Walt Whitman drives the horse-pulled flatbed freight wagon he borrowed from Dr. Liston, Abraham Stowe’s colleague at New York University, through the hundreds of New Yorkers who have lined the route to the Women’s Medical College of Manhattan. Men, women, and children of all social classes, craning for a glimpse of the body. They are eerily silent now, and Walt fights back the urge to tell them they are partially responsible for his friend’s death.
He directs the horses onto Centre Street, leaving the white light of the gas lamps and the parade of New Yorkers behind. Poorer streets like these are marked by the absence of light. And sound. The Broadway omnibuses are barely audible from a few streets over, the drivers preferring to remain where the money flows.
The Women’s Medical College of Manhattan comes into view, and along with it the protestors. A group of twenty or so gathered in front of the college the day after Abraham’s murder and has since grown into the hundreds. Their leader, the antidissectionist Father Allen, stretches his arms toward the sky like some Old Testament prophet: “Dissection stops the resurrection!”
Whitman has met the opportunist priest before, and has observed his skill at wielding human vulnerability, drawing on the fear of a public that believes a dissected corpse cannot rise from the dead. Walt assesses the mood of the crowd, recalling that only a month ago, a mob in New Haven burned down the medical school lab and lynched one of the young medical students.
The college is housed in a black-shingled granite-slab building accessible by a wooden staircase that leads to a porch. Just over the second-floor door, a single window stares like an eyeball. He recalls his first visit to the college a year earlier for an article in the New World, and how he got along with the Stowes straight away. They welcomed him in like family, and it was as if he had known them for years. He half expects Abraham and Lena to emerge in the entryway right now, holding hands, as they always did.
Walt steers the wagon right into the midst of the protestors, and stops in front of the stairs.
With Lena in his arms, Whitman keeps an eye on the priest, who at the crucial moment gestures his followers to remove their hats, bow their heads, and make way for him. A sliver of humanity in the madness.
Walt nods his gratitude as he passes.
Once inside the college, his eyes adjust to the gaslight shining from each corner of what was once a dining room. Anatomical drawings on butcher paper hang from the walls over rows of chairs and desks.
He carries Lena past the bar turned lectern, the chalkboard behind it, and the dangling skeleton. To get into the dissection room, he has to walk underneath the sign painted in blue script: She must mangle the living, if she has not operated on the dead.
Walt lays Lena on the very dissection table where only two weeks earlier Abraham was murdered. He straightens the tarp so that it covers her from the shoulders down. A wave of emotion hits him, and he wipes his eyes with a handkerchief. He needs to be strong for the students.
Upstairs the students begin to stir. Whitman can’t bear the thought of them seeing their instructor’s lifeless body. They appear on the landing, one by one, each of them wearing the same black dress and white apron as Lena. They approach, place a hand lovingly on their teacher, their faces haggard and raw.
He knows each of them by name. Marie Zakrzewska, or Miss Zacky as the other students call her, is from Berlin. An ethereal redhead, she escaped a pogrom that killed her parents, two sisters, and three brothers, then she studied medicine in Europe and, as a midwife, ran a maternity ward in Switzerland. It was her dream to learn from the Stowes.
Blond-haired and blue-eyed Karina Emsbury, from Hartford, was disowned by her pastor father for studying medicine, then connected to Abraham and Lena through her school’s headmistress and Abraham’s cousin, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Olive Perschon, short and mousy, from Philadelphia, is the daughter of abolitionist parents supportive of her medical aspirations. And Patricia Onderdonk, a tall, powerful woman from the Netherlands who claims to have been orphaned in a coastal flood.
Elizabeth Blackwell, the Stowes’ most loyal supporter and handpicked successor, breaks the silent procession. “This is madness.” She shakes her head, squeezes her hands into fists, her British heritage evident in every syllable. “How could they?” She clenches her square jaw and thin lips. Her dark hair is pulled in a tight bun at the back of her head. Miss Blackwell will display her determination but never her devastation in front of her students.
Walt and Miss Blackwell will keep the medical college going. The students need Elizabeth to be strong. So Whitman takes her by the hand, and they form a prayer circle around the body. Our Father who art in heaven, he begins, and for once he lets someone else’s words do what his own simply cannot.
When the last of the amens has echoed through the chamber, he steps back. Watching grief seize their young faces and shatter their confidence, he vows to honor the family circle Abraham and Lena provided for them here at the college.
As they had done for him.
He wants to stand on the table, call them to arms. We will fix this injustice, we will storm the city, crash their homes, shout from the rooftops. His army, these strong young women and their new leader, Elizabeth Blackwell. But now is not the time. He will stand down, he will let them cry, and he too will cry.
Miss Blackwell joins him at the back of the room. “Your friend, young Mr. Smith, is resting upstairs,” she says. “We blocked off a corner for him.”
“Thank you,” Whitman says. “How are his injuries?”
“I’m afraid his internal organs may be severely damaged,” Elizabeth says. “I gave him a dose of laudanum to help him rest.”
Walt says, “I’ll look in on him later.”
“He said he has no family.”
Whitman nods.
Elizabeth shakes her head. “Poor dear.”
Behind them, a distraught Karina Emsbury throws herself across Lena. The other students blanch at this naked display of grief.
Amidst the jumble of emotion, Miss Zacky approaches Walt. “Your wrists.” She takes his hands into hers. “They’re bleeding.” She slides up his coat sleeves and examines the long scrapes from the handcuffs, rubbed raw and bleeding. “We need to clean and dress these.” Miss Zakrzewska has become Elizabeth’s most reliable help, though their styles of practice diverge. She touches where Elizabeth withdraws from physical contact. She knows the power of her beauty, bewitching others with her penetrating gaze.
Walt says, “I tried to save her—” Flashes of Lena on the platform intervene, the hood, the noose, the floor dropping away, and he grits his teeth in agony.
“We know.” Miss Zacky pulls him close, wraps her arms around his neck. It feels good to be held like this, as Henry used to hold him, and in that moment he needs her, and so he presses up against her even more, holding tight.