City of God (16 page)

Three times before she had made this long march, following the big carriages pulled by many horses. “Om-nee-bus.” She had attempted to get on an om-nee-bus a long time ago, before she knew what it was called, when she first tried to come and see where Lord Samuel went when he left his
tai-tai.
A man inside the big om-nee-bus wore a jacket with shiny button things and a funny cap. Told her she must pay money to ride. So Ah Chee got off. Walked along the road and watched. As long as the big carriages kept going by her, she was in the right place. But now it would be dark soon. Could be no om-nee-bus go up road or down road when it was dark. Could be that if the plum blossom was alone when it got dark she would forget it was very too much necessary she lie still and make a strong son. Almost four months now since she had bled, and every Peach Blossom morning so far she retched green
yin
juice from her stomach. So son definitely coming.

Wait here too much. Know only bad things she knew before. Yellow hair had a big fine house, bigger than the whole house on Cherry Street. And yellow hair didn’t share her house with many men. Only servants. Yellow hair also had a son. The first time she saw him Ah Chee had
convinced herself the baby was a girl, but today she saw a for-sure-boy baby in push thing with wheels. For-sure-son of yellow hair and Lord Samuel. As for the only thing she wanted to see, that did not appear. She had waited and waited, but the lord had not come. Leper Face and Taste Bad and the others said he made business in a new very too much big house on Canal Street. She had passed Canal Street on her long trudges up and down the rock streets of this place. Many too much big new houses. Ah Chee had no idea which one was the business place of Lord Samuel and no intention of trusting one of the men to take her there. They would whisper about it to the lord, and he would for sure guess what Ah Chee knew. It was no good to know things if other people knew you knew before you told them. Very much too late to stay here now. Ah Chee got off the bench and began hobbling south in the direction of Cherry Street.

She heard the sound of a small rig and a horse behind her, but she’d heard many of those during the course of her long wait. Too much trouble turn around and look. Be wrong one more time.

“Ni gan she me?”
a voice demanded. What are you doing here?

Ah Chee’s smile was so wide it showed all the empty places where teeth had been before she got old. Jade Emperor was at last satisfied with her. Make Lord Samuel come to yellow hair house while Ah Chee still here. She made the smile go away before she turned.
“Zhang san li shih,
come to this place,” she said. “Why not this old woman?” The world and his wife came to Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. Why not Ah Chee?

Sam had reined in the buggy as soon as he saw her. Now he leaned forward and stretched out his arm. “Get in. I’ll give you a hand up.”

Ah Chee allowed herself to be hauled into the buggy, though the thought of the last time she rode beside the Lord Samuel, when the devil woman stole Mei-hua’s son as well as Ah Chee’s money, made her shudder.

Sam looked over at his house. There was no indication that he had been seen, but even if he had, he could not go inside and leave Ah Chee to her own devices. “How did you know to come here looking for me?”

“This old woman did not come looking for the lord. This old woman—”

Sam flicked the whip over the horse’s back and the buggy started forward. Another flick of the whip and the horse broke into a trot.

The buggy’s metal wheels struck sparks from the cobbles and the whole rig shook. Ah Chee gripped the edge of the seat with both hands. “Where you go so fast with this old woman?”

“Into the woods,” Sam shouted over the rattling. “Where I can beat you and no one will hear your screams.” There was construction as far north as Twenty-fifth Street, but there were still stretches of the old Manhattan wilderness to be found near Fourteenth Street. When he pulled up the buggy was hidden beneath a stand of willows showing the first traces of April green. “Now you will tell me how you got here and why. Otherwise I will beat you to death with this horse whip and leave your body for the dogs to eat.”

They both knew it was an idle threat, just as they both knew Ah Chee had come here for the very purpose of telling him something. Sam, however, was not quite sure why she hadn’t simply made an opportunity to speak to him back on Cherry Street. He’d wager any amount that she had walked the two miles from there to here. It must have hurt like the very devil. The only reason she would put herself through such an ordeal had to be to let him know she could. Or, more precisely, that she knew where to find him. Still more to the point, that she knew about Carolina and his son. So what did Ah Chee really want?

