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WEDDINGS
Dr. Dixon and Miss Dunton
Miss Sadie Dunton, the only daughter of Mr. William C. Dunton, was married at the residence of her father, No. 148 South Oxford Street, to Dr. George A. Dixon of New York. Rev. Thomas B. McLeod, pastor of the Clinton Avenue Congregational Church, performed the ceremony. The bridesmaids were Miss Carrie Warner of Troy, a cousin of the bride; Miss Pauline Dixon, a sister of the groom; Miss Grace Brown, of Adams, Mass.; and Miss Mattie Houghtaling of this city. The ushers were Dr. W. S. Halsted of New York; Dr. L. C. McPhail of this city; Dr. T. M. Cheeseman of New York, and Mr. E. W. Dixon, a brother of the groom. The house was beautifully decorated with floral designs, cut flowers, and ornamental plants. Over one thousand invitations were issued to the reception. Among those who accepted were. . .
—The Brooklyn Union, December 14, 1881
Halsted sat at one of the long tables arranged along the back wall of the ballroom, a flute of champagne at his elbow, watching the groom’s rather unsteady approach. But he’d certainly seen Dixon in worse shape. He drew from his breast pocket a packet of Cosmopolite papers and his pouch of Bob White tobacco and started sprinkling out enough to roll two cigarettes.
Dixon slumped into the chair next to him. The handsome idiot was the most exquisitely dressed drunk Halsted had seen in a long while. Those coattails! Dixon would never give out the name of his tailor but it had to be someone in London.
“I didn’t know you could dance, old boy,” Dixon said, punching Halsted’s shoulder as he continued twisting and rolling the cigarette, unperturbed.
“Of course I can dance.” He’d done his duty with each of the bridesmaids in turn. Now he intended to sit, smoke, and pretend to drink a second glass of champagne. He ran the paper along the tip of his tongue, pinched off the ends, and slipped it into a holder that he then offered to the groom. “I just don’t enjoy doing it.”
Dixon shook his head to refuse and instead latched onto Halsted’s glass.
“Hell, you don’t enjoy dancing, drinking, girls—what do you enjoy? I mean, besides work?”
Halsted lit his cigarette and filled his lungs. “To tell the truth, I don’t much enjoy work.” He puffed out a cloud.
Dixon laughed and threw back Halsted’s champagne in one long gulp.
Halsted nodded to the empty flute and said, “You might want to watch that. You wouldn’t want to disappoint Sadie.”
“Not a chance.” The man winked. Then he leaned in, elbows on the table, and said in a low, insinuating voice, “So, what then? You can tell me, old boy.” Halsted heard the concern behind the teasing and felt touched. There was a reason they all liked Dixon, regardless.
He gave the question a moment’s thought, using the cigarette to stall, then answered as truthfully as he could.
“I like to think.”
Dixon locked eyes with him a moment, then laughed. “Not me. No future in it.” He stood and put a hand on Halsted’s shoulder. “Do me a favor when you’re done with that. Dance with Pauline again?”
Halsted flicked his gaze upward. Dixon’s sister was a beauty, but he’d gotten all the brains in the family. And that wasn’t saying much. What was he up to?
“Don’t give me that look. If you don’t ask her that old dog McPhail will.”
Halsted smiled. McPhail was harmless. Dixon was ribbing them both. He nodded. “All right.”
He’d finish his smoke, dance one more Mazurka, then slip off to his hotel. To think.
Hard to believe Dixon, of all people, was now married. Sadie was a nice girl—good family, he’d sung with Sadie’s brother in the Glee Club at Yale—but she was too tame, in his opinion, for George Dixon. Not that the man would care for his opinion.
