White Wind Blew

by James Markert

  “Why are you here?” he asked again, more gently. He moved his hand back to his lap.

  “I’m moving to Minnesota, Wolfgang. I’m married again—to Bruce over there. He’s a minister.” She waved, and from the car Bruce waved back. Wolfgang nodded at him this time. “We’re going to Minnesota to start a church. That’s where he’s from. Would you like to meet him?”

  “No,” Wolfgang said. “I don’t think so.” He looked at her again. “You came to tell me you were leaving, that’s it?”

  “I came for Charles’s violin,” she said. “You took all of his instruments. I’d like to have one to keep.”

  “Which one?”

  “You know the one.”

  Wolfgang braced his hands on his knees and stood. He walked a few paces and stopped to face his mother again. “Wait here.”

  Wolfgang limped past the Model T. He moved as quickly as he could down the footpath to his cottage. Inside, seven of his father’s violins rested against the wall, the eighth being used by Josef. He grabbed the P violin and started for the door, but then he grew suspicious of his mother’s sudden arrival and even more so about why she’d requested the violin. Did she really want it for sentimental reasons? He ran his fingers over the small F-holes and then slid them beneath the strings. He shook the violin and heard nothing moving inside. He turned it over and saw a circular groove about the size of a baseball in the back of the violin. And a tiny metal latch. Out of curiosity he’d opened it before, seeing nothing. But he’d never felt inside. He unlatched it, removed the round wooden plate, and felt around until his long middle finger brushed up against something. He flattened his hand as far as he could and reached inside until the skin between his thumb and index finger felt as if it would split against the carved wood. Finally it came loose in his fingers, and he pulled out a stack of bills. One hundred dollars.

  “I see,” he said aloud.

  The front door blew lazily open. Wind rustled leaves across his porch. His mother was still out there, up the hill, waiting. So that was why she’d come, for the money? She could have it. It felt like poison in his hand. He fixed the back of the violin and carried it by the neck out the door.

  Doris Pike waited patiently on the bench. She stood when Wolfgang approached. Wolfgang handed her the stack of bills but held on to his father’s favorite violin. “You can go now.”

  “Wolfgang…” Doris grabbed Wolfgang’s hand, placed the money inside of it, and closed his fingers over it. “I want the violin. Not the money.”

  He lowered his fist and offered her the violin. He hadn’t seen her smile so widely in twenty years. Relief showered over her face, a smile that instantly made her look young again. He’d taken every one of his father’s instruments ten years ago without a thought that he’d be taking one of the only parts of his father that Doris cherished most—his music. He’d left her nothing.

  Doris took the violin from him and clutched it to her chest. “Thank you.” She kissed his cheek and he didn’t pull away. “Your father trusted no one, Wolfgang. Not even the banks. Do something good with the money.” Then she grinned as she walked around the hood of her husband’s Model T and stopped before opening the passenger-side door. “Good-bye, Wolfgang.”

  “There’s a concert.” Wolfgang stepped closer to the car. “Valentine’s Day. On the rooftop. You can come.”

  Doris didn’t answer. He could feel her peering at his cassock, hiding her distaste. She lowered her head into the car and closed the door. She waved as Bruce pulled away, leaving Wolfgang standing in a pocket of car fumes and rock dust.

  ***

  That afternoon, Wolfgang attempted to coax Frederick into talking but couldn’t tell if the man was too weak or just refused to do so. Wolfgang feared that more than anything else, depression could kill Frederick now. For the rest of the day he moved slowly from patient to patient, gave a homily at Mass that lacked passion, and started the afternoon’s rehearsal with uncharacteristic flatness. Both Susannah and Lincoln had seen Wolfgang outside with his mother, but they didn’t pry. He would tell them eventually.

  The cold wind whistled through the porch screens. McVain watched from his bed, still unable to sit up, let alone play the piano. Five minutes into rehearsal, which had quickly taken on the emotionless mood of their choirmaster, Dr. Barker entered the solarium. “Wolfgang, shut it down.”

  Wolfgang’s shoulders dropped. “We just started.”

