Dr. Phibes in The Beginning Read online

  It was the weekend of the finals and Tanis, intent on making an annual event of the tournament, had turned Old Ironsides into miniature Wimbledon. Five hundred invitations had been sent out but gate crashers had doubled the attendance.

  On the lawns, the exorbitant finery of the English upper class was on full display. Silver lorgnettes, feather boas and a swirl of the ladies’ chiffons waved above the grassy knolls like an errant Bristol mist.

  The men were a bit more subdued. Most sported tennis attire with the younger men, as was the custom of that era, carrying hip flasks. By late afternoon this contingent had grown quite rowdy, loud-talking and scuffling amongst themselves. Olmstead quickly put a stop to this. With a signal to his private guard, the troublemakers were silently hustled off the grounds with nary a ripple in the larger crowd.

  For Gerard Olmstead, his wife's happiness was paramount! A moment later the entertainment began in the big house, the main floor ballroom there filling up with couples dancing to a snappy Charleston provided by Sidney Bechet's All Stars on the dais. Bechet, an American ’expat’, was hugely popular in Europe during the Twenties.‘Wimbledon’ was drawing to a close at that same moment.

  Victoria was up two sets to one and they were at match point in the fourth. Her opponent had just served up two aces. One more would throw the match into a fifth set. Victoria was digging in for the return when strong piano sounds spilled out from the second floor conservatory. The grass surface in front of her, already gouged by many aces, was jolted once again by the incoming serve. She shifted and drilled a baseline shot across the net that caught the chalk. The volley was on!

  5...10...20 minutes, the bruising, sweat-drenched play wilted the onlookers while the match and its players froze into something eternal and the music played on.

  Few present at Old Ironsides that day would recognize the music - Liszt's First Piano Concerto - coming out of the great house nor the pianist at the keyboard. But we have seen him before: Middle Aged, business suit, quite intent on his play.

  Anton Phibes.

  He was playing cabaret music when the match finally ended – an hour and half later – with Victoria taking the third set 9-7. It was dusk and they’d been playing since noontime! Later, the local press would call it ‘one of those match-ups for the ages.

  The crowd was already drifting into the big house by the time the players met at the net for the traditional congratulations. Vicky followed the crowd in, signing autographs along the way and making her way upstairs to the refreshments. She was ravenous but only permitted herself a few finger sandwiches and some charged water.The conservatory was crowded when she got there. Chairs had been cleared away and people were dancing to the ragtime. Vicky drifted to the piano at the far end. There, leaning easily against the backboard, she started to talk to the man at the keyboard.

  It was a casual – and not so casual - exchange that went on for two hours. Several guests came up to Vicky in the meanwhile. She obliged them with her autograph and a smile and then went on chatting with the pianist.

  Four months later, after a whirlwind courtship, she and Anton Phibes were married.

  THE CRASH

  He could hear the scraping. Hurried, insistent, like rats gnawing at a table leg. They sounded like they were in the next room and there were more sounds now. Metal slipping along metal and crackling, like when you're trying to start a fire and the tinder finally catches.

  He took it all in. He’d been dozing off, so happy now that he’d gotten to Victoria! She was lying there next to him but why all the bright lights? The glare? He just wanted to be alone with her in the dark.

  Then he remembered. She was having surgery and he’d come to protect her. You can’t be too careful about the one you love. Even the best doctors make mistakes.

  He was in Switzerland at the time. The cable came in at 6am. He didn’t know she’d been sick. It was just her annual physical, for God's sake! He was on the road at 6:10, pushing the car down the mountainside. These Alpine roads are too damn slow. He knew the route well enough. It was the same one he’d used going in. All these quick switchbacks came right after the road began to lift off the valley floor. Good! He’d be down there soon enough and that's when he could open her up. The Hispano cruised at 80 and could easily break 100 on the straightaway.

  Pain jolted him out of his reverie. Stop it, he growled, lifting his head to see what was going on, but the straps held him down. He dug in his heels trying to free himself. Nothing. That's when it hit him!

