The Heart Specialist (19 page)

13

JANUARY 1900

When my needle punctured the heart it met with resistance. I had imagined it soft, a sponge-like mass that might disintegrate at my touch, but it was actually quite solid. When I had returned from Baltimore it had been at the top of a long list of things to do. Then a series of events and circumstances intervened, preventing me from attending to it.

There was work, of course, which was ever more demanding. Grandmother had fallen ill and required immediate attention in St. Andrews East. She was ninety-five, tough and independent; it was hard to imagine she would not live forever. She had slowed down over the years. Right up until the end she did the washings on Tuesdays, shined the silver on Wednesdays and baked Friday afternoons. The summer I returned from Baltimore was the first one in memory that she did not keep the garden. That had been one chore she truly loved and the source of excellent tomato ketchup and pickled beets, which she was constantly sending back to Montreal with me in jars I had once used for my own entirely different purposes.

She did not complain about her health. It was the untended garden that finally gave her away. When we called the town doctor in, my suspicions were confirmed. What she had been dismissing as indigestion was actually an advanced tumour in her large intestine. Cancer in patients as old as my grandmother tends to grow slowly, but this one was already big enough to cause pain and blockage.

I did not shed many tears during the funeral, unlike Laure who cried so hard she’d had to leave the church on Huntley’s arm before the eulogy. People probably thought me callous, toughened unnaturally by my professional training, but the truth was that I couldn’t quite believe in my grandmother’s death. The loss was not yet real.

The day after the funeral I had walked into the kitchen at the Priory to get some breakfast. It was a large room with earthenware pots on the counter for flour and sugar, and a set of copper-bottomed pots scoured to a brilliant shine. Everything was orderly and in its place. It was so familiar to me, so full of my grandmother, that I said her name aloud.

There were plenty of good reasons why I neglected the Howlett Heart until the winter. I kept putting the work off month after month. I knew I would have to do it eventually. It was my prize specimen now that my article had been published. William Howlett had suggested I write it up and even found me a publisher. The heart was indeed a prize. It was a complete anomaly, one of only two such specimens in the world. The other one was in London I had since discovered. A pathologist had written to inform me after my publication came out. In Montreal colleagues who had never so much as nodded in greeting stopped me in the halls to inquire about it. The recognition had spread farther than McGill’s faculty of medicine. My name was now known to physicians in the United States, England and the Continent. Howlett had seen to it that my first publication was in a prestigious and widely read journal.

Each time I invited people in to look at the specimen I was ashamed. It was one of the largest hearts in the McGill collection, and perhaps because of this the glass tubes supporting it had slipped. It hung lopsided on a single thread and looked sinister and mouldy with age. The formaldehyde in which it soaked was cloudy and yellow like concentrated urine. For months I simply hadn’t had time to do anything about it. Now time was not a problem. I had an entire week of bereavement leave. Laure and I had buried Grandmother two days before in the family plot in St. Andrews East, right behind the church founded by her father-in-law in 1822. My mother was buried there, as was my grandfather, whom I had never met. The snow was so high that the tombstones bearing their names were only just visible.

It was a relief to be back in Montreal away from the mourners. The funeral had been an exhausting, drawn-out affair. Laure was still in St. Andrews East, closing up the Priory where we had stayed together as in the old days, only now in separate bedrooms. Laure and Huntley took over our old bedroom while I slept in the room off the kitchen, formerly occupied by Miss Skerry. I certainly wasn’t about to sleep in Grandmother’s room, in the bed in which she had died. We’d left the corpse there for a day as an informal viewing before the undertaker came. She had seemed so small she looked like a child.

One of her cousins had come to tend her in her final weeks. This was for the best as Laure certainly couldn’t have undertaken the day-to-day care and I could leave my work only for brief stints. St. Andrews East and the life I had once led there now seemed impossibly remote. I had a new home and a new life, a situation Grandmother’s illness seemed to underscore.