They were different as night and day, but Dixon was the type of man who could pick and choose his friends, and he’d chosen Halsted. They were in Vienna studying at the same time—that was in the fall of ‘79—both bankrolled by their fathers, and they roomed together in a widow’s boarding home. It went well enough until the woman’s daughter fell hard for Dixon. They had to move on. Wherever they went, Dixon charmed the local women. Even on vacation in Italy, where they didn’t speak a word of the language, he’d found a girl to take up with for a while. McPhail joined them in Rome. He didn’t know McPhail then as well as he’d known Dixon, but he liked him. Maybe more than Dixon. Now that was a vacation.
Still, Halsted had not pried traveling money from his father’s tenacious grasp to join Dixon’s social whirl. He could do that in New York. He’d gone overseas to learn surgery from men who knew what they were doing.
After Easter vacation, Dixon and McPhail returned to Vienna while he went on to Leipzig, to work with Weigert, who’d been mentoring Welch. Welch had left by then, but graciously put in a good word. Welch’s good word opened doors.
Halsted closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the lateness of the hour. Look at him, now. Sitting here, thinking. Enjoying himself. He opened his eyes and stubbed out his cigarette. What was Dixon doing over there pointing like a lunatic?
Ah. McPhail was dancing with Pauline. He laughed and lit his second cigarette.
McPhail was another one. Disturbing Halsted’s work. When he was in Leipzig, he got two telegrams saying McPhail had contracted typhoid fever, the second more panicked than the first. Dixon begged him to come back.
Halsted chuckled to himself, remembering. He’d gone up to the ward and the nurse greeted him with a warning that his friend was exceedingly ill.
His ears pricked up. The music was ending. The next set would be a waltz. He flicked his cigarette into the nearest potted plant and stood. If he didn’t go muscle in between Miss Dixon and McPhail, George would press the joke and embarrass his sister.
Dressed in a well-fitting yellow dress with a flattering décolletage, Pauline welcomed him back into her presence with a practiced, polite smile. McPhail relinquished her arm ungrudgingly. Halsted was pretty sure McPhail had his eye on a young lady in New York. The music started and he took Dixon’s sister into his arms.
“Did George ever tell you about Dr. McPhail’s near-death experience in Vienna?” he asked pleasantly.
Her eyes widened. “I don’t believe so. I would have remembered. Is he all right?”
“Oh, certainly.” He smiled to show her he was not such a buffoon that he would tell a gruesome medical story at a wedding. “He came down with typhoid fever. It was all the rage, you see, so he had to have it. I went to visit him, and his nurse, a solid German woman—you can imagine—informed me that his temperature was ninety-five and his pulse, two hundred.”
Miss Dixon fluttered her lashes. “I suppose that is bad?”
“Very.” Surely she knew that much. “I raced to his bedside to see him only slightly flushed, but otherwise his hearty self.” Mcphail was an ox. He let Pauline picture it as he twirled her around. “I took his pulse. It was a respectable sixty-two.”
“Your mere presence cured him?” She dimpled skeptically.
“Ha! No. I asked him what game he was playing and he groaned at me. The nurse had no clock. She told him to count to out loud to sixty while she counted the beats of his pulse. Mcphail had almost no German. He said he made it to ten all right, but struggled from there.”
He paused for her laughter, but, seeing her forehead pucker, his stomach sank. If he had to explain the joke, it would not be amusing.
Her forehead smoothed and she laughed, the tinkling bell sound that Society girls must practice in front of their mirrors by the hour.
She said, “I wonder what made the woman stop at two hundred,” and her eyes sparkled at him.
He laughed, relieved. “Perhaps her shift was over.”
The song was ending. She danced very well. He had almost enjoyed himself. The next set would be a quadrille and Dixon was approaching with Sadie. It would be awkward to excuse himself now. He’d go one more, then it would be expected of him to find another partner or his name would be linked with that of Miss Dixon in tomorrow’s Society pages.
He’d slip out and have the butler fetch his coat and not bother with a hansom at this hour.
His hotel was, by his reckoning, about three miles away. The evening had been clear earlier and likely remained so. A cold, brisk walk would be the perfect ending to the night. Nothing better for a good long think.
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