The Anatomy of Deception (10 page)

Charlie kept a spare key in one of the flowerpots that had been incongruously placed on either side of the door in a miserable attempt to provide a dose of cheer. When I was completely sure that no one else was about, I quickly retrieved the key and slipped inside.

When the door was shut, I was alone in the dark, in the silence, alone with the dead. Science deserted me and I felt as if I had ventured without leave into forbidden terrain, perhaps even to purgatory itself. At any moment, I feared cold fingers on my cheek or a grasp at my ankle. I tried to be furious with myself for fearing the dark like a child, but my palms remained moist and my breath shallow and labored. Forcing myself inside, I felt my way to the drawers where the matches were kept. With some difficulty, I located the box and, although even through the thick curtain the illumination might be visible to a passerby, lit one quickly all the same.

As soon as the match was struck, I felt an enormous wave of relief. In the light, even from one match, the Dead House was again simply a set of rooms in which I sometimes worked. I removed the smallest candle from the shelf and placed the match to the wick. When the flame had taken, I shielded the light with my hand and moved quickly to the morgue. I intended to discover why Turk and the Professor had reacted so strangely yesterday to the corpse of the young woman.

The morgue was windowless so, as soon as I shut the door, I could move about with impunity. I walked to the receptacle that held the young girl and swung open the lid.

It was empty. I checked the other four chests that held yesterday’s subjects. Two were empty as well. Two held cadavers that had obviously been brought in since.

I was puzzled. Generally, three or four days at least were required to make arrangements with the city authorities for
public burial, and Charlie had assured the Professor that each of the cadavers had arrived just the day before. Why had these cadavers been removed so rapidly? Charlie could have been mistaken, of course. Still, he had never made such an error in the past.

I remembered that Dr. Osler had remained behind when the rest of us had left the autopsy session to return to the hospital. Could the Professor have been responsible for the disappearance of the bodies? Unlikely, I decided. He was hardly intimate enough with Charlie to join with him in a conspiracy. The mystery of the young girl in the ice chest, it seemed, would remain, at least for the moment, just that.

Disappointed that I had risked this nocturnal visit for naught, I blew out the candle, replaced the matches, and was on my way, my departure not nearly so eerie as my arrival. I crossed back to University Hospital to discharge my second errand.

As I reached the third floor, I hoped that this visit would be for naught as well, that Annie, the sad girl with the pulmonary infection, would be asleep, since rest came so sporadically to her because of the inability to take in sufficient oxygen. But if she was not, I intended to sit with her at her bedside.

As I got to the door of the children’s ward, I heard the sound of low conversation inside, odd at such an hour. I pushed open the door only a crack and peeked in. There was the Professor, sitting at Annie’s bedside, reading to her.

S
OMETIMES IN LIFE, SHE REALIZED
,
no choice is a good one. Still, it was surely better to take action, to make your own decision, than to have your life ruled by others. Now that she had elected a course of action, as distasteful and fraught with danger as it was, she felt stronger
.

She had astonished herself just to get this far. Who would have imagined that she, who never so much as purchased her own eggs and bacon for breakfast, had planned and executed an elaborate conspiracy, and then arranged through an intermediary to meet a complete stranger in a waterfront saloon? Her heart had been in her throat since she slipped into the carriage that she had hired surreptitiously earlier in the day. What if she was observed? No matter, though. This had to be done
.

Within seconds of meeting him, she knew he could not be
trusted but, again, she had no alternative. She had planned to offer only half the agreed amount until the job was finished, but he had insisted on the entire sum in advance. She prayed it was sufficient to ensure, if not his loyalty, at least his competence. And his silence
.

B
OTH THE
P
ROFESSOR AND
I left the hospital at four the following day in order to prepare for our dinner engagement at the Benedict home. On rounds, Simpson and I, in unspoken agreement, had conducted ourselves as before, neither of us acknowledging that we had met away from the hospital. We had, however, passed a look between us when Turk for a second day failed to appear for rounds.

At six-thirty, Dr. Osler’s carriage came for me at Mrs. Mooney’s. The Professor’s consulting practice, which he ran out of a small office on South Fifteenth Street, had begun to thrive, and with the supplement to his university salary, he had been able to acquire clothing suitable for a man whose future greatness was an accepted fact to all in his field. Fees from private patients, mostly hospital cases who needed care after discharge, had allowed me to acquire at least the rudiments of proper dress, although I had yet to replace my cutaway frock coat with the new, tailless “tuxedo,” and my low formal boots were stiff as iron.

The hesitancy I felt about that evening’s dinner was not limited to fears of sartorial inadequacy. I would be attending as the Professor’s assistant, my first assignment in that role, and I did not want to bring even the slightest obloquy upon him as a result of my woeful lack of experience in better society. How would I fare at the home of Hiram Benedict, who, in addition to heading the board of trustees of the university, was chairman of the Pennsylvania Merchant Bank? My only
knowledge of the manners of the rich had come from books—
The Rise of Silas Lapham
by William Dean Howells, or
The Europeans
by Henry James, Jr….

The Professor’s hansom was a proper affair, crisply lacquered and pulled by an elegant black horse. He looked me up and down as I climbed on board. “Very well turned out,” he said.

I was grateful to the Professor for the sentiment, but I nonetheless continued to feel as though those serving the soup were certain to be more fashionably attired than I. When I noted that I did not feel as if I belonged at a gathering of such eminence, he laughed.

“Eyewash,” he declared. “They are just people, Carroll. You will do wonderfully. Best get used to the rich—this is hardly the last time that you will attend an affair of this sort. Hospitals don’t build themselves, eh? In modern medicine, the ability to chat amiably over dinner is almost as important as recognizing scarlet fever.”

