A Fall of Marigolds (13 page)

I’d be here on the island.

Almost a world away from him.

It was as merciful a plan as I could come up with, not only for him but for me as well. I would wrap the scarf in tissue, tie it closed, and hand it to him at the last moment, just before he left. He would thank me. And that would be the last thing I would hear him say to me.

As I washed, my fingers rubbed the slender bit of metal I’d felt the day before, when the Italian had the scarf in his suitcase. Thinking it to be something left mistakenly behind by the seamstress who made it, I picked at the stitches on the turned-under edge to work the metal fragment free. It clinked onto the porcelain sink, and I could see that it wasn’t a sewing implement. It was a small brass key. When I picked it up, I saw that tiny words had been hand-etched into it. I held the key up to the light above me and squinted to make out the words: 92 Chambers Street.

A New York City address, carved into the metal by a slender hand.

I held the key for several seconds, unsure what to do with it.

I set the key on the shelf above the sink while I rinsed and squeezed out the excess water, bringing the garment close to my nose to gauge whether there was any lingering scent of Lily’s cologne. I smelled only carbolic and lavender and soap.

Spreading a towel over the back of the tub, I laid the scarf on it flat. Then I sat on the edge of the tub beside it and worked the key back inside the hem.

The truth would wound Andrew, and he would likely hate me for inserting myself into his private affairs, but surely Dolly was right. Surely knowing the truth about Lily would be less grievous—and less prolonged—than mourning a lie.

A braver person would march right down to the ward at that very moment and hand over to Andrew what belonged to him.

But I wasn’t that brave person.

SUNDAY
morning dawned cloudy and clammy, as if it had just been let out of a simmering teakettle. I stepped outside before heading over to Ward K, as much to prepare myself for the week that lay ahead as to gauge the conditions for getting the patients outside for air, as Dr. Randall had ordered. There was no scent of rain but the air felt heavy with purpose. It seemed there would be clouds and late-summer heat but no soothing rain to calm the hours.

The men in the scarlet fever ward were awake and finishing breakfast when I arrived, including Andrew, who was sitting on the side of his bed. He looked up when I entered the room and nodded a hello. In the sallow morning light I could see three new arrivals from the previous evening’s shift, whom I hadn’t noticed last night when I’d brought Andrew the book.

“A late-arriving ship from yesterday,” the night nurse said as she briefed me on the new additions before heading back out to the main nurses’ station. I greeted the new arrivals, all of whom were being quarantined for a low-grade temperature and suspected exposure to scarlet fever. The remaining five patients, including Andrew, would need to be scrubbed today, at least once or twice, to rid their scalp and skin of the flakes of disease that still clung to them. A male attendant named Mr. Charles, an ebony-skinned, soft-spoken man whose accented English reminded me of faraway islands, arrived to help with the baths and short strolls outside. After the scrubbings, we would take the men out, one by one, for a dose of fresh air.

While the breakfast trays were being cleared away, I filled the tub in the tub room with hot, soapy water and lined my cart with scrubbing sponges and towels. While Mr. Charles helped the first patient step safely into the water, I put on gloves. Then I proceeded to scrub the man’s head, back, neck, and arms. He spoke no English, so I cleansed the unreachable areas of his skin in relative silence. Mr. Charles left us to change the sheets so that the patient could return to a freshly made bed.

I’d given dozens of descaling baths during my nearly six months on the island, and had politely turned my head away as men of all ages lowered themselves into the tub. It had taken me a few weeks to get used to seeing men that way. As I had not had brothers nor been married, my exposure to the male body had been limited to photographs in the nursing textbooks, rounds at teaching hospitals, and one abscessed thigh wound the week I first arrived in New York. But on the island, where it seemed that for every sick female immigrant there were two males, I had quickly gotten used to my role as caregiver for grown men. I had stopped wondering how my touch might affect a man who had been my responsibility for two weeks, separated from anyone he cared for. My goal at this stage of the disease had always been largely singular—rid the skin of the scales using as aggressive an approach as possible. Most welcomed the scrubbing, as the scales tended to itch, but as I rubbed Mr. Oliveri’s skin and scalp I was acutely aware of how personal my ministrations were.

I’d changed the tub water four times before Mr. Charles brought Andrew Gwynn to the tub room. He seemed surprised to see me there and this produced an anxiety in me that I had not felt since my first week on Ellis. None of the other men that morning seemed to care that I was in the room.

