Galore - Michael Crummey [113]
—I kept a plate warm for you, she said. —You’ll want to wash up.
Newman ate the full of his supper a second time that evening while Bride was upstairs settling Tryphie for the night and he was still famished when he was done. He thought there was nothing in the world would fill him up. He could hear the crisp hammer-stroke of her heels overhead, each one a little explosion in his chest. He couldn’t stay here, that much was clear. There was Alaska on the opposite end of the continent, still unsullied by his stupidity. South America, India, all the ancient histories of Asia to fall into if he chose.
Bride came back into the room and he swung around to face her. She let that appraising look linger on him. —You know you’ll have to give up the drink, Doctor.
He had no idea what she was talking about.
—When we marry, she said.
—Of course, he said, nodding stupidly. —Of course I will.
They were wed in the Methodist chapel that spring and Newman took Bride to Connecticut for the honeymoon. They spent most of the summer in the States where Newman attended fundraisers to outfit the new hospital while Tryphie was guinea-pigged through skin grafting and physical therapy. Bride came home that fall with a set of false teeth and pregnant with a second child.
They moved into Selina’s House and set about renovating the rooms for wards and an operating theater and an office, for waiting and examination rooms and storage for equipment and supplies. Barnaby Shambler was on hand for the official opening and he toasted the new facility and the generosity of Levi Sellers who sold Selina’s House for the sum of one dollar. He toasted the new couple and then led the local dignitaries in an assault on the tables of booze laid out for the occasion. He cornered Newman hours later, waving his glass of rum.
—She’s a fine-looking woman with the teeth in, I’ll grant you that, he said.
Judah Devine was officially placed under Newman’s care at the same time the title to Selina’s House was signed over. He arranged to move the patient to an outbuilding behind the hospital fitted with a proper bunk and a small woodstove but Judah could not be enticed or coerced through the door of the fishing room. Eventually he was left to Mary Tryphena’s oversee and she was the only person to lay eyes on her husband in the years that followed. Newman relied on her for news of any change that might require his intervention but there was never any change. From the upstairs windows of Selina’s House he sometimes caught sight of her on her daily pilgrimage to the waterfront, a solitary figure carrying her parcel of food. Widow in all but name.
Every two years, Tryphie returned to Connecticut to undergo additional skin grafting while Newman scrounged after money and medical staff for a northern practice. Tryphie’s posture improved after each visit though he was never able to stand fully upright and his right shoulder was hunched at an awkward angle all his life. Twice Eli made the trip through Boston en route to Hartford with his cousin and he fell in love with the endless avenues of shops, the factories and train stations and opera houses, with the industry at the heart of the undertaking. It was a revelation to see that work could do more than strip a person of their health, that things might be created, that accumulation was possible. Tryphie grew up despising America for the pain it inflicted on him, but to Eli it looked like a fairy-tale kingdom.
The youngsters spent most of their time on the shore alone together. They holed up in Patrick Devine’s library in the Gut, flipping through illustrations in the science and botanical volumes. At Selina’s House they worked on one or another of Tryphie’s inventions, a rotating contraption that toasted bread on two sides at once, a hand-held periscope fashioned from wood and mirrors that allowed them to spy around corners. Tryphie’s affinity for material and the mechanical was at the heart of each design but he lacked Eli’s nose for the pragmatic. The years of enforced rest