The coconut pieces worked much better. “It must not be thum-thum-thum-thum,” Aren told Seaton, “but must have-be surprise—thum-thum…thum thum-thum…”
“What is that sound for?” Kay asked.
“It is to call echarivus,” Aren said. “Then with a white rock I go up and down, a string on it, in the water…”
She did not want to make it difficult for him, so she nodded as if she understood.
Then, from the boat above, Seaton’s mahogany arm descended with a boiled egg on a string, bobbing slowly up and down, and that made Aren laugh. “Fishing shark, Miss,” Seaton said. “First they calls ’em with the rubbing sound, then lure ’em with something they can see from a ways away…That what that fish-word means, boy?”
Aren said, like Kay with her Greek vocabulary: “Echarivus, bites white stone.”
After long and useful discussion with the Brazilian doctor, they had decided against dosing with syr. iodide iron or maltine, which had been shown to have no real benefit, although cod-liver oil could not hurt. The doctor had spoken seriously to Aren, explaining that while his physician for the voyage—Thea—must be “determined and forceful,” the ideal patient must be “intelligent, earnest and obedient.”
Thea was not certain Aren understood, but it did not matter; he had those qualities innately. Her aim was to keep him perfectly rested and fed, thoroughly invigorated by exposure to sun and wind; then, when he had regained some strength, to give him as much exercise as could be managed on board the ship.
But no matter how much milk the little cow produced, no matter how many eggs Kay found in the chickens’ nests, Aren’s arms and legs still grew thinner, and his face acquired the tight patience that she remembered from Blade Lake, that she was not allowed ever to forget, however much, or if, she ever was forgiven.
And then, before she was at all ready, the Morning Light approached New York, where he would be taken out of her hands.
18
New York
At Presbyterian, they were taken on a tour through the TB ward. Kay kept very quiet behind Francis, not wanting to be left in the waiting room. Miss Burgess, the charge nurse, said they would admit Aren today, but it was possible that a stint in the Shively Sanitary Tenements, a facility designed for patients who could be cared for by family, would be more productive.
Miss Burgess told them she had a high calling for this work. She was a medical philosopher, with theories and authority. “I have occasionally had to reprove an intern who forgot that his hospital patient was more than an interesting study. They look on this class of patient as a curiosity, rather than as a human being!”
Thea had slowed, feeling Aren’s steps flagging. Francis picked him up and carried him, and Kay took Aren’s place beside Thea, sliding a hand softly into her sister’s.
Nurse Burgess looked back and smiled, stiff lips not revealing her teeth. “I feel it is my responsibility to provide the atmosphere of refinement and culture my patients need to get well. I encourage nature studies—I am in the habit of bringing a flower to each bed patient, and I recommend that our nurses read good literature aloud to our patients. I have acquired decorative china and tray cloths so food can be attractively presented. It is the task of our nurses to see that the sanatorium experience be a civilizing influence. Sanatoriums should not resemble prisons! Each of our patients, I hope, returns home with a knowledge of the essentials of a true home life.”
“If,” Thea said, “they do not have that knowledge already.”
Nurse Burgess smiled again, with pity this time, and shook her head. “All too few,” she said. “All too few.”
They had reached a large set of japanned double doors with a window in each one. Miss Burgess pushed the doors so they flew wide on loose hinges, and they were in a long, echoing ward, green-painted, open windows down one long wall. It smelled of strong disinfectant. Each bed was occupied by a skeleton in white clothes.
A young nurse came toward them, but Miss Burgess waved her off. “I know I do not have to explain to you, Mrs. Grant, how desperately essential cleanliness, of the person and of the home, is to disease prevention.”
She struck out to the left and they followed her past twenty or thirty cots to a space with an empty bed, freshly made, with a thin blanket thrown across the foot. Very clean, very clinical, Kay thought.
“Here we are!” Miss Burgess raised a hand and an orderly came with a list. She dictated: “Bed 39, Grant, Aaron, eight years of age, male, Negroid.”
Thea’s head lifted. “What is this list for?”
Kay could hear how angry she was, her boundless anger about everything to do with this.
“Dr. Shively’s great project is to begin tabulation of the statistics of the disease. It will be of great help in future delineaments of treatment.”
Thea said, “He is Micronesian, if you care for precision.”
Kay looked at the woman’s spotless uniform and self-satisfied face. But perhaps, perhaps, this place could cure Aren, so they must endure it too.
Aren climbed down from Francis’s arms onto the expanse of bed. He looked very small, standing there. Thea helped him into the bedclothes and sat stroking his arm, smiling with him in her way, and Kay and Francis leaned against the wall beside them, letting Miss Burgess’s talk run over their heads like a sluice of bilge water, effusive but not important.
“Dr. Shively says our advanced tubercular patients need the same kind of attention lepers do, and for the same reason: our lepers are nursed and cared for, not altogether out of sympathy, but because they constitute a menace to the community.”
