The Heart Specialist (10 page)

“Your hair will frizz,” said Laure.

“It will frizz whether I take a trap or a tram,” I replied. “There’s no saving me either way.”

Huntley laughed and, to my surprise, I found myself laughing too. I could imagine for the first time a life that might include him if he and Laure married. I had been worrying about this possibility ever since he started courting her.

“Speaking of trams,” said Huntley, “did you hear they are going electric?”

“Electric?” said Grandmother. “Whatever will they dream up next?”

“I’m writing a piece on it,” said Huntley shamelessly. “I’ve been talking with the engineers down at the Montreal Street Railway. Right now they have a thousand horses. In five years not one will be left.”

“But what will pull the trams?” Grandmother asked.

“Wires,” said Huntley. “In the air above the tracks, conducting electrical currents.”

Laure was looking at him doe-eyed, as if he had invented the plan himself.

“I don’t believe it,” said Grandmother.

“You said the same thing about privy pits,” I broke in, realizing only once the sentence was out of my mouth that perhaps it wasn’t the ideal subject to discuss in mixed company.

Grandmother glared at me.

“Well it’s true,” I said defensively. “You didn’t believe in toilets that flushed for the longest time. Now almost everyone has one.”

Laure made frantic little movements with her fingers to shush me while Huntley smirked at his boots. “Well,” he said finally, pulling out his watch. “
Tempus fugit
. We must be off.”

Grandmother and Laure collected their coats and umbrellas, bade me good luck and good bye, and allowed Huntley to herd them out the door. I took a minute to sit and appreciate the silence in the flat. It was rare for me to have the place entirely to myself, and I found myself thinking of my parents and trying to feel their blessing on this important day, but the rain distracted me, hammering rhythmically at the window. I could not hold them in my mind.

The rain was coming down in sheets by the time I made it outside. I could barely see the contours of the Catholic seminary across the way. I was beginning to regret refusing my future brother-inlaw’s offer of a lift. By the time I reached campus I would be as wet as a drowned rat. All the work of my sister and grandmother would be undone.

A strong wind blew from the north. I held my umbrella tight, pulling it close and turning it so the wind would push me along the sidewalk to the tram stop. Beside me the gutter threatened to overflow. My shoes were already several shades darker and making squishy sounds. The hem of my skirt slapped my shins.

If this were a scene in a novel, I thought, the storm would be significant. In books by the Brontë sisters, for instance, storms were always a bad omen. Thunder clapped above me and I laughed out loud. It was as if a mocking god were listening to my thoughts. I threw back my shoulders. The dean of medicine himself had given me a figure, which I had met thanks to the generosity of Lord Strathcona and a good many other prominent Montrealers. The weather today was irrelevant, except insofar as it was ruining my shoes.

I stood at the tram stop getting wetter and wetter until at last I heard the sound of hooves clattering in the distance. The lower third of my skirt was soaked through. My fingers, still clutching the hook of my umbrella, were waterlogged inside my gloves. My chignon was still in place, but straggles of hair were plastered to my cheeks and forehead. I was certainly no dandy, no matter what the men sang.

The tram stopped in front of me and I climbed aboard. There was only one other passenger, sitting far back in the car, but I didn’t catch more than a glimpse of him before my glasses fogged up. He was likely from the suburb of Westmount. Older, more established families generally lived downtown in the Square Mile, but this was changing as Montreal grew more crowded and costly. Our flat was just outside the Square Mile, whose western border was Côte des Neiges Road. The rents were cheaper here, but we could still boast a downtown address.

I turned to look at my travelling companion. He was quite a dandy, in a light grey suit with wide lapels and a handkerchief poking out of his front pocket. His boots had spats. His face was partly hidden by a hat, but I could see that his skin was dark. And he had a moustache.

I was now staring quite openly. He was reading what appeared to be a textbook, which he had propped against the seat in front of him so he would not have to bend his neck. Suddenly he snapped the book shut and raised his eyes as if he had felt me watching. I blushed hard and turned to the front.

