Katherine Keenum (5 page)

“Yes,” said Jeanette, softly, with a catch in her throat. She stared at Cousin Effie questioningly.

“So much the better!” said Mrs. Hendrick, with a chuckle. “Adeline and Harold chase over to Paris every year or so to search out the latest and the best. Won’t we impress them!”

“This is pie in the sky,” said Mrs. Palmer. “Even if the money could be found—”

“My brother has made a big success in Ohio. Money is not the problem, is it, Sarah?”

“Not entirely, Maude. But setting that aside, and setting aside the question of whether Jeanette deserves the chance to go, she cannot just traipse off to Paris by herself.”

“I won’t,” said Jeanette, whose eyes had never left Effie’s. “You’re coming with me, aren’t you, Cousin Effie?”

“Oh, my,” murmured Cousin Effie, “and I don’t speak any French.”

CHAPTER FOUR

An Attack in Cincinnati

E
dward Murer customarily kept the Murer Brothers Pharmacy on Elm Street in Cincinnati open until eight o’clock at night. At six, when most other shops on the block closed up, he sent Hans, his clerk, home. There were few late customers; but, as Edward explained whenever his older brother Theodore urged him to shorten the retail store’s hours, those few were likely to be emergency cases. They needed him, and he preferred to serve them in the ordinary way rather than be rousted out from his boardinghouse in an atmosphere of crisis. Besides, he could read as easily in the back room behind the counter as he could at home. At age thirty-seven, as he had ever since the end of the war, Edward relied on quiet orderliness to keep suffering and panic at bay.

One night in February, he was, as usual, slumped in the shabby easy chair he kept in the back room. It was faded to no color and gray at the seams with dust, horsehair stuffing showed through on the threadbare arms, and it sagged. But the bones in his lean body settled automatically among its familiar bumps and hollows. He would have said it was comfortable.

He was watching his right hand as it lay on a small side table where an oil lamp provided a pool of light just sufficient for reading. The latest copy of
La Revue des Deux Mondes
to come from Paris lay open on his lap. The journal was his primary link to the larger, Continental world he wistfully yearned for, but he could no more have said what was in this issue than predict whether his hand would move to unstopper a full bottle of laudanum that sat in the shadows beyond his fingertips. No, that was not true. He was pretty sure he would not succumb. It had been more than two years since he had given in to the apothecary’s temptation.

From beyond the curtain of beads between him and the main shop came the muted hum of tiny gears winding up, followed by eight clear tones as a brass clock struck the closing hour. At its prompting, Edward withdrew his hand from the attenuated pool of yellow light and closed the magazine. He sighed. On the whole, he was glad of the victory but regretted the temporary solace of opium. He extinguished the oil lamp. After the dusky shadows of the back room, the yellow gaslight in the shop seemed artificially bright—though not half so harsh and glaring as the new electrical lighting that was turning up in stores throughout Cincinnati and making Theodore, who had shares in Cincinnati Light and Power, a very rich man (it had been many years since Theodore, who ran the manufacturing wing of Murer Brothers, had actually worked in the drugstore).

As he closed up shop, Edward glanced outside. When the lamps were first lit near sunset, gaslight seemed briefly to extend the day; and on the more garish streets, like Vine, where store windows and beer halls blazed, it was part of the bright scene; but on the quieter side streets, the isolated pools of light were surrounded by darkness. In his present mood, Edward was irritated by their feebleness; they were like dots of campfires. He turned the
Open
sign in the door to
Closed
, pulled the shades, counted the till, entered the daily tally in the ledger, and locked up the cash in the safe. After exchanging his white pharmacist’s smock for a black frock coat, he pulled on a smooth, warm overcoat with a fur collar, set a top hat on his head, and picked up his favorite ebony walking stick. Not a man specially given to extravagance or show, he nevertheless took advantage of prosperity to place comfort and a touch of elegance between himself and the memory of scratchy, thick army uniforms and the worse—far worse—lice-infested, thin rags that came later.

