“It’s done in other places. We quarantined many at Camp Douglas. I was the doctor there. We saved a lot of Confederate lives, more than the Rebs did at Andersonville.”
“How would we staff it?”
“Hire men and women who have had it or are inoculated,” Angela said briskly.
“Wouldn’t there be a risk to their lives? The inoculations don’t always work.”
“Generally they prevent death . . . We would have to pay them for their work . . .”
“Who would direct it?”
“I will,” Angela said. “It is one way to prove that inoculation works. I will donate my salary—which had better be large—to pay for the inoculation of schoolchildren . . .”
“Not all parents will want that.”
“They don’t have to take it. I’ll give the money to Catholic schools. The parents won’t resist it if the church is doing it.”
Her family was not pleased with her for this decision.
“Angela,” Mama Mae said, “you can’t go on risking your life like this.”
“It’s not a risk, Mama Mae. I’m immune.”
“You won’t be living here, will you?” Rosina asked, worried about her baby.
“Certainly not. I’ll live at the pesthouse until the epidemic is over. I’m not going to run away from my responsibility.”
“I take your point,” Papa Paddy murmured. “And respect your courage. Yet . . . Well, we haven’t had you very long and we don’t want to lose you.”
“You know very well that you won’t lose me.”
“The doctor knows it, small one, the foster father doesn’t. However, I will not resist your conscience.”
Vinny, now studying for the priesthood at the College of St. Mary of the Lake, a day school preparatory seminary behind the Cathedral, cast his vote. “I admire you more than ever, big sister.”
Timmy’s handsome face was unreadable.
“And I agree with you, little brother. Our sister shows us what faith is all about, that . . .”
She was grateful for the admiration. Someday . . . But she wouldn’t think about someday.
“Pray for me.”
The pesthouse was a small orphanage just off the grounds of the municipal cemetery on North Avenue, where many of those who did not survive the Camp Douglas horror were buried. She ordered that the building be scrubbed with chlorinated water and that a hundred large bottles of her Wisconsin spring water be brought. She fixed up a small chapel for the young immigrant priest who had volunteered to be chaplain and used her own money to order the delivery of flowers every day. There was no way to pretend, however, that a pesthouse was not a pesthouse.
“Do you think you’re being very brave?” a reporter from the Daily News asked her.
“It requires no bravery at all,” she said confidently. “I have been inoculated and am immune to the disease.”
No one came voluntarily to the pesthouse. They had either been arrested on the streets by the police or sent, often under guard, from hospitals that wanted to be rid of them as quickly as possible.
Half of them, she told herself, would survive. Maybe more.
Angela used all her charm on the patients.
“I know you don’t want to be here,” she said. “I don’t want you to be here either. However, more than half of you will leave alive, maybe even three-quarters, and we will have good doctors to take care of you and who will make you as comfortable as is humanly possible . . . We will not willingly give up a single one of you to this horrible death.”
She sang for them, prayed for and with them, brought in Bishop Muldoon to give confirmation, knelt at their bedside when they were dying. Some of the women began to say that Angela was an angel.
These behaviors were not planned. Angela was being herself. She hated the pesthouse with its dead and dying, with its violated faces and burned-out eyes, its constant stench. She had published her sanitation handbook for midwives after she was elected to the Board of Health. Now she kept a diary—Life in a Pesthouse—which would later become a big success and be translated into many languages. She used the money for the inoculation of schoolchildren. Angela was becoming a legend, a lonely legend with an aching heart.
Her dreams in the pesthouse were terrible. The ma of her previous dreams came back, more ugly and hateful; the smells of the cholera ward combined with the smells of the pesthouse and permeated her body so that when she got off the train at Central Depot her new family ran away in horror. “She smells like death!” Timmy had yelled. Her own, dear, beloved Timmy.
“Timmy would never say that,” her own ma said. “He still loves you, even if you are an eejit. And don’t pay any attention to that skeleton of me that claims to speak for me. You know that as well as I do.”
“Yes, Ma.”
Four out of five patients in her pesthouse survived, some badly scarred, others relatively untouched. It was later argued that quarantine was good even for the people quarantined. Angela was outspoken on the subject: “They survive only if the medical care in the quarantine is excellent, and the personal care kind and reassuring.”
When the sores and the scabs disappeared, the patients were eager to return to their families, their work, their lives. Angela kept them till a week after the end of symptoms and ordered the police to hunt those who had left without leave. She did not punish them, however.
If I were here and thought I had recovered, I might have run away.
The worst kind of pox, almost always fatal, was the “black pox” in which the disease spread to tissues inside the body; black blood poured from every orifice, and the eyes turned red.
She held the hands of those dying so horribly and promised that God would transform them. Sometimes she wondered about God. However, the guilty ones were the people who would not spend money on inoculation. When the last patients left the pest-house, she thanked the young doctors—most of them right behind her at Rush—and nurses for their heroic work and sponsored a party for them at the Palmer House, to which she did not come because she was suffering from the onslaught of pneumonia.
