“I’m sorry,” she said. “That it didn’t work out, that everything happened the way it did.”
A few weeks later she went to a meeting in Maine and slept with a graduate student from a San Diego lab, who rode a mountain bike and wore his hair in a ponytail. When she returned to Boston Peter had bronchitis and emerged from her shower hacking and steaming, each cough making the loose flesh around his nipples shimmy. Something must have shown on her face, because Peter raised his head from a wad of tissue and said, “What? What?”
“Nothing.” But she continued to stare. It was not so much that he looked like her father as that he was so obviously of her father’s generation.
“It’s no big deal,” he said, coughing again. “I know you hate it when I’m sick, but it’s not a sign, or a symbol, or a warning. It’s bronchitis. Anyone can get it.”
“I know,” she said. The biking biochemist had meant nothing to her, but she found herself thinking of his smooth legs.
She turned and went to her desk, where a huge stack of paper awaited her; she’d been asked to write a chapter for a book devoted solely to the mysteries of ubiquitin. It was absorbing, and very complicated. Nothing Peter could understand. Can you write? Are you old enough to write? In the other room, Peter settled onto the futon with a groan.
When they parted, after a quarrel she manufactured, it was like losing her childhood all over again. It was not his fault, exactly, that he’d altered her last vivid memories of her mother, nor was he to blame for the secret she’d kept from Bianca, which increased the distance between them. She had chosen all this, she had chosen him. But years later, when she went to visit her dying father, she found her old trunk in the storeroom. Long ago she’d ransacked her mother’s closet, hauling the contents around with her even during the years when she’d owned almost nothing else. But the trunk she’d left behind, the trunk she left with Theo. Inside it she found the hand lens Suky had given her after Peter’s first visit, the stolen library book, some beetle pictures Bianca had crayoned—when was that?—and a postcard (she had forgotten this too) which Peter had sent on her eleventh birthday.
Hugs and kisses to my favorite beetle-girl, he’d written. Love, Peter. She mentioned none of this to Theo. But when she sat by his bed and stared at his creased tired hands, it was their shared past she mourned for as much as him.
The Cure
1
EVERYTHING, THINKS ELIZABETH, is in order.
Everything is as it should be, exactly as she would wish it: nine o’clock, on this December day in 1905, and already breakfast has been cooked and served and cleared, Livvie and Rosellen are at the dishes, and all nine of her boarders are resting, wrapped in blankets and robes, on the lower veranda or the private porches of the upstairs rooms. In the light, airy dining room, the new napkins look well in their rings and the cloth is crisp on the table. In the kitchen—the girls look up as she walks by, smiling without interrupting the dance of dishes passing from basin to basin and hand to hand—and also in the mudroom, the woodshed, the smaller shed where the laundry is stored in enormous lidded crates until the boilers are fired up twice each week, everything is as it should be for this hour and minute of the day.
Everything, Elizabeth thinks, except that she hasn’t found a nurse to replace Mrs. Temple, who left three days ago. And that Martin Sawyer is dying; and that Andrew refuses to believe this.
Outside Andrew is burning trash in a big metal bin; the essential task he does each day after breakfast. Through the frosted window in the laundry shed she can see, after rubbing the glass with her apron, her husband poke the vents, shake the grate, and then toss in the contents of two more covered tins. One scrap of paper catches fire midair, but Andrew—no gloves, she notes with a rueful smile, no hat no scarf no coat no socks, ankles bare above his low boots and thick white curls flopping dangerously—bats it down before it flies away. A few weeks from now, she knows, he and his oldest friends will strip naked for their annual New Year’s celebration, smashing through the ice on the lake to leap, shouting and pounding their chests, into the frigid water. Along with the rest of the crowd, she’ll applaud the grizzled, wrinkling, suntanned heroes.
For now she goes back through the walkway, back through the kitchen (Rosellen and Livvie are almost done; she reminds them the woodwork needs washing down), and into the empty nurse’s room, where she tilts her head and listens thoughtfully to the ceiling. Both this and the room next door, which she and Andrew have always shared, are crowned with porches, two among those she added to the second-floor guest rooms. Everyone wants to sleep outside now; no one will rent a room without a cure porch. Sometimes she hears footsteps crossing the ceiling above her head. Today, she hears nothing.
