An Acquaintance with Darkness (25 page)

"That is unfair, Robert!"

He sighed. "I'm weary of this. My head is spinning. I need to go home and sleep....Go into the house and face the music. He's waiting for you. I wish you luck."

I clambered down from the chaise. He handed down my portmanteau and the basket with Ulysses in it. "For your information," I told him, "I wanted to get in touch with you yesterday afternoon, when Myra sprang her plans on us. But I couldn't."

He nodded briefly. "A lot of good it does us now," he said.

I picked up my things and moved away. "I hate your mustache," I said.

I
WAS TREMBLING
when I went into the house. I set my things down in the hall. Ulysses meowed again, poor dear, and I opened the basket and let him out. He ran scampering off, right up the stairs. I wished I could follow him and jump into my bed and pull the blankets over my head.

Where was everybody? Except for the ticking of the tall clock, the house was as silent as the inside of a marble vault. Was Maude out? I hoped so. I didn't need her around, chiding me. It was enough I had to face Uncle Valentine.

What would he say? I knew how he could cut you with his words, like he was doing surgery. Like he was cutting the bad parts out and throwing them away. Would he cut parts out of me now? I'd seen people he'd done it to. They walked away limping. Or all white in the face, like they were bleeding and didn't know it.

"I'm in here, Emily." The voice came from the parlor, muffled and sad.

I went down the hall. He was seated in a large wingback chair, reading. He looked up. I was a sight, all right, with grass stains on the skirt of my dress. It was torn at the hem, too. My arm was in a makeshift sling, my face dirty.

He stood up at the sight of me. The book dropped to the floor. "Are you all right? What happened? You look as if you were run down by a carriage."

"No. A horse, almost. It's a sprain, Robert said. And there's a bump on the back of my head."

He came over to me and felt my head with expert hands, knowing hands. "That's quite a bump. You've got to get some ice on it. But you don't have a skull fracture." He went to the kitchen next and I heard him fussing around out there. He came back with some ice tied in a rag. "Sit down and put this behind your head." He gestured to the wingback chair. I sat. He did, too, across from me.

"Emily," he said, "we have to talk." He looked so sad.

I said, "Yes."

"Why did you run away from me, Emily?"

"Because of what I saw yesterday." I wished his voice wasn't so kind. I wished he would scold. But he didn't.

"The bodies in my lab?"

"Yes."

He leaned forward. "You have suspected the true nature of my work all along, haven't you?"

I told him yes again.

"Then why didn't you ask me outright? Don't you think I deserved at least that?"

"I wanted to. But every time I set my mind to it something happened. You did something good for Annie. Or me. I was thrown off the track and thought I was being silly."

"I meant to throw you off the track. I couldn't have my work compromised. And it
was,
yesterday. It was more than compromised. It was almost ruined. I was almost ruined. If Robert hadn't been tipped off about the police raid and gotten the bodies out, I would have been arrested."

"Uncle Valentine, I didn't lead those girls there. They forced their way. The only reason I went along with it was because Robert told me there were no bodies at your lab. I never meant to hurt you."

"You discussed all this with Robert?"

"Yes, but he wasn't honest with me, either. Any more than you were."

"Don't call me to account, Emily." He turned sharp.

"I'm not calling you to account, sir."

"This has nothing to do with honesty. It has to do with research. With treating shattered bones and torn muscles. With head injuries and ghastly injuries of the face, the spine, the chest. The war taught us all we do not know about the human body. But we must now apply what we have learned in the war. Only, there are not enough available legal cadavers. We need Anatomy Acts to provide us with legal cadavers. New York has one now. Pennsylvania is working on one. I am authoring a pamphlet telling of the need here for such an act. When it is passed, the traffic in bodies will end. Until that time, I shall continue my practices. It is not a pleasant business. I do not profit from it, and I will not purchase a cadaver from anyone who profits from it. But it is my work, the most important thing in the world to me. Do you understand?"

I understood. "It's what caused the argument between you and Mama," I said.

"Yes. She found out what I was doing. She did not approve."

