With Every Breath (9 page)

“Do you suppose Mr. Twain will write another sequel to
Tom
Sawyer
?” Hannah Wexler asked. “
Huckleberry Finn
was so good, and he ought to do another.”

“Maybe we should write a letter and ask about plans for a sequel,” Kate suggested.

“Could we really do that?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Leonard Wilkes perked up. “Tell him the request comes from a bunch of patients dying in a tubercular ward. That ought to light a fire under him!”

He snickered, and Hannah joined him in a guilty chuckle. This sort of gallows humor always made Kate wince. What
kind of person would she be if she joined in their laughter? And yet it was common for the patients to jest about their illness. Yesterday Leonard joked that Dr. Kendall’s serum was so awful he was likely to die from the taste before tuberculosis got him.

“Very well, it is resolved,” Kate said. “I will draft a letter to Mr. Twain and will circulate it among the patients for anyone who wishes to sign.”

When the letter was written, she donned her mask and brought it to every patient in the ward for their signature. As she approached Ephraim Montgomery’s bed, his ghastly pallor and sunken eyes made it look as though he were already dead, but the slow, shallow breaths indicated he was only sleeping. She tiptoed past to the next patient.

“Can’t I sign?” Ephraim wheezed.

Kate froze. “I’m sorry, I thought you were asleep.”

Ephraim struggled to rise. His hand trembled, making his signature scrawl across the bottom of the page. “Tell him to hurry,” he said with a resigned smile.

Her vision blurred with a sheen of tears. Her nose twitched, and the back of her throat hurt as she collected the last of the signatures in the men’s ward. She dashed back to the office, reaching for a handkerchief and blowing her nose, smothering an ungainly sob in the soft cotton fabric.

“No sniveling, Kate.”

Trevor didn’t even look up from his desk. Temptation clawed at her to ball up the handkerchief and throw it at him, but that would only prove that he was right about how draining it was to make friends with these people. She folded the handkerchief and slid it back into the top drawer.

“Just a bit of hay fever,” she sniffed.

Mercifully he didn’t argue with her. If she were a better Christian, she wouldn’t find dealing with death so difficult. Why was
it easy for her to believe in a loving God but still be terrified of watching people die? She hadn’t handled Nathan’s death well. Even four years after the accident, she still wrestled with questions and doubts about why such a healthy, cheerful man had been snatched away so early. She prayed, she sought counsel, but still she questioned. So far there’d been no answers to soothe her apprehension, only the looming fear that such a tragedy might someday overwhelm her again.

* * * *

No city in the country was more eager for news than Washington, D.C. Journalists tracked each morsel of gossip flowing out of Capitol Hill, rushing to be the first to get the story into print. Political news was a major staple around the boardinghouse dining table, and this morning was no different. Kate startled when she saw the newspaper’s headline.

President
Harrison Threatens to Send Marines to Chile
.

“What?” Kate gasped. “Why is the president mad at Chile?”

“He’s not,” Harvey Goldstein said as he cut into his morning omelet. Harvey was a reporter for the
New York Times
and always had his ear to the ground. “The British are supporting rebels in Chile and are sending them aid. Rumor has it President Harrison is likely to retaliate by sending the marines to the other side.” The reporter glanced over at Charlie. “What’s the word in Congress on that?”

One of the benefits of living at the Norton Boardinghouse was hearing political gossip before it leaked into the newspapers. It was the reason journalists liked living there. Charlie considered the question carefully before answering.

“The president is still licking his wounds for sending the marines to Argentina last year. It will be a gamble to intervene down south again.”

The talk was enough to give Kate an upset stomach for the entire day at the hospital. They couldn’t send Tick to the wilds of South America over some silly quarrel with the British, could they? True, he was assigned to the surgeon general, but if the country engaged in a military intervention, anything could happen and Tick could find himself on a battlefield.

It was hard to concentrate on her statistics with her mind wracked with worry. Especially since Trevor wouldn’t stop fiddling with his pencil. From the other side of the office he kept rapping his pencil on his desk as he read a medical journal.

