Sweet Everlasting

by Patricia Gaffney

  The need for controlled human experiments is obvious now, a thought that gives none of us any pleasure. The soldiers in the military hospital take all of this as a joke, and volunteer constantly. A trooper named William Dean from the Seventh Cavalry says he’s ready and willing to let one of Lazear’s “birds” bite him. God help us, and him, for we’re set to do it. Everyone is of two minds, as you can imagine. Having once suffered the full course of the disease myself, I can honestly say I wouldn’t wish it on Satan himself. But if Trooper Dean comes down with it on schedule, it would be the first case ever induced deliberately by the bite of an infected mosquito, and the implications would be enormous.

  Forgive me, Carrie—can this be of any interest to you at all? I’m consumed by it, day and night. I’d thought to write you a pleasant letter about the camp—clean and comfortable; the weather—balmy and beautiful; the company—interesting to say the least. But I see I’ve jumped right into the storm that rages around us all the time, and dragged you into it with me with out a thought. It’s the enormity of what we’ve undertaken that confounds and humbles me, and the risks we can’t help taking with each other’s lives. If we succeed, people will say we were heroes, but if we fail, our hopes and our memories will be consigned to hell—and who’s to say they don’t belong there?

  8:30 P.M.—Jesse Lazear dragged me away to the officers’ mess, telling me I work too hard. I never told him that I wasn’t studying pathology culture results, but writing a frivolous letter to a dear friend! Jesse is an awfully good fellow, by the way. I knew him slightly at Hopkins, where he was an assistant in clinical microscopy. His wife and son were here in Cuba until recently, but he sent them back home because of the epidemic. He and I spend our free time (such as it is) together, two homesick bachelors comforting each other.

  It’s an odd existence we lead here, Carrie. Already I miss the conversation of women, the sounds of children playing, the song of a plain, ordinary bird I recognize! I think of you in your cabin on High Dreamer Mountain, and wonder what you’re doing. What wildlings have you found to doctor these days? How does your hospital look in September? Has Louie driven you completely insane? If so, that would explain why you haven’t written me a letter yet. Memories of the times we shared this summer warm me, and help me through some of the horrors here. You gave me a promise that you would tell me if you ever needed my help. I believed it or I wouldn’t have left you. And now I’ll simply remind you of it again. Ever, Carrie—for anything.

  It’s late, and the days are long and exhausting. Give my best to Frank and Eppy, and Broom, and Doc Stoneman if you write to him. Most of all, take good care of yourself.

  Good night, Tyler.

  Columbia Barracks

  Quemados, Cuba

  September 20, 1900

  Dear Carrie,

  Everything is chaos here. Jesse Lazear felt out of sorts two days ago, and now he’s so frantic with delirium they’ve had to restrain him. High albumin, high fever—his chances look very poor to me. Still, he’s young, only 32, and strong and fit; he may pull through. But time is the enemy now.

  The hell of it is, it was another accident!” He was securing mosquito samples in the hospital, holding a test-tube bug on a patient’s stomach while it fed. Another mosquito lighted on his hand—he told us this before he became completely incoherent—and thinking it was the culex malarial variety that’s common in the hospital, he let it bite, meaning to capture it in a minute and add it to his specimen collection. But he was busy, and it flew off before he could catch it. He made no note of the incident and never thought of it again—until five days later when he fell gravely ill.

  Dr. Carroll, thank God, is getting stronger all the time. Did I tell you about Trooper Dean in my last letter? He was our first volunteer. He was bitten, contracted the disease, and is now recovering. If Lazear dies, it will be for nothing, and Dean’s will be the only case that conclusively proves anything at all. I can’t describe to you the guilt and anguish and desperation among us all. The irony is demoralizing-two of the members of the very board sent here to put an end to unscientific conjecture about the disease have become its random victims. And anyone who disagrees with the mosquito theory can use Carroll’s or Lazear’s cases as examples to prove almost any method of infestation he likes!

