by Juliette Fay
“Stay here,” I told her. “Stay right here by the street so I can find you again. I’ll go look for them.”
I ran like some sort of devil myself, calling their names, trying to scream louder than everyone else calling out for their loved ones.
And then I looked up.
There in the window.
Winnie.
41
WINNIE
We could never learn to be brave and patient,
if there were only joy in the world.
—Helen Keller, deaf and blind author, educator and activist
Across the endless, burning desert, I heard a voice that sounded like Kit’s, though I couldn’t be sure. It was rasping, and she kept taking little sips of air after every few words. “Winnie,” breath, “you’re in a,” breath, “hospital for,” breath, “Swedish people.”
Am I in Sweden? Then pain slammed into me like a wall of molten lava, and I dove back down into the balm of unconsciousness.
Hours, or possibly days later, I opened my eyes and saw a chubby pink leg dangling and bobbing, a sturdy white ankle-high shoe kicking around looking for something to land on.
Harry. You must be walking now.
Later it was Mother’s voice, unmistakably shrill and annoyed. “And how am I supposed to pay for all of this?”
Sometime after that, soothing words found me, the girl I was, behind my animal screams. “Hang on, Winnie. Please, darling, stay with us. You fell off a cliff, but you haven’t fallen onto rocks.”
I let out a guttural growl, desperate to locate the space outside my universe of pain. “Where . . . is . . . Gert?”
“She’s on another floor. The doctors are taking good care of her. She’ll be right as rain in no time.”
But I won’t, and I never will be. Rain is freedom, but I will always be trapped in fire.
“Joe.”
A suspicious silence.
“Joe!”
The voice grew firm. “He’s taken Lucy back to Boston.”
The Great War probably saved my life, which is ironic when you think of how many lives it took. The care of all those burned and wounded soldiers precipitated great strides in medical treatment. I tried to focus on that, and on all the things I could learn from my extended stay at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, rather than the only other thing in my world: excruciating pain. Doctors used silver nitrate as a corrosive agent on the burns and then debrided the dead skin to create eschars, or scabs. In effect, they had to torture me to save me.
What truly saved my life, of course, was Gert. After all the times she dropped me—by accident or on purpose—the last and most important time I jumped into her arms, she stood firm and made the catch. Because of her I didn’t die right there on the sidewalk . . . though in truth, there were many long days and weeks afterward when I wished I had.
“Why doesn’t he write to me?” I asked, three weeks after the fire. Gert sat in my room, her casted arm in a sling, the bruises on her face and neck yellowed to splattered tea stains.
“Because he’s a coward.”
“He’s not! He went in to save you!”
“But he left you there, didn’t he? He should never have left you in that room, Winnie.”
“I told him to.”
“A man doesn’t leave a woman in a burning building, no matter what she says. And now he doesn’t want to deal with the consequence of his stupidity.” She let out a snort of disgust and looked away. “Coward.”
The consequence. That was me. No longer a desirable young woman, I was burned from below my right elbow up to my ear and halfway down my back, and still unable to care for myself. A consequence, indeed.
Yet, even in such a state, physically and emotionally scorched, I was almost certain the connection between Joe and me was stronger than that. Maybe we would never be lovers again, but he would at least want to extend his comfort and friendship, wouldn’t he? He was a better man than to simply walk away. Wasn’t he?
“Should I write to him?” I asked Nell a week later.
She didn’t answer for a minute, just sat there staring down the length of the hospital ward with its rows of white metal beds, and biting the inside of her lip until I was sure she must be tasting blood. “I think he may need some time,” was all she said. “Maybe it’s best to wait until he contacts you.”
“Now, Winnie,” Mother said after I’d been in the hospital for a month and a half, taking my left hand in hers. She always positioned herself on my left; true to her squeamish nature, she couldn’t stand the sight of the wounds on my right side, which doctors left open for the purpose of drying.
I could feel some sort of announcement coming, and the first crazy thing that popped into my mind was that Joe hadn’t made it out of the fire at all. That he was dead. I braced myself for the kind of pain no medicine could dull.
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” she soothed. “We’ll all be together again soon.”
“What? You’re leaving?”
“Now, dear,” she started, and that’s how I knew for certain she was leaving. Only Dad ever called us “dear.” “We’ve . . . well, we’ve run out of money.”
“Run out?” I said. “But there was so much! How could it all be gone?”
Her eyes shifted around the ward. “This is a very good hospital,” she said. “You likely would’ve died if we’d been in some podunk little backwater instead of a real city. Even still, in those first few days, we thought we’d lost you.” I saw her bite down to still the emotion the very mention of this raised. She forced a smile. “We’re all very grateful to have you with us, and happy to give what we had.”
She was so careful with her words. My mother, who generally shot her mouth off any which way she pleased, had somehow learned to be tactful in the last six weeks.
“Everyone’s money is gone?”
“Well, not yours. You’re not a minor anymore, so I had no way to get at it. But we’ll need it to pay the hospital until you get out. You’ll have to wire for it.”
Dread hit me in wave after wave, as I realized the far-reaching repercussions of this simple fact. “What about the house?”