Smallpox does not cause pneumonia, but months of exertion and weakness caused by weight loss and overwork can, though. Angela, true to her convictions, was convinced that the weakness in both her lungs resulted from invasion by some kind of microbe.
“You are one very sick child, little sister,” said her father, “but we will pull you through, never fear.”
Her hospital room—the guest room where she had spent her first nights in the family—was filled with wonderful aromas to ease her breathing. Eucalyptus, pine, lavender. They also eased her soul. This time Angela was convinced that she was going to die. She didn’t mind dying. It had been a good life. She had been loved by two wonderful families. She had helped a few people to live a little longer. She wished that the doctors in her family would let her die peacefully.
But no, they had to make her suffer. She was to lean over the side of her bed, her face just above a hospital pan, and they would pound her on the back to force the liquid out of her lungs. It usually worked, but why bother, since she was going to die?
She heard Tim and Papa talk about a crisis. In some pneumonia cases, the temperature of the patient rose precipitously and then either the patient died, which would happen to her, or the fever broke and the patient recovered. Since she was going to die, the crisis would be the end of her and it would all be over. She could finally get some sleep. Wasn’t that what they called it—eternal rest? She really needed eternal rest. Then she dove into a deep black pit and sighed quietly.
Much later she woke up. She was still in the guest room and the sunlight was pouring in through the windows. Sir Charles was in the room, sleeping next to her bed. Timothy was sitting next to the bed, his head nodding.
“Hi there, little sister. Still with us, huh? You sure had us scared last night. You’re OK now, no fever and finally good sounds in your lungs. You are even getting back some of your color. We were all praying ve
ry hard for you. Rosina and Shay came over with Barry, and they prayed too. Well, Barry fell asleep. Everyone is sleeping now. I’m here just in case you go hysterical on us again.”
“I was hysterical?”
“Talking to your ma again. She was apparently telling you that you weren’t going to die and you accused her of lying to you. But she was correct, wasn’t she? Do you mind if I listen to your lungs?”
“Not at all, Doctor.”
He listened carefully, moving the stethoscope gently around her chest.
“The back?”
“Certainly.”
“Sounds great . . . a shame you couldn’t take notes on your trip to the far edge of death. It would make a great book.”
“Timmy,” she said, “I’m convinced that some day we will have medications that will wipe out diseases like this—kill all the germs.”
He folded the stethescope.
“You’ve been right so far. I’m sure you’ll be right again . . . I’ll go wake up Da and tell him the good news. The reporters are outside waiting. Bishop Muldoon is waiting for word.”
“Thank you, Timmy, for taking such good care of me.”
“It was my pleasure,” he said and winked.
She felt her face turn warm. After all these years, Tim could still do that to her.
Her convalescence was long and easy . . . She ached in every inch of her body, she slept away most of the days, read novels, and even played on her guitar and sung lullabies to herself. Yet while her strength returned and her appetite was almost normal, she still felt like she was carrying a heavy burden. She was alive, yes. In a while she could go back to her OB practice and her arguments on the Board of Health. She was receiving lecture invitations, but she asked her mom to write letters politely declining “for the present.” But life didn’t seem quite as sweet and exciting as it had been.
One day she was sitting in her chair, looking out at the snow in Union Square and reading at a languid pace a new novel by Mr. Thackeray, whom she loathed because he was so English. Timmy came into the room in a thick sweater.
“You’ve been outside?”
“Walking, thinking . . . It’s not as cold as it looks. Pretty soon we’ll have to let you go for a little walk.”
“Not for a long time,” she said. “Not till I get my strength back.”
Timmy made her irritable these days. Everyone else did too. Especially Rosina with her obnoxious little baby.
“Mind if I talk seriously for a minute or two?”
“I don’t think I’m ready for really serious talk yet, but if you wish . . .”
“I’m thinking of taking a leave from Rush and from Mercy and going on a trip to Europe, a long one, several years anyway.”
He sat down uneasily on the couch next to her chair.
“Why would you do that, Tim? There’s so much to do here in Chicago.”
“And there will be more to do. I’ve seen an advance copy of the Flexner report. It’s devastating. We’re going to have to change everything. I know I’m going to be deeply involved in the new ways. I reckoned I ought to prepare myself by observing what went on in other countries . . .”
“That’s a very interesting perspective . . . You must do whatever you think best.”
She realized from the expression on Tim’s face that her responses were troubling him.
“Well, I was wondering if you would consider accompanying me on this exploration?”
“What!” she cried. “Whatever in the world are you talking about!”
“I mean as my wife, of course. I mean . . . Well, we could both learn a lot more together than either of us could by ourselves . . .”
“Timothy Gaughan, you’re impossible. You’re not only crude. You are cruel. I am recovering from a very serious illness and you come blundering in here with crazy ideas about a tour of Europe and marriage! You never stopped to think how that might upset me. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I’m sorry if you’re offended, Angela. I didn’t mean to be offensive.”
