Fever (27 page)

He woke up one night to Eric shaking him awake. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked and Alfred realized he’d been shouting, thrashing. There was no sympathy in the question, only accusation. It wasn’t Alfred’s fault that Gustaf had miscalculated the tree. The Swedes talked all day long and sang songs, and where before their red faces had seemed so merry now they seemed to Alfred to be part of their selfishness. They were monsters, the two of them. Who but a monster would choose to live so far from civilization, would dig a hole in the snow and call it a place to live? There were strange animals in the North Country, tracks he didn’t recognize, and he knew they were all gathered somewhere deep in the shadows of the pines, waiting to see what he would do.

He would always be the odd man out, even if he handed over every single drop, every pill. Gustaf didn’t seem to be getting worse, but he wasn’t getting better, either, and now when Eric gave him more of Alfred’s medicine, Alfred felt his blood rise. He doesn’t need it, he said, and Eric looked at Alfred like he’d stepped out naked from behind a curtain. Alfred took bigger and bigger doses at night, and again in the morning so that he could get his share before the Swedes took everything. No more trees were cut. Where before the days had been full of the sounds of work—cutting, cracking, splintering, chopping—now the days were as still and silent as night except for the occasional sound of the skillet on the fire, the pop and crackle of bacon meeting the hot pan, Eric’s boots crunching the top layer of snow outside their tent flap, and finally, ten days after the accident, the sound of cracking on the river, like a volley of gunshots every few minutes, a racket unlike any Alfred had heard in his life.

“You have to go to the crossroads,” Eric told him one morning, two weeks after the accident. “Luc should have been back days ago. Send him back and bring help as well.” He put his hand on his brother’s head. “I think there’s something broken inside. Not just the shoulder. A few bones maybe. I don’t know.”

“I’m not sure I remember the way. Did we pass one other clearing or two? Can I take the compass?”

Eric looked at him with disgust. “You are not an axman,” he said bitterly as he shoved the compass to Alfred’s chest. “Leave that medicine for my brother’s pain.” He put his hand on the barrel of one of the shotguns that was lying on its side by Gustaf’s head. They kept it loaded in case of passing deer.

Alfred fished out one bottle of pills and gave it over easily, knowing he’d be back in the city soon.

“And the rest,” Eric said, using the shotgun to tap Alfred’s other pocket. Alfred closed his fingers around his last vial of morphine and the second bottle of bills. “I need it to get back. I can’t walk all that way and pull my things without it. I need it for rest. I don’t—”

Before Alfred could catch his breath he was on his back, and the Swede’s knee on his neck. He reached down with his good arm, found the bottle and vial, and pushed both into Eric’s face.

When he got to the crossroads he found Luc sitting between two men in the only public house for fifteen miles. All three glanced at Alfred as if they’d been expecting him. Alfred told Luc about the accident, told him about Gustaf’s injuries, but Luc nodded off while he was speaking. So Alfred returned to the crossroads to look for something to carry him back to the city.

  •  •  •  

It was April, and spring had already arrived in Minneapolis. The stink of his body was strong now that he was back where women wore tailored spring coats and the men were neatly shaved. The smoking lounge was shut down. At the boardinghouse he asked about work so he could pay his way back to Chicago and then to New York, but no one knew of anything. He went to the clinic on Lake Harriet and bought more medicine with the last of his money. It was a mistake, this place, all its foreign cleanliness. The shops closed early. The food was bland. All anyone talked about was his next meal, the weather, going hunting on the weekend. He had to get home as soon as possible. Thank God he hadn’t talked Mary into coming to this place.

He walked down to the stockyards, and then over to the train station, where several cargo cars were being coupled on the main track. When the railway man went inside the station house, Alfred walked along the track, peering into the dark cars. In one he sniffed corn. In another, buckwheat. In a third car he looked left and right and then noticed from within the darkness a pair of eyes. He felt a chill, and stepped back. “Get away,” a disembodied voice growled. “Or get out of sight.” Alfred climbed up and quickly moved to a shadowed corner. “Where is it going?” he whispered. “East?” As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the man was really a boy, fifteen or sixteen at most. Another voice said, “Boston.”

“Hold on, buddy,” the second voice said. “Are you sick?”

“No.”

