White Wind Blew (7 page)

He still watched her throughout the entire Mass. He watched her lips move as she sang along with the choir. Father Peterson had told them to carry their
Liber
Usualis
with them everywhere they went, and if confronted with temptation, put eyes and mind to word and prayer. Wolfgang didn’t have his
Liber
Usualis
. He’d left it at home on his desk. So his eyes stayed on her every time she stood, sat, and kneeled. Friar Garney had laughed when he’d given Wolfgang advice on women, which was to blur the eyes and pretend they were monsters. Wolfgang tried that as well, but no amount of blurring could mask her beauty.

He couldn’t get her out of his mind after that day. Every afternoon he returned to Mass at the cathedral with hopes of seeing her again.

Two weeks later on a Sunday, a light rain fell. Wolfgang hurried along the slick sidewalk with an umbrella, hobbling more because of the rain, and his left foot got too far ahead of his right. He slipped just before the cathedral steps but managed to catch himself with his outstretched hands, avoiding injury. He felt like a fool and quickly wiped his hands off on his pants. Lowering his head against the rain, he moved up the steps. He opened the cathedral door and spotted her coming up the sidewalk, moving hurriedly in a blue dress and heels, protecting herself with a black umbrella. Wolfgang held the door open at that moment, allowing the wind to blow rain inside the front of the cathedral. Finally a cluster of people moved inside, thanking him as he soaked himself in the rain. But he hadn’t been holding the door for them.

She lowered her umbrella when she reached the first step. Her hips moved beneath the tight blue dress and an urge swept over Wolfgang. He resisted. He never expected her to talk to him, but she looked up. They locked eyes.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Me? Yes…”

“I followed you up the street.” She clutched his left forearm with her right hand and led him inside. “I saw you slip and fall.”

“I’m fine, thank you.” Wolfgang wondered if she would have touched his forearm so easily if she’d known that he was a student at Saint Meinrad and that he’d been wearing the Roman and Jesuit cassocks for two years now.

Once inside, she ran her hand over the front of her dress, flicking off tiny beads of rainwater. She shook water from her hair and smiled at him. Her eyes were blue, her lips full, and her smile framed by dimples.

“You had a chance earlier to close the door, on the steps back there.”

Wolfgang blushed.

“You waited for me, didn’t you?” Another smile. And then she touched his arm again. “I thought it was sweet.” She extended her hand. “I’m Rose.”

“I’m Wolfgang.” He shook her small hand, his palm memorizing the feel of every bone, ridge, and knuckle in her grip.

“Do you mind if I sit with you today, Wolfgang?”

His heart raced. Sweat had already begun to wipe away the residue of her grip on his palm. “Of course.”

“Of course, you mind?”

“No, no, I mean—”

She laughed. “Wolfgang, I’m kidding.”

He started off toward his seat in the back, and she held on to his arm as if being escorted. Wolfgang looked down to his right foot, aware of his pace and the awkwardness of his steps with another in tow.

“Don’t be ashamed, Wolfgang,” said Rose. “I like your limp.”

“Really?”

“Not everyone has one, you know.” She squeezed his elbow, and the pressure helped to ease his speeding heart. They sat side by side during Mass. Wolfgang sat with his legs straight and his feet flat on the floor. Rose sat with her right leg crossed over her left, exposing part of her thigh. At some point during the Mass she whispered in his ear, “I love the Coronation Window. Don’t you? The colors are beautiful.”

Wolfgang turned his head toward her, their faces less than a foot apart. She smelled of something exotic and pure. “Yes,” he told her.

Rose patted the top of his hand, and they both returned their attention to the priest and the altar.

***

In his mind, Wolfgang still talked to Rose, almost nightly. He knew it was silly; in fact, it was just the kind of reaction he saw at times with intensely grief-stricken relatives of his patients. But he desperately clung to the intimate details of her face. He’d had nightmares of not remembering what she’d looked like. He asked her questions. He laughed about their memories.

Rose never answered back.

Swaths of dusty sunlight hit the shiny floor of the Grand Lobby, where a bright red cardinal fluttered around the white columns, frantically searching for a way out of the sanatorium. Wolfgang’s footsteps echoed off the tall ceiling as he hurried toward the north wing, oblivious of the trapped bird, and of Susannah and Dr. Barker standing behind two of the columns with towels in their hands. The front door was propped open. The warm weather had returned for another day. The bird dove and nearly took Wolfgang’s head off, but he ducked just in time.