She waits; still nothing. Not a glass clinking down on a coaster, not the sounds of a body shifting in bed. Martin, so lively when he first arrived, these days hardly moves. He’s gone back to sleep, she thinks. Otherwise she’d hear him coughing. She decides to bring up his mid-morning tray herself, before she visits her friends. Dorrie and Emeline, who also run private homes for health-seekers, grew up helping their mothers and aunts; they know everything that goes on in the village. One of them may know of a plausible candidate for Mrs. Temple’s vacant place. Or they might, on this particular day, mention Nora, from whom all three of them learned their trade.
Dorrie’s mother, Bessie Brennan, was the first to rent a room to a sick stranger. During the summer of 1875, a slender Baltimore banker named Mr. Woodruff spent six weeks at a sportsmen’s hotel here in the northern Adirondacks. His cough improved, his fever decreased; he felt better than he had in months. At the end of the season he decided to stay on, only then learning that all the hunting and fishing lodges closed down for the winter. He asked advice from Bessie’s son, the guide who’d rowed him through the lakes, built his lean-to, and cleaned and cooked his fish.
Once Bessie agreed to let the room behind her kitchen, she made Mr. Woodruff’s meals and did his laundry, mended his woolen coat and provided a chair and horse blankets for the days when, despite the frigid weather, he sat outside for hours on the porch. He gained ten pounds and lost his cough entirely. The following September, Bessie took in a Boston professor who’d summered at the Northview Inn and had the same idea as Mr. Woodruff. Her cousin Olive, eager for the extra income, then rented a spare bedroom to a young man training to be a lawyer. Other neighbors joined Bessie and Olive and soon there were eight women housing invalids through the winter.
Sturdy and competent, the daughters and mothers and wives of guides, they were perfectly comfortable tending to a finicky eater, a late sleeper, one who shivered and needed an extra log on the fire. If a boarder’s cough worsened, if his fever rose or he spat blood, then the women sent to the Northview Inn for Nora, the only one among them to have experience as a nurse. There wasn’t a doctor, then, within sixty miles.
Nora, like the men who first wintered there, was a stranger to the village. During the long hours of their exile in the freezing air, the strangers talked. Nora learned how the men had discovered they were consumptive, who they’d left behind, why they’d chosen to stay in these mountains. At first, as she’d later tell Elizabeth, this had mystified her—she couldn’t imagine why anyone not bound by family would choose the harsh climate. The dark, close-crowded trees, hemlock and cedar, spruce and pine, balsam fir with here and there the shocking light of a birch—how wild this place could seem! Snowshoe hares and deer and skunks, birds she’d never seen before and the slithering, weasel-like fishers and minks, which she despised although some of the men had first come to the mountains just for the pleasure of hunting them. Others, like Mr. Cameron, who’d taught astronomy in Connecticut before moving into Olive’s house, came solely for the air. He’d been assured, Mr. Cameron said, that the pure air of these mountains was as dry and bracing and curative as the more famous air of a place called Davos.
The atmosphere was rich in ozone, a powerful disinfectant, while the trees themselves exhaled p
urifying balsamics. The frequent rain and snow of the Adirondacks Mr. Cameron claimed meant nothing; from his bed he lectured Nora in a stern voice, coughing between every sentence. The soil was so extremely porous and stony, he said, that no dampness could ever linger. This on an April day when the ground was soaked with melted snow, when for a week they’d woken to rain, seen the clouds rise a few feet above the rooftops only to descend again; when there was mist then rain then fog then sleet then wet snow then fog again. Shivering in a heavy sweater and a knitted hat, Mr. Cameron claimed stoutly that the air was actually dry.
Nora let him talk, she let all of them talk. She brought them herbal decoctions she’d made at the inn, and teas and salves and a syrup of horehound compounded with hyssop and licorice root. When the other women needed a hand, she aired the invalids’ blankets and freshened their rooms and occasionally bathed those confined to bed. Sometimes—or so Elizabeth has envisioned from Nora’s stories—when the snow was dry and the sun was bright and the air was perfectly still, Nora borrowed her brother’s cutter and his gentle mare and took the men for drives or a lunchtime picnic.
