Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (20 page)

She decided that she and her brother and sister would live there together. They would fit out a whole wing for Lillian, grow squash in the yard, store winter and summer clothing in separate closets. Chastity would cook feasts for her brother, Abraham, whose return had gladdened her heart, despite the horrid circumstances surrounding his arrival and the fact that he no longer confided in her or sought her company. She knew her brother was in love with Hilda, and Chastity suspected herself of petty jealousy.

Weekends and evenings when the practice was closed, Chastity swept and dusted and aired out the house, where she found herself repeating catchy lines from the tunes her
mad sister sang, “Fly, fly, fly away home” or “Little bird, little cage, sing, sing, sing.” She interviewed construction workers, met a competent one named Joseph Miller. Joseph accepted each of her assignments with a thoughtful nod and even flirted with her, surprising the neighborhood boys who sometimes went down to Orchard Street to spy. Joseph busied himself with the front porch, which had a westerly tilt and had rotted so thoroughly that emaciated cats risked falling through the floorboards. He promised to have it in good shape before winter, when he would carry her over the threshold. Even then, he spoke of marriage. Chastity only reddened and turned away.

On weekends Abraham took Lillian down in a hired car, and he and Chastity would take turns minding her. She loved the dandelions that grew by the front of the porch and the clusters of hard dirt that she extracted from the ground with her fingernails. She began to smile when others smiled, and to remember odd games the three had played when they were children, games both her siblings had forgotten, like who could swing their arms for longest or put their head between their knees and pretend to be underwater. She sat with her head down and her dress immodestly pulled to one side, and she laughed loudly, leaving Abraham certain she'd been poisoned by the summer sun. He took her temperature, frowned, led her to the shade, where she played other games, like writing words with
twigs, only she'd never been able to write words and instead made patterns on the ground.

Abraham sat down a few yards away, his shirt collar buttoned despite the torridity, a newspaper spread on the ground beneath him to protect his fine Swiss trousers. The clouded sky didn't blunt the sun's heat, though it did soften the light so that the world looked more like one of Lillian's paintings than a real place with dark shadows.

“Could you help me move the table?” Chastity called from inside.

Abraham often left Lillian on her own, releasing her from her padded room. He thought nothing of leaving her alone in the yard. He moved toward the front door. He'd been thinking of Hilda and his dead father, the fortune he'd squandered. If he hadn't gambled the money, he could have remained in Europe under the tutelage of Doctor Gottlieb Burckhardt. He could be performing psychosurgery instead of practicing common medicine. At the very least, he would be out of the oppressive humidity that made him sweaty and irritable.

He crossed the front porch on the narrow planks Joseph Miller had set down to create a temporary passage, moved the table, an old piece that might have had value save for the circular burns and water stains, and sat down with his back to the smoke-blackened wallpaper. Across the floor, a column of ants marched toward the kitchen.

“Won't it be lovely once we're done?” Chastity said.

“The land will fetch a fine price,” he said, a thought he'd not consciously acknowledged until that moment. But the heat had intensified the rotting scent of the walls and floor, and he felt himself, suddenly, to be rotting as well, and his sister had begun to reek of mildew.

“We can't sell it,” Chastity said firmly. “It's been in the family for generations.”

“It's time we moved on then, high time we moved on.”

The two would have argued further, except for the rain, falling forcibly.

Abraham turned to the front porch, where Lillian sought refuge.

“Lillian!” Abraham and Chastity rushed to grab her, only Abraham reached the door first, and so it was he who fell through the boards, and he who was struck by the wailing Lillian, terrified by the thunder and rain. Again and again she struck her brother, the skin of her hands white where she clutched a jagged fragment of hard, bloody wood.

A
BRAHAM WAS BEDRIDDEN
for eight months, too weak to work. Hilda often came to sit with him, but otherwise the home remained empty and sad, the source of the meanest gossip: how the siblings had fallen on hard times, how Chastity fought with her brother, how mad Lillian was left to starve in the attic.