  Walter Reed is still away; Dr. Carroll talks of going home soon for a rest. Agramonte and I keep working, but Jesse’s agony makes it impossible to concentrate in any constructive way. And yet everyone feels we’re on the brink of something important, one of the great discoveries of the century. If I didn’t believe that, I would despair.

  My family writes to me of all the news in Philadelphia. I keep my letters to them light and brief—because those two women in my life are volatile, and worry altogether too much about me. I hope that no word from you means that you are well, and happy on your mountain. I try to picture you there in autumn, but I find I can never see you in my mind’s eye without flowers. Do you remember your first gift to me? A tiny bouquet of wildflowers, light as a feather. You wrote that the sweet everlasting smelled like “perfume,” and so it did.

  Be happy. Think of me sometimes.

  Tyler.

  Columbia Barracks

  Quemados, Cuba

  October 13, 1900

  Dear Carrie,

  Jesse Lazear is dead. We buried him two weeks ago in the post cemetery with full military honors. He left a wife and son, and the unborn child his wife carries. They say he had no insurance, no pension, and they’ll be left with nothing. I miss his tall, lanky shape hanging in my doorway at dinnertime, and drawling, “You planning to eat anytime this week, Dr. Wilkes?” He had an old-fashioned Southern courtliness that made him easy to know, easy to love. His passing has diminished us all, and the mood here is grim.

  Dr. Reed arrived a week ago and is working feverishly on the preliminary report he plans to deliver to the American Public Health Association on the 23rd. But for all his activity, he’s got precious little to go on, and we all dread the consequences when his colleagues realize his mosquito theory is based on three cases, two of which were uncontrolled. But death is all around us. September was the worst month for the fever in Havana in two years. Reed has no choice but to go forward with all speed.

  I’ve been thinking of that night you met me on the bridge over South Creek, Carrie, after one of my patients had died—do you remember the old man with the brain lesion? I’d stayed with him all day, and he was lucid almost to the end. It hit me hard when he died, no doubt because he’d reminded me of my father. You didn’t say much to me that night. But you leaned against me while we stared down at the water rushing under our feet. I can close my eyes now and feel the weight of you against my arm, and it comforts me. That warmth and that pressure. There must be a hundred things I’ve never thanked you for. Are you well, Carrie? Are you happy? I pray that you are, and that you’ll keep your promise to tell me if you should ever need me.

  Yours, Tyler.

  Columbia Barracks

  Quemados, Cuba

  November 20, 1900

  Dear Carrie,

  There’s time for only a note, in case you’ve been wondering how we fare. There was a storm here five days ago, a strong one that uprooted trees and—much worse, from our admittedly peculiar viewpoint—blew most of the mosquitos out to sea. Since then, Dr. Reed has had us scouring the island with cyanide bottles in a most undignified manner, hunting for eggs and larvae so that our experiments can go on.

  His report to the APHA was greeted with a great shrug of indifference by the attendees, and with open scorn by the newspapers afterward. The Washington Post called the mosquito hypothesis “the silliest beyond compare,” and referred to the members of the team—yours truly included—as “whoever they may be.” Reed was glad to come back, and now he’s supervising work on a new observation camp being built about two miles from here. It’s to be called Camp Lazear.

  Since an animal has never con
tracted yellow fever in any known experiment, we find ourselves in the ethically questionable position of needing to recruit more human volunteers. We have eight so far, including an American army private and an American civilian clerk from General Lee’s headquarters. The others are all Cubans, desperately poor men, overjoyed at the idea of earning $100 in American gold for doing what they consider nothing at all. I’m happy to say that the American volunteers have declined payment. Kissinger, the private, was bitten today by a carefully infected “ladybird.” If he doesn’t contract the disease, everything we’ve done is for nothing. If he does—he may die. It’s a bleak, practically winless situation, and the pressure’s beginning to tell on all of us. Dr. Carroll is back from his sick leave, but he seems bitter and remote. He and Reed were friends for years, but there’s a strain between them now. Some say it’s jealousy, that Carroll resents the professional advancement in store for Reed once—if ?—his theories are accepted. Even so—

  Forgive me. This can’t possibly be of any interest to you. I’m surrounded by these petty intrigues 24 hours a day and have lost my perspective. Well, what shall I say to you, then? Shall I describe the weather? The cold mango I ate for breakfast? Shall I tell you that I miss you, that I think of you more often than I have a right to? I might have once, but your continued silence tells me those words would not be welcome anymore. Might even cause you pain. I’ve hurt you enough in the past, Carrie, and would never knowingly do it again.

