The Heart Specialist (5 page)

4

JUNE 1885, MONTREAL

It is sad but true that people tend to dwell on the troubles of their lives and forget the riches. I am no exception, for in this account of my early days I am skimming over the two years I spent in Miss Skerry’s company out at my grandmother’s farm, which I count among the happiest years of my life. Of course, I did not realize how happy I was while I was living them. Happiness is a strange thing. It is something I tend to recognize only after it has passed, when I realize I miss it.

In Miss Skerry I discovered a companion every bit as intellectually driven as I was. I had not met anyone like her, and it freed me in ways at which I still marvel. Although I could not know it at age thirteen, when she arrived at the Priory to take charge of me she was a mentor, dropping from the sky as Athena did in
The Odyssey
to guide the fatherless Telemachus. It was Miss Skerry’s idea that I leave St. Andrews East. She instigated the plan and worked tirelessly to ensure its success, even though she knew it meant we would have to separate. The year I turned fifteen Miss Skerry announced she had taught me all she could. There were gaps in her own education — algebra and geometry — which would become gaps in mine if I did not get myself out of the Priory and off to a regular school.

She did not boast about how splendidly she had prepared me in other respects. I was exceptionally strong in natural history. It was our mutual passion. She had also taught me a great deal about literature and history. I read widely in both English and French and was fluent in dead languages — Latin and Greek — which Miss Skerry had learned from her father.

Just before I turned fifteen Miss Skerry discovered an educational institution that she thought would suit me — Misses Symmers and Smith’s School in Montreal. She arranged a visit so I could write the entrance exam. She sat with me on the train, waited three hours in the corridor while I wrote the exam, and, after I had won a full scholarship, presented such a strong case for my enrolment that Grandmother had to accept.

I found myself in June of 1885 in a tiny room with a crack on the ceiling fanning out at one end like the River Nile, and a girl called Janie Banks Geoffreys snoring in the bed beside me. Janie was lying on her back with her limbs flung out in all directions and the covers kicked to the floor. She mumbled something and heaved a sigh. She was the prettiest, most popular girl in my year at Misses Symmers and Smith’s. I could not stand the sight of her.

For eight long months Janie and I had tolerated each other. We had been assigned to the same room in September on the hopeful theory that she could assist my integration into the school’s social life and that I, with my brilliant performance on the entrance test, could help with her studies. The road to hell is paved with hopeful theories.

Now it was June and both the crack and my roommate would soon be things of my past, a thought that cheered me. We were graduating at noon at a ceremony to which our families had been invited. Grandmother, Laure, and Miss Skerry, who had spent the year tutoring Laure back in St. Andrews East, would attend. Later that evening the four of us would board the six o’clock train departing from Montreal’s Windsor Station, and close this bittersweet chapter of my life.

I checked my pocket watch, a heavy old thing inherited from Grandfather White, and saw it was ten minutes to six. I had slightly more than an hour before the wake-up bell rang, shaking everyone, including my roommate, into some version of consciousness. I put on my glasses, new since Easter, when Miss Symmers realized I could not see a foot in front of me. At first the frames had cut my nose, but I’d bound the bridge with cloth and yanked the ear rails loose. These days I hardly noticed them. And how the world had changed! I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole, stumbling into a garden of delights.

Janie’s face jumped into focus. Even this was delightful in its way. Before my glasses I had always looked down when she was around. Now the face of my roommate, like every other face I came across, drew me like a flame, offering up all kinds of intriguing details. Acquiring glasses had been momentous, similar to the day I had first used a microscope. I would never forget the awe I had felt all those years ago, peering through the eyepiece.

Janie’s mouth was sensual, but if one looked closely one saw pulled-down corners. In public, with her gang of similarly pretty, popular girls, she was always laughing. In the privacy of our bedroom, however, when she thought she was alone, her sadness showed. Janie’s mother was in a second marriage. Janie was boarding at Misses Symmers and Smith’s not to learn but to keep her stepfather’s house child-free.