Chastity oversaw the sale of 62 Orchard Street herself, collecting a tidy sum that felt filthy in her hands. The family had no other source of income, and she knew better than to complain.

Lillian remained locked in her rooms painting pictures of Orchard Street, lovely pictures of old, rotting windows and doors that only made it harder for Chastity to forget the estate that had so briefly resided in her hopes. She brought her sister meals and sometimes sat with her, though Lillian, mad Lillian, had ruined her only dream. She knew that Lillian could not be held accountable. The girl was insane, incapable of understanding consequence. Still, her art had soul, and her singing voice was sweet and pure. She was a gift, as her father used to say.

Abraham, who never once asked for Lillian, broached psychosurgery numerous times. Each time Chastity refused, despite the pain her brother's condition brought her and the small bitter part of her that whispered that she had suffered more than he, for he would recover, while she would never inhabit 62 Orchard Street again.

“She's our sister,” she said. “Think of the risk — You know Father would not have approved.”

“Don't let fear blind you,” Abraham said. “We can improve her mind, improve her condition.”

Abraham became more animated when he discussed removing the insides of his sister's head. He spoke at length
of man's mastery of the human brain, how scientists understood the blood-brain barrier, the nervous system, the cerebral cortex — all the marvels of the mind. Their father was a man of a past generation, and the new generation had progressed far beyond the old one's quaint ambitions.

Chastity sometimes felt tempted, but she knew that what her brother spoke of was a gamble. And he lost when he gambled, despite all his talk of risk and great steps forward.

By early spring Abraham had mostly healed, and he wore the scars above his left eye as if the pink flesh imparted wisdom. After dinner he and Chastity discussed household matters — mostly finances, which were fair, but after his long convalescence, not as good as hoped. When he felt well enough, he took a short walk, and people who encountered him on the streets thought he'd aged by ten years. Miss Stein, who after decades of feeding stray dogs had at last purchased a white, curly haired one, stopped to chat with him. She swore he looked exactly like his father, and she stood firm in her assertion, even though John, who saw Abraham far more often from his saloon across the street, disagreed. In addition, Mr. Landers had been overheard to say that the doctor had come by the pharmacy to collect some medicines and was so pale and thin that he resembled his sister more than anyone else. The mad sister, not the coldhearted one.

Abraham admitted to feeling well, and after one of his evening strolls — the days were beginning to feel warm, and he'd been back in New York for just over a year — he announced to his sister Chastity, “Hilda and I are to be married. I'd like her to live with us.”

Chastity looked up from the drop scone recipe she was committing to paper. Depression had made her forgetful, and she'd failed to add sugar to the dough the last time she'd prepared it; the time before she'd doubled the salt and flour. She set down her work, attempted a smile. She'd long believed her brother would marry Hilda and that only the accident postponed the union this long.

“I'll tell Lillian,” she said.

“No need.”

Abraham spoke to Lillian, but only infrequently, and he never let her wander through his office anymore. Her madness was a threat, not so much to him, but to a gentlewoman. Chastity overheard her brother whisper this to Hilda, and had he not spoken into his beloved's ear, Chastity might have contradicted him. But his words were not meant for her, and so she remained silent.

“I worry about you, dear sister. You've not been yourself for some time — not since the incident at Orchard Street.”

“I miss the house.”

“I've arranged for you to spend a week in the countryside. After all this — caring for Lillian and me on your own.”

“I insist,” he added, before Chastity could protest. “Hilda will help me with Lillian, and once you're back and rested, we can reopen the practice.”

T
HE DAY AFTER
she learned of her brother's engagement, Chastity left for the Finger Lakes, where she spent a miserable week comparing the grounds of the guesthouse to those of the old Orchard Street home.

By the time Chastity returned, all of Eighteenth Street knew about Lillian's surgery. Abraham had taken a stroll with his mad sister, whose hair was too short to cover the line of holes he'd drilled into her skull. Children, who had grown up with warnings about Lillian, followed the two siblings around, at once curious and horrified by the sister's unexpected and ghostly appearance.