Kay remembered Miss Ramsay, at the worst of the sickness, declaring in disgust before she took herself off, “I might as well have gone and worked amongst the lepers!”
Then there was the tedious process of having Aren’s disease classified. Eventually he was declared Moderately Advanced, which Thea translated in her head as Stage II, according to the terms Dr. Bryce had used in the West. She was trying to remember everything Dr. Bryce had ever told her, in the bad time. Moderately Advanced. Next would come Advanced. There was no further stage, only death.
She looked at the little head slumped against the propped-up pillow. Strands of black hair lay plastered to his head in a day-sweat of exertion and emotional strain. His eyes were closed, and blue stained the skin below the tangled lashes. His mouth, small and delicately outlined, seemed to her never to have smiled once since she’d met him.
She sat by the bed, one hand uselessly set on the sheet beside him, and wished she could make sense of anything.
Aren stayed in the ward for three weeks. For four, and five. Thea spent every day there. Francis saw to the unloading of his cargo and began to seek another, in a half-hearted way. He acquired a boy called Jimmy Giles, fresh from New Zealand, to replace poor Arthur and keep Jacky Judge company in the rigging; but he could not have the whole crew eating their heads off for nothing, and would have to discharge some of them soon if they were to be in dock for much longer. He had been offered a contract for Belgium, if Thea thought she could manage without him—a short run, a month or a little more, and it would do if Thea could be comfortable alone in lodgings. Kay listened to their conversation, but she had no stake in the matter at all. Thea would stay with Aren, and she would stay with them.
It seemed to be a case of waiting for the inevitable, a feeling Kay remembered from the old days, which she put aside by taking Pilot for long walks along the Hudson or by going down to the galley to beg Jiacheng for a job to do. The empty saloon was not fit to be in by oneself these days, and after that first day she had not been allowed back to the tubercular ward. She was lonely.
She wrote to Mr. Brimner, sending him a translation from Lucian, of the inhabitants of the Island of the Blessed who wear clothes made of spiderweb “very fine and of a purple colour” because she thought New York was a bit like it:
Of course, it was not like Thea writing home to the aunts; with mail to Ha‘ano, nobody could say when he might receive her letter, or if he ever would.
One afternoon, just before Francis was to leave for Belgium, Kay accompanied him out to the East River to tour the Shively Sanitary Tenements, also called the East River Houses. The tenements were not a medical clinic, Nurse Burgess had explained, but housing designed with tuberculosis patients in mind, built the year before by Mrs. William Vanderbilt to a plan devised by Dr. Shively, who ran the TB clinic. There were still suites genuinely untenanted, Nurse Burgess had hastened to say. “The building is new, and the concept still experimental, so you would not be in a set of rooms where—well, where any former tenant had passed on.”
“It can’t be long until Thea clocks that prune-mouthed old biddy with a bedpan,” Francis told Kay as they took themselves off in a cab to the East River—an area which Francis said was not generally thought wholesome. “We’ll reserve judgment, I promised your sister,” he said, and told the cabman to stop at the corner of East Seventy-Seventh and Cherokee Place.
Kay had thought tenement meant a crowded lodging house for the poor, but the place looked very respectable: a large, modern yellow-brick building, bandbox new and handsome. Each apartment had lacy copper-green metal balconies and large windows looking out onto the river. Kay thought it was pretty. And less frightening than the hospital.
“Handy for shipping,” said Francis, pointing downriver past the bridge to the long strings of docked steamships and luggers. “Might get a berth there…Let’s go up and see.”
Tiled tunnels led them in from the street to a central courtyard with a little garden. Mrs. Prince, the manageress, met them in the lobby and took them up, asking them to “Notice, please, the wide corridors and generous stairwells—Dr. Shively believes this lessens the risk that healthy family members will succumb to the infection.” She directed their attention to carved seats built into the stair landings, resting places for easily winded residents as they went up and down. It all smelled of fresh paint and fresh air, almost to the point of wind.
At the fourth floor, Mrs. Prince unlocked 4B and let Kay and Francis step inside. The pale-green walls of the little foyer matched the green balconies outside. They walked through four large rooms, opening into one another but arranged, at least in this corner apartment, so that each room had two or three windows—those on the interior side opening onto the central court, so that Kay could feel the breeze on her cheek. This was the most like a ship of any house she’d ever seen.
Mrs. Prince threw open the windows to the balcony on the river side and they heard the bustle of the street, only as a cheerful rumour this high up. There was a small kitchen in black and white; more black-and-white octagonal tile in the well-outfitted bathroom. Past the kitchen lay a little room with one diamond-shaped window—just the size for an elder sister. Kay thought that would be her room. She saw for a moment her old iron bedstead from Blade Lake half-filling the room. Then her inward eye shut and opened again, seeing Aren in this good place.
