to decide if he was sincere. There was something about the way he spoke, something about the way he looked that made her think he was. She was not a trusting person. “You have a talent for choosing the right thing to say.”

“Trust not the argument but the word.” And he had such a way with words. With people, too, she feared. “It all sounds good.”

“The power of sound—greater than the power of sense.”

“In spite of your eloquence and obvious education, what it all boils down to is this: I don’t trust you any more than I trust myself,” Susannah said.

“Trust and be deceived, is that it?”

“Something like that.”

“‘To long for that which comes not. To lie abed and sleep not. To serve well and please not. To have a horse that goes not. To have a man who obeys not. To lie in jail and hope not. To be sick and recover not. To lose one’s way and know not. To wait at the door and enter not, and to have a friend we trust not are ten such spites as hell hath not.’”

He must have been amused at the expression on her face, for he laughed and said, “Alas, those are not my words, but the words of the English author and translator John Florio.”

Alas?
What kind of man talked like that? she wondered. She found herself envious of Reed, of the knowledge he possessed.
The English author and translator…
She couldn’t name an English author if someone held a gun to her head. She tried to sound nonchalant when she said, “I never heard of him.”

He laughed again. “No reason why you should. He died in the early sixteen hundreds.”

“Apparently you heard of him.”

“Only because my father was a scholar. My mother swore my first words were ‘To be or not to be.’”

She gave him a blank look. The words had no meaning to her, and she found herself growing resentful of the education, the opportunity he obviously had. He was unlike anyone she had ever met. He knew so much. She was suddenly overwhelmed by the prospect of discovering more about him, of understanding who he was and where he came from. She could learn from him if she would just let herself. Part of her wanted to trust him. Another part warned her away.

“‘Life is short,’” Reed suddenly said, “‘the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.’”

“Another quote from a man who died two hundred years ago?”

“No. It’s from Hippocrates. He died about four hundred years before Christ was born. He was a Greek physician. What I quoted was the first of his
Aphorisms
on the art of healing.”

“Who are you? How do you know those things?”

“Do I have your word that what I say does not go any further—not to your aunts, not in your journal, not anywhere?”

She nodded.

He sighed and sat back. “I come from an old and prominent Boston family. My father is wealthy and educated, an architect by trade, a scholar by choice. My mother’s maiden name was Adams. She is descended from President John Quincy Adams. I am their only living son. My younger brother died when he was six. I think that is when I became interested in medicine. My parents both supported my choice, and I was sent to the best schools. I studied medicine in Edinburgh and Vienna.”

Susannah was astounded. “You’re a doctor?”

“I received my M.D. from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In Vienna I received a diploma for proficiency in obstetrics operations and gynecology.”

Susannah listened raptly. His life sounded like something out of a fairy tale—Prince Charming, perhaps, for he must have led a charmed life.

“Shortly after I returned home and set up my medical practice, I married the catch of the season, Philippa Copley, the daughter of Adam Copley. He was president of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement and founder of Copley Hospital.”

He paused and looked at Susannah. His hand came up to stroke her cheek, and she found herself leaning into his palm. “You are looking at me with such wide-eyed wonder. I know all of this talk about Boston society and Copley Hospital doesn’t mean much to you.”

“No, it doesn’t, but it helps me understand the importance of the man whose daughter you married.” She paused, then plunged ahead. “What happened to your wife?”

“About a year after our marriage, when Philippa was about to give birth to our child, she asked me to deliver it. Her father thought the privilege belonged to him. For a while she was torn. Philippa was her father’s favorite child, his only daughter, and she adored him.”

“But you were the child’s father. It is scriptural that when a man and woman marry, they shall leave their families and cleave one to the other.”

“‘Devout’ is not a word I would use to describe Adam Copley.”

“Did you deliver the baby?”

“Yes, at least in the beginning. I told you that I had gone to school in Vienna. I studied in the childbirth wards of the Allgemeines Krankenhaus. It was there that I first heard of a Hungarian doctor who believed that childbed fever was contagious. His name was Ignaz Semmelweis, and he believed a great many of the deaths from childbed fever were caused by the doctors who assisted the births.”

Susannah was certain she misunderstood. “You said they were
caused by
the doctors?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The medical profession is young, Susannah. Primitive. There is so much we don’t know. There are too many men practicing medicine who left their apprenticeship or graduated from medical school without ever observing or delivering a baby. Many of them have never used a microscope. There are still places where doctors apply hot poultices of cow manure to cuts. Many doctors were trained only to lance abscesses, administer age-old remedies, set fractures, or sew up cuts. Semmelweis was different. He was well trained. He observed. One of the things he noticed was there was a much higher rate of deaths from childbed fever in the wards where medical students trained than there was in the wards where midwives assisted. When he began investigating, he discovered the doctors and medical students often came into the childbearing wards straight from autopsy rooms, something the midwives did not do. He also noticed the women who had childbed fever were often in a row of beds where they were examined one after the other.”