  Victoria wasn’t with him! There’d been a terrible accident. He’d hit the gas coming out of that final turn and was heading into the straightaway when a hay wagon loomed up from a small rise. The farmer was bringing the week's worth of silage to the pasture. He yanked on the reins, his two Belgians veering to the side with all the ponderousness of the Titanic avoiding the iceberg.

  Phibes eased into the brake pedal. Too hard and he’d spin out; too soft and he’d plow into the horses broadside. They froze at the sounds of the onrushing Hispano, Phibes tapping the brake furiously but he was off by half a second. The wagon caved over sideways dragging the broken and shrieking Belgians with it. The car spun out, fishtailing along the gravel, and rolling over and over in a centrifugal maelstrom.

  Phibes was thrown out of the car, the wind sweeping past as he bounced along the macadam, tearing off patches of skin as he bumped down the roadway knowing that he’d break in half if he tried to stop.

  He should’ve been killed so how did he survive? Victoria! He had to get to her. Had to protect her. Victoria saved him!

  Phibes heard everything all through the surgery and memorized it, not missing one step. Dermis, epidermis, sub-q. He knew the layering of the skin. Muscles, fascia, tendons, and the bones they attached to - he knew all that and he knew how to repair a kneecap. Eye sockets and the ocular nerve. Rods and cones and what you needed to see…all of this Phibes heard and learned in the OR while they were putting him back together.

  Later he’d make use of everything that he’d learned to form the ones closest to him starting with Vulnavia, that beautiful mute shrouded in mystery. With porcelain features grave yet ethereal, she projected the infinite intimacy of a runway diva. She was totally devoted to Phibes. Did he make her that way? Or was it some internal impulse on her part that made this bond unbreakable?

  The Wizards started out as mechanicals but with some tinkering, they assumed human characteristics. The saxophonist, especially, took a very human liking to Sophie, the band‘s chantoozie. This diminutive hellion was Phibes’ masterpiece, a precursor to his life's work - the revivification of his beloved wife, Victoria.

  No sooner had they met, than Anton Phibes and his Victoria became the brightest glitter in the social whirl. Idolized in the gossip columns both in London and on the Continent, where Phibes was already well-known in diplomatic circles as a brilliant technician, the presence of this gorgeous young American on his arm only added to his luster and set not a few tongues wagging.

  Phibes wanted to re-create this high life in his Maldine Square mansion. He and Victoria made a striking couple on any dance floor and so he installed a small ballroom there - complete with a black marble floor, a crystal ball overhead and a bandstand.

  There he would station an orchestra, those diminutive players seen earlier but now quite resplendent in the formal soup-and-fish worn by the jazz bands of that era. And their instruments were the required bass, clarinet, trumpet, drums, and sax. Sophie would be their headliner, a red hot mama who could belt out “…didn’t he ramble,” and those other Jazz Age standards with the best of them.

  The Clockwork Wizards…The Band That Plays Forever!

  Designing and building these musicians to scale would’ve required a lifetime's worth of computation. To speed up the process, Phibes acquired the plans for that nineteenth century computing marvel, the Difference Engine - and built the instrument from scratch, making frequent visits to the Science Museum, where was housed the only extant mo
del of that fantastic pre-computer.

  Charles Babbage was a hundred years ahead of his time when he built the original Difference Engine. Phibes was a hundred years ahead of his time when he built the Wizards.

  Thanks to the Difference Engine, he was able to construct his first Wizard in a matter of months, a large bulky individual whose skeleton, composed of a secret metallurgical formula known only to Phibes, displayed all the texture and resilience of natural bone. Its chief ingredient was nitonol, a nickel-titanium alloy that gave even his most complicated joints - ankle, knee, and elbow - a youthful bounce. He would be Phibes’ drummer.