A whole new era did indeed seem to be opening. In the last two weeks, while Grandmother lay dying, the twentieth century was born. There had been speeches and parades. The newspapers were full of retrospectives and projections of ambitious hopes. The excitement was contagious. In my own little corner on the third floor of the McGill medical building I too felt it stirring. The pathology collection was growing. I had identified and classified about three quarters of the specimens, a feat Dr. Clarke declared miraculous. Miracles had nothing to do with it. For the last six months I’d worked relentlessly, arriving hours before classes began and remaining late into the night. When the professors’ common room was refurbished I inherited a chesterfield, and on a few occasions I slept there. Dr. Clarke and the others would have been scandalized to hear of it but they all arrived too late in the day to notice.

My responsibilities seemed to accrue like organic growth. There were the specimens to label, including new ones arriving daily from the Montreal General and the Royal Vic hospitals, which compounded my chaos. Since September I had been teaching.

It started without my full awareness. Two students came by inquiring about the Howlett Heart. They were Dr. Mastro’s boys, enrolled in his physiology course. I showed them a few of the specimens, pointing out functions and anomalies, and the next morning they came again, this time with friends in tow. Soon I was meeting with half of Dr. Mastro’s class. It had taken my attention away from my other duties, adding a substantial burden at the height of my grandmother’s illness, but it could not have made me happier. I drew up a schedule so there would be no more than five students at any one time. I made them tea as the room was full of drafts and the conversations long. I even offered them biscuits.

At the end of term Dr. Mastro’s students presented me with a purse. It touched me so deeply I wept right there in front of them for it struck me that I was now teaching at McGill, just as my father had done, and William Howlett, the man who had once considered my father his mentor.

I loved the work. It did not enter my mind to ask for pay. I had sufficient funds to meet my needs and, more importantly, I now had ample funds for the museum. Howlett was contributing money. He sent it to Dean Clarke, clearly marked for me, a cheque to be spent on the museum’s maintenance as I saw fit over five years. In November I’d hired a man to fix the window and I’d had electrical lighting installed. My workroom was now warm and bright.

The shelves, once chaotic, were now orderly. Each jar had three inches of space around it and a typed, detailed label. The McGill collection held all manner of specimens, from an enormous hairball in the shape of a human stomach to the lumpy fungus-infected jaw of a cow. Both these specimens had been provided by my father, I had recently learned. The hairball was my favourite — an incidental finding in an autopsy he’d performed in the 1860s on a clinically insane woman who had been obsessively pulling out and consuming her hair. It was so bizarre he had bottled it for display. At least this was what I imagined must have happened because the pedagogical use of such a thing was limited. There had been no label or indication who the discovering physician had been. It was Howlett who let me in on the secret.

The written records that should have documented my father’s contributions had been removed or his name excised. When the label on an older specimen was missing or obviously wrong I began to suspect the handiwork might be his. All I had was a hunch, but often enough consultations with Howlett or clues provided in the scholarly writings of other men proved me right. My father’s name seemed to have been systematically removed from the faculty annals. Someone had deliberately erased all trace of him. Intellectually I understood what had happened — my father’s name was associated with calumny and McGill wanted no part of it — but emotionally I could not fathom it. It seemed a cruel thing to wipe out all trace of his accomplishments, especially as he had been acquitted by the courts. My archival detective work began to feel deeply personal.

In contrast to my father William Howlett left traces everywhere. He had taken pains to document everything he touched as a pathologist. One of my early discoveries was his collection of autopsy journals: three volumes detailing every case he had worked on from his student days to his years as chief pathologist at the Montreal General. What a mine of information. The material from his student days had been the key to my father’s work, the source unlocking many mysteries. Most of his early post-mortems, Howlett confessed to me in conversation, had been done under Honoré Bourret’s supervision. My father had been his teacher, his mentor and, later, his friend. Howlett claimed he had taught him more about medicine and about life in general than anyone else in all his schooling. Howlett was a stickler for detail. Each case included a patient history as well as autopsy results, so links could be made between symptoms in life and lesions unearthed after death. The other thing he mentioned, almost equally important in my eyes, was who had been in attendance at the autopsy and who had actually wielded the knife.

