Servants of the Map (31 page)

The women left his kitchen in a clump, talking furiously among themselves and delegating Nora to learn, as quickly as she could, whatever else Dr. Kopeckny was willing to teach her. As the cold deepened and the snow kept falling, Nora visited his house repeatedly. He talked to her, he thought out loud in her presence, he gave her things to read. Some of the articles startled her. Criminals condemned to death might well be experimented on, one doctor wrote. There is nothing cruel nor revolting about this idea; for a certain period prior to the execution, the criminal should be exposed to the dried sputum of one known to be sick.
After execution a careful necropsy would show if tubercles had developed. Thus might useful results be secured.

She stared at the pages, thinking about her days, so long ago, at Grosse Isle. If Dr. Grant hadn’t been there, what else might have happened to her? We must be scientific, the paper said. The white plague puts all of us at risk. But meanwhile another doctor claimed that the presence of the bacillus in the sick might be only a harmless concomitant, useful perhaps as a diagnostic sign but in no way a convincing demonstration of the germ theory.

“What does he mean by ‘germ theory’?” Nora asked.

“I shouldn’t have assumed you knew that,” Dr. Kopeckny replied. As simply and swiftly as he could, he told her about Pasteur, in France, who’d proved that all life came from earlier life, and that putrefaction and decay were not spontaneous but were caused by living germs. He’d found germs that fell from the air or lived in the soil, that made wine go bad or killed cows and sheep. Under the microscope Dr. Kopeckny showed Nora the creatures swarming inside spoiled meat and then those that lived in her own saliva: brethren to the brilliantly blue sticks.

For weeks she looked in that eyepiece, always seeing something new. On her way home the world would seem utterly different to her, every surface quivering with a thin secret film. There was life on the leaves and in the rivers, on the food she ate, and on her clothes; it was wonderful, it was horrifying, some days she couldn’t eat and she wanted to boil her hands. The world was alive in a way beyond the way she knew. What did that mean?

Nora went back to her friends and together they worked through the implications of what she’d learned. The bacilli come into the lungs, Dr. Kopeckny had said, attached to dust particles in the air. Infected dust might be spread about by the swish of a skirt or a vigorous broom; the worst things they could do were to raise any dust or allow infected material to dry before it was disinfected. Most of their habits still made sense
in the light of this new information. They’d never used carpets or curtains in the invalids’ rooms; they’d always damp-mopped the floors instead of sweeping, and wiped down the walls and woodwork frequently, simply to keep the rooms tidy and fresh. But now they figured out, together, that the invalids’ laundry might best be kept dampened until it could be washed. That scraps of torn paper, used only once, might be better than handkerchiefs, and that the papers should be burned.

For a while, some of the women kept more than their usual distance from their guests. But after the initial fright they relaxed, partly from habit—they’d been doing this work for years, it was hard to think about it differently—and partly because they realized that what Bessie had said was true. Not a single person in the village, not even those who cared directly for the invalids, had ever gotten sick.

To Nora’s surprise, it was not people in the village but guests from the cities who first began to shun the sick. The following summer, a wealthy widow objected to sharing a table with Elizabeth, whose cough had grown much worse. She had not paid good money, the widow said, to be in contact with the same germs the filthy immigrants assaulted her with in Boston.

Ned moved the woman to a distant corner of the dining room, and later took Nora aside. People were getting ideas, he said. From articles in the paper, from conversation with doctors. After all the years when people might share a bed with a consumptive family member, sleep in the same room, share dishes and food, suddenly they were being told about invisible, lurking germs that leapt from person to person. It might be better, Ned said, if Elizabeth took her meals separately for a while, and if Nora didn’t talk about her work. A few guests, he said, had left simply after hearing what she did in the winter months.

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“I didn’t want to upset you,” he said. “But if you could do something about Elizabeth …”

“She might have bronchitis,” Nora said. “Or hay fever—she coughs more when there’s a breeze and when the weather changes. I’m not sure what’s wrong with her.”