  Dr. Barker shouted, “All of you, back to your rooms…please.” He shot Susannah an angry glance and she looked away.

  “The concert is almost here, Dr. Barker.”

  “There will be no concert!” He stormed off. “It’s finished.”

  Herman watched Dr. Barker until he was gone. Then Susannah took the big man by the arm and walked him up to the rooftop.

  Wolfgang stood alone as the choir departed. Dr. Barker blamed him for what had happened to Big Fifteen, that much was clear. He blamed Lincoln for what had happened in the chute.

  Later, when Wolfgang dropped Susannah off at her dormitory, there was no hand-holding and no kiss on the cheek. He watched her until the door was closed and then walked home, craving his sacramental wine.

  He took off his lab coat and dropped it on the floor next to the bed. He unbuttoned a few buttons near the neckline of his cassock, took a bottle of wine from the kitchen, and stared for a moment at the theology books stacked against the wall, covered in dust.

  In his pocket he found the money from the violin.

  Do something good with the money…

  He grabbed one of the violins and turned it over. It too had a secret compartment on the back. After some fiddling inside, his hand came out with a stack of bills. Two hundred dollars. He dropped the violin on the floor and reached for another one. More cash—three hundred dollars. That violin he hammered to the ground, snapping the instrument at the neck and sending tiny slivers of wood across the floor. He chuckled and drank from the bottle again. He checked the violins, one by one, and compiled a stack of cash worth nearly a thousand dollars. He asked me to do it… He asked me to kill him, Wolfgang. He stood with a grunt and hobbled across the room. He pulled out his father’s cello, viola, and bass from the closet. Five hundred more dollars.

  He pictured Dr. Barker playing the bass the other night, trying to impress Susannah. Turning the bottle up again, he staggered toward the bed, where he sat on Rose’s side. He pictured Susannah standing naked in the middle of his floor with a shower of water soaking her hair and body. He got up too fast and nearly fell over. Before he knew it, he was outside, bundled in his heavy winter coat. He stumbled up the hillside, bracing himself on every tree in his path, a grown man acting like a child. Dear God, what am I doing?

  His body was warm from his thick coat and the alcohol. He stumbled past the front porch of the nurses’ dormitory, his back against the side wall like some thief. A voyeuristic mock-priest, drunk from an entire bottle of wine and searching desperately for a peephole, which—come to think of it—might have just been another one of Lincoln’s stories. Wolfgang’s vision cleared momentarily, just long enough to spot the log in the grass about ten feet away. Lincoln’s log. Wolfgang lifted it up with both hands. He carried it, hunched over, closer to the ground next to the building’s concrete foundation, his vision swimming, searching the wall. He looked up—was that it? He stepped up onto the log and balanced himself.

  The log shifted beneath him.

  By the time he hit the ground, Wolfgang blacked out.

  ***

  Everything happened for a reason. It was God’s will, Wolfgang—the words his mother had told him weeks after his father died in his sleep.

  So now was it Rose’s time to go? Was it that simple?

  Rose looked up at him from her bed inside the small sanatorium room as Wolfgang raked his hands through her hair. Waverly Hills was just a mere fleck of the size it would
be in the coming years. For now, it was overcrowded and badly in need of expansion. Wolfgang left his hand in Rose’s hair, never wanting to let go. He was her doctor and he refused to let the tuberculosis take her. The day after he’d graduated from medical school, he’d volunteered to help the sick at Waverly, arriving weeks after Rose had been admitted.

  This was not God’s will, Wolfgang said to himself. This was God’s cruel punishment. His mother would believe the same thing had she and Wolfgang still been speaking. Rose had been sent to him on the steps of the cathedral as a test. A devilish vixen, a temptress luring him away from the righteous church.

  His Rose.

  They had attempted to start the family they’d always talked about. “He’ll send us children when the time is right, Wolf.” That was what Rose had told him. But it was as if God hadn’t wanted their children to grow up without a mother, because none came, and now here was Rose, at Waverly.

  A new nurse walked in with a cart of food. She had blond hair and kind eyes that smiled. “Hello, Rose. Are you hungry?”

  “Hardly, dear.”

