Katherine Keenum (6 page)

In all the hours they had unavoidably spent together, moreover, she had come to know Edward as the man he had become, not as the lost brother whom Theodore kept wanting to reappear. As he began to respond to the world beyond his bodily needs, he showed a sensitivity to small things that Theodore, best of husbands, never noticed. For his part, after the hideousness of the camps, it was balm for Edward simply to spend time with a woman whose voice was pleasant, who always smelled powdery and clean, who shared some of his interests and knew his sadness. There had come a mild day in late autumn when he approached her while she was hanging clothes in the backyard. She had looked up over her shoulder at him and smiled. Their eyes met tenderly, but then the moment passed. They both knew it, cherished it, and never once spoke of it.

Edward sat back with his eyes closed, patted Sophie’s hand, and held it for a moment. “I ought to be stirring.”

“Nonsense; rest. You were freezing last night when you got here. You may have taken a chill. You know in your condition that’s dangerous.”

“You’re making an invalid of me.”

“I am giving you a holiday, you donkey. But you—if you have your way, you will make yourself sick, and then I shall have you on my hands for weeks.”

Once Edward resigned himself to being fussed over, lassitude set in. All day, he dozed fitfully. He would think he should get up, only to sleep some more: cottony sleep that brought him no refreshment. The oxtail soup Sophie brought him for lunch was excellent—a rich, brown, flavorful smoothness on the tongue—but he was too weary to care. As the day wore on, he grew duller and duller. Late in the afternoon, when Sophie got him up to move to the guest room, now fully heated, he padded down the hallway in sock feet, aware primarily that the wooden floor under the runner was cold and hard and that his bones ached. His eyes stung. He slept through Theodore’s return that night.

*   *   *

On the second morning, he awoke ravenous. Hunger was a spur, but the main thing that got him going was habit—habit and the discipline instilled in him by his father, by Colonel Willich of the Ohio Ninth Infantry Regiment, and by years of running the store. A fresh towel and washcloth had been left for him on a chair, and his clothes were laid out: his own coat and trousers brushed, his boots polished, and fresh linen lent by Carl, who was closer to his size than the much stouter Theodore. What required more effort than bathing and dressing was going downstairs to breakfast. He was ashamed of having been ill.

Luckily, when he came into the breakfast room, his voluble fourteen-year-old namesake, Eddie, was rattling on to Theodore about an experiment in thermal dynamics that he was devising for school; he broke the stream of his talk only to rise and welcome his uncle with a brief “Good morning, sir,” as unconcerned as if Edward were a familiar household fixture. Edward returned the greeting briefly and nodded to the others. Eddie plunged back into the technicalities of his project. Theodore, who understood both his brother’s reserve and his son’s lack of it, winked at Edward and for once let Eddie flow unchecked.

Breakfast had been set out on the sideboard, a very Southern breakfast of ham, biscuits, and redeye gravy (Hannah, the cook, was from Kentucky), along with the pickles and sausages Theodore loved and the novel canned grapefruit that was Sophie’s current fad. Edward’s appetite waned at the sight of so much food, but he took a thin slice of ham, a biscuit, and a few sections of grapefruit to please Sophie.

“There is coffee in the pot, or would you rather have tea?” Sophie asked, over Eddie’s chatter.

“Coffee, please,” said Edward. Hannah roasted the coffee at home and brewed it strong. It should banish the vestige of his headache.

In response to Sophie’s bell, Hannah came to the dining room door. “How you want your eggs this morning, Mr. Edward, scrambled or fried?”

“Scrambled, please, Hannah.” He would have to make an effort.

Carl pushed back the chair at the place set beside him. “Why don’t you let Hans and me open up the store again, Uncle Edward? It’s a rotten day outside.”

It was. Gray with a sleety rain.

“I need to get my blood stirring.”

“Well, I’ll come with you and show you what we did.”

“Hans can do that.”

“You must come back here tonight,” said Sophie.

“It will take me longer in the bad weather to come here than to go home.”

“Yes, but the dinner here will be better.”

“Infinitely better, but still a distance.”