My bloomers and school uniform were on the chair beside Janie’s head. I swung myself up and reached for them. Almost immediately Janie’s eyes opened. “It’s barely dawn, Saint Agnes.”

The nickname was another thing I would not miss. I had endured it since October, when we had studied Keats and the Romantic period in English class. It was not a compliment. I was a newcomer, a country girl who in a few short months had beaten the school’s top students, earning the highest average ever for a graduating girl. Janie had coined the nickname, predicting I would be a virgin till the day I died, just like my martyred predecessor.

“Why are you putting on that old thing?” Janie’s lower lip hung open, revealing a row of straight, white teeth. “We’re allowed to wear what we want, remember?” She rose on one elbow and grabbed her own uniform from where it lay crumpled on her bed. “Between you and I,” she added, “this thing gets burned the minute I get home.”

I gazed at the fractured ceiling. Janie Banks had been a pensioner at Symmers and Smith’s for ten years and in that time had not figured out how to use an object pronoun. Like so many of the girls here she didn’t care a fig for learning.

“Yoo-hoo,” said Janie, pulling me back from my thoughts. “Where do you fly away to, Agnes? Sometimes you look so utterly vacant. I just said we can wear real clothes.”

When I shrugged she leapt off the bed as if she had scented a mouse. “Give it here,” she said, standing over me. “We’re all wearing pretty things today. You must too.”

Janie opened our closet, revealing a large collection of dresses that belonged primarily to her. She withdrew the exception — a plain white cotton frock. “Here.”

I shook my head. White thickened me and the tapered bodice made me think of weddings.

Janie held it up, jiggling the hanger so it danced like a puppet. “Come now, Agnes. It is perfectly saintly!”

I slipped my tunic over my head. “I must go.”

Janie stopped jiggling. “What do you mean, ‘go’? You’ll miss breakfast.” Her expression changed suddenly from stupefied to sly. She sat on my bed. “What is this about, Agnes? I detect that something distinctly unsaintly is going on.”

Janie’s mind had one track. It was almost laughable how for her all roads led to boys. I fastened my sash, self-conscious with Janie’s eyes studying me closely. “I have to run an errand. I will not have another chance.”

“An errand,” Janie repeated. She reached for my watch and squinted at it. “At six o’clock in the morning.” She stuck out a shapely leg. “Here, pull the real one, why don’t you?”

The tension broke and we laughed.

“Is it a man? Come on, confess.”

Light was pouring through the flimsy curtain. Girls would soon be in the halls, lining up for the toilets. If I were going to leave it would have to be now. “You’ll cover for me?”

Janie smiled. “This is rich. I never dreamed you had it in you.”

“Just say I am practising my speech if anyone asks.” I was to give the valedictory that day. It was a perfect excuse.

Janie grinned. “Is he handsome?”

I pursed my lips in a smile I hoped looked something like the Mona Lisa’s, grabbed my sweater and left. Rumours would be buzzing like blackflies when I returned, discretion not being in Janie Banks Geoffreys’s repertory, but frankly I was past caring. By tonight school would be done with. Let them have their fantasies.

THE CITY WAS FULL
of snow. Not real snow of course as it was practically summer, but something so close it looked like snow as I stepped into the street — pollen from the cottonwoods. I grabbed at flakes of it floating in the viscous air. Every June this happened in Montreal, and in St. Andrews East too — a sort of winter out of season.

Misses Symmers and Smith’s School was perched on the steepest part of Peel Street in the shadow of Mount Royal. I ran down the hill, stopping only when I reached flatter ground at Sherbrooke Street. I continued a little farther south and then turned east, into the commercial district. On the corner a boy was hawking newspapers in a clear, sweet voice. A tram clanged by under hissing wires. The odours of springtime in Montreal were stronger than ever that day. This was the city of my birth. It had informed me in my earliest childhood and I loved to explore it. Because the streets were considered dangerous for girls I had not had much chance to leave the school grounds. I knew the Windsor train station quite well and the route from it to my school. I also knew the Church of St. John the Evangelist down on St. Urbain Street, where most of my classmates and I went to worship on Sundays. The instant the service ended, however, we were marched up the hill to our dormitories.

