PHILADELPHIA, 1870
THE CITY CELEBRATED HIS ARRIVAL WITH FIREWORKS AND CANNONADES and a torchlight parade through the cobblestone streets. At least that was the way John Henry liked to think of it, not learning until later that the festivities were presented by the Philadelphia Fire Association in honor of a visiting fire brigade from New York, and he’d only happened to arrive on that same late August night. The timing still seemed a serendipity enough to make him consider the celebration partly his own as well.
He had plenty to celebrate with the start of his professional training and his first taste of big city life both coming at once. And what a city it was! With a population of nearly three-quarters of a million, Philadelphia was the second largest city in the country. Compared to it, Atlanta with its twenty-thousand was just a town, and Valdosta where John Henry could name almost every one of the three-hundred residents was nothing but a bump on a backwoods road.
From Penn’s Landing on the Delaware River, Philadelphia stretched for seven miles north and south, spread west for two miles to the Schuylkill River, and reached for another four miles past that into the Pennsylvania countryside. Even the city market was enormous, covering eighteen whole blocks from the Delaware to 18th Street. And with buildings as old as the Revolution and some even older than that, there was an air of steady importance about the place, as though Philadelphia had always been there and always would be. Not like Georgia, where everything was either raw and new or tumbling down from disuse. Georgia was still half frontier; Philadelphia was civilization.
His father had arranged a room for him near to the dental school in the boarding house of Mrs. Christina Schrenk on Cherry Street. The house was a typical Philadelphia dwelling place, two stories tall but only one room wide with a narrow staircase taking up most of the front hallway. The room Mrs. Schrenk gave him was smaller than his old bedroom in Valdosta, but it had a window facing out onto Cherry Street and the use of a water closet down the hall—and the novelty of indoor plumbing made it seem like real luxury to John Henry. Back home in Georgia, most of the houses still had no plumbing at all, and bath water had to be carried in from wells out in the yard. Even his Uncle John’s new house in Atlanta, elegant as it was, still had an outhouse out back. And to his mind, having the use of a flushing toilet and a bath with running water was final proof that Philadelphia was truly civilized.
His father warned him, however, about letting the luxuries of city life spoil him.
“You’re here to study, not lay around in the bathtub all day,” Henry said as he helped John Henry carry his heavy traveling trunk up Mrs. Schrenk’s narrow stairs and into his newly rented room. “Though for the price of this place, you ought to get as much washing in as you can. Fifty dollars a month for room and board! At least the gas light should help you get through that crate of readin’ material, anyhow.”
The gas was another of the luxuries of life in Philadelphia as the city had been illuminated since the 1830’s, with gas lamps at every street corner and gaslights in nearly every house as well. With just the turn of a key and the strike of a match, John Henry would be able to study all night long without having to worry about a candle burning down or an oil lamp running out. And he had plenty of material to study in his newly purchased library of medical books, required reading at the dental school.
“I don’t reckon I’ll have much time to lay around in the tub, Pa,” he replied. “I’ll be lucky to get through this reading at all.”
“You’re lucky just bein’ here, John Henry, and don’t you forget it. I’ll be expectin’ to see top marks when you come home next summer.”
His father hadn’t changed any since John Henry’s first days at the Valdosta Institute. Henry still believed that getting an education was a privilege and good grades were proof of proper gratitude. But John Henry was prepared to be grateful, and he did indeed feel lucky to be getting away from the provincial life of south Georgia. Let his father warn and reprimand all he wanted; his own spirits were too high to take offense.
“Don’t worry, Pa. I’ll bring home good grades like I always did. Besides, Dr. Frink says I have a natural aptitude for dentistry. ‘Good hands,’ he calls it, just like you used to say about my shootin’. So I reckon I’ll do all right. I won’t shame you.”
And though any other father might have taken the offered opportunity to say that he was not ashamed of his son, was proud even of his past accomplishments and his bright future, Henry made no reply. His only comment was that it was getting on toward suppertime, and they’d best be finding somewhere to eat unless Mrs. Schrenk had enough for an extra plate.
