Chapter Fourteen #3
He even liked what most frustrated him, her stubborn purity.
She’d no chaperon, she worked in the theater, and she was a widow, but despite all that evidence to the contrary, he knew, to his growing bodily discomfort and pride in her, that she was prim as she was proper.
He doubted she’d had a lover since that terrible marriage that had so put her off men.
But he could remedy that—at the proper time, in his marriage bed.
Because she also had the fire: it was banked, but it was there.
And so he’d resolved to treat her just as he might any respectable virgin girl, and take her to bed only after he’d taken her promise to marry him.
And he was equally resolved to be sure of her answer before he asked.
Now he was the one who backed away.
“Sunday night,” he said slowly, as he stepped back to the door, his eyes glowing.
“Dress real fine, please, Miz Roberts, because we’re meeting Josh and Lucy at ‘monico’s and I want every man there to die of pure envy of me.
Well, come to think of it,” he said, as he opened the door.
“It don’t matter how you dress then, does it? ”
He stepped out into the hallway, grinning as he thought of what he’d say to her after Josh and Lucy left them alone, and what he planned to give her that was burning a sizable diamond-shaped hole in his vest pocket since he’d bought it yesterday.
He hummed to himself as he took the steps down, wondering if he’d have to leave her early come Sunday night, or if they’d find a cure for the miseries of Monday mornings together, as they had for Wednesday nights.
Hannah sank to her favorite chair and groped for the book she’d left there. There was an address in it she’d meant to visit before the month was out. Now she knew it would have to be much sooner than that.
She hadn’t understood the book at all, it was all to do with surgery and had illustrations of appliances that terrified her simply looking at them.
But it was, after all, a medical text and not for laypersons, and one written by a physician who was a professor and authority on woman’s diseases at a New York hospital.
She’d bought it because all the simpler books had failed her.
But it did, as well. She’d only skimmed it, realizing she’d wasted her money, until a note at the back caught her attention.
Because it seemed that the renowned Dr. Lewis, when he was not operating, writing, or lecturing, was pleased to give consultations at his office.
The fact that Dr. Lewis’s offices were at the hospital made things easier for Hannah.
Hospitals had telephones, so she could go to a bank and call for an appointment before taking a horsecar so far uptown on Friday afternoon.
When she marched into the great echoing reception hall of the hospital, she could ignore the reek of ether and disinfectant by pretending to be a woman on a mission of mercy, visiting anyone there, because only the desperate were sent to hospitals.
With the right expression of kind concern on her face, no one would imagine her a patient come to see a doctor dealing in women’s complaints.
Then she would walk down a hall to the left until she came to the office with his name on it, as she’d been instructed to do on the telephone, and nip inside before anyone saw her doing so.
She promptly gave the receptionist her name: Mrs. Eva MacDowell, and perched on the edge of her chair for a half hour listening to her heartbeat, until they called her name three times and she remembered who she was supposed to be.
She was shown into a cold green room with a chair, an examining table that looked very like the machine in the dungeon that was used to get prisoners to confess in The Count of Monte Cristo, and a folding screen to the rear of the room.
She stood erect and held her pocketbook in front of her like a lifeline until the door opened.
A harsh-faced woman in white came in, and Hannah found herself feeling as thwarted as she was relieved, because she’d been prepared to meet her doctor.
The woman read her a litany of intimate questions to do with her health, relations with the opposite sex, and history of procreation.
Hannah would have bolted from the room if she hadn’t been asked in such bored tones, the woman checking each question off and entering her answers in the notebook as she did so.
“Now, Mrs. MacDowell,” the woman said when she was done, “go behind the screen, and take off everything, if you please. Your dress, your chemise, your petticoat,” she said, enumerating undergarments in a bored singsong, “your bust bodice, corset cover, corset, drawers, garters, and stockings. Everything. Put on the gray gown you find in there, and button it at the back. You may leave on your shoes,” she added generously, as she left the room.
