Servants of the Map

by Andrea Barrett

  “It did,” Elizabeth says reluctantly. “But I hate to ask for her help unless I really need to. She gets so involved, and then she wears herself out.”

  “She likes to feel useful,” Ned says. “When’s the last time you wrote her?”

  “October, I suppose. Maybe September. She wrote me back right away.”

  “Doesn’t she always?”

  Ned and her mother, Elizabeth knows, have been corresponding for almost twenty years. Both of them over seventy now, but still Ned sits down at least once a week and describes for Clara everything interesting that’s happened at the inn, or at the cottage next door, or—when he’s privy to it—within Elizabeth’s boardinghouse. Clara responds, or so Ned claims, with reports of her daily life among what’s left of her family in New York. Elizabeth has never been sure what lies behind this long exchange of letters. Simple affection, loneliness, some romantic urge?

  “If Martin—” she begins to say, but Ned swiftly interrupts her.

  “I can’t believe things have gone so fast with him. We were fishing together in May.”

  “I remember that,” Elizabeth says. Martin had been so proud of the new lures hung from his handsome vest. So delighted to present her with his pack-basket heavy with trout.

  “I wish …” Ned says, before he falls silent. As he gazes out the window, Martin, in his room at Elizabeth’s house, gives up all pretense of sleep and squirms against his pillows until his head and shoulders are raised and his knees sloped sufficiently to support his writing board. Next to him are several pencils and a tablet of paper. Although this is strictly forbidden—one is not to read during the afternoon rest hours, not to chat, not to write, not even to turn the pages of a magazine—Martin has decided to write a letter.

  Dear Mother, he begins.

  He will write, he thinks, about the departure of Mrs. Temple, whom he liked despite her lack of humor and a tendency to chatter. Her hands, when she rubbed his back and chest with liniment, were both gentle and strong. She never fussed when he coughed blood. She could change his bed without getting him up, rolling the sheets and blankets into slim flattened tubes along one flank, then gently easing him over the ridge and onto the clean linen. Elizabeth, so scrupulous about every aspect of her house, will surely hire someone equally skilled, but it won’t matter to him.

  Today, he writes.

  Shouldn’t he be writing the truth? What is really happening to him, what it feels like. He felt such comfort, as a boy, unfolding his secrets to his mother. And such isolation when, after his father died and he became sick himself, she stopped listening and insisted on his health.

  He should say that, he could start with that. Or with the disturbing sound that is filtering up to him now, causing his pencil to pause—the sound of the lidded brass containers boiling on the kitchen stove. Stripped of their pasteboard liners, and of the bits of lung and life which he and his fellow boarders cough up, the nine apple-sized cuspidors clonk gently together. With the strange, upsetting acuity that has come to him in these last two weeks, he can hear them rolling, bumping each other, as he can hear the damp tea leaves falling from Livvie’s hand onto the wooden floor, the soft swish-swish as she spreads them around, and the crisper noise of them being gathered, along with the dust that must not be allowed to rise, into neat piles by the broom.

  He will write to his mother, he thinks, that the dull collisions of the cuspidors boiling reminds him of the eggs she boiled by the dozen, and tried to force him to eat, during the year before she finally let him come here. She would not believe he was sick; his father was dead, he could not be sick too. If he was sick he would lose his job, their new neighbors would despise them, they’d have to move yet again. If she didn’t believe it, why did she keep showing up at his bedroom door with a bowl lined with strips of buttered toast, onto which she’d cracked the eggs?

  He will write that he came here too late. That he is dying. Later she’ll want to know that he knew the truth.

  Everyone knows, he thinks. Maybe not Andrew, who shares his mother’s ability to rebuff unpleasant facts—but certainly Elizabeth and Mrs. Temple, and probably his fellow boarders too. They know what will happen once he’s gone. What’s left of him will be sealed up, sent home on the train to his family; no concern to anyone here. But some of the boarders will flee the house on the day his room is cleaned and disinfected, spending hours walking briskly through the woods. Others will pace the hallways, both watching and trying not to watch as the walls and woodwork and floors and ceiling of his room are washed and painted with carbolic acid, as the curtains and bedclothes are taken away to be boiled and every smallest item that once was his is steamed or burned. He has himself, on similar occasions, both walked the halls and walked the woods.

