A Fall of Marigolds (9 page)

MY
instructors at nursing school taught me there were three elements of responsibility I needed to be mindful of when nursing patients with scarlet fever. First, I had to understand the relationship between patient contact and aseptic care so that I would not also become infected. Second, I had to be vigilant regarding complications: secondary maladies brought on by the fever, such as nephritis. And last, I had to carefully safeguard anyone else in close proximity to the patient.

My father had told me the same general advice, only in far fewer words.
Respect the disease. It is powerful.

He also told me the disease has no intent. It doesn’t want anything. It has no malevolent desire to kill. If it could talk, it would not say, “I want to make you ill! I want to bring you to the brink of death! I want to kill!” It would say only, “I make people ill. I bring them to the brink of death. I can kill.”

The disease is like the machine that does what it does but has no cognizance of self. When a machine stops working, it does not care. And it doesn’t celebrate when it starts working again.

I have seen enough cases of scarlet fever to know that to those who have it and to their loved ones, the disease seems heinous, deliberate, and personal. And of course I know why they feel this way. When you are in a fight for your life, then surely there is an adversary. There is something opposed to you. Something that desires to defeat you.

You want to believe your enemy is the disease.

You don’t want to believe even for a minute that the enemy is your own body, this weak tent of flesh that cannot stand up against a speck of contagion, this fragile weave of muscle, bone, and soul that also cannot resist the power of flame nor the pull of the ground below it.

•   •   •

ANDREW
and several others who had been on his ship developed the crimson rash on the second day. It showed up first on their chests and necks and rapidly spread. This rash is not like measles, where the skin appears as if someone has dotted it with a red pencil. The scarlet rash looks more like smears of rosy-red paint applied by the haphazard strokes of a mad artist.

The rash’s angry blisters will not show up for another three days, and after they’ve had their way, their crusted remains will erupt into a sloughing, scaly waste that will have the men thinking they’ve been turned into lepers. The bits peel off like the scales of a fish, and the process is celebrated for only one reason: With each passing hour it signifies you will likely survive. But it is a nasty business that can last for days and it is often the reason clothes and belongings are burned. The confettilike debris is akin to powdered poison.

Today my main concern as I entered the ward would be monitoring the men’s fevers and the swelling in their throats. The fever and the swelling were always heightened on the second day. I went from bed to bed, checking on each patient, assisting with sips of water and a bedpan or two. I intentionally saved Andrew for last.

When I approached his bedside, Andrew barely acknowledged my presence. I placed my hand on his forehead and the heat of his skin warmed my hand like an iron. Andrew leaned into the coolness of my palm, moaning softly. The night nurse had written in his record that Andrew’s temperature had been hovering at one hundred five degrees since before dawn. There was only one thing I could do for him as I waited for Dr. Treaver to arrive on his morning rounds: Draw the heat out with a cool cloth.

I had given hundreds of baths to men of every age, but I felt an unfamiliar bond with Andrew as I pressed a wet compress to his neck, chest, and back. I might have been running alongside him as he fought a dragon, handing him what he needed to fight. The dragon’s hot breath seared into the cloth, wanting to take me on, too, it seemed. But I kept dousing the flame as I plunged and wrung out my cloth, again and again. Andrew shuddered at my touch, and each time I imagined him running toward the dragon with his sword raised high, poking the reptilian hide and looking for the place of weakness in the serpent’s body.

Then he opened his eyes and gazed at me.

“Lily?” he whispered.

A drip of water slid down his temple and I caught it with the edge of the cloth. “It’s Nurse Wood, Mr. Gwynn.”

“Lily?”

“It’s Nurse Wood. Remember me?”

“Lily, those aren’t your clothes.”

This wasn’t the first time I had seen fever bring on delirium, but it was the first time I’d been mistaken for someone’s dead wife. “You are at Ellis Island Hospital, Mr. Gwynn.”

He said something in Welsh. At least, I think it was Welsh. He sounded very sad, and it pained my heart to hear the tone of his voice. He said it again louder and he seemed on the verge of having a fit. He raised his head a few inches off his pillow. I said something back to Andrew in French, because my mother would speak French to me when I lay sick in bed, hot with fever. It always calmed me. I hoped it might shatter the fever’s spell.

“Ne t’inquiète pas, mon cœur.”

Do not trouble yourself, sweetheart.

His shining eyes grew wide and he lay still.

“Fais des beaux rêves de lendemain.”

