Dr. Sabatier

Four

Collaborator

Knife-carved, so large that only strings of letters fit the panels of the door to his office-building: collaborator. Dr. Sabatier taps the head on his new cane, surprised at the vandal’s spelling. On the sidewalk behind him people make noises of reproach. He hurries in and slams the door that now must be plastered or replaced.

He isn’t angry. It is to be expected, if not somewhat overdue. Last week the leering caricature that has overtaken General Butler had printed in the papers the names of all those who signed the Oath of Allegiance. Among the names listed, Union men and moreover those who wouldn’t forfeit the gains of a lifetime for fidelity to Secessia, was the doctor’s. And despite the imprisonments and banishing, there are those who at the least wish him harm, at worst seek to harm. So he goes about wary, as he always has, and armed. His new cane contains a long, double-edged blade.

His tenants at 136 Dumaine: the attorney, Lawrence; the aged Veracruzano tailor, Basquez, are snug behind their doors. Coal fires burning, the muffled sounds of work. They too have signed. For a moment he considers knocking, questioning one or both of them. He heads on. The opinions of others are malleable, and for the most part useless.

Case in point: In the months of Lydia’s illness, he, haggard husband, prebereaved, called on what medical colleagues and acquaintances remained in town or were still willing to see him, in order that they might give their opinions. And like most physicians he has ever known, when faced with an ill insensible woman, their faculties were immediately lowered to half-staff. They came to the most obvious and rudimentary conclusions, foredrawn and hustled out of the way so they could have a comforting brandy with him in the drawing room and talk about his finances. He, face in his hands, brandy untouched, saying that he would give all of his money to have her well again.

And, pardons, Emile, but what about her estate?

Oh, it’s considerable.

She has no family?

None but me.

And her friends, these spiritualists?

Frankly, sir, I blame them. I blame them and their foolishness for bringing her to this state.

Indeed. Right of you to keep them away.

So they made their prescriptions, which he followed. Phials and ampules expended over Lydia’s paling form. She making brief bursts through the opiate surface for gulps of consciousness so fevered they passed for madness. He sees Lydia’s hand shoot out from underneath the sheets, feels her grip on his wrist, shaking him awake.

Stop squatting on my chest, she said. Stop biting me with your little teeth.

As she often did when raising her voice, Lydia hacked out a red cloud that drifted for a moment in the lamplight at her face before settling in crimson constellations on the sheet.

He would admit none of her spiritualist cohorts who stood on his doorstep and regarded him with impertinent looks of sustained lunacy. Eyes that mediums, prophets, and preachers would like you to believe have seen the other side. To placate them he’d gathered up all of his wife’s spiritual effects in a few boxes and left them on the steps one night. By morning the boxes were gone. At the funeral, the spiritualists manifested: fingering their trinkets, devoutly insane. The man who kept a mummy’s hand grabbed the doctor by the arm and told him he would hear from his wife soon. There was nothing soothing in the man’s voice: all ghostly threat. And while the priest looked on and fidgeted with his missal, the doctor took the man who carried a mummy’s hand gently aside and said that if this wasn’t his dear wife’s funeral he would dash out his old fool brains on the nearest stone.

His breath trails from his mouth in hateful winter clouds as he bends to light the stove. The coldest November he can remember, and here is December, baring her teeth. And cold has lately been the topic at the house. Throughout the summer, while the windows sweated and so did she, Lydia would blink awake while he applied the needle to her arm, her buttock, her foot, and say that her blood was running cold. Now the boy claims his limbs are freezing off. Early November it was only the tips of his digits; now the cold has reached his knees and elbows. Whenever the subject arises, he tells the boy it’s likely a symptom of his growth. Which is remarkable. Joseph has come to the gangling point, the awkward bane of lamps and glasses. Almost a man in body, in mind still a boy. The doctor has made great strides in teaching him, despite the boy’s lapses into fancy. The cold, for instance, and how he claims objects in his room are moved by unseen hands when he’s not there. Of course they are, the doctor said, gesturing at the nearest black. Do you think specters make the bed? Still and all he’s met with much success, clearing away the traces of old Woolsack’s grim fanaticism, unseating the plush hold of Elise’s doting, the same way he cleared the filth of the canals so that the waters might run clean and free. Day by day he is surprised by the acuity of the boy’s mind. If we geld unsuitable horses, Joseph opined once in his then-cracking voice, then why not unsuitable men? This remark was occasioned by a visit to the Jefferson lunatic asylum, where the director allowed him to show the boy a roomful of lumbering, heavy-headed children, the offspring of other inmates. Wouldn’t that be more humane, sir? The doctor stamped his cane. Yes, my boy. You have it on the nose.

