What Is Visible: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

man. Most women don’t even have them his size—like a walnut—though yours is close. I told him last year he’d better find a girl on which to exercise its benefits. The most eligible bachelor in Boston, over forty with no wife and that enormous bump. A sin, I told him!”
    Doctor could have done without his friend sharing this particular knowledge. “That’s not why I came knocking, my dear,” he told Julia, though that wasn’t entirely the truth.
    “I’ll take your word,” she said. “Bumps and all.” She laughed as she rose, and Doctor saw that old George was as charmed as most—dare he say all?—men were by his Julia. She laughed as much as any woman he’d ever seen, and yet managed not to be aswoon with frivolity. It must be the eyes, which had a way of looking smart even when her mouth was open. A rare talent for a female. If her laugh were too high, like a schoolgirl’s, or too low, like a washerwoman’s, or too long in duration, like a spinster’s, or so short, like his dead mother’s, God rest her soul, that it might be mistaken for a hiccup, then Doctor would not have been able to consider a life with her, no matter the light of devotion in those large gray eyes.
    Laura tugged at his arm. “Julia’s head like mine?”
    “Almost exactly,” he wrote, and it was true. They actually had far more in common than Doctor and Julia did.
    “Dr. Combe, Oliver is waiting, and then the other children are lined up for you in the main hall,” he told the phrenologist. “And I’d like you to take a look at my six teachers’ heads too, if you could.”
    “Of course,” Combe said and paused before Julia. “I hope to wish you the best in the near future.”
    Doctor showed him out, but as soon as he returned, Laura erupted in a low howl―“Whoowah! Whoowah!”—over and over again. She cast about for Julia’s arm, but Julia moved quickly out of her reach.
    Julia looked frightened. “Why is she doing that?”
    Laura made the noise louder, and now he understood. “It’s her surprise,” he told Julia. “She’s made a special naming noise for you.” It was really quite good; she must have been practicing for a long time. “She has noises for everyone she likes, and each one sounds completely different. Well, not completely, but different enough to recognize, anyway.”
    Julia sat down in the chair farthest from Laura. “Oh,” she said, “that’s very sweet. It is. Tell her thank you very much, but could she please stop.”
    “Julia very excited,” Doctor wrote. “Wonderful present.” She howled again. “But stop now.”
    She quieted down and settled back into her chair, smiling, drumming her knees in satisfaction.
    Julia said, “Well, that put a little damper on my surprise for you. I don’t know how it will compare.” She reached delicately into the front of her bodice with her thumb and forefinger, and Doctor was glad Combe was not there for whatever was coming. She pulled out a folded sheet and opened it, then arranged herself in front of the fireplace, resting one elbow on the mantel. She cleared her throat.
    “A great grieved heart, an iron will,
    As fearless blood as ever ran;
    A form elate with nervous strength
    And fibrous vigor—all a man.”
    Laura asked what Julia was doing.
    “Poem,” Doctor told her and signed the verses as Julia recited them. She was a slow but excellent declaimer.
    “One helpful gift the gods forgot
    Due to the man of lion-mood
    A woman’s soul, to match with his
    In high resolve and hardihood.”
    He didn’t finish writing the poem for Laura; he stopped at “lion-mood.” She didn’t need to know yet that Julia would be his wife. He would tell her when the time was right.
    “Brava!” Doctor clapped. “Your poetry almost does your beauty justice.”
    “So we are matched then, now that Combe has combed my head for flaws?”
    “In high resolve,” he told her. “And so your lovely poems from now on, as we discussed, will be only for private