“How are you feeling this morning, Mr. Gwynn?” I attempted a bright tone.

“Very well. Thank you.” He was politely guarded.

“Your bathwater is ready for you.” I forced a smile.

“I can take my own bath.” His tone was polite but firm.

“I’m afraid I must scrub the areas you can’t reach.” My voice sounded meek in my ears and I cleared my throat. “But I promise to give you your privacy as you step into the tub. Mr. Charles here will help you into the water.”

I turned away before Andrew could protest. I heard water sloshing as he got into the water. When I turned around, Mr. Charles moved past me to go change Andrew’s sheets. Andrew was now sitting in the tub, his legs bent against his chest and his arms crossed over his knees.

“Let me know if you feel light-headed or if you need me to stop,” I said as I pulled on gloves and reached for my sponge. “I’ll just be scrubbing your scalp, back, and shoulders.”

“That’s a grand relief,” he said, and I laughed nervously.

As he held his head back, I plunged the sponge into the water and brought it up again, squeezing it over his head and neck. Then I began to scrub his scalp the way a mother might wash mud off a little boy who’d been playing in puddles. Again and again I doused his head and neck and shoulders with water and scrubbed away at the mottled skin, exposing hints of rosy pink. The more I rubbed, the more it seemed Andrew relaxed.

At least, I hoped it was a relaxed state that made him close his eyes, and not pain.

“Does that feel all right, Mr. Gwynn?” I asked. “Am I hurting you?”

The sound of my voice seemed to rouse him as if from sleep. “It’s fine. I mean, you are not hurting me.”

And so I kept at it. The rhythm of my hand strokes sounded like a swishing skirt on a dance floor and there was no other sound but that of water dripping off his body. As I moved my sponge across his shoulder blades, I was overcome with the intimacy of this act in a way that I never had been before. I felt a stirring inside me that I had not felt since I had met Edward on the elevator. It nearly took my breath away. I opened my mouth to explain to Andrew what I was doing, to remind myself I was only a nurse washing skin ravaged by scarlet fever.

“This is the last stage of the disease, the skin peeling. Underneath the damaged skin is a new layer. It won’t be long now—” I would have prattled on, but he unhooked one of his hands from around his knees and covered mine as I washed just under his jawline.

My hand stilled under his.

“I think I can take it from here.” He gently pulled the sponge out from underneath my hand.

“Of course,” I managed to say as I eased away from the tub. “I’m sorry if I was rubbing too hard.”

“You weren’t.”

“Yes, but—”

“You’ve been nothing but kind to me, Miss Wood.”

After a moment of watching him scrub his damaged skin, I backed away, and waited at the doorway for Mr. Charles to return.

When I was free to leave the tub room, I made my way to the nurses’ station to dutifully record that the morning scrubbing baths had been completed. But it was several moments before I picked up the pen to write anything down.

I had been so tuned to Andrew’s loss I hadn’t noticed how much I was tuned to his presence, his gentle manner, even his deep affection for his dead wife. I had let myself get too emotionally attached to a patient, something I had been warned in school not to do. And it wasn’t just our common grief that drew me to him.

I had let my loss become entwined with Andrew’s such that I was now having a hard time distinguishing between where mine ended and his began.

Andrew’s loss, I reminded myself sharply, began with vows he had spoken to another woman the day before he sailed. Mine began with an elevator that opened its doors to hell. This attraction I felt for Andrew was simply validation that I wasn’t stupid to think you could love someone you’d only just met.

That was all it was.

As soon as Andrew was clothed in clean pajamas and making his way to his bed with Mr. Charles helping him, I went back into the tub room to let the water out. I watched as the water swirled away, hurrying down the drain.

I wiped the tub clean with considerable force to reorient myself to the task at hand: following the doctor’s orders so that the patient would be successfully discharged. There would be days ahead filled with scrubbing baths and taking walks outside. A week of them, no doubt. The baths and the walks were doctor’s orders, nothing more. I could think of them as nothing more.

After his discharge, I would never see Andrew Gwynn again, Lord willing. Surely after he opened the scarf, he would wish never again to see me.

Over the next hour, Mr. Charles and I took turns with the men who were well enough to step outside for a breath of air. As it happened, I was not the one to assist Andrew Gwynn with his few minutes outside; Mr. Charles helped him.