Dream of sweet tomorrows.

Andrew lay back on his pillow but his eyes never left mine.

“Lily?”

“Shhh.”

“Lily?”

I gave in. “What is it, Andrew?”

“I don’t have money for a ring.”

“It’s all right.”

“I wish I had my mother’s ring.”

“Shhh, now.”

“You would have liked her, Lily. I wish you could have known her.”

“Yes. Hush now. Time for rest.”

He closed his eyes like an obedient child. I left my hand and the compress underneath it on his warm forehead until his breaths became slow and measured.

I sensed movement behind me.

I looked up expecting to see that Dr. Treaver had entered the room, but Dr. Randall was standing a few yards behind me, fastening the protective cloak tight around his neck. I remembered what Nellie had said at lunch the day before, about Dr. Randall asking my first name, and I rose with a start from Andrew’s bedside.

“Good morning, Nurse Wood,” he said as I made my way toward him. When I reached him I looked past the doorway to see whether Dr. Treaver was not far behind.

“It’s just me today.” Dr. Randall smiled.

“Oh. Of course. Good morning, Dr. Randall.”

“And how are things this morning?” He walked over to the nurses’ desk to look at our main chart for all the men in the ward. With a glance he could see the general state of all the patients in the room.

“Five confirmed new cases, then?” he said.

“Yes. The rash showed up this morning.”

“And no temperatures higher than one hundred six? No convulsions? No edema?”

“No.” I looked toward Andrew. “Mr. Gwynn was a bit delirious. I brought down his fever some with a cool bath. He’s resting comfortably now.”

“Delirious? How so?”

I swallowed. “He thought I was his wife. She . . . she’s one of those who died of the fever aboard the
Seville
.”

Dr. Randall looked up from the chart. “Oh. How terrible. I hadn’t heard that about him. Very sad.”

There was nothing to say to this. I turned to prepare my cart so that I could assist him on his rounds. When I was finished readying it and tying on my mask, I turned to him and saw that he was watching me.

“You know, you have a gentle way about you, Nurse Wood. I saw you with Mr. Gwynn.”

My cheeks grew instantly warm and I was glad he could not see it.

“I couldn’t hear everything the two of you were saying but I could see that he was agitated and you calmed him with just your touch and a few words. I’m sure that wasn’t taught at nursing school. Or was it?” His smile broadened.

I laughed nervously. “Did they not also teach you bedside manners at medical school, Dr. Randall?”

“They didn’t teach us French.”

I bumped a bottle of alcohol on my cart and it started to topple. He reached out and steadied it.

“That was French you were speaking, wasn’t it?”

I pulled the bottle from his hand and righted it myself. “It was.”

“But Mr. Gwynn is Welsh.”

I shrugged. “My mother is French. She’d speak to me that way when I was sick. French sounds pretty. It soothes. I hoped it would soothe him.”

“Indeed it did. How wise you were to think of that.”

For a moment I thought perhaps he was mocking me, his smile and manner were so effusive. But he was being sincere.

“We do what we can here to ease the patients’ discomfort,” I said lamely, wincing a little at how rote it sounded.

“You do not give yourself enough credit, Nurse Wood. Or may I call you Clara?”

I pulled the cart close to me, and away from him. “You may call me Miss Wood.”

His smile did not waver. “As you wish, Miss Wood. Shall we?”

We made the circuit from bed to bed. Many minutes later, when we arrived at Andrew’s bed, the moments of delirium had clearly passed. Andrew stirred awake as Dr. Randall listened to his lungs and heart, palpated the glands of his throat, and observed the spread of the rash. He obeyed when Dr. Randall asked Andrew to open his mouth so that he could see inside. And he was able to hold the thermometer in his mouth. I was relieved to see the number had dropped to one hundred three, even though the decrease would likely not last. The third day would probably be worse.

“You’re in very excellent hands here, Mr. Gwynn,” Dr. Randall announced. “Nurse Wood is taking good care of you.”

Andrew’s gaze shifted to me and I smiled politely. I had no idea whether he remembered he had called me Lily. I suspected he did not.

We moved on to the next patient, who did not awaken when Dr. Randall performed his examination. And because Dr. Randall couldn’t interact with the man in the bed, he addressed me. “Do you like to read, Miss Wood?”

“It depends on what it is, Doctor.”

“Ah, yes. Of course it would. Do you like philosophy?”

