The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus Read online

  She gave her hardest look. “WRONG. 183-4 to 193-4! —Even so, for a town the size of La Verne, you’re at least the first today to ‘get’ my latest attempt. I try things. They sometimes go unnoticed. Anyways, you’re close enough for graduate work.”

  I laughed. She coughed—her laughter’s substitute. I absorbed one lateral rake from her poisoned eyes and inwardly admitted, “I think I’m a little in love here….”

  Is there ever anything except intelligence?

  Then, as my own eyes sought some moment’s added heat from hers (she was a woman, I was a man), her piping oboe voice conceded in a hurry half-mechanical, “About this picture you’re s’dead-set to blunder into the story of: Around 1849, no, in 1849, June fourth to be more clock-logical”—she paused for the nod too quickly won from me—“a sailor named Sanders Woolsey came home to La Verne from his eight-month voyage to the Far East. Sandy’s ship, The John Gray, brought back tea, Canton ware, and ginger. He’d sailed into Chicago (then a going port, thanks to their dredging Canada’s waterways). You can imagine the meal his mother and sisters fixed, his first night home. Baked chicken, be my guess. And Sandy most-like so full of tales: monkeys, the pagodas, what have you. They ate that dinner at their farm three miles due east more toward Matherville. And it was Sandy Woolsey who pretty well ruined us out-this-way. Was Sandy brought us cholera. Real contagious stuff, ooh yeah. His poor mother and sisters would be dead in six days, along with most of three households, their nearest neighbors. Two those homes still stand, back by the propane distributorship you passed but never noticed. A new doctor’d just arrived in town. Boy so recent to practicing medicine, he had price tags still strung on his best surgical tools … —You think I’m exaggerating what-all I got in here, do ye? Think I made up that about his tools?”

  “No, so far, I trust you. You clearly know your stuff. And, seeing how packed your place is (I mean with excellent things), your having proof of the man’s having lived around here wouldn’t be a shock. So the fellow in this picture isn’t the sailor but the new town doctor, right? My only question is whether you’ll need to stand up to run fetch that doctor’s bag, or have you maybe got it tucked somewhere even closer?”

  “Look harder at me, son. I’ve never ‘run’ toward (or, comes to that, ‘from’) anything in my whole life spent here. However, you’re not totally stupid….”

  She bent, first with a broken-backed degree of inconvenience then with visible pain. (Now I knew: she would never let me see her actually walk.) From beneath the cash-register (her abacus eyes steadily tallying me), Theodosia lifted a cardboard box intended for canned green beans. From it she hoisted a goodly leather satchel. Brown, it was bigger than the doctors’ black bags seen in movies and pharmaceutical ads. Clanking it atop her glass-counter, she expertly opened its silver latch. Her eyes never abandoning mine, she now slid toward me one small saw.

  Ash-wood handle, a fine blue Sheffield blade. Amputation-worthy, that heavy to the touch. And suspended from its cutting-edge, one price-tag still dangled from string. “Dollar-fifty,” she read aloud. “Then.”

  This implement she whisked from me and shoved back—as the satchel dropped to the flooring just beneath her stool. As she rushed right on, “Doctor’s name was Frederick Markus Petrie, since you asked. He’d just turned thirty. Had been in town less than three weeks when Ordinary Seaman ‘Sandy’ Woolsey, twenty-one, brought sickness home out here to us. Morning after the Woolsey ladies’ homecoming feast, their boy begged to stay in bed till nine. By noon admitted he was pretty sickly, had to ask for help when they seen how sick he’d been most everywhere. First the sailor’s older sisters tried treating him. They were proud girls, skilled in home arts. Glad, I guess, to finally lay eyes on a boy who’d been far away so long. Sandy was a beauty, people admitted, platinum hair. Better-looking than his spinster sisters, who could’ve used such beauty in a town harsh as La Verne … then.

  “Before the Civil War I guess we were even a more backward little place, being out this far from Kewanee. And just the idea of a local boy getting to sail clear to China and back without being drowned, well, a certain kind of fame must’ve hooked onto that fellow. And hadn’t he brought his mother, to dress up her plain farm mantel, one of those ivory carvings with little worlds inside other little worlds and all shaped from one hunk of tusk? I have that in back, though it’s not cheap….”