  Yours ever, Tyler.

  Camp Lazear

  Quemados, Cuba

  December 10, 1900

  Dear Carrie,

  This will be my last letter to you from Cuba. I’m going home in three days, assuming all goes well here in the meantime. I plan to spend the week preceding Christmas with my family in Philadelphia, then report immediately to the Pathology Laboratory at the Army Medical College in Washington, D.C. I’ll be a civilian bacteriologist there, working, at least initially, on identifying the specific agent of the disease carried by the C. fasciatus mosquito, and after that, we hope, on an immunizing agent. There’s a great deal we don’t know—but what we now do know, definitely and unequivocally, can’t be underestimated. I don’t think it’s too much to say that our mission here has changed medical history. If it weren’t for the loss of Lazear, we could claim absolute victory. But that’s a loss we can never forget, and it tempers everything. The truth is, it’s a bloody miracle that no one died besides Jesse. Even though so much is still a mystery, all of us are repelled by the thought of infecting more volunteers, and we’re agreed that it has to stop.

  Still—it’s hard at times not to feel euphoric. Reed says that except for the diphtheria antitoxin and Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus, this is the most important scientific finding of the nineteenth century. His friends joke that he’ll be the next surgeon general. He smiles his charming smile, modest as always. And yet, I think I see a twinkle of excitement in his eyes at the prospect—which is not farfetched to me in the least. I count myself the luckiest of men to have served under him on this commission. Whatever reward is in store for Walter Reed is a thousand times deserved.

  So. It’s over. In hindsight, as with all successful detective cases, I suppose, what seemed mysterious now appears almost ridiculously obvious, and the real mystery is how the truth could have been overlooked for so long. What we didn’t understand was the time—the crucial secret that the mosquito can only contract the virus from a victim in the first two or three days of the disease, and that 12 to 14 days have to pass before the virus can multiply enough within the bug to enable it to infect another victim. That’s why the sudden outbreak of yellow jack on a ship two weeks at sea confounded us, why—

  But I’m doing it again. I apologize; these details must bore you to distraction. I wonder if you even read my letters anymore. If you do, they must seem like jottings from the planet Saturn, by some creature you knew vaguely in another life. I have no excuse, unless it’s—

  “Shit.”

  Tyler threw his pen down in disgust, and a blotch of black ink marred the paragraph he’d just written. Good. He’d been about to write the word “loneliness.” So it had come to this: trying to get Carrie to write back by making her feel sorry for him. The plaintive tone of the ink-blotted paragraph embarrassed him. He snarled at it, grabbed his warm glass of brandy and soda, and carried it to the doorway, hoping for a fresh perspective.

  Another perfect day. How profoundly sick he was of perfect days. Carrie, he recalled, professed to like all days, all weathers. She had a particular fondness for the brown, dreary, truly ugly ones because, she said, they were temporary, they were friendless and pathetic, and they made good days seem even more beautiful by comparison. But surely the gorgeous sameness of the Cuban skies would daunt even Carrie’s boundless enthusiasm eventually. Then again … probably not.

  His memories of her were vivid and relentless, and lately they had all been of the last time he’d seen her on Dreamy Mountain that final, wrenching night. He’d come to her in her hospital at dusk, and she’d been pottering around in her old blue dress, her beautiful hair awry as usual, smiling to herself. Smiling. Later, she’d held his hand and told him, “I’ll be fine. I’m happy now, I swear it.” And when he’d kissed her and gone away, she hadn’t cried. He’d wanted to cry, but Carrie hadn’t shed a tear.

