White Wind Blew (27 page)

His body was warm from his thick coat and the alcohol. He stumbled past the front porch of the nurses’ dormitory, his back against the side wall like some thief. A voyeuristic mock-priest, drunk from an entire bottle of wine and searching desperately for a peephole, which—come to think of it—might have just been another one of Lincoln’s stories. Wolfgang’s vision cleared momentarily, just long enough to spot the log in the grass about ten feet away. Lincoln’s log. Wolfgang lifted it up with both hands. He carried it, hunched over, closer to the ground next to the building’s concrete foundation, his vision swimming, searching the wall. He looked up—was that it? He stepped up onto the log and balanced himself.

The log shifted beneath him.

By the time he hit the ground, Wolfgang blacked out.

***

Everything happened for a reason.
It
was
God’s will, Wolfgang—
the words his mother had told him weeks after his father died in his sleep.

So now was it Rose’s time to go? Was it that simple?

Rose looked up at him from her bed inside the small sanatorium room as Wolfgang raked his hands through her hair. Waverly Hills was just a mere fleck of the size it would be in the coming years. For now, it was overcrowded and badly in need of expansion. Wolfgang left his hand in Rose’s hair, never wanting to let go. He was her doctor and he refused to let the tuberculosis take her. The day after he’d graduated from medical school, he’d volunteered to help the sick at Waverly, arriving weeks after Rose had been admitted.

This
was
not
God’s will,
Wolfgang said to himself.
This
was
God’s cruel punishment.
His mother would believe the same thing had she and Wolfgang still been speaking. Rose had been sent to him on the steps of the cathedral as a test. A devilish vixen, a temptress luring him away from the righteous church.

His Rose.

They had attempted to start the family they’d always talked about. “He’ll send us children when the time is right, Wolf.” That was what Rose had told him. But it was as if God hadn’t wanted their children to grow up without a mother, because none came, and now here was Rose, at Waverly.

A new nurse walked in with a cart of food. She had blond hair and kind eyes that smiled. “Hello, Rose. Are you hungry?”

“Hardly, dear.”

The nurse began to unload a plate of mashed potatoes and gravy and roast beef. “Dr. Barker’s orders. You must eat.”

Wolfgang stepped forward. “Rose, this is our new nurse. Susannah, is it?”

“Yes, Dr. Pike.” Susannah stood beside her cart. “My second day, actually.”

Rose sat up in bed. “Well, God bless you, then.”

“Thank you.” Susannah started to push the cart out to the porch. “Anything that you need, Doctor?”

Wolfgang looked up. “No, not right now. Thank you, Susannah.”

After Susannah left, Wolfgang gripped Rose’s hand and sat beside her bed again.

“Tell me your thoughts, Wolf?”

Coughing sounded up and down the small, crowded porch outside Rose’s room. Wolfgang had little hope for her, but he couldn’t say that. “I think only of your recovery, Rose.” Wolfgang prayed silently to God and demanded that He listen.

Rose rubbed his hand. “I will wait for you in heaven, Wolf.”

“Don’t say such things, Rose.”

She laughed. “I’ll answer your questions if there’s a way.” She coughed. “I’ll speak to you from the other side. You’ll know I’m there. You’ll never be alone.”

***

Wolfgang’s eyes peeled open. A raccoon sniffed his left boot and something was crawling across his forehead. He jerked, frightened the raccoon into the woods, and wiped his face. His ears were frozen, his nose like ice. His head ached. How long had he been out?

The stars were still out. An owl hooted.

He felt sick to his stomach when he remembered where he was lying. Moments later, he was up on his feet, leaning against the brick wall. He headed back up the hillside to the sanatorium, blowing into his hands repeatedly. A long hot bath would be nice, he thought, but the piano on the fourth floor was calling to him more loudly.

Inside, he walked quietly beside McVain’s bed and started to remove the requiem from the box underneath.

McVain’s voice startled him. “I’m freezing.” His breath came out in clouds.

Wolfgang held out his hands. “My fingers are numb.”

“You look like shit,” said McVain, eyeing Wolfgang’s clothing, which was matted with frozen leaves and sticky burrs. “Fall asleep in the woods?”

“Yes.”

McVain watched him suspiciously.

Wolfgang handed McVain an extra blanket. “How are you feeling?”

“I think that bastard Barker stitched me up with barbed wire.”

“I stitched you.”

“Well, I feel like I’m dying.”

“Not until the concert.”

“My curtain call, huh?”

“Or the great awakening.”

“You think he’ll come around on the concert?” McVain asked.

“He has to.”

“We’ll figure out something.” McVain’s two left fingers gripped the blanket. He sighed. “I’m not going to make that walk, Doctor.”

Wolfgang sat stunned for a moment. He looked away, but only momentarily. “We can’t ever know—”

“Spare me the platitudes,” McVain said. “I can—”

“Trust me, McVain, I’ve seen it. Patients on death’s door, and then Waverly somehow helps them to make that walk. I need go no further than Rose, if you want examples.”

McVain’s head settled on his frozen pillow as he listened.