Twelve years separated Theodore and Edward in age—twelve years, which meant that when war was declared in 1861, Theodore, with a wife and five children, did not feel called upon to serve in the Union army despite his gratitude to the country that had welcomed the Murers and other German political refugees. When conscription became mandatory, Theodore took the legal recourse of hiring a substitute to go in his place. In contrast, at age twenty and unmarried, Edward had dropped out of medical school to enlist in the first month of the war. His mother wept, but his father was proud. Herr Dr. Murer had been a chemistry professor and liberal activist before the failure of the revolution in 1848 had driven him into exile and the humbler druggist’s trade of his ancestors. When Edward came home at the end of the war, emaciated, coughing, and limping, Mutter was dead and Papa was a sad old man. An abashed Theodore had taken Edward into his own home. Papa made him a partner in the pharmacy as soon as Edward could return to work. A return to medical school was out of the question. At first, even after regaining strength and mental acuity, Edward could not face it. He had seen too many hacked limbs to stomach the surgery classes, he said; he had slipped in too much blood. He did not add that he had smelled too much vomit, piss, and shit in the mud of the battlefield ever to want to go back into a hospital ward. Eventually, he reenrolled in classes to master the use of botanicals and alkaloids; he found himself able to undertake the gentler alleviation of pain that came with dispensing drugs and sugar pills. Although he seldom smiled, he was observant and sympathetic. After his father’s death, the neighborhood transferred their reverence for the old man to him. With his reserved demeanor, the flecks of gray in his dark hair and beard made it easy to imagine him older than he actually was. They called him Dr. Murer.

Out on the street, Edward lingered for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the uneven darkness. On a winter’s night, nothing made the obscurity of the deeper doorways and alleys penetrable; but at eight o’clock, with a few other pedestrians out and the occasional carriage or streetcar passing, he gave no thought to danger as he made his way to a neighborhood tavern where every night he drank a glass of beer and ate whatever sausage or sauerbraten was chalked up on the bill of fare. In years past, he had varied the routine from time to time—going to other eating houses, dining at home with Theodore or friends, attending concerts—but not lately. Sunk in dull thoughts, he passed familiar sights unawares, but his nerves had lost none of the sixth sense he had developed too highly during the war. Almost before a rough arm had reached for his throat and another grabbed for his waist, he had wrenched away and struck out with his walking stick. His first blow caught his assailant on the shoulder hard enough to make him duck. In the brief scuffle that followed, Edward landed a second blow squarely on the man’s head and then struck again, savagely, to knock him to the ground. He was prepared to beat him again and again.

“Lay off, mister. I ain’t armed,” whimpered the man, rising woozily to one knee and shielding his face with his arms. He mumbled something about being a veteran, a prisoner of war, bad times. “The whole damn country’s forgotten, but lemme tell you, it’s hard.”

Edward jabbed the tip of his cane under the man’s rough beard and forced him to raise his chin. Even in the gloom between streetlamps, he could see the flattened pockets under the fellow’s eyes and guessed at the coarse skin; it was no doubt a face ravaged by drink. A bleakness in their eyes met.

“An-der-son-ville,” declared Edward, fiercely, between clenched teeth.

The man pushed the cane away and crumpled back down to the ground, sitting with his head bowed between his knees. “Salisbury,” he replied. “North Carolina. Hellhole.”

“They all were,” said Edward, beginning to shake.

He stood back; the hot flare of his anger drained away, leaving him empty. The wreck at his feet recovered quicker than he did and, without lifting his head, held out a beggar’s palm. Edward stared blankly at it for a moment, then stepped farther away, still shaking. He turned his back and walked on.

He walked and he walked. He passed right by his usual tavern, recoiling from the smell of beer and cabbage and the babble issuing through the door as someone came out. At first, he was jumpy. He walked quickly, hitting the ground with a resounding tattoo of his cane. Over and over again, he relived the attack, sometimes angrily, sometimes made sick by an inexplicable sense of failure. Once or twice, he thought of going back but knew it was too late. Gradually, his step slowed. The wound in his leg began to ache. That pain he could ignore, and did; but to his horror, tears came suddenly to his eyes. Worse than the surprise of their hot, round wetness was the conviction that they were right and natural. The world, or his life anyway, called for them. Get hold of yourself, man, he thought. He could not stand on a city street and cry. He looked around to see where he was: He had walked out Liberty, almost to the railroad tracks. Ridiculous to have come so far. He must get inside somewhere. Not his drab boardinghouse room; he balked at that. He would go to Theodore’s house, must go to Theodore’s house; an instinct for safety drove him to his brother and his brother’s wife, Sophie. He had walked so long and so late that the streetcars were no longer running. Just as well; he might not have trusted himself to get on board with other people. What if he cried? What if they asked questions; what if they stared.

