The Heart Specialist (22 page)

He stood in my doorway, illuminated by golden light. With his cropped hair and eager smile he didn’t look at all like a distinguished pathology fellow. When he’d first arrived he’d caused quite a stir with the nurses. His looks were undeniable — the chestnut hair and skin so wonderfully unblemished and pale. He held himself with authority, which women tend to like. But there was something lacking, I couldn’t help thinking. Looks weren’t what made me sit up and take notice when a man entered the room. It was something else, a kind of energy that even a short, ugly body might possess. Whatever this energy was Rivers didn’t seem to have it. I found I could be completely at ease with him. This may have been why, of all the women who flocked about him that first autumn in Montreal, I was the person he chose as a friend.

“I brought you something,” he said, swinging his pail up on my desk.

Jakob Hertzlich and I peered inside. A freshly excised heart was sloshing in its juices.

“I’ve come from the Dead House,” Rivers said. “I figured the fastest way to get it here was by foot.”

Jakob usually ignored strangers, continuing with his work when someone dropped by for a visit. Today, however, he made an exception. “You mean you walked like that from the hospital?” he said, much impressed. The Dead House was annexed to the Montreal General Hospital on Dorchester and St. Dominique Street, a good twenty minutes by foot.

I began to laugh.

“With one stop along the way,” said Rivers, lifting his pastry box.

“You stopped to shop?” I asked. “And no one noticed the pail?”

Rivers flashed a boyish grin. “One lady did. She mistook it for a beef heart though and gave me a recipe for entrail pie.”

I laughed so hard my ribs ached. Jakob smiled. I poked a finger at the gift, which was very large and red. A grown man’s, given the size, neatly chiselled to show the lesion.

“Atrial septal defect,” I observed. “A fine example.”

Rivers accepted the compliment with grace. “I have the autopsy report and a patient history for you,” he said. “I thought it was an especially clean one. It’s a wonder he lived into his forties. I had no idea until a few days back when his pressure suddenly shot up.”

“The atrial ones can be sneaky,” I said, nodding. “It’s the pressure that usually gives them away. The ventricular ones you can tell right off because of the murmur.”

“How right you are.”

It was my turn to show grace. “Enough to predict that this one will soon smell if we don’t get to work. You’ll excuse Jakob if he tends to it before tea? Thank you, Dugald.”

The new fellow was surprised and visibly gratified when I pronounced his name. First names were my custom in the museum. I was Agnes, Jakob was Jakob, and now Rivers would be Dugald. Poor man. Patronymics were the only thing allowed in the Army and as a general rule hospitals were not less formal than military barracks.

I handed the pail to Jakob. Over the months I had come to trust him and was now convinced that he could do any job in the museum as competently as I. He was intelligent, hard-working, and had proven to be a brilliant choice on Dr. Clarke’s part.

When I returned to Dugald’s side he was examining the wall. “Nice likeness,” he said, pointing at a poster Jakob had brought in not long after he’d started working for me. It was a pen-and-ink drawing on bristol board, lightly coloured with water wash, depicting three hearts from various angles. The component parts were meticulously labelled.

“My assistant’s work,” I told him.

Dugald Rivers’s head bobbed in surprise. “Him?” he whispered, turning to the corner of the room where my unimposing helper was rinsing our newest specimen. “That person?”

I nodded.

“He’s talented.”

It was one of the many surprising facts I’d learned about Jakob Hertzlich over the months of our association. He was an artist. A real one. He liked nothing better than to sketch the day away on his notepad. His spare time was devoted to drawing and his results were sometimes breathtaking.

I invited Rivers to take a seat. I liked a proper tea, and in order to make the occasion festive I spread a white cloth embroidered by Laure and Miss Skerry over one end of the dissection table. Rivers laid down his pastry box. While we waited for the kettle to boil we chatted about the faculty and his duties and I asked how McGill compared to his experience in Baltimore.

“Apropos,” he said suddenly. “Did you end up learning about that heart of yours? You remember the one — that mysterious reptilian thing you brought all the way down on the train with you? I’ve thought of it many times.”