“Take the streetcar or a cab,” said Theodore, who had caught his wife’s glance. “I have business to talk over.”

“Can’t it wait?” asked Edward. His hands came to a standstill, and he stared at his plate.

Sophie and Theodore exchanged a look.

“Of course,” said Theodore.

A little while later, when the men were all leaving for the streetcar, Sophie quietly pressed Edward’s arm. “Do pack a bag and come stay here a few days,
liebken
,” she said. “Now that we’ve warmed up the guest room, we should make use of the heat.”

*   *   *

But Edward did not return, not right away. He stubbornly told himself there would be nothing wrong with him if he took himself in hand. Needed or not, Carl had gone with him to the store, where Hans was waiting, stamping his feet in the cold at the door. The bad weather kept customers away, but the morning proved busy as Edward stepped in to help finish up some housecleaning the boys had initiated the day before, preparatory to taking a thorough inventory. He was not sorry for the extra help and even the company: Carl was affable with those few old customers who did come in, many of whom had watched him grow up, and his presence deflected appraising eyes from Edward’s strained face. But after lunch, Edward sent Carl on to his real job at the company headquarters of Murer Brothers. By the afternoon mail, he sent Sophie a note of thanks for his rescue and regrets for dinner that evening. At eight o’clock, with some trepidation, he went through his routine of closing up shop. The thought had crossed his mind more than once during the day that he might go somewhere new for supper, but a change from the tavern so convenient to his boardinghouse would make mockery of his refusing Sophie’s invitation on the grounds of wanting to keep dry. His real reason for staying away was stubbornness: He knew it and she knew it, but a certain loyalty required him to go through the motions of pretending even to himself that he was simply being practical.

At the tavern, the regulars argued politics as usual: old Forty-Eighters like his father, socialists, radicals, and staunch Republicans. If they ever turned from theory to current news, they were as likely to be concerned about Kaiser Wilhelm and imperial Prussia as about President Hayes and the mess in Washington. Edward, who seldom joined in these ceaseless debates, did occasionally take on a game of checkers. Not tonight. He made himself inconspicuous and left half his pork chop, potato, and overcooked shell peas uneaten.

When he opened the door to his boardinghouse, the little bell that rang at its every movement brought his landlady out from the kitchen into the hall. She carried herself very straight and wiped her hands on her apron.

“I didn’t hear you come in last night, Dr. Murer.”

“No, nor see me at breakfast, Mrs. Wiggins,” said Edward, who knew that although something more than prurient curiosity moved her, she had a salacious mind. “I spent the night at my brother’s.”

“I don’t inquire,” said Mrs. Wiggins, loftily. “But I do have to charge you for the breakfast, anyway, seeing as you didn’t give me no warning.”

“Of course, Mrs. Wiggins,” said Edward, wearily. Mrs. Wiggins’s system of charging for the rooms a month in advance and individual meals at the end of each week caused endless wrangling with her tenants.

Satisfied on the main point, she paused before returning to the kitchen and looked at him quizzically. “Nothing wrong I hope, sir?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Wiggins, nothing.”

Edward’s second-floor suite consisted of a bedroom, closet, and study, rented furnished. Over the years, he had added a few things of his own: a large cherry bureau and a glass-fronted bookcase from his mother’s house, some prints on the wall, a good rug. They mitigated the secondhand, catch-as-catch-can racketiness of the place. He could, of course, have moved a long time ago, but inertia kept him there. He believed it suited him.

On top of the bookcase lay his most precious possession, a small, black leather-bound picture case. He deposited his cane in an umbrella stand, hung up his hat and overcoat, and walked pensively over to pick it up. “Why did I feel nothing, Marie?” he asked, cradling the case.

He opened the cover. A young woman—no, a girl just entering womanhood—stared out with a fixed solemn expression, her fair hair primly parted and combed flat against her head, her soft mouth held in a line. For the first time ever, Edward admitted to seeing it for what it was: a thin, metallic film of silver grays and black on a slightly shiny surface. It did not recall the prismatic wisps of Marie’s blond hair escaping into the sunlight, nor the uneven pink flush of her skin, nor the full contours of her nose and cheek and lips. It had not for a long time. The light blue of her eyes emphasized by a darker rim to their irises was only a blank lightness in the photograph. Worse, he realized that the image of Marie in his mind was as static as the darkening tintype. Of her likings, of her mind and quickness, of her laughter, all that remained to him were odd flashes, now stylized fragments, a boy’s memories—and he was no longer that boy. He snapped the case shut and laid it down again, clutching the edges of the shelf as he leaned over it in defeat.

