Beacon Street Mourning (15 page)

"Yes, Michael, I do," I said grimly. "You may be certain I would not have some pathologist cut open my father's body without good reason. Aren't you the slightest bit curious yourself to know why, with no warning whatever, Father suddenly
had a heart attack when up to then he'd been getting better? Not to mention that his problems were with his stomach and digestive tract, not with his heart."

"And his liver," Michael added. "Watch your step."

"That too," I said as we crossed Clarendon Street.

Just when I thought he wasn't going to say any more, Michael caught me by surprise: "To tell you the truth, Fremont, I was not so much taken aback to hear that your father had died as I was to have been told about it by someone other than you. Why didn't you call me immediately? You know I would have come right away. You have the telephone number at the Vendome."

"Oh, Michael. When I found Father dead, it was the middle of the night."

"Fremont, the Vendome has a desk clerk on duty. I'm sure he would have summoned me no matter what the hour."

We'd reached Searles Cosgrove's house and office in the middle of the block. I stopped at the foot of the steps, grasped Michael's arm, and pulled him around to face me. "Dearest Michael, I don't know why. The horrible truth is, I didn't think at all. I wasn't able to think—I wasn't really myself. I'm sorry."

There was more, of course, and I'd tell him the rest soon; but not until after I'd confronted Cosgrove. If I said more now, particularly if I told him everything that was going through my mind, Michael might very well think he should talk me out of what I intended to do. I couldn't let him do that. I didn't have enough energy to deal with Cosgrove and Michael both.

Michael's eyes searched mine, and softened. He touched my cheek briefly but tenderly with the back of his hand, and I knew if we had not been standing on the street he would have bent his head and kissed me. He said gruffly, though in a soft voice:

"It's just that sometimes you're too damn independent.
With you I never know when I'm going to be left on the outside."

I might have said the same was true of him, with me, but I didn't.

I said instead, "Be patient," which is another thing he always says to me—impatience being just one more trait we have in common; and then I began to climb the steps.

Michael stayed with me until Nurse Bates had grudgingly agreed I could sit in the waiting room until the doctor had time to see me, then Michael went on to his room at the Vendome to change his clothes. As the Vendome was just half a block away at the corner of Commonwealth and Dartmouth streets, he should be back shortly.

The cross streets in Back Bay run along in alphabetical fashion, from A for Arlington through H for Hereford. After that comes the tail end of the long sweep of Massachusetts Avenue, which originates on the other side of the Charles River and crosses it by means of a bridge by the same name. Beyond Massachusetts Avenue lie the Fens, which are all that is left of the swamp that once was Back Bay. I sat thinking of these streets and of how I'd planned to show Michael more of the Boston I'd loved as a girl. Not quite, of course, in the same way I'd fallen in love with San Francisco—but still there was so much here I'd wanted to do with Michael. I'd thought there would be time after our wedding. Before the wedding I'd wanted to be with Father, to keep encouraging him to get better, and . . .

And to watch over him,
said that inner voice of mine that compels and protects me, even from myself.

"Doctor will see you now," Nurse Bates said, startling me from my reverie, though she was not speaking to me. A man who was the only other occupant of the waiting room hauled himself out of his chair with difficulty and went off with the nurse.

Alone now, I returned to my thoughts and to the comment of my inner voice. Yes, I'd wanted to watch over Father; and perhaps some of my unhappiness, my discomfort, came from the nagging possibility that I might not have been vigilant enough. But the two private nurses had been doing such an excellent job. Who would've believed the scrupulous night nurse, Sarah Kirk, would fall asleep and let Father die?

She wouldn't have,
my inner voice said.

Yet in my mind's eye I could see her asleep in the chair where she always sat, beneath the reading lamp, her book open on her chest, rising and falling almost imperceptibly with each breath.

"Oh, my God!" The words came out of me involuntarily, and I clapped my hand over my mouth as if to put them back in. But of course the horse was already out of the barn, so to speak.

