Deathwatch - Final Read online

  “We’re pioneers,” I said. This was slow, careful work, but not more difficult than what a good seamstress could do.

  “There’ve not been more than a handful of successful separations. Course, it’s not like they were buried one inside the other’s chest, like some I’ve seen. Or those cases where the children lie head to head—like human pinwheels.”

  I twitched at the words, the needle caught in the girl’s scant flesh. Abby moaned in her sleep.

  “Give her just a touch more ether,” Saunders said casually—one colleague to another—and I marveled at this second miracle: if the girls were separate, he and I, by virtue of our work were joined.

  - 4 -

  Saunders had left me to go dose himself with the first drink he’d taken in a week; so I sat alone waiting in the cool of the darkened room, keeping vigil while the girls slept off the anesthesia. There wasn’t much to do; I checked their pulses often, watched the color slowly returning to their waxy faces. Twice Abby moaned lightly, and Eleanor’s hands twitched in a dry rasp against the coverlet, startling me briefly while I brooded on the peculiar life I’d led during the past month.

  I’d expected to do a sort of penance to make up for being expelled—had, in fact, exiled myself to a low status job in a place that was far from home and friends. But I hadn’t been prepared for the sheer isolation that made me feel I was living in a sort of ghost house—a microcosmic Brigadoon—that appeared or vanished at will.

  The doctor had no patients—or none that I ever saw. Each morning as we were finishing breakfast and the hall clock chimed nine, he consulted his pocket watch, replaced it in his black wool vest, then clumped down the hallway to his office. I don’t know what he did there. Occasionally he left the house, his medical bag in hand and said he was going out on a house call. But there were none of the flurried knocks in the middle of the night, anxious voices asking for care, or medicines; no sickly wailing babies soothed by worried mothers, none of the constant activity I associated with a doctor’s busy practice.

  Apart from delivery boys, there were no visitors either. The first week, I assumed the heavy brooding weather kept the doctor’s friends from dropping by. But by the end of the month, no one had come. When I looked out the window at the frozen landscape, the fantastically whittled drifts and blowing snow, I felt as if the rest of the world outside the house had suddenly come to a stop.

  That was outside; inside I felt something that was equally stifling. Routines are often soothing, they allow life to mesh neatly. But in Saunders’s house, they were like the strong silky threads of a spider web: nearly invisible, but capable of holding a man mute, fast.

  Mornings, I tried to teach Abby and Ellie the rudiments. They were bright enough; but their deformity got in the way. They sat on a bench, like those in any country schoolroom, but forced to use one hand, their papers flew from the desktop.

  “Stuart,” one or the other would announce, after I’d set them to writing compositions or doing a raft of sums. I’d look up from Saunders’s grimy anatomy book and meet two pairs of eyes.

  It was easier for me to get up and retrieve the yellow lined paper than it was for them. I thought I’d solved the problem by fixing the pages down with small balls of wax. But there would be a brief silence followed by the tapping sound of pencils bouncing on the floor, and once, a gasp when Abby upset a jar of ink over both of them.

  We tried oral lessons and reading aloud. I took to using a blackboard.

  “Now, repeat after me,” I’d say, hearing Ruth’s scrape outside the door, or the doctor’s cough.

  They wouldn’t though. They only peered up at me, small wry smiles on their faces. Sometimes one or the other asked a question:

  “Were you ever in love?”

  “Do you like us?”

  I ignored these questions, but the sound of my own voice droning geography lessons and Latin verbs made me feel like I was living in a vacuum. I guessed the school work bored them—they made so many slow halting trips to the bathroom—and of course, if one went to squat over the double seated box of a ‘toilet’ Gabriel had built, her twin had no choice but to sit dangling her legs over the other chamber pot concealed in the cabinet.

