The Heart Specialist (7 page)

The audience began to applaud as they had for the other prizes, but mechanically this time, just going through the motions. I could hear rustlings and muffled laughter. I could not see, of course, which may have been a blessing, but by the time I made it to the front of the room it was obvious that most of my classmates were not feeling friendly. After all, I was responsible for holding them there in the sweltering heat, and most of them were not bookish or concerned with school grades. Miss Symmers registered none of this. She stood above me smiling. I was supposed to collect the purse, the one that would pay my way to McGill, and then give my speech. I had rehearsed it many times, but all of a sudden it did not seem so straightforward. I stood at the podium, gazing out at the sea of glistening, blurry faces and realized I could not remember a word of it. I had scribbled the main points on cards, and I read from these now in a pinched and little voice. Not the speech I had painstakingly planned, but a choppy, truncated thing that could not have made much sense to anybody bothering to listen. Miss Symmers smiled bravely through it all and then came forward to embrace me, but I was already lurching away, heading for the exit. I fled blindly, without a plan, my heart pounding so hard it drowned out all other sounds.

The first thing I saw with any clarity after the fiasco was Miss Skerry’s face. She had raced after me, following me outside with my glasses. Laure came out next and gave me an unexpected hug. I had taken refuge under a willow at the far end of the school’s playing field. During the school year I had come here to read. It was at the edge of the school grounds where few girls ventured. Its branches dipped all the way to the grass, providing a natural cover.

“Your headmistresses will worry,” said Miss Skerry. “We ought to go and tell them you’re all right.”

I shook my head. My pride was still stinging so we stood together under the willow as the others began to file outside. Miss Skerry spoke softy to me, telling me it was all right, commending the speech, even though I felt I would die of shame for making such a hash of it. Eventually Miss Skerry sent Laure to tell Miss Symmers and Miss Smith where we were and to collect my purse.

“How will I face them?” I asked when we were alone.

Miss Skerry shrugged. “You’ve done nothing wrong, Agnes. I think you should go out there. Enjoy the graduation. Rejoice in the fact that you will be moving on to bigger and better things.”

I shook my head, having none of the faith of my former governess. Grandmother was quite adamant that my future held a move back to the small and dismal St. Andrews East.

We stood for a while longer behind the branches. A canvas awning had been set up in the middle of the field, under which tea and sweets had been laid out on a table. Several girls from the next grade down were serving food.

I spotted Grandmother walking across the lawn with the two headmistresses. Laure ran up to them and gave them the news of where I was and they turned and peered in my direction. They crossed the field with Laure to seek me out. Grandmother was not quite as willing as my teachers to forgive my gauche departure. She walked over to the table and started a conversation with Mrs. Banks Geoffreys. I raked my fingers through my hair, pulling loose a braid.

“Your hair!” said Laure, who had just made it back to the tree with Miss Symmers and Miss Smith. She retrieved a fallen ribbon and approached to reattach it, but I shook my head. “Oh Agnes,” she sighed. “I was just trying to help.”

I pulled out the other ribbon and pins, letting my hair down just as my headmistresses ducked under the branches into our hiding spot.

“I can fix it,” said Laure, more to the headmistresses than to me.

“I’m very good with hair.” And right there in front of them she began to braid it again, smiling sweetly as if she really had it in her power to set every awkwardness aright.

“She’s always been like this,” my sister explained, tugging at me fiercely. “She’s never cared about ordinary things.”

Miss Skerry intervened. “Agnes is not an ordinary girl, Laure. That has been clear for years now, and frankly it is what I appreciate most about her.”

Miss Smith laughed. And Miss Symmers, bless her, reached into her pocket and took out the purse for McGill. “It is true you are not ordinary, Agnes. Extraordinary is the word that best fits.”

As soon as Laure finished we walked out into the sunshine. The playing field had been recently mowed and mounds of cut grass were giving off a fresh, hopeful smell. In front of us groups of girls were laughing and talking. Some of them looked my way and waved. I waved back, then lifted my hair so the breeze could reach my neck. Suddenly I felt much better.

Janie Banks Geoffreys and two other girls approached us. They had seen Laure with her golden hair and fine looks and wanted to meet her. “It’s a pleasure, I’m sure,” Janie said, nodding her head once as if not wanting to show more enthusiasm until Laure had been assessed. “Are you a genius too, like your sister?”

Laure blushed. “Heavens no,” she said innocently. “Agnes is the clever one.”

Janie Banks Geoffreys smiled, but Miss Skerry’s expression turned fierce. Laure was just doing what girls did — downplaying her abilities — but Miss Skerry did not approve. Intelligence, she had told us repeatedly, was nothing to be ashamed of.

“Your sister is certainly special,” said Janie.

“Oh yes,” said Laure, not catching the underlying insult.

Janie was paying me back for forcing her to endure me as a roommate all year. She was not smart enough to think up a decent jibe. All she could manage was this sarcasm, a word whose Greek root, I had recently learned, meant to tear flesh like a dog. I longed for McGill, where a mind like Janie Banks Geoffreys’s would be barred from entry.

Miss Skerry’s hands twitched at her sides. She saw exactly what Janie was up to. She seemed about to intervene, perhaps to put Janie in her place, when Grandmother walked over. “Your mother pointed you out to me when I was at the tea table,” she said to Janie. “I am so pleased to meet you.”

Janie stepped back, eyeing her. Her friends exchanged glances.

“Your mother and I had a lovely chat.”

Janie’s eyes narrowed. The sensual mouth stretched into a practised smile as she waited to see where the conversation would go. She had not made up her mind whether she should be polite to Grandmother or dismissive.

“It is my understanding that you are to attend McGill this fall,” said Grandmother.

