The Dress Lodger Read online

  Mr. Eliot feels the heat of candles on his chin as he bends over for Gripeall’s tray. He sneaks a peek at the front rows, at his people, as he’s come to think of them tonight. Times are changing. The people, his people, are done with court foppery and aristocratic infidelity, finished with comedies full of words they don’t understand. The new breed of playwrights, bold men like myself, thinks Mr. Eliot, thrusting his buttocks as high into the air as they will go, are writing to their tastes. He asked a man on the street just the other day—a man very like the rough gentleman in the front row who sits gnawing off and spitting out bits of fingernail—what it was the working class most wanted to see. Love and murder suits us best, sir (said the man on the street), but of late, I think there is a good deal more liking of tragedies among us.

  Mr. Eliot takes a few steps upstage to Gripeall, who shivers under his mountain of blankets. Eat up, he says. The audience roars as the old hypochondriac takes a pill for each imaginary ailment, fifty-five in total—a pill to guard against Reform-itis, another to protect him from Parliamentari-osis, yet one more to ward off Old King George Cuckold Croup. With each more elaborate disease, named for scandals and popular novels, famous criminals and fallen monarchs, the workingmen and -women in the pit shriek with laughter and gratify Mr. Eliot with suggestions of their own. “How about a pill for Quarantine Ass-Ache!” yells the man in the front row. “Give us a remedy for Board of Health Ballocks Boils!” The hilarity swells until Gripeall has but one last pill left upon his tray. It is an enormous blue ball, the size of a walnut.

  GRIPEALL:

  Pray, Jeremiah. What is this pill for?

  JEREMIAH:

  Why, don’t you know? It’s for that most Dread Disease of all. It is for—

  Mr. Eliot indulges in a huge wink to the audience.

  JEREMIAH:

  —the Cholera Humbug!

  The pit explodes with wild applause and shouts are heard from every corner: “Cholera Humbug! Cholera Humbug!”

  GRIPEALL:

  Cholera Humbug? I’ve never heard of it. What are its symptoms?

  JEREMIAH:

  Well, we have it not yet in England, but abroad it has been said to Starve the Poor, Ruin the Tradesman, Fright the Rich, and Turn Men Blue.

  GRIPEALL:

  Blue, you say?

  JEREMIAH:

  Yes, blue. But have no fear, m’lord. It hunts only them that are so wretched they can afford no food for their bellies, and it kills only them poor saps who yearn to be free men. You are already inoculated from Cholera Humbug. You have the Right to Vote!

  “Reform!” screams the audience. “Reform, not Humbug!”

  GRIPEALL:

  Give me the pill anyway, Jeremiah. A man can never be too sure.

  JEREMIAH:

  Whatever you say, m’lord.

  As Gripeall reaches for the pill, Patches the parrot swoops down and takes it. After a series of choreographed dives, the parrot lands on Jeremiah’s silver tray, rolls onto its back with its claws in the air, and plays dead.

  Bravo, parrot! Bravo!

  “Look, it killed the parrot!” screams the man who had challenged the doctors. “Look what use their pills are!”

  Listen to them, thinks Mr. Eliot, jubilantly. My “Cholera Morbus” is an unbridled success! He glances off stage right to where Mr. Webster is making his entrance. The portly quack physician is decked out in a coat of saws and knives, hung in such a way that he might not turn around without causing the other actors to leap back in alarm. His top hat is stenciled about with skull and crossbones, his pockets bulge with pills, and prominently displayed upon his chest is a hastily constructed pasteboard replica of the Sunderland doctor’s India medal! Bravo, Webster! Bravo!

  “Did someone call for a doctor?” brays Mr. Webster in Clanny’s Irish lilt.

  And in that instant of recognition, the audience releases a cry that a playwright hears but once or twice in his career. It’s the subtle moment when hilarity jumps a pitch to hysteria, when the audience suddenly hears in its own applause the shattering of windows and the cracking of skulls. Miss Watson glances over worriedly. She has the next line, but the crowd is so loud she cannot be heard. Let them shout, glories Mr. Eliot. After opening night of the ferryboat tragedy in Lyme Regis, en masse the audience stormed a corrupt shipbuilder’s and set his warehouse on fire. He can’t help scanning the boxes to note the impression his comedy has made on the doctors. The young one, furious, is on his feet; the girl (well, he’s sorry about her) has fallen back in what looks to be a faint. The old doctor, though—old Cross of India–wearing, body-snatching, burking doctor that he is—sits rigidly upright, as contemptuous and calm as if the whole theatre did not demand his blood.