Sam jumped down from the buggy, went around to the other side and yanked the old servant down as well. She made a great show of cowering. He brought the horse whip down on her shoulder. Not too hard, just enough to give her the opportunity to say what she’d come to say not because that’s what she’d intended to do right along but because he’d beaten the truth out of her. A dog barked in the distance, and Sam said, “He is waiting for his dinner. Now talk, or he will get it immediately.” He accompanied this speech with much flailing of the horsewhip. He had not spent all those years in China without learning about face.

Ah Chee put up her hands as if to protect herself from the onslaught, though the whip was striking everywhere but her. She allowed this to go on for a few moments before whispering, “Supreme lady
tai-tai
does not bleed since First month.”

Sam wasn’t sure he’d heard her. He stopped the charade of whipping Ah Chee and stood very still.
“Zai suo yi bien,”
he commanded. Again say it. “Right now.
Zai suo yi bien.”

“
Tai-tai
does not bleed any month since First month. Pretty soon her belly get round. In Osmanthus month she give lord strong son.”

Sam allowed the whip to fall from his hand. There was no wind, but he felt chilled. A baby due in September.
“Bu ke nen.”
Not possible. “I have taken steps.
Tai-tai
cannot be expecting a child.”

“Ke nen.”
Possible. “Son of the Lord Samuel comes in Osmanthus month.
Ke nen.
” The look on the Lord Samuel’s face was what Ah Chee had feared most, why she could not simply let Mei-hua tell the news herself and plead to be allowed to give birth to their son. Ah Chee knew what the Lord Samuel was thinking. “No other man go near plum blossom’s privates,” she said. “No other. Never since first time the Lord saw her. On the sampan of Di Short Neck. Never. Never.”

“Bu ke nen,”
Sam repeated. There could be no pregnancy if the seed did not reach the womb. That’s what Nick Turner said.
“Jue duay bu ke nen.”
Absolutely not possible.

“Ke nen. Ke nen.”
Possible. Possible. “Look.” Ah Chee reached below her tunic and produced the hollow bamboo rod that had reappeared in her kitchen as soon as the second month of no blood passed and Mei-hua was sure. “Look. Supreme
tai-tai
use this. Suck up seed from silk cloth and put it deep inside pleasure place. Like this. Like this.” Ah Chee put the bamboo rod in her mouth and made loud sucking sounds, then clapped her finger over the hole and waved the thing in the direction of her crotch.

It took him a moment to understand, and then he was more furious than astonished. “Who did this? You?”

“This old woman not do no thing. Not this thing, not no other thing. Plum blossom
tai-tai
do thing herself. Because if she not give her lord strong son she will weep so many tears she will die.”

“But she’s too young. There’s plenty of time. I don’t want—”

“
Tai-tai
want. She want much. Much. This time you let son grow inside her. Have son from real
tai-tai,
not ugly too big yellow hair.”

Samuel spun around and walked away. Mei-hua really was pregnant. Indeed, if Ah Chee was to be believed, she had taken extraordinary steps to become so. The child was his. But the rest of it…. Ah Chee not only knew where to find him she knew who Carolina was and she knew they had a son. “Bad joss,” he whispered, then chided himself for having become as superstitious as the most ignorant coolie. All the same, he could feel it in his bones. The whole thing was all very bad joss.

Carolina was standing by the window in her bedroom when Samuel drove the buggy back past the house and continued south on Fifth Avenue. The peculiar little woman was still sitting beside him with her feet sticking straight out, just as she had been after he pulled her into the rig nearly twenty minutes earlier.

Now, Carolina guessed, he would drive her back where she came from. For a wild moment she toyed with the notion of running downstairs and out the back, of throwing her old sidesaddle on the riding mare and taking off after the buggy.

And maybe pigs would fly.

Where would Barnabas the stable boy be when she set out on this adventure? Watching her, of course. And he would run and report the whole extraordinary business to Celinda Devrey. And what would that harridan do with the information? No way to know, except that it would not be to the advantage of Carolina.

And when Samuel took the wizened little creature to wherever he was bringing her, they would speak Chinese. She had once heard him mouth those extraordinary sounds he claimed were words when a man came to the door bringing him a note about some emergency on the docks.
There are any number of Chinese dialects, Carolina. That man speaks the Cantonese of Toishan to his familiars, Mandarin to me. Yes, of course I learned the language when I was there.