“Only thing is,” Francis said, as they descended again to the street, “it won’t be easy on Thea if he is discharged.” Because that would mean the hospital had given up, had decided he could no longer be treated.
And would they be allowed to keep Pilot in the apartment? She would walk him herself, every day, three times a day—and Aren was supposed to have lots of outdoor exercise. One of the doctors advocated eight hours a day outside! Francis had suggested that such a regime might be easier to manage back in Yarmouth than here in the city, but Thea had not answered him at all.
They were walking down a street lined with trees. Kay bent to pick up a pale gold leaf opening out in a fan shape. “Look!” she said. “It is a ginkgo tree—like the one in Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai!” The tree there was three hundred years old. These trees looked spindly and young, but the beautiful shape of the leaf was there, halfway around the world. Kay did not know why a leaf should make her feel less miserable. She would send it to Aren.
Francis glanced at it but kept walking, preoccupied with thinking, assessing, making arrangements in his mind for cargo and contracts and what would have to be done. Kay walked on beside him, taller than she had been last year, so that it was no effort to keep up with him. She put an arm through his navy-blue wool sleeve anyhow.
At the corner there was a fruit and flower shop. Francis put a hand out to some white narcissus, slender, fragrant things—and then, abruptly, picked up the top one of a pyramid of coconuts, old, brown, hairy things, not at all like the young green ones at home. At Aren’s home, she corrected herself.
“We’ll take him one of these,” Francis said.
Thea had never sat beside a child at Blade Lake with such fierce concentration. That, she saw now, was her true fault. She had existed in different relation to those children: their caregiver, their guardian, but not their—family. She did not for a moment call herself Aren’s mother; the word did not even spring to mind. But she was his family now.
Those children had had mothers of their own. Mothers who came to the school too late, to ask where were their children. It was very hard that she must live through this again, must see what she had done and what (being younger, unprepared, untrained, selfish) she had left undone. Again she told herself what the doctor had said in Corcovado: six months to cure, patience, do everything you are doing, this is all that can be done.
Nurse Burgess came down the ward and stopped.
“Mrs. Grant,” she said, a genteel, tittering canary. “I’m afraid we are going to have to discharge this little fellow on Monday, according to Dr. Shively’s advice.”
Aren was sleeping. Thea stood up slowly.
Burgess continued, “We’ll have to go over some indications, of course, and there will be papers. It’s a terrible shame, poor little monkey!”
Thea turned on her, very angry. “Do not speak of him in that degrading way again.”
“Oh! I meant no harm, I’m sure!” Pink squares flashed hot on the bunchy cheeks. “I’m sure, he is quite civilized!”
There was no point in saying more. Thea turned away and knelt beside Aren, putting her face down into the blanket over his chest, the good red blanket that they had bought in Corcovado. She would pray again, pray better. Perhaps that would help.
She bent her mind to the humblest prayer she could remember. “We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy—”
Where she was pressed against the bedstead, Thea felt a small interior motion. A ribbed movement, a finger raking along damp tiles, a fish turning in the riverbed.
It did not take her an instant to understand—it was as if she had told herself already but had failed to read the note in her own hand. She looked back over the last several months and realized that she had not even thought, had not for a moment—
Oh no, no, she thought, pressing again more deeply into the bed, her cheek on Aren’s arm. Do not do this—dear God, I beg you, I’m sorry, please do not take this child away so that I may have one of my own.
There was no punishment she did not deserve, but she could not bear that. She knew—she told herself again—that God in His great mercy did not ope
rate by vengefully tallying, but she could not trust that now.
Aren’s hand touched her hair. “Are you weeping?” he asked.
“Oh, I am only tired,” she said. “Just a little.”
“We will go from this old place,” he said.
She nodded. His eyes were half-closed, but they had sense in them. He held the little yellow ginkgo leaf in his fingers, not quite dried out, that Kay had put in her letter.
“Kay says the airy place is good,” he said.
After a minute she said, “Shall we go there, to the apartment?”
He answered, “Yes.”
In the afternoon-shadowed room with windows wide open to the street below, Aren lay resting on the low camp bed. Pilot yawned and leaned slowly against the shape under the blankets, exhausted from his walk.
“I am very brave,” Aren said.
Kay nodded. “I know that you are.” She sat against the footboard, feet tucked up.
“It is a thing that I have…”
“A quality,” she said.
“A quality that was given to me. But now I am aferrad.”
“Afraid.” It was hard to stop correcting.
“Yes.”
Yes. The high room was as quiet as birds flying above the mast, not speaking, no wind carrying their cries.
“I am afraid too,” she said. Then she wished she had not, but Aren smiled at her, skin stretched over small bones.
“That is good company!”
He curled himself into the crescent of her knees as Pilot had curled into his, and they waited for Francis, or for Thea, or for the next thing to come along.
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