  Surely he should explain some of this to his mother. She kept him from coming here early, when he might still have recovered. As his aunt, who swooped down with her two loud sons and, on the pretext of comforting his mother, settled her family into his house, has kept him from returning home to die. Once she’d grasped the nature of his illness, she’d convinced his mother to urge him to stay in the mountains. Too much of a risk to her boys, she said; too awkward to explain his case to the neighbors. Better to wait until he was wholly cured. Together they have stranded him here, among strangers.

  He might blame them, or forgive them. He might describe what it feels like inside his chest. Instead his hand writes, as it always does, The weather continues to be fine, and I am feeling much improved.

  Ned, still thinking of the morning when he and Martin fished for trout, remembers something Clara wrote him recently and says, “Your father is headed to Alaska.”

  “Again?” Elizabeth says, wondering if this means he won’t be back in time for a summer visit. When her parents come up they stay not with her—she seldom has a free room—but here at the inn, where Clara can be near the children.

  “Right after Christmas,” Ned continues. “Last week they went to the opera with some of your cousins. Iris and Hermione send their love.”

  Iris and Hermione, Julia and Otis—her cousins, her uncle George’s children—grown now, with children of their own. As a girl she’d disliked all of them, along with the crowded, noisy, smelly city where everyone mocked her accent and where she knew no one. But her father had made connections in New York, and promptly found work that pleased him. Clara had been comforted to have her brother and his family next door during Max’s chronic absences. This was home now, she’d told her daughters. And slowly England had disappeared, house and garden and landscape and birds, watery sky and secret hedgerows fading one by one.

  Rising, Elizabeth says to Ned, “I appreciate your suggestion about the nurse.” She puts the kettle on the stove and looks through the larder to make sure he has plenty of supplies. Tea and coffee and sugar and oats, a fresh loaf of bread, half a steak and kidney pie, preserved plums, and two kinds of jam—really there is nothing for her to do. Returning to Ned’s side, she adds, “I’ll wire my mother today.”

  As she leans over to kiss his cheek, he plucks from the table a small crimson book, which he hands to her. Poems, she sees. The work of a young woman who lived for eighteen months in the sanatorium on the hill. “Would you give this to Martin for me?” Ned says. “And tell him I’m thinking of him.”

  “He’ll be glad to know that.” She slips the book into her pocket and turns away.

  “You might stop by the cottage on your way back,” Ned says.

  6

  In the summer of 1882 a group of poplars stood, shivering their leaves, where the cottage next to the inn is now. Near them was the landing where the afternoon stage set down Clara Vigne’s family, along with seven other guests anxious to settle into their rooms and start their holidays. Among them, only Clara hung back. Her stillness caught Ned’s eye, and her air of being completely self-contained. Otherwise her looks—middling height, middling weight, smooth brown hair, and deep-set, grayish blue eyes—were not remarkable. Surrounded by he
r luggage and flanked by two young women, she stood calmly as Ned approached.

  “Is your husband arriving separately?” he asked.

  “He’s in Borneo,” Clara said, one hand tracing a serpentine path in the air. “Collecting plants.”

  “Then you must let my nephew help you with your things.”

  Even as he called Michael, Clara touched one hand to each daughter’s arm and they said, simultaneously, “We don’t need help.” How could it be, Ned would wonder later, that their words made him long, paradoxically, to protect them?

  They bent toward the bags as their mother introduced them. Gillian, whom Ned had assumed was older—she was taller by several inches, with sturdy shoulders and light brown hair and an easy, expansive manner—was actually younger than Elizabeth. Yet it was Elizabeth, gray-eyed like her mother, who yielded her bag to Michael with a smile. As it was Elizabeth, Nora saw later that afternoon, who stood by the edge of the beach, watching Michael from the unreliable shade of a pine.