“We were married for five years,” Wolfgang said, “all through medical school. I was set to go to the priesthood. I believed that was my calling.”

“And you met her?”

Wolfgang smiled. “I was home from Saint Meinrad with four years of high school and two years of college under my belt. I saw her on the steps of the cathedral. She had beautiful eyes and dark hair. I waited for dozens of people to enter the church just so I could hold the door for her. An innocent gesture, right?”

“Sounds like a man who knows what he wants.”

“She was a weekly churchgoer. But I soon learned her other side as well.”

“Was she trouble?”

“No, she was stylish and brash and unpredictable. Just what I needed. She was a walking example of what I’d never had in my life.”

“A flapper, huh?”

“Short skirts, makeup, everything. And I trusted her. I knew my parents wouldn’t have approved, but that was part of the allure.”

“She saw a naïve, shy stick-in-the-mud.”

“I’d devoted my life to the Lord.” Wolfgang laughed, but it hurt his head. “Rose turned my life upside down.” He rubbed his eyes and blinked the pain away.

“Are you drunk, Doctor?”

“Possibly,” Wolfgang said. “The ladies of the church used to question my decision to join the seminary. ‘You’re too handsome,’ they said.”

“Please.”

“‘You should get married,’ they’d say. ‘I am,’ I’d tell them, ‘to the church.’ But I knew the moment I saw her that the priesthood wasn’t for me. Not then, at least.”

“And now it is?”

“Things have changed.”

“Have they?”

Wolfgang fidgeted with the zipper on his coat and spotted the rose and vase atop the piano. “We had a rose garden. I would pick one for her every day. ‘A rose for a Rose,’ I’d say.” He took a deep breath. “One morning, we were nearing our fifth anniversary, and I approached her in the kitchen with a rose. She was crying, and she kissed me on the cheek. Not on the lips, you see.”

McVain listened.

“She told me she had been to the doctor, which surprised me, because she hadn’t mentioned anything to me. She had TB.” Wolfgang sighed. “My heart sank.”

“That’s when you moved here?”

Wolfgang nodded. “I became a doctor here. She was a patient just before this building was built. The sanatorium was much smaller then.” He pulled McVain’s blanket back up where it had fallen from his arm. “I took care of her every day. Rose was strong.”

“But TB took her anyway.”

“No.” Wolfgang shook his head slowly. “She was one of the few whom our rest and fresh air cured.”

McVain furrowed his brow. “I don’t get it.”

Wolfgang wiped his mouth and sat straight. “She left this place free of disease eleven months after we’d arrived. She’d lost a lot of weight, but she was in the clear. She Made the Walk with little trouble.”

***

Rose promised she was healthy enough to go out, and perhaps Wolfgang, as her doctor, should have forced her to take her recovery slowly. But Rose was Rose, and as her husband he couldn’t deny her the pleasure of going out to celebrate. She’d beaten tuberculosis in eleven months, and they were both young and eager to continue on with their lives.

“Besides, Wolfgang.” She giggled, kissing his neck. “We lost so much time at Waverly.”

He held her at arm’s length. “What, you didn’t enjoy spending our five-year anniversary on the hillside with the other patients?”

“Of course I did,” said Rose. “Dining on stale cupcakes and milk was a delight.” She wore the yellow summer dress he liked so much. A red rose bloomed from her hair, a rose he’d given her earlier in the day. “Come on, Wolf. It’s warm outside. We’ll eat, have a few drinks. We won’t stay out too late.”

Wolfgang took her hand and followed. “Well, it
is
Valentine’s Day.”

They dined at Abe’s White Doorknob on Preston Street. It was either there or Cunningham’s at Fifth and Breckinridge; both were known for their supplies of illegal liquor. Cunningham’s was owned by a police captain, and Rose had joked that she didn’t want to celebrate their late anniversary within view of the police, so they’d taken a horse carriage to the Doorknob. They both ordered steak and potatoes and laughed in the dim light. They stole kisses in the shadows of their private corner table and sipped on illegal bourbon. Rose leaned over the table and whispered, “Let’s go home, Wolf.”

They walked hand in hand out on the sidewalk, both tipsy from the bourbon. Rose showed no signs of the disease, and despite her loss of weight, her energy had fully returned. Wolfgang thanked God for her recovery as they walked along. The sun set behind the downtown buildings in smears of red and orange. A block down, a man in a top hat gave a hot dog to a little girl in a green dress. A horse-and-buggy hurried down the street, the carriage wheels bouncing noisily over the potted road. Wolfgang felt the breeze of the carriage as it sped by.

Then the heel of Rose’s left shoe stuck in a crack in the sidewalk and her foot came right out of it. She laughed as she stumbled forward. Wolfgang stopped to get her shoe. It was red. She’d worn the shoes because they matched the rose in her hair. Her favorite colors were red and yellow. Wolfgang heard the car before he saw it. Kneeling on the sidewalk, he looked up to find Rose a few feet out into the street, her back turned to the oncoming car. She stood on one foot, tipsy, trying to remove her other shoe.

“Rose!” Wolfgang screamed.

She looked over her shoulder, a smile still etched on her face.