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to enlighten the doctor on what I liked to read. I thought of Lily’s book of poetry up in my room. I hadn’t read any poetry in years. I didn’t think Dr. Randall had either.

“I like poetry,” I blurted.

He looked up at me, happy, it seemed. “Truly?”

I nodded, a bit alarmed. I replaced the chart of the man he’d been examining and pushed my cart to the next bed. The patient who lay in it was in his second week with the disease, and was awake and sipping from a glass of water. His hands and neck were pasty white with scaling skin and spent blisters.

“Have a favorite?” Dr. Randall asked.

“A favorite what?”

“A favorite poet.”

I bent toward the man in the bed. “Mind if I set your glass of water here on the table, Mr. Gianelli?” I asked, gently removing the cup from his hand.

“Surely you’ve a favorite poet.”

“I like them all.”

Dr. Randall laughed. “No one likes them all.”

I placed the glass on the table next to the bed, eager as I had never been in my life to talk instead about swollen eustachian tubes, kidney pain, and desquamation. Dr. Randall set about examining Mr. Gianelli and giving new orders for increasing the number of scrubbing baths to twice a day to remove the rash residue.

The last two patients were also awake and conversant. When we finished, I headed for the sink at the end of the ward to scrub my hands. Dr. Randall followed me, unfastening the mask and cloak and dropping them into the bin to be sterilized for their next use.

He stood beside me and began to scrub his hands also. “I don’t mean to pry, Miss Wood, but there is little to entertain us after hours during the week. I thought it would be nice to discuss a book together in the staff commons after dinner. I was bored out of my mind last night.”

“You were bored your first night?”

“It was my third night, and yes, I was bored.”

I scrubbed and said nothing. Part of me longed for something to do in the evening besides read the social pages of the newspaper with Dolly and the other girls and listen to them gossip about people. But to sit in the commons with Dr. Randall and discuss a book? People would think I wanted him for a beau. That was an impossible scenario in my in-between place.

I dried my hands quickly and took a step away from the sink.

“Tell me who your favorite is,” he said. “And I’ll tell you if I’ve read him. Or her.”

I could think of only the one name at that moment. Just the one.

“Keats.”

He smiled. “Keats. I’ve read him. Shall we say later tonight? After supper?”

I shook my head. “I can’t tonight.”

“Tomorrow, then?” He dried his hands and turned to face me.

“I’m not . . . ready.”

“Not what?”

“I’m . . .” But the next words dwindled away unrepeated. To my relief, at that very moment one of the patients called out for a drink of water. “I’m needed,” I said, smiling with effort. “Good day, Doctor.” I rushed to fill a pitcher of water and then made my way to the bedside of the man who had asked for it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dr. Randall leave the ward.

When I had finished helping the man with his drink, I heard another voice ask me for water. Andrew.

I went to his bedside and poured his water. He sipped slowly and with effort as I held the glass.

“I like Keats, too,” he said when I took the glass away. I was surprised he had heard the conversation at the sink. My eyes must have grown wide. “Wasn’t trying to listen. The doctor’s voice echoes in this tiled room,” he continued.

I smiled a bit uneasily. “Then I shall have to be careful what secrets I tell in here.”

He lay back on his pillow. “Your voice doesn’t carry like his.”

And it was as if he were really saying,
Your secrets will be safe with me.

As I replaced his glass on his bedside table I wondered whether he knew Lily had also liked Keats. Did he know she had a volume of his poems in her baggage?

I didn’t see how he could know that, considering what had been slipped inside it.

MY
parents came to New York three days after the fire, arriving on the noon train with no luggage. Their plan was to help me pack my few things and then the three of us would be on the four o’clock to Philadelphia, where my father had no doubt left his motorcar for the hour drive home.

I should have met them at the station, but I couldn’t summon the strength to do it. I hadn’t been outside since the grocer’s delivery boy escorted me home three days earlier. A cab brought my parents to the brownstone where I was renting a room on the top floor. It was a nice room in a well-kept building owned by a spinster named Miss Hatfield, who felt it was her mission in life to protect young single women from the perils of city living.

They arrived a few minutes after noon and Miss Hatfield insisted on making us lunch while we used her sitting room for our visit. It was clear she didn’t want to lose me as a boarder, and she could tell, as I could, that my parents intended to take me home that day. She surely hoped her hospitality would nudge my parents into securing my room until my return, since I surely wouldn’t be able to keep paying for it myself if I left with them.

