Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain by Kirsten Menger-Anderson Page B

a charitable man, a man who cannot stand by as fate’s hideous hand reduces a good family, one already sorely burdened, to dire circumstance. We Steenwyckses believe in the common good; we help common folk. My father — you may know him, the great Jan Steenwycks — ah, but you wouldn’t, of course you wouldn’t. My father and I open our doors to people like you. Tell your mother to come by my parlor on Monday. Crown Street, near Trinity Church.”
    I repeated Doctor Steenwycks’s words so I would not forget them before Mother awoke, which she did two hours later. Doctor Steenwycks and Miss Willett and her sister and all the men who’d arrived with the body had left by then along with Father’s corpse. All that remained of the afternoon was a layer of mud and excrement on our floor.
    â€œDear Mother,” I said, and she ran her fingers throughmy hair and kissed my forehead and told me how blessed I was to be a fool. “Doctor Steenwycks says he can cure me.”
    T HE GROUNDS IN FRONT of Doctor Steen-wycks’s house had eleven elm trees and seven white stone figures of unclad people. I touched one to see if it felt warm, but Mother pulled me away. The front porch was big as our house, and covered, and the doctor sat in one corner with a Negro girl. He was reading to her, and she was watching him, but she looked scared, crouched with her dress pulled tight over her knees. I was scared, too, but I followed Mother up two stairs to the porch and over to the corner where I saw that the man wasn’t Doctor Steenwycks, but someone much older.
    â€œTheodorus is in the back parlor,” the man said. He smiled, like Doctor Steenwycks had, and I realized that he was the famous doctor, the one who cured the dead.
    â€œI’m very pleased to meet you,” Mother said, and she made a kind of curtsy. I told him my name was Lubbert, Lubbert Das. I was about to ask him to cure my father, when Mother took my shoulder and we walked through the front doors; there were two, and they opened in opposite directions from each other. We passed through four empty rooms with stone hearths and burning fires, till we found Doctor Steenwycks.
    â€œYou’ve arrived,” he said. He’d been writing and his fingerswere stained with black ink. He ran his hand over my head, and I thought he might stain my hair, which is brown but not dark, not like the stains on his hands.
    â€œIn France, the operation takes less than an hour. Here, with my tools, it will take somewhat longer.” Doctor Steenwycks looked at Mother, who had borrowed a plumed hat from the milliner. He stared at her a very long time, so long her cheeks changed color.
    â€œHe’s all I have,” she said.
    â€œWe remove only a small portion of the skull, a fragment of bone. Once the pressure in his skull has lessened, the brain membrane will heal. He may — well, suffice it to say that he will be able to secure employment. And with the passage of time, he may one day become an intellectual. Once I’ve restored the proper flow of blood to his brain —”
    â€œYour father taught you this … this cure?”
    â€œMy father has his specialty, I have mine. We are both great doctors, in our own way.”
    Mother nodded, and I could tell she was impressed but was trying to hide it, which is why she bit her lip and looked down. Doctor Steenwycks watched her, and I almost said yes because I knew that’s what he wanted Mother to say and why he was waiting and I didn’t want him to look at her any longer.
    â€œI can’t afford to pay you, not all at once,” Mother said.
    I sat down on the floor because Doctor Steenwycks’s chairs reminded me of the ones the men were burning in the streets. Last time the Sons of Liberty marched through the streets, I tried to explain that the figures they held aloft were not really men, but bundles of straw that would never burn like people. Straw