  “I’ve seen plenty of those. I can live without touching that. Please, go on….”

  Now we seemed in this together. Sunset’s last pink light squandered itself along the edge of everything glass, serious evening drawing down hard around us. Darkness mostly had us now. Opening a box of kitchen matches, Theodosia lit one candle.

  III.

  “PRETTY SOON, ‘a little feverish’ turns more toward ‘diarrhea.’ Till their bringing another basin becomes, ‘Maybe too much for us. Send for Doc Eaton.’ But old Eaton, he’d just retired, see? And there was only that recent graduate, so new he yet boarded with Hester Brinsley, and was still out looking for some rental of his own.

  “They say the eldest Woolsey girl, which’d be Dorothea, found the boy-doctor out this way having just paid his first month’s rent on a little house about the size of this, not an eighth of a mile back toward the Coal Valley turnoff. Dorothea rushes in, says, ‘We’ve got something. At home, we tried and take care of it, but Sandy’s having something bad to where we … ’ and fainted. She had rushed out here so fast, see. The horse, a nag, was lathered. So there stands our young Doctor Markus Petrie. He’d best get prepared. And him not even all-the-way unpacked. And having to replace old Doc Eaton that everybody loved. (Because Eaton’d do everything you wanted and never tell another living soul about it.) Girls in trouble used to troop out here on the train clear from Chicago, stay in Hester Brinsley’s pretty rooms, and she’d look in on them for the day before and after; till they appeared strong enough to climb back on that train alone. (Most of them arrived and left alone, poor souls.) But Eaton always managed to keep such ‘helpings’ quiet. (Eaton did his li’l operations right at Brinsley’s boardinghouse after dark, leaving his buggy out of sight in Hester’s barn, we heard, with her getting a little cut, so to speak, out of every lost child. What wouldn’t a Brinsley do for a dollar?)

  “But Eaton had lately grown too shaky to even fake acting able, being so up in years. And here’s this new boy, Petrie. They’d advised all the young fellows graduating from State Med School, boys should grow facial hair that’d make a kid look older, so’s people would trust him more. Important, trust. Anyways, young Petrie, mustache and silly new goatee, helps the sailor’s sister rise up, he ties her horse behind his new-leased phaeton and a rental bay from Brinsley’s stable. (They were big around here then. But you know, not a one’s left?) Petrie walks in and here is the Woolseys’ parlor strewn with fine red and gold silks that Sandy’s just brought home, cloth still tossed everywhere, and … no, I don’t have those in back since somebody-careless left them in direct sun and they pretty much fell to pieces. But Petrie goes in the room and there are basins set all-round the iron bed and the poor mother, burning up herself, is working hard, washing a naked boy, who’s embarrassed and, you can see he knows it, losing his life at both ends…. This going to be too much for you?”

  “Nothing is too much for me. Yet, I mean. And this? is the…. ahm…. portrait of that very doctor, you say?”

  “Didn’t. Say. Getting to that. But answer me this, you think you’re so smart. How did young Markus Petrie know it was cholera and from halfway ’cross the room? Hmmn?”

  I shook my head one sideways swipe. (Never contradict/upstage your teller. Besides, I hadn’t a clue.)

  “Because in the bowls, mixing bowls, pans pressed into service to spare the home’s one good mattress, the doctor saw ‘rice stool.’”

  “Which is …”

  “Which is where the person has already been so emptied of food that nothing but what’s clear is left to come out and, here’s the cholera part: it
’s only clear broth but with little white bits of dissolving intestines that look like rice … and float just like cooking rice.”

  “A trip home from the Orient bringing rice-stools.”

  “‘At’s it. But, of course, what happened, the sailor was already near-to-dead and his sister and mother went soon after, then the two neighboring farms downhill of their groundwater and all that scrubbing and suds the brave Woolsey women loosed on that poor boy’s leavings, they let seep into the soil, and stream downhill. —Back in Chicago, the disease was going wild, folks falling over by the hundreds and hundreds. Back then nobody knew the word bacteria. Pasteur hardly being a professor yet, if my dates are right. Their sad idea of ‘cure’? Mustard plasters, hot as you could stand, then ‘bleed’ the patient to calm him good. No, up Chicago-way? the panic got so bad, town-fathers felt sure they were now non-electable, so they eventually voted to pump in drinking water, not from that little latrine Chicago River downtown, but bring it in from clear cold Lake Michigan. Officials were that desperate and, for once, the bigwigs got it right. But they had money, city ways and lots of things to try up the direction Chicago. But out here? here our folks, well, we only had just Petrie.