What Henry Holliday lacked in private emotion, however, he made up for in patriotic spirit on his tour through the old Colonial capital of Philadelphia. Though Henry’s patriotism had put him on the losing side in the last War, he remained proud of his ancestors who’d fought and won the War of Revolution against the British and helped to create the United States of America. After all, it was on Revolutionary War bounty lands, won for service at the Battle of Kettle Creek, that his own grandfather, William Holliday, had made his first home in Georgia. So it was with some personal feeling that Henry took his son to Chestnut Street to see the old State House called Independence Hall and the great brass bell that had rung out the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The bell still hung in the rotunda of the dusty hall, displayed behind a wrought iron fence that kept visitors from trying to ring it. But as John Henry and his father paid their respects to that emblem of American freedom, he couldn’t help but think of the irony of its history, noted on a large bronze plaque. When it was first cast in England and shipped over the ocean to the Pennsylvania Colony, it was called the Province Bell. During the Revolution, when it rang out meetings of the Continental Congress, it was called the State House Bell. It was only when a group of nineteenth-century Boston abolitionists took it as the symbol of their own cause that it gained the name Liberty Bell, for its inscription from Leviticus, Chapter 25, Verse 10: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto the inhabitants thereof.” But the bell cracked soon after that, proof, as far as John Henry was concerned, that the abolition movement had cracked the country apart; North and South, Yankee and Rebel. And that was the one unfortunate thing about Philadelphia: it was still a Yankee city, through and through. Even though the War Between the States had been over for five years, the name “Rebel” still clung to anyone with a Southern accent. But the South was still rebellious, as far as the North was concerned, refusing to ratify one Constitutional Amendment after another until forced to do so by Martial Law. And where, John Henry wondered, was the liberty in that?
But there were other, less troubling, sights to see in Philadelphia: Betsy Ross’s home where the first American flag had been sewn, Christ Church where George Washington had prayed and Benjamin Franklin was buried in the churchyard near the old city wall, the ingenious water-works that supplied the whole city with fresh drinking water, Fairmount Park with its miles of lush green preserve along the Schuylkill River. And by the time Henry had taken him around to see it all and readied himself for his return to Georgia, John Henry was almost sad to see his father go. To his recollection, he’d never had so much of his father’s attention, cool-tempered or not.
But Henry had his own business to attend to back in Georgia and could only stay long enough to see his son settled at the boarding house and registered at the dental school. For in addition to operating his Valdosta Buggy and Carriage Company, Henry was planning on running for Mayor of the town in the coming November election. It would be a tough campaign to win, as his opponent was Sam Griffin’s father, owner of the only general store in town and owed money by nearly everyone in Valdosta at one time or another—and money owed meant votes in the ballot box. So it was probably the election, not John Henry, that Henry was thinking of when he shook his son’s hand and wished him well, then boarded the Steamship Wyoming, sailing back to Savannah.
The Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery was located in a four story brick building at the corner of 10th and Arch Streets, across from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacology, and the two schools shared more than just a street address. For with both courses of study including an anatomy laboratory, it was convenient for both to share laboratory cadavers as well. The dental students took the heads for dissection, the pharmacology students took the rest of the bodies, and where the remains went from there no one would say—though there was rumored to be a hundred-foot deep pit in the basement of the Medical College of Pennsylvania where used body parts were thrown.
Grisly as it was, cadaver study in the anatomy lab was a vital part of the dental school curriculum. A dentist couldn’t very well treat a patient if he didn’t know the physical structures underlying the teeth and gums: how the muscles of the mandible connected to the skull, where the nerves ran under the skin, how the arteries and veins carried blood to the tissues and bones. Once John Henry got over the initial shock of slicing into dead flesh and handling torpid bones and tissues, he found the work fascinating. The only really disturbing aspect of Anatomy Lab was that it was held during the noon hour, between Clinic and Lecture, and the students often brought their dinner to the cadaver table with them. Seeing a dental student reaching into an open cranium with one hand while holding a bite of bread and cheese in the other was far more unsettling than the lab work itself.