“Could you please stop that incessant tapping?”

The noise stopped, but a few minutes later he was back at it.

“Trevor!”

It stopped again. “Sorry,” he said dryly. “I find the amount of frilly knickknacks suddenly populating my work space brings out my old nervous habits.”

Kate glanced at the two potted plants and the lace doilies on the table. They made the place look much nicer, but Trevor grunted when he saw them. “Dust collectors,” he muttered under his breath, but he hadn’t asked her to remove them.

The moment it was five o’clock, Kate went tearing across town to the Marine Barracks and was able to coax Tick out to dinner at a local pub. No sooner had they sat down than she broached the topic.

“About Chile,” she began.

Tick interrupted her before she could even start. “If they call us up, I’m going.”

“But surely that’s not what you want!” She would think of something, pull a string somewhere to get him out of it.

“No one wants to go, but if it happens, it happens. Besides, it wouldn’t be so bad to see something of the world.”

“Something like rebels armed with British rifles and grenades?
Or the opportunity to catch cholera and malaria? Or how about another round of diphtheria?”

“Kate, I can’t live my life in the shadow of your fears. I’m sorry about what happened to Carl and Jamie, but you can’t keep me wrapped up in cotton for the rest of my life.”

Was she so obvious? Watching Carl and then Jamie die from diphtheria haunted her for years, and surely it was natural to protect her only surviving brother.

Natural but not wise. Her father had been warning Kate to quit hovering over Tick so much, but she couldn’t bear any more loss in her life. Nathan’s death only reinforced all her old fears about how fleeting life could be.

“Do you ever think about them?” she asked. “Carl and Jamie?”

Tick’s smile was sad as he held a cup of coffee between his hands. “I don’t really remember them. I was only four when it happened, remember?”

“Right. I feel so helpless,” she mumbled. “You could get shipped off to fight some war we don’t care about. Trevor has been getting horrible stories written about him in the newspapers, and I haven’t been a lick of help getting them stopped. I want to
fix
things so all this won’t happen.”

Tick’s eyes twinkled, and he drew a long sip of coffee. “Poor Kate . . . wanting to run the world and yet no one will let her.”

She kicked him under the table, but before he could respond, a musician in the corner of the pub picked up a fiddle and began playing a tune.

Kate stiffened. Tick shot to his feet and said, “I’ll go ask him to stop.”

He was gone before she could say anything. For years the sound of a fiddle was enough to reduce Kate to tears. The bright, lively music would always remind her of Nathan, but her heart had mended. Now the sound of a fiddle only brought a gentle
rush of bittersweet memories. The music lurched to a halt in the corner while Tick leaned over to whisper to the fiddler.

“He’ll hold off until we leave,” Tick said after he returned to her side, looking down with concern in his somber blue eyes. “You okay?”

She stood and impulsively kissed each of his cheeks.

“Kate,” he said in a warning growl.

“Sorry!” she said, smiling. When he was little, she used to pinch his cheeks and kiss his face silly, but for his sixteenth birthday she promised she would quit. Sometimes she still slipped up, though.

“You’re not sorry at all.” He wiped his face but was grinning as he escorted her out the door.

* * * *

A veil of low-hanging clouds cast the morning into faint shades of gray. A storm was brewing, and the electricity in the air stretched Trevor’s nerves even tighter as he strode to the hospital, the summons burning in his pocket.

In a perfect world he would never need to deal with another hospital administrator as long as he lived. The people who ran hospitals were rarely men of medicine, and Frederick Lambrecht was no exception. The hospital’s superintendent was nothing more than a bureaucrat who quibbled over the cost of test tubes or the expense of feeding dying patients in a tubercular ward. Every time Trevor was pulled away to go blather with some hospital administrator, he was losing research time when he could be making headway against the disease that was killing thousands of people each year.

He went through the administrative wing, rapped on the superintendent’s door, and entered without waiting for a reply. He would waste no time on niceties.