  He was standing over his boat, which was drawn up on shore. While he fiddled with an oarlock, Elizabeth pretended to examine the hills across the lake—as if her feet, hiding beneath her bell-shaped skirt, were not moving invisibly toward him. Flushed and narrow-chested, she was the opposite of Michael in everything but age; both were twenty-one that summer but Nora had, until that moment, still thought of her son as a boy. His friends were Ned and the guides and the dogs; she’d never seen him court anyone. Unless he was standing right before her she pictured him as he’d been years ago, galloping behind Homer and Virgil and chasing the wind in the grass.

  The guides, who’d once made a pet of him, later made him their apprentice. By the time he was eighteen he worked alongside them as an equal. He dwarfed the men in Nora’s family and resembled Francis only vaguely; he could carry a guide boat over his head and return for the guns and the oars and the packs while his clients were still catching their breath. With Homer and Virgil, who were ancient now, or with the new puppies, Helen and Dido, he joined his friends’ hunting parties. Off-season, he worked in the shop with Ned, growing more skilled each winter. A vixen and her kits by their den, a family of ravens, twin fawns and their mother—whenever one of Ned’s clients wanted not just a simple head or full-body mount but a lifelike tableau of several specimens, Ned proudly gave the project to Michael.

  And so why, Nora chided herself that afternoon, did she persist in thinking of this competent person as a boy? Within a few days, she saw both that he was aware of Elizabeth’s interest in him and lacked any feeling for her. Apparently unperturbed by this, he avoided her when he could. When he couldn’t, he was careful to be polite but cool. Where had he learned that? Nora wondered. Briefly she felt sorry for the girl, whose frequent cough and occasional hectic flushes made her appear to be ill.

  Mostly, though, Nora worried about her brother and the inn. That summer, for the first time she could remember, they weren’t booked for the season. New hotels, expensive and spacious, were rising throughout the woods, and for much of July the Northview Inn had only fifteen guests. Nora and Ned spent hours fussing over the books and postponing payments to tradesmen. They printed new handbills; they paid for advertisements in the Syracuse and Albany papers. At dinnertime, she and Ned and sometimes Michael circulated among the three tables that now seated everyone: three, where they’d once had eight or ten.

  Too often, Nora saw, Ned kept them sitting with the Vignes throughout the entire meal, asking Clara so many questions that Nora was embarrassed first for him and then for her own younger self. No wonder he’d evaded her, all those years ago. Clara sometimes answered him, sometimes ducked the questions politely. How was it, Nora wondered, that her brother, so reticent for so long, should turn not toward her but toward a guest who still spoke with an English accent?

  She watched Clara closely, unable at first to see what had captured Ned’s interest. It had something to do, she thought after a while, not just with the woman herself, but with her husband, Max. From Clara’s reluctant responses, Nora gathered that they’d lived in England when they were young, and that Clara had raised their infant daughters alone while Max worked as a surveyor, and then as a botanist, in the Himalaya. Later they’d emigrated to the States so Clara could be near her oldest brother while Max continued to travel.

  “Tell me again what he does?” Ned asked one night.

  “He attaches himself to expeditions,” Clara said. “Didn’t I mention that? Government surveying expeditions, private exploring expeditions. Any kind of expedition you can imagine. There’s always a need for someone who can collect and classify plants.”

  Nora watched her brother lean forward, utterly absorbed. In the arctic, she remembered, his companions had greedily collected both animals and plants. Perhaps this woman’s stories reminded him of those lost friends. As he began to ask yet another question, Nora interrupted with one of her own.

  “What kind of plants does your husband gather?” she asked.

  “Oh … mosses from Tierra del Fuego,” said Clara impatiently. “Orchids from the rain forests of Brazil. Tropicals from Java and Guinea and Tasmania—swamp palms, strange bamboos, all kinds of lilies and climbing vines, pitcher plants that eat live insects. The last time I heard from him, he’d found a new kind of pitcher plant, violet with a bright orange mouth.”

  She prodded a piece of meat with her fork. “Venison?” she asked. “It’s delicious.”