I was relieved to hear that among the guests would be Weir Mitchell and Hayes Agnew, the Professor’s closest friends in Philadelphia. I had met each man previously; perhaps their presence might lend at least a semblance of familiarity to the occasion.

Mitchell, in addition to being one of the world’s leading authorities on nervous diseases, was also a noted novelist and had recently taken to writing poetry, but his manner with patients could be eccentric in the extreme. Once he had been asked to see a woman whose condition was sufficient to convince her attending physician that she was dying. After a cursory examination, Mitchell dismissed everyone from her room, and then walked out himself a few minutes later. Asked whether the patient would live, he replied, “Oh yes, she will be coming out in a moment. I have set her sheets on fire.” When the terrified but obviously robust woman burst out of her room and ran down the hall, Mitchell nodded and said, “There! A clear-cut case of hysteria.”

Agnew, the man who had tried unsuccessfully to oust Burleigh, was an eminent surgeon and esteemed professor of anatomy at the university. Eight years earlier, he had attended James Garfield in a doomed attempt to save the President’s life after the latter had been shot. Just turned seventy, Agnew had recently announced his retirement.

“And then, of course, there will be the women,” the Professor added, mischief playing at the corners of his eyes. “The presence of a couple of bachelors like us will require the balance of two attractive and charming ladies.”

“I’m always happy to share a table with attractive and charming ladies,” I replied without enthusiasm. On Rittenhouse Square, among the millionaires, chatting amiably at dinner might prove daunting. I was certain to be paired with someone who knew less about rural Ohio than I knew about Patagonia.

“As am I,” Dr. Osler agreed, unable to mask his eagerness. “When I arrived in Philadelphia after accepting my chair, everyone seemed quite astonished when I stepped off the train alone. They had somehow gotten the notion that I was a married man. Agnew later told me that he had come to the station more to meet Mrs. Osler than me, because he had been told that she was a Buddhist. I have never quite deduced how that rumor got started. My colleagues quickly overcame their disappointment, however, and replaced it with what seems to be a competition to see which one of them will succeed in introducing me to my future wife. Tonight, Mitchell tells me that my dinner companion is to be young Gross’ widow, Grace.”

Dr. Samuel W. Gross had recently died of sepsis at age fifty-two. Although a noted physician and surgeon in his own right, he had toiled in the shadow of his father, Samuel D. Gross, who himself had died at age seventy-nine only five years before. The elder Gross had been the dominant figure in American surgery and medical education for four decades.

“Mrs. Gross is a direct descendant of Paul Revere, you
know,” the Professor observed, “although that is not as significant in the wilds of Ontario as here.”

“Perhaps you should carry a single lantern, since you come by land,” I offered. “Do you know who has been invited as my companion?”

“I believe you will be seated next to Abigail Benedict, the old boy’s daughter. Do you know of her?”

I admitted I did not.

“Well, Carroll,” he said, reveling in my ignorance, “it might have been best to wear armor.”

All too soon, we pulled up to the Benedict home, a wide-fronted, granite Greek revival with a small second-floor balcony over the entrance on Walnut Street, facing south on Rittenhouse Square. The carriage came to a halt and we were met by a liveried Negro coachman who helped us down and ushered us into the house.

I had on occasion strolled across Rittenhouse Square and seen the mansions, a line of monuments to rewards of class, but had never before been inside one of them. However exalted my expectations for what I would find, they nonetheless proved inadequate. The second I stepped across the threshold, I was overpowered by opulence. The foyer was a huge oval, two stories high, with a promenade ringing the second floor, and topped by a stained-glass skylight, a celestial incarnation of the layout in the Dead House. The entire building appeared to be illuminated by electric lighting. Directly opposite the front door, a staircase of gleaming white marble snaked up to the second floor, lined with oil portraits of gloomy colonials or musty dowagers. Thick, ornately patterned Oriental rugs lay on either side of the mouth of the staircase. As I perused art and furnishings worthy of a museum, the four thousand dollars I was to receive at Johns Hopkins did not seem at all like a great deal of money.

Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Benedict waited to greet us. Benedict was in his late fifties and immense, well over six feet, with a large gray mustache and an even larger stomach. He wore
what seemed to be an embedded glower, and there were tufts of white hair growing from each ear, giving him the mien of an angry Etruscan god. Mrs. Benedict was portly as well, white-haired, and handsome, wearing a gown of green lace, buff lace gloves, and a diamond tiara. Four long strands of fat pearls draped over her more than ample bosom.

“Thank you for coming, Dr. Osler,” said Benedict, stepping forward. “We are honored that you have joined us this evening.” He turned to me. His eyes were sapphire and, although a bit rheumy, his gaze was nonetheless penetrating. “And this must be your young protégé. It is good to meet you, Dr. Carroll.” Benedict’s voice was deep and seemed to roll out from within him. He spoke with the casual ease of a man comfortable in his supremacy. “May I present my daughter, Abigail.”

I had not seen Abigail Benedict as we entered but, from the moment she appeared at her father’s side, I knew she was remarkable. She was not pretty in the way that women were typically thought to be pretty—her nose was a trifle long and her lips a bit full—but I was transfixed all the same. She wore a high-necked gown of black velvet and no jewelry whatever. She was tall, like her parents, auburn-haired and lean, with her father’s extraordinary blue eyes.

I knew those eyes. I had seen them at Barker’s restaurant two days before. A fleeting smile played across Miss Benedict’s face and I knew that she remembered as well.

“Dr. Carroll,” she said, stepping forward and extending her hand assertively, as would a man. She was not wearing gloves, revealing long and graceful fingers. “I have been looking forward to meeting you. I expect you to regale me over dinner with exotic tales of modern medicine.”