Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

She tells him her breathing is difficult and describes her sensations of simultaneous numbness and heat. The panicked race, herself against herself, in her head, and her sense of some sourceless refusal and insult compressing her spirit unbearably. He seats himself beside her bed on a brocaded side chair that has been brought. Dr. Chapman is trying to be a father to her, she perceives through the ribbed blur of candlelight — as if a father’s heaviness is not already part of her complaint. “Your frame is resisting some recent event,” he tells her solemnly. “You must relax into God’s hands. Repose within the inevitable is the sine qua non of the healthy soul.”

“How do we know the inevitable, unless we strive to change it and fail?”

“Strive we all must, Miss Coleman; but we cannot overnight change our natures, or the nature of God’s arrangements in this fallen world of clay. Mrs. Hemphill tells me you have lately met disappointment in a romantic attachment.”

“It was I who pronounced the disappointment; the gentleman, I now think, has been misjudged.”

Dr. Chapman likes hearing this; his thick hands lift from the knees of his old-fashioned breeches in a reflex of salutation, and then settle again, as his deep, unhurried voice states, “Then so inform him, when circumstances permit. Or do not, as Providence wills. You are young, and the young heart exaggerates — indeed, it must exaggerate, to propel the body into the great task before it. The task, I mean, of procreation, and all it entails of social establishment. Our flights of poesy and yearning work toward a practical end. We wish to make a place in the world, and to please our Father on high, Who commands His creatures to be fruitful and multiply. The fair sex especially has been burdened with the wish to be fruitful. But these matters of carnal affection, my many years of clinical observation suggest, work themselves out by internal imperative, and are not so much at the mercy of exterior chance as we suppose. I know the gentleman in question only by repute, and the repute is mostly to the good; but even a small qualm, on your part, at this initiatory stage, needs respecting, since the long years of marriage tend to magnify each of the couple to the other, like mites made horrific under the microscope. Qualms will come, but better later than sooner.”

Reflecting, Ann supposes, upon a sour experience of his own, Dr. Chapman softly snorts, and raises his hands up on his fingertips upon the platform of his thick thighs, so that the elbows of his arms point outward. The features of his face, unevenly blanched by the candlelight, lift as if to say “Ah!” and then collapse back into briskness. “My dear young lady, I beg you, respect your own impulses and intuitions, and do not condemn your body to a war with your protesting spirit. To bring the two into more harmonious association, I will prescribe an anodyne. Have you had experience of laudanum?”

The exotic word in the doctor’s sonorous pronunciation looms like an angel above their two consulting heads. She answers so softly he has to lean forward, his elbows pointing outward still farther. “Once or twice, some years ago, for a toothache, and more recently for the monthly distress, with its accompanying sharp temper.”

“The elixir holds miraculous powers of ease,” Dr. Chapman avows, glancing around at the cluster of concerned family forming one large shadow near the door. “It solidifies the bowels, erases pain, and dissolves the cankers of the soul.” His voice has become more consciously beautiful and rounded. He produces from an unfolding bag of black leather a corked vial shaped like a small man of thin glass, with rounded shoulders and a pear-shaped head capped by the cork. The yellow tint within the liquor, as of suspended dust like the spinning golden flecks in the water of a muddy-bottomed spring, casts an amber glow on the physician’s face as he holds the vial up to the candle. “The cure of Paracelsus,” he intones. “Named by him after laudere , to give praise. But not compounded of gold dust and melted pearls as the rascal claimed. Tincture of opium, opium in alcohol. The dose must be exact. The drink holds peace but also a demon.” The physician turns his head — his wiry ginger hair shows a halo of dancing filaments — and addresses the clump of shadows behind him. “Mrs. Hemphill, does this house contain a dropper, and a teaspoon?”

Scurryingly, these are fetched, and all in awed silence watch as the physician counts out the drops one by one into the spoon. “Eighteen, nineteen …” The shadows of his brows and nose restlessly change shape on his face; his concentrated, lidded irises are pricked by the reflected candle-flame; each hesitant sphericle from the dropper holds a spark for its trembling instant. “… twenty-four, twenty-five. And if the dose does not induce relaxation within the half-hour, twenty-five again. But no more upon that until morning,” Dr. Chapman warns, almost savagely, uplifting that great haloed head, its upper lip split by shadow like a lion’s. “Nervous stress untouched by such a dose is not amenable to chemistry. An excess — ” Lest he alarm the patient, he halts himself, and in truth there is no need to complete the thought. In this era suicide by laudanum is a commonplace of hushed parlor gossip, even in innocent inland Lancaster, though its written report was generally suppressed by the superstitious journals of the time, to whom the taking of life was God’s abundantly exercised prerogative. Ann from her infatuated reading of the living British poets would have been acquainted, no doubt, with the heretical charms of being snatched away in beauty’s bloom, of emptying some dull opiate to the drains and sinking Lethe-wards.

The potent tawny liquid, forming by cohesion its tremulous mound in the spoon’s small bowl, glints as a housemaid, freckled plump Abigail, lifts it toward Ann’s parted lips. The doctor has surrendered the operation as too intimate for a man still as robust as he, upon a young patient so replete with attractions, though distraught. The coolness of the pewter couches the insistent push of the liquid. The servant tips up the spoon’s handle, and Ann swallows. Alcohol’s sweetish sting masks a foreign bitterness, an Asian hint of something forced unripe, of green poppy-heads slashed. The attentive doctor has observed the dose, and now stands up with a peculiar loud exhalation of finality, a habit of his at wretched bedsides where he has done all of the little that medicine of this era can do.

Civil courtesies follow, and promises to return on the morrow, and murmured details of a light domestic watch to be set about the patient. The crowd of family ebbs away. The little man-shaped vial remains on the high bedside table in the corner of Ann’s vision. Sarah, too, remains in the room at first. She says, “I do hope, dear sister, no words of mine have added to your afflictions. I spoke more than I knew, and carelessly, not gauging the true depth of your misery.”

“You heard the good Dr. Chapman,” Ann responds, with a show of spirit. “Our impulses and intuitions must be yielded to, yours as well as mine.”

“Not where my interest is so much less than yours, and so little of the consequences are mine. If I urged Mr. Buchanan back upon you, forgive me such interference. He would not want your health endangered, even if it mean his own doom.”

Ann answers wearily, tired of reasoning on this topic. “In truth, I wonder if my unhappy mood doesn’t stem merely from the exertions of travel, worsening this spell of ague, and from the contrast of the Hemphills’ so very settled state with my own. I feel all the respectable Colemans condemning me. I chose Mr. Buchanan in spite of them, and then I have cut him off just as they were growing resigned. And he — he would have so enjoyed being one of us.”