  “That young doctor was so new among us he’d not made arrangements to get his laundry done. And yet already Markus was giving us whatever we were going to get of hope. He’d have to trust himself now to take care of every local who’d soon come down with it. And all of us were strangers to him, all. Looking after even those mortally sick people you love, that is hard enough. (I should know, believe me.) But to get some address in writing that’s on a street you don’t know how to find, even in a town as tiny as La Verne, and to walk in there and discover another whole family puking and voiding in plain view and down with it already, and even the kids giving you that look like, ‘This is all? this here’s it?’ See, that’s what got the town to thinking, see.

  “They were so grateful there was somebody to call. He turned up at the hardware store and asked for rope to use for quarantining homes and the owner gave him for free a coil of orange rope that looked so new and city-made no customers would touch it, and Petrie kept that in his buggy and wrapped it round many a home’s front door. That orange struck fear in folks. But when he did turn up, Markus was also a fine looker. You see him here, with a deep voice too, sober and polite and right out of an accredited Illinois school, well, it reassured. Little beard, such dark eyes. Likely kind to his mother. And with a plain way that out this far means real skill. No wonder the worship started! Even old Doc Eaton couldn’t have got such a sudden following. It’d taken Eaton years, but he grew on you. We already knew him. They did, I mean. (For, ancient as I must look to a boy your age, this went on it’ll be seventy-odd years even ’fore my time.) Old Eaton, see, people still tipped every hat to him downtown. Hadn’t he delivered most the folks in sight? But they knew about his serving those family-way city girls, about certain other mistakes he’d buried. Plus there was a little drug habit he got into real bad at the end. Strange, somebody like that waiting so late to find a vice. Like some delayed vacation for him to retire into. Eaton, being that old, man couldn’t travel, so he went right into a pretty red-lacquered letterbox, oh, I’ve got it in back, the case where Doc kept his opium-products. Old Eaton soon drifted into falling asleep while standing there mid-operation, hands’d fly up all of a sudden palsied, so the mayor and a committee had sent, just in time, for Petrie fresh-as-paint out of university. Fourth in his class, too.

  “But even if Doc Petrie had come during a normal healthy season around here, he still woulda been quite a standout. I mean, unmarried. To this day, that’s rare here. Keeps you off from the wedded pairs. (I should know.) Fine-looking boy, as still shows here, if in a darker than Swedish kind of way, but that would be romantic to all these braided towheaded girls for miles hereabouts. It was that everybody liked his quiet manner, long legs. Just felt flattered, being watched over by a public servant, but from a good family, you know?

  “He kept asking locals to please please just call him ‘Mark’; but ‘Doctor’ was a godly word by then. And those folks of ours that hadn’t come down yet with the cholera? instead of hiding from Doctor Petrie, they took to bringing him fresh-dug beets from out their gardens and sending their slimmest daughters over with the food. Matchmaking! and here it was the middle of our terrible epidemic year. I guess it was superstition. Because the more folks got sick, the healthier and taller did that boy look. He’d turn up at church and, my mother’s mother told me, they clapped. Doctor Petrie, white shirt, black tie, black suit like you see here, he walked into the Lutheran chapel and the whole place, choir and sour-puss preacher and all, applauded. Organist held a chord…. Made him stay away, of course. Man never set foot in there again. And he’d only come into their sanctuary hoping to maybe find a little support from On High, a little quiet, relief from farm folks that were turning gray and then becoming a puddle at both ends. See, that’s what the cholera bug does to you, I guess. Liquefies. Gets its energy by turning the host creature to a liquid it can then ride on to the next host and the next. It’s awful ‘catching,’ I guess. And the doctor was soon the only person brave or fool enough to duck under the quarantine ropes, ignoring warning signs he himself had nailed to doors of those farmhouses worst hit.

  “And him introducing himself as ‘just Mark, please.’ Fat chance.

