Servants of the Map

by Andrea Barrett

  Some weeks later she begged Elizabeth for a sputum sample. By then Dr. Kopeckny had tested all the invalids in the village, and found the bacilli in every one. He’d tested Nora, Bessie, Olive, and Jane—the others would not permit him—and found none. He’d found them in himself, although he was presently feeling well. And in his wife, although she had no symptoms and appeared radiantly healthy. He and another doctor who’d recently arrived were making a map of the village, showing every house and listing every person: who had consumption and who did not, which houses took boarders and which had healthy occupants who worked with the sick. Where should he include Elizabeth?

  Where you want, Elizabeth said. She refused him and Nora, and refused again. By then she’d become so useful that Nora gave up pressing her. She was not a child, she could not be forced. At the bedside of one of Nora’s favorite patients, she stanched a hemorrhage without flinching. How had this girl, Nora thought—this skinny, obdurate, interesting girl—become such a large part of her life?

  9

  Snow begins to fall as Elizabeth walks back along the river. A light snow, dry and airy, carried by the wind; who could object to this? Exactly this harmless confection decorates the cover of the pamphlet promoting their village as a health resort. Piles of these pamphlets, she knows, lie in faraway libraries and dispensaries, churches and city offices. The message they trumpet resembles William Murray’s advice of half a century ago: Come to the woods and let the pure air cure you! But the popularity of the pamphlet seems ominous. Orders pour in from Boston and Baltimore, New York and Detroit—who is reading all these copies?

  The heads of large companies, Elizabeth thinks. The directors of each city’s Board of Health. For the moment, a tubercular patient may still choose whether to stay home or seek treatment at a sanatorium. But now that most general hospitals will no longer admit such patients, and most resorts turn them away; now that phthisiophobia is, in some cities, so prevalent that a coughing and feverish person may be dismissed from his employment or turned out of her lodgings, the insistent pressing of this pamphlet into the hands of the sick means something different than it would have in Nora’s day.

  As the snow picks up, Elizabeth quickens her pace; it is ten past four. Martin will already be awake, patiently waiting for her-—inexcusable to let him fret for a moment over something she can fix. She takes comfort in the knowledge that everything else, despite her absence, will be running smoothly back at the house. The parlor will be warm, the lamps lit, and the center table spread with tea and cakes; she’s trained Livvie and Rosellen well, while Andrew knows exactly what to do. Livvie will be pouring tea for some, glasses of frothy rich milk for others. Rosellen will be circulating through the rooms upstairs, bringing milk or eggs to the few who remain in bed. Andrew will be making conversation, concealing his mild irritation that she’s failed to join him for their nap. Late afternoons are his favorite time to approach her, when the sun streams through the long windows, over the clean white sheets and mounded pillows—over her, he says, with a certain smile. This part of her marriage, which she feels absurdly lucky to have, and thinks of as secret, is in fact perfectly obvious to everyone who has ever stayed in the house. But even if Andrew plans to reproach her later, for now he’ll be tending to the guests. One of them, Corinne, may in her new exuberance and strength have offered to help him.

  Last week, while Elizabeth was preparing the grocery order, Corinne ran down the stairs so quickly, calling out so breathlessly, that Elizabeth rose from her desk in alarm: nothing but a hemorrhage usually generated such noise. Corinne cried, “I’m bleeding, I’m bleeding!” but this was triumph, not dismay—she’d not had her monthlies for more than two years, they’d stopped even before she knew she was sick. Almost all the female boarders, as well as Elizabeth herself, are similarly afflicted. But Corinne, after months observing every rule of the cure, has been rewarded.

  “It’s such a good sign!” she said to Elizabeth. “You know what Dr. Davis says, he says it is a splendid sign for one’s monthlies to return, it means my system is restored …”

  Elizabeth made a special cake. Corinne proudly blew out the candles and, without embarrassment, told the other boarders what they celebrated. Where else but in this village could such a scene take place? In this village, in this house, which is Elizabeth’s place. The minute she slips inside the door, she’ll feel like herself again. Her house holds her as a shell holds an egg, giving form and structure to a substance that is worthy in its own right, useful and nourishing, but which would otherwise drain away into nothing.

