“That’s all?”
“That’s it.”
“What if I say you don’t want to comment?”
“Print that,” said Brainard, “and you’ll never get anything from me again.”
“That’s hard on me, Asa.”
“Too damn bad.”
For the next four days I laid low at Gasthaus zur Rose. When Johnny wasn’t around to talk to, I. read, stared at the geraniums in the window, and wondered morosely what new plans McDermott and O’Donovan were cooking up. The notion of Le Caron stalking me in Cincinnati was terrifying. I’d rather face the whole Fenian army.
Stories of the disputed game filled all the papers. The consensus was that if the Haymakers had not quit the field to protect gamblers, we’d have gone on to win convincingly. But I wasn’t so sure. The Haymakers were fighters. Now we wouldn’t know, unless we played them again in the East.
Which, according to the papers, was increasingly likely. The leading New York clubs, practically begging for return matches, were practicing hard, particularly the Mutuals and the Atlantics. Prospects of capturing the pennant, plus receipts from eager crowds, I reflected, must be a powerful lure for Harry and Champion.
The Haymaker game had been on Thursday, August 26. They left town on Sunday. I didn’t emerge from my refuge until Monday the thirtieth, and had it not been for Andy’s message I might have hidden longer. Johnny brought the note to me. It was brutally simple: Timmy’s sickness had been diagnosed: typhoid fever.
Typhoid . . . I didn’t even know what it was. Something that killed people. Like diphtheria, whooping cough, scarlet fever—things people used to get before new vaccines and preventatives eradicated them.
With Johnny I raced to the.West End, fearing what I would find. Andy answered Cait’s door, his face haggard.
“How bad is he?” I asked.
“Can’t get much worse.”
Timmy lay motionless, thin and wasted, burning with fever. His eyes were half-shut. Cait, bending over him, looked ravaged. She hadn’t slept, Andy said, for three days.
“Samuel,” she said softly, her eyes lifting to meet mine. I saw frightening depths of resignation in them.
“When did a doctor see him?”
She shook her head.
“He was here day before yesterday,” Andy replied. “Said there’s nothing for it but to wait.”
“Wait?” I exclaimed. “What the hell kind of doctor is that? Let’s get him over right now, for as long as we need him.”
Cait said nothing. Andy looked uneasy. “Irish don’t always rate that kind of crack attention,” he said.
I stared at him. “You mean to tell me—”
“Wait,” Johnny interrupted. “There’s a wizard doctor in Over the Rhine, a Dutchman, came here in the ’forty-eight revolutions. Looks after Helga and me sometimes. Charges top dollar, though.”
“Go get him,” I said.
“He speaks mostly Dutch,” added Johnny, heading for the door.
“Then you can translate.”
Two hours elapsed. Andy left for practice. I sat beside Cait, watching Timmy and listening to his choked breathing. Occasional groans emerged through his parched lips. Cait squeezed drops from a drenched cloth, but he could barely swallow. I held him, his body fearfully light, over a bedpan four times in those first hours; a foul-smelling, pea-soup diarrhea spilled from him, and each time he cried and clutched his stomach.
Cait’s weary passivity irked me. We can’t just sit here, I thought, we’ve got to do something. Questioning her, I learned that there had been a gradation of head and joint aches, coughs and sore throats, nosebleeds, chills, and suddenly the relentless high fever with alternating spells of constipation and diarrhea, vomiting, and terrible abdominal pain. The prescribed quinine had been too harsh on the boy’s weakened system, so Cait had stopped it.
How often is this fatal? I wondered, and then wondered if I really wanted to know.
The doctor arrived, a balding man named Unzelman whose aristocratic bearing and superior German tones put me off, but he treated Johnny with surprising deference.
“That’s ’cause he knows I’m a performer, an artiste,” Johnny said later. “They’re serious about the circus where he came from.”
Unzelman put a hand on Timmy’s brow and muttered. He checked his pulse and lifted his nightshirt. A welter of rash marks dotted the boy’s swollen abdomen. The doctor pressed gently on one, watched it go pale.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Rose spots,” replied Johnny, after an exchange with Unzelman. “A prime sign of typhoid.”
Translating carefully, Johnny gave us Unzelman’s instructions: withhold quinine until Timmy was stronger; keep him on a high-protein, nonfibrous diet of milk and eggs; apply cold compresses to his head and warm gum-spirit compresses to his abdomen.
The fever, Unzelman said, rose in staircase escalations. Timmy was approaching the peak, the crisis point. If he survived it, his chances would be fair.
“Doesn’t mince words, does he?” I said. “What caused it in the first place?”
“Bad air,” said Johnny. “You know, the ether.”
At that word Unzelman’s head jerked and he rattled off something with harsh quickness.
Johnny looked abashed. “He says I’m an idiot, no such thing as evil air.
Unzelman insisted that Timmy’s compresses, bedding, and all waste material be carefully disposed of, or the disease would spread. The house would have to be quarantined, its occupants restricted in their movements. I saw a shadow of a worried frown cross Cait’s face. A quarantine, I thought, might not fit Fenian plans.
“I’ll try to sterilize everything in here,” I said.
“Do what?” said Johnny.
“Boil stuff,” I said. “Kill germs.”
He spoke to Unzelman, who regarded me approvingly.
“He says that’s one of the most intelligent things he’s ever heard in Cincinnati. Wants to know if you’re familiar with the new work of somebody named Pasteur.”
“Sort of.”
“He’s impressed,” said Johnny, adding that Unzelman was willing to return daily. His visitation fee was five dollars.
Cait looked despairingly at me.
“Let’s make it twice a day,” I said, taking her hand. Money was least among our concerns.
The days and nights that followed contained long sleepless vigils punctuated by fits of intense activity. I boiled rags for compresses, soaked them in the gum spirits—the odor of turpentine permeated the house—wrung them out, changed them