  In the evenings I sat in the library poring over surgical literature and looking at sketches and drawings and reading the doctor’s notes. Overhead, I’d hear the sound of the wheels of their toy sheep turning hollowly against the floor boards. Saunders had forbidden them to cry out while I studied, and their unnatural silence made it all the eerier. And that thin noise began to haunt my sleep and invade the quiet time with my books. My head would jerk up from my work at the sound of the metal wheels ratcheting along, the small bump when the stuffed animal tipped against the windowseat which had been covered in a strip of old carpeting. Stifled giggles, whispers. Then at eight o’clock, Ruth would ready them for bed. The sameness of it all grated on me, and from downstairs I could have set my watch by the little sounds from the nursery. Ruth drawing the drapes and bringing the girls cups of chocolate, the spoons clinking against the china. The final trip to the bathroom, and then my name called lightly on the chill air of the house.

  “Stuart…we’re ready.”

  At the sound, the doctor, half drunk, would pop like a jack in the box out of his office, his face red, his collar hanging like a tiny flag, and eye me up and down.

  “They’re calling you, Granville. Go on up. Why else am I paying you?” And he would reel away toward the cellar—or if he was too unsteady, bellow for Gabriel to fetch him another bottle.

  Saunders had conceived the idea that I should be the one to read them a bedtime story, so I would tuck a book under my arm and go up to that room, the fire sunk down to a pale strip of orange light on the hearth, the shadowy faces of the girls lying on their bed, propped with pillows. What Saunders never knew was that my book was window-dressing. When I climbed the stairs each night, it was the girls who spun the tales; Ruth banished, their voices a dark whisper.

  “Mother is here again, you know,” Ellie said. I’d been there just a little more than a week. Outside, the January snow spat against the windows, closing us all in.

  “Her name is Regina,” Abby added. “Regina Cahill, before she became Saunders.”

  “She comes in our dreams.”

  I was sitting on a low, red leather hassock alongside the bed, my hands limp between my upraised knees. The girls peered down at me, and suddenly I felt absurdly small.

  “Do you have the same dream?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” Ellie shook her head. “It’s better that way, don’t you think?” She paused, picking at the coverlet. “She likes you. She wants the surgery soon—”

  “Ssh,” Abby punched her sister lightly. “She killed herself, and now we know why. I dreamed it.” Her blue eyes were very bright. Then she closed them as if she’d gone back inside her dream and was searching for the details.

  “After we were born, Father didn’t want her. No he didn’t,” she said. Her voice was sad, mournful. “Mother understood. He was afraid there’d be more babies like us or worse.”

  I jumped. This was nothing a twelve year old—a completely sheltered twelve year old—could know, I thought.

  “It was a long time, years and years, and her heart was full, but there was no one to love.”

  Her voice had the sound of a recitation, and it unnerved me. I stared at her, and for a second she seemed so much older than the ringleted child lying on the pillow, her ballerina doll with dripping, flesh-pink cloth legs cuddled in her arm.

  “It was one of our teachers,” Ellie put in, excitedly. “John Price—he was older than you—nearer our Mama’s age. Almost thirty-five. He was good looking. but not as handsome as you.”

  “He found out,” Abby said, her eyes remote, hazy as a sleepwalker’s in the dim lamplight.

  “Andrew,” I breathed. “He killed her….”

  “No. She was quick with John’s child,” Ellie said. “It was a terrible time, a time
of confusion. Part of her singing to the sleeping child within, most of her terrified, knowing the doctor’s eye was sharp. She meant to go away to have it, and to keep it safe. She told herself knowing it lived—somewhere—would be enough.”

  Abby clutched the doll more tightly, her voice tinged with the same unearthly tone. “A drug in the tea…he knew, you see. He noticed she’d stopped taking wine with dinner. Mother felt his arms around her, lifting her while she slept heavy-headed as an opium eater. She felt him carrying her bulk down and down and into the office. One light glowed.

  ” ‘No Regina,’ he whispered, ‘No more monsters.’ And then Mother felt the hard metal of the curette inserting itself like a cold snake between her legs. It was gone. He cut the baby out, limb by limb and bit by bit.”

  “Dear god,” I said. Was this the source of the man’s desperation?

  Abby went on, her whispery voice overriding mine. “He sent John away. After that there were only lady teachers. He said he forgave Mother’s infidelity, and yet, there it was between them. Always. It was in his eyes, and he wouldn’t touch her. He drank more and more. He went to one of those low women, someone in an alley. She was drunk, too, when he put it up her, banging her against some broken down alley fence. He taunted Mother with it, ‘I had a whore’ he shrieked.” Abby paused, and I saw her tongue creep out to lick her lips.