She held the lace curtain back and peered up the avenue until the buggy could no longer be seen. Pigs did not fly, and she could not take the chance of following Samuel, because what she learned would probably be worse than her suspicions and doubts, and her actions would likely have terrible and unpredictable consequences. Like the night she waited up for him and forced that terrible and shaming confrontation. She had acted like a strumpet, a street whore, and Samuel had responded by meting out exactly the treatment such behavior deserved.

There was no way to avoid seeing her reflection in the glass above her dressing table. She looked, Carolina thought, old and tired and worn out. No wonder her husband had so little use for her and so little love.

I
T WASN
’
T AS
if Lilac Langton had been a churchgoer back home in London, and heaven knows Joe Langton weren’t the sort to spend his Sundays listening to any sort of preaching. Nursing his sore head from Saturday’s boozing more like. But they was married proper in a Methodist chapel the way her ma wanted, and Lilac always remembered how good that made her feel. She was a wife in the sight of God. Poor Joe. She had a duty to his memory. There had to be a heaven, didn’t there, for Joe to be in it?

The other reason she put on her best bonnet and her newest frock and her gorgeous new cloak with the genuine rabbit fur collar and tucked her gloved hands into the matching muff (just enough early October chill in the late afternoon air so that didn’t look out of place) was all the fuss everyone was making about Charles Finney’s preaching. The papers were full of how ordinary folk were flocking to hear him and be saved for certain sure. More fuss than ever since a couple of years back, when some rich men bought the old Chatham Street Theater and turned it into a church where Mr. Finney could hold his revival meetings three days every week, as well as a regular church service on Sunday.

It was the Wednesday afternoon meeting Lilac had decided to attend. Quite a distance down the town from Christopher Street to Chatham Street, but Lilac knew her way. She’d been once before when it had been a theater. Went to see that minstrel fellow who blacked his face with burnt cork and pretended he was an old nigra. Jim Crow he called himself. Quite amusing, she recalled, but to be honest, she was with a gentleman friend on that occasion, and she was a bit tiddly by the time they got to the theater. And thinking about what she might expect later in the evening and whether she would or she wouldn’t. Ah, nice gent he’d been, but that must have been the Bowery Theater. She didn’t remember anything as big as this.

What was now officially known as the Second Free Presbyterian Church—unlike every denomination in New York except the Methodists, Finney’s churches charged no pew rents—had been built in 1825 as a splendid and elaborate theater that could seat 2,500. The entrance was through a set of triple doors fronted with eight tall pillars, then up a double stairway to a great balcony with row after row of seats, all looking down at a ground-level pit filled with yet more seats.

The gilt had been painted white and the interior shorn as much as possible of theatrical frippery. What had been the stage was now an austere altar, backed with an enormous and utterly plain wooden cross. “Whereon Our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ died to save sinners,” Finney intoned in a voice that was somehow both sweet as honey and compelling as a trumpet blast. “Where he waits for those who choose the salvation he offers.”

Lilac’s gaze never left the preacher’s face. She’d come early enough to get a seat in the very front row of the balcony, right next to the stairway down to the pit. And near the aisle leading to what they called the Anxious Bench, where Mr. Finney invited those whose souls were troubled by sin, who knew they had done evil in God’s sight, to come and sit and be prayed over by him and by the congregation. Then, if you thought and prayed hard enough and so did everyone else, you would choose Jesus as your personal savior. After which, sure as anything, you
would have enough faith to go to heaven when you died. But what if you didn’t?

Mr. Finney seemed to have heard her thoughts. “And what of sinners who do not choose Jesus, who do not respond to this call? I tell you what the Gospel tells us. It was better for them had they never been born. Hellfire awaits them, burning and torment. Not just for a time, my brothers and sisters. For eternity! Can you imagine what that means? I admit that I cannot. Burning and torment forever and ever. And all because you do not choose Jesus, the loving and good Jesus who prays to the Heavenly Father to forgive our sins. Your sins, my brothers and sisters. Yours! Yours!”

God help her. All those babies. But if she didn’t do something for the women, they’d be after shoving lord knows what up their twats. What about Joe? How sick he was, and she left him anyway, because it was so terrible hot down in the bowels of the ship.