  The nurse began to unload a plate of mashed potatoes and gravy and roast beef. “Dr. Barker’s orders. You must eat.”

  Wolfgang stepped forward. “Rose, this is our new nurse. Susannah, is it?”

  “Yes, Dr. Pike.” Susannah stood beside her cart. “My second day, actually.”

  Rose sat up in bed. “Well, God bless you, then.”

  “Thank you.” Susannah started to push the cart out to the porch. “Anything that you need, Doctor?”

  Wolfgang looked up. “No, not right now. Thank you, Susannah.”

  After Susannah left, Wolfgang gripped Rose’s hand and sat beside her bed again.

  “Tell me your thoughts, Wolf?”

  Coughing sounded up and down the small, crowded porch outside Rose’s room. Wolfgang had little hope for her, but he couldn’t say that. “I think only of your recovery, Rose.” Wolfgang prayed silently to God and demanded that He listen.

  Rose rubbed his hand. “I will wait for you in heaven, Wolf.”

  “Don’t say such things, Rose.”

  She laughed. “I’ll answer your questions if there’s a way.” She coughed. “I’ll speak to you from the other side. You’ll know I’m there. You’ll never be alone.”

  ***

  Wolfgang’s eyes peeled open. A raccoon sniffed his left boot and something was crawling across his forehead. He jerked, frightened the raccoon into the woods, and wiped his face. His ears were frozen, his nose like ice. His head ached. How long had he been out?

  The stars were still out. An owl hooted.

  He felt sick to his stomach when he remembered where he was lying. Moments later, he was up on his feet, leaning against the brick wall. He headed back up the hillside to the sanatorium, blowing into his hands repeatedly. A long hot bath would be nice, he thought, but the piano on the fourth floor was calling to him more loudly.

  Inside, he walked quietly beside McVain’s bed and started to remove the requiem from the box underneath.

  McVain’s voice startled him. “I’m freezing.” His breath came out in clouds.

  Wolfgang held out his hands. “My fingers are numb.”

  “You look like shit,” said McVain, eyeing Wolfgang’s clothing, which was matted with frozen leaves and sticky burrs. “Fall asleep in the woods?”

  “Yes.”

  McVain watched him suspiciously.

  Wolfgang handed McVain an extra blanket. “How are you feeling?”

  “I think that bastard Barker stitched me up with barbed wire.”

  “I stitched you.”

  “Well, I feel like I’m dying.”

  “Not until the concert.”

  “My curtain call, huh?”

  “Or the great awakening.”

  “You think he’ll come around on the concert?” McVain asked.

  “He has to.”

  “We’ll figure out something.” McVain’s two left fingers gripped the blanket. He sighed. “I’m not going to make that walk, Doctor.”

  Wolfgang sat stunned for a moment. He looked away, but only momentarily. “We can’t ever know—”

  “Spare me the platitudes,” McVain said. “I can—”

  “Trust me, McVain, I’ve seen it. Patients on death’s door, and then Waverly somehow helps them to make that walk. I need go no further than Rose, if you want examples.”

  McVain’s head settled on his frozen pillow as he listened.

  “We were married for five years,” Wolfgang said, “all through medical school. I was set to go to the priesthood. I believed that was my calling.”

  “And you met her?”

  Wolfgang smiled. “I was home from Saint Meinrad with four years of high school and two years of college under my belt. I saw her on the steps of the cathedral. She had beautiful eyes and dark hair. I waited for dozens of people to enter the church just so I could hold the door for her. An innocent gesture, right?”

  “Sounds like a man who knows what he wants.”

  “She was a weekly churchgoer. But I soon learned her other side as well.”

  “Was she trouble?”

  “No, she was stylish and brash and unpredictable. Just what I needed. She was a walking example of what I’d never had in my life.”

  “A flapper, huh?”

  “Short skirts, makeup, everything. And I trusted her. I knew my parents wouldn’t have approved, but that was part of the allure.”

  “She saw a naïve, shy stick-in-the-mud.”

  “I’d devoted my life to the Lord.” Wolfgang laughed, but it hurt his head. “Rose turned my life upside down.” He rubbed his eyes and blinked the pain away.