“She is?” I said before I could stop myself. Janie Banks Geoffreys could barely spell. If she had not cribbed my notes, she would never have passed the year.

“I’ll be an occasional,” Janie said, shrugging, as if anyone or his pet dog could gain admission.

“So your mother said. Well I think it is marvellous. I had no idea so many girls from your class had applied. I thought Agnes was the only one.”

“Oh no,” said Janie. She nodded at the girl to her left. “Marianna’s going too. There will be four of us including Agnes.”

“Do not include me,” I said, unable to lift my gaze from the lawn.

“As a matter of fact, Agnes,” said Grandmother brightly, “you will be joining them. My mind was quite changed by my chat with Janie’s mother.” McGill, Mrs. Banks Geoffreys had explained, was safe for girls. They were sheltered in separate classes, and unlike the men there was no pressure to take a degree. Most girls took only a course or two. Of those who had applied the previous year more than half were now engaged.

Miss Skerry was standing behind Janie and her friends, leaning against a tree. When I looked over at her she grinned.

I grinned back. Life was full of irony, another word that happened to come from Greek. Janie Banks Geoffreys would attend university, and — irony of ironies — I would be indebted to her for life. I squinted into the sunlight, blurring the governess’s small, oval face against the backdrop of leaves until her grin, like that of Lewis Carroll’s cat, was the only thing I could see.

5

FEBRUARY 1890

Puddles had sprung up all over campus, making the ground glitter. I was walking with Felicity Hingston, trying to listen to what she was saying, but I had to concentrate on keeping my feet dry, and Felicity’s voice kept merging with the water rushing off the mountains.

“You have got to read them, Agnes,” Felicity said, waving several newspapers that billowed madly in the wind. “
The Gazette
and
The Herald
have full-page stories. They even published your picture.”

Felicity stopped to show me. My graduation photograph from Misses Symmers and Smith’s stared at me with squinty eyes. I had been chubbier when it was taken and incapable of smiling. I immediately pushed it away. “I am so ugly!”

Felicity laughed. “It is quite the mug shot, isn’t it? You look all of twelve years old!”

“There ought to be a law against school-graduation photographs. They are painful.”

“Well,’’ said Felicity. “Forget your mug. The articles are far more flattering. You have stirred up quite a controversy.”

I groaned. Controversy was the last thing I needed right then. We fell silent as two young men came into sight, walking downhill in our direction. They gave us a wide berth, stepping to the very edge of the path. Instead of addressing us directly they started humming.

Felicity Hingston hunched her shoulders, looking up only after they had passed. Her cheeks were an angry red. “I cannot stand that.”

I nodded. In and of itself the tune was innocuous, but the way McGill boys flung it at us was far from anodyne. “She walks abroad a dandy with no buttons on her boots.” It was so catchy that sometimes I caught myself humming it.

It was sung when a girl was inappropriately dressed. I buttoned up my coat. I had attended McGill for four years now, with a year’s delay at the start of my studies due to a smallpox epidemic that had swept through Montreal in the autumn of 1885. They were four of the most splendid years I could have imagined, but almost every week that song had been flung at me. Perhaps my stockings were snagged, or my boots showed flecks of mud, or my sleeve inadvertently revealed an elbow in the library. I had never attended much to these matters, but the McGill boys were like watchdogs, reminding me and the other women enrolled in the Donalda degree program that our presence was a privilege we must earn at every step. The “controversy,” as Felicity called it, would not help matters.

I had excelled academically, which had not come as a surprise, but socially I had also blossomed. There were nine girls in my class. We were different from the occasionals, girls like my former roommate, Janie, who flitted around campus like butterflies for a session or two and then disappeared. The Donaldas, of which my year was the third in McGill history, were all as serious about learning as I was. And they liked me. Twice I had been voted class president. For the first time in my life I had friends, peers who understood me. I was active on campus and in the fall had become the first female editor of McGill’s paper,
The Fortnightly
.

This spring I would graduate. I had packed my final term with science courses, supplementing Latin (Horace’s
Epistles
) and philosophy (the presocratics all the way to nineteenth-century positivism) with zoology (a course taught by McGill’s principal, Sir William Dawson), physics and math. These choices were not whimsical. I had a plan.

In February I had screwed up my courage and written the university registrar requesting admission to McGill’s faculty of medicine. Three days later a written answer came back: a curt, unequivocal “No.”

“Let us sit,” said Felicity, pointing at the steps to the Redpath Building where honours classes were given. “We are early.”

I squinted at the sun. “Is that not Laure up ahead?”

We advanced toward my sister, who was standing alone on the stairs, looking out over the city. She seemed taken aback to see us.

“She looks like a Rossetti painting,” said Felicity. “Only the courtly lover is missing.”

I laughed. Laure did look beautiful. No one would dare hum the buttons-off-her-boots song at my pale and golden sister.

“Done for the day?” I asked, arriving at her side.

Laure nodded. She was sixteen. Grandmother had enrolled her in a British-literature class offered by a fellow whom the students had nicknamed Easy-A Atkins.

“Your sister’s a celebrity,” said Felicity, huffing up the stairs. “Her name’s in all the papers.”

“So I heard,” Laure replied. “Professor Atkins spoke of it in class this morning. He says she is overreaching.”

“He is parroting the editors at
The Herald
.” Felicity’s face darkened. “He is not alone, although some of his colleagues have been daring enough to disagree. A number of the governors and professors feel it is high time that the McGill medical faculty let women in. The medical schools of Europe have done it for years. There are hundreds of female physicians in Vienna and London. The University of Toronto now admits us. Even stodgy old Queen’s University in Kingston does! It puts McGill to shame.”

Laure was about to continue, so I checked her. “I must hear what was printed. Read.”