  But then, just as suddenly, the shout changes again, and now Mr. Eliot grows worried. Is it a note of panic he detects? One woman—he can see her quite clearly, off to his left, fifth row from the front—has leapt upon her bench in horror, flapping her arms like a demented bird. She shrieks long after the rest of the audience has quieted in alarm, shrieks so long and loud, in fact, that her neighbors in the pit move away to clear a space for her. She is pointing to the ground, where a man lies, a man she’s never met before but who was sitting beside her and who, just as Mr. Webster took the stage, vomited quietly into his cap. While the others were shouting down the doctor, he had tried in vain to struggle from his seat and make his way up the aisle, but had, to the woman’s horror, collapsed at her feet in convulsions. Now his bowels have let loose and a horrible stench pervades the pit.

  “Please someone help!” screams the woman. “This man is dying!”

  Is this someone’s idea of a joke? scowls Mr. Eliot. He looks over at fat, crestfallen Mr. Webster. The quack’s saws and knives quiver, sweat runs down his cheeks and drips onto his pasteboard Cross of India medal. It is not very witty to make fun of doctors when a man is dying in the audience. He is put completely out of his part. Quick, Eliot, he hisses, what are we to do?

  But Eliot too is at a loss. He turns upstage to Mr. Mortimer and Miss Watson. With a withering look at the two men, intrepid Miss Watson sweeps to the lip of the stage. She, too, had overheard the altercation between the pit and the doctors in the box, had felt for the elderly physician who had stood up to the crowd. Her father, before turning actor, had studied medicine, and as a girl at dinner she’d sat upon his medical books so that she might reach the table. Now she bends her pretty knee, stretches her white arms beseechingly up to the boxes, and calls out in her most becoming tragedienne voice: Doctors! Oh please, is there not a doctor in the house?

  “Don’t go,” says Henry sharply as his uncle rises. “They don’t deserve you.”

  He’d watched his uncle’s proud face blanch when that mincing bit of fatty tissue had taken the stage, speaking in his voice, sporting a tasteless sham of his medal, and had wanted to leap from his box to throttle the lot of them. What does his uncle owe this crowd? They need him until the moment he makes a mistake, and then they will turn on him and tear him to pieces. Henry has seen it. Back in Edinburgh, after the murderer Burke had been executed and Hare had fled, the mob came after his mentor, Dr. Knox, who had not been indicted. They hung him in effigy outside his house at 10 Surgeons’ Square and, with Henry watching from the window, fell upon the doll like a pack of wild dogs. The constables came, and the crowd grew hotter, smashing the windows, hurling stones and screaming, Burker! Burker! They ran through the city, scattering and regrouping in elegant Princes Street, welling up in lowly West Port, where the sixteen murders had been committed. Back at 10 Surgeons’ Square, Dr. Knox sat haughtily in broken glass, watching them try to light his greenwood trees on fire, and Henry, standing behind him, understood then—no matter how guilty you may be, it is still better to be one against the crowd.

  Audrey is crying quietly in the chair beside him. He sees the other wealthy members of Sunderland society craning in their boxes, so much more excited by this turn of events than they had been by the tedious play. D
own below, a hundred resentful, fearful faces stare up at him, each one mutely commanding—save him, you bloody bastard; save him or we will rip you limb from limb. Can his uncle not see it is unsafe to go downstairs? They are just waiting for us to make a mistake so that they might devour us.

  “For God’s sake, help him, Uncle,” Audrey sobs into her handkerchief. Dr. Clanny smoothes his coattails, straightens his India medal, and walks to the door.

  “Don’t!” shouts Henry, throwing his arm out to block his exit. “They have humiliated you. They want to hurt you.”

  Clanny smiles at his young nephew. “In my day, we used to fight them at the gallows for their hanged men. The relatives bit and punched and tried to rip them out of our hands, but we had the right. I know how to handle myself with the mob, son. You must believe in what you do.”

  Henry steps back and watches his uncle make his way downstairs to the pit. Inside the auditorium, the men and women who only moments before were calling him burker and body snatcher step aside so that he might pass unmolested. The woman on the bench shrieks again, and now Henry can see it is because the convulsing man has hold of her ankle.

