Aw, come on, it’s worth eight at least, sulks he, but she will not budge. Whilky sells for five and leaves the store before Mag’s shears come out and cut the wretched dress to ribbons. We’ll see no more of you, vows she. Of you, we’ve seen enough.
But why did he sell your dress, you ask, you who almost died in nursing me? Do you not remember falling ill inside it, thrashing in agony for several days, crying out to your son, who stretched forth his arms, crying out for your wretched mother and even for me? But though you desired death, it was not yet time for you to come. The doctor who nursed me, nursed you more successfully, and slowly you grew stronger until you had the strength to stand up and walk, and that night you walked out of Mill Street. Don’t you remember stealing out of the house in the dead of night while everyone slept around you, everyone but the little girl in the patched pink dress, whose hand slipped into yours and begged to go along? They were the first words she’d uttered since the fateful day on Nile Street when all hope had died within her.
Two weeks into the future and what a change there is. Look with me across town now, down toward the south near Coxon’s Green. Do you see a tidy adolescent girl in an indigo frock, her hair smoothed back into a demure knot at the nape of her neck, her white nurse’s apron tied in a perfect bow in the back? She stands on a wooden box, applying whitewash to the new fever hospital’s walls, handing her brush off to the younger girl in her own simple blue pinafore, who splashes the stuff all over herself and drips it across the floor. They work in earnest, these two, as if their lives depended on a job well done. They wouldn’t want Dr. Clanny’s faith in them to be misplaced, nor would they want to lose the room they share with the other women who work at the hospital. Nurses are so hard to come by these days, and the doctor thinks you have a natural ability.
And some Saturday nights when you and Pink are buying sausages and coffee down in the marketplace, wiping your greasy chins and watching the crowds pass by, you are treated to a weirdly familiar sight. A pretty miss in a theatrical white gown, with her chin up and her eyes inviting, sets her slippered feet toward the Theatre Royale or the Bridge Inn. A few steps behind her shambles a broken-down drunk of a woman (her two blurry eyes barely registering the smudge of white ahead) whom Whilky pays in beakers of gin. Three Saturdays later, the white dress has disappeared from the street, you notice, and a jade green gown replaces it, with yet a third old woman, temperate, yes, but birdlike and nervous, and easily overcome by jade green’s greedy punk of a boyfriend. Pale lavender watered silk is the landlord’s last try; but when that one too skips town, he swears off dress lodging forever, thoroughly disgusted by the ingratitude and perfidy of women.
But can the genius of vision see even further into the future? The Eye’s lips move and Gustine strains to make out any individual word. Where most women measure their lives in childbirth and miscarriages, the Eye hears herself say, you measure yours in epidemics. I can see ahead to 1848, when fifteen years later, the cholera, unappeased, comes once more for Britain. You are a matron now, happily married for the past ten years to that sailor who stepped off the pitcher and over the Quarantine. He treats you kindly and you go with him to visit his mother and your son at the Trinity Graveyard, you with no children in tow (your body was too ravaged for that) but happy nonetheless with your job as a nurse and your husband’s love. All the babies you could want live down the street at Pink’s house, where she is the mother of four, nearly a child a year since she married at seventeen a shortsighted, ferrety-looking young clerk who adores her. Your old skills as a dress lodger help you minister to the sick and dying. Those who cannot speak for pain turn to you, and you almost magically find the place that hurts them. It is your gift, and you have learned to use it well. Your family and Pink’s both come through the new epidemic intact, but not long after, word reaches you through old Dr. Clanny at the hospital that his nephew was carried off in London, ministering to the ill in the slums of Stepney. Perhaps it was more merciful this way, says Dr. Clanny, helping you hold down yet another convulsing dark blue patient. Henry was never the same after poor Audrey passed on. Stopped teaching altogether, moved back to his mother’s house. A gifted surgeon, though, his uncle says, shaking his head. Such a bloody shame.
Your skills are monopolized by cholera again in 1853, then in 1866, but when it comes for a final time in 1892, you are not around to see it. With Dr. Koch’s discovery of the cholera vibrio, the disease that would define the nineteenth century is identified and conquered, just as you close your eyes and come to us. Cholera morbus has served its purpose; it has taught the rich to fear the poor, and that fear more than anything else will have led to all the subsequent reforms in sanitation. The cholera that began its westward career in the very year you were born lays down its head the year you die. You are one of the lucky ones: you die at home, surrounded by friends, of ripe old age. Yours has been the life span of a pandemic.
The Eye’s lips cease to move. The genius of vision has spoken. She has foreseen as absolute truth all that shall come to pass, and imparted it as best she could. Escape, a family, and long life for Gustine. A new start, true love, and something akin to happiness. But is all this in Gustine’s power to fulfill, or are these words nothing more than the ramblings of a delirious dying woman? It is all the same to the girl, who lays her head on the cold gray breast and weeps. What are you trying to tell me? she asks. I can’t understand a word you say.