  Recognizing the petulance, the discomfitingly churlish tenor of his thoughts, he set his glass down and rubbed his tired eyes with his knuckles. His mind slid effortlessly—from habit—to the night she’d given herself to him. Another woman contemplating such a choice might have waited for the magic words, the sedative, talismanic “I love you” from her intended lover before she risked everything. Carrie hadn’t. She’d said them to him. “Did you think I thought you would marry me?” he could hear her asking. “Oh, Ty, I just love you. I just love you.”

  She had loved him, and the gift was absolutely free, absolutely without conditions. Because no one had ever loved him in that way before, he hadn’t known quite what to do with Carrie’s gift. It hadn’t pleased him; it had made him guilty and uneasy. Not guilty enough to refuse what she was offering, of course; oh no, he’d been glad enough to accept that. He’d enjoyed her as long as he could, and squared it with his conscience by making sure he gave her as much pleasure as he received. As if that made them even.

  And how lovely it had been. He shut his eyes tight, lost in a familiar blur of sensual recollection. Being with Carrie had made his liaisons with previous women seem practically sordid in comparsion. No—that was an exaggeration, “sordid.” Barren, then. Yes, barren. The very word.

  And now she wouldn’t even write to him. Was this to be his punishment? To realize too late that the only woman he would ever love in quite this way, certainly the only woman who would ever love him with such an open, unselfish heart, had given him up and gone on with her life without him? If so, harsh as it was, it was a fitting punishment, because his reason for not recognizing what he’d had when he’d had it filled him with shame.

  The truth was, as much as he enjoyed casting fond, superior, supercilious aspersions on his mother’s high-minded hopes for him—the truth was that he shared them. Oh, not her specific hopes: he wanted no political career; his goal in life wasn’t to be famous. At least not for the same things Carolivia wanted him to be famous for. His hopes for himself were nobler—perhaps—but were they any less self-gratifying? He wanted to cure diseases and reduce human suffering; he truly wanted that, genuinely and unambivalently, and he was fully prepared to devote his life to accomplishing it. Ah, but if he were recognized for it—if respected medical men admired him, wrote papers and dissertations based on his brilliant theories—if, God help him, they gave him prizes and accolades for his accomplishments—would he turn his back on the rewards? Far from it.

  He had a picture of the rest of his life in his mind’s eye, and whether he cared to admit it or not, Carolivia had helped draw it for him. Because he wanted to acco
mplish so much, he’d always seen himself, in the successful future, as a man who lived and thrived in the rarefied world of science. When he’d bothered to envision a partner in that life at all, he’d seen someone like Adele, someone familiar and comfortable, and eminently suitable. Suitable for what? Enhancing his esteem. Fulfilling his barely conscious dream of himself. But although he’d grown up with her, he hardly knew Adele. It didn’t matter: from childhood everyone had assumed that they would marry. If, one day, he’d decided not to marry her, the reason—how demoralizing it was to admit this—would’ve been to thwart his mother, and not because he’d ever looked honestly at Adele and realized they didn’t suit. And it was no consolation to know that her disappointment would’ve been as skin-deep as her happiness had he married her.

  But never, not in a wild, maverick dream, had he ever seen himself linked for life—in the picture in his mind’s eye—with someone like Carrie Wiggins. She was a foreigner; she might as well be from another country, another world. She didn’t fit any niche or type he or anyone else in his set had ever known, ever even imagined. She was impossible. Eventually—how democratic of him!—he’d brought himself around to sleeping with her. But marry her? Good God. Out of the question. Not done, old man, simply not done.

  His hypocrisy mortified him. He delighted in tweaking his mother and her sort for their hidebound social and political philosophies. Prosperous and potbellied, he called them. There was nothing he enjoyed more than reminding his own contented, conservative, conformist Philadelphia cronies of how enlightened he was compared to them. But he dearly loved a mountain girl named Carrie Wiggins, and her preposterous unsuitability to his comfort, his complacency, and above all his ambitions had prevented him from knowing it until it was too late. Too late. She wouldn’t even write him a letter.