Doc: A Novel (3 page)

The ovation was rapturous. Even the one-legged veteran two rows up struggled to stand along with everyone else in the theater. John Henry applauded until his shoulders ached and his hands stung. Only when the maestro left the stage did the boy come back to earth.

“Mamma, please,” he begged, turning toward her, “can we get the score? Mamma?”

He rose on his toes, searching the faces around him. He must have looked distraught, for an old gentleman in the row behind him leaned over to pat his shoulder. “It’s all right, son. She was havin’ a little trouble with a cough and didn’t want to disturb anyone. I imagine she’s out in the lobby.”

John Henry pushed through the crowded aisle. When he found his mother, she was waiting for him calmly, her dark blue taffeta skirt fanned out over the little bench on which she rested. One hand rested gracefully in her lap. The other clutched a lace-edged handkerchief, stained pink.

“This terrible old cough,” she complained smilingly. “I just don’t know why I can’t shake it!”

For the first time, the boy saw how small his mother was, how thin. The relief at finding her was shattering and he was shamed by the single sob that escaped him, but his pride was saved when Alice Jane let them both pretend it was the emotion of the music that had unmanned him.

“Oh, John Henry, I just knew that you would love it,” she cried, gray eyes shining at him from a pale oval face. “The
Emperor
is pure virile beauty! It is everything I want
you
to be, sugar. Elegant, and strong, and full of fire!”

They ordered sheet music for a solo piano transcription the next day and began work on the piece as soon as it arrived in the mail. Alice had taught many children to play and she was realistic about her son’s talent. John Henry was good, but not a prodigy. What made him unusual as a student was his capacity for obstinate labor, and she was confident that he would make this music yield to his persistence.

In the beginning, he was still so small that some stretches were impossible. As his reach lengthened, Alice made him play with pennies on the backs of his hands to level them and train his fingers to strike the keys more cleanly. At twelve, he’d have practiced trills and turns for hours if she hadn’t cautioned that too much repetition could injure him and stop his progress. By his thirteenth birthday, he was shooting up like a sunflower, already taller than many full-grown men, his wrists and forearms as flexible and strong as steel springs, his hands easily spanning tenths. His attack improved noticeably from week to week. He began to understand when to linger between the notes to expand the elegance and grace of a phrase.

Never in all that time did he or his mother speak of her illness directly.

He continued to study other compositions, but the
Emperor
was their common cause and their great shared passion. It was serene assurance within gnawing anxiety, splendor in defiance of deprivation and creeping poverty; as the drumbeat of incomprehensible Yankee victories grew louder, it became a bulwark against raw fear. By the spring of 1865, he could play the entire concerto without pause, executing the tense flying arpeggios with accuracy and authority, making low chords thunder and high chords chime like silver bells. Alice herself gave less and less instruction as the months passed but never tired of listening to him play, even as her own fate, and the Confederacy’s, came closer.

The war that was to have finished by Christmas of ’61 lasted four catastrophic years. More than 625,000 combatants were dead of wounds, starvation, or disease, with a million more bodies and spirits damaged beyond fixing. Nearly everyone in the South was bankrupted by the collapse of the Confederate currency and the postwar inflation. In this, the Hollidays were no exception, though the clan was more fortunate than most. Its menfolk bore their share of danger and hardship, but they all came back alive and relatively whole.

In the end, it was not Confederate veterans but his mother who taught John Henry Holliday that there are wars that cannot be won, no matter how valiantly they are fought. Consumed by fever, weakened by privation and by the terrible hunger that followed Sherman’s march to the sea, exhausted by the violent cough that all but shook her to pieces, Alice McKey Holliday died, day by day, before her child’s eyes.

He was barely fifteen when the great blow fell. Until her coffin closed, they had never been separated longer than a school day.