  “Mother found him in bed with the last governess. The girl was wearing one of her own soft blue satin gowns, ripped down the center, the halves lying like jagged wings against the white sheets. She knew she’d never shut out the hideous picture: Andrew’s mouth fastened on the girl’s ruby-tipped breast, his fingers plunged between her naked white legs, her hands burrowing against his back, her voice a low scream.

  ” ‘Am I to have nothing?’ Mother bristled. ‘Nothing and no one?’ Her stomach was in a knot, her mind whirling. The girl sat up, clutching the sheet to her breasts—but not before Mother saw the sheen of the moisture on her full thighs and the bold light in her eyes.

  ” ‘Get out, Regina,’Andrew said. ‘Women who make monsters are not wanted here.’

  “The girl tittered, and Mother fled.

  “It would only get worse, she told herself. She was a prisoner here condemned to a loveless life, forced to watch him flaunt his lust for others. He would not let her love anyone—even him. Mother knew there were drugs in the locked medicine cabinet, she didn’t care if it was quick or slow or easy or painful. She latched the outer door of the office and went in; then she broke the glass pane on the closet door with her fist and took the first thing that came to her hand. Inside the small brown vial there was a white powder, sparkling crystals. She spilled it into her palm, and she began to eat.” Abby stopped.

  “She’s here right now,” Ellie said. “She comes to us at night. Can’t you smell her?” She wrinkled her nose, sniffing.

  I caught a faint perfume: Parma violets. My eyes were dragged to the bedclothes, I knew Ruth scented the cupboards with lavender.

  “Violets,” Ellie whispered. “The first scent of spring.”

  The air seemed suddenly drenched with warm rain, earth.

  “When we’re separated, they’ll make our new clothes from hers,” Abby said. I saw she was livelier, more alert. “She likes you Stuart, the set of your shoulders, the way your eyes light. You don’t smile enough—ah, but when you do.”

  I felt something brush my cheek, soft as fingertips trailing beloved flesh.

  Ellie cocked her head. “She wants the surgery, sends him dreams to hurry. Ruth has been watering his wine, more and more. His hands will be steady, keep on with your work. She watches you.”

  I gave a small gasp, thinking back to times when I’d felt someone’s keen stare while I turned the thin leaves of Saunders’s heavy texts. Once the candle had gone out, and I’d heard the rustling sound of silk as if someone hurried from the room, wide skirts fluttering against the door jamb.

  “You’re her second chance. We’re her salvation.”

  “Kiss us goodnight, Stuart,” Abby said, and I leaned across the bed kissing each of their foreheads in turn. Abby’s small arm went round my neck. She clung to me.

  “Soon, Stuart,” she whispered against my ear. I nodded thinking she meant the surgery.

  “But only one of us can be chosen,” Eleanor sad sadly. “Only one can survive….”

  “Hush,” I soothed, putting out the lamp. I left the nursery, the rational part of my mind saying it was nothing more than the fancies of two crippled girls, an imaginary game got up between them. Compensation it was called. Lonely, motherless, they invented her again. And lonely and friendless, isolated, I’d let them bewitch me with their half-truths and wishful thinking.

  After that night, I made Ruth stay during the story hour. I didn’t want to listen to or encourage their strange fantasies; but Abby and Ellie had no interest in my stories. I read tale after tale in Scheherezade; but I read to a pair of slack-faced dolls, their blank eyes upturned and fixed stonily on the white nursery ceiling. The only sound—apart from my thick voice—was the small, steady pricking of Ruth’s needle—altering Regina’s old gowns—in anticipation of their surgery.

  ***

  “What is there to do or see hereabouts?” I asked the doctor one evening just before dinner. The month was dragging on. I felt the walls closing in; the silence was oppressive. It was just past five o’clock, he stood with his back to me looking past the library window at dead darkness. I sat in my usual place, a drift of papers and books under my nose, my eyes bleary from the dim light.