I scanned the heads bobbing in front of me on the raised wooden sidewalk. Nearly every time I walked downtown I saw him. Today would likely be no exception, although my glasses had changed things a little. For it was not actually him that I saw, not that this dampened my pleasure or my pain. I would catch a glimpse of a dark head or a shoulder and stop dead in my tracks. Sometimes it was not looks but the way he walked, or even the rakish tilt of his hat. Those first seconds when hope surged were so good they made up for the regret when he finally turned around, revealing a face I did not know.

No one was paying me the slightest attention. They never did. It was my one consolation for being short and unprepossessing. I could walk unobserved through the city’s streets pretending I was just a pair of eyes detached from my woman’s body. No one would think to interfere with me.

I loved walking in Montreal, where people did not know my name. Many times over the course of this year I had wondered what it would be like to live here and make my home in so big a place. There was little chance of this, of course. Grandmother had made it plain that I was needed in St. Andrews East for the coming year, not to mention all the years that would follow.

While Misses Symmers and Smith’s School had enabled me to leave my childhood home, it had been a mixed success. The curriculum included a daily course in domestic arts, in which I was made to cut and sew things. I was working hard in mathematics, but it was the only subject that challenged me. Science at this school did not involve empirical observation, dissections or microscope work. For most of the year we learned the names of distinguished men and the dates on which they had made discoveries. The Latin course was so basic that after four or five classes I was granted permission to sit outside in the corridor and read novels. Miss Symmers and Miss Smith tried hard but they were no match for my governess and I began to understand how lucky I had been in having Miss Skerry come to our home.

In early October, when the leaves started to drop from the trees, my grades began dropping too. Miss Skerry tried everything to rekindle my interest, but I was too disappointed to heed her. In November McGill announced that it was looking for women to enrol in its undergraduate arts program for the third year in its history. Miss Symmers told us that a purse would be given to the girl in the graduating class with the highest overall academic average so that she might continue her studies.

It was what I needed. I started to apply myself with as much effort to domestic arts as to memorizing stories about Sir Isaac Newton and his apple. In March I wrote my university entrance exam and was accepted.

There was only one hitch: my grandmother. Even after I had told her of the purse and assured her it would not cost a penny to send me, she would not accept it. The idea of my living alone without her chaperoning skills in the city of my father was beyond her ken. Miss Skerry told me not to worry. She said I must do my best at my studies and things would work out. I was not so certain. Once Grandmother formed an opinion she stuck to it.

The smell of baking bread pulled me from my thoughts.
Pain frais
, announced a hand-painted sign hanging in a bakery window. Fresh pain, I thought, playing with the language, as opposed to the stale kind I was so accustomed to. My mouth watered for a simple roll or a croissant, but I had no money.

St. Catherine Street was shabbier than I recollected. I squinted at addresses, repeating the one I was searching for like an incantation. I became so involved I walked right past the unassuming greystone. From the street it seemed small, but it was one of those buildings that makes up in length for what it lacks in breadth. The stones were stained black except for a small pale patch near the door where a little bronze plaque had once been affixed with my father’s name engraved on it. A wooden sign now hung over the door with a picture of a needle and a spool of thread.

The windows on the lower storey were barred, giving the place a slightly forbidding air, but up above they were open. My gaze continued upwards to the topmost rooms just below the eaves and I wondered if whoever lived there knew the building’s sad history. People were walking toward me on the sidewalk so I slipped past garbage crates into an adjacent alley.

The alley was so narrow that I could reach out and simultaneously touch the stones on either side. There were only two windows that looked into it from my old house, both lined with bars. I pulled myself up to the back window, but the pane was so filthy that all I ended up seeing was my own dusty reflection. A dog began to bark so I dropped back down and retraced my steps to St. Catherine Street. I was within a few feet of the light and noise when a voice called out for me to stop. A man had stepped out of the house. In the morning light he sort of shimmered, more ghost than human. I could not see much more than his profile. He was not tall but made up for this by his girth. I was straining forward, trying to make out his face, when he spoke again.