If she were alive, she’d be eighty today—which no one, Elizabeth thinks, seems to remember. When she mentioned Nora’s birthday, Dorrie, who as a girl had stood openmouthed before a microscope while Nora showed her pollen grains and the nettle’s tiny stinging spines, had said only, “Is it?” Emeline didn’t mention Nora at all and Andrew, who’s working on the chimney in the nurse’s room—Nora’s old room—claims simply that the flue has been temperamental. How can he not feel Nora’s presence? The room, despite having been occupied for eleven years by first Mrs. MacDonald and then Mrs. Temple, still speaks to Elizabeth most strongly of her dearest friend.
White walls, white ceilings, smooth, polished oaken floor, and a narrow bed with a white metal frame: Nora’s, all Nora’s. It had been Mrs. Temple, though, who several weeks ago complained about the draft.
“Is it the damper?” Elizabeth asks her husband now.
Andrew straightens, a chisel in hand. “It’s almost fixed. When’s the new nurse coming?”
“I haven’t found anyone yet.”
Andrew frowns. “You can’t do everything yourself.”
“I know,” she says. “Especially not with Martin fading so fast.”
“Martin needs to be outside more,” Andrew says sharply. He reaches back into the flue and waggles something that makes a metallic sound. “I thought I’d take him for a drive to the dam tomorrow—he needs something to interest him. I hate to see him giving up.”
Elizabeth stares at her husband. When did he last actually look at Martin? Martin weighs less than a hundred pounds and is coughing up chunks of his lungs.
Earlier, while Andrew was finishing his outside tasks, and while Livvie and Rosellen were filling glasses for the midmorning snack, each holding a raw egg garnished with salt and pepper and lemon juice, Elizabeth took a tray up to Martin. Some of the boarders will gulp down three eggs, swearing they taste like raw oysters. Martin might have swallowed two without any fuss and then gone back to sleep, but instead he’d raised a glass, taken an egg partway between his lips, and let it slip back, his face contorting horribly.
Months ago he’d told her this: that initially he hadn’t felt sick, although a strange, almost liquid lassitude sometimes gave him wobbly legs. Often, he said, peculiarly often, it was true, he’d felt a need to clear his throat; and it was also true that he’d had a trifling but persistent cough: but these things were nothing. He hadn’t suspected anything. He was at a family picnic when his cousin’s three-year-old daughter ran out from behind the hedge crying, “Catch me! Catch me!” as she hurtled toward him. He’d swooped her up, over his head: a game a girl in a white blouse and a yellow pinafore had loved. As he lifted his Daisietta he’d had the strangest feeling in his chest, a warm, quivering, sickening feeling and then a flood of sweetness. His mouth had filled with blood as he set Daisietta down.
Dr. Davis, who will never say to a patient, You are getting worse, admits this about Martin: “You have not improved.” Each week Martin loses weight; he sweats through two changes of sheets each night. His cough is ceaseless—she can hear him cough now—and he’s had hemorrhage after hemorrhage. He’s tired, he said an hour ago. So tired. She ran a cloth wrung out in witch hazel over his face and hands and neck.
“Martin needs to rest,” Elizabeth says to Andrew. “He can’t go anywhere. And I’m going to need your help with him, unless I find a new nurse in the next few days.”
Andrew’s face, usually so open and cheerful, sets, exasperating Elizabeth. It is only in this circumstance that they quarrel. When they have problems with the house itself, or with their guests—the ardent friendships that flare up so swiftly and later burn out in violent quarrels, the more secretive romances and renunciations, the jealousies and squabbles and the occasional slump into melancholia and withdrawal—they talk these over after they retreat to their own room at night. She rests her head on his shoulder while he agrees with her theories and diagnoses, or disagrees and proposes his own. Either way she counts on him completely.