“And that’s how he knew it was the doctors?”

“His proof came when his colleague, a doctor, died from an infection from a scalpel wound.”

“I don’t understand.”

“His colleague received the scalpel wound while doing an autopsy on a woman who died of childbed fever.”

“What did that prove?”

“It proved there was a link. You see, when Semmelweis viewed the autopsy of his colleague, his friend’s organs showed the same changes, as seen in the women who died from the fever.”

“So what did he do?”

“Everyone under him had to scrub his hands with soap, then soak them in chlorinated lime solution before and after going into the wards. Over the next few months the deaths, which had been as high as twenty percent, dropped to one and two-tenths percent.”

“That’s wonderful.”

Reed frowned. “You would expect the hospital staff to hail his discovery and follow his lead. Instead, Semmelweis was condemned and found his rank lowered, his practice limited. When he reported his results to the Medical Society of Vienna, he was ridiculed and jeered, the victim of virulent attacks.”

“Oh, how awful. The poor man. What happened?”

“Although some supported him, he was too deeply hurt to continue his practice in Vienna. He returned to Hungary and practiced in Pest, in the wards of Saint Rochus Hospital, where he reduced the death rate of women in childbirth. Ten years later, in 1861, he wrote a book about his beliefs.”

“Did they believe him then?”

“No. Hardly anyone took notice. And the ones who did, like the renowned scientist Virchow, opposed and ridiculed his ideas.”

“What happened?”

“They broke him. A brilliant, intense, and sensitive doctor was broken by the callous indifference of his superiors and colleagues. He was committed to an asylum and died in 1865 of a blood infection—virtually the same illness that had killed the mothers he tried to save.”

“Poor man. To die in such disgrace.” She suddenly thought of something. “You know, it’s strange, but I don’t remember hearing anything about this. I’ve helped with a few birthings. I was never told to wash my hands or to rinse them in—what was the name of the…of the…”

He smiled at her. “Chlorinated lime.”

“Yes, that was it. I’ve never heard of it.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. Even today few have heard of it, or they have heard and refused to believe. Even when prominent, educated men have joined in support—men like Oliver Wendell Holmes, who read his essay ‘
The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever
’ before the Society for Medical Improvement, and that was in 1843.”

“Society for Medical Improvement? Isn’t that the—”

“One Philippa’s father was president of?”

She nodded.

“Yes, it’s the same.”

She frowned. “How does all of this fit together?”

“You have to understand that although I was convinced of what Semmelweis discovered, I didn’t jump to conclusions. An English surgeon by the name of Joseph Lister and a Frenchman by the name of Louis Pasteur made further discoveries to support Semmelweis’ theories. Pasteur sterilized with heat; Lister with carbolic acid. In 1867, Lister published the results of his findings. Like Semmelweis, he was greeted with indifference or open hostility. When he came to America, it was the same thing. Even the most prominent physicians, like the leader of American surgery, Samuel Gross, criticized Lister and failed to see the connection between sterilization and infection. Even now, it isn’t accepted very widely here.”

“But you believed.”

His voice turned cynical. “Oh yes, I believed…for all the good it did me.”

“You wanted to follow these ideas when your wife gave birth, but your father-in-law did not. Is that right?”

“Yes. I think Adam’s complete disregard went back to a long-standing feud he had with Oliver Wendell Holmes. Since Holmes supported the idea, it was Adam’s natural bent to oppose it. Of course, I don’t think he accepted the idea, even on its own merit.”

“So your wife did not benefit from what you had learned. She died, didn’t she? She died with the fever?”

“Philippa died, and our son with her.”

Her heart went out to him. “Oh, Reed…I’m so sorry. So very sorry. What a terrible loss.” She was quiet for a few moments. She understood his pain, of course. She could even grasp why he might not want to live in Boston. But there was one thing she could not comprehend. “Why would that make you turn away from medicine? I would think you would have been even more determined to prove Semmelweis was right.”

“That isn’t the end of the story.”

“There’s more?”

“Yes. In the beginning hours of Philippa’s travail, I followed the procedure I learned in Vienna. I scrubbed my hands and soaked them in chlorinated lime solution. I used carbolic acid to scrub down anything that would touch her or our baby when it came. Philippa’s father saw me and was furious. He said it was an extremely controversial procedure, that he would not subject his daughter to such speculative medical procedure.”

“That must have been difficult for you.”

“Extremely so. Adam said it was because I was educated in Europe and studied medicine with heretics.”

“What did you do?”

“I am sorry to say that I did not use my head. I played into his hands and endangered the very person I wanted to save. I accused Adam of being narrow-minded and too stupid to see what was clearly before his eyes.”

“Your poor wife. Was she listening to all of this?”

“She was in labor. It was her first child. She was hurting and terrified. We did nothing to alleviate her fears by our arguing. In the end it came down to her having to choose between her father and her husband.”