After a few dazed, dry moments, he lifted the glass panel of the bottom shelf and from behind a row of books took out a small box. From it, he withdrew a key to a locked lower compartment of the bureau, which he used as a sideboard. He crossed the room, bent down, turned the key, and pulled out a wineglass, a bottle of sherry, a near-empty vial, and a dropper. Half a bitter ounce of escape dripped into a glassful of musky sweetness to cover the taste.

He took the laudanum.

CHAPTER FIVE

“You Must Go”

I
n the army hospital where Edward had been sent after liberation from the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, opiates were administered freely as a kindness amid intolerable suffering. They not only killed pain and cured diarrhea but induced a euphoric sense of well-being in the starved, the dying, and the amputees. Edward had been given his share.

In the lost days immediately following his return to Cincinnati, Sophie had preferred to comfort him with warm food, cleanliness, and sunny quiet. When he had nightmares, she held him and rocked him as she had soothed her children, including the two who died. “He needs to learn he is safe,” she said, “not to be blunted into a stupor.”

Theodore agreed. As a pharmacist, he understood the benefits of laudanum (indeed, with a clear conscience he had profited handsomely from supplying it and other derivatives of opium to the Union army); but he also knew that patients grew dependent on it. He himself was judicious in prescribing it and frowned on the new, distilled, and highly addictive morphine. Edward knew everything Theodore knew and more. Once he was on his own again, therefore, his intermittent laudanum use had been furtive. He did not want his family or his customers to know how incomplete was his recovery.

On the first night he was home after the attack on Elm Street, he calculated the dose well. He woke up at his usual hour; and if his pupils were still slightly constricted and his manner dull at breakfast, Mrs. Wiggins would notice nothing. Liveliness was not required of her boarders, nor expected in the morning.

He dragged himself up and sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, weighed down by an unfocused sense of dread. Memory of the night before crept back and, with it, certainty that the tintype of Marie would never again have power to move him. He had learned of her death when he came home from the war. She had been dead some fifteen years now; the past was gone. Early in his bereavement, whenever he saw a view that would have delighted her or passed a band concert in the park, the moment of recognizing a pleasure as hers had been sweet; the instant stab of loss that followed had been deep and real. Out of such moments, he had made a practice of addressing her mentally as if to share things with her. He let her voice rally him for his absurdities. When had the habit lapsed and faded? When was the last time he had thought of her at all? The realization that had felled him the night before remained true in the morning: His devotion to Marie was a sentimental self-delusion, which he had given up long ago without even noticing. For that matter, the real eighteen-year-old Marie was probably nothing like the girl he had repeatedly resurrected in memory. Obviously, she wouldn’t be now, not if she had lived. But for all he knew, she had betrayed him while he was away. She hardly ever wrote, he told himself brutally, then felt ashamed. Why malign that sweet girl in his blue funk? Hating his room more than he hated moving, he went downstairs.

Mrs. Wiggins’s tea was stronger than her coffee, a coarse black China tea that stood up well to milk. He drank a large cup and ate toast. He had no appetite for her badly cooked eggs or dry chops, but the stimulant did him good.

Back in his room, he picked up the closed tintype case and bounced it in his hand. Smiling a little sardonically at the experiment, he pushed it open with his thumb. The image of the pretty girl was still a flat gray irrelevance. He was no longer shocked by its failure to move him, though some part of his mind grieved. He might as well throw it away. But he didn’t. Some caution, or perhaps a flickering thread of light in the back of his mind, led him instead to bury it in the bottom of his handkerchief box.