I lifted it from where it now sat on a permanent, privileged corner of my desk. “This one you mean?”

Dugald Rivers nodded, sucking in his breath. “It really is a wonder.”

“Wondrous or not,” I said with a laugh, “it very nearly got me thrown out of Number One West Franklin.” I proceeded to tell the story of little Revere and his pilfering.

Dugald laughed. He could picture it, he said, the old heart ticking like a bomb beneath Kitty Howlett’s meticulous table.

“I managed to get the history, though,” I said. “Dr. Howlett has such precise recall. The autopsy was performed twenty-seven years ago. October of eighteen seventy-three. The patient was in his thirties when he died.” I paused to let him take this in. “That makes it nearly sixty years old.”

Dugald whistled. “Well it’s a damned nice job. Howlett’s got more than recall, I can tell you. Look at the way he opened up the ventricle. What a light touch.”

“The work isn’t Howlett’s.”

He looked at me in confusion.

“It’s misleading because for years everyone called it the Howlett Heart.” I took down from the wall a framed copy of the article I’d published with Dr. Howlett’s help in the
Montreal Medical Journal
.

“
Burritt
,” he read, mispronouncing my father’s name.

“Dr. Honoré
Bourret
,” I corrected with French Rs and a silent T. The name rolled off my tongue with intoxicating ease. I even managed to meet Dugald’s gaze. It was French, I explained, although like so many ambitious French Montrealers he had spent his adult years speaking mostly English.

Dugald’s curiosity was piqued. “But where does William Howlett come in? Why the Howlett Heart?”

“Bourret was his mentor,” I explained. “He was a professor here. They worked together a lot of the time. The patient was Bourret’s and Howlett was invited to the autopsy.”

“So it was this fellow Bourret’s work?”

I nodded. “There was a scandal, though. Bourret was forced to leave McGill.” I kept my voice neutral and avoided Dugald’s eyes.

“Is that when Howlett was hired? When this Bourret fellow left?”

I did not trust my voice. I nodded.

“Lucky man,” Rivers sighed. “I wondered how he was appointed to faculty at such a young age. He was a full professor and the sole pathologist at the Montreal General practically upon graduation.”

My throat clamped. I needed tea.

“He’s fortune’s child,” said Dugald.

I watched him withdraw from me, his eyes becoming slightly unfocused. Was I as transparent as this? Since returning from Baltimore I’d been floating. Dr. Clarke and Miss Skerry had remarked on it: how strong and full of spirit I was despite my grandmother’s death and Laure’s collapse.

Howlett was the reason. My work in the pathology museum, which I was now undertaking with his blessings and on his penny, and my correspondence with him were my lifeline. When his name was spoken my cheeks became hot. I was aware of my affliction but it was only now, watching Dugald Rivers, that I wondered if it might show. At the slightest reference to Howlett Dugald’s face turned wistful. It was at once pitiful and funny. I glanced over at Jakob, who watched us from his corner. I could only pray that I was more opaque than the adoring Dugald Rivers.

I felt an urge to snap him awake. “It was not fortune alone.” Howlett had worked with discipline and energy to attain his present stature. His list of publications was impressive. The number of autopsies he’d performed — 787 in fewer than ten years — seemed unimaginable.

I explained a little of this to Dugald. “I’m not even through my classifications yet but I’d say a good two thirds of the specimens are his. The quantity of his work is remarkable, Dugald. And everything was written up either in notes or for publication.”

Dugald Rivers was completely still while I enumerated Howlett’s accomplishments. He looked slowly around. “So you’re saying that almost all of this is William Howlett’s.”

I smiled. “Some things come from Bourret. These days the specimens from the Royal Victoria and the Montreal General arrive with a frequency that makes it difficult for me to keep up. Now I suppose,” I said, nodding at the pail, “there will be material from you too. The majority of the specimens, however, come from Howlett’s autopsies.”

