The Islands of Dr. Thomas (5 page)

“I was trying to figure out who might have taken these photos, until old Léon remembered that a Doctor Thomas used to be seen around here, taking pictures with an odd-looking camera. Léon could even recognize him in some of the photos. Hold on,” he said, shuffling through the piles scattered around him, “I'll show you what he looked like.”

“Here he is!” he announced proudly, holding an amazingly sharp photo under their noses.

The photograph had been taken on Dog Island. It was a view from the high-water mark looking out in the direction of Tréhouart Cove. A wharf, some houses, and the salt-works could be seen, and farther back, neighbourhoods on the island that had long since disappeared. Two men dressed completely in black were standing on an ice floe just off the bank; the contrast between the men and the dazzling white snow was startling. From the bank, a third person was watching the scene.

“The fellow in front, the one with the beret, is definitely the fisherman who owns the dory. The second one, right in front in the fur coat, that's Doctor Thomas.”

“Can you pass me the magnifying glass?” asked François.

Jacques passed him the magnifying glass that he always kept nearby, and Francois took a close look at the photograph.

His feet straight forward, his eyes staring out to the open sea, his body stiff, his hands at his side, the doctor's stance and style were a strong contrast to the more relaxed appearance of the two other men, who were standing with their hands in their pockets, watching rather indifferently, as though they had seen all this before. On the other hand, the doctor seemed flabbergasted by the sight of ice floating on the water.

François felt oddly touched by the emotion emanating from the snapshot, and he lowered the magnifying glass.

“Have a look,” he told Émilie, passing her the lens and photo.

Now it was her turn to delve into the past. As usual, she commented aloud on her discoveries. “You can see a white collar, a stiff one, under his coat. You can tell he isn't from around here. He is so well-dressed! And a fur coat! My goodness, to look at him, you'd think he was about to jump in the water,” she added, moved by the photo without understanding why.

“What do we know about that doctor, Jacques?” asked François.

“Not a whole lot, unfortunately. We know he came here in 1912, that he was posted in Miquelon—you should see the photos of Miquelon! Gorgeous! One day he went back to France and we never heard any more about him. I don't know why he would leave all this behind. It's pretty mysterious...”

François and Émilie looked at each other. Outside, the siren was beginning to screech, announcing it was noon. The store would close and the entire town would sit down to eat. Jacques saw them to the door, eager to go home like the others and spread a serviette over his lap, pour a nice glass of red wine, and dig into the steak and french fries his wife had promised him that morning. An hour and a half later he would be back at the studio. If he wanted to take a nap, there was no time to lose. Closing the blinds in the window, he called out: “If you want, come back this afternoon! I can set you up in the back, where you'll be more comfortable to look at all the photos.”

People were already hurrying home. A few cars were headed up from the wharf. Standing still on the sidewalk, François and Émilie stood out from the crowd of people milling about, as though they had just arrived in a time machine and had not yet adjusted to the new world around them. Should they, too, learn to comply with the habits of Saint-Pierre? Without a word, she looked at him. Émilie, who was usually so frank and daring, could not manage to find the words. She wanted to invite him to come back with her in the afternoon, to continue looking at the photos.

“I can't,” he replied, before she could even open her mouth. “I promised my aunt I'd visit, and she's expecting me.”

Émilie put on a brave smile, as though she had not foolishly been hoping that he would accept her invitation. Still, a few hours stolen from her daily routine would have been so precious.

“Maybe another time,” she murmured.

Without a word, François leaned towards her and kissed her on both cheeks, held her close for a moment. Émilie placed her head on his shoulder; there was a silent tenderness during this brief moment they shared. Then, regretfully and without a word, they turned and walked off in separate directions.

The leaden shroud that had lifted from the city this winter morning and drifted off to sea suddenly fell over them once again, threatening to suffocate them both.

Two

“Jacques, I need a favour...Jacques, can you hear me?”

Communications between France and Saint-Pierre et Miquelon left a lot to be desired and put a man like François, who was not known for his patience at the best of times, on edge.

“Jacques,” he continued, leaning even closer to the machine, as though he hoped to get closer to his listener.

Never did he feel the distance that separated him from his loved ones as cruelly as he did when he telephoned them. The delays in transmission made it easier for each person to wait his turn, the way René Olivier did at his telegraph in Langlade: “Need fresh bread for Monday delivery, over to you.” “Message received, will tell Jeanne, over to you.” Or the way the captains of the trawlers did it: “On our way to Saint-Pierre, over.” “Need the pilot tomorrow six o'clock, over.” Between the nearly inaudible voices and static electricity (as they called any noise they could not immediately identify), François felt the full extent of the distance—an abyss.

That morning, he was persistent. After hanging up, he took a deep breath and dialed the number again.

“Jacques?”

This time the connection was good. The photo- grapher in Saint-Pierre and the architect in Paris could hear each other clearly. How long would they be able to talk?