Hannah’s heart was as cold as her fingers as she stood in the center of the room and tried to control her breathing.
It seemed all roads had led to this, as she’d always feared they might—to finding herself alone in a cold, strange room in a hospital: the place for the mismade or ill-used, unfortunates of nature and fate in a place of last resort.
No one she knew had ever been in a hospital; people with families didn’t go to them, those with any choice didn’t either.
Although she was only in an office in a hospital, she still didn’t know if she would stay.
She didn’t know how she could bear to appear naked before a strange man.
She’d never appeared so before her husband until the last days of their brief marriage, and even then, it had been in the dark.
She began to tremble, she’d never been so cold.
But then she thought of the warm bright color of a certain crop of hair, and the vivid summer sky blue of a particular pair of eyes, and the vision warmed her somewhat.
And she knew that if she ever hoped to dwell upon those things again, she must do what she’d been told to do.
For there was no other way that she could hope to discover what her problem was and if it were solvable.
Surely, a few moments of shame and embarrassment, no matter how every sensibility shrank from them, were worth suffering for the possibility of a bright future.
She walked behind the screen, took off all her clothing, and put on the gray smock. But when the doctor entered the room and she came out to meet him, she was shaking so badly she thought he must think she suffered from St. Vitus’s dance.
The gentleman in the white coat was a balding, unremarkable looking man with spectacles and a full beard.
It heartened Hannah somewhat to realize that she wouldn’t recognize him if she ever met him again, outside of this place.
The strong-featured woman entered the room after him, and stood with her back against the door, watching them.
“Mrs. MacDowell,” he said, barely glancing at her as he gestured to the examining table, “if you would, please.”
She sat up on the table and squeezed her eyes shut, and kept them so as he asked her to undo her buttons and lie down. But she was trembling too hard to do it.
She couldn’t seem to stop shaking even long enough to get into the position he indicated, and she felt hot tears on her cold cheeks as she realized she could not because her body was clenched as tightly as her fists were.
“Just relax, can you relax?” the doctor said as he tried to get her to lower her shoulders to the cold table.
“I c-can-cannot seem to, just yet,” she said in a broken voice. “I’m terribly sorry, if you could but wait, I could try, I cannot seem to help it,” she explained with embarrassment as she kept shuddering despite all her attempts to calm herself.
“No need,” he said, wheeling about and stepping away from her.
“The examination would be both painful and unproductive, as things are. No. Return next week, we shall get an operating theater, and use ether in order to perform the examination. It should be interesting, at that. Yes, make a note to inform the students, Mrs. Bailey,” he remarked to the harsh-faced woman, “next Tuesday at ten, on regular morning rounds. It ought to be instructive for them. Is it a case of hysteria such as the Viennese journals are now so fond of reporting?” he asked with a slight sneer.
“Or a simple imperforate hymen? Or perhaps,” he mused, “a truly interesting anomaly?”
“The students?” Hannah asked, coming out of her well of shame and sitting bolt upright. “There will be students present?”
“Medical students, yes. Why not?” the doctor said, adjusting his spectacles as though noticing her for the first time as he gazed at her in surprise.
“You will not be bothered by them, I assure you, since you will be asleep, for hours. If you have something correctable, we shall correct it then and there. If not, you will know of it when you wake. But,” he added, with the first smile she’d seen from him, “be assured, Mrs. MacDowell, in any event you will be instructive. A very interesting case.”
Hannah worked until past sundown on Saturday, which Kyle knew she didn’t need to do.
But her face was so set with determination, he wisely decided to let the matter be, after a simple inquiry as to her health and state of mind won him a: “Fine, and just fine, thank you. It is not a thing I wish to discuss further, thank you, Kyle; did you want this letter to go to ‘Mr. Peacock and Son,’ or ‘sons’?”
But when he left the room, she went to work again on the other letter she’d been composing since she’d left the doctor’s office the day before.