  “Michael brought it in,” Ned said. “He’s an excellent shot. Does your husband have any interest in the mountain plants here?”

  Clara shrugged. “I expect he wouldn’t consider these real mountains. Not after where he’s been.”

  Elizabeth, who’d been coughing quietly throughout dinner, coughed violently then. When she held a handkerchief to her lips and then hid the folds, Nora looked at her sharply and saw Clara reach for the handkerchief, before pulling her hand back to her own lap.

  “I gather wild plants myself,” Nora said, to fill the dreadful silence. “I know a bit about medicinal herbs and roots and I’ve treated our neighbors for years with them.”

  “Might you know something to ease Elizabeth’s cough?” Clara said. For the first time she looked directly into Nora’s eyes. “She’s had it for months now.”

  Nora described some of the treatments she prepared for the invalids she visited during the winter. “Would you let me try a small experiment?” she asked, looking at both Clara and Elizabeth. “For persistent coughs, I’ve had good luck with a milk infusion of mullein leaves and a few other things, given warm, with honey.”

  “We’d be grateful,” Clara said.

  Restless herself, Nora blamed the unease she felt through the rest of that summer not just on the inn’s peculiar half emptiness, but also on the three Vigne women, who seemed to unsettle themselves as well as everyone around them. Ned’s interest in Clara continued; Elizabeth still seemed distracted and miserable even after the mullein syrup eased her cough. Gillian was never where she said she’d be. And Clara, who seemed to ignore Gillian’s frequent absences, watched over Elizabeth with unnerving intensity. Yet who could blame her? Nora wondered. Max, who remained in Borneo, had been in Siberia the year before; Clara bore whatever happened to her daughters alone. Perhaps Max’s absence also explained the way both sisters, although clearly devoted to their mother, seemed eager to escape on their own whenever they could. Turning a corner on the porch or entering the sitting room, Nora would glimpse their disappearing skirts. Sometimes she caught the sisters whispering intently. Or Ned and Clara, or Gillian and Michael … after a while, Nora tried simply to avoid them. They were guests; they need not be friends.

  When that summer finally ended and the inn emptied out, Nora happily put the Vignes out of her mind. She didn’t think about them again until she opened the workshop door one November day, after the first snow had fallen, and found Michael standing there in a white cloud so dense it seemed to be snowing inside. As she closed the door he brought his right ar
m down sharply, the thin switch in his hand whistling through the air before striking the bundle on the table. A terrible crack, again and again. He whipped at the form on the table as if he couldn’t see her, white puffs rising into her nose and throat. She covered her mouth with her handkerchief and cried, “Michael!”

  Whip, whip, whip.

  “Michael!” she called again. Normally his movements were slow and meticulous, his workbench perfectly tidy.

  At last he lowered the switch. His face was red, spattered with white. On the table was the skin of a loon, speckled black and white beneath the film of powder. Nora touched a feather and then examined her finger.

  “Plaster of paris,” Michael said. He was breathing hard. “It cleans the plumage. I shake off what I can, and beat out the rest. Three or four times and all the dirt and oil and blood are gone and the plaster falls out dry. Could you move?”

  He held the skin by the neck feathers and beat it like a carpet, then picked up a finer switch, a thin supple twig, and bent close to the skin. Plaster clung to the sweat on his face and formed a white mask.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “It’s ruined if I don’t get out every speck.” He knocked the skin to the floor, picked it up, threw it back on the table, and leaned over.

  “I’ve written her five times,” he said. “She hasn’t answered me once. Instead I get these ridiculous notes …”

  “From who?” Nora said.

  “Elizabeth. About what she’s reading, or some opera she’s seen, or someplace interesting her father has been …”

  “You’re writing to Elizabeth?”

  “Not her,” he said furiously. With a piece of wire he began flicking, fiercely yet precisely, at the the webs of down clinging to the bases of the feathers. “Gillian. She never answers me. I don’t even know if she gets my letters. I write her and instead of answers I get these foolish notes from Elizabeth. About concerts. The trees that grow in the park—what do I care about those things? What does she want with me?”