  Again she passes the train station—the coffins have disappeared—and the hotel, the cobbler, the greengrocer, Phoebe’s house, where she met Andrew, and Bessie’s. How fortunate she has been with her own house. At Gillian’s wedding, which was held here, and not in New York, because that was what Gillian wanted, she could not have anticipated any of this.

  That day she sat in the dining room of the Northview Inn, a room crowded not with her own relatives but with guides and their families, including all the women she’d gotten to know; with Dr. Kopeckny and his family and his patients; with guests who’d been visiting the inn for years. Gillian had looked beautiful. Nora had looked old. Clara had cried, and clung to Max’s arm—Max, who’d arrived not the week before, as he’d promised, not even the night before, but the very morning of the wedding.

  Elizabeth watched Michael and Gillian stand side by side, speak words she couldn’t hear, turn to face each other. She saw this through a haze of shimmering color, as if it were taking place on a slide, below the lens of Nora’s microscope: distant bits of protoplasm darting and flaring and colliding. By then she no longer wanted Michael for herself; already it was hard to remember what she’d seen in him. But as Gillian turned toward him, and as Clara, despite Max’s presence, dropped his arm to seize Elizabeth’s, Elizabeth felt a baffled sense of failure. If she fit nowhere, if her only work was to keep her mother company …

  A few weeks after the wedding, pale and quiet and coughing into a handkerchief, Elizabeth convinced Clara that she needed to leave their stuffy house in New York and return to the Adirondacks for the winter. This time the village felt like home as soon as she arrived, and within days she was working side by side with Nora, living among the invalids as one of three boarders in Phoebe’s pleasant house. It was there that she met Andrew, who despite being sick was amusing and kind and even-tempered.

  On his good days Andrew took her snowshoeing, guiding her along a creek to a frozen waterfall glinting in the sun. They walked, they skated on the lake, they ate picnic lunches on sheltered mountain ledges. When he had a relapse, Elizabeth nursed him; he thanked her with pots of hyacinths he forced after he’d recovered. Ten months after their meeting they married outside, in a grove of white pines on a hill that would, a decade later, be covered with new houses.

  By their second summer together—Andrew’s health was much improved, but his money was running out—they too began building a house, one ample enough that Elizabeth could take in boarders. A different kind of house, she said, when she approached Nora. A house that would take sicker patients than did the regular boardinghouses, a house in which there’d be a resident nurse: “You’d live here,” Elizabeth said. “With us. I’ll manage the business end, and do the cooking, and hire whatever other help we need; and you’ll supervise the health of the invalids.”

  Nora’s face lit up and her eyes glowed; she seized Elizabeth’s hands in both of hers and said, “Really?” As if Elizabeth, in offering her hard work and a daily acquaintance with sickness and death, were giving her an enormous present. As if, Elizabeth thinks now, it hadn’t been Nora who’d given her everything. For seven years they worked together, building a reputation that extended far beyond the village. For seven years, while Andrew took care of the house itself, they shared the care of the boarders, the surprises of their lives, and, occasionally, their deaths. When Nora finally sickened—“It is my heart” she said, with peculiar pleasure.
“My heart, not tuberculosis”—she chose to spend her last days in her room at the house. Michael and Ned came daily; often Gillian appeared with the children; Andrew spent hours with her. But it was Elizabeth who was with her through the nights.

  The disjointed, delicate, fragmentary conversations they held then, a phrase dropped one night, picked up the next, Elizabeth has never repeated, not even to Andrew. During the nights she spent in Nora’s room she felt her friend’s life sliding through her body. Separate stories, different aspects of her journey lay adjacent one moment, passed through each other and merged the next—a ship filled with fever, a hedge filled with finches, a hospital filled with broken men. The astonishing sight, after so many years, of Ned; or the no less surprising discovery, under Fannies patient guidance, of her own gift.