“I would like to buy a selection of Doctor Thomas' photos. You know, the ones I saw in your studio a few months back. I want large prints, mounted and ready to hang in my office. Can you do it?”

The desire to have the photos had hit him suddenly, after he had been thinking of the piles of black and white photos on the counter of the studio, and especially of the picture of Dog Island. No doubt, the memory of the delicious morning spent with Émilie was part of it too.

As soon as he had returned to Paris, François had had his own photos processed, the ones he had taken on the shore that morning. He thought they had a particular texture, probably because at the moment he was taking them Émilie's presence by his side had influenced his point of view, or perhaps being momentarily released from his solitude had transformed his vision.

The image of the mysterious doctor standing on the shoreline (“ready to jump in,” as Émilie had said) rarely left his mind. He was intrigued: Why would a physician, undoubtedly very busy, have decided to become an ethnographer? Why would he have so tirelessly observed, in minute detail, a way of life that was foreign to him and in which his colleagues surely had no interest whatsoever?

“Photos? Of course,” replied the photographer, enchanted with the order, “but which ones? How many? There are hundreds, and I haven't even finished developing all of them yet.”

“Let Émilie choose them for me. As many as she wants. I have room.”

By entrusting her with this responsibility, François hoped to make up for the missed opportunity to spend some time together that afternoon and regain some of the cozy intimacy that had enveloped them for an instant before evaporating into the misty noon air. But he had another reason: He had an intuition that her choices would be perfect, the ones he would have made if he had the time to do it. She would go directly to the essential photos, uncover the most beautiful and the most likely to move him. By giving her this role, he was confirming the precious connection that bound them together and that, he felt, she still had doubts about. He hoped to erase the infinite sorrow he had seen come over her for a second, before she regained her courage.

Through these photos, chosen according to her own tastes and priorities, and which he would hang all around his office, Émilie would become a permanent part of his everyday life in Paris. When exhaustion would overtake him and he would fall asleep on the big leather sofa across from his desk, instead of going home to an empty apartment, she would be there—along with the islands—two inseparable parts of a whole.

On the other side of the world, at the end of the telephone line, Jacques did not seem to find anything strange in François' request. During their short visit to his studio, he had felt the harmony of their connection, a very discreet emotion that had not escaped his experienced photographer's eye.

The two men talked a little about the order and how it should be shipped to France before turning to the weather (“in Saint-Pierre you could cut through the fog with a knife, the last couple of days,” “blazing sun in France”) and then on to trout fishing.

“Good, then, I'll look after it. I'll talk to her about it,” Jacques said. He had to hang up because a customer had come into the studio.

François hung up the receiver, satisfied as always at having taken care of something. He was above all a man of action. Gifted with an enormous capacity for hard work and a contagious energy, he considered every matter with equal part enthusiasm and rigorous attention. “Everything is a series of steps,” he often explained. “The greater the challenge, the more stages there are to pass through, that's all. Intelligence consists of pushing the process as far along as possible.”

Preoccupied for several weeks with his discovery of the doctor, François had decided to do something about it. The first thing to do was to surround himself with the work of the enigmatic Doctor Thomas. A photographer himself, he was in a good position to appreciate the doctor's technique, his explorations, and especially the patience required to produce such a collection of photos. The spontaneous shots, combined with the rich composition and the quality of the details, spoke volumes about his artistic talent, especially since the camera he would have used at the time was not nearly as sophisticated as the ones available today. François was determined to track down Doctor Thomas.
He can't have fallen off the edge of the earth
, he reminded himself time and time again,
especially if he left all this behind
.

He would have to arm himself with patience. Since he did not like the waiting any more than the absence, and since he was forced to put up with both, he got back to work with his typical single-minded dedication. He was used to cutting himself off from the world to create and to work, and now satisfied to have taken the first step towards solving the mystery of Doctor Thomas, he put all thoughts of the island out of his mind and returned to his role of well-known architect whose work so pleased his Parisian clientele.

A few days later, when Émilie was on her way to buy bread as she did almost every day, the photographer called her over from his doorstep.

“Come in for a minute, would you?”

He recounted his overseas conversation with François. Jacques did not add any of his own comments, which suited Émilie, “as if he found it perfectly normal that I would be asked to do this.” The request nearly knocked her off her feet, but she made sure no one could tell. It was a priceless gift, a special gesture. “The photos are for him,” explained Jacques, “for his office.”

So François was giving her the chance to shape his environment, to put her own mark on his daily life! By asking her to do this favour, he was proving that she had a special place in his life. She could not get over it, and filled page after page in her diary in her desire to dissect its meaning.

Doctor Thomas was now part of her life, as were her family, friends, teachers, and François. As soon as she found a free moment—the skating rink was closed for the season, so that made it easier—she would go to the photographer's studio and methodically review the photos Jacques was continuing to develop whenever he had time. He had set up a little spot for Émilie to work behind the velvet curtains.

