Really the job was made for her. It left her time to read, to tend her window boxes, to give an occasional dinner party, to go to an afternoon concert. She lived alone. She wasn’t burdened with an automobile — she biked to and from the hotel in all but the worst weather, her confident high heels gripping the pedals, two guiches of hair pointing forward beyond the helmet. She wasn’t burdened with family either, unless you counted the half-crippled aunt back in Pittsburgh. The old woman loped along on a single crutch, the filthy adhesive that wrapped its hand bar replaced only on her niece’s annual visit.
Until that night in the church basement this game relative had been Gabrielle’s only responsibility. And yet now Gabrielle was writing her name on a clipboard and undertaking work on behalf of females unrelated to her, unknown to her, half a planet away.
Something had stirred within her. She supposed that a psychologist would have a name for this feeling. But Gabrielle would as soon discuss emotions with a psychologist as with a veterinarian — in fact, she’d prefer a veterinarian, she thought, biking home with a packet of information in her saddlebag. It was as if the kinship she felt to those pathetic girls was that of mammal to mammal, house pet to feral cat. The jungle creatures had been cruelly treated by other beasts, attacked with needles and knives as sharp as flame; whereas she, a domestic feline, had in her two brief marriages only been left cold. Free of sex at last, she was disburdened of her monthly nuisance too. The loss had been hastened by a gynecologist — not the distinguished Henry Ellison, rather a Jewish woman with unpleasant breath who advised Gabrielle to rid herself of the bag of fibroids beginning to distend her abdomen. The hysterectomy was without complications. And now, flat as a book below her waist, dry as linen between her legs, she felt pity for the Africans’ dripping wounds…well, curiosity, at any rate.
III.
Gabrielle’s chief responsibility within the new chapter was arranging its semiannual meeting — the visit of Dr. Gouda, the visit of victim Selene. The first thing she did was thank the church for the use of its chilly basement; then, in its stead, she commandeered the function room of the hotel, a small cocoa-colored space with three elongated windows looking out onto the boulevard. She wheedled a promise of wine and coffee and cheese from Mr. Devlin and convinced him to charge the chapter his lowest rates for the overnight stay of doctor and witness. She did other work too. She and the two elderly women — who were in fact sisters, and hated each other — designed a fund-raising brochure. She helped the emaciated girl, who had volunteered to be a liaison with the local university, withdraw without shame. “Suffering affects me too strongly,” the goose said, her hand on her meager chest.
“Of course, dear,” said Gabrielle, flashing her compassionate smile with its friendly missing tooth.
And she listened to the boring conversation of the man with white hair. He turned out to be not Dr. Henry Ellison, as his dignity suggested, but a retired salesman with time on his hands. He was good for running the Follies, though he sometimes got the slides upside down. And she answered e-mails for Dr. Gouda, who hated the computer, and she wrote letters on behalf of Dr. Henry Ellison.
Henry Ellison was the man who looked like a thug. On closer inspection he was merely unwholesome. He had pockmarked skin, teeth like cubes of cheddar. His children were grown and his wife suffered from some malady. He wasn’t on the prowl, though. He seemed to welcome Gabrielle’s indifference to romance just as she welcomed his pleasure in quiet evenings and good wine and the sound of his own voice. He liked to answer questions. “Is the Dutch doctor gay?” she asked him one night when they were sorting new slides in her living room.
“Doubt it. She’s got a muscular husband and five children.” A well-trained surgeon, she could have had a splendid practice in The Hague. Instead she was now running a fistula-repair hospital. She drove a van around the African countryside, performed procedures under primitive conditions, sterilized her own instruments.
Henry held a slide up to the light. “Oh Lord, too graphic. Our folks want terrified damsels. They want stories of eternal dysphoria. This…” He kept looking.
“What is it, Henry?” And she did an eager jig on her high heels.
He didn’t relinquish the little square. “It’s an excellent photograph of the separation of the labia with a speculum, a wooden one for heaven’s sake — the thing ought to be in a museum.” At last he handed the slide to Gabrielle.
What a strange mystery lay between a woman’s legs. The skin of thigh and pubis was the same grainy brown as the old instrument, but within the opening all was garnet and ruby. “Yes, too…graphic.”
Henry adjusted the carousel on her coffee table. He held another slide to the light.
“What’s that, Henry?”
“A trachelectomy…a sort of D and C. I hope they used some analgesic, something more than the leaves from the stinging nettle.”
“Why is she sending slides we can’t show?”
“She wants to remind us that despite our efforts, despite our money, the practice continues.” He switched off the lights. They sat in the dark, and Henry clicked, and the wall above Gabrielle’s couch — she had removed her Dufy print — became a screen. Gabrielle and Henry watched unseen hands manipulating visible instruments.
“Surgery is thrilling,” he mused. “Do you mind if I smoke? These village witches probably get a kick out of it. You divorce yourself from everything except the task at hand. Your gestures are swift, like a bird’s beak plucking a worm. The flesh responds as you expect. Someone else takes care of the mess.”
Gabrielle imagined herself collecting blood in a cloche.
Click. “An excellent example of splitting the clitoral hood. Sometimes they excise the external genitalia, too, and then stitch the vaginal opening closed. This is known as…”
“Infibulation,” supplied Gabrielle, who was growing knowledgeable. She too was enjoying a rare cigarette.
Click. “Here’s a procedure not yet legal here.” An instrument was attacking something within a vagina; there was a glimpse of a pregnant abdomen. “They are destroying the infant’s cranium,” said Henry.
IV.
With her usual thoroughness Gabrielle went beyond her official chapter assignments. Often on one of her days off, Wednesday or Thursday, she visited Selene in her town, once thriving with factories, now supported, Henry said, by the welfare industry.
There were houses in Pittsburgh too that had been home to factory hands — little brick two-stories, near the river. But there they had been rehabilitated and now belonged to young academic gentry. Here they belonged to the wretched. Here immigrants and their children and a stream of relatives packed themselves into the structures and onto their uneasy porches. The railroad station was a mile away. Gabrielle walked from the train along a broad and miserable street, never wobbling in her high heels though she was always carrying two bulging paper bags. She took a right and a left and fetched up at Selene’s shanty. She distributed toys and clothing to the children, and delicacies to Selene — it would have been insulting, she knew, to bring grocery items, and anyway there were food stamps for those. She played with the kids, she talked to Selene, she learned songs, she admired the proverbs that Selene had embroidered on cloth and nailed to the walls. A cow must graze where she is tied. Men fall in order to rise. Some were less explicit, riddles, really. A bird does not fly into the arrow. “A woman does not seek a man,” interpreted Selene.