“Your sins, sisters and brothers! Weighing down your soul with black misery!”

It wasn’t like she could do anything for him, burning up with fever the way he was. When she came back she brought a wet cloth, except by the time she returned poor Joe was dead. And far as she knew, Joe never declared Jesus Christ to be his personal savior.

“Jesus is the only way to heaven, my brothers and sisters! So if you think you might be ready, and if you are hoping to be ready, even though you do not yet feel the light of faith in your soul, come and sit on the Anxious Bench and we will pray over you and you will be saved. You, madam, will be saved and happy in heaven with Jesus forever. Tell us your name, dear sister, that we may pray for the light of faith to enter your soul.”

“Lilac Langton.” She didn’t realize until she said the words aloud that she had walked down those steps and along that aisle and was sitting on the Anxious Bench with Mr. Charles Finney himself standing over her, bending down from his great height, with his piercing blue eyes looking directly into hers. God Almighty! How could she begin getting saved with a lie? “Least wise it’s Lilac now. Used to be Francy.”

“Lilac suits you, sister. A sweet flower. And you, sister”—moving on to the woman sitting beside her—“what is your name?”

“Adelaide Bellingham, Mr. Finney, sir, and I’m guilty of terrible sins. I been aiding and abetting them as encourages the poor in their profligate ways, and my soul is black with guilt.”

“Now, gentlemen, a small demonstration. Cup your hand around one ear. Like this.” Nick performed the action even as he explained it. The three medical students who were watching him did the same. “Do you see how that channels the sound of my voice?”

The students nodded in unison like marionettes whose strings were being pulled. Christ. Had he been so Godawful ignorant at their stage of medical experience? Probably. “Now, as doctors, when do you most need to hear as clearly as possible?” Silence. “Come, gentlemen. Your professors have surely discussed with you the art of auscultation. You put your ear to a patient’s chest and listen to…to what, Dr. Klein?”

“The heartbeat, sir.”

“Excellent.” Klein, one of the student assistants, was of the Hebrew race, from Germany originally. Spoke English quite well, but had the dark and swarthy looks of most Jews. Sinister some people said. Nick had known too few of them to have an opinion about that, but this one certainly had a quick mind, though when he asked, “What else can you hear with auscultation, gentlemen?” even the clever Klein appeared stumped. “Good God, gentlemen, the lungs. If we can hear clearly enough, it’s possible to tell if the lungs are clear or filled with filth. Like those blackened things I showed you in the laboratory the other day.”

The man in the bed around which Nick had assembled his young assistants, an Irishman named Patrick Heffernen, grew wide-eyed with terror. “You’ll not be after taking me up to the laboratory for slicing and dicing, Dr. Turner? I’ll not be dying, will I?”

“Of course you will, Patrick, but not this afternoon.” The man had broken his leg in the stepping house, and Nick was not entirely sure he hadn’t stepped into the gears of the turning wheel on purpose. “I told
you I was having the students listen to your chest for practice. Ah, here’s Dr. Chance.”

Monty Chance appeared at the bedside carrying a wooden box stamped “Portugal” on one side and “Port Wine” on the other. It looked the right size for about four bottles.

“Don’t get your hopes up, gentlemen. Dr. Chance has not brought us a libation. He has instead procured the latest invention designed to serve medical science, made for us in one of our own Bellevue workshops exactly to my specifications. Show them what you have, Dr. Chance.”

“Yes, sir.” Chance knelt down, put the box on the floor, and lifted the lid. Inside were hollow black tubes, shiny and stiff, each about twelve inches long and three inches in diameter. He handed the first to Nick, then one to each of the three students. The fifth was for himself.

“What are they made of, sir?” Klein didn’t wait for an answer before holding one up to his ear.

“Newspaper,” Nick said. He leaned towards the young student, pitching his voice straight at the cylinder. “Layers of newspaper held together with pitch, then finished off with a few coats of shellac. They’ll last a good long while if you take care of them. Chap in France who came up with the idea is calling them stethoscopes.”

“In France, sir? You have been there?”