When I returned to the ward with the last patient, Dr. Randall had arrived to make his rounds. All the other men were either back in their beds or sitting on the edges, waiting for their turn to be examined. Dr. Randall greeted me as the last patient and I made our way into the room. When I returned to the nurses’ station, he was bent over the night nurse’s notes.

“And how was the rest of your evening?” he asked.

“Fine.” I didn’t elaborate. “And yours? Did you find Dr. Treaver in the dining room?”

“I did. He’s a better player than I. Dr. Treaver had a great evening. He won every hand.”

I smiled politely and gathered what I needed for my cart for rounds. Tongue depressors, clean cloths, a cleansing basin, an otoscope.

We began to move around the room, Dr. Randall making his examinations, and I meticulously recording his findings on the patients’ records.

At the end of the first rows of beds, as he washed his hands at the basin in my cart, he leaned in toward me. “Fancy a stroll outside tonight after the evening meal?”

I handed him a drying towel. “A stroll?” I said, though I had heard him perfectly.

“Yes. A stroll. A walk.” He took the towel from me.

“I don’t think—”

“I’m not asking to court you, Miss Wood. I just want to take a walk after dinner. Unless you’d like to come with me on the ferry tomorrow instead. It’s your day off, too, isn’t it? We can take a walk in Central Park.” He handed the towel back to me.

I took it from him. “No.”

“Just a walk in the park.”

I folded the towel slowly. “No, thank you.”

He moved in a bit closer. “You know, I’m only trying to help.”

I could hear the genuine compassion in his voice, and the ardor all good doctors have for curing what ails someone. When I looked at his eyes, however, I couldn’t tell whether the fascination I saw there was for my pathetic state or my being a woman he might actually find attractive.

“It’s not right that no one has stepped in to help you with this, Miss Wood,” he whispered, mindful—and I was glad of it—that some of the patients in the room understood English. “If you were my sister or friend or my beloved—”

“Let’s finish the rounds, shall we?” I yanked the cart from in between us and spun it around, as much to end the conversation as to point the cart in the opposite direction.

“Think about it,” Dr. Randall said as he fell in step with me and we moved across the polished floor toward Andrew Gwynn’s bed.

“And how are you this morning, Mr. Gwynn?” Dr. Randall said as he reached for Andrew’s record at the foot of his bed.

“Fine, Doctor. Thank you,” Andrew answered.

“You’re looking much better today after the scrubbing bath. Any lingering pain?”

“No, Doctor.”

Dr. Randall handed me the patient record to examine Andrew’s scalp and neck. But as he moved closer to the bed I saw the doctor’s gaze linger on the bedside table. The poetry book lay near the base of the lamp, as if Andrew had placed it there after reading it last night.

Ethan Randall opened his mouth to say something but abruptly shut it. My breath caught in my throat. He turned to me with questioning eyes. I looked away.

“Now then, Mr. Gwynn,” I heard him say. I lifted my eyes and saw that Ethan Randall was examining Andrew’s skin. And Andrew seemed to know something odd had just occurred between the doctor and me. His gaze traveled to the book on his bedside table.

The awkward silence surrounding the three of us was palpable. I busied myself at my cart, as if the book hadn’t caught Dr. Randall’s attention. As if there were no book.

But when Dr. Randall turned from Andrew to wash his hands at my cart, his eyes sought mine. I met his gaze because I knew I must.

“Change your mind about that walk tonight?”

I couldn’t read the emotion behind Dr. Randall’s simple question except to know that he was at the very least concerned that I’d had in my possession last night something that belonged to a patient in my care.

What could I do but nod my head?

THE
rest of the day dragged as though it were weighted with irons.

Before he left the ward, Dr. Randall gave instructions for the second scrubbing to take place after supper, before the men retired for the night and after my shift was over. I wasn’t sure of his rationale but I didn’t care. It meant I wouldn’t be giving Andrew Gwynn another bath that day. I didn’t think I could handle another one. He was starting to remind me too much of Edward in too many ways.

In the early afternoon, two more new patients were sent to us from the main building, a lad of fourteen as slender as a birch tree, and an older man with a mustache and beard that reached to his waist. After I had both men resting comfortably in their beds, I made my own afternoon rounds: temperature taking, filling water pitchers, administering aspirin to those with fevers and chills.

When I approached Andrew’s bed to fill his water pitcher, he pointed to the book beside it. “Did the doctor recognize that book? I mean, I couldn’t help but notice.”

