All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred thirty-four)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Five

Collecting Debts

(part one hundred thirty-four)

Underpinning all this inventory, of a perfectly fine household none had cause to put themselves above, was the hint of Ranilde’s being over-petted at home. Under her mother-in-law’s roof, she would try harder. Élucide agreed.

“Now, is your mother like to allow us a talk, her and me, in her room alone?”

“You alone with Ranilde?”

“Well.” The question misunderstood at once. “Supposing my son’s wife can hear a civil word from me.”

“No, you know… I think Papa will even see things your way.”

“Will he?” said Michael. “Will your sister?”

“She’ll like it above all if Owen comes to fetch her.”

She sat for a space, reins on lap, after waving McClurkins on their way, wondering what dinnertime mood she would find at home.

“Teach,” Isa said. “Be a schoolmaster, I think, if I could get the training.”

At Crownhaven was a chamber lit by one tall window, stained-glass, in a design of Swedenborgian angels. (Made in Chicago, at the cost of a small house.) Couches fitted to a sunken octagon ringed it; a low block of white marble made a table (veneering over a wood frame, not to overweight the beams). The couches were velvet, rose-purple, with fringed bolsters for the subject’s lying down. Glass vessels held candles at the table’s four corners. Chinese pots of flowers were freshened daily.

“Belief by itself saves.” A quote of Dr. Crowninshield’s.

Ebrach added: “I have sat with men and women, held dry discussions, explained the natural course of their illness, the treatments that might or not alleviate their pain. They do not wish to die. They are willing to try. But in their way, they’ve done the experiment. They’ve tried before.”

“They are the experiment.”

“Some of your colleagues in politics would say so. I only suggest there’s no palpable climb for the patient, from the plane of this surgery or that drug, to a plane above, looking down at a sadder time, looking up to true happiness.”

This language of octagons, couches, candles, of rainbow hues shining over faces, was a simple one. Fearful at first, at length amazed; awed if poor, gratified if rich, the patient had undergone the healing change already—from the hour she first abandoned explanations.

He called Élucide’s attention to her cousin. “Honoré deprecates it all…his apartment doesn’t please him, his wife and children vex him. That he should have his son with him, that he is able to walk our grounds and ride in carriages, that I employ him in his profession, that he is alive at thirty-one and may live a decade longer… Tocqueville, I believe, survived to fifty-three. None of these miracles strikes the vein of faith. We have not made Honoré one of us.”

144

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred thirty-five)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)