The students couldn’t be blamed for trying to get two things done at once. With the demands of the dental school schedule, there was little time for anything but study. Mornings from eight until noon were spent in the dental clinic treating patients under the watchful guidance of the clinical professors. Afternoons from one until four were spent in lecture classes learning the medical sciences of anatomy, chemistry, histology, pathology, and physiology. Evenings from suppertime until dusk were spent in the dental laboratory learning to refine and alloy precious metals, fashion artificial teeth from porcelain and gold, and make dentures from the newly patented vulcanized rubber. Finally, from dusk until dawn, the students were free to relax and study for the next day’s work. Most nights, though, John Henry fell asleep at his reading and woke in the early hours to find the gaslight still burning and his back aching from slouching over his books.
Though he’d started out the fall session with confidence in his abilities and hopes of good marks, he was finding the schoolwork to be more difficult than he’d expected and most of the students better prepared for the material than he was. Two of his classmates were doctors, planning to add dentistry to their medical practices. Three were dentists already, hoping to expand their knowledge in the field. Six were the sons of dentists who’d already spent years working in their fathers’ practices and studying their fathers’ textbooks. But none was better prepared than a soft-spoken young man who stunned the class by interrupting one of the professors on the first day of the session.
“Excuse me, Sir,” Jameson Fuches said, raising his hand. “I believe you mean the mesial, rather than the distal. Or if you do mean the distal, perhaps you are discussing the adjacent tooth.”
The fact that the error was certainly just a slip of the tongue and no cause for embarrassing correction in front of the class, made the student’s comment seem like a criticism, and the lecturer answered with sharpness.
“And I suppose you are an expert in dental terminology, Mr. Fuches?”
“No Sir,” the student replied, “but my preceptor is: Dr. Homer Judd of St. Louis, Missouri. He is a student of classical languages and fluent in Greek. It was he who invented the dental nomenclature now in use.”
“Yes, Mr. Fuches, I am aware of the work of Dr. Homer Judd. But the question which begs answering is why, with Dr. Judd as your preceptor, you would make the journey all the way here to Philadelphia? I understand that he is dean of his own dental school in St. Louis, the Missouri Dental College.”
“Yes, Sir, he is. I attended that school for one session, but Dr. Judd sent me here to learn the most modern techniques and bring them back to share with the other students. Dr. Judd believes that the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery is the finest school in this country, Sir.” And though the young man had rudely interrupted the lecture, there was surprisingly little arrogance in his manner.
“Well, indeed,” the lecturer replied, seeming somewhat mollified. “Now, may I get on with my own lecture, or would you like to take over as professor for the day, and finish up for me?”
A ripple of laughter went around the room, and Jameson Fuches blushed bright red right up to his fringe of pale blonde hair.
“No Sir,” he said politely, “you’ll do adequately.” And that made the class laugh out loud, and even the lecturer seemed amused.
After that, everyone at the school called him “Professor Fuches,” though Jameson was never so bold as to correct a lecture speaker again. But he took pages of notes and the rumor was that he was planning to write his own textbook on dentistry someday and dedicate it to his preceptor, Dr. Homer Judd.
The other rumor about Jameson Fuches was that he was a German, though he had no foreign accent, but his surname was certainly of Germanic origin and that made him suspect. For in a city where immigrants filled most of the working class, it was unusual to find a German attending professional school. Germans ran the restaurants and hotels and boarding houses that professional men frequented, but they didn’t often rise to the professions themselves. They even had their own section of the city, Germantown, and their own German-language newspapers. But when one of the other students questioned Jameson about his family background, he only blushed red again, and said that he’d been born in New York City where his father had settled after sailing from France. Still, his scholarly aloofness and his uncertain heritage left him out of the circle of prominent young men at the dental school.
John Henry wasn’t sure what to think of Jameson Fuches, though they sat only one chair apart in the alphabetical seating assigned by the dental school. He was German looking, that was true, with his pale skin and paler blonde hair—tow-headed, they would have called him back home, though the Georgia sun would certainly have turned his fair complexion ruddy red. But other than his unusual looks, there was little about him to draw attention. He was quiet, studious, and impeccably polite, and though he rarely initiated a conversation, when John Henry asked him some dental question or other, his answers were always clear and concise. So if the studies got too hard, Professor Fuches might just be a good substitute as a tutor—if John Henry ever got that desperate. For he was well aware of the social structure in Philadelphia that found its way even down to the dental school: Northerners before Southerners, Americans before foreigners. John Henry was one of only six Southern students at the dental school that session, so his standing among his classmates was shaky enough without associating himself with the likes of Jameson Fuches.