"I would have approved," I said, "if you'd given me the chance."

"I don't want your approval, Emily. All I want, if you wish to continue living with me, is your promise that you won't interfere again. If you can't promise, you may go to Aunt Susie in Richmond. I will pay for your ticket."

I stared at him. "You'd let me go?"

"I don't want you to go. I think you know that by now. But I will let nothing and no one interfere with my work, Emily. Ever. I will put nothing before medical science."

"I won't interfere," I said.

He sighed. "Now that we have that cleared up"—and he waved his hand to dismiss the matter—"tell me. Did you let Addie go?"

The question was so abrupt, the brown eyes so accusing. "Yes."

"Why?"

"She begged me. Ever since I've been here. All she wanted was to be free. I didn't think it right that she was a prisoner."

"You didn't think it right?" Tears came to his eyes. He couldn't speak for a minute. And he was white-faced. "Do you think that was your decision to make?"

"Uncle Valentine."

"Do you know what you have done? Letting that woman go was more an act of betrayal than going with those girls to my lab."

I was confused. He was more distressed about Addie being gone than about the police raid on his lab. There was something here. But what? It came to me then that if I could figure it out, I would understand my uncle Valentine.

Maybe I would even understand the secret of life.

"Do you know how long I've been working with Addie? How far I've come with curing her of the Wasting Disease?"

"She was better," I said. "She wasn't coughing anymore. That's why I let her go."

"She was better because she was on my medicine." He turned and picked up a bottle from a nearby table. He set it down, none too gently, on another table before me. "This medicine."

The bottle was dark. Or was that the medicine inside?

"Pick it up and open it," he said. "Smell it."

I did so. It smelled terrible. Like camphor. Yet at the same time like rotten fish. "What is it?"

"I call it Purple Mass. President Lincoln took something called Blue Mass for his nerves and other ailments. Until I find a better name for this, it is Purple Mass. It clears the lungs. I have been working on it since my wife died. It is a mixture of my own making. Made in part from crushed leaves of devil's tongue, a flower Marietta grew in my laboratory. A nightflower."

I remembered the flower. Remembered Marietta saying what trouble she had growing it. Remembered how the flies were drawn to it, how she'd told me it would smell of decayed fish.

He gave a great sigh and took the bottle back. "My wife always had a cough," he said. "Valentine,' she would say to me, can't you find something to cure this cough?' Only I was too busy becoming an important doctor. I had no time for her. I thought she was being petulant because I wasn't paying her much mind. 'Keep away from damp air,' I told her. 'Take hot tea. Soup.' She got sicker and sicker. Then she got bad. Her lungs filled up. I knew nothing about lungs. I still don't know enough about lungs. She died."

He fell silent. He set the bottle down. "I went on being an important doctor. I worked to overcome my grief. Then Marietta came along. She is very knowledgeable about slave medicine, folklore medicine. One day I told her the story of my wife. It was she who told me about the devil's tongue flower. She had all these decoctions written down from before she came north. 1 thought devil's tongue was worth a try for congested lungs. Marietta grew the flowers in pots in my lab at the college. I experimented with them and added my own ingredients. It was working for Addie. She was getting better. But her treatment wasn't finished. And without her medicine, she will sicken again and die."

I stared at him. "She was better," I said.

"No. She was on her way to being better. I explained to her how long the treatment would take. She agreed to it. Oh yes, every day she'd ask to leave. Every morning I'd talk with her, reassure her, tell her, 'Just a little while longer.' And she believed me. Until you spirited her up to be free. You have interfered, my girl. In a most dastardly way. With medical science!"

"I didn't, Uncle Valentine. She kept telling me she was a prisoner."

"I told you when you first came here not to listen to her, that she was a patient, not a prisoner. One of the effects of the medicine is that it makes people feel persecuted, mistrusting of others, and addle-headed. Even dizzy. They are plagued with dark thoughts. Lincoln's death didn't help. It brought her guilt over her past drinking to the fore. When these moods struck, she played on your sympathy."

I said nothing.

"Where is she, Emily? Can you tell me that?"