It took him an hour of steady plodding, the last stretches up many flights of public steps that climbed steeply between bends in the road. By the time he reached Theodore’s street high on Mount Auburn, all the houses were dark. If he had not been so exhausted, he would have been ashamed to trouble the family; but he could not afford the scruples of pride. In spite of his warm coat and the heat of exertion, he was shaking again. His teeth chattered.

He lifted the knocker and rapped three times, a hesitant, furtive summons. Useless, futile. He pounded harder, louder. He leaned his cheek against the door and beat it with his fist.

An upstairs window flew open. From above came Theodore’s choleric voice: “What the devil—? Do you know the time? Who is it?”

“Theodore. It’s me.
Ist Eduard. Bitte!
” he called. “Please,” he whispered, into the darkness.

*   *   *

He awoke the next morning sluggish and disoriented. A pencil-thin streak of light blazed painfully white at the bottom of a window shade; it was not where it should be. An unfamiliar chest of drawers loomed in a corner. As he roused himself enough to remember being put to bed in his nephew Carl’s room, he remembered the rest of last night, too, in a surge of misery. Coming to Theodore and Sophie might have been the only thing to do, but he abhorred the need, and the fuss and bother that followed. He couldn’t bear to think now about what came next. His bad leg ached; so did his head and back. He rolled over onto his side, away from the hateful light, and fell asleep again. He bolted awake later to the realization that he must open the drugstore and half rose on one elbow. His head pounded. He knew that the pain was due partly to hunger (when had he last eaten? lunch yesterday?). What he didn’t know, on second thought, as he hung over his arm, was whether food or the drugstore or anything else in the world mattered enough to force him out of bed. Maybe not, but a full bladder did.

Sophie, who had kept an ear out for any sound from his room, heard his footsteps stumble down the hall. When they stumbled back, she came upstairs with a tray. She found him standing in the middle of the bedroom, engulfed in a voluminous nightshirt borrowed from Theodore, looking around helplessly for his clothes.

“Get into bed,” she ordered. Not for nothing had she spent a year nursing him back to health. She set the tray down on a bedside table and plumped his pillow against the headboard.

“The drugstore,” he protested, feebly. He felt almost too sick to speak. “What time is it?”

“Nearly eleven o’clock. Don’t worry,
liebken
, Theodore sent Carl over with his key to let Hans in. They’ll run the store today.”

Hans was the ablest pharmaceutical apprentice the Murers had ever taken on. Edward himself had overseen most of the boy’s training and knew he was both methodical as a druggist and ambitious. Carl, moreover, a year out of high school, was already active in the family’s larger business (unlike his older brother Christian, who had gone east to Yale University and showed no sign of returning). Carl could easily handle the ledger. Nevertheless, Edward shied away from the thought of the boys tampering with his supplies and his bookkeeping unsupervised.

“They’ll make a mess of it,” he said, as he lay back in bed. Sophie picked up the tray, ready to place it on his lap. “But they’ll have fun,” he conceded, with a trace of the sweet smile that few other people ever saw.

The smile did not last. At the sight even of dry toast, his gorge rose. A pang of squeezing pain behind his left temple shot across his forehead and sent a sick wave down through his body. His hands went clammy; he panted. His face was chalky and drawn. Hastily, Sophie leaned him forward, propped a second pillow behind him for more support, and fetched a shawl to settle around his shoulders. Then she sat on the edge of the bed and poured him a cup of milky tea.

“Sophie, I can’t—”

“Shhhh, dear. We’ve been through this before. Just a sip.”

A sip of tea, a nibble of toast, wait. Another sip, another nibble, wait. Gradually, the headache subsided and his stomach settled. They had indeed been through this before, all too often, in that first year after the war when she brought him back to life, as he was inclined to say. For Sophie, too, it had been a year of healing. Despite her best efforts, she had lost both her daughters to a typhoid epidemic that swept the city during the fighting. It had done her a world of good to see her patient mend instead of die.