Besides, keeping himself in favor with the right people had its rewards. One of those Yankee students, a New Yorker named William DeMorat, had an uncle in Philadelphia who owned a photography studio, and the uncle, as a kindness to his nephew’s friends at the dental school, had offered to make portraits of each student. John Henry’s had turned out well, he thought, the sepia-toned print showing a fashionable young man wearing a vested wool suit with velvet lapels, his sandy hair slicked down and darkened with macassar oil, his blue eyes looking clearly into the future. Only the thin new mustache above his resolute mouth showed that the subject was still young, not yet twenty-years old, in a school filled with mature men—though none of them were more determined to succeed than John Henry.
The photograph had turned out so well, in fact, that he thought he might give it to Mattie as a Christmas gift—and hoped she wouldn’t mind too much that it came from the camera of a Yankee. He owed her a photograph in exchange for the one that she’d sent to him. It had come carefully wrapped, a small leather-framed daguerreotype of a young woman with a delicate heart-shaped face and luminous dark eyes, her hair swept up in tendrils, silver earbobs dangling close to her slender neck. And staring at the photograph, John Henry could almost hear her gentle laughter, welcoming him home.
She wrote often that autumn, her letters coming by the twice-daily Philadelphia home postal delivery service established by Benjamin Franklin. Home mail delivery was another of the luxuries of living in Philadelphia, since back home in Georgia the mail came only twice a week and had to be picked up at the post office. The only problem with old Ben’s innovation, as far as John Henry was concerned, was that with the mail coming twice daily, he had two chances a day to be disappointed if an expected letter did not arrive.
But he wasn’t often disappointed, for Mattie was a good correspondent and rarely a week went by when he didn’t receive a long letter from her, filled with news from home. She told him how the family was doing, how her younger sisters were turning into young ladies and how little Jim Bob was growing taller every day. She told him about her students at the Jonesboro High School, and how proud she was of their progress. She even told him about the weather, and how the fall leaves were turning to yellow and gold and making a patchwork of color on the country roads.
The one thing she didn’t tell him though, and the one thing he wanted most to read, was that she loved him. But Mattie was a proper young lady, he reminded himself, and too well-bred to trust her passions to paper and ink. Besides, with all that family around, how would she find the privacy to say such things, anyhow? So he consoled himself that her constancy in writing reflected her feelings clear enough, without the tender words he longed to read. And as long as those letters kept coming, one a week and sometimes more, he had no reason to doubt her feelings for him.
There was nothing tender about the letters from his father. Henry’s words were as spare as his affections, written on thin paper sheets crisply folded around John Henry’s monthly allowance money. The Valdosta City elections were coming up, and the contest was still a close one. The cotton crop in Lowndes County was looking better, though not as good as it had looked before the War. The buggy business was steady, and he was thinking of starting up a nursery farm on the property at Cat Creek. But mostly, his father’s letters were reminders of John Henry’s duty to do well in Philadelphia, with so much invested in his schooling. Rachel, he said, sent her love.
John Henry was proud to reply that he was, indeed, doing well. After the first difficult September session of medical lectures and exams, the class was moving into the clinical work in which John Henry excelled, and he was beginning to feel more at home in Philadelphia, riding the street cars for a seven-cent fare, and finding his way around without getting lost too often. He didn’t add that he’d even taken himself up to Fair-mount Park on the Schuylkill River to see a sculling race, in case Henry should consider that diversion a waste of good study time and chastise him for it. For though his father was a thousand miles away, buried in the small-town life of south Georgia, his good opinion was still something John Henry hungered for.
The good wishes from Rachel he simply ignored.
The first snowfall came at the end of November with a short fifteen minutes of flurries followed by a brilliant blue sky and a stiff northeast wind. By midnight the temperature was below freezing, and the next morning the ponds around the city were covered with thin ice. But while most of Philadelphia seemed unimpressed by the change of weather, John Henry was jubilant. He had never seen a real snowfall before, only the occasional ice storm when a winter rain turned to freezing sleet, and the sight of the snow falling, like so many bits of fine white paper drifting down from the clouds, dazzled him. So when William DeMorat and some of the other students suggested that they celebrate both the first snow and the last class of the fall session with a visit to the Arch Street Opera House, John Henry readily agreed. Although the theater was right across the street from the dental school, he’d never taken the time to see the varieties acts there.