Rose’s body folded. She hit the windshield, and when the car finally stopped, her body flew through the air and landed in the middle of the street.

Wolfgang hurried with her red shoe still in his grip. He knelt beside her. Her eyes followed his. Blood pooled on the street behind her head. A crowd gathered around, and the driver jumped from his still running car, left his door open, and ran toward them. Wolfgang’s outstretched hand kept him at a distance.

“Rose…” Wolfgang ran his hands across her hair and face.

She found his eyes again and smiled. Only Rose would smile. Blood stained her dress, bright red on yellow. Wolfgang spotted the rose from her hair a few yards away, propped against the dirty curb.

“Wolf…”

He touched a finger to her lips and stretched to examine the wound in the back of her head, shocked that she was still alive at all. He kissed her forehead, inhaling the scent of her. He pressed his hand against the wound, but the blood continued to pump through his grip.

Rose stared upward. “Wolf…where do we go?”

Then the life vanished from Rose’s eyes. He closed them for her and looked up toward the sky, and he blamed God.

God continued to deliver. A new patient, a fifty-year-old man named Cecil, arrived three days after Big Fifteen’s death. He’d played the clarinet for forty years and agreed to join the ensemble if and when Dr. Barker reinstated the concert and allowed the rehearsals to go on. Two days later a new nurse arrived at Waverly. Beverly was a twenty-five-year-old brunette with a deep southern drawl and a budding violin hobby, and was spotted taking tips from Josef after hours on her first night on the job. Four new patients volunteered for the chorus, three men and a woman—not professionals, but willing and eager to sing—and their ranges included two tenors, one contralto, and one soprano.

Wolfgang stopped Dr. Barker in the hall one afternoon. “God continues to send musicians. I truly believe we all have a purpose here.” Barker moved on without comment.

The new arrivals fueled Wolfgang. He continued to work with the choir members individually and in small groups, by their bedsides, as often as he could. He encouraged them to not give up hope, leaving the door open for Barker to have a change of heart. He visited Frederick several times a day and played for him beside his bed. On one of his visits, Wolfgang left him with the picture Susannah had taken of his wife and son. Frederick placed it beside his pillow.

Valentine’s Day was rapidly approaching, only a few days away. Despite the spotty security in the woods, or maybe because of it, Wolfgang continued to walk Susannah home every night and then returned to the piano and the fourth-floor solarium to work on the requiem. It was progressing quite well. He was three-fourths of the way through and moving quickly, even more so now that rehearsals had been canceled. But underfoot he was beginning to feel the quagmire of doubts that had bogged him down before McVain’s arrival. He was still in need of the perfect ending.

***

Herman was ranting again, shouting Dr. Barker’s name from the rooftop, as loud as his tubercular lungs would allow. Wolfgang endured it for a few minutes before slamming his pen down, standing from the piano and marching down to Barker’s office, where he found his boss at his desk, massaging his temples.

“What does that lunatic want?” Barker asked Wolfgang.

“I don’t know.” Wolfgang leaned against the doorway. “But he won’t stop until you pay him a visit.”

Dr. Barker stood so fast that his chair toppled over.

When they reached the nurses’ station on the rooftop, they found Susannah standing at Room 502. Apparently Herman wouldn’t even allow her inside. He was still chanting, “Dr. Barker…Dr. Barker…Dr. Barker…”

Barker ignored Susannah and hammered on the door. “Herman, open up, it’s me. Stop screaming…HERMAN!”

Maverly Simms showed herself in the doorway to her darkened room. “Maverly at Waverly…Maverly at Waverly…”

Dr. Barker turned toward Wolfgang and hissed. “Shut her up.”

Maverly started to whimper. The doctor pounded on Herman’s door again, and finally Herman stopped. The door opened a crack and Herman’s face was visible, his wandering eyes looking Barker up and down.

“What is it, Herman?” asked Dr. Barker.

The door opened wide and Herman took up most of the doorway. “You stopped the concert.”

Dr. Barker closed his eyes and sighed, as if trying with every fiber of his being not to strangle Herman.

Herman stepped closer. “You stopped my concert.” Wolfgang saw the overhead light glisten off the polished tines, but he couldn’t shout in time as Herman brought the fork down into the meat of Dr. Barker’s left shoulder.

***

Barker allowed Wolfgang to stitch him up, but he remained silent.

And when he left for the night, he stalked past Wolfgang and Susannah through the Grand Lobby, still in a silent fury, a hump underneath his coat by his left shoulder, where he was heavily bandaged.

The door to the entrance opened before Dr. Barker reached it. He froze. His wife, Anne, walked into the lobby with a gray satchel in each hand. She stood in her black shoes and ivory coat, staring at her husband. Her hair was brown but beginning to gray beneath a rounded ivory hat.

Wolfgang stopped and watched the estranged couple. Anne was normally quite friendly to Wolfgang, but this night she didn’t smile. Her green eyes were tired and focused on her husband, the surprise on her aged face as apparent as the shock on Dr. Barker’s.

Then Anne coughed into her fist.

Dr. Barker’s head lowered, and Wolfgang understood.

The newest patient had arrived at Waverly.