  Stix’ was modeled on Baby Dodds, the most famous percussionist of that era. Dodds toured with Sidney Bechet's New Orleans Feetwarmers. Phibes first saw them in a Revue featuring Josephine Baker at the Theatre des Champs Elysees. Bechet's style, driven by his soprano sax, would be the inspiration for Phibes’ house band.

  On the bandstand, the Wizards glowed with energy. Their skin was artificial of course. An elastic resin grown on cat gut provided the natural texture. But their skin color, so fresh, so real, was a trade secret. One look at the Wizards showed them to be in robust health. (Think boolah, boolah and muskrat greatcoats). A few Phibesian biographers make the case for Peter Paul Rubens. Tintoretto has also been mentioned.

  Theirs was the music that Phibes and his Victoria had danced to, shimmying themselves into the society pages of Le Monde, L’Osservatore and Der Spiegel. The way he clutched the small of her back was the giveaway: this poised and accomplished diplomat undone by desire. But not quite!

  For he loved her, loved his Victoria as his wife. Loved her scent. Her cool lips. The flash of her hair against his cheek. Loved to kiss her hands, so small and strong. And her feet even smaller still.

  I’m a strong woman, she had told him at their second meeting. So matter of fact, as if he’d expected it. Victoria designed her life and there were no entrances without permission.

  No one had ever loved her the way she needed to be loved (she was too young for all that, anyway). But Victoria wasn’t a woman who needed to be loved. Ever practical, her career once she found one would be all that mattered. She was that Kantian ‘thing in itself’, no interpretation needed. So he gave her that, and pressed her so close when they danced that their sweat mingled into their shoes.

  They took two days to dry. Victoria's shimmy was Chicago speakeasy. She caught every light in the room, offering up a dazzling image that confused the men and left them with a sense of loss for something they never had.

  Women admired Victoria, especially the older ones. With them she could write her own ticket. Help, assistance, patronage, here was one woman who just said no to all of those demeaning tidbits that society tossed onto their plates. And so it was the matrons, ground down by decades of subservience, who saw in Victoria a heroine, someone who did what they’d always wanted to do. And never chanced it.

  But who was her escort, that handsome older man vaguely familiar in the toney joints they frequented but totally unknown - and invisible - in the dives where the music was hotter and the drinks less watered?

  Anton Phibes had known and enjoyed many women. He was very comfortable with young beauties and commanding matrons alike and had fashioned a most serviceable persona for every circumstance. This made him a popular ‘odd man’ at parties where his skill at the keyboard was always in demand. A diplomat must always conceal his true feelings but when Victoria came along, his poise was tossed to the wind. He tried mightily to recover but after two weeks of heroic effort, he was completely flummoxed.

  Swept away! He laughed at the thought. Never would he allow that to happen! Love makes us crazy, a friend once confided - and so here he was - turned upside down by a skirt!

  Weeks, months went by while he drifted along in this torrent. He knew he had to right himself but how?!

  Tell the truth: He loved a woman half his age! With the admission, the sterner tides of realism started to course in his veins. Should Victoria become too worrisome, he told himself, he’d cut her loose!

  But she was so beautiful! He liked to look at her when he woke up, letting his eyes wander about her sleeping form. What is she thinking? he wondered….

  The accident had left Phibes without a voice. Once so articulate, so precise in conducting his diplomatic missions, he now was forced into silence. He wanted to speak but no words came, nor could he hear himself.

  He was in lockdown. ICU: UCME but from that point on, all contact with others was in one direction and one direction only. You're telling me what you think and I can only blink.

  This forced silence galled Phibes when he was with his wife. Seeing her there in her sarcophagus - her stillness had an organic perfection about it - he wanted to call out to her. Perhaps she could hear him… if only he could speak!

  After months of speechlessness, of grotesque pantomime, Phibes engaged a surgeon to repair his voice box. If his wife couldn’t talk to him, he would talk to her! He found some voice records of his diplomatic speeches and insisted that the surgeon listen to them. And he brought in a voice coach from Old Vic to ensure that Victoria would recognize his words.