“Well it’s high time!” DeMorat said incredulously. “Aren’t you interested in culture?”
“You can’t exactly call the Opera House culture. Looks like mostly minstrel shows and varieties acts, judgin’ from the playbill. I doubt they’ve ever played Verdi.”
“Who wants to hear Verdi?” DeMorat said with a bored yawn. “Give me Andy McKee, or Lew Simmons playing the banjo. Or better yet, show me an actress in skin tights, dancing a fandango—now that’s what I call entertainment! It’s about time we taught you some debauchery. You’re far too pristine for Philadelphia.”
Though DeMorat had a risqué way of talking, John Henry suspected he wasn’t too far from pristine himself, as he spent most of his time in the dental clinic when he wasn’t studying and never showed up late or drunken. It was just his New York sophistication talking—an easy worldliness that John Henry admired.
“So what time does the show start?” John Henry asked. “I’d hate to miss any of my first night of debauchery.”
“Who said anything about nighttime?” DeMorat chided him. “We’ll start with the matinees, and go on from there. For in addition to being a patron of the Opera House, I am also a valued client at several of the finer taverns in town. And you, my young protégé, will soon become one too.”
The interior of the Arch Street Opera House was as grandly ornate as its façade, with a velvet-curtained stage and a crystal chandelier hanging from a stamped tin ceiling. Around the stage, seventeen rows of wooden benches were set in a horseshoe bend, while two balconies balanced on eight pairs of Corinthian columns. And though there were no private boxes for wealthy patrons, the admission price still seemed steep: two-bits for the balcony and seventy-five cents each for a seat at the front of the orchestra, but well worth it to get a good look at the dancers—though they’d have been hard to miss, even from the back of the balcony.
The dancers seemed to be wearing little more than their underpinnings, their arms and legs bared and their bosoms impolitely exposed. But John Henry’s astonishment didn’t mean that he didn’t enjoy the show, and he had to work hard to find a balance between polite applause and the cat-calls some of the men in the audience were making. The girls didn’t seem to mind the attention though, twirling flirtatiously close to the gas footlights at the edge of the stage and giving the men in the front row an even better look at those bared bosoms. And seventy-five cents, John Henry quickly decided, had never been better spent.
But the thing that John Henry most remembered about that evening was the thrill of ordering his first drink across a saloon bar. For much as he had done his share of youthful drinking, he had never actually walked into a drinking establishment and ordered a glass from a barkeep before. His liquor drinking had been pretty much limited to borrowing some of his father’s whiskey from beneath the sideboard or sharing a stolen bottle in the back room of Griffin’s General Store with the other boys in town. So it was with a feeling of both adventure and accomplishment that he joined DeMorat and the others in standing up to the polished wood bar at the Broad Street Saloon, put one foot on the brass foot-rail like a practiced sporting man, and asked for a shot of Bourbon—and never had liquor tasted better.
After the shots of whiskey, the dental students stopped at the Dublin House Hotel and Restaurant for a light supper and a glass each of French champagne wine. Then they moved on to the Volks Halle Hotel, to play ten-pins and shuffleboard and ease their thirst with some foamy lager beer. The Thistle House came after that, where they drank dark Dublin Porter and heavy English ale, and some of the other students said good-night and left the rest to their entertainments. By the time they reached the St. Bernard Sample Room and got back to the Bourbon, it was just DeMorat and himself, and John Henry was feeling peculiar.
He’d never been drunken before, only a little tipsy from time to time. But he was well beyond tipsy now, with his head pleasantly spinning and his thoughts all loose. He was witty, he was dashing, he was having trouble keeping his balance as they walked along the brick streets of Philadelphia. And even that was amusing, laughing at the passersby who turned away in prudish disdain as the two young men stumbled from one saloon to the next. But what did a chastising glance from strangers matter, anyhow? They knew themselves to be true gentlemen and bon vivants. DeMorat said so himself, looking serious over a glass at a Front Street groggery by the river.
“Did you notice that fandango dancer looking down off the stage at me? The one with the dark-siren eyes?”
