Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

“Sit back,” said Annie. She brought the cloth to Andrew’s forehead. It felt cool and good there as she dabbed it. “Yes,” she said. “I knew they brought in a fellow. I heard some of the fellows start calling him that name.”

“They brought him straight to the quarantine?”

“As far as I know.”

“Now why do you think they would do that?”

“How do you mean, Doctor?”

“Why would they take a fellow straight to the quarantine? Was he contagious? Exhibiting symptoms?”

“I suppose he must have been.” Annie dabbed the cloth down Andrew’s cheek. “You could do with a shave,” she commented.

“So no one told you what they thought he might have,” said Andrew.

“Kept it pretty quiet,” she said.

“I’ll say they did,” said Andrew. “All winter long, I didn’t see anyone bring him in. Didn’t see it, didn’t hear about it.”

“Well of course not,” she said. “That fellow came in late last summer. He’s been there the whole time.”

“Since the summer?” Andrew shook his head. “And I didn’t hear a word about it.”

“Really.” Annie stepped back, inspecting his face like it was a canvas and she’d finished painting it with water. “He would have been an interesting case for you—for any surgeon from Paris, I’d thought. What with his irregularities.”

“That is the second time I’ve heard that word used when talking of this fellow. What are his irregularities?”

Annie reddened a little at that. “They are not widely—I mean to say—those of us who had a look at him when he came in—”

Andrew nodded encouragingly.

“Well. He is not entirely a… he.”

Annie seemed literally about to entirely collapse into embarrassment, then remembered who she was and what she did—her profession—and cleared her throat, stood straighter.

“The word is hermaphrodite. Do I really need to go on?”

Andrew raised his eyebrows. “A person of both genders?”

Now Annie smiled a little. “I imagine you saw those sorts of folk all the time, studying in Paris.”

“No, not really. I’ve read case studies, but that is as far as it went. Hermaphrodites are as unusual in France as they are in Idaho.”

“Well you should have been able to have a look,” she said. “It would have spared me recounting it. You must be in poorly with the management, for them not to’ve told you about it.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Andrew and threw Annie a grin. She grinned back, and told him to rest some more, then started getting ready to leave him for the night.

§

He could put as fine a face on it as he wanted to, but Annie Rowe was right. Andrew Waggoner was in poorly with the management; very poorly indeed. He was in so poorly he was fired—fired for upsetting Klansmen in a mill town, having done nothing worse than applying his meagre skills to a girl who needed more. Fired for hurting his elbow in the course of protecting himself from one of those Klansmen—for hurting it badly enough he might seriously not be able to operate again. Fired, at the core of it, because he was a Negro, who so far as the management was concerned did not belong here from the beginning, who was not fit to consult on the charity case in the quarantine.

Gloom fell on him like a wool blanket on a hot summer’s day.

It wasn’t, he brooded, as though no one had foreseen this sort of problem. His uncles had been deeply sceptical when Elmore Waggoner announced that he would be putting a year’s profits in the Connecticut livery company he founded towards sending his oldest boy to France to study at the Paris School of Medicine. Andrew would not be the first or even the second Negro to lift a scalpel in the United States. But he would be consigned, they predicted, to ministering to the ill in Harlem or other similar neighbourhoods in big cities. To try and find a place in a surgery—a surgery where white men’s wives and children might one day lie down under the scalpel—would be throwing good money away, they said. And not helping his boy a whit.

But Elmore was stubborn, and because he had some money he could put behind that stubbornness, he was able to send his boy on a boat to France, and welcome him back with a medical certificate from one of the finest schools of medicine in the world.

Who was right? As the sun climbed past the scope of his one window and the room fell into cool, grey shadow, Andrew thought it might be time to congratulate those sceptical uncles of his. Them, and Nurse Annie Rowe.

Andrew was ready to call for some morphine after all, when a knock came at his door, a face draped in shadow poked around the edge of it, and a familiar voice boomed out.

“Dr. Andrew Waggoner! Bless me, it is grand to find you well!”