He squatted on the ground and spotted Susannah a few feet away.

“That was close.” She watched the bird as she spoke to him. “You in a hurry?”

“I’m looking for Lincoln.” Wolfgang ducked again as the cardinal swooped low and then back up toward the ceiling.

“You’re heading in the right direction.” Susannah made a play for the bird when it stopped on the floor a few feet away. She attempted to cover it with the towel and actually thought she’d been successful, only to turn the towel over and find it empty. She looked back toward Wolfgang. “Last I saw Lincoln, he was in the morgue. About twenty minutes ago. Something wrong?”

“Mr. Jenkins passed away during the night.” Wolfgang stood, careful of the flying bird. “I wanted to catch him before he sent the body away.”

Dr. Barker’s voice rang out. “I got it. I got it.” He took off toward the front door and opened the towel. The bird was hesitant at first but then took off toward the trees. Dr. Barker returned a moment later, towel in hand. He smiled at Susannah. “How about that? I did it.”

Susannah nodded. “Very impressive, Dr. Barker. Lincoln now has competition.”

“That he does.” Dr. Barker moved on toward the east wing, folding the towel as he went. To help circulate more air, Waverly’s doors were often left open, especially when the weather was mild. Sometimes birds accidently flew into the sanatorium. And if not through the doors, they oftentimes slithered in through creases or holes in the solarium screens. When it happened, Lincoln was usually called in to catch the bird, but this time Dr. Barker had insisted on trying it himself.

Susannah knelt down next to one of the columns and wiped bird droppings from the floor. “
Othello
is playing in the theater in an hour.”

“I’m sorry I’ll have to miss it.”

“Your new helper in the chapel. Jesse.” Susannah stood up. “He’s volunteered to play Cassio.”

“He doesn’t even know how to read.”

“This isn’t exactly Broadway, Wolfgang.”

“True.” Wolfgang started off toward the north wing. He waved without turning around and then headed down the hallway. He ducked his head into the morgue, which reeked of cleansing solution. The floors had recently been washed. Dead bodies lay under blue sheets on all six tables. The three trays on the far side of the room were occupied as well; the corpse on the middle tray had long red hair that reminded Wolfgang of his mother. Curls fell from the end of the tray, the tips scraping the wet surface of the floor. He looked away.

No Lincoln.

Wolfgang checked the freezer room next. It was a cold storage for Waverly’s dairy, meat, vegetables, and fruits. And it probably wasn’t too far away from being used as cadaver storage if the death rate didn’t slow.

Wolfgang continued down the hallway and through a pair of metal doors. The large roll-up gate that led directly to the body chute was open. Amid the darkness and cobwebs he heard footsteps. He stepped into the chute and spotted Lincoln kneeling down beside a coffin.

“There you are.”

Lincoln, his face half concealed by shadows, looked up from his kneeling position on the floor. He grinned. “Peeping Tom.” His voice echoed in the cool, dank air. “You sly devil. I told you. Marlene is the one you want to see naked.”

Wolfgang ignored him.

“Well, how did she look?”

“Dr. Barker just caught a cardinal bird in the lobby.”

“What? That’s my thing.”

Wolfgang shuffled fully into the tunnel and squatted down to help Lincoln position the wooden coffin on the pulley system to the right side of the chute. “So Mr. Jenkins didn’t make it through the night?”

Lincoln stood, knees popping, and tapped the top of the coffin. “Couldn’t pry the harmonica from his grip. Had a smile on his face, though.”

Wolfgang sighed. Darkness filled the chute. There was no electricity. On the left side of the chute, a set of elongated platform stairs ran alongside the winch system that gradually lowered the coffins downward and toward the hearses that idled next to the railroad tracks, awaiting pickup. The same reversible system brought supplies up the hillside on delivery days. Drop-off was right outside the bottom of the chute. Lincoln and a few other orderlies were responsible for getting everything up into the main building, and the winch system was the easiest way to go. In years past, some of the men who delivered to Waverly would stop and chat and even help get the supplies up the chute. But the current team would be in and out like phantoms, petrified of tuberculosis. Afraid that any moment the Waverly wind could swoop down the chute and invade their lungs.

