The Book of Madness and Cures by Regina O'Melveny Read Free Book Online Page B

didn’t hear him. But he was never unsociable.”
    “Maybe he and Dr. Fuchs had a disagreement.” I didn’t want to believe that my father had gone austere or, worse, bereft of reason.
    Dr. Cardano opened the top letter, one of the first ones I’d received, and began to read it aloud, as if to read it silently was a breach of privacy.
     
Dear Gabriella,
The decline of the body is certainly a sorrowful thing, as you mentioned in your last letter, especially in the elderly poor, for it is also the decline of the will. This may terrify me more than anything else, for I have found myself capable of bearing pain, but what if I were stranded without recourse to affect my condition? What if my family and means were taken by the plague? I have seen many a starving old wayfarer blank-faced with hunger, hunched in a ditch, hand stuck out like a stick of wood for alms. The eyes of such a person are no longer the eyes of a grandmother or a grandfather but rather the ravaged sockets of permanent grief or hard rage. I fear them, for it is beyond me to help, but for a small bit of bread. The beggar may be the god in disguise, as the Greeks once believed. If so, the gods are everywhere among us, gaunt and withering…
     
    He went on, but I no longer heard the words. I’d read them often enough at home in my room, trying to evoke his company. The fire spent itself and the room grew dark. Outside, the sunlight bled from the red-tiled roofs and left them ashen.
    “…Tübingen, December twelfth, 1580.” Dr. Cardano stopped reading. Olmina finished my hem.
    “Gabriella?” the doctor asked.
    “Yes?”
    “Why take this trip to foreign cities to find your father after all these years?”
    “If I could persuade him to return, things would greatly improve for us. My mother frets beyond reason. My life in Venetia is a prison. I can no longer practice medicine there, and my father’s last letter proved a fine gadfly, stinging me to change things as they are.”
    “I’m an old fool, but I ask you, is this really the best course to follow?”
    “Ah, you’ve been troubled by the worry in my father’s letter. ‘Of what use is grief ?’ he used to ask in times of disquiet. ‘It’s for holding each other,’ I said as a girl of ten. It can bring us to that calm when we know we’re not alone, that affection that can even bind strangers.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I find solace in every stranger I help with my art of physick.”
    “Oh, Gabriella, that is dangerous.”
    “Why?”
    “Because as you well know, there are those you can’t help.”
    “But one must try.”
    “The doctor is not a sister of charity, but a scientist, and what you want—even if it’s communion with another—is irrelevant.”
    “Not communion, Dr. Cardano, but recognition.”
    “Of what?”
    “Of pain, brokenheartedness. The more we can openly bear, the more we can cure.”
    “I heartily disagree. We must keep the proper distance, my dear.”
    Olmina sighed loudly with disapproval.
    “What is it, Olmina?”
    “Well, I’m no doctor and no educated person.” She shot Dr. Cardano a glance that verged on audacity, and I was glad the fire burned low. Maybe he didn’t see it. Years ago, Dr. Cardano had reprimanded me for allowing—and even encouraging—my servants to speak freely. My father never seemed to care much about it, though he didn’t interfere with his friend’s reproach.
    Olmina continued, “Sometimes you folk make too much of a thing that’s simple.”
    “So what do you say, my smart maid?” asked Dr. Cardano.
    “I’m no maid, to begin with.” I held my breath at that statement, but Dr. Cardano only narrowed his eyes. Olmina continued, “Smart in what way, I’m not sure. But if you ask me what use is grief, I’d say it’s got no use. There’s no mincing of doctors or ranting of frocks at the pulpit that’ll convince me otherwise. We don’t know the use. And that’s why, Gabriella, I think your father kept asking the