For so long Dr. Sabatier has considered his immersion in cyanosis, the disease of occupation, to be the crowning of his life’s achievements, but with Butler’s slide into ignobility and self-caricature, and the appearance of the boy, he has found another calling. What greater experiment than a child?

Lydia had said that once, in the early years of their marriage when he blamed their barrenness on his business or his work for the medical society. What better experiment than a child, she’d said sweetly. He can’t remember whether he’d yielded to her then or not. No more than he can presently recall what transpired on the night of All Saints’, spent at Lydia’s grave. A drunken candle-lit blur without even the satisfaction of a haunt. He is almost sorry for the fact that there isn’t an afterlife from which she can torment him. All that reading of leaves and dabbing up ectoplasm and chanting with phantom Indian-guides for nothing.

Strange, he considers it now, that he spent more time with his wife in all the nights of her illness, all the nights he gave her the needle’s tip, than when she was well. When with one hand he held her forearm and pinched up a vein, while the other thumbed the plunger down. Death by droplets. Call forth the hemorrhage with calomel bicarbonate, a mixture laced with dulling morphia anodyne, for he never intended to be cruel. He intended to be rid of her.

Lydia, feeling the chill of the mixture as it climbed the tree of her veins.

When he has the stove lit, the doctor sits at his desk and opens his diary to today’s date. The fourth of December. This day or the next Elise will be released, packed aboard a steamer and hauled back to the city under the parole that she will no more trouble the occupying forces. If all goes well, she will be here within the week.

Not here. They won’t need to use his office anymore. When he looks back on their nights spent on the floor, among his instruments and files and collections, Elise arranging vials and jars, it is with disgust. Disgust at having rutted on the boards. And more, that she could so easily urge him to his knees, guide his mouth against her sex. The secrecy, the floor, the hiding, his desire, all of it had reduced him to boyhood self, echoes of which he sees sometimes in Joseph—­whenever his charge speaks of the Fandal girl. He has done his best to temper the infatuation, spoken many times to the négresse Pichon, who seems content to abet their ruin. Though now they’ve carted Willie Fandal’s body back from the Mississippi mudhole, he might take a lighter tone. The girl stands to inherit; and the matter of her parents’ wealth is still unsettled in the Cuban courts. She might not make a bad match, but first he must get his hands on the figures. He has great hopes for Joseph, for his wealth-buoyed rise in the wake of cyanosis—so much that he’s considered more than once making him his heir.

He is almost giddy, looking at his dates. Past his lamp and papers, his cigarbox and matchcase, over the lip of the desk, the carpeted floor stares back. He won’t have her here again. He has unlimbered some of Woolsack’s money and found her a house on the border of the ­Marigny, twice the size of her old one. She will have a cook, a washer, a maid. All paid. Prudent considerations, he thinks, for though Mr. Lincoln’s coming proclamation does not include federally held territories such as New Orleans, it one day will.

Such are the changes wrought upon us by time and circumstance. Likewise, he is no longer aggrieved that Elise was taken. She had grown too strong, her hold over him too powerful. She’d clouded his mind, and now in these months as the heat bled out of the world his vision has cleared. She will return chastised and willing. Eager to assume her place.