“I pay the food bill for the patients out of my own pocket,” Trevor said as he slapped a grocer’s bill on Mr. Lambrecht’s spacious walnut desk. If the administrator was so concerned about costs, perhaps he could swap that gleaming antique desk for a plain oak desk like Trevor used. The velvet draperies and silk rug also had no place in a hospital concerned with trimming costs.

Mr. Lambrecht pushed the invoices back toward Trevor. “I am well aware of your generosity in supplying beef and dairy to the patients,” he said. “But the food is cooked in hospital kitchens, using hospital staff, and served by hospital attendants. None of this comes cheaply. Why can’t your patients eat the same food all the other patients receive?”

“A carefully controlled diet is part of my study,” he replied. “The patients do better when they keep weight on.”

“Then I insist you help fund the added kitchen expense. When I agreed to take this study, I was assured the hospital would incur no additional expense.”

Trevor glared. Frederick Lambrecht never “agreed” to take this study. He grudgingly accepted the tubercular clinic on his hospital’s fifth floor because the surgeon general insisted on it. The hospital was funded on federal dollars and was therefore obliged to accept government directives in matters of public health.

Nevertheless, the complaint was valid. Trevor’s demands for his patients’ diet were exacting, and the lead cook had been amazed when Trevor outlined the high volume he expected the kitchen to deliver. He did some quick mental calculations.

“I am willing to fund an additional cook to supplement the kitchen staff,” he conceded.

“And the attendants?”

“Forget it. I see those women loitering in the halls without enough to do as it is.” Clusters of them giggled in the hallway
whenever he walked past. Lately one of them had taken to slipping him notes in the hallway. It was awkward and he wished they would stop.

“Your patients have been making heavy use of hospital supplies. The amount we spend on soap has soared.”

Trevor rocked back in his seat. “Soap? You’re begrudging my patients
soap
? What kind of doctor would I be if I didn’t insist on cleanliness?”

Mr. Lambrecht narrowed his eyes. “That brings me to my next topic. I’m sure the articles appearing in various Washington newspapers have not escaped your notice. The words
quack
and
disgrace
were never used in relation to this hospital before you arrived.”

The barb hurt. Nothing in his professional career infuriated him as much as those vile articles, but he would not waste his time by placating idiots. “It’s just a bunch of muckraking journalists who want to whip up paranoia to sell newspapers.”

“Perhaps, but the publicity is damaging the hospital, and I want it stopped.”

“And how do you propose I do that? I’ve already demanded a retraction, and they haven’t done so. If you have another suggestion, I would welcome it.”

“I’m not interested in cleaning up your scandal,” Mr. Lambrecht snapped. “If you can’t maintain a respectable reputation, I want you out. You can take your patients and move elsewhere.”

“I would like to see you explain that to the surgeon general.”

“Don’t be so sure you have the surgeon general’s full support,” Mr. Lambrecht said. “No politician likes to see this sort of scandal splashed across the newspapers.”

“Barrow is a man of science. He’s a doctor, not a politician.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Mr. Lambrecht. “No man that high in the government is immune from politics,
and trust me, he’s angry about these reports. If there is one more damaging article in the newspapers, I’m taking my complaints to the surgeon general. And then I want you out of the hospital.”

On that refreshing note, Trevor grabbed the food invoices on the desk and stormed from the office. Few doctors wanted to be associated with tuberculosis, as there was no glamour or prestige in curing a disease that primarily afflicted the poor and uneducated. The surgeon general was different, though. Soldiers and sailors lived in cramped quarters that mimicked the conditions of the urban tenements, so he had a vested interest in funding Trevor’s work. But apparently even the surgeon general had a limited supply of patience.

The meeting with the hospital’s superintendent made Trevor late for work, and it was raining outside, which only added to the ominous sense of foreboding that had been plaguing him for months.

Kate was already at her desk, contemplating a tableful of numbers. She wore a starched collar with a slim black tie tucked into her vest, her red-gold hair neatly coiled atop her head. By heaven, was there anything more attractive than watching a pretty woman tackle a thorny mathematical equation?

“Good morning, Kate. If you looked any smarter, I’d fear you were after my position.”