Protected from curious stares, she was starting to sort out her choices. She could never stay long (an hour at a time, if that), but every time she felt as though she were watching a history of the islands unfold before her eyes—rewinding, at high speed, an uncut version— because the doctor, as she called him, seemed to have made a documentary of every aspect of island life.

More than anything else, she wanted to know more about his own life. Was he married? Did he have children? Why did he leave? Where did he go? What kind of medicine did he practice? Did he spend a lot of time caring for his patients or did he prefer to rush through his work so he could travel all over the countryside, through the snow, on the ocean, or around the docks? The sheer number of photographs was an indication that he spent a good deal of time outside the hospital.

During a supper conversation, Émilie had mentioned to her family that she was interested in Doctor Thomas' photos. She simply explained that she was helping the photographer sort and catalogue the prints. It was not because she was concerned with appearances or worried about indiscreet assumptions that she did not reveal her affection for François; it was simply because she had not found a way to put it into words, and sensed that others would have no idea what he meant to her and be tempted to discount it as a young woman's crush on an older man. Only Jacques shared her adventure, out of necessity but also because, since their first visit to his studio that freezing January morning, he had shown himself to be worthy of her trust.

Émilie's parents were not in the least surprised by her new project. It was fascinating, and besides, Jacques' studio was right next door, so it was very convenient.

“You should go to the library to find information about Doctor Thomas,” her grandmother suggested. Like everyone else, she had heard about the doctor but had no idea what had become of him when he left the island. In the
Journal officiel
, there might be a bit of information, or at least some mention of his comings and goings.

She had followed her grandmother's advice, taking the dark stairs four at a time to the library. The room had large windows overlooking the port. On each side, in huge glass bookcases, the bound volumes of
La Vigie
and
Le Réveil
, two newspapers from the islands that dated back to the 19th century, were carefully arranged, as were the volumes of the
Journal officiel
. Despite a careful search, she could find no trace of the doctor. It was as if he had passed through the islands without leaving any trace other than his superb photos that captured every detail of daily life: ice cutting at the Frecker pond, capelin drying on the shore, washerwomen in the stream at L'Anse à Miquelon, shipwrecks, First Communion and Corpus Christi processions, burials. The man had gone everywhere—hunting, fishing in dories to catch squid, on sleigh rides in the winter, with seals on the sandbanks by the Goulet.

“When did he find time to look after his patients?” she commented one day to Jacques, who was having enough trouble trying to finish the inventory of the glass plates.

Choosing the photos for François was not an easy job. Émilie approached the task like a school assignment, dividing it into several steps. First she examined all the prints, one by one. Then she discarded the ones which were simply teaching tools, like the one that showed a motor being installed in a dory in dry dock (“a Lashtrop,” Jacques said; “I remember my grandfather bought his in 1913”) and the ones that showed public events that may have been important at the time but which did not hold much interest now (a shipwreck against the Savoyard cliff or a war ship in the harbour).

She spent a long time on a series of photographs taken at the hospital. One of them showed an operating room; you could clearly see the inert patient on the table and a group of doctors and nurses who seemed to be marvelling at the surgeon's dexterity. It revealed quite a bit about the period, but this scene did not seem entirely appropriate for an architect's office.

In the soft light of the little room, she put down the photographs for a moment and began to think about the old hospital where Doctor Thomas must have worked, and that had been converted into a “hospice,” as nursing homes were called here. “What kind of a doctor was he?” she wondered. A little later, on a brand new page of her notebook, she would let her imagination guide her towards the answer.

“The doctor is on his way, Mrs. Gautier,” whispered Sister Hélène. “He'll explain it to you.”

Thérèse Gautier, her face hidden in her handkerchief, between two sobs, whispered: “Is he gonna save my Louis, at least? Eh, Sister, is he gonna save him?”

At that very moment, Doctor Thomas enters the small waiting room and sits on the wooden bench next to Mrs. Gautier.

“Mister Gautier is a lucky man. What at first looked like tuberculosis is simply an acute bronchitis. I'll save your husband, Mrs. Gautier,” the doctor said quickly and gently, “but you're going to have to take good care of him,” he said, taking her hand in his. “Otherwise...I'm not responsible for what happens.”

“Thank you! Oh thank you, Doctor!” cries Thérèse, “I'll take good care of him, for sure. You'll see.”

But that is exactly what worries the doctor. “For months I've been trying to get through to these mothers that they are killing their husbands and children by overheating their houses, never letting in the fresh air, keeping them in the kitchen for hours near the coal stove until they are turning scarlet!” he had complained, again and again, to his wife.

“Your husband needs to rest for a few weeks. Then he should go outside, Mrs. Gautier—dressed warmly of course! He has to get some fresh air. It's very important.”