“Dad paid December’s rent yesterday, but he can’t cover January’s unless we get some real dough, not just the few dollars he makes at the factory.”
“But how? We can’t perform . . .”
“Nell can.” She waited while I put the puzzle pieces together. Nell and Fred could earn good money on the road, but Nell wouldn’t go without little Harry, and as a toddler who now loved to run off any chance he got, little Harry couldn’t go without someone to watch him while Nell and Fred were onstage.
“I’ll take care of Harry,” said Mother. “Birnbaum was all broken up over what happened, so he called in every favor he had and got us a good run. Kit’s going home to Dad. Lourdes Hospital is right there if her breathing takes a turn for the worse. Gert will stay here with you. She’s already got a room at a boardinghouse nearby and a spot in a local chorus line.”
I tried so hard not to cry—hadn’t I caused enough trouble? But the tears leaked down my face and into the scars on my neck anyway.
“Now, now.” Mother patted my hand. “At least we’re all alive to tell the tale. It can only get better from here.”
In a matter of days they were gone.
Gert visited every day, and I looked forward to her arrival like a prisoner in a maximum-security jail. But she had to work, and could never stay long. The nurses became my friends, and over the next few weeks, I learned their schedules, mannerisms, likes and dislikes: one was hoping her boyfriend would pop the question on Christmas Eve; one liked to stay out too late and irritated the other nurses by being tardy for her shift; some were truly interested in medicine, and some only biding their time until something better came along.
My favorite was Lisette D’Orsay. She took my questions seriously, explaining procedures and finding answers when she didn’t know them herself.
“You’re not really French,” sh
e said one day, as she changed the dressing on my right elbow. “At least, you certainly don’t speak the language.”
I smiled—more of a grimace as she tugged at a stuck bandage. “What gave it away?”
“Trinqué.”
“It means to give a toast, doesn’t it? Mother wanted us to be the toast of the town.”
“Yes, but that spelling, it has another meaning.”
“What?”
“Damaged.”
How appropriate, I thought.
The days went by; I got stronger.
And Joe never wrote.
I had healed well enough to travel back to Johnson City just in time for the holidays. The only thing I can say for Christmas 1919 was that it was better than Christmas 1918. Dad and Kit made us a nice meal, but we decided not to exchange presents. It would’ve been too strange without all the others there, and we were still watching our budget.
I missed Gert. She’d found a job with a traveling revue. Even if she hadn’t, she would never have gone back to Johnson City. “I may not be living large, but at least I’m working on it,” she wrote. To her, home meant giving up, and Gert was no quitter.
Kit’s breathing was much better, but she never quite lost the rasp in her voice, and now sounded like she’d smoked a pack a day since she was born. Combined with her height, she routinely passed for twenty, though she was only fourteen. The Stone Opera House in Binghamton hired her on as a stagehand, and she spent almost every waking hour there, when she wasn’t in school.
“You need new clothes,” she said to me a few weeks after Christmas had passed.
I’d been wearing my old high-necked shirtwaists to cover my back, right arm and shoulder, and the side of my neck. “I can’t wear those new fashions anymore,” I said. “I’d scare people. Besides, we can’t afford it.”
“I’m making good money at the Stone,” she said. “And I should pay you back for all the help you give me on schoolwork.”
“You don’t have to pay me to help you, Kit. Besides, what else have I got to do?”
“Go to school yourself.”
I’d thought of this, of course, but had decided to wait until the following fall. By then I hoped my scars would have turned from a red that seemed to rage against the twisted seams of skin to a more resigned pinkish-white.
That wasn’t the only reason, of course. The real reason, the one I could barely admit even to myself, was that I was scared. Standing at that open window, facing a choice between death by fire and death by impact, a near paralysis had set in that hadn’t completely left me. I had to force myself to get out of bed in the morning, and rarely left the house. I was also terribly, painfully sad. I had lost my livelihood, all my money for college tuition, the company of Nell and Gert, to whom I’d grown so close. And Joe. In the thick fog of fear and sorrow, I couldn’t even begin to make sense of why he hadn’t written.
“It’s too late in the school year to start now,” I told Kit.
“You could catch up.”
“It’s too much work.”
She studied me.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing. It’s just not like you.”
A couple of weeks later, I lay dozing on the couch, and my eye caught on something glinting through the lace curtains. The previous night a ferocious ice storm had whistled around the house, but now sunlight shone through the icicles hanging from the tree branches like tiny sparkling crystal chandeliers. I smiled and thought, How lovely!
It was the first bit of beauty I’d noticed in the three months since the fire. I looked down at the graying shirtwaist I wore, and the raveled hem of my ankle-length skirt, and I began to feel the stirrings of anger—at myself! Why was I living this way? I knew better. Vaudeville had taught me better: Life is hard sometimes. So what.
It was time to start booing back.
My first small step forward was to let Kit take me clothes shopping. A kind and discreet saleslady helped me choose two dresses. One had a shawl collar that rose high enough at the sides and back to cover my scars. The other had a bow that tied at the throat. Both had long sleeves, of course, but they were otherwise not too terribly unfashionable.