“Well, I don’t know how you could expect anything else from me. Let me be blunt so this issue never arises again. I may well never marry. It has very little attraction for me just now. I am certainly not prepared to make any decisions about marriage, much less about a marriage partner. But I do know that neither now or ever would I consider marrying you. Is that clear?”
She couldn’t believe those damning words had poured out of her mouth. If Tim had not blundered about time and place, she would not have lost her temper. It was all his fault.
His poor face looked so sad.
“Very clear, Angela. I’m sorry I’ve made a mess of it, but I must make plans for the journey.”
“Find yourself another woman to share your bed on this cockamamie pilgrimage.”
She knew that she would always regret those harsh and terrible words. But they were said and could never be unsaid.
Timmy rose from the couch.
“I’m sorry, Angela. I obviously chose the wrong time and the wrong place.”
“And the wrong woman!” she shouted at him.
He paused at the door and turned, his face twisted with grief and humiliation.
“I still meant what I said at the lake so long ago, Angela. I’ve always loved you and I always will.”
Even the demon inside her could not find something mean to say in response.
Much later, when she learned from Dr. Lenny Fredericks about the “emotional letdown” after pneumonia, did she understand what had happened. She was angry at Timmy because he was such an idiot to propose to her when she was depressed. And she was angry at herself for her tirade. If she had shut off her demon she might be floating down the Danube with him this very week.
Did she want to do that? She wasn’t sure. She should have asked for more time to think about it. Too late now.
She realized that she could not continue living in the Gaughan house. They might not know all the details, but they would certainly surmise that she had given their son and brother a dishonorable discharge. She rented a small two-room suite in a residential hotel for women farther out on Washington Boulevard near Garfield park, close to the L which would bring her to and from work every day. To add to her sorrow, her pal Sir Charles had died at an honorable old age. There were many tears when she said good-bye after a Sunday afternoon dinner, in June, just before Tim was to sail to Europe. She was as lonely in her tiny bedroom as she had been on the train to Chicago ten years before.
She realized that she was still dependent on the Gaughan family. The trust fund that her father had established for her on her eighteenth birthday continued to earn money and had become a source of income for her so generous that she did not need to work for the rest of her life. Most of it was unspent at the end of the year and she put the money back into her account. After she moved out of the house on Union Square, she lived most of the time from her salaries at Rush and Mercy and the Board of Health. She used her lecture fees and royalties on her books for the inoculation of children in Catholic schools. She spent little on herself and limited her budget for new clothes. She had become a socially important person in the city and was invited to many events, especially those connected with the approaching World’s Columbian Exhibition. She understood that men and women found her attractive, especially in the simple unadorned gowns she always wore. Thus she felt no embarrassment when she wore the same dress to two or three events.
She always attended such events unattended. Hostesses came to understand that it was necessary to find an attractive dinner partner for Dr. Tierney. Occasionally the partner became obnoxious. Angela promptly froze him out. Some of them were interesting, one or two of them very interesting.
But not as interesting as Timmy.
She insisted that she might marry some day, but not right now. However, she knew that she never would. She hoped that she would not grow into a mean, ill-tempered spinster, but knew that her character and disposition inclined her in
that direction. So she tried to keep her tart tongue under control. It was, she discovered to her surprise, easier to keep the world at a distance with a charming smile and a gentle laugh than to attack it with a rapier.
“Won’t the next step be to stand for Parliament.”
Ma was walking behind her in Garfield Park with a dog accompanying her, both fading in an out of the sunlight.
“They call it Congress here, and I don’t think so . . . Is that Charlie you have with you?”
“Well, who else would it be?”
“There are dogs in Heaven?”
“Where else would they be . . . and himself agreeing with me that you were an eejit for rejecting that nice young man and now you living in that spinster house!”
“He asked me at the wrong time!”
“There is no wrong time to love, darlin’ . . . I hope you’ve learned that.”
And they were gone.
“Thank you, God, for sending me that guardian angel. I’m sorry about Tim. I hope I get another chance.”
The “spinster house” was even more lonely that night. Angela cried and wept herself to sleep.
She avoided her foster family. They must hate her because of what she had done to Timmy. She hated herself.
“Timmy was a fool!” Rosina exclaimed one day when they were having lunch in the women’s tea room at Marshall Field’s. “We all know that. We are angry at him for making such a mess and forcing you out of the house. My parents miss you so desperately, dear little sister, and so do I. Vinny is in the seminary on Pacca Street in Baltimore. Timmy is wandering around Europe like a lost soul. I’m busy with my child and will soon have another one, which is wonderful, but they’re not getting any younger. Besides, little sister, you were always the favorite since that day at Central Depot. None of us minded because you were our favorite too . . . I wish you and Timmy were married. I really do . . .”
“It was not to be, big sister.”
“Well, not then anyway . . . Timmy will be home . . . Next time I hope he won’t be such an idiot.”
“He was in love, Rosina.”
Irish Tweed Page 17