  “Nothing,” he said. He inhaled a small brown cigar, and I saw its glowing tip wink in the reflection of the glass. “I don’t pay you to sightsee or carouse. I pay you to teach my daughters and bone up on surgical techniques.”

  “Am I your paid prisoner?” I said.

  He stared back at me, his eyes hard. “What is there to do?” he mocked. “And don’t bother asking Ruth or Gabriel. They won’t answer.”

  He left abruptly, but not before he’d pulled another weighty volume—A Textbook of Pathology—from the shelves and slammed it on the flat of the mahogany desk.

  I was no slave I told myself; it was only a question of waiting ’til he fogged out some night, snoring on a couch or in his bed. So, twice I ventured out in search of company, taking the doctor’s carriage. The first time I drove north toward Rhinebeck, just inside the town limits I saw a white elephant of a place called the Beekman Arms Hotel, the oldest inn in America. Eagerly, I hitched the horse and sprinted up the brick walkway.

  But it was dead winter, and apart from a few tight-lipped locals, there was no one to share an ale, or a joke with. I was a stranger, I was not stopping there, so the men talked around me in low voices and I felt walled off by their quick glances, by the way they turned back to their own cliques. I drank a brandy by the taproom fireplace. Northerners were narrow and suspicious, I thought. This wouldn’t happen in the south. I stood up to go, paid my bill. I was going out the door when I caught the sound of the barkeep’s quiet voice: “Lives in the house with the freaks. Teaches em.”

  “You can teach a two-headed cow to dance,” another voice answered, “but that don’t make it any prettier to look at.”

  I went out, wincing at the sound of soft, brittle laughter behind me. Earlier, the barkeep had asked me if I needed a room; I’d said no more than I lived nearby, that I was a tutor living with a doctor named Saunders. Stupid. I should have known better than to mention his name within 20 miles of the place.

  The second time, I drove south toward Poughkeepsie determined to break the silent spell-like atmosphere of the house.

  I cannot say what sent me back before I’d gone even two or three miles, unless it was the sight of the Roosevelt’s house lit to the roofline, with a vast array of carriages entering, jockeying for spaces. There was obviously some huge party going on. I could see the dark silhouettes of figures moving up wide porch steps toward the doors. From across the frozen fields, I h
eard the distant sound of an orchestra, the violins clear and sweet.

  Perhaps it was the thought of all those welcomed guests, people who knew one another as friends and lovers—and the contrast of my own loneliness. I lost heart, turned the horse around and returned feeling gloomier than when I’d left.

  ***

  Now, I sat, watching the twins return to consciousness in the doctor’s office. I felt a change coming. Certainly during the surgery, Saunders had been a different man—talkative, friendly. Perhaps the twins’ deformity had been the thing that weighed all of them down, and their freedom would release him, too. With the thought, Saunders stepped lightly across the threshold, a bottle and two glasses in hand.

  “It was good work, and good work calls for a celebration,” he said, pouring. “Drink up, Stuart.”

  It was the first time he ever called me Stuart, and the wine was champagne—another first for me. I liked the giddy way it frothed inside the glass he handed me.

  “Smooth,” I said.

  “As silk,” he answered, and we both laughed, though I wasn’t sure why. He called for more champagne and poured a round for Gabriel and Ruth, whose wide anxious eyes informed me they’d never seen the doctor in such a good humor.

  We were both drunk and well into the fourth bottle when Ellie came to, her voice cutting like a scalpel through my champagne glaze.

  “Pain,” she screamed. “It hurts, it hurts, oh it hurts!” She struggled like a beached fish, and I saw the spasms take her. It was the after-effects of the ether; she began to gag.

  Christ! She’s vomiting, she’ll drown! If she aspirates it, she’ll die for sure, I thought, panic invading me. I banged the wine glass down, ignoring the sound of it shattering, and raced to her bedside. I rolled her to one side, thumped her back, then thrust my fingers deep inside her mouth to snatch at the slimy clots of vomitus, scraping my skin against her teeth.

  Only one of us can survive

  Her hollow words jumped in my mind.

  “No,” I shouted. “No! C’mon, Ellie, breathe, breathe!”