“If you’re sick, we’re not getting help. You understand? We’ll bury you in this shit and leave you here.”

“I’m not sick.”

“You look kinda sick.”

“If you get us caught, I’ll kill you dead,” the first voice assured him as Alfred leaned into his bed of yellow peas. After a while, he heard the lock thrown in place on the other side of the door and the train began to rock toward the Atlantic.

HIS BANNER OVER ME IS LOVE

TWENTY-THREE

As she walked from St. John the Apostle to Dr. Tropp’s office, Mary clutched the torn-off corner of paper the nun had given her and prayed that Alfred had given the doctor his current address. She hadn’t seen him in seventeen months. Who had visited him in all that time he spent in the hospital? Who had made sure the doctors were doing their best? Not Liza, she thought with relief. But not Mary, either. He’d been alone in this horror while she’d been oblivious, making pastry downtown.

She had never before walked the neighborhood above Columbia University, and noticed that all the hectic life and energy of Morningside Heights was muffled and then silenced in the space of half a dozen blocks. Around the university were brownstones as beautiful as those on Park Avenue, and residential buildings with elevators inside. The sidewalks were neat, the lawns trim. Clusters of rosebushes punctuated the green spaces of campus like so many bright and shining jewels. But just above that, outside Dr. Tropp’s office on 129th Street, the sidewalks were silent, the trash bins unattended for weeks. The few automobiles scattered about the neighborhood were parked in every direction, some facing west, some east, some with their wheels up on the curb. There was a pigpen by the river, and the odor hung over the surrounding blocks.

No one answered her knock when she arrived at the doctor’s office, so she let herself in and caught him dozing at his desk. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, and when she was sure he was awake and paying attention, she told him that she was Alfred Briehof’s wife, just returned from abroad, and needed Alfred’s address. She looked around. There was no secretary. No patients. After hearing her business, the doctor’s expression became one of doubt, but he turned and searched his desk for a file. “Briehof,” he muttered as he moved papers back and forth. “I saw him only once since he came back from Minnesota. I can’t remember if he gave me an address.” Finally, he singled out a file from the mess and opened it. “Ah, yes,” he said, and Mary’s heart beat faster. “It’s 545 West 125th Street.”

Mary tried to check her anticipation, and reminded herself that she had not been kind to him the last time he tried to talk to her. Maybe he would turn her away now, just as she’d turned him away seventeen months earlier. Maybe the months he’d spent out west—doing what, Mary wanted to know—had taught him that the empty spaces in his life could easily be filled, and maybe he had no interest in Mary anymore. The satchel she’d been lugging around the city since leaving the boardinghouse felt much heavier than it had that morning. She thought of Mila and the boys, and wondered if Soper had gone looking for her there. She hoped Mila could convince him that she’d really left, and then Soper would leave them alone.

When she got to the building it seemed a little like a hotel, but one where the bellhop and the doorman had abandoned their posts years ago and left the lobby to be pulled down by cobwebs on the rafters, buried by mud tracked in from the street. She scanned the list of names beside the buzzers and there it was, halfway down. She pressed the button, and just as she began to worry that it didn’t work, she heard the sound of a man’s boots coming down the stairs. It didn’t sound like the step of a sick man, an incapacitated man, a man hobbled with injury and pain. She knew he’d spotted her through the glass of the door when the boots stopped. He pushed open the door and stepped outside.

“Mary,” he said, shoving his hands deep inside his pockets and leaning back on his heels. She noted the skin of his right hand, all the way up his arm to the place where his shirt was rolled to the elbow. His shirttail was hanging out over his pants, and he wore no socks in his shoes. There were dark rings under his eyes and his hair had more gray threaded through it than she remembered. But otherwise, he was himself, and within five seconds of seeing him again she knew that there was no Liza upstairs, no woman by any other name. She sniffed the air around him, out of habit, but smelled only aftershave, soap. His hair was damp, and he hadn’t yet combed it. She tilted her head and looked closer. He had none of that wolfish quality he had when he was drinking, always moving and itching to get out, always fiddling with something in his hands. Nor did he have that look he had back in 1909, when she’d seen him at the hearing. He was not full in the face, nor was he gaunt. He was not jumpy, and yet he gave off a gentle hint of impatience. She couldn’t quite read him.