At the drugstore, he kept his customary hours. It was a busy morning. A warm wind during the night had brought in the kind of balmy day that presaged spring, and with it all the patients who had been kept indoors yesterday by the sleet. The newer customers with simple needs or doctors’ prescriptions to be filled were glad to see Hans, whose ruddy cheek and alert eye attracted them; the older ones, those who remembered the Ohio Ninth Infantry,
Die Neuner
, and those who needed a diagnosis, generally waited for Edward. He attended each one with forced concentration despite an incipient headache. Not even the newcomers, who were intimidated by the gaunt shadows under his cheekbones and his sunken eye, doubted the assurance with which he prescribed remedies and compounded dosages. Not even Hans.

That night he forced himself to attend a lecture on the
Reichpatentgesetz
, the new patent law in Germany. His head pounded. Saturday, he worked all day. Saturday night, he tried to lose himself in the raucous gaiety of a music hall but had to flee the noise and smoke. On Monday, his hand trembled in the morning, but he kept himself on the job. He was late to work on Tuesday; he took to walking instead of eating at midday. Hans began stepping forward to greet all customers. Edward’s condition worsened. Finally, the mother of one of his slain comrades in the Ninth came in, a woman who had known the Murers back in Germany. She leaned past Hans at the counter to peer at Edward hunched over in his chair behind the bead curtain.

“Is it one of his headaches?” she asked, in an undertone.

“He’s been like this for a week,” whispered Hans.

“So. Go take a cab, tell the driver to wait, and fetch Mr. Murer.”

“But—”

“Take the fare from the till if you are afraid Mr. Murer will not pay.”

“It’s not that, but—”

She waved away objections. “Tell Theodore Murer that Frau Lund is with his brother, and he must come. Now.” She turned the placard in the window to read
Closed
and pulled down the shade.

Hans returned with Theodore, who had the cabdriver deliver himself and Edward to the house in Mount Auburn. This time, Edward did not resist when Carl was sent around to the boardinghouse to pack a suitcase. Sophie installed him in the guest room. Hans and Carl took over the drugstore.

Although the symptoms of Edward’s collapse were unnervingly like those of his postwar debilitation, a few weeks of poor eating and finally some laudanum were physically nothing compared to two years of near starvation. Theodore was inclined to give him more laudanum, at least for a few days, but Sophie was against it. “He is ashamed of his use,” she said, “and it dampens his appetite. Let us try to bring him around without it.” She started Edward at once on soups and custards, carried up on a bed tray. When he failed to pick up his spoon, she hand-fed him small swallows, a few at a time. When he closed his eyes, she held his hand gently until he was willing to try again. As soon as she could move him to solid food, she did, always in small servings. To please her, he forced himself to use a fork even while food still stuck in his throat. He had not been able to bring himself to ask Carl to find a newly opened bottle of laudanum in his room; pride prevented his begging Theodore for more; and he suffered through the days wondering at the body’s insistence on living. Meanwhile, the weather cooperated by turning warm and dry. In the lengthening March afternoons, Sophie led him on walks in the neighborhood; they made excursions by carriage to the sylvan retreats of Burnet Woods, still leafless but picturesque and sunlit. He rejoined the family table. In spite of an apathy born of self-loathing, his physical health returned and with it a restlessness.

*   *   *

“It’s time to sell out to Hans, Edward,” said Theodore, one evening, leading Edward into his study after supper. “Here.” He held out a glass with a small splash of brandy.

“Should I?” asked Edward, not reaching for it.

“Certainly! What do you take me for? You are no drunkard, Edward, and you know it,” said Theodore, stabbing the air at him with a cigar, which he left unlit in deference to Edward’s damaged lung. “Besides, wine is—”

“—the foundation of civilization.”

“You mock me, but it is true. Where is the cradle of civilization if not the Mediterranean? And what grows there? The grape. The ancient Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans—they all drank wine. What better to stimulate the flow of conviviality, the soul of humanity? And brandy—”

Edward cut him short. “In Turkey, the site of Troy, they grow poppies.”

Theodore placed the glass on a table at Edward’s elbow, poured a larger glassful for himself, and sat down. “Edward, opiates consume the user. They isolate him; he does not eat. He gives no thought to his fellow man.”