John rushed out of his saloon to invite the two siblings in for a hot tea on the house, and he learned firsthand about the Swiss cure for violence, and that Abraham had performed it on Lillian as a gift to her and his wife to be, who would live safe from the injuries he himself had suffered.

“A few bits of her brain were diseased, and he knew what to remove,” people marveled. Mrs. Landers interviewed him for her newsletter. Abraham spoke at length about his procedure, a modified version of the one his mentor, Doctor Gottlieb Burckhardt, used with great success in Europe.

“How amazing,” Miss Stein said, and others echoed her
sentiment: “How docile she is now,” and “Mark my words, that young man will be known far and wide.”

No one expected Chastity to react as she did, even though everyone knew she was cold and distant. When the returning sister set eyes on Lillian, she screamed at her brother so loudly Miss Harding could hear from next door: “You lied to me! You murdered her!” — despite the fact that Lillian was very much alive, as Abraham pointed out.

“She's gentle as a lamb,” Abraham said. He clapped his hands in front of Lillian's face to demonstrate that the madwoman no longer tried to bite him. “All I did was remove the sick part of her brain, the part that was — look at me.” He pointed to the scar on his forehead. “What more do you need?”

Lillian showed little interest in the argument. She had begun to wet herself, and she no longer cared for painting or song, but otherwise she appeared, at least to the neighbors who'd been fortunate to catch a glimpse of her both before and after the surgery, unchanged. Only Chastity maintained that her sister's soul was gone, even going so far as to say that she had no sister and no brother either, as Abraham was a liar and a murderer. Most people thought she was upset that he'd done the surgery without her consent, or perhaps jealous of her brother's success, and that she'd come round in time. But matters between the siblings only worsened when Lillian in fact did die three months later.

Even at Lillian's funeral, people whispered that she was better off underground. Mrs. Chadwick noted that she had womanly ways, despite her madness, and it was best she hadn't had children. Blind Miss Harding, who came to the cemetery though she had not been invited, said that the girl was very like her father, God rest his soul.

The siblings stood apart from the others, side by side, though they did not speak. Abraham cried more than anyone, and Chastity didn't cry at all, and everyone was reminded of how unmoved she'd been when her father died. She'd bought a new black dress for the funeral, and it fit her well. The older women shook their heads and called it indecent, showing off her figure at a time like this. Abraham wore his Swiss trousers and Swiss glasses and a long, dark jacket he'd found in his father's closet. Hilda, his fiancée, thought he looked smart, but most everyone else saw only his pale, almost translucent skin. “He looks like a ghost,” they said.

John's Saloon shut down the next year, and the Steen-wycks gossip began to fade with it. Abraham married Hilda, and they had one son who surprised everyone who knew the family with his poor academic marks. Chastity ran off with Joseph Miller. Common wisdom said that she was desperate to get away, and that he wanted her for her money, what little she had. Lillian, mad Lillian, who'd been given a puppy before she died because she was no longer
violent, came up only when people discussed matters beyond their control, like the Great War or the price of gold, and then everyone would shake their heads and call all men vain and powerless, and agree that God granted everyone a nature and medicine couldn't alter that.

Abraham was fifty-six when psychosurgery became well known, and thousands of people were given what they called lobotomies. He was furious, then bitter because no one credited him for his early work. None of the neighbors noticed or recalled that Lillian had died, or that her violence had been cured, or that Abraham had ever had anything to do with the procedure.

Chastity thought of her brother when she read of Doctor Walter Freeman's lobotomies on the front page of the
New York Times.
She had just baked an apple pie, and the flat she shared with her husband smelled of nutmeg and cinnamon. Her hair had grayed, and arthritis crippled her left hand. Perhaps Abraham had been right, she decided. The article spoke highly of the new surgery, and popular opinion never strayed too far from the truth. Perhaps Abraham had been ahead of his time, and she'd been too small-minded to recognize progress and the sacrifice it required.