As I laboured, mucking about with formaldehyde-soaked specimens and dusty books, sorting, searching and labelling, William Howlett and my father became closely associated in my mind. Most of the older material was theirs. Their hands had touched the jars I picked up every day. Their scalpels had probed the organs inside, peeling back membrane and fat, exposing hidden points of weakness. Every time I set foot in the museum I felt their presence. At night in my rented room just east of the campus on Union Street I also felt them. I spent my evenings sifting through Howlett’s publications, digging deeper and deeper. I fell asleep with his words propped on my chest and his face in my mind’s eye.

The heart was cupped in my left hand. The thread was through the pericardium now. It had been easier than I’d thought. I pulled the two sides even and pushed one end through a tiny puncture in the glass tube. It did not smell good, this heart. Not rotten exactly, but unclean. I filled the jar with fresh preservative, as clear and colourless as water. I’d read somewhere about people in Portugal going to dust the bones of their ancestors in family crypts. There was a special day for it and everyone in the entire country took part. This was more or less my current job, year-round.

I took the heart in my hands. It was as slippery as a stone pulled from a stream. I held it and with infinite, anxious care, lowered it into the jar. There was a second’s hesitation when I feared it would not work. But then the tubes snapped into place. I heard the tiny, satisfying popping noise. I had done it. The heart hung evenly now, perfectly aligned.

14

FEBRUARY 1900

On a Sunday in early February I was startled awake from one of my first truly deep sleeps since the funeral. I had been dreaming of the North River in St. Andrews East. It must have been autumn in the dream because the trees were bare, the river was free of ice and the valley was blanketed with a dense November fog. I was down by the water’s edge in bare feet and a nightgown trying to find Grandmother, who was calling my name. Her voice seemed to come from the river but the fog was so thick I could not see a thing.

I sat up and realized I had overslept. It was five minutes to eight and someone was knocking with great force at my door, calling me. It was Peter, the man who worked for my sister. He stared with wide eyes after I opened the door, as if it were strange that I was still in my bathrobe with my hair uncombed at this hour on the Lord’s day of rest. Actually it was an unusual for me, but there was no way he could know this. In the winter I was usually out the door to the museum before dawn. Sundays were no different except that I allowed myself a midmorning break to attend services at St. James’s. Last night, however, I had worked late. I glanced behind me at the chaos of paper littering the floor. A plate with a half-eaten tart sat in full view on top of the mess.

“Peter,” I exclaimed with more brightness than I felt. “Whatever brings you here?”

He looked quickly left and right then mumbled his message, not daring to step inside.
My sister was unwell. Mr. Stewart requested I come immediately
. He offered no details so I told him I’d be there straight away and packed him off to Huntley.

In no time I changed, fixed my hair and was stepping out into the brilliant white street. It had snowed the previous night, but today it was melting. The sun beat down with such boldness I had to loosen my scarf and undo my coat. It was only February but this thaw had the unmistakable feel of spring. Water ran in the gutters. The earth was warming up. The weather did not improve my mood. I was still anxious from my dream, and more so from Peter’s strange apparition on a Sunday bearing bad news. I was walking quickly now, my thoughts on my sister’s household. Peter had been so tight-lipped it was hard to tell how serious this was. Laure didn’t live far away. In fact it took barely fifteen minutes to walk from my rooms on Union Street to their home on Mountain. Of course the snow would slow me down. My boots were making a clopping sound, not unlike a horse’s trot. They were heavily soled like those worn by the farmers in St. Andrews East. Huntley had laughed when he had first seen me in them, but I did not care. They were a lot more practical than the flimsy, tottering things he liked to buy for Laure.