More mature members of the family were not surprised when John Henry’s father remarried a scant three months after his first wife was laid in her grave. In the view of Henry Holliday’s many brothers, he had shown admirable restraint during the long years when Alice was no true wife to him, for it was not only the war and her illness that had come between them. No one would have said as much, but everybody knew. On the day his little boy was born, Henry Holliday became superfluous in his own household—displaced as decisively as King Laius by the returning Oedipus, who made Queen Jocasta his own.

Equally unsurprising: Henry’s son did not see matters that way. Like the defeated, devastated South, in deep mourning and groaning under Yankee occupation, the grieving boy was outraged by the sudden appearance in his home of a young and pretty pretender to his mother’s throne. Relations between father and son quickly went from indifferent to cold to worse.

There are a thousand ways for a boy of fifteen to go wrong. The most gently reared will lash out, battered by gusts of mindless fury. The brightest can be swamped by black despair. The sweetest may turn sullen and withdrawn. The most rational are quick to anger. Add the antagonism of a stepmother hardly older than the boy himself, and not one whit wiser. Pile on daily humiliations in an occupied country where the only things available in abundance are guns, hard liquor, and provocation …

Well, something had to be done.

Nearly two dozen aunts and uncles came together to discuss John Henry’s future. The consensus was to put a little distance between disconsolate son and newlywed father. That might be enough to mitigate the current discord and keep the breach from widening.

John Stiles Holliday, who’d attended John Henry’s birth and repaired his cleft, had always taken a special interest in his namesake nephew. During the occupation, Dr. Holliday had quietly accepted a few Yankee patients who could pay in greenbacks; this was an economic extremity he concealed as effectively as he could, but he soothed his conscience by looking for discreet ways to share the income with destitute relatives and friends. He and his wife, Permelia, had already fostered the young mulatto daughter of a Charleston friend, and if little Sophie Walton could become part of the doctor’s family, why not take John Henry in as well? The more the merrier, and the good Lord knew that poor boy could use some cheering up! He could continue his studies at the Fayetteville boys’ academy, and there’d be shoals of cousins about—better companions than he might otherwise fall in with, and mindful of his sorrow.

To everyone’s relief, John Henry himself agreed to the proposal with gratitude. He had always admired his Uncle John and felt at home in his Aunt Permelia’s household, where dinner conversations were enriched by lively discussions of philosophy and literature, of progress in technology and advances in the natural sciences. He would never truly get over the loss of his mother; nightmares of the war and her death would haunt him all his life. Still, the change of scene and company did him good.

Fostered alike, and both of them motherless, John Henry and Sophie Walton quickly became close, though she was only ten and he was five years older. Sophie taught John Henry one card game after another, and they spent countless hours in the cookhouse, playing for buttons and small change, computing odds on the fly, competing to see who could be craftiest in stacking decks, shaving edges, and dealing off the bottom.

Among the dozens of John Henry’s cousins, Robert and Martha Anne had always been especially loving and beloved. Robert was the boisterous older brother the quiet, bookish John Henry never had: outgoing and full of fun. And John Henry thought the world of Martha Anne. Everyone did. Sweet as a peach, that girl.

All the aunts had reason to recall that John Henry and Martha Anne were dear to each other even as small children, before the war. And since marriage between cousins was common in their set … Of course, they were young yet. And Martha Anne had been brought up a Roman Catholic. That presented difficulties. Even so, there was always something special about the bond between those two.

And you just never know, now, do you?

John Henry’s desire to follow his Uncle John into medicine seemed natural enough. The boy was interested in biology and, early on, he asked to observe a surgery. Soon he was assisting his uncle; before long, John Stiles Holliday permitted his bright young nephew to perform some of the simpler procedures. And yet, when John Henry began to talk about becoming a physician, his uncle advised against it.

Training standards had fallen, his uncle declared. Licensing had disappeared. Medicine had become a haven for quacks and charlatans hawking patent medicines and fake cures to the unsophisticated. Which was just about everyone, by his Uncle John’s lights. Now, dentistry, by contrast, had far surpassed medicine as a scientific discipline and a respectable profession for a gentleman. That was the field John Stiles Holliday recommended. After some thought, his nephew came around to the idea, even though it meant going to school up North.