  “Are you drunk, Doctor?”

  “Possibly,” Wolfgang said. “The ladies of the church used to question my decision to join the seminary. ‘You’re too handsome,’ they said.”

  “Please.”

  “‘You should get married,’ they’d say. ‘I am,’ I’d tell them, ‘to the church.’ But I knew the moment I saw her that the priesthood wasn’t for me. Not then, at least.”

  “And now it is?”

  “Things have changed.”

  “Have they?”

  Wolfgang fidgeted with the zipper on his coat and spotted the rose and vase atop the piano. “We had a rose garden. I would pick one for her every day. ‘A rose for a Rose,’ I’d say.” He took a deep breath. “One morning, we were nearing our fifth anniversary, and I approached her in the kitchen with a rose. She was crying, and she kissed me on the cheek. Not on the lips, you see.”

  McVain listened.

  “She told me she had been to the doctor, which surprised me, because she hadn’t mentioned anything to me. She had TB.” Wolfgang sighed. “My heart sank.”

  “That’s when you moved here?”

  Wolfgang nodded. “I became a doctor here. She was a patient just before this building was built. The sanatorium was much smaller then.” He pulled McVain’s blanket back up where it had fallen from his arm. “I took care of her every day. Rose was strong.”

  “But TB took her anyway.”

  “No.” Wolfgang shook his head slowly. “She was one of the few whom our rest and fresh air cured.”

  McVain furrowed his brow. “I don’t get it.”

  Wolfgang wiped his mouth and sat straight. “She left this place free of disease eleven months after we’d arrived. She’d lost a lot of weight, but she was in the clear. She Made the Walk with little trouble.”

  ***

  Rose promised she was healthy enough to go out, and perhaps Wolfgang, as her doctor, should have forced her to take her recovery slowly. But Rose was Rose, and as her husband he couldn’t deny her the pleasure of going out to celebrate. She’d beaten tuberculosis in eleven months, and they were both
young and eager to continue on with their lives.

  “Besides, Wolfgang.” She giggled, kissing his neck. “We lost so much time at Waverly.”

  He held her at arm’s length. “What, you didn’t enjoy spending our five-year anniversary on the hillside with the other patients?”

  “Of course I did,” said Rose. “Dining on stale cupcakes and milk was a delight.” She wore the yellow summer dress he liked so much. A red rose bloomed from her hair, a rose he’d given her earlier in the day. “Come on, Wolf. It’s warm outside. We’ll eat, have a few drinks. We won’t stay out too late.”

  Wolfgang took her hand and followed. “Well, it is Valentine’s Day.”

  They dined at Abe’s White Doorknob on Preston Street. It was either there or Cunningham’s at Fifth and Breckinridge; both were known for their supplies of illegal liquor. Cunningham’s was owned by a police captain, and Rose had joked that she didn’t want to celebrate their late anniversary within view of the police, so they’d taken a horse carriage to the Doorknob. They both ordered steak and potatoes and laughed in the dim light. They stole kisses in the shadows of their private corner table and sipped on illegal bourbon. Rose leaned over the table and whispered, “Let’s go home, Wolf.”

  They walked hand in hand out on the sidewalk, both tipsy from the bourbon. Rose showed no signs of the disease, and despite her loss of weight, her energy had fully returned. Wolfgang thanked God for her recovery as they walked along. The sun set behind the downtown buildings in smears of red and orange. A block down, a man in a top hat gave a hot dog to a little girl in a green dress. A horse-and-buggy hurried down the street, the carriage wheels bouncing noisily over the potted road. Wolfgang felt the breeze of the carriage as it sped by.

  Then the heel of Rose’s left shoe stuck in a crack in the sidewalk and her foot came right out of it. She laughed as she stumbled forward. Wolfgang stopped to get her shoe. It was red. She’d worn the shoes because they matched the rose in her hair. Her favorite colors were red and yellow. Wolfgang heard the car before he saw it. Kneeling on the sidewalk, he looked up to find Rose a few feet out into the street, her back turned to the oncoming car. She stood on one foot, tipsy, trying to remove her other shoe.