When I thanked Kit for my new purchases, she said simply, “Tomorrow, school.”
And so I went. I had planned just to visit Miss Cartery, my favorite English teacher, and Miss Darlington, the history teacher who’d joined me in wearing white for women’s suffrage. School was over for the day—I wasn’t up to facing crowds of students, many of whom I knew—and I felt a wave of longing just walking down the empty hallways. The faint smell of chalk dust filtered around me, and I could almost hear the clang of the bell announcing the start of the school day. It was as if my senses were finally reawakening after months of catatonia.
My teachers were delighted to see me again and pressed me to return, promising to do anything in their power to help me catch up. What could I do in the face of such kindness but agree?
I studied and wrote papers almost around the clock. I took makeup exams after school. It was a crazy business, but the path I’d been on was a far worse threat to my sanity. Having something to occupy my mind and a goal to achieve helped immeasurably.
Despite my gradually lifting spirits, however, one thing continued to darken my thoughts.
I waited for my brain to tire of wondering about Joe, but it never quite did. Why hadn’t he contacted me? Did he know if I was alive or dead? Did he care? Or was it as Gert had said, that he didn’t want to face a horribly scarred former girlfriend? The longer I waited for a letter, the more I started to believe she might be right. The more I started to wonder if our love had ever been real at all, or something I had just wanted to feel in the moment.
At times I still longed for him, but other times I felt my fury rise. Had he duped me into believing in a love he hadn’t really felt, so that he could gain physical satisfaction? Or had he truly loved me only to abandon me at my darkest hour? Either way, I now questioned whether Joe Cole was the man he had presented himself to be.
It’s for the best, I told myself when my anger abated and I felt the pain of his absence again. I was free to pursue any life I chose without deferring to the needs of another. Maybe I might become another Dr. Lodge, guiding new life into the world. With no husband to please, the horizon of my future broadened considerably.
The spring wore on, and Misses Darlington and Cartery pressed me to apply for college.
“I have no money for tuition,” I told them.
“Just apply,” said Miss Cartery. “Sometimes they give scholarships to good students.”
Cornell was at the top of the list, of course, but they suggested a few other places, as well.
I sprinted to the end of the school year—mentally, not physically, of course. I still wasn’t moving terribly quickly, though small improvements had gotten me from walking like a humpbacked crone to more like a middle-aged matron with back pain.
Nell, Mother, and Harry made it home for my graduation, and it almost felt like a real party. Fred came along, too. “We asked Mr. Birnbaum if he could get us some gigs in the area,” he explained. “We’re playing the Stone Opera House this week.”
We all went to see them, of course. It was the first time I’d been in a theatre since that last show in Seattle at The Moore, when we’d headlined. As I sat in the third row, surrounded by happy people settling in for the first act, memories came flooding back: the sounds of the hall filling with footsteps and voices, the smell of the leather seats and dusty boards, the glow of the footlights against the velvet front curtain. I even felt the jitter of preshow nerves.
But it was all backward. I longed to be experiencing it from the other side of the curtain, whispering “break a leg” to the other performers, squeezing into my old trunk with the internal latch, and feeling the warm flood of applause as I rolled out of it onto the stage. I dabbed at my tears in the darkness and pretended it was from laughing.
In the middle of the night I cr
ept downstairs, past Fred snoring like a one-man band, with his long legs hanging off the couch, and out to the front porch.
I missed Gert. And Joe. Graduating from high school had been a far greater challenge than I’d ever imagined it could be, and I was proud I had made it. But without them, the joy of it was dulled.
The front door opened and Nell came outside to sit on the old trunk next to me.
“I miss Gert,” she said.
“Me, too. Never thought I’d say that.”
“You two are more alike than anyone else in the family.”
“We are not!”
Nell laughed. “I mean it in the best way. Hardworking, determined, talented.” She cut her eyes at me. “And a little big on yourselves. You each think you’re smarter than the other.”
I had to admit, she was just a tiny bit right.
“I hope she’s happy,” I said. “That revue she’s in sounds like a pretty big deal, playing all up and down the West Coast.”
Nell patted my knee. “And you’re both secretly very generous to each other.”
I laughed. The things only sisters know.
I thought of Gert and me smoking out here together the last time we were home. “You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you?” I asked Nell.
“I certainly do not, and I hope you don’t, either. Smoking is very unladylike.”
“You’re right,” I said, and I meant it, but not about the cigarette.
We sat there in the silence of 3 a.m., listening to the wind blow through the weeping willows in the cemetery.
“Nell?”
“Yes.”
“Fred’s pretty nice, isn’t he?”
A secret little smile lit her face, and I knew for sure that what I’d suspected was true. “Yes,” she said, “he’s very nice.”’
“We all really like him,” I said, and her smile brightened just that much more. I’m ashamed to say I felt a pinch of envy in the face of such happiness. The love of a good man had found Nell twice. I was no longer sure it had even found me once.
She must have sensed my turmoil. “Are you still thinking about Joe?” she asked.