“What you mean is, I’m all washed up.”

“That is exactly what I do
not
mean!” said Theodore, pounding the arm of his chair. He brought his temper under control. “No, but I do say that you need a change; you grow stale. I would be the same if—”

“—if you had moldered on at the store.”

Theodore waved aside the old quarrel impatiently. “After your recovery from the war, Edward, you took up many things. While Papa was alive, we played chamber music together, with Herr Schwartz, remember?”

“I was only the violist.”

“
Ja
, but you were good. Or what about that fencing master? You went to his school on Vine Street?”

“Dancing master was more like it; you know that—you were the real fencer. Anyway, that was before the war, not after.”

“So, so. Nevertheless, you did things. You got your medical training; you moved in the society of men. You came out to the laboratory and experimented. You invented new products. Your cure for chilblains allowed us to expand.”

“Any pharmacist can compound salves and remedies, Theodore. We both know that, and we both know it was your business sense that made the real difference.”

“Only half true! You are proud that your salves and remedies work, and so am I. Without a good product, a businessman has nothing to sell. And now to keep expanding, we need new products.”

“Hire younger men.”

“Edward, what I am saying is that when you take an interest, you contribute! Your mechanical suggestions for the production line paid off, too. You have a good mind; it needs to stretch again. The routine of serving individual customers—”

“—of caring for patients, Theodore. They are our neighbors—mine, anyway.”

“Some ever since Germany, and your comrades in the war—I know,” said Theodore, sympathetically, and yet with a touch of impatience. He started to light the cigar, remembered, and flung the match away. “Papa clung to Forty-Eight. For him everything always had to be measured by the revolution that failed. It was my big cause, too, but we lost. We came here. I put it behind me. What happened to you in your war was very terrible, but at least the Union was saved, enslaved men were set free. Don’t you ever get tired of it, Edward, always this looking back?”

“Tired of it? I’m sick of it! Sick of myself. Sick of being watched and pitied, yes. Sick of gratitude; sick of what follows—impatience at having to be grateful. Oh, the devil! That bum was right; nobody remembers anymore but the old mothers. Yes, Theodore, I am sick to my soul; we have all seen that. Nostalgic, you think. Impotent is more like it.” Edward, whose thin frame had become taut with anger, slumped back. He turned his face toward the fire. “In France, they call it ennui.”

Theodore, who had been taken aback by the vehemence of Edward’s outburst, was silent. In the soft semidarkness of the cluttered room, lit only by the fire and a small lamp, strong feeling ebbed away. If the two brothers had been strangers, they would have rubbed each other the wrong way. As it was, the attachment between them was strong.

“What I was going to suggest was travel,” Theodore said. “Why don’t you go somewhere?”

“Covington, maybe? Kansas?”

“I mean it; I am serious. New sights to make a new man. Not all of France is ennui, Edward—it is also gaiety and beauty and esprit. Or if not France, then Italy, England, maybe even Spain. Go back to Kiel if you want. You were eight when we left; you can only half remember it. Such lovely, gentle views in Holstein. Or go to Alsace—you remember the summers at Gran’marie’s house? Go to Switzerland. Take the waters at Baden-Baden.”

“You have something in mind.” It was a measure of Edward’s improved health that he could detect an unspoken purpose in Theodore’s pleading and be almost amused by it.

Theodore shrugged like a man caught out; his eyes twinkled. “There is something I want you to do. I want you to accompany Carl to Europe.”

“The Grand Tour! Stuff his Midwestern head with culture?” asked Edward, disbelieving.

“No—though that would not hurt. They are tabulae rasae, these American children of mine. That much Latin even they may know, though not a word of Greek. What do they know of music, of theater, of painting and art? The best Cincinnati has to offer,” he answered himself ironically.

“I speak with a twang myself,” said Edward. “I’m as much a hick as they are.”

“That you are not! You grew up with Papa and Mutter. And you still read,” said Theodore, pointing the cigar forcefully. He frowned as he caught the drift of his own thought. “Not that we have no reason to be proud in Cincinnati! It is a great city in a great country. The future lies on this side of the Atlantic, in the New World, you mark my words.”