Uncle John would pay the boy’s tuition. The other uncles scraped together money for his travel and living expenses. The aunts provided John Henry with the best wardrobe they could fashion from hand-me-downs and hoarded fabric. His cousins threw a festive farewell party, and the next morning everyone went with him to the depot. Even his father came to see him off, although his stepmother had the sense to plead a headache and stay home.

At the age of nineteen, determined to do his family and his state proud, John Henry Holliday left Georgia for the first time in his life and traveled alone to Philadelphia. There, he matriculated at the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, a progressive school with a fine national reputation. He quickly gained distinction as a serious student—and a good thing, too, for the curriculum was demanding. There was course work in chemistry and metallurgy, gross anatomy and physiology, dental histology and microanatomy. There were long hours of practicum, during which he gained surgical experience with operative dentistry.

Fifteen years of piano practice had given him the strength of grip and attention to technique needed to pull teeth quickly and cleanly. His gold-foil fillings were the envy of his classmates, some of whom never mastered that most difficult of dental procedures. Indeed, all of his handwork—creating and fitting bridges and dentures—was judged exceptionally fine by his instructors. In the spring of 1872, he wrote his graduate thesis on dental pathology and passed his faculty examination easily. That summer, he returned to a bustling, rebuilding Atlanta with the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery. Upon arriving home, he immediately secured a position with the city’s most prominent dentists.

Atlanta society sat up and took notice.

At twenty-one, Dr. J. H. Holliday was a slim, ash-blond six-footer with high, lightly freckled cheekbones and a fashionable mustache that concealed his slightly scarred upper lip. His grace and sophistication made him a sought-after partner at Atlanta’s many dances, while his serious demeanor at dinner parties made his droll, dry commentary all the more amusing. And, mercy! Didn’t that boy play piano beautifully!

Not only was John Henry a fine young man himself, Society noted, but he was turning out to be a good influence on his cousin Robert, who had always been a little wild. Impressed by John Henry’s successes, Robert announced that he, too, would be going into dentistry. The cousins planned to form a joint practice in the city just as soon as Robert finished his own degree up there in Philadelphia.

Everyone in town agreed: young Dr. Holliday would make quite a catch for some lucky gal. His proud family did not dispute the assessment but quietly discouraged speculation, for they knew whom John Henry loved and who loved him in return. Martha Anne had gently discouraged several potential beaux while John Henry was away. The cousins were well matched in intellect and temperament. It seemed only a matter of time before their engagement was announced, now that John Henry had come home.

Night sweats. A low, persistent fever. Those were the first signs that the Fates had begun to circle him again.

But it was summer in Atlanta! Everyone suffered from the humidity and heat, so John Henry didn’t take much notice. The weight loss was subtle as well, for he was slender to start, but there came a day when he realized uneasily that no clothing he had owned for more than six months still fit.

That winter, a brutal chest cold left him with a deep and painful cough that interrupted examinations and made handwork increasingly difficult. Success was proving too much for him; he simply could not keep up with the hectic schedule of patients. No amount of sleep made him feel rested. He was exhausted from the moment he awoke.

In June, he made the clinical diagnosis himself. Even before his uncle confirmed it, John Henry
knew
. Advanced pulmonary tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his mother. Two foci in the inferior lobe of the right lung, another developing high in the left. He might survive one or two more summers in Atlanta’s soggy heat.

Six to eighteen months—that’s all the Fates had left him.

He was not quite twenty-two.

His horrified family gathered to discuss this fresh disaster. Once again, however, Dr. John Stiles Holliday was able to say of his nephew’s condition, “This need not be fatal.” Growing evidence suggested that the dry air, warmth, and sunshine of the North American West could effect remarkable results among consumptives. There were stories of remission and even cures—some undoubtedly exaggerated, but others that sounded legitimate. With rest, a nutritious diet, and moderate amounts of healthful wine, convalescence in that climate seemed possible.