Servants of the Map (30 page)

“Don’t these look good?” Gillian says proudly. “Would you like to take one back?”

On the counter are two more of the meat pies Elizabeth saw at Ned’s, along with loaves of bread and trays of roasted squash and onions. “They smell delicious,” Elizabeth says. “But everything’s all planned for supper back at the house.”

“Such a surprise,” Gillian says, with affectionate mockery. Elizabeth returns her smile, thinking what a pair she and her sister are. Both of them so competent, such excellent cooks and household managers. When they were young, they’d thought themselves so different from each other.

“How did Ned seem to you?” Gillian asks.

“All right. A bit frail, the way he has been lately. And his hands are certainly no better.”

For a few minutes they discuss their aging relative thoughtfully. Although they’ve grown apart some over the years, they still have in common Ned, the details of keeping house for so many people, the children. And of course Michael. One of the children, Elizabeth knows, will already have skipped to the shed behind the cottage, where Michael runs the business that used to be Ned’s. Michael will be setting down his draw-shave now, lifting his bulky body from the wooden stool, and moving calmly toward the kitchen. That noise at the back door is him, kicking the snow from his boots. One more thump and here he is. He clasps Elizabeth’s hand and touches his massive cheek to hers.

“I just wanted to say hello,” she says. If she could reach through his skin, she might find Nora inside. “And to see how the children are.”

“In excellent shape,” Michael says, stepping back to look over at his brood. “As you see.” While a black and white cat with pearl-gray eyes twines among everyone’s legs, he adds, “Won’t you stay for supper?”

“I can’t,” Elizabeth says. “It’s three-thirty, I need to hurry back.”

The rigid schedule at the boardinghouse, Elizabeth’s inflexible, invariable duties there, have never made an impression on Michael. What his mother did, he once said—not in the least meaning to be insulting—had been the practice of healing. Whereas what Elizabeth does is, in his eyes, no more than keeping house. How difficult can it be?

He has no idea, Elizabeth thinks, amazed again at what she’d once felt for him. He is nothing like Andrew, who, whatever his quirks, has always understood her devotion to the house and its constantly changing population. Andrew will be rising now, she thinks: stretching after his afternoon nap, ready to resume his duties. And in fact he’s doing almost exactly what she envisions.

Two miles away, in the pleasant room at the back of their house, Andrew slips on a shirt, which he leaves unbuttoned, ignores the socks Elizabeth laid out for him, and then steps outside through the French doors and begins his afternoon exercises. Twenty deep knee bends, his arms straight out and his hamstrings burning. Windmills, touching right hand to left toe, left hand to right, straightening vigorously in between with a great whooshing exhalation. Sit-ups, jumping jacks, several minutes with the jump rope; he’s breathing hard, his lungs strong and elastic and a healthy sweat, a useful sweat pouring down his temples—oh, the air is gorgeous today, the fragrance is like burying his face in a bed of balsam needles. Counting ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR, he thinks of all the afternoons he’s exercised in this handsome setting. And of the invisible line, a few feet to his right, that separates the bit of ground before his French doors from that in front of the doors to the nurse’s room.

During Mrs. Temple’s tenure, and also Mrs. MacDonald’s, he was careful not to cross that line: he might have seen inside the room inadvertently, or they might have looked out at the birds and trees and been disturbed by the sight of his prancing. In this house, so packed with people, everyone’s careful to guard each other’s privacy. Yet Nora, so private in other ways, was the one who most often broke through his caution. She seemed to sense his movements, even when she couldn’t see him; as he finished the last of his exercises she’d rise from her reading chair, tap on the glass, and wave as he stepped into view. Sometimes she’d ask him in for a minute, before they both returned to the duties of the day.

She might tell him, then, about a new remedy she was concocting. He might describe something interesting he’d seen, or confide some worry. Once he told her about a swimming companion who complained, weeks after they’d spent an afternoon splashing in an isolated stream, that he could hear frogs croaking in his stomach. They’d seen frog spawn, Andrew explained—he hadn’t mentioned this to Elizabeth, for fear that she might laugh at him—floating in the brook. His friend believed that he’d swallowed some, which in his stomach had hatched and, after dining greedily on his own food, metamorphosed into frogs. “Can he get them out?” Andrew said.