Dugald laughed. “And that makes you his high priestess, like Apollo’s oracle.”

I laughed uneasily. “Don’t come to me for truths, Dugald. Tea I can offer, but nothing as grand as the truth.”

“What became of the illustrious Dr. Bourret?” asked Rivers, replacing the specimen bottle on my desk. “I don’t believe I’ve heard of him.”

I looked away. I had no answer to that particular query, and this happened to be the truth, as opposed to the rest of the story I’d recounted, which was riddled with omissions. I had besieged William Howlett with questions but he had not seen or heard from his former mentor. “He disappeared.”

Dugald Rivers rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Must have been an awful scandal to ruin a career like that.” He was looking at me, waiting for elaboration, but I couldn’t. My throat was dry. Were I to utter one more syllable Rivers would understand the emotional depth of my involvement in this history. Seconds ticked by. I could feel colour seeping into my cheeks, and then suddenly Jakob was beside me with the kettle.

“It was about to sing,” he said. “Do you know where I can find the teapot?”

I felt a surge of gratitude but hid it and joined in a hunt for the teapot. After I found it I busied myself setting out cups. With exaggerated care I measured two spoonfuls of smoky black twig into the pot. “Have you ever tasted Lapsang Souchong?” I asked Dugald in a voice that I hoped sounded close to normal.

Dr. Rivers shook his head.

“You’re in for a treat.” We had returned to safer ground with the subject of food. “If you don’t like it there’s standard fare on the shelf.” I was feeling more in control now. I took up the pastry box and snapped the string with a scalpel. A pair of my favourite tarts stared up like rising suns. “Apricot!” I exclaimed. “I do believe we shall be friends, Dugald Rivers.”

There was no milk but I did have a supply of sugar lumps and a baguette, half-eaten from lunch, so I put Dugald to work slicing while I peeled a cucumber.

“Cucumber sandwiches?” he muttered. “Civilized.”

“One has to have standards, Dugald. Especially given the work we do.”

Jakob joined us. He liked Dugald, which I fully understood. I cut the tarts in half so he too could partake. It was a pleasure to feed him. On his pittance of a salary he seemed forever hungry.

It was he who told Dugald that I was working for Howlett. “She’s writing scholarly essays for that man in Baltimore you seem to admire so much.”

Dugald Rivers stopped chewing. He put down his teacup and reddened.

Jakob was glancing back and forth between us. “She’s writing a chapter in his forthcoming textbook.”

Dugald looked at me. “Is it true, Dr. White?”

I nodded. I was the only woman of one hundred and four physicians invited to contribute to the multi-volume series Dr. Howlett was editing. Dugald’s breath had grown slightly raspy, I noticed. It was hard not to feel sorry for this man who seemed so incapable of dissembling.

“What is the subject?”

“Hearts.” I answered with pride, though it was sure to nettle him. The cataloguing work had quickly borne fruit. “It started with that,” I said, pointing at the framed copy of my first published article.

With my first piece of research into the misnamed Howlett Heart, William Howlett had realized I could write. He had commissioned a statistical survey of one hundred of his other, less spectacular, cardiac specimens, which he also helped me to publish.

“Dr. Howlett is an expert in circulation, but he needed help with the congenital material,” I explained. No one actually worked in the field of congenital heart defects. There was nothing one could do for these cases save to diagnose and then autopsy them. There was no money in it.

“You’re damned lucky,” Dugald whispered.

I shrugged this off. It wasn’t as great an honour as he imagined. It meant gruelling nights at the typewriter after equally gruelling days at my museum work table. The work itself was derivative. I would have traded places in an instant with Dugald Rivers, who worked at a hospital and performed the autopsies that I merely examined afterward and tabulated. “You’re the lucky one. You won a McGill fellowship.”

We set to the business of eating and drinking. Dugald Rivers loved my smoky Chinese tea and I loved his choice of tart. With the help of hungry Jakob Hertzlich we devoured every morsel.

IV
THE HEART’S REASON

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.

— BLAISE PASCAL