The Eye is tired of talking. Dawn breaks through the nailed and shuttered windows; outside it is a perfectly clear and cloudless morning, one of the rare days like those she knew as a girl, before the factories struggled out of the mud and the bridges clamped down upon the banks. No yellow smoke to smudge the windows, no soot to catch in the teeth; even the normally dun brown Wear runs with water the color of the living dress. She finds herself on the bank of the river, where on either side of her men and women throw themselves into the water, swim across, then run wet and shining to the field of green beyond. Where is this place? wonders Eye, who thought she knew every nook and cranny of the city. It is separated off by a pretty white picket fence, low and inviting, behind which stretches a dirt path leading where she cannot see.
Eye squints across the water, trying to make out a small, hand-painted sign hung on the white fence’s latch. Three simple words she sees that will open the gate and allow her inside. As she watches, a baby crawls toward her across the meadow, happy and fat, its heart beating joyously. All she can hear is his heartbeat pounding in her ears. He laughs and stops by the gate, and though he is not old enough to speak, she thinks she hears him say, Come. Come to the place we have prepared for those who learn to love only in their last days.
Men and women race past Eye, reading the simple sign and entering. It seems to her that she has seen these words someplace before—yes, now she remembers. They were carved into every door and windowsill in Sunderland, like a secret code, worked into the fabric of everyday clothes and written into beads of sweat running down a pint of ale. Funny she never realized before now; the words—the blessing and the curse of all poor men and women, the words they live and die by—were everywhere she looked.
The Eye’s gray lips move; the dress lodger leans in closer.
She is not talking, says the doctor, pulling Gustine back from what might be the Eye’s fatal breath. It is only the spasms affecting her cheeks and lips. Look, he points out. Her feet are moving, too, like she is running. You don’t believe she is really running, do you?
No, says Gustine through her tears. I don’t suppose I do.
Then don’t endanger yourself further by thinking she has something to say.
Gustine sits back, depleted and so very, very sick. She knows the doctor is right—it was all the cholera talking. And yet, when those dry lips moved and her breath like the soft creaking of a gate passed through them, Gustine could have sworn she distinctively heard a voice inside the hinges. The Eye saw all that was and all that was to come, and though she could not make Gust
ine understand, she did not wholly fail. You heard her correctly, Gustine. Take up the short sentence of your inheritance. Go and live a happier life. All the Eye foresaw can be yours, if you but remember the words upon the gate.
“Nothing without labour.”
A GROVE PRESS READING GROUP GUIDE
THE DRESS LODGER
SHERI HOLMAN
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
We hope that these discussion questions
will enhance your reading group’s exploration
of Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger. They are
meant to stimulate discussion, offer new viewpoints,
and enrich your enjoyment of the book.
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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Why do you think the novel opens by following Fos? How do you feel when you encounter her again later in Whilky’s house? What does the movement with, then away, and finally back to Fos accomplish?
2. Describe the voice of the narrator in The Dress Lodger. How is the narrative voice different from that of most contemporary novels? Does the voice remind you of other books you may have read? Does the narrator play a role in the story? How do you, as a reader, react when the narrator addresses you directly?
3. How would you characterize Henry’s feelings for Gustine? Is his behavior toward her reprehensible, or do the class-based restrictions imposed upon him thwart his good intentions? What are his intentions? Does he even know? Compare Henry’s interactions with Gustine to his behavior with Audrey.
4. Compare the clearly articulated goals of the various characters: Gustine, the Eye, Pink, Henry, Audrey. What is each character striving for? What do you think about their goals? How do their efforts to do good and to be of use to others backfire, and are these characters responsible for their failure to realize their goals?
5. How would you characterize the relationship between Whilky and Gustine? Is she Whilky’s slave or does she have other options? Is being a prostitute ever a moral issue for her, or even in the world of The Dress Lodger? Is Whilky evil for exploiting Gustine, or is he also a victim of the economic circumstances in Sunderland?
6. What do you think the social function might be of a play like Cholera Morbus, or Love and Fright? Why would people wish to see such a play? What did you think of the content of the play and of the audience’s reaction?
7. Discuss the gulf between rich and poor in this novel. What are some of the more significant flash points of this divide? What do you think of Whilky’s suspicion of the government and of doctors, and the general belief among the poor that the cholera epidemic is some kind of conspiracy? Are the wealthier characters also victimized or in some way injured by this social chasm?
8. Is there a metaphorical significance to Gustine’s baby’s condition? What do you make of his namelessness and his disease (and Henry’s particular interest in it)? Do you think Gustine is attached to her child in ways she would not be if the child had been born perfectly healthy?
9. What function does the Student of Life have in this novel? What does his presence tell the reader about narrative? Is his goal of writing a book “spanning the great gulf that yawns between rich and poor” laughable or laudable?
10. What is the connection between prostitution and anatomy? Is Holman drawing an analogy? Does labor, in the general sense, form the third point of a triangle in this novel? In what ways is The Dress Lodger concerned with the economic uses to which the body is put?
11. What function does the Labor in Vain serve in The Dress Lodger? How does this space in which characters of various social classes congregate, work within the fabric of the novel? How does the name of the public house relate to some of the events of the story? Do the people in this novel labor in vain, and if so, is the pointlessness of their labor inevitable?
12. Henry says that he has “been wed to the graveyard since I first laid eyes on Dr. Knox.” Is Henry in some way addicted to dissection? Would such an addiction explain his dubious actions in Edinburgh?
Sheri Holman, The Dress Lodger
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