My mother folded me into her arms as soon as Miss Hatfield left us to prepare our meal. I had not cried since the fire, and as I stood wrapped in motherly care, I felt a great wave of emotion rise to the surface of my being, as powerful as a storm surge. I pulled away from her so that we both wouldn’t drown in it.

“I’m all right, I’m all right,” I said, as I pushed back against the tide. “Let’s sit.”

We took seats on upholstered chairs adorned with lace doilies on their padded armrests. A canary in a bell-shaped cage twittered as we arranged ourselves.

“Oh, my darling. I can’t believe this happened so soon after your arrival!” My mother leaned toward me and patted my arm, and I noticed for the first time that she was wearing a cornflower blue dress and matching hat that I’d never seen before. This suddenly struck me as odd. I had never seen her in a dress that I didn’t know already. I’d been home for only a week in between graduation and moving to New York, and before that I had been away at nursing school. It occurred to me that if I went back with them, I would see that everything was slightly different—the size of the apple trees in the garden, the height of the little boy who lived across the lane from my parents, and even the dresses hanging in my mother’s wardrobe. Everything would be slightly different except for me. I would go back to the exact spot where I’d been before I had met Edward. For me, that little tiny sliver of time and place would still be there, but only for me. For everyone and everything else, the world would have changed.

I couldn’t go with them.

And I knew I couldn’t stay.

Repairs to the top floors were under way at the Asch Building and I’d received a message from the clinic manager that businesses on the undamaged floors, which included the doctor’s office where I worked, could expect to resume operating by the end of the week.

But I could never step inside the Asch Building again. Not ever.

“It must have been dreadful for those people who couldn’t get out,” my mother went on. “I feel so bad for their families, especially when we are so lucky that you—”

“It was dreadful. It was the most dreadful thing I’ve ever seen.”

I’d been taught never to interrupt when someone else was speaking, and my intrusion surprised my mother. Surprised me, too.

“Seen? Did you . . . So you were on the street?” my father asked, unsure how to ask me what I had witnessed.

“From the time I got out of the building until the fire was out.”

“The whole time?” My mother’s eyes were wide.

“The fire burned for only half an hour.”

“All . . . all those people and the fire lasted only half an hour?”

An ugly boldness seemed to sweep over me, as if I wanted to blame someone for how I felt that day. “Yes. All those people died in half an hour. None of us on the street could do anything about it. I’m a nurse and I could do nothing.”

I hadn’t meant to sound so blunt, and my mother was certainly not expecting it. She sat back in her chair as if I had struck her.

I looked down at my feet and summoned the apology I owed her. “I’m sorry. None of this is your fault. I don’t know what came over me.”

“It’s quite all right,” my mother whispered, grace lacing her words together.

“Look, Clara,” my father said gently. “Everything is all set for you to come back home with us. You don’t have to give any of this another thought.”

I smiled in spite of myself. He could not know that thoughts are not things you can give or not give. Thoughts are thrust upon you. You can only hope that thoughts that you don’t want will tire of you at some point and flutter away. I think it was at this very moment that I realized I needed to be in an in-between place. Not home in Pennsylvania where my parents were. Nor in Manhattan where Edward had been. But someplace in between where I could wait for the heaviness to lift.

“I’m not going back with you,” I said.

“Beg your pardon?” My father cocked his head as if he hadn’t quite heard me.

“You . . . you want to stay here?” my mother asked.

“No. I don’t want to stay here.”

“I don’t understand,” my father said.

The truth was, I didn’t understand either. I just knew that sitting with my parents in that room in Manhattan, I found I could barely breathe; it was as if I were suffocating on the fire’s ashes. They were falling on top of me like January snow and if I didn’t move, I would disappear underneath them.

I remembered then that in nursing school there was a fellow student, an aloof girl who kept to herself, who wanted to be stationed at Ellis Island Hospital when she graduated. When I asked her why, she told me it was because it was new, and big, the latest equipment was in use there, and nurses didn’t have to enlist in the medical corps to work there like the doctors did. And she told me it was in the city without being in the city, and she liked that because she didn’t like feeling pressed in. I had said something about its surely being a busy place nonetheless, and she said, “Yes, but it’s a different busy. No one stays there for long. It’s a place for the next thing to happen. It’s Ellis. People don’t live there. It’s nobody’s address.” She dropped out before she graduated, but I remembered how she looked when she described it to me. It was the most animated I had ever seen her.