  The latter lasted one day, a martinet whose frothiness angered Phibes beyond repair. The surgeon, who was well aware of Phibes’ contempt for doctors, maintained a low-key presence during his time with his new patient. Actually, Blaise Noonan was well-regarded by his Harley Street peers but both he and Phibes knew that past success is no guarantee of future outcomes.

  The surgery proved less than expected. Phibes’ talking voice was well off the mark. Thin, raspy, it was more chatter than anything else, a staccato that was unnerving to the surgeon. What to do?

  After experimenting with various amplifiers and modulators, they settled on a Victrola cone, the same one in use in that popular record player of the day. Installed on a cart it made Anton Phibes portable in his own home. And free to spend as many cherished moments with his beloved as the day required.

  Phibes’ first words to her were the same ones he used to express his true feelings soon after they’d met: And let us bid Good Morrow to our waking souls… (John Donne). Back then, sensing a boundary, he had broken off before the end of the first verse. How would she take to his attentions, that most pedestrian of questions, crossed his mind at the time. She could have had anyone she wanted, is the cliché, but so could most of the young American ladies in her circle. Yale & Harvard were the schools. Business & medicine were the professions. Live in New York (with Boston a distant second).

  She never spoke about such things. Victoria didn’t want anyone in her business. She was casual with her girlfriends and indifferent toward her family. Her older brother, Tom, had missed the war by a year. He’d enlisted just weeks before the Armistice and stayed on in the Army's Flying Corps ’where a young fellow can go far if he's got gumption’.

  Victoria liked her brother and wrote to him occasionally. Tom was stationed in Kansas. His letters were as flat as the local terrain.

  Now that Phibes had met Victoria, what would he do with her? Conquer her - no that wasn’t the word. Win her over? This wasn’t a lottery. Having her - this sounded like Russian serfdom. He had to be careful because Victoria was quite specific in her tastes and wasn’t afraid to say ’no’. She always looked wonderful, spoke with precision and her goals were simple and few.

  Victoria had danced at school. It was a whim at first but as the audiences grew more welcoming, the belief that she could make a go of it took hold. No one in her circle had ever considered a career. Marry a good provider and make a home for the man.

  But the Bohemian life was abhorrent to her. Victoria's father worked hard and she admired him for that. She intended to hone her skills until she got invited to the better productions. Phibes knew a few people connected with Sadler's Wells. He could help her but was quite guarded in offering assistance.

  No promises. No guarantees. No fooling, he declared. From that moment on, his every move was calculated wit
h precision, his conversation constructed and deconstructed in advance. In just a few weeks, his attentions to this glorious creature had become quite lapidary.

  RECONSTRUCTION

  Phibes wanted Victoria back. His quest (to revivify her) would test his endurance, of that he was certain. No one has ever come back from the dead. Crossing the River Styx is life's last and final journey. And while we yearn and mourn for our loved ones and believe against all the facts that we’ll find them again, hold them close and shower them with kisses and tears, we know in our hearts that it isn’t - can’t - be so. And so we build the Taj Mahal, write poems like ‘Annabel Lee’ and crash ourselves upon their tombs in a rage - all for naught.

  Gone but not forgotten. But gone!

  Or not. Anton Phibes, rushing to be at his wife's side during her surgery, wrecked his car on an Alpine two-lane. The crash should’ve killed him - but didn’t. And after two years of surgeries and rehab, he left the hospital, left it with the same steely determination that propelled his Hispano Suiza down that Alpine two-lane.

  He would reclaim his wife. And in doing so, he would defy and conquer death.

  To test his endurance, Phibes took up running. He ran Dover Beach and the Lake Country pastorals. He ran up Ben Bulben, stretching out the distances till he was running five miles at a clip, and then ten.

  He entered the Boston Marathon in 1934 and finished with a time of 3:50. The next year he ran it in 3:15.