When we were seated inside the coach, Elizabeth called to the driver up on his box, “To Bellevue, and don’t spare the horses!”
He touched his whip to the horse’s rump, and the coach jumped forward; its wheels sent up a cloud of grit. The girl’s head lolled on her breast as we bounced over cobbles. She was the incorporation of the misery of a million people jammed into 37,000 tenement houses—a scale of pauperism too vast to help or even comprehend. Forty thousand bodies filled the city’s asylums and workhouses; half a million beggars and ten thousand tramps passed among us, eliciting disgust, if they were noticed at all. More bodies—call them that, since they appeared to be more dead than alive—crowded the Lower East Side than Bombay. But our attention was centered on this girl, gratefully. To have only a single life on one’s conscience is a convenience in the same way that one pesky fly is easier to swat than a swarm, one itch less irksome than a rash.
Located in Kips Bay, on First Avenue, near the East River, Bellevue Hospital had been an almshouse and, along with the penitentiary and pesthouse on Blackwell’s Island, had served Gotham’s poor by making the sick well or, from its morgue, by sending them to the potter’s field on Hart Island, in Pelham Bay. Whether they went thence to glory or perdition was a matter for theologians. The girl, whose name we could not discover, was attended by Dr. Jasper Garmany, a surgeon whose competence extended even to the brain, which he would trephine with a drill resembling a carpenter’s. He was a decent sort, and I suppose skillful at his trade, if daunted by the number of patients and the seeming futility of his work; no sooner had he treated one of them than three others took his or her place. The poor are often sick and not always articulate; like drunkards, the insane, the febrile, or those stricken by religious mania, they often speak in an alien tongue. The girl continued to bemoan the loss of her baby, whose whereabouts never would be known. (Sentimentalists may like to imagine that the infant was rescued from the alley where it had been rudely loosed into the world and, in time, would become the scion of a Fifth Avenue millionaire.)
We stayed with her in a whitewashed room while she alternately thrashed and went limp in the bed, which seemed, in contrast to her small, gaunt body, enormous. There was nothing we could do, and as it turned out, nothing Dr. Garmany could do, either. She died before he could allay her fever, reverse the course of sepsis, undo the effects of hunger and poverty, relieve the pressure of blood blooming inside her skull, or stitch up her broken heart. Despair, too, could have been sufficient cause of death, a canker not even the finest surgeon in the land can lance.
“I’m sorry,” he said as a nurse drew the bedsheet over the girl’s head. I was glad he hadn’t shrugged, a gesture often revealing an unsympathetic character, or a demoralized one.
Elizabeth was upset by the death of the girl, who shortly would be buried as Jane Doe, wife of John Doe—names bestowed upon the nameless since the time of King John of England. I supposed that my suffragists were disappointed not to have had the chance to parade the girl—in her misery and degradation—before lecture audiences. In those days, I was often cynical.
“Will you be claiming the body?” asked the surgeon.
Putting their heads together, Elizabeth and Susan conferred in hushed voices. When Riis discreetly left the room, I followed, hoping that they would not make a tour of the lyceums with the dead girl. I shuddered at the thought of her sitting in a stifling Chautauqua tent in the dog days of summer, her spoiled condition a reproach to faithless men and hardened hearts.
I walked down a corridor until I came to a room in which the more docile of Bellevue’s lunatics were permitted to sit and take the sun streaming democratically through barred windows. I smiled at a young man, who responded with a look so serene, it could only be called “beatific.”
“Good morning, madam,” he said, and added anxiously, “It is, is it not?”
“It is a good morning, sir,” I replied cheerfully. “I hope it finds you well.”
“It does not find me at all,” he replied, touching a finger to his nose. “I am too cunning for it.”
“I see,” I said, preparing to be amused.
“What do you see?” he asked, nervously looking around him.
“I see you,” I said.
My answer appeared to reassure him. “Ah! I’m glad. They do not allow glasses, you know.”
“Glasses?”
“Looking glasses. Without one, I can’t be sure that the person who is here is I and not an impostor. ‘Seeing is believing,’ as Thomas Aquinas said—and quite right, too. Unless it was Mr. Krueger who said it. Mr. Krueger gives me my baths. They’re therapeutic, you know; they open the pores. I would suffocate otherwise.”
I could not help laughing; he was so droll.
“I would like to see you this evening, if it can be arranged,” he said, like a philanderer in one of Douglas Jerrold’s melodramas.
“I’m sorry. I have a previous engagement.” He seemed such a boy; I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
“Would it be difficult to break it?” He gave me a knowing glance.
“I’m afraid that would be quite impossible!” I felt like an actress uncertain of her lines.
“So much is impossible for humankind, when every day a spider climbs the Himalayas.”
I had been about to leave, but the cleverness of his remark stayed me. He was a charming and plausible young man.
“I want to draw you in the nude,” he said, and this time there was a sinister quality in his tone. He continued airily. “I am an artist, you know, or I would be if they’d give me back my pencil.” Again, he touched a finger to his nose and whispered, “The blind man has it and will not give it back.”
I felt—well, you can imagine!
“Your breasts are said to be very fine, and I have heard that the dank place between your legs is magnificent! I once painted a woman who had a tiny crèche there. An angel showed me it. I was astonished. Who wouldn’t be? Because I’m devout, I bowed down and worshipped it. I sent the painting to the Vatican, in care of Pope Leo the Thirteenth, to be hung in the College of Cardinals. I’m still waiting for His Holiness to acknowledge the gift.”
He covered his face with the palm of his hand like a saint in contemplation. “Peekaboo, I see you!” he said gleefully, his eyes peeping through his fingers. “God the Father has lain with you, you naughty girl!”
I hurried from the room. I heard his footsteps behind me, but I dared not turn around. The perspiration stood out on my forehead, my heart beat fast, and I felt my chest and throat tighten. I considered calling for help, but the hallways were empty, the doors to the patients’ rooms shut. In my accumulating fear, I ran from one empty ward to another. In the amphitheaters, surgeons dressed in bloody aprons were sawing arms and legs and tossing them into buckets. I rushed up a stairway, only to find myself in the basement morgue, where row after row of shrouded corpses lay in eerie silence until, one by one, they shouted “Peekaboo!” from underneath their sheets. I screamed, but no one came to my aid.
I wandered like a child in a garden maze, too small to peer over the hedge tops. Endless corridors were spawned by rooms that multiplied on either side. Behind closed doors, moans, gibbers, and guffaws made my blood run cold. I ran down a flight of stairs that led, perversely, to the roof, where chimney pots, each a miniature Krakatoa, were spewing ash. The East River had turned to blood. I would not have been surprised to see Aaron stirring the water with his stick while Moses snickered. I felt like the poor Minotaur lost in the Labyrinth, waiting for Theseus to come and slay it. I roamed the balconies on which inmates would gather to watch Barnum and his circus perform, as they sometimes did to prove the impresario’s munificence. The balconies could have been on the moon, so very desolate they seemed. Exhausted, I went inside the sprawl of brick and iron and lay down on an empty bed. I shut my eyes and, after a time, opened them.