  “Please, back away,” Dr. Clanny commands the curious coster boys who crowd around him. The stricken man is half under the fourth row of benches, his knees drawn into his chest, his elbows striking staccato against the wooden floor. He will not release the woman’s ankle and it is beginning to swell from lack of circulation, turning bulbous and blue under her white stockings. She screams and screams until Henry is sure his uncle will strike her, but instead he brings his mouth close to the patient’s clinched hand and bites it—hard. The hand flexes for less than an instant, but long enough for the woman to lurch away and fall heavily off the bench behind her.

  Clanny feels about for a pulse, shakes his head, and shouts up to his nephew in the box.

  “Henry!” he calls. “I need you.”

  Henry takes the stairs two at a time; he would have leapt over the box to help, for, in truth, a deep sense of shame had come over him waiting upstairs with Audrey. The smell of the patient is overwhelming when he reaches the pit, and even accustomed as he is to the stench of decaying cadaver Liss, Henry finds it difficult to choke back his rising vomit. The sick man’s face is contorted and his eyes are sunk deep in their sockets, but something about him seems familiar.

  “You, you, you, and you,” Dr. Clanny singles out four strong men in the audience. “Carry this body out into the lobby.”

  The workingmen, used to taking orders, obediently rise and lift the patient. The ill man throws back his head and groans through thin blue lips, “Put me down.”

  Henry unties his cravat and wraps it around his mouth and nose to keep from choking. Where has he seen this man before?

  “Where ayr takin’ me mate?” demands the red-faced man in the fustian jacket who had challenged Clanny earlier. He has pushed his way through the crowd and now lunges for them. “Where ayr you takin’ Jack?”

  “To hospital,” answers Dr. Clanny.

  “Over my dead body,” the man says, and plants himself so that the four men might not maneuver around him. “No one who goes in there comes out alive.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Henry sneers, though his contempt is lost beneath his wrapped cravat. “You people never come until it’s too late, and then you blame us for not working miracles.”

  “You don’t even wait for people to die in there before you cut them up,” the man growls. “And when you’re done, you feed what’s left to your dogs.”

  “Stand back and let us pass,” commands Dr. Clanny, nodding for the men to move forward. “If this man has cholera morbus he needs immediate attention.”

  “Take him to his house, then,” counters Fustian.

  “We don’t know if this disease is contagious,” says Clanny. “It could kill his whole family.”

  “He touched me!” screams the lady whose ankle had been grabbed. “He’s killed me with his Cholera Humbug!”

  “We don’t know if he has cholera,” Henry tries to calm her. “We won’t know until we take him to hospital.”

  “If he’s going to that hellhouse, I’m goin’ with him,” declares Fustian. “This man is a national treasure. This is Jack Crawford, hero of Camper-down you’re lugging.”

  So that’s it, thinks Henry. Jack Crawford. I’ve been looking at this man’s face tattooed on cadaver Liss’s fleshy left biceps for the last three days.

  “You are not allowed in unless you are ill,” Clanny frowns. “A hospital is not a circus.”

  “They won’t let you go, Bob,” yells the woman who called Dr. Clanny a burker, “because they’re using this cholera as just another excuse to hack up our loved ones!”

  “He’s not goin’ if I’m not goin’.” Bob, as Fustian seems to be known, bears menacingly down on Henry. Clanny looks worried, and poor Jack Crawford is groaning in pain.

  “Have it your way,” Henry says at last. “Come along. If you have the stomach.”

  The theatre is absolutely silent. It was all too easy, and Bob, who has no desire to set foot inside a hospital, looks searchingly around the pit. He can’t go there—walk all alone into their territory. There in that dark and lonely place, at the mercy of their saws and scalpels, he too might “develop” cholera and need to be taken apart limb by limb. What if neither Jack nor he comes out alive?

  “Witness, my friends!” he shouts with such a ringing note of pathos, the actors onstage are jealous. “I leave here a well man. Sound in mind and body, possessed of both arms and legs. Witness—my head attached. If I come not back, revenge me, friends, and revenge poor sick Jack Crawford!”

  Henry motions impatiently for them to be off, and together he and his uncle lead a groaning Jack Crawford through the crowd. Red-faced, contentious, fustian Bob follows the procession with his hat in his hands, his eyes fixed straight ahead on the highwater mark of his mortality. Jesus, why can’t he keep his fat mouth shut?