Wolfgang had been inside the chute with Lincoln one morning when the delivery truck arrived. They’d waited in the shadows at the bottom of the chute and watched as two young men hastily unloaded the boxes from the back of their truck. “They were practically tossing them inside the chute,” Wolfgang had told Susannah later in the day. “They wore white masks over their noses and mouths, and their fidgety eyes followed every sound. They flung a receipt atop the pile as if the boxes were going to explode.” Just as they turned back to the truck, Lincoln had stepped out of the shadows with his arms outstretched like a creature of the dead. “Maverly at Waverly,” he hissed. “Maverly at Waverly.”

One of the young men slipped on some gravel. The other one shouted, “It’s one of them,” and quickly locked himself in the truck. “He actually started driving off before the other one could make it!” Wolfgang had told her, laughing uproariously.

Wolfgang remembered the incident every time he entered the chute. Waverly needed more young men like Lincoln. He could be obnoxious and crude, but he was a treasure, and loyal to a fault. Lincoln’s father and grandparents had all battled tuberculosis—and lost—so Lincoln was determined to fight it off, especially after his two older sisters had succumbed to the disease in the early 1920s.

It was his stubbornness that had brought Lincoln to Waverly, despite the pleas from his mother to stay away, not to run into the lion’s den and chase the beast responsible for wiping out half of their family. His mother had told him numerous times that he had no medical training. “Don’t go looking for it. It’ll kill you like it killed your sisters.” But that didn’t matter to Lincoln, and it didn’t stop him from marching up the hillside one April morning in 1926 with a bag in each hand, prepared for the long haul. And when Dr. Henry Waters had stopped him in the lobby to ask if he needed to be checked in, confusing him for a new patient, Lincoln had said calmly, “No, sir, but I’m a volunteer ready to go to war.”

Wolfgang had heard the story of Lincoln’s arrival from Dr. Waters, and they’d both admired the boy’s grit, immediately feeling at ease with his sense of humor. Months later, they invited him to Dr. Waters’s cottage for a game of cards. Just before shuffling the virgin deck, Lincoln pulled a bottle of brandy from his bag. With a cautious look, he said, “You two aren’t prohibitionists, are you?”

To which Dr. Waters replied, “We’re Catholic. I’ll get the glasses. You start pouring.”

So far, and for no reason other than luck and sheer willpower, Lincoln had managed to keep the white death from entering his body. He’d never had a positive x-ray in nearly four years of labor on the hillside, and the staff was checked every year.

Wolfgang stood beside Mr. Jenkins’s coffin, careful not to look Lincoln in the eyes and invite a deeper discussion of last night’s incident with Marlene on the porch. Wolfgang touched the top of the coffin and imagined Mr. Jenkins inside, resting peacefully, eyes closed, the harmonica in his grip, his hair neatly combed for the trip downward.

A few months ago, in the beginning of October, Wolfgang had stopped at the doorway of the morgue. Lincoln was crying. Maybe not crying, but sniffling. He was working on a male patient he’d befriended at the beginning of the summer. Wolfgang saw the black comb in Lincoln’s hand and how carefully his young assistant was dividing the part on the left side of the dead man’s hair. Wolfgang left him alone, for the interruption would have embarrassed him. Only he knew that Lincoln combed the hair of each and every victim, male or female, before their final descent from Waverly down the chute.

Wolfgang motioned the sign of the cross over the wooden box and then whispered a quick prayer for Mr. Jenkins.

They sat silent for a moment before Lincoln burst out with laughter.

“What’s so funny?” asked Wolfgang.

Lincoln tapped the top of the coffin. “I sent Mr. Jenkins down twenty minutes ago. You just blessed our newest shipment of alcohol.” Lincoln arched his fingers under the lid and pried it open. It creaked and wood splinters fell to the concrete floor. Bottles of bourbon, wine, and beer rested in pockets of hay. “Want one?”

“No…not now,” stammered Wolfgang.

“Haven’t you ever wondered how I got the booze in here? Your extra wine?”

“I gave up on the notion long ago, Lincoln,” said Wolfgang. “This isn’t going to help my inability to sleep, you know.”