It was folly. I had done this too many times before to let myself believe it was really him. Part of me realized he could not be my father. The age was wrong. Honoré Bourret would be fifty-one this year and the man behind me was obviously much younger.

At Mountain Street there were problems with the tracks and we had to stop. I pretended to watch the driver, who went outside to poke around in the rain, but really I was trying to control my sadness. There was too much at stake that day for me to engage in flights of nostalgia. I was deep in thought, trying to cheer myself up when I realized someone was standing over me.

The man from the back of the tram was so close I could touch him. “I have just realized who you are,” he said when I looked up.

I couldn’t find my voice to answer.

“You’re Agnes White, are you not?”

I stared. He was not my father, that much was certain, but so many of the details matched it was unsettling. He was stylish, as my father had been. He had swarthy skin and a moustache.

“You think me impertinent,” the man said, laughing. “My apologies, Miss White. But you’re a celebrity now. You will have to get used to strangers accosting you on trams.”

I tried to smile.

“So it is you. I knew it. You’re prettier than I thought you would be,” he said. “Prettier than those photographs in the papers.” He winked and grinned, and all of a sudden the face before me knocked loose a memory of a much younger man, dark-haired and dark-skinned with the same walrus moustache as my father, bending over me and grinning years ago.

I peered at him more closely.

“You’re also a lot less voluble than the newspapers suggest,” said the man.

I was still staring as openly and boldly as a child. He had been one of the students at our home. I was certain of it.

His tone grew suddenly serious. “Listen. You don’t know me, but I am hoping you will trust me enough to listen to some advice. You have to take it on faith that I’ve given the matter thought and that I really am saying this in your best interests. I know that you are on your way to the medical faculty.”

I was so taken aback I just stared at him, but what came next was even more unnerving.

“Turn around, Miss White. Forget this plan. It’s ill-conceived and will only end in hurt and sorrow.”

There was no malice in his face. He seemed honestly to think that he was helping me, but what business was it of his? What sort of a person would come up to a young woman on a public tram and address her in this way? If he was the person I suspected him of being he was a doctor, and I knew them to be a conservative bunch, at least in Montreal, with little faith in women. Was his so-called advice really just contempt? I was angry now, on the verge of giving a piece of advice right back, when he nodded, ending our conversation.

I could have stopped him I suppose, but the encounter had been so rattling and strange I sat wordlessly as he left the tram. Water streamed down the greasy windowpane, distorting him. He waved his umbrella at a passing cab, and as it drew up beside him he looked blurry, like a memory slipping in and out of focus. Before I knew it he was gone.

When I finally made it to the medical building on McGill’s campus I was in a state. The tram man had upset me more than I liked to admit, and then crossing campus my umbrella had blown inside out in the wind. I walked the last quarter mile totally exposed.

“You poor thing,” said the dean’s secretary, who recognized me from previous visits. She relieved me of the mangled mass of rods and cloth that had provided such poor protection and put it in her trash can. She was a heavy-set woman, and the flesh of her arms jiggled whenever she moved. She led me down some stairs into the basement. Apparently there was no powder room for women on the main floor, only a men’s lavatory. In the autumn, with five of us joining the faculty, this would have to change. The room to which she led me was no bigger than a broom closet, but it did contain a sink and mirror. For once I actually wished that Laure were with me to do something with the strands poking out rebelliously all over my scalp.

The dean’s secretary congratulated me through the bathroom door as I dried myself. “You made it onto the first page of
The Gazette
today. Whoever would have thought.”

I smiled at my reflection. I may be a little soggy but I was also the quarter-million-dollar girl. Nothing could take that away. We climbed the stairs again and I sat on the same bench outside the dean’s office on which I had sat the day before with Felicity. On the wall opposite was a life-size portrait that I had studied rather carefully over the past few weeks. “Andrew F. Holmes, 1824,” the caption read, “founder of McGill’s Faculty of Medicine.” Dr. Holmes certainly held himself erect. I straightened my own back and coughed. He would probably roll in his grave to learn why I was sitting there that day. Yesterday I had laughed with Felicity about his fierce-looking eyebrows. Today, sitting all alone, I didn’t dare smile.