John Henry took a sip, wiped his mustache clean, and tried to focus on DeMorat’s face.
“I wasn’t payin’ too much attention to their eyes,” he said earnestly.
“Well, she was looking at me, all right,” DeMorat said. “The last girl on the left in the chorus line. The one with the shapely thighs.”
“Why, Mr. DeMorat!” John Henry said in pretended surprise at his companion’s coarse language. “You know ladies don’t have thighs, they have limbs. Which we, as gentlemen, are not supposed to notice. Like their bosoms,” he said properly, then hiccoughed.
“Breasts,” DeMorat corrected, lingering on the word. “Which we do, of course, notice. Why else would they pad themselves with ruffles and such to add to their natural, wondrous dimensions?”
“They pad themselves?” John Henry asked in amazement. “How do you know?”
“I know,” DeMorat said with a self-important air. “Really, it is amazing how innocent you still are. Well,” he said with a sudden determination, putting down his glass and standing shakily, “we must remedy that.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“We must introduce you to some women and let you study human anatomy for yourself—thighs and breasts and every other delightful aspect of femininity. I did promise you a night of debauchery, didn’t I?”
John Henry couldn’t argue the point, and he couldn’t say that he wasn’t tempted. But he was also beginning to feel a little queasy, the pleasantly euphoric spinning of his head beginning to turn into downright dizziness.
“I believe I’ll have to decline . . . your gracious . . . offer,” he said, his words suddenly sliding together. “Perhaps someother night . . .”
“You are beginning to look peaked, Holliday,” DeMorat said with a laugh. “And we still have so much yet to do: billiards, bagatelle, several hands of poker . . .”
He didn’t wait around to hear the rest of DeMorat’s catalogue of gambling games, as the dizziness turned to nausea and he pushed himself to his feet and ran from the tavern, retching into the brick gutter.
He had only vague recollections of what happened after that: DeMorat hailing a horse-drawn cab and helping him up the stairs to his boarding house room; gaslight flickering on the ceiling as he lay across the bed, his head spinning; waves of nausea that made him run to the wash basin, heaving until his whole insides ached. And sleep at last.
He had thought that the nausea would be the worst of it. He was wrong. The worst came next morning, when he awoke with the first hangover of his life. The giddiness of the night before was gone, and in its place was a piercing pain that made the daylight streaming into his window seem like fireworks going off in his head. And when DeMorat knocked on the door to see how he was faring, the noise sounded like a canon salute.
“You look like hell, Holliday!” DeMorat said cheerfully, clearly not suffering any himself from the night’s intemperance. “Have you seen yourself in the mirror?”
He hadn’t even thought to look at himself, since opening his eyes at all was a torture. But when DeMorat held a silvered shaving mirror to his face, he had to agree that he did, indeed, look hellish. His face was still peaked with a purplish cast about his mouth, his nose was red and running, his eyelids were swollen over teary bloodshot eyes.
“And you smell even worse than you look,” DeMorat commented. “Morning-after vomit, I suppose. Though I take some of the responsibility myself for not watching better how much you were drinking, being a novice at this still.”
DeMorat’s half-hearted apologies didn’t help John Henry’s mood any, only serving to remind him of his complete failure at debauchery. The sporting life, it seemed, was not meant for him.
“Nonsense,” DeMorat countered, “everyone starts out that way. You’ll get over the liquor sickness soon enough. You just need to toughen yourself up a bit, keep drinking regular until it doesn’t bother you so much. Why, I had an uncle who could down a quart of hard liquor a day like drinking water, and never have it show. Just takes practice, that’s all. And as for the rest of it, well, there’s plenty of time yet. We’ve still got all of Christmas vacation ahead of us, after all.”
“Christmas,” John Henry said, then he lay back down and closed his eyes against the thought. He had hoped to go home to Georgia for the three-week winter break, maybe even getting a chance to see Mattie while he was there. But the cost of the trip—forty dollars for a round-trip steamboat passage—was a needless expense, according to his father. Better to save the money for his room and board for the next session of school than squander it on vacation travels. But being away all those months still, clear until June, seemed like forever. Especially now, with every moment a long painful eternity.