But she brought Elizabeth her meals on a tray for the next few days, unsure how to comfort this frail, unhappy stranger.
Do you think I don’t know?
she might have said.
Do you think I haven’t seen you looking at Michael?
She’d been lucky enough, herself, to have Francis, if only briefly, and to have her son and her brother. But she thought she knew what it felt like to be the one who always stood outside, watching the others settle in contented pairs. Still she felt trapped when, just before the Vignes were due to go home, Elizabeth looked up at dinner and asked her mother if she could stay in the Adirondacks for the winter.

“Nora would keep an eye on me, I know,” Elizabeth said.

“I would not ask her for such a favor,” Clara said, avoiding Nora’s eyes.

Stubbornly, Elizabeth continued, “It would help me so much, I know it would. I could stay at one of the houses in the village, like the people Nora goes to visit.”

“Olive has a free room,” Nora said reluctantly. Did Elizabeth think that, if she were around, and Gillian were not, Michael would somehow change his mind? “At least I think it’s still free.”

“You’ll stay here,” Ned said firmly, looking not at Elizabeth but at Clara. “No need for you to stay in the village. Our guest rooms aren’t warm enough for the winter months but we have room in our own apartment. You’ll stay with us.”

Nora seldom went alone to the village that winter. Visiting the invalids, or meeting with the women, almost always she had Elizabeth at her side. Together they looked at the three new houses Bessie’s cousin had built in the meadow, each now rented to someone who wanted to take in invalid boarders.

“Smart women,” Elizabeth said approvingly. “They should do well here.”

Nora turned to her with surprise. “You have a head for business?”

“Gillian and my mother do too,” Elizabeth said. “How else would we have managed?”

Her strength and energy were surprising, Nora thought, after her frailty during the summer, but week by week she seemed healthier. She helped Nora order new snowshoes for the invalids, listened carefully when Nora gave Olive advice about washing dishes—a rinse in boiling water: all the dishes, every time—and seemed to absorb every word and sight when Nora stopped at Dr. Kopeckny’s to ask a question or peer once more into the microscope that soon would become her own.

Elizabeth read what Nora read, she learned what Nora learned. Around the invalids she was clumsy at first but she knew enough to sit back and watch and listen. Soon she began to seem comfortable. Almost, Nora thought, to flirt gently with them. Was she flirting? At the inn, where Elizabeth cramped the family quarters, Nora still sometimes caught her gazing at Michael. Yet her voice at dinner was low and calm and her attention to Ned’s stories apparently genuine.

One March day, after they’d found one of Bessie’s guests coughing frothy blood, Nora asked Elizabeth how her own health was.

“I’m fine,” Elizabeth said. “Don’t you know that?”

Nora stopped on the street and stared at her. “I know no such thing,” she said. “When you first came here I thought you might be in real trouble. Why else would you—”

“I had bronchitis the winter before our first visit,” Elizabeth said. “But nothing worse than that—I pretended I wasn’t better so we could get out of the city for the summer. You have no idea how annoying it is to always be under my uncle’s thumb.”

“You were
faking?”

“I suppose.”

“Then why did you keep coming back?”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

Michael, Nora thought. “What did you think would happen this winter?”

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. She bent down and packed a handful of snow into a ball. “It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s done, it’s like I had an abscessed tooth and then I pulled it. Michael and Gillian are perfect for each other, I’m glad for them.” Her gaze, Nora saw, was quite steady. “I’m glad I stayed, though,” Elizabeth continued. “I like being here. And I like helping you. Can’t I stay?”

“I didn’t ask you to go.”

She watched Elizabeth stretch her arm back over her head, heave the snowball, and then bend and make another. Just the idea made her shoulders ache. Sixty years old, she thought. How did I get to be sixty? Michael no longer needed her, Ned managed perfectly well on his own. If he wasn’t working in the shop—he and Michael had an enormous number of commissions that winter—he was scribbling letters to Clara about Michael and Gillian’s impending wedding, or sending plans of the cottage he planned to build for the new couple. Next summer, Nora thought, the guests would come and go, the wedding would happen and then be over, Elizabeth would leave with her mother and everyone else. And then there would be, come wintertime, only her and Ned.

There is so much left to me,
Nora thought.
So much left that I want to do. How am I to do it?

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?

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.