I tried to look Andrew F. Holmes in the eye. I would not be intimidated, not now, with cheques for such an enormous sum tucked away in my handbag. Damn the dean and his deadline, which had very nearly broken us. Damn that man on the tram for his curious words and insolence. All kinds of people now felt entitled to counsel me on my life, but that did not mean I had to listen. I was in the medical faculty, a place I had dreamed of all through my childhood and young adulthood. Honoré Bourret had once walked through these halls, passing under this very portrait.

A bell sounded and the secretary, whose desk was in an alcove just outside the dean’s office, went to see what was wanted. I removed my glasses and gave them a vigorous rub, more to calm myself than because they were dirty. Seconds later the secretary reappeared. “They are ready,” she said.

I wondered about the “they,” but did not ask because the secretary had rushed off, urging me to follow. The alcove was a cluttered space, piled high with boxes and books, and my sleeve, still wet from the storm, brushed against a vase on the desk’s edge. It wobbled precariously for a second then crashed to the floor, spilling tulips and a quantity of water.

Someone leaned out the dean’s door but I couldn’t see because I didn’t have my glasses on. By this time I was on my hands and knees and the first thing I registered after I put my glasses back on were a pair of spats.

“Miss White?”

The tram man was bending over me, looking amused. Behind him three other men peered. For an instant I was somehow able to gaze down at the scene as if I were one of them and not a girl squatting on the floor in a mess of flowers. I knew I looked ludicrous with my fists full of dripping stems.

“Oh, don’t bother with that,” said the man in spats. “You have come to supplicate, but there’s no need to do it on your knees.” The others laughed politely, and as he bent to help me up I could see his own eyes were laughing too. I definitely remembered him now, even though he had less hair, and some of it was beginning to grey. Without his hat he looked older, but I could see his facial lines more clearly now. He had come often to see us at the house. He had been one of my father’s proteges.

Dean Laidlaw finally came to my rescue, ushering me inside then introducing me with a certain grace, considering I had just shamed myself. These were the members of the faculty admissions committee. The air in the inner office was thick with smoke, but I had no trouble recognizing spidery Dr. Hingston, whom I had met on several occasions, first at Misses Symmers and Smith’s School and later at Felicity’s home. He nodded curtly but did not smile. A short man who looked more like a boxer than a doctor said his name was Dr. Mastro. He taught physiology and was by far the youngest man there. The last hand I shook belonged to the man from the tram.

“William Howlett,” he said smiling.

My jaw must have dropped because he started laughing and gave me a squeeze. This was the man I had heard about at the tailor shop, the one who now owned my father’s former home.

“We were not sure,” Dr. Howlett said, “that you would show up in such inclement weather.”

I glared at him. Nothing, I assured him in as calm a voice as I could manage, could have kept me from McGill today. I was on the point of mentioning the tram but thought better of it. The dean was watching me carefully. With his mutton-chop sideburns and beady eyes, he looked a little like a fox, which I found disconcerting. At his invitation I took the only available chair, which happened to be in the middle of the room facing the four men.

My gaze kept intersecting with Howlett’s, partly because he was staring at me. It was making me even more nervous than I was already. What if he recognized me and made the connection with my father? In my dealings with him today he had shown himself to be someone who did not rein in his impulses. He might blurt out my identity right here, right in front of these medical men.

“I will start,” said the dean, “by commending you.”

I straightened in my chair. There was no time to think anything more about Howlett or even about the tulips and my bumbling entrance. I pushed it all aside, smiling, trying to concentrate on the honour the dean was about to bestow on me. On the desk were the morning newspapers, which he held up, inquiring if I had seen them. He said that I had accomplished a remarkable feat for which everyone on the admissions committee and in the entire faculty held me in esteem.

While the dean was saying all of this, Howlett studied me. It was unnerving. The other men were worse. Dr. Mastro had relit his cigar and was smoking. At one point he blew a ring in the air that hung suspended above him for several seconds before wobbling across the room in my direction. Dr. Hingston gazed out the window.