Lincoln sat back down and patted Wolfgang’s knee. He stared down the dark chute for a moment. “I know it was my choice to work here, Wolf, but it don’t change the fact that sometimes I feel like a prisoner.”

“You’re not alone in that regard.”

Lincoln let out a quick laugh. “You know what I’m craving?”

“What?”

Lincoln stared at the coffin. “A Hot Brown from the Brown Hotel.”

“That does sound good,” said Wolfgang. “Rose and I had one when they first started making them.”

“Open-faced with that turkey.” Lincoln’s eyes grew large. “Cheese and bacon under the broiler. And that special sauce.”

“Mornay.” Wolfgang laughed. “Rose tried making her own.”

“And?”

“I told her I loved it.” Wolfgang grinned as he reminisced. “But it was pretty bad.” He chewed on the memories for a moment. “Did you find a bundle of letters in Mr. Jenkins’s room? I promised I’d get them to his daughter.”

Lincoln stood. “His stuff’s in a locker. Barker wanted his room cleaned out right away. Someone else is already moving in.”

***

During his morning rounds, Wolfgang managed to scratch off over half of the morning’s request list, with most of the tunes requiring the violin. By noon his right shoulder hurt from all the playing, but he was determined to finish the list by the end of his shift, which he was able to do most every day, even if he had to abbreviate many of the requests.

He took a break at noon to meet the farm boy and
Othello
star in the chapel to go over how to make communion bread. A budding thespian Jesse was not, according to those who had seen him in the morning on stage. Word had made it back to Wolfgang within ten minutes after the shortened play. He’d missed his lines. His timing was impeccably bad. He overacted. But he apparently had fun doing it, and the crowd of tuberculosis patients had been amused. The tragedy had been turned into a comedy of sorts. And was that not the entire purpose, Wolfgang thought, to be entertained? He regretted not seeing Jesse live on stage.

He found Jesse hunched over the altar, staring down at a piece of paper, as if trying to read. He looked up, startled, as Wolfgang approached.

“What do you have there, Jesse?”

Jesse handed him the note. Wolfgang read what had been printed in blank ink:
We
know
about
the
alcohol, Father. This Klan hangs bootleggers from trees.

Wolfgang looked up. “Where did you get this?”

Jesse pointed to the altar. “On top there. It was weighted down by the rope when I come in.”

Wolfgang lifted the thick rope, which had been tied into a noose.

“Somethin’ wrong, Doctor?”

Wolfgang placed the noose back on the altar and shoved the note into the pocket of his white coat. “No,” he lied. “Everything is fine. Let’s start with the bread, shall we?”

Jesse seemed eager to learn, although all Wolfgang would let him do was watch. He couldn’t allow a TB patient to handle bread that would at some point make it into the mouths of other TB patients. Wolfgang worked quickly because he was preoccupied: he was thinking about the note and about his plans for McVain after his shift was over.

Jesse watched from a safe distance with a goofy smile on his face as Wolfgang demonstrated how to warm the honey and mix it into the dry ingredients. He explained how long to bake it, how to cut a cross into it, how many pieces to break it into, and how to refrigerate some and store the rest in the freezer. How to take his time and not rush. And how to do it all with a pleasant smile because the Lord would be watching him prepare the very bread that would be consecrated into the body of Christ.

As Wolfgang worked on the bread, Jesse was full of questions. Yes, the abbot was in charge of the abbey, and the monks taught the classes, and there were priests and brothers, and, yes, I’d be happy to take you there once you get out of Waverly, Jesse.

Wolfgang left Jesse to clean up the mess, which he began to do with the same goofy smile.
God
love
’em,
Wolfgang thought as he’d hurried up to the fourth-floor solarium to find McVain resting with his eyes open.

Wolfgang sat by his side, gazing out at those same trees, as if having the same focal point would help him tap into McVain’s thoughts.
If
I
can’t coax him into a conversation
, Wolfgang thought,
maybe
I
can
bore
him
into
it
. So ten minutes of meaningless—unanswered—questions soon turned into a droning monologue about his Edison records and the new blue cylinders that held four minutes instead of two, leaving McVain on the verge of sleep, or perhaps it was nausea.