And her words were echoing in my head.
It’s nobody’s address. Nobody’s address.
An in-between place.

“I want to get a post at the hospital on Ellis Island,” I said. “I have heard there is a need for nurses.”

My mother gasped, albeit quietly.

“Ellis? You want to work on Ellis? In public health?” My father blinked several times.

“It’s such a . . . such a . . .” My mother couldn’t finish.

“Such a what?”

“You don’t want to work there,” my father said soothingly, as if I were ten. “Cholera, typhus, measles, influenza—that’s what they deal with there. It’s no place to be, Clara.”

And again my mother gasped. Even I started a bit at the mention of cholera and typhus. But I held my ground. “Unless you’re a nurse. Then it’s a perfectly reasonable place to be.”

“Clara, what’s happened to you?” My mother said it so softly I almost couldn’t hear her. Before I could decide whether I truly had, my father spoke.

“I understand you’ve been through something . . . traumatic . . . and if you don’t want to come home with us, that’s fine. But don’t punish yourself for surviving the fire by taking a post among the world’s worst diseases. It’s not your fault you couldn’t save anyone.”

For a moment I was rendered speechless. Punishing myself for surviving the fire? Was that what I was looking to do? The answer came swiftly.

I didn’t need an island to do that.

“Clara?”

“If I wanted to punish myself, Papa, I could do that by staying here and stepping back inside that building. Or going home with you.”

“You can’t mean that?” My mother was now on the verge of tears.

“I don’t mean home is a terrible place, Mama. I mean I am in a terrible place. And if I come home with you, nothing will change.”

“Of course it will!”

“No, it won’t.”

My father cleared his throat. “You think that now because you witnessed a terrible fire, but when we get you home, what you saw will start to fade, Clara. You must trust me on this.”

I turned to my father and saw strength and determination in his eyes. He was a fixer like me. He thought he could fix this just as he’d fixed every broken person whom he’d stitched back together. I had seen him do it a thousand times. But this was not a broken thing to be fixed. Or a disease to be cured. It was an abyss to climb out of.

“It’s not what I saw, Papa. It’s what I lost.”

“What did you lose?” my mother asked, still clutching my hand.

I wanted to say, “Someone I was meant to love,” and have the six words fall from my lips as sure and quick as the words “Merry Christmas” on the twenty-fifth of December. But I didn’t think I could explain what I meant, and surely those words would need an explanation.

“I’m glad you came,” I said instead. “And I know you think coming home would somehow make it seem as if I never left, that none of this happened. But in here”—and I pointed to my heart—“I know that it did.”

“But do you have to go
there
?” my mother said, her eyes glassy with fear for me. “Those diseases . . . they are insidious; they are foreign!”

“I will be careful.”

“But there are hospitals right here in Manhattan,” she continued. “Why can’t you work at one of those?”

“I promise I will be careful.”

She turned to my father. “Tom! Talk to her!”

My father had grown silent in the last few moments, no doubt contemplating the last thing I had said to him.

It’s what I lost.

I could see him turning the sentence around in his head. Examining it as he would a wound or an illness. And I saw in his eyes the moment he realized that fixers like him and me can easily mend broken things. But we can’t easily find lost things.

Finding something you lost takes a different kind of skill.

“Clara needs to handle this her way, Helene.” He held my gaze and then faced my mother. “She will be careful.”

“Tom.”

But my father turned back to me. “How long do you want to work there?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know.

But in my mind I answered him.

As long as it takes for what I lost to become what I release.

Lunch at Miss Hatfield’s table was a stilted affair. And poor Miss Hatfield could sense it. By the time she served us slices of chocolate cake, she knew she was losing a boarder and my father’s good money.

My father asked whether I wanted his assistance in getting a post on Ellis. He had an acquaintance in public health he would contact if I wanted him to. I would have turned him down were it not for the pressure of the invisible ashes inside my chest, bearing down on my soul. I agreed. And while he left to make his inquiries, my mother helped me box up the few trinkets in my room that I would not need in a dormitory room at Ellis Island Hospital.

When they left for the four o’clock train, I promised I would write them, that I would be careful, that I would tender my resignation the moment I didn’t want to be at Ellis anymore.

As they drove away in a hired cab, I waved from the steps of Miss Hatfield’s brownstone, breathing in the outside air tentatively.

There wasn’t a hint of smoke or ash or death.

The pounding in my chest was the only evidence within and around me that I did not belong there anymore.