  “Locals were real glad Doc Petrie was up on the techniques of 1849 from our best state school. Taxpayer money well-spent. But, listen, there were no techniques except don’t wash your ricey basins in the river where the poisons will drift, which is exactly what they went out and did, poor fools. And too soon the Mengers and the Hurleys, then the Hopwoods and the Mortensens, they all come down with it. ‘Come down,’ you hear me? Going back like this, I fall right into my grandmother’s voice. —Now, after such-like buildup, you might think there’s not much of a story to the rest of it. But what’s mainly inter-resting is such madness as grew all up around him during the worst part of our plague. All La Verne left enough bread puddings and busheled fruit outside his house to where he couldn’t open the front door of a morning. Had to go out around the back to see what gifts had him so locked in. Doc kept busy, writing off for help, him so new to the practice and here he’d landed out here in this throwback sickness. But most other doctors elsewhere had their own hands full. Still Petrie made newspaper suggestions that the Bugle printed and passed along. He listed dos and don’ts, most of them a scared boy’s purest guesswork. Things to do. Mainly meant to keep folks’ panic down. And, at the end, he added how important it was that people stick by each other through the worst. The doctor wrote how civilization depends on nobody going untended.

  “And then Petrie ‘strongly suggested’ that families gather into bands of five to ten to assure no matter how bad it got, somebody’d stay put and tend those left alive. And local tribes, especially those whose farmland adjoined, they went along with him on this. And oh but that sure saved many a local. Later, they gave Doc Petrie all the credit. His idea: The ‘Health Alliances’ they were called, and that still holds. Nowadays they’re mainly used for tornado-watch and swapping Christmas gifts. Community granges-like, but they’re still called the Petrie Alliances.

  “Was a real warm June that June, which was bad for spreading the cholera, but good, you know, for how stuff grows in soil this black. Young girls brought him masses of zinnias and they got into his house and folks heard-tell that more than one threw herself at him. What he did, who knows? And yet you kind of hope he at least tried something with a few of our better-looking ones that were spunky. They weren’t all peaches, trust me. I remember some these ones from when they’d oldened up later. And they had never been an inch better looks-wise, be my guess.

  “But young Markus Petrie would buggy home exhausted, not even expecting to get much sleep before somebody else was there pounding on his door like they owned it, which they thought they did. And here he’d just turned up at his rental house
(barely furnished, the bed and two chairs being about it) to find some young girl, lovesick for a hero, leaning on the rail of his front stoop, wrapping one curl around her finger. Like it was noon on any healthy Sunday! Didn’t care how late it was, or how he smelled after all that ugly work for strangers. He would maybe nod and go into the house and just start washing up in that terrible way they had to around something as catching as that. You’d pour carbolic acid right on your hands, to burn the infection off. He’d had no more sleep than a cat-nod, and for weeks. Kept going anyhow, like only some boy that young even could. On med school graduation day three weeks earlier, he’d said his vows about helping anyone, regardless, hadn’t he? Well. But Petrie must’ve at least considered turning tail and running anywhere else. Had to’ve. ’Cause the world is made for a fine dashing doctor with so strong a back and eyes this size. And La Verne, Illinois, couldn’t have been such a prize assignment anyways. Here poor young Doc Markus, hoping to just be ‘Mark’ at least on weekends, had walked into this full-blown sickness brought by some local sailor come clear inland from China! The luck.

  “Some said Petrie would be home in his rental. It still stands back two blocks on your left if now with a sun-porch and an aboveground pool behind, and while Doc was standing there, hurting his hands with acid, working by kerosene lamp, washing up, and shucking off his pants and throwing hot water and soap even over his good shoes, with him standing there alone wearing nothing but his shirttails, more girls would come in. Folks swear that for weeks about then there were virgins turning up at all hours the night. And their parents right aware of where the daughters’d gone dressed in which white frock and what for at this ungodly hour. Guess I can still hear them: ‘Now, daughter, don’t you be letting that Grace Cunningham, who everybody at the school for some reason thinks hung the moon, get a jump on Doc ahead of you. Why, Sister, when this is over, after all he’s done to help our county and setting up the Alliances, he can stand for governor, sure. They say Boss Brinsley alone gave him two hundred-dollar gold-pieces when their spoiled littlest girl pulled through. But brush back your hair off your face, why don’t you. Show those features. Grace Cunningham is not a patch on anybody pretty as you.’ Oh, but it was a pagan time, 1849. Could’ve been the bubonic in Poland around 231 AD.