I met his inquiring look with a dumbstruck one of my own. "Gone," I said.

"Gone? Where? Where did you take her?"

"I took her to the Relief Society at Twelfth and O Streets this morning. It's where she wanted to go."

He started to get up out of his chair.

"No," I said. "She's not there, Uncle Valentine.
She's gone by now. Long since gone. She just stopped by to tell the reverend there she was all right and to pick up some things. She was leaving this very day."

"For where?"

I brightened. "Home," I said. "You can likely fetch her there. Or get some medicine to her."

He shook his head sadly. "She never told me where home was, Emily. She never would tell me. Did she tell you?"

"No," I said miserably, "she didn't."

T
HINGS WENT
back to normal. Uncle Valentine wanted it that way. "It is over and done with," he said when I told him I wanted to do something to make up for the loss of Addie. "I just want life around here to get back to normal. Do you understand?"

I said yes. But I didn't believe it. Some matters are never over and done with. They just seem that way, is all. If you wait long enough, they pop their heads up again when you least expect it.

Uncle Valentine didn't believe it, either. He acted differently toward me. He acted polite.

I could have stood anger, I think. Even being punished. But in the days that followed he was so carefully polite I thought I would die. I went back to school and decided I would wait for a chance to make things up to him. It would come to me.

Myra Mott did not speak to me. Which qualified as normal, I suppose. I could bear that. But I could not bear the fact that Robert didn't speak to me, either, when he came around. And he came most every day. He actually sat at our breakfast table and didn't speak to me. He spoke more to Ulysses the cat. He acted so superior I couldn't bear it. I sat paralyzed in his presence, tears in my eyes. How could a person's silence say such terrible things to you? And when he left, I felt so stricken I wanted to die. Uncle Valentine noticed, of course. But all he said was, "He'll come 'round, be patient."

I didn't want to be patient. And I didn't want Robert to come 'round. I wanted to show old, superior Robert that I was not the stupid, noodleheaded, no-'count, inferior insect he thought I was. I didn't want him to like me anymore. I didn't even know if I still liked him. It had nothing to do with such insipid feelings. It had to do with respect.

Robert would know I was someone to be reckoned with before I was finished with him, or I'd know the reason why. And if I could make things up to Uncle Valentine at the same time, why, I'd die happy. That was all I knew.

In spite of my troubles, life went on. President Johnson granted amnesty and pardon to all who'd participated in the "existing rebellion," with a few exceptions. On Saturday, June 17, Annie came around. She looked wild eyed. I'd had it all fixed in my head how I wasn't going to talk to her because she snitched about my running away. But I don't think she even remembered that, that's how crazy-acting she was.

They were getting ready to sentence her mother. The government's man, John Bingham, was summing up his argument for the convictions, she told us. "He's been talking three days straight and shows no signs of stopping."

"The press has condemned your mother from the start," Uncle Valentine mused.

"Oh, what will I do?" Annie was pulling at her hair.

I hadn't thought about Johnny in a long time. But now I wondered what had happened to his "gentleman in Washington" who was supposed to let him know if his mother was in danger. And what about the stories in the press? Hadn't Johnny seen them? Funny, I had no more feeling for him except anger. Same as I had for Robert. I was fourteen and finished with men.

"Don't lose faith," Uncle Valentine told Annie.
"A last-minute act of executive clemency is always possible. We are a civilized nation. We don't hang women. If they sentence her, I'll go myself with you to the president, on her behalf."

Annie left, plied with food and comfort. But she still looked wild eyed. "He's a good man," she said of Uncle Valentine. "How could you ever have wanted to run away from him?" So. She did remember.

School let out. I made myself useful around the house, minded my business, and kept my eyes and ears open. You can learn an awful lot that way. I helped Maude, greeted Uncle Valentine's patients, did some baking, and sorted out Uncle Valentine's mail daily. Bills came from Aiken and Clampitt, Mrs. Mary's lawyers. There was correspondence from the Almshouse. Did Uncle Valentine go there and visit the poor? Another bill from the Board of Health. It fell out of the envelope.