“Can I come in?” she asked and watched his face as he noted her bag, the weight of it.

“Sure,” he said, as if he’d seen her the week before. He walked ahead of her down the long hall, but waited by the bottom of the stairs for her to go up ahead of him. “Second floor,” he said. He was quiet as he followed her up the stairs, his injured hand clutching the handrail. He moved slowly, carefully. When they got to the landing he nodded toward a door to her left and she pushed it open.

“I heard about your accident,” she said once they were both inside. She held out her hand so that he would show his injured arm. The skin there was raw, melted and cooled, and she wanted to run her palm over the surface, learn the new topography. There was no hair on that arm, and his hand appeared swollen, lumpy, as if it needed to be drained. She pressed the swollen part with her fingertip.

“It’s fine now,” he said. “I was lucky.”

“I just found out,” she said, as if this would explain why she hadn’t sought him out earlier. “Then Jimmy said you might have gone out west.”

“Ah,” he said, as if it didn’t matter to him. “I was planning on sending you a letter, but then . . .” He trailed off, distracted by something she couldn’t see or hear. He turned to the counter, began to open and close cabinet doors. His room was not neat, she noted, but it was not dirty. His bed was unmade but the sheets appeared clean. The counter was cluttered with mugs and bowls and spoons, but all seemed washed, left there to dry. Dirty laundry was piled in a corner instead of scattered everywhere underfoot. Once she understood that he was well enough to live in the world outside the hospital, she expected a scene, she expected to have to make her case to him right away, to roll up her sleeves and peel the years back and back and back until they were exhausted, and there was nothing further to say except what was new and now, and how they’d cope with tomorrow. She expected to have to draw a boundary and show it to him. She’d prepared herself for blame and had lined up a list of grievances she’d level at him if he implied for a second that their split was her fault. Instead, he seemed to barely register her presence.

“Coffee?” he asked without looking at her. He turned over the mug on the counter and found another from within a cupboard that held only a few mismatched plates.

“You all right, Alfred?” she asked. Maybe an accident like the one he’d had changes a person. Maybe she’d been too cruel, leaving him in the vestibule that time. Maybe he’d waited for her and waited for her, and when she didn’t come back, and didn’t search for him, he’d had to shake himself loose of her for good. Maybe he’d made his own vows to himself, and her showing up now had knocked him off balance. She cast her eye quickly around the kitchen and noted a single bottle of Powers Gold on the top shelf of the cabinet, two-thirds full. She noted an empty bottle of Baby Powers next to the sink. Maybe this was a new kind of discipline. She smelled the air again, and again came up with nothing. Maybe, like a doctor, he’d learned his dosage, finally, and had become strict in measuring it out.

He saw where she was looking and picked up the small bottle, dropped it in the trash can.

“I didn’t say anything,” Mary said. He leaned against the counter. Folded his arms.

“What is it, Mary? Has something happened?”

“I’m hungry, Alfred. Will we eat? Will I make you something?”

“I’ll make it.”

Slowly, and watching him carefully all the while, she explained everything to him over a supper of fried eggs and toast, cooked by him and served to her on a dish so clean she wondered if Jimmy had warned him, somehow, that she was headed uptown to find him. He smirked for the first time when she pointed out that baking and cooking were two entirely different occupations, and looked at her over his shoulder as if to ask if she believed that, or if she hoped he would believe it, before turning back to the stove to flip the eggs, first one, then the other, and she paused her story to lift her chin and peer into the pan to see if he’d broken the yolks. When she saw the eggs had remained intact, she continued, telling him about the bakery, about Evelyn and Jacob, about throwing the plate of lemon squares when she saw Soper’s face. She lifted her chin again and told him the eggs were ready, so he slid them onto two plates, put the toast alongside, and when she pushed into the soft center with the hard corner of bread it ran in a beautiful, pure, yellow river across her plate, exactly as it should. She told him about the Triangle fire, about how strange it was that she could remember every single detail of that day better than even the first day she left North Brother for the hearing, better than the day they set her free. She could remember what she was wearing down to the undergarment, the man with the ink-stained shirt, the shirt itself, pale pinstriped blue. She remembered the Lithuanians looking up at the rumbling ceiling with fear on their faces, and then the pandemonium outside, followed by the eerie calm of the days after.