Nurse Bates had just returned from escorting the man she'd summoned, and was shutting the door that led to the examining rooms and to Cosgrove's private office. She looked at me sharply and said, "I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing," I replied, too quickly perhaps, with the first thing that came to mind. I could only hope I didn't sound as flustered as I felt. "It's just something I forgot. To do, I mean. At home."

She gave me one more keen glance, then shrugged and sat back down at her desk. She returned to her task of writing notes in the patients' charts.

At home.
The words echoed, running round and round inside my head . . .

I hadn't called the Beacon Street house my home for years, but ever so subtly, the ties of birth and ancestry had asserted themselves. Now Beacon Street felt like home again. Now the house
was
mine. I felt the stirring of some urgency for the
necessary legal proceedings to confirm this—but, one thing at a time.

A different man came out of the door to the examining rooms. He tipped his hat wordlessly both to Bates and to me, walked through the waiting room, and left. The doctor's previous patient, I presumed. Interesting they'd both been men, similar in age and appearance to one another, though the one who'd just left had more of a jauntiness to his walk. Where were Cosgrove's female patients? I could not recall ever having been in a doctor's waiting room without at least one other female patient present.

I worried over this a bit to no avail, and ended by deciding I must just have been in a suspicious mood.

"Are you all right, Miss Jones?" Bates asked.

"Yes, I am. Perhaps not quite my old self yet, but I'm all right."

"I expect it will take some time," the nurse said.

It was the first reference she'd made to my father's death. She went on to be more specific, "If I didn't say so before, my condolences on the loss of your father."

"Thank you."

"He was a fine man."

"Yes. Yes, he was."

Nurse Bates cocked her head to one side, as if considering, and then said something more: "Sometimes when men get older they make poor choices. Even fine men. Guess you can't blame them." She narrowed her eyes for a moment, pressed her lips into a firm line, and returned to her work. She'd said her piece, that was it.

And I understood. You could have tipped me over with a feather I was so surprised, but I understood. And I knew she knew I'd understood.

Bostonians, all Yankees in fact, will do that. They'll go around with their lips tight shut for weeks, months, years even,
minding their own business and keeping their opinions to themselves, but then one day they'll bluntly state a truth as they see it. Bam, there, just like that—and then those lips close tight again. Nurse Bates had just now given an excellent demonstration of this Yankee trait.

No comment was required from me; the proper response to one of these verbal offerings is a curt nod of the head, or some nonverbal vocalization such as "mrmph." So I nodded, whether with her head lowered to her work she could see me or not.

But I had an idea. I waited; I paged through an almost new copy of
Collier's
magazine without reading a word, barely even looking at the pictures. When I dared not wait any longer, for no one else had arrived to see the doctor and the man who'd gone ahead of me had been in there for some time, I said, "Nurse Bates, I wonder if I might ask you something?"

"Hm?" She looked up, rather severely, but I fancied there was a softness in her eyes. I was beginning to like this woman, who was more than she had seemed on the occasion of my first visit to this office.

"About the night nurse you arranged to look after my father, Sarah Kirk. She's an excellent nurse, wouldn't you say? The other one too, Martha Henderson, they were both very good, but Sarah was especially kind to me. And, I think, to Father too."

"Yes, Sarah's good. A conscientious woman. Has two children, one sick all the time with something chronic. Costs a bundle to take care of that sick child, so Sarah works at night when her husband's there to take a turn at looking after the children. Anything else you want to know?"

"Yes, there is, and what you've just told me about Sarah makes it all the more important: I wonder if you'd be so kind as to give me her address. I'd like to write and thank her myself for taking such good care of Father and for her particular
kindness to me the night he died. And of course I'll enclose a little something in the way of extra appreciation—if you take my meaning."

Bates smiled. "That'd be a fine thing to do, Miss Jones. Here, I'll write it down for you."

"Thank you. I can't tell you how much I appreciate this. While you're writing, if it's not too much trouble, please put Martha Henderson's address too—because of course I'll also want to send her a note of thanks."

I HAD BEEN in Searles Cosgrove's office not five minutes when there was a tapping at the door and Nurse Bates looked in.