Nora, listening attentively, asked a few more questions and then replied that in Ireland, where she’d grown up, people took it for granted that toads and frogs might live inside a person. “Once,” she said, “I saw a man vomit a live toad after drinking one of my grandmother’s herbal infusions. Wait here for a minute.” While he sat gazing into the fire, she gathered leaves and powders from her stock in the attic and bound the mixture into a square of white muslin. Soon after Andrew gave this to his friend, the croakings vanished and he was cured.

The truth, Andrew thinks now, breathing hard and bending at the waist, is that they never saw the frogs expelled; perhaps they slipped out while his friend was asleep. But what matters is that his friend got better,
not how Nora did it. So sharply does he miss those brief, private conversations, from which he always emerged restored, that he wonders how Elizabeth, whose friendship with Nora was both older and deeper, lives without her.

As Elizabeth, at the cottage on the lake, kisses Nora’s grandchildren good-bye and accepts the pencil Eudora offers her, Andrew folds his jump rope and strides toward the trees, wanting a better view of Martin’s porch. Why not, it suddenly strikes him—why not run a strand of wire around the entire frame? He could fix magnets to either end so the wind, blowing down from the hill past the stand of sugar maples and through the screen, would carry healing waves directly to Martin’s bed. The magnetized chimney on one side of him, a magnetized porch frame on the other—perfect. He’ll do this tomorrow.

He bounds back into his room and Elizabeth, eager to return to her duties, presses Gillian’s hand and murmurs that she has to wire their mother later about some business, and will tell her the children are fine. Martin and Andrew are waiting for her, so is everyone else; she has to go.

Before Elizabeth had a house of her own, before Dr. Kopeckny arrived and changed the way they thought, Nora and her friends had their own ideas about the nature of consumption. Bessie had heard it was caused by perverted humors and hidden inflammations; Olive, that it ran in families and affected only those of a melancholy nature. Jane and Lillian had been taught by their mother that it rose directly from damp, cold air trapped inside a room crowded with people: a miasma, open the windows against a miasma. Their cousin thought, more straightforwardly, that dirt meant rot meant smells meant sickness: everything must be clean! Nora herself, as a girl in Ireland, had been told by her grandmother
that consumption arose from putrid phlegm, draining into the chest from the head. If you lit a dried cow patty and let it smoke, and then inhaled the smoke through a reed, you’d be cured. Or if you ate the cooked and powdered lungs of a fox, or the blood of a goat. The fore-quarter of a dog that had drowned, claimed one of her grandmother’s friends, would if boiled and made into a stew cure the sickest patient.

One of Ned’s guests, a Dr. Fuller from Baltimore, ridiculed everyone’s theories but his own. Hearing that Nora nursed invalids wintering in the village, he sniffed and said, “What do you know about phthisis? It takes a good solid classical education and medical school and some years in a hospital after that before you can even think of understanding this disease. What can you do for those men?”

Nora explained the diets she and her friends had devised, the arrangements they made so the invalids could rest, as their doctors back home had ordered. The astringent teas she made and the soothing syrups. Another guest leaned forward and said, “But don’t you worry you might catch it from them?”

Dr. Fuller thrust out his chin. “It isn’t contagious,” he said. “It’s inherited, the result of constitutional peculiarities inflamed by indulging in unhealthy living and excessive emotions.” Just then Elizabeth—this was during their second summer—coughed.

“The mountain air seems clearly helpful,” Clara said nervously. Around the table everyone was suddenly embarrassed. “Our Elizabeth has suffered from bronchitis, and still has a bit of a cough. Summers here seem to help her. Perhaps the winter air is even more beneficial to Nora’s friends.”

“I was taught that cold and stormy weather was the worst possible thing for the consumptive patient,” Dr. Fuller said. “That a warm and sunny climate was essential and that staying in a place like this through the winter was tantamount to suicide. Yet now there are fashionable doctors claiming quite the contrary.” Frowning, he turned to Michael and started a conversation about his spaniels.

Another doctor, Jacob Kopeckny, offered a different perspective. Two hemorrhages, less than a month apart, had brought this even-tempered young man to the mountains; a summer at an inn on another lake, where he regained much of his strength, had convinced him to close his practice in Rhode Island and settle in the woods. He’d built a small house near the river, between the village and the lake. Each time Nora passed his porch on her way to the village he called out a greeting to her.