“And you?” Mary asked. “The nun said you were released in November.”

“I was,” he said, running the tip of his finger across the plate and bringing it to his mouth. “I went to Minnesota for a while, but—”

“But?” Here it was. He appeared healthy, strong, sure-footed, and of steady hands, but here it was. Drinking on the job. Chronic lateness. What would it be?

“It wasn’t for me.”

He pushed back his plate. He got up to make more coffee. “What about you? Do you mean to stay here?” She felt him looking at her bag. She’d known him since she was seventeen. A lifetime ago, and still, she was nervous.

“Yes,” Mary said. She turned in her seat to look at him. He was still for a moment, then he grabbed hold of the back of the chair where she was sitting.

“Good,” he said. “That’s very good.”

  •  •  •  

That night, as she went to the small bedroom to change into her nightgown, he came in and sat on the edge of the bed. She’d gotten heavier since he’d seen her last. He’d gotten thinner. Her arms were soft. Her belly was soft. She’d never have children now, and that was a thing that took getting used to. Women said it so easily. When I get married. When I have a child. And then to find herself a forty-three-year-old woman who would not have a child, to know that that future had arrived already, was already part of her past.

When she had her clothes folded and stacked on top of the dresser, her cream and hairbrush placed alongside, he told her he was going out for milk and bread, and she felt for the first time that day that she’d made a mistake. He was on the wagon from the looks of it, but now here he was, not even a whole day with her and he was making excuses to go out. She had a vision of herself meeting the neighbors when he came home at two in the morning, howling. So she said nothing, only lay down on her side of the bed and closed her eyes. She was startled into sitting when, not fifteen minutes later, the locks slid in the door and he was back.

“You scared me,” she said when he appeared at the bedroom door. He sat in the desk chair and brought to Mary’s mind the image of a priest listening to confession, all those years ago, all the way across the Atlantic.

“How are we going to do this, Mary?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

He reached into the desk drawer and brought out a bottle of oil. He twisted off the cap, shook some into his palm, and rubbed it up and down his bad arm, briskly, like he was trying to rub that thick skin into what it used to be. When he returned the oil to the drawer, Mary noticed other small vials, a syringe, pills scattered like seed on a lawn. She got out of bed to look closer.

Alfred took out everything to show her. “For the pain.”

“It still hurts?” Mary was surprised. The arm looked damaged, but closed over, like it had healed itself completely and had shut itself off from pain.

“Sometimes. They say I need it for maintenance.”

“Is that unusual? So long after?” Mary noticed that his good arm was covered in gooseflesh.

Alfred shrugged. “The doctor keeps giving me the prescription.” He put the vial back in the drawer and closed it. “Sometimes it’s hard to sleep, so it’s for that, too. It’s been hard to sleep since getting back to New York.” Mary knelt down beside him and took a closer look. It was like a tree trunk, thick with bark and impenetrable. Next to it, the pale white of his good arm looked vulnerable, like it would be easily broken, quick to burn.

“Is it just your arm?” she asked, and quietly, his movements sure, he opened his shirt, pulled open the right side where the fire had taken a swipe at his chest, from his collarbone to the bottom of his rib cage. It wasn’t quite as bad as his arm, but it was there. She put her palm to it and felt his heart beating underneath.

“I started letters to you but I didn’t know what to say. I was trying to think of the perfect thing so that you’d agree to see me again. And then you showed up. You just showed up.”

Before he kissed her, he gripped her at the upper arms and put his forehead to hers. She closed her eyes, and the rough stubble of his chin and cheeks brushed up against the smooth skin of her neck as he breathed there for a moment, rested his head on her shoulder. She was tired, all of a sudden, and looking back over the twenty-six years since they met it seemed as if they never stopped, only worked and fought and went up and down stairs and opened and closed windows and counted their money at the table and fought again, and went out again, and once in a while they looked at each other, and talked, and laughed, and made love without rushing up to get somewhere after. Outside, a child shrieked, a woman shouted at him to hush. Alfred’s room had grown dark, and what had seemed stark and bare to her before now seemed merely simple, spare. Notes of Alfred played around the room, his razor on the edge of the sink, his boots topsy-turvy by the door.