Prospero's Daughter. Elizabeth Nunez
he and Paul, when he used to live in London. Peter and Paul Bidwedder, before he changed his surname to Gardner. His parents, ardent Christians when their sons were born, named them for the loyal disciples of Christ, but regretted their decision later, with the war, after the deaths of so many of England’s most promising. After an explosion in a field in France brought their father back home a quadriplegic. By the time he and Paul left for medical school, their parents were proselytizing atheists.
It was because of their father that he and Paul decided to become doctors. He chose research, for unlike Paul, he was happiest when he was in the library, his head buried in a pile of dusty books. He told his father that he believed it was possible to grow new arms and legs for him in the laboratory. He was sure it was only a matter of figuring out the right cells and stimulating them. Then, when they multiplied into arms and legs, he would attach them where the old limbs had been amputated.
Voodoo medicine, Paul called it, but their father grabbed on to the hope Peter offered. “Maybe not as perfect as the ones you had before, Father, but they could grow back almost as strong.”
Paul scoffed at him. He was the realist, the practical man. He spoke of a future of mechanical artificial limbs. Better still, robots that could respond to human command.
“You wouldn’t have to do a thing,” Paul said to his father. “It would be like having a personal servant.”
His father preferred the fantasies Peter spun for him.
“All it would take is figuring out the human genome,” Peter said. “Then we would have the secret to life. We could even make a clone of you, Father.”
Their mother, who loved Paul best anyhow, was horrified. “Dr. Frankenstein was a monster,” she said.
Peter waved her away. “Oh, those ideas are passé,” he said. “No one is planning to use the dead.”
“Playing God,” she said.
“Yes, playing God,” Paul repeated after her, but even when he was ridiculing Peter envy was eating him up.
In medical school, it was obvious that the professors admired Peter. He was the brain, the smarter of the Bidwedder men. But the students loved Paul. He was the popular one. They consulted Peter when they were faced with a difficult problem. At examination time, they stuck to him like flies to honey, but it was with Paul they went to the pub. Peter’s ardor, his focus, his single-mindedness on curing every illness he came upon, made them uneasy. His patients were not human to him. To him, they were a mass of cells, tissue, blood and bones, not people, not living, breathing men and women with feelings and desires.
Peter became more human to them when he married. He still worked hard, but he no longer slept in the lab, as he often did when nothing mattered except the project that engaged him. His wife was beautiful: blond hair, blue eyes, a perfectly shaped oval face, and the pale alabaster skin that so many Englishmen loved. But what Peter Gardner boasted about was her virtue. He had married a virgin. So certain he was that no one could seduce her that he offered to put his head on a block to be chopped off if anyone proved him wrong. “Her virtue is nonpareil,” he said. Paul’s friends called Peter “Nonpareil” behind his back, but not only because of what he claimed for his wife, but because of what he claimed for himself. No one was smarter than he, he seemed to imply by his serious demeanor. And, indeed, all that he touched turned to gold.
Then his wife died, three years after giving birth to a daughter, and he was his old self again.
Except for his little girl, Virginia, Peter became, in all his human interactions, cold and distant. Inhuman, Paul accused him of being when Peter refused to lend him money after he lost his savings and three months’ salary at a gambling table. “Keep it up and you will kill someone one day.” It was a matter of time before Paul’s words proved prophetic.
Peter had not intended to kill the woman. He had intended to cure her. He had given her one of his concoctions. Put it in her IV drip.
It was not the first time he had given one of his patients the experimental medicine he had mixed himself. Some improved. A few died, but, as he always reasoned, most were already terminal, and nothing, except this chance he was prepared to take, would have saved them.
This patient, however, was not fatally ill. She was the patient of another doctor. Peter Bidwedder just happened to be in the ward when she was admitted. He wanted to test a medicine that had worked on his rats. He gave it to her. She died within hours. She was rich, important. The wife of a government minister. There would be an inquest.
He was terrified. He went to his brother. His brother said that an inquest would lead to others. The hospital authorities would find out about the patients who had not been cured by the medicines he had given them. The ones who had died. When Peter said to Paul that they were dying anyway, Paul reminded him that he had enemies, colleagues who hated him.
Paul recommended Trinidad. He told Peter he would hide him at a friend’s flat in London and the next day his friend would drive him to Liverpool. From there he could take a ship to Trinidad. It would cost money, lots of money. He would have to sign over his bank account to him. His house and his inheritance from their parents, too.
When Peter bit his lips and cast his eyes from side to side nervously, Paul was quick to reassure him. “I won’t need all the money,” he said. “But if that woman tries to sue, I want to be sure there is nothing left in your estate for her to take. Then, when things clear up, I’ll send you what’s left.”
“When things clear up?”
“Surely there have been no cures without fatalities. One day people will understand that and acknowledge your genius.”
Peter was in a bind. He had to trust his brother.
Paul said he knew someone with connections who could arrange for him to go to Chacachacare, a little island off the northwest coast of Trinidad. It was a leper colony, he said, but it was virtually abandoned. Most of the lepers were cured and had returned to Trinidad. There was a doctor there, taking care of the few patients who still remained, but he was old, hardly likely to ask disturbing questions. It would be a perfect hideout, he said to Peter.
Peter Bidwedder knew about the cure for Hansen’s disease. Contrary to popular belief, the disease was not easily contracted. That it was not easily contracted, however, was not the same as saying it could not be contracted by contact with infected persons. Still, the chances were so slim that a reasonable man could conclude that even on a leper colony, if he kept some distance away from the lepers, he would be safe. In any case, Peter Bidwedder had no intentions of practicing medicine with lepers. His brother was right. A leper colony was the perfect hideout. No one would think of looking for him there. All that remained was to change his last name.
* * *
It was more than two hours now since Carlos had left. Peter Gardner sat on the porch in his rocking chair, staring at the sky and brooding, his head flopped backward on his neck.
Twilight. The time in the evening he loved best. Night hovered as in the wings of a stage, waiting its turn, while the sun glittered above the darkening clouds. But this evening the sun had cast an eerie white light on the sky—electric—that had made the darkening clouds darker.
The gods frowning. The words flitted, light as gossamer, through his head and he shut his eyes, willing his brain to mount a defense.
It is he who had wronged me. He who would misuse my daughter. He who would screw her.
When he opened his eyes, he was rewarded. Forgiven, he chose to believe. For below the clouds, the sun splashed her magnificent colors: red that bled to purple, yellow that burned to orange—the exquisiteness of a sunset found only here, on these Caribbean islands.
It was art: a great painting in the sky. Dark clouds but a fire below them. In the foreground, statuary—the tall bushes at the end of the lawn outlined in the silvery light. For after science, it was art Peter Gardner worshipped: music, painting, sculpture, literature. Poetry, best of all.
He groaned