Chapter 46
To perform the operation, the surgeon should therefore be steadfast and not allow himself to become disconcerted by the cries of the patient.
The next morning, Joseph offered Mass for his sister. Then he returned to his family’s home with Father Baker. When they reached the gate, a sign greeted them:
Surgery today.
Please do not summon the police.
Joseph grimaced. He peered up through the balustrade to watch his father and Henry carrying part of their dining table onto the third-floor piazza. Surely Dr. Mortimer did not intend to operate in public?
Joseph found Tessa on the first-floor piazza, cradling Clare on the joggling board.
She did not see them at once, so intent was she on her daughter.
On such a day, this beautiful idyll of mother and child was a welcome distraction; but Joseph reminded himself not to smile—Father Baker stood beside him.
Tessa rose and bowed her head in greeting, as the stomping and scraping continued above them.
“My father and Dr. Mortimer cannot mean to do this on the piazza?” Joseph inquired.
“They plan to use a screen,” Tessa explained. “Your father says the piazza has better light than anywhere inside the house.” Then she looked away. “And Dr. Mortimer said it will be easier to clean.”
Joseph invited Tessa to sit again.
She told Father Baker: “Mrs. Conley is in her bedchamber.”
He went up to hear Hélène’s Confession.
Considering his sister’s behavior last night, Joseph imagined the Confession would be a lengthy one. He could not sit beside Tessa on the joggling board—they might be thrown together—so he pulled over a chair.
Tessa asked her wide-eyed daughter: “Clare, do you remember Father Joseph?”
“I hope not,” he chuckled. “She slept through your churching, so the last time she saw me, I put salt in her mouth and poured cold water on her head.”
If Clare recalled the incident, she proved forgiving.
When Joseph offered his forefinger, the little girl grasped it with her tiny, perfect fingers.
For someone so small, Clare was wonderfully strong.
Her mouth was a rosebud, and even the two tiny moles on her left cheek became her.
Joseph sang her a French verse, and Clare’s eyes widened attentively.
“David is here too,” Tessa told him. “He insisted on coming.”
Joseph should start behaving like a Priest. He climbed the stairs to find Hélène’s bedchamber door closed. Dr. Mortimer and Dr. Michaels (the assistant surgeon) were carrying the easy chair from her dressing room onto the piazza.
The men positioned the chair atop a canvas floor cloth. Reassembled across the piazza’s width, the dining table was set with a terrifying assortment of blades. They might have been plucked from a butcher’s shop. The surgeons even wore bloodstained aprons. Joseph shuddered.
His mother paced past him, clutching her rosary.
He caught her attention. ‘Do you really think this is punishment for Hélène’s sins?’
His mother frowned, confusion in every line of her face. ‘How can a Priest ask that?’ She averted her eyes. ‘I only wonder that God has not struck me instead.’
Dr. Mortimer had warned them that, if the cancer had spread beyond Hélène’s breast, he would have to cut away her axillary glands and pectoral muscle as well.
She might lose the use of her right arm and her ability to sign.
That would punish Joseph’s mother after all.
There were so few people left with whom she could converse.
Joseph turned to his nephew, who stood at one end of the dining table caressing a tall wooden case. David called to Joseph’s father, who was adding a Chinese screen to the strange assemblage of furniture. “May I set up the microscope, Grandfather?”
“If you’re careful, David.”
“I will be.” Reverently the boy undid the latch.
Joseph asked: “Are you certain you wish to be here, son?”
David nodded as he withdrew the microscope from its case. “I want to be a surgeon, not a physician. Physicians only advise people. Surgeons fix them.”
If Joseph’s father was insulted, he did not defend himself. He only asked Joseph to anchor one end of the folding screen so he could pull it open.
David muttered: “They won’t let me watch.”
“Three men staring at my daughter’s breast are quite enough,” Joseph’s father reasoned with his usual misplaced levity.
“But I don’t care that it’s her breast!” the boy persisted. “After Dr. Mortimer removes it, then may I—”
“David.” His grandfather’s face was grave now. “Try and see this from your aunt’s perspective.”
Chastened, if still disappointed, the boy dropped his gaze. “Yes, sir.”
“Whether you become a physician or a surgeon, you must think of your patient, not only her disease.”
Father Baker called Joseph into Hélène’s bedchamber to assist with Viaticum and Extreme Unction.
Liam, Tessa, and Joseph’s mother joined them for the prayers, with Clare offering her own cooing accompaniment.
Following the last “Amen,” Father Baker gave Joseph leave to remain with his family as long as they needed him, then departed.
Hannah appeared from somewhere to ask: “Should I take Clare now, Miss Tessa?” Joseph supposed the surgeons did not want any sudden noises startling them while they had knives in their hands.
“Let me kiss her first, for luck.” Hélène leaned over her goddaughter’s bassinet and smiled. “After all, little one, you are a living miracle. An answered prayer. The seventh child of a seventh child.”
Clare sucked her thumb with great importance.
Joseph crossed back out to the piazza to bless the operating theatre. A sheet was draped over the easy chair now, and two smaller chairs were set beside it. He knew Liam and Tessa would brave the bloody business. Someone must restrain Hélène’s arms.
Dr. Mortimer was concealing the last of his blades by laying a towel over them—to hide them from his patient, Joseph imagined. The surgeon hesitated. “Should I have left the instruments uncovered for you?”
Joseph tried to smile. “Thank you, but no. God can see them, even if I can’t.” He motioned toward the easy chair. “Why seated and not reclining?”
“Supine patients are less likely to faint,” Dr. Mortimer explained, “and that is the best bulwark we have against pain.”
