“Come along, Mr. President,” said the lady. Will had forgotten her name, though she’d danced for him before. He followed her towards the stairway, a whiskey bottle in one hand, her hand in the other. Jolly followed after them.
“You know I am not the president of anything.”
“Not even the League of Large Gentlemen?”
“No,” said Will. She took him up the stairs and onto a creaking wooden gallery, along which the private theaters were set. Will’s dancer held a curtain open for him, and he passed in, Jolly right behind him. The room was directly over the trio, so the music was very loud.
The dancer pushed Will towards the far wall, where a photograph hung, two ladies dressed only in hats, their four breasts pressed together. Will sat down in a dirty yellow chair while the dancer closed the curtain, and Jolly flattened himself against the wall. The woman started to dance, kicking up her legs in that confined space. A few times she almost kicked Will in the head with her boots, but after a few near misses he became adroit at dodging her, even as he watched her take her skirt in her hand and toss it around. There were tiny bells sewn into the hem that made a small music which was sweet compared to the din below. She was not wearing any underclothes. She turned around, leaned forward, threw her skirt up over her head, then shook her dimpled ass in Will’s face.
“Why don’t you give it a slap?” she asked, but he did not do that. She had a few bruises back there already, one of them very much in the shape of Italy’s kicking boot. She turned around again, holding her skirt up so it obscured her face but left her crotch in plain sight. It wasn’t young anymore, what she had. It looked old and broken down, but still he thought it was fascinating. She inched towards him in tiny steps. It seemed to Will that it took forever for her to cover the scant distance from the curtain to the chair, and when at last she arrived to press herself into his face he thought that he would die, or at the very least fall away in a fit. The smell of her turned his stomach yet delighted all his base instincts. Jolly watched her too, though he tried to give the appearance of not watching her.
She stepped back from Will, reaching down with one hand to stroke his face, his neck, his shoulder. Still holding her skirt up, she undid her blouse and freed one of her breasts. Pendulous and covered with scars, it was utterly unbeautiful. It reminded Will of the breast of Mrs. Hanbury, a patient in Ward 23 at Bellevue. She was an ancient Negro woman, somnolent to the point that she would have seemed dead if she had not been hot to the touch. Once, Will was obliged to move her breast so he could listen to her weak heart. The breast seemed four feet long to him. It was unwieldy, a sock filled with sand, and it sought to thwart him; its wrinkled nipple was a mocking eye. The dancer’s breast was unpleasant like that, but still it demanded his attention. She pushed it towards his mouth, but he only stared at the thing. She took the bottle from his hand, did something unspeakable with it, then put it to Will’s lips. He drank greedily, not minding how the liquor ran down his chin. “Oh Jolly,” Will said. “What am I doing?”
“Jolly indeed,” said the lady, her hand on his pants now. “You’re doing well enough.”
Occasionally Jolly and Sam and Lewy Greeley and Frenchy and a dozen others would gather around a luxurious divan — the rudest ladies always preferred to drape themselves on it for their portrait — upon which the angel boy would sit with his legs crossed under him, his one wing waving lazily in the breeze from an open window. Will would demand of them, “What are you looking at? What?” Scolding them never did any good. He’d swum with Sam in a clear spring when they were boys. He’d looked down and seen fish through the clear water, floating and moving their mouths just like these spirits, open and closed and open, but never a sound came out. “Stop looking at me!” he’d say, but they wouldn’t, and the only way he could escape them was by covering up his own eyes.
Being friendly with Gob was good for Will’s education. Though technically his junior, Gob was farther along than Will; he’d been apprenticed to a respected German physician, Dr. Oetker, for three years before he came to Bellevue. His performance on the entrance exam had so impressed Macready that the secretary had made Gob a junior assistant in the second surgical division.
Under Gob’s aegis, Will was allowed to assist on a surgery with the great Dr. Wood himself. It was a daring procedure, an exhilarating bowel repair. The fattest man Will had ever seen lay on the table. He’d been set on by would-be murderers after a feast, and their stabbing knives had poked three holes in his vast belly. Will and Gob hooked out loops of bowel and held them steady while Dr. Wood, a neat man who sported a boutonniere of violets on his black coat, sewed up the wounds. Will thought of the boy he’d carried over the field at Gettysburg, and how his guts had been similarly exposed.
“So you see, Mr. Woodhull,” Dr. Wood was saying, “how you must put your stitches through the fibrous tunic of the intestine.” He was finished with his suturing, and now he inspected his work from various angles. He took a decanter from another assistant and began to pour oil liberally over the wound. He smiled and said, “A little olive oil will facilitate the return of the bowel to the peritoneal cavity.”
Surgery made Will partial to ether. Assisting Dr. Wood, he was often assigned the role of anesthetist. He’d apply Squibb’s ether to the patient with a cone made of newspaper, a towel, and a wad of cotton. He filched small quantities and brought them home to Fulton Street for use in making collodion, and for sniffing. He liked to sit with all the lights out but the curtains open, and take little whiffs of ether until he passed into a dreamless black sleep.
It was better than hooking arteries or bowel, this ether-duty. Will never got sleepy administering the ether, but he sometimes developed a carefree attitude during the course of an operation. It made him bold.
“Doctor,” he said to a senior assistant during a multiple amputation, “please stay away from the patient’s head. You will cause her to combust.” The assistant had a lit cigar wedged between his teeth.
“She says her mother was frightened by an elephant when she was pregnant,” said Dr. Wood. The blond-headed girl on the table had been born with an extra finger and seven extra toes. Dr. Wood was pruning the girl to a better life. Whenever anyone noticed her finger she had suffered fits of hysterical blindness and St. Vitus’s dance. “What do you think of that, Mr. Woodhull?”
“I think elephants are formidable creatures, sir,” said Gob. “I think it is sensible to fear them.” Dr. Wood laughed too long and too loud. Gob’s hands, dexterous despite the congenital absence of one finger, were educated while Will looked on, wondering if his friend couldn’t take the girl’s extra finger as a replacement for his own. It didn’t seem beyond him. Under Dr. Wood’s tutelage, Gob tied off arteries and sewed up wounds, and once even opened up a skull with a Hey’s saw. Will would have liked to do some cutting of his own, but Dr. Wood seemed unlikely ever to let him. He often looked scornfully at Will’s big mashers and said, “Those are not the hands of a surgeon.”
Many nights, Gob and Will would sit up with fresh amputees, watching over their wounds for signs of secondary hemorrhage. The patients would be arranged in their beds in a circle around the two students, with their stumps facing inward. Gob and Will would sit back to back, observing the stumps.
“I think blood is beautiful,” Gob said during one such vigil.
“You wouldn’t,” said Will, “if you’d ever been covered in it for days. It loses its charm.”