  During the hours when Nora couldn’t talk, Elizabeth told stories of her own. She kept back only this, which still no one but Andrew knows: although she’s never let Dr. Kopeckny test her, she’s always been sure, despite what she told Nora, that in fact she’s mildly tubercular herself. She can feel it, she can read the signs she conceals. She’s never worried about catching it from her boarders because she’s already infected: an excellent thing, she thinks, it has made her fearless in certain respects, stripped concern for herself from her acts. To be fearless in other respects—to give her heart, as she did with Nora, and has with Martin—is another story. Again and again, she pays for that. Still, there’s nothing she’d change. Long ago she decided to keep her house always open to the sick.

  Recently she saw, in a magazine read by the invalids, an article about a window tent. The illustration showed a grotesque structure meant to offer, to the poor trapped in city tenements, a version of the out-door life. On a narrow cot, in a shabby room, an anonymous man’s legs and lower torso were outlined beneath heavy blankets. Head and shoulders and chest were enclosed in a tent that formed a quarter circle: one edge sealed to the cot, the other clamped, like a lamprey’s mouth, to the open window. Fresh air blew in, the caption claimed. And foul air out. In this way, the article noted, the patient may benefit without protruding his cot through the window. Such a sight, viewed by the neighbors, might result in the unfortunate sufferer being obliged to seek other quarters.

  That stifling, useless tent, or her own large, airy rooms with their private porches: no choice at all. Had she stayed in the city, had she not met Nora, she might be sleeping in such a tent herself. What difference does it make that she will always be an outsider here? So was Nora, so are half the residents.

  For a minute, Elizabeth misses her friend so sharply that she grows dizzy. She stops, she draws a deep breath, she thinks again of the faceless man trapped beneath the window tent and then of Martin, still waiting for her in his room, trusting that she’ll replace Mrs. Temple with just the right person and, during the coming weeks, know exactly what he needs at each stage. She bends to the ground, grasps what has caught her eye, and then straightens, slipping the speckled feather between the pages of Ned’s crimson book. The poetess died before she finished her work, before she saw it printed; yet the poems exist. Martin, Elizabeth thinks, will take the book and its page marker gladly, knowing it came from both her and Ned. Not knowing that what they’d most like to give him is Nora.

  The new nurse, she thinks, should be someone younger. Someone vigorous, warm, and good-humored, who can cheer Martin’s last days and counteract her own increasing tendency to worry. Nora grew more relaxed as she aged, gentler, more accepting; she herself is growing fussier, more and more anxious. The tasks that Nora and her friends approached with curiosity, friendship, even joy, have in her, she has thought recently, had a tendency to turn to duties.

  But here is her house. Here is her house. Not a duty, but her living self. It is as if, she thinks, as she moves toward Martin and Andrew and all the others up the walk and the clean brick steps, her hand reaching of its own accord for the polished brass knob in the four-paneled door, as if, in the order and precarious harmony of this house and those it shelters she might, for all that gets lost in this life, at last have found a cure.

  Author’s Note

  Although the main characters and situations in these stories are invented, all grew from a foundation in fact. Among the historical characters in the fringes are William Bartram, Charles Darwin, Henry Godwin-Austen, Asa Gray, Joseph Hooker, James Hutton, Charles Lesueur, William Maclure, William Murray, Robert Owen, Rembrandt Peale, Thomas Say, Johann Scheuchzer, John Cleves Symmes, Godfrey Vigne, and William Wells. Excellent guides, every one.

  I’m grateful as well to those who guided me to crucial sources and showed me various wonderful stones and bones: Carol Spawn, Ted Daeschler, and Elana Benamy at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Gary Mason at the Providence Athenaeum, Martha Kelly and Chris Rozzi at Gutenberg Books in Rochester, and Roderic Long of the Sedgwick Museum at the University of Cambridge; also to Philip Gwyn Jones, who brought me to Cambridge and Wales and shared my pleasure in the fossils, Cecile Pickart, who taught me about ubiquitin, Sarah Stone, who gave me the antique Manual of Geography that inspired “Theories of Rain,” and my husband, Barry Goldstein, who introduced me to the Adirondack Mountains and helped me over the glaciers of three countries. The Rochester Public Library, the New York Public Library, and the New York Academy of Medicine provided inspiration as well as information.