Heat rose to my cheeks. “I think maybe he did.”

“You had it with you last night when you met with him?”

I winced at the way those words sounded together. But I nodded my head.

“Does he think it’s yours and he’s wondering what I’m doing with it now?”

I grabbed his pitcher and began to pour from my larger one. “He knows it’s not mine. I told him it belonged to a friend. I’m sure he’s wondering what
I
was doing with it.”

A drip of water fell onto my polished shoe, splattering like a raindrop on pavement.

“Are you in trouble, then?”

“I don’t know. It was a stupid thing to do. It wasn’t my book and I didn’t even have your permission. Now Dr. Randall probably thinks . . .” But I let my voice trail away as I realized I had been thinking out loud.

“He thinks what?”

I set my own pitcher back on my cart. “Nothing.” But as I exchanged Andrew’s water glass for a clean one, I stole a glance at him. I could see he knew what Dr. Randall probably thought.

“You’ve done nothing wrong,” Andrew said. “You’ve shown me nothing but compassion.”

I nearly knocked over the glass as I backed away from both the table and the compliment. “Don’t say that.”

“But it’s true. I shouldn’t have asked you to get the pattern book. I knew it was asking too much of you. But you did it anyway. And because you did, you saved my mother’s poetry book. You found Lily’s scarf too, and brought it back to me. You’ve made sure my every need has been met here. I’ll tell him myself if you want me to.”

“No need, I assure you. But thank you. You should rest now.”

I eased myself away from him and his gratitude, to tend to the rest of the ward’s needs and to wait for the long, awkward afternoon to end.

As the day slogged on, I missed Edward more than I had in weeks. I missed where I would have been had life dealt us both a different hand. Perhaps after these last six months Edward would have asked me to marry him and I’d be choosing a dress and planning my wedding, not hiding away on this spill of earth, latched onto the grief of another.

When the day finally ended and the evening shift began, I left the ward without a backward glance. I headed to the dining room to take my meal at a corner table, where I could enjoy the solitude of not having to answer any questions about my personal choices.

The dining hall was stuffy from the day’s humidity, and I hadn’t much appetite. The stewed chicken was sinewy and tasteless. After eating a few bites of overcooked potato and creamed peas, I was finished. As I prepared to leave, Dr. Randall entered the dining room with Dr. Treaver and two other nurses. Dr. Randall excused himself and walked over to my table and set his tray down.

“I think we need to talk,” he said, politely but assertively. He took the chair opposite mine.

“There really is nothing to talk about, Doctor. I borrowed Mr. Gwynn’s book and then I gave it back. Ask him yourself.”

“You said that book belonged to a friend.”

“No. You asked me if it belonged to a friend and I said, ‘You could say that.’”

“Is that what Mr. Gwynn is? Is he more than a patient to you?”

His words felt like a reprimand and I instinctively drew back in my chair. “You presume too much. May I remind you Mr. Gwynn just lost his wife. He is in mourning.”

Ethan Randall regarded me for a moment. Then he spoke, calmly but with purpose. “I’ve seen the way you look at him, Nurse Wood. I’ve seen the way you care for him. I thought it was admirable at first. You don’t treat the other patients the way you treat him. You favor him. I presume only what I see evidence of.”

At first I could summon no words. Fury rose up within me and tied my tongue in a knot that loosened only as I pressed down my anger.

I leaned over the table and spoke softly so that no one else would hear and so that it would appear I was perfectly calm, which I most assuredly was not.

“I treat that man differently because he lost his bride of a week on the ship that brought him here. His bride of a week! She practically died in his arms!”

He seemed taken aback by my response, but only for a moment. “What has that got to do with you having his book?”

“I was merely borrowing it. What is the harm in that?”

“You make it a habit of borrowing things from your patients?”

“Of course not. Why are you making so much of this?”

“Because I have seen the way you are with him. And the way he is with you.”

What Dr. Randall was intimating was ludicrous. “You don’t know what you are talking about,” I murmured as low as I could and yet with vehemence. “If you are insinuating that I am in love with Mr. Gwynn, then you are indeed greatly mistaken. And Mr. Gwynn is not in love with me. He loved his wife. And I . . . I loved someone else. It’s our grief that binds us!”

Ethan Randall’s earlier disapproval thinned to something more like surprise. “You loved someone else?”