"This Mr. Kossoff says he's to join you. Is that right?"

Cosgrove looked at me, although I'd already told him I expected Michael to be along. I nodded, then the doctor said, motioning with his hand, "It's all right, come on, come on, we don't have a lot of time."

After shaking hands across the desk with Cosgrove, Michael took a chair and brought it up next to mine. As he settled in the chair I could smell the faintest whiff of Pears soap, and a vision of Michael in the bath flitted through my mind— all that dark hair, soap suds . . .

Yes, I was glad to see him; I was also somewhat concerned at the way my mind was wandering—more than wandering, jumping—all over the place this morning. I resolved to focus, to get and maintain control.

"Now where were we?" Cosgrove asked crossly.

He wasn't going out of his way to be sympathetic, that was for certain. If he was like this now, I hated to think how hostile he was likely to become before I'd finished with him.

"You were saying how Father's death was probably a blessing in disguise, et cetera, et cetera," I said, "and I'm afraid I don't want to leave it at that. I have questions."

I did not intend to come right out and demand an autopsy. I wanted to lead up to it. To wear away at him for a bit first, as it were, so that when I mentioned the word "autopsy" he would be inclined to think if he agreed to the autopsy it would silence me, and that would be a good thing. Therefore I had to be a bit of a nuisance first.

I must say, I quite relished the role of nuisance.

"What's he here for?" Cosgrove rather rudely waved his hand in Michael's direction. It was a dismissive gesture, and I bristled.

Placing a hand on my arm, Michael answered for himself. "May I remind you, I am Miss Jones's business partner. Now I am also, as I expect someone in the family has told you if Fremont herself has not, her fiance. I am here in a supportive role, as I'm sure you'll agree is perfectly proper."

"Yes, yes, of course." Dr. Cosgrove rubbed his forehead, closing his eyes for a moment as if immeasurably weary. "Well then let's get on with it. What do you want to know?"

"I've been told," I said, "that you attributed Father's death to heart failure. Is that right?"

"Cardiac arrest. Yes. Same thing. Means his heart stopped."

"I know what it means."

"Eh? How'd you know medical terms, then?"

"I have studied Latin in school, Dr. Cosgrove, and most medical terminology is derived from Latin. It is not so difficult, but that is beside the point. The point is:
Why
did Father's heart stop?"

"Could be any one of a lot of reasons. The man had been very sick for a very long time. His heart just gave out. It stopped beating. That's all."

Yes, that had been all, quite literally, for Father.

I persisted: "But he had been getting better. Every day he seemed stronger and more alert. He was beginning to talk of getting out of bed, getting some exercise by walking up and
down the hall inside the house, and then going outside when the weather improved. We were planning to get one of those special chairs for him, the sort that would allow him to wheel himself, as well as to be pushed by others. Surely Augusta discussed all this with you? Father had not taken any downturn. So how could this have happened?"

"Young lady, we don't know how the heart decides when it's worn out. But when it's ready to stop, it just stops."

"You don't know, you say. But after death if you look at that heart, you can tell if it was really worn out, or if something else caused that person to die. Can't you?"

"Well yes. Maybe I couldn't, but a cardiac specialist could, or a pathologist. That's—"

"I know what a pathologist is, Dr. Cosgrove. I have a friend who is a pathologist in California. Not only that, he is the coroner for Monterey County."

"Is that so?" Searles Cosgrove stared at me, then repeated the stare at Michael.

I'd stretched the facts a little—the pathologist was an acquaintance, not a friend. But I needn't have worried, though, because Michael took this opportunity to become a part of the conversation by answering Cosgrove's challenge.

Michael said, "Yes, it's so. Fremont Jones is no ordinary woman. Those of you who know her only from the days of her youth here in Boston may soon be in for a surprise."

"Is that so?" Cosgrove asked again, turning to me and sweeping his eyes up and down.

As the doctor's eyes swept over me I suddenly had a creepy, dirty feeling, and thought of all the things that could be done to a person rendered insensible by laudanum.

I shuddered, repressed that unpleasantness, and held to my original thought.