“Surely you will give her laudanum?”
“Opiates are beneficial only in small doses. In large ones, they induce severe vomiting. A small dose is useless against this kind of pain. But too deep or too protracted a syncope is also dangerous. If your sister does faint, your father will be monitoring her pulse very carefully. We may be forced to revive her before we can continue.”
“So your choices…”
“Are between the Devil and the deep sea. I believe that’s why we need you.” Dr. Mortimer left Joseph to the blessing.
At last Liam led Hélène onto the piazza.
She was trembling. She wore pink slippers and a white wrapper.
She embraced her husband, her friend, and her father in turn, as if drawing strength from each of them.
Her mother too, though she offered only a stiff pat on her daughter’s back.
When Hélène embraced May, both women had tears in their eyes.
Dr. Michaels leaned over the edge of the piazza. “We’re ready for the hot water!” he called.
Finally, Hélène slid her arms around Joseph. He pulled her close, as if he could press his chrism into her. He blessed her one final time, then kissed her forehead for good measure.
Hélène sank into the chair. Their father knelt before her as if she were an enthroned queen, only to bind her ankles to the chair legs. She squeezed her eyes shut.
Joseph could not help but recall the last time he’d seen his father restrain an innocent woman. He’d been standing on this very piazza, that terrible night he’d glimpsed his father raping his mother.
Dr. Mortimer pulled protectors over his shirtsleeves. “Remember, Mrs. Conley: we wound but to heal.”
Hélène nodded. Liam and Tessa settled uneasily on either side of her. Behind them, the cheery, fragrant blossoms of the yellow jessamine twining up the piazza columns seemed a frame for a romantic interlude, not a surgery.
Henry brought the hot water. Joseph, his mother, his nephew, and May crossed around the Chinese screen to the other end of the piazza. David took up the book he’d left on a chair, while Joseph and his mother knelt on prie-Dieus, May close beside them.
As he prayed, Joseph’s ears strained for every sound on the other side of the screen. Liam and Tessa murmured encouragement while the doctors murmured to each other.
“We’ll need samples of both tumors,” Dr. Mortimer said clearly.
Hélène sucked in her breath. The first puncture, Joseph imagined. There were footfalls and a long pause, followed by male whispers. Joseph caught only scattered words that held little meaning for him: “colloid,” “encephaloid,” “muco-serous”—and then, unmistakably, “cancer juice.”
Sloshing in the water basin. Footfalls. Dr. Mortimer spoke distinctly again, as if instructing Dr. Michaels: “The situation of the smaller tumor…”
Another sound from Hélène, halfway between a whimper and cry.
Footfalls to the table and microscope again.
Murmurs, increasing in volume. The doctors conferred with animation.
David looked up from his reading. A glance at the distressing illustration told Joseph it was a medical text, not a prayer book.
Finally, his father stepped around the edge of the screen. He exhaled—and smiled. His hands followed his words so Joseph’s mother would understand too: “The matter is not cancerous. Not in either growth.”
“You mean…” came Hélène’s feeble voice.
“We will remove the tumors only,” Dr. Mortimer affirmed.
Joseph released his breath and praised God for this mercy. His mother wept her thanksgiving, while May shouted hers.
Even as they celebrated, Joseph’s father returned to the other side of the screen. The worst of the surgery was yet to come. Dr. Mortimer promised: “We’ll be as quick as we can, Mrs. Conley.”
Still she cried out and sobbed. Her breaths became more and more ragged.
Liam’s voice broke through her pain: “I bet you cannot recite our sonnet anymore.”
“Of course I can!” she yelled at him.
“Prove it to me then, Ellie.”
Her rendition would never have won an oratory prize. The words were as jagged as her breaths, climbing and falling with a meter entirely separate from Shakespeare’s. The pagan verses invaded Joseph’s prayers even still, desperate and defiant:
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never…”
That was as far as she got before she fainted.
Practicality replaced poetry. Joseph’s father informed them that Hélène’s pulse remained strong, but could Liam please fetch the smelling-salts, to have them at hand?
Liam must have hesitated to leave Hélène’s side; after a moment, Tessa offered: “I’ll get them. ” Joseph heard her flit to the table.
An instrument clattered in a basin. Dr. Mortimer assured them: “We’re nearly finished.
” Yet several more minutes passed before they called Joseph, his mother, his nephew, and May around the screen again.
“Everything went as planned,” the surgeon declared.
“There will be a scar, but I kept it as small as I could.”
Hélène sat slumped in the easy chair, her head resting against one wing.
Her right shoulder and arm were bare, and clean bandages encircled the right side of her chest. Joseph tried not to look at the bloody linen surrounding her.
Their father untied her ankles and roused her with the smelling-salts.
Hélène sucked in a panicked breath. “Papa?”
“It’s over, ma poulette. It’s all over.”
Her eyes darted to each of them, as if for confirmation.
“Welcome back,” Joseph and Tessa said almost in unison, then blushed.
“You were magnificent, Ellie,” Liam told her. “As brave as any man would have been.”
“How is the pain now?” Joseph’s father asked. “Would you like a little laudanum?”
She nodded without hesitation.
Gently, Liam carried her to their bedchamber.
In addition to the abandoned instruments streaked with gore, beside the operating chair lay a porcelain bowl covered with a towel. David watched with interest as Dr. Mortimer transferred the bowl to the dining table, setting it down next to the microscope.
The surgeon offered: “Perhaps we might dissect the tumors together, Mr. Lazare?”
The boy leapt to his side. “Yes, sir!”
Joseph grimaced and followed his sister.