I cleared my throat to sweep away the ache of having said so much in such a small number of words. “I lost someone I loved in the fire, if you must know. Someone I’d just met, but who meant a great deal to me.”

“I . . . I truly am very sorry to hear that.”

I knew my eyes were shimmering with emotion but I held it in check, even as Dr. Randall suddenly put it together. It all made sense to him.

“That’s the real reason you haven’t gone to Manhattan, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s not what the fire did; it’s what the fire did to
you
.”

I shifted in my chair at his bluntness. “I haven’t gone because I’ve had no desire to go.” I blinked back the last of the threatening tears and pointed to his tray. “Your food’s getting cold.”

“I am, as I said, so very sorry for your loss, but I think you haven’t left here because you haven’t given yourself any reason to.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’ve been here nearly half a year? You haven’t left the island—even once—in all that time. And you think your grief is as fresh as Mr. Gwynn’s? Can’t you see? It’s
your
grief you are concentrating on, not his. You’re keeping it alive by staying here.”

It took me a moment to fully realize what he was saying. That I was in love with my grief.

That my in-between island was a place where my loss could stay evergreen and a bereaved man like Andrew Gwynn would seem like a soul mate.

I rose from my chair. “I think we are finished talking.”

“And Mr. Gwynn?”

“What about him?”

“You can’t be treating him differently, Nurse Wood. He’s your patient. You’re his nurse.”

“I know exactly what I am!” I replied hotly. “And you’re telling me you treat all your patients the same, even though their needs are vastly different?”

“Yes, I do,” he said, as gentle as I had been angry. “Each one gets the best care I can give them, all that I can give them, regardless of what they suffer from.”

I opened my mouth to protest, and shut it just as quickly. Despite Dr. Randall’s flair for frankness, he was right. In my zeal to administer healing and hope to the grieving Andrew Gwynn, I had neglected to some extent every other man on the ward.

“It won’t happen again. Good night, Doctor.” I took a step away from the table.

He reached for my arm. “Please don’t leave angry with me.”

I wriggled my arm free of his grasp. “I’m not angry with you.”

“I really do want to help you.”

I looked past Dr. Randall’s clean-shaven face, past the spectacles, to his blue eyes. “Why?”

“I like you. Is that so terrible?”

“You mean my pathetic state interests you.”

He drew back a bit in his chair. “I don’t mean that at all. And I do not think you are in a pathetic state. Do you think you are?”

Truly, in that moment I didn’t know what I thought. The breach now was so wide I could not feel solid ground beneath me. It was as if the island were sinking into the water and taking me with it.

I was sure of only one thing.

Everything had been under control until Andrew Gwynn had arrived. The sooner he left, the sooner I could repair what had been broken. In the morning I would request an early rotation to a different ward. It would be easy enough to ask Mrs. Crowley. Surely there was a nurse in reception who could take my place in the scarlet fever ward. When the day came for Andrew Gwynn to be discharged, I would see to it that everything I had that belonged to him was returned. Dr. Randall, who would continue to see Andrew every day, could be convinced to return the pattern book and scarf to Andrew upon his discharge. He would be only slightly aghast to learn I had kept other items that belonged to Andrew Gwynn, and if he was truly eager to help me he would do it. In the morning I would send a note to Andrew via Dr. Randall that I had been moved to another ward. I would tell him that his belongings would be safely returned to him before he left. I would wish him well, and in my heart I would pray that he would bear up under the weight of what he would soon learn. And that would be the end of it.

“Miss Wood?”

“No. I do not think that I am in a pathetic state.”

“Will you let me help you then?”

“Yes.”

I turned from his surprised but pleased face. And I left the dining room without telling him what I had in mind by way of help; he would find out soon enough. I hurried to my quarters to finish what I needed to do. I found a long piece of tissue paper in the trunk I kept at the foot of my bed and spread it out on my coverlet. The scarf, draped across a chair back, was dry and smelled faintly floral and yet sterile. The little key was snug under the hem. I laid the scarf out on the tissue and then reached under my pillow for the letter and the certificate. I placed them at one end of the scarf and began to fold it over, again and again, until the fabric was a tight rectangle bearing no hint of what it held inside. Then I wrapped it in the tissue and tied it closed with a bit of ribbon. It looked like a gift.

I heard voices on the other side of the door. Dolly’s and others’. She was saying good night to another nurse.

I grabbed the package and tossed it under my bed.