Soon she began to stop so they could talk at more length. He had clear brown eyes, a gray streak in his beard, and a wife at whom he gazed with obvious affection. They’d known each other, he confessed with a laugh one day, since they were ten. When Nora asked him if he felt bitter at having his life and career so disrupted by illness, he shrugged and gestured toward his wife. “This place has its own charms,” he said. “And wherever I am, I’m lucky enough to live with the person I’ve loved since I was a boy. How many people can say that?”

Not many, Nora thought. They spoke so easily together that after a while it seemed natural to welcome him when he asked if he might join her on her rounds. The invalids were delighted to see him, particularly as he charged no fees: he was still too sick himself, he said, to actually practice. He was simply getting acquainted with his fellow sufferers. With Nora’s permission he also joined her friends for their occasional gatherings, answering questions and demonstrating his stethoscope. Only Nora had seen one before.

During his second winter in the village, once he’d gotten to know all the women who took in sick boarders, Dr. Kopeckny invited them to visit the room off his kitchen he referred to, somewhat fancifully, as his laboratory. There, after his wife served scones and jam and the women gave him news of the invalids, he said that he had something astonishing to show them.

In Germany, he said, a doctor named Robert Koch had discovered what caused consumption and had proved how it was transmitted. The culprit was a germ, he said. A little plant, although it wasn’t green and
wasn’t shaped like a plant: it was invisible except under a microscope. Inside the lungs these germs made deadly poisons.

One by one the women bent to the eyepiece and peered through the metal tube. A smear of gray mist, the broken fragments of a decaying lung. Between these fragments were brilliant blue rods—so slim, Nora thought. The blue of wild gentian, or iris, or lobelia. Astonishing blue. Nothing like the tattered, dark red bits she’d seen her invalids cough up. The peculiar color, Dr. Kopeckny said, came from the blue dye with which he’d stained them, to make them visible.

That first time, the shock of that first sight: Sophie put on her cloak and left, taking Jane with her. Phoebe, who shuddered and said her flesh was crawling, stayed but withdrew to the kitchen with Mrs. Kopeckny. Nora stared and stared. She’d looked in books over the years, whatever books she’d been lucky enough to find; she’d seen drawings of lungs and stomachs and hearts and she knew how blood and lymph moved through a body, and food and air and water. But this—“Where do you find them?” she asked. “Are they everywhere?”

“In the sputum,” Dr. Kopeckny said. “And in the spray a patient coughs out, and inside the airways and the lungs.”

“Can you kill them?” Bessie asked.

“Not yet,” he said. “But the things you give your patients, rest and good food and clean air, make the body more able to fight off the infection. Sometimes the bacilli can disappear entirely.”

“All the bedding I’ve changed,” Olive said quietly. “The laundry I’ve carried and washed, the dishes I’ve handled. The handkerchiefs, the nightshirts, all the times I’ve been coughed at and sneezed at …”

She looked at her friends. “It’s not that simple,” Dr. Kopeckny said. “I didn’t show you this to scare you—don’t you think you’d already have it, if you were going to get it?”

“Eight years,” Bessie said. “Since I took in the first one. Everyone told me it wasn’t contagious.”

“In a big city almost
everyone
is exposed to the bacillus. But most of them don’t get sick, any more than you have.”

“That’s true,” Bessie said. “Not one of us has, nor our families. No one native to the village.”

“Then are the bacilli the cause or not?” Nora asked. “How do you know the bacilli aren’t just
there
in a person’s sputum, the way …” She looked at her friends and at her own arm, which she held out. “The way these freckles are here on my skin, but not on Bessie’s. They don’t mean anything, they don’t mean I’m sick or she’s not sick. They’re just here.”

“That,” said Dr. Kopeckny approvingly, “is a very good observation.”

“Then why do you think the blue plants cause the disease?”

There were experiments, Dr. Kopeckny said, which Koch had done with mice and rats and rabbits. He tried to explain these and then frowned and tapped the microscope. Later, when he acquired a newer, more powerful instrument, he’d give this one to Nora. “Without the germ there’s no tuberculosis—no one has found a sick person who didn’t carry the bacilli. But you don’t always have the disease just because you carry the germ. If you think of the germ as the plant, perhaps we’re like the soil. Uncongenial soil and the plant doesn’t grow. The plant might be fussy. Or delicate—maybe it dies easily when it’s outside the body, and maybe the care you take to keep things clean in your houses is enough to keep it at bay.”