The same question Sam Devrey had asked about reproductive theory. Nick sighed. “No, Mr. Klein, but in medicine we write about what we discover, so other doctors can read and learn and medical knowledge can spread. Now tell me what you think. Can you hear me better through the stethoscope than without it?”

“Enormously better, sir. It’s amazing. And so…forgive me, sir, so simple.” It sounded like “zo zimple.” A carryover from his mother tongue, Nick supposed.

“Indeed. Now watch.” Nick bent over Patrick Heffernan’s bed and put one end of the cylinder to the man’s chest while holding the other end tight to his ear. The heartbeat, steady and strong, was many times amplified. After a moment he raised his head. “You’ll definitely not be among the dying today, Patrick. Now gentlemen, one after another. And
for your information, this is what a healthy heart sounds like. Be sure you move the stethoscope to allow you to distinguish the sounds of the two separate chambers.” He had dissected a pair of hearts for them the previous month, one a three-year-old child’s, the other that of an old woman. The old woman’s was normal in all respects, the child’s flabby and one side collapsed. Expect the unexpected when you do an anatomy he’d told them. He might have added that it was not the only thing unexpected in the practice of modern medicine.

“Soap, Dr. Turner? Ordinary soap?”

“Ordinary soap, Sister Mary, as long as you use plenty of it. Wash your hands with soap and water between treating your patients. It will work wonders, I promise. Particularly with an outbreak such as this.” Nick dismissed the last of the six young orphans who had been presented to him, all with the same itchy and ugly red rash, mostly on their legs, though one or two had it on their arms as well.

Sister Mary did not follow her young charge out of the small room the nuns provided for these consultations. “With the greatest respect, Dr. Turner, my hands are clean. As clean as this. Always.” She held them out. Red and roughened, but the nails pared and no trace of grime anywhere.

“What concerns me, Sister, cannot be seen with the naked eye.”

He had taken to visiting St. Patrick’s Orphan Asylum once a week, usually in the late afternoon, when he could most easily get away from Bellevue. Sister Mary was the Infirmarian, as she was called among the Sisters of Charity, so he saw more of her than of Mother Louise or any of the others. Notwithstanding the evidence of hard physical labor, the hands she had presented for his inspection were long-fingered and elegant. Like much else about her, they made it obvious that in another place and had she made other choices, Sister Mary would be mistress of a grand household. Even wearing the black habit of the Sisters of Charity, it was easy to see that she was a patrician beauty, and educated with it.

“It occurred to me, Doctor…”

“Yes, Sister Mary. Do go on.”

She folded the reddened hands beneath the short black cape she wore over her black dress. “The children are not ill, sir. They do not feel sick and they have neither fever nor loss of appetite. Except for the itching, they appear to enjoy their play time and do their chores and their lessons with the same will as usual. How then can this eruption on their skin be a medical matter?” He had to struggle to hear her, and Sister Mary did not look directly at him in her usual fashion but stared at a spot on the floor.

“And you make of this—what?”

“Perhaps”—she was now barely whispering—“it is a manifestation of something I should be discussing not with a doctor but with a priest.”

“Sister Mary…” Nick hesitated. But she was intelligent. And devoted to her duty. “I assure you that you’re wrong. Illness is not merely what we can see. It’s not just based on the symptoms the patient reports and the patterns we build up of those symptoms. The best medicine requires an understanding of what happens inside our bodies and what we can learn when peering through a microscope.”

“The study of anatomy,” she said.

She was looking straight at him now. Nick was quite sure they were both thinking the same thing. The word anatomy hung in the air between them. “Yes,” he said, making no effort to avoid her gaze. If he backed off now, he would simply confirm her worst suspicions. He suspected the Catholic Church, along with all the rest of the clerical establishment, to be virulent in its condemnation of what it would see as showing disrespect for the dead.

Sister Mary seemed to make a conscious decision to avoid the perilous topic. She drew a deep and audible breath. “We seem to have strayed from the subject, Dr. Turner. You believe then that despite their having no symptoms except for this prickly rash, the children are diseased?”

“In a manner of speaking. This irritation may come from some sickened internal organ, but I can’t say that for sure, and frankly I doubt it. What I’m quite convinced of, because of previous observation, is that
they are passing it to each other through ordinary contact. Or that you, in all innocence may have passed it from one to the rest.”