But when someone is dying he disappears, clutching his own chest protectively, clearing his throat, tensing and flexing his arms and thighs as he wards off the years when he was sick himself. Convinced that he cured himself by an act of will, adhering rigorously to a regimen of exercise and nude sunbathing and frequent freshwater plunges regardless of the season, he’s both horrified and disapproving when one of their boarders fails to recover. Especially when, as in Martin’s case, they don’t pack up before the end and return home to die.
Sometimes, despite her best efforts, Elizabeth thinks of Andrew’s evasions as cowardice. Other times she’s able to see how his constant optimism balances her own grimmer tendencies. When she and Nora first lost a boarder—Aaron Brown, whom she’d liked very much—she’d been ready to sell the house and find another occupation. Andrew hid in the woods through those terrible days, with a book and a jar of double-cream milk and a lump of cornbread. Half the time she’d been furious with him; the other half simply envied his ability not to see. If this was death, she’d said to Nora, if this was where we were all of us headed—then what was the point of anything?
“Everyone feels this way the first time,” Nora had told her. “The first few times. As if we’re the only ones to understand what really lies at the heart of the world. Until you get used to it, nothing can make you feel more alone.”
What does it mean, to get used to it? That, after nearly twenty years of this work, Elizabeth can think, Martin might have a week, and still be able to plan calmly all she’ll arrange for his comfort and consolation, and all she must also arrange to spare her other boarders during his last days. And that, although she’s desperate with worry, and although Andrew has hidden his head inside the fireplace, his back muscles clenched with panic, she’ll cook an excellent dinner and he’ll sit at the head of the table, making pleasant conversation. He’ll carve the roast mutton, she’ll add potatoes to the plates. Upstairs Martin will cough and cough—he’s coughing now, she’ll bring him some syrup—and downstairs Livvie will pass through the swinging doors with dish after dish after dish.
“I can’t talk about this,” Elizabeth says to Andrew. “Not if you’re going to be so stubborn.”
Who will she find to move into this room? Dorrie spread her hands and said she didn’t know of a single free nurse in town. Emeline shook her head and offered her a muffin and an advertisement for an electrified carpet sweeper. Elizabeth tries to imagine a stranger folding freshly laundered nightdresses and slipping them into the second drawer, where Nora kept hers. A stranger in Nora’s armchair, reading by the afternoon light. Even with Andrew inserted into the fireplace, head and shoulders invisible and legs rising like andirons above the grate, she feels Nora’s presence. But that feeling lasts only a minute, like so much else in her life: what presses her most is the ceaseless ticking of the clock. Breakfast, the ten o’clock t
rays, and then dinner—she should be cooking now. After dinner she’ll have a tiny breathing space before the four o’clock snack: but then there’s supper, almost right away, and later the bedtime trays. For the consumptive invalid, she hears Nora saying, food is life.
Andrew’s voice comes from inside the chimney, muffled by the bricks and so distorted he might be speaking through the two stuffed pheasants splayed above the mantel. “Don’t be angry at me,” he says.
Is that what he says?
She backs out and closes the door behind her. Martin may have another month, but no more than that. For his sake, for Andrew’s sake, she must find another nurse right away.
Andrew waits a minute, until he’s sure she’s gone. Then he slides his head and shoulders down, backs away from the chimney, and searches his workbox for the two smooth bits of metal he was about to seize when she appeared—magnets, one in the shape of a star, the other a disk, like the moon. Magnets may, he’s read, shift the shape of the aura surrounding each person into a new and more healthful alignment. And a stream of heat carrying the magnetic waves—this part he’s hypothesized for himself—might increase the benign effect. On its way to the roof this chimney runs between the outside wall of Martin’s room and the inside wall of his porch. Ideally situated, Andrew thinks. When placed above the damper, on the brick ledge he’s just chiseled clean, the magnets will exert a quiet, beneficial influence on Martin’s health.
Back into the chimney he goes, his head and shoulders once more disappearing. He is his own boss, he thinks. Quite independent, capable of aiding Martin in his own way: not, whatever Elizabeth and her friends may think, simply Elizabeth’s husband. All through the house, in fireplaces and windows and under the eaves, behind the boilers, beneath the compost heap, are hidden other objects that some—Dr. Davis among them—might scorn as superstitious and that his own wife might dismiss as useless.
Servants of the Map Page 18