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a play to perform,” Mr. Eliot announces, but it is a good ten minutes before the audience ceases its buzzing and quiets down. What a demoralizing turn of events, he sighs, changing offstage into his costume for the final act. He fumbles into his blue hose and laces up his blue doublet. To have them so completely in his power and then lose them to a whiff of disease. Fickle, fickle, wretched crowd. He yanks on his blue boots and fastens the clasp of his blue cape. A few minutes more and he would have had that mob at the doctor’s doorstep, dismantling his house brick by brick, banging their foreheads against his windows and tearing apart his sofa cushions with their teeth. Mr. Eliot stands before a rudely hung mirror and smears his face with blue greasepaint, wipes his hands on a shammy, and draws on a pair of elbow-length blue leather gloves. Instead, at the first sign of illness, they are begging, whinging creatures, groveling on their bellies before the gods of medicine. Through a gap between the curtains and proscenium, he can see straight up into the boxes, high above the pit, protected from the contagion of the crowd. The woman who accompanied the doctors has moved to the box of another rich family, and now wilts among them, cosseted and kissed. You will have to get used to it, he can imagine they are telling her (all the while urging sips of ripe brandy), if you plan to become a doctor’s wife.

  Mr. Eliot finishes his makeup and pulls on a blue cavalier hat, complete with curling blue feather. He makes his way down the narrow, dark steps to the trap below stage. Pushing his body up through the hole in the floor, he squeezes into a box, fitting his head inside the tight dome at the top. He has written the scene so that Gripeall, who has barricaded himself in his room for fear of the cholera morbus, will lift the lid from his tray of food and find upon it the head of Jeremiah, in disguise as the blue disease. There are holes cut strategically around the stage. Jeremiah as Cholera Morbus will peek in at the window. He will drop down from the beams. He will slither out from beneath Gripeall’s bed and sit upon his chest, scaring him finally to death. If tonight has witness
ed the humiliation of Mr. Eliot the playwright, critics in the audience will later report that this night saw a great actor born. As he hounds Gripeall to his ultimate demise, he will be all ferocity, all confusion, all unexpectedness, all death.

  Mr. Eliot hunkers in the dark cramped space below stage, waiting for his cue to spring. Tomorrow the newspapers will be full of him. In the role of counterfeited Cholera Morbus, one reporter will write, Mr. Eliot so terrified us that four grown men ran screaming from the theatre, while a woman of the lower orders went directly into labour, delivered of a son, eight pounds, three ounces. I am Cholera Morbus, Mr. Eliot finally roars, pointing a long blue finger. And I am coming for you!

  Jack Crawford wakes in a theatre.

  God knows how long he’s been unconscious; he remembers only laughing at a fat doctor dressed up in saws, and then nothing until he opened his eyes on a glass-fronted cabinet full of the same implements, directly in front of him. It is a shadowy, close theatre he finds himself in, with eight or ten tiers of benches arranged in a circle about him. The stage floor has been strewn with sawdust, the walls hung with strange skeletal and muscular backdrops of the human body. Two players move slowly, performing stage business with tubes and beakers, pausing every once in a while to pour a kettle of steaming water into a tub next to him. He is at center stage, is Jack Crawford, and it takes him a minute to realize he must be starring in a play about his own life. Oh yes, it’s all coming back now. The premise—unlikely as it may be—is that Jack Crawford, sot of Sunderland, climbs the mast of the HMS Venerable with a marling spike to nail up Admiral Duncan’s colors when the Dutch attack off the coast of Ireland. The Hero of Camper-down, as he is now called, is presented at court for his bravery and awarded thirty pounds a year. Back home they begin to paint him on pots and stencil him onto pearly pink pitchers; soon he finds himself on nearly every mantelpiece in the East End and shipped off for export to Norway and America. But then the years begin to pass, and over a pint (and then another) Jack contemplates his own fraudulence. Jesus Christ, he never wanted to be on the HMS Venerable. He was grabbed by the Press Gang on the way to a pub on Pottery Bank and pointedly invited to join the Royal Navy. Aboard ship, he was whipped and sodomized, threatened with court-martial and practically pushed up that pole with the colors between his teeth; then, when the smoke cleared and Admiral Duncan realized improbably that he had won, young Jack was raised up shamelessly as a hero. He knew he was naught but a shill for George’s government, a working-class hero to gain sympathy among the poor for a most unpopular war. Will the audience be surprised, then, when thirty years and however many pints later, poor Jack Crawford finds less solace in his heroism than in the drink?