“It’ll pass,” DeMorat said as he picked up his hat and headed for the door. “And when it does, I’ll be ready to finish your training. We’ve still got all that gaming to do, you know—and the ladies to meet, of course. Then he turned from the doorway and pulled something from his coat pocket, tossing it to John Henry: a silver flask with a stopper chained to it.
“What’s this for?” John Henry asked.
“Hair of the dog that bit you,” DeMorat replied. “The only known cure for drinking too much liquor is drinking a little more. Cheers.”
As his footsteps echoed down the wooden stairs like pistol shots ringing off the walls, John Henry pulled the stopper from the liquor flask. The smell of the whiskey made his stomach grow queasy again, but he held his breath and took a sip anyway. Nothing could make him feel any worse than he already did, and he’d try anything that might make him feel better. Then he dropped the flask to the floor, groaned, and pulled the bed pillow over his head. Debauchery, he thought, wasn’t near what it was made out to be.
The whiskey helped some, lessening the pain in his head and settling his shattered nerves. But the queasiness stayed through supper and into the next morning, and the very thought of drinking more than a sip at a time was repulsive. So when DeMorat came back around a few days later offering to show him more of Philadelphia’s night life, John Henry nearly declined—and only went with trepidation. He would never go on a binge again, he told himself, gingerly nursing the same one glass of whiskey all night. But drinking it slow like that, one careful sip at a time, was enough to give him the pleasant liquor light-headedness without the humiliation of puking in the street or the pain of the hangover the next day.
Moderation also left him with enough wits about him to enjoy the variety of pastimes the Philadelphia taverns advertised. Billiards came to him easy enough, and he soon became expert at the challenging table game called Bagatelle, using a cue stick to shoot small marble balls into a series of target holes on a decorated board. And though Philadelphia wasn’t much known for card playing since the days when the Quaker founders had frowned on all forms of gambling, there were still plenty of card games around, including one John Henry had never seen before. It was called Faro, played on a table of green wool baize patterned with a suit of Spades where the players laid down their bets while a dealer pulled cards to see who’d won. He watched the Faro game, made a little money on Spanish Monte, and a little more when he and DeMorat found a poker game at a riverfront saloon. And as long as he went easy on the whiskey, staying only mildly inebriated, he enjoyed the nightlife immensely.
But his vacation wasn’t all leisurely fun. He did study some, reviewing his notes from the fall session and looking over the winter session material to come, in case his father happened to ask how he’d spent his free time. And he made sure to go to church on Christmas Sunday morning, as his mother would have wanted him to, even though he’d been out gaming and drinking for most of Christmas Eve. But if the other members of the congregation of Old Saint George’s Methodist Church smelled the whiskey still lingering on his breath, they didn’t mention it. It was Christmas, after all, and the season of peace on earth and good will toward men.
It was hard to get back to work again when January came and the winter session of school began. He had gotten so used to staying up past midnight and sleeping in until noon that the eight o’clock clinic hour seemed more like the middle of the night. And the weather didn’t help any, snowing heavily and dropping to a low of five degrees, then warming up just enough to melt the snow and leave a slippery sheeting of ice on the cobblestone streets and brick sidewalks. The river froze solid above the Schuylkill Dam, and steamships in the Delaware had to maneuver around the ice. The newspapers were filled with stories of ice injuries: sprained ankles and strained backs, broken limbs and head concussions, and the tragedy of a boy on Race Street who fell to his death while leaning out a third-story window trying to catch an icicle. Yet the locals said it was a mild winter, all things considered, and John Henry wondered what bad weather was like in Philadelphia.
But other than cursing the ice as he slipped and slid and shivered his way from his boarding house to school every morning, he didn’t have time to ponder much on the climate, for his professors seemed more determined than ever to overload their students with work. There were exams at the end of every lecture week, and case presentations to be made, and the endless line of clinic patients to be treated. And come March, when the senior students would be graduated and gone, the clinic work would double.
Spring came on all at once, with the ice in the Schuylkill River thawing out overnight and the riverbanks turning floody. But the warming temperatures brought the tree-lined streets into a bloom of green leaves and flowers, and made John Henry suddenly homesick for Georgia, where the air would be lazy-sweet already with a smell of honeysuckle to it and the azaleas would be blooming pink and white and wild among the pines. And best of all, Mattie was in Georgia, waiting for him.