  The errors and infelicities here are mine, but the book would be much less than it is without the wonderfully insightful readings and helpful comments of my editor, Carol Houck Smith, my agent, Wendy Weil, and my friends and readers, Thomas Mallon and—always, essentially—Margot Livesey.

  About the Author

  Andrea Barrett lives in Rochester, New York. As well as Ship Fever – a collection of stories that won the National Book Award for Fiction – she is also the author of five novels, the most recent of which was the much-acclaimed The Voyage of the Narwhal.

  Visit www.harpercollins.co.uk for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Also by Andrea Barrett

  THE VOYAGE OF THE NARWHAL

  SHIP FEVER

  THE FORMS OF WATER

  THE MIDDLE KINGDOM

  SECRET HARMONIES

  LUCID STARS

  Praise for Servants of the Map

  ‘Servants of the Map confirms how deserving Barrett is to be ranked with Alice Munro and the other great North American storytellers of the moment … It is the precision of her words, and the intelligence with which she creates bonds between characters from an age so different from our own, that makes reading her such a joy.’

  Economist

  A beautifully stylized collection … a testament to the diverse and growing repertoire of an important American writer.’

  San Francisco Chronicle

  ‘The six stories that make up this collection turn out to be connected, but you won’t know exactly how until you read the last one — which comes together satisfyingly not only with its fellows but with the author’s last two books, Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal … Like fossil-hunters, most of Barrett’s characters are looking for a way to piece together fragments of the past; when, in the last story, a cherished belonging of one character shows up in the life of another, we feel rescued and redeemed.’

  New Yorker

  ‘Breathtaking … Servants of the Map vividly showcases the audacious historical imagination of Andrea Barrett.’

  Elle

  One of America’s best fiction writers … No one writes about the history of science better than Andrea Barrett.’

  Philadelphia Inquirer

  ‘A lovely collection … Barrett, wise and restrained, can say more about grief in one exchange than many authors can force into an entire book.’

  Entertainment Weekly

  ‘Barrett is a superb storyteller … Her approach is anthropological in the sense that each story background has undergone extensive research which, instead of deadening the impact, gives each a d
eeper resonance. The main themes are the emotional states of people on scientific or spiritual quests and the distances between people, geographical and emotional in the case of the brilliant title story … Very satisfying.’

  Irish Independent

  ‘Dramatic and profound … Barrett has an uncanny affinity for the nineteenth century … Though she sticks mainly to a decorous prose, she is capable of sudden, startling lyricism … Her ability to navigate the universe’s deepest mysteries with such a gentle touch is a marvel in itself.’

  Washington Post

  ‘Servants of the Map marries arcane science with audacious prose in six gemlike stories that sparkle with intelligence and fire.’

  0 Magazine

  ‘Characterised by a fierce intelligence and an ineffable sense of wonder, and driven by spare, economical prose that, through a mystifying sleight of hand, somehow seems lush, Andrea Barrett’s interwoven tales satisfy completely, utterly. She is surely among the very best writers writing in English today.’

  San Diego Tribune

  ‘Superb … gorgeous, illuminating, entrancing fiction.’

  Kirkus Reviews

  Portions of this book have appeared previously—sometimes in substantially different form—in the following magazines: “Servants of the Map” in Salmagundi, “The Mysteries of Ubiquitin” in Story, “Theories of Rain” in The Southern Review, “Two Rivers” in Triquarterly, and “The Forest” in Ploughshares. “Servants of the Map” was also included in The Best American Short Stories 2001 and in Prize Stories 2001: The 0. Henry Awards; “Theories of Rain” was included in Prize Stories 2000: The 0. Henry Awards’, and “The Forest” in The 1998 Pushcart Prize XXII. My thanks to these publications and their editors.