Ana cheered up later when Lars returned with her sisters and offered to take them out to explore the train. Rosa was content to stay in the private car with Miguel, amusing him with games and songs, cuddling him while they watched the small towns and verdant farms pass by. Gradually the breathless fear that had squeezed her since John left the adobe to kill Lars lifted, replaced by sadness and grief and worry about what might lie ahead of them.
The train pulled into the Oakland station a few minutes after nine o’clock. After disembarking, they carried their luggage to the pier where they would board the ferry to San Francisco. Departing passengers climbed the steps they had recently descended, the conductor called for all to come aboard, the whistle blew, and in a cloud of steam, the train chugged out of the station. Minutes after it departed, another train passed on an adjacent set of tracks heading in the opposite direction, but it did not pause at the station.
“Is that the train we’ll take home after Ana and Miguel see the doctor?” asked Lupita, craning her neck to watch as they walked along.
“No, mija,” Rosa said, shifting her sewing basket on her hip and holding tightly to Miguel’s hand so she wouldn’t lose him in the crowd. “That’s a freight train. See? There aren’t any windows for people to look out of, no seats or dining cars. This train carries food and goods, but no passengers.”
Lupita nodded and watched the train pass, intrigued, but Marta threw Rosa a quick, curious look from beneath raised brows, a single glance that told Rosa immediately that her eldest daughter had figured out that they were not going back to the Arboles Valley anytime soon, if ever. Rosa knew that eventually she would have to tell the others, but she dreaded that moment and had decided to put it off until after the doctor’s examination. She didn’t want to tell them they weren’t going home until she could tell them where they were going, and she wouldn’t know that until the doctor provided a diagnosis and recommended a treatment.
“There sure are a lot of freight cars,” said Ana tiredly. She had slept poorly, woken throughout the night by the noise and jostling of the train and by stomach pains. Later, when she could not keep down the cornmeal mush she had eaten for breakfast, she confessed that she had tasted a few bites of chocolate layer cake at lunch the previous day when no one was watching. Rosa was greatly relieved that the cornmeal had not caused her illness, but not so relieved that she didn’t scold Ana for disobeying the doctor’s orders.
“I wonder what they’re carrying,” said Marta, watching the train cars pass.
“Maybe toys,” Lupita guessed.
“Fruits and vegetables, more likely,” said Lars. “Bound for markets throughout California and across the country.”
Lupita seemed about to reply until she caught sight of the ferry. “Are we going on that?” she exclaimed, pointing.
When the children heard that they were indeed, they would have run ahead to join the queue if they weren’t encumbered by luggage. They enjoyed the ride across the bay and seemed sorry when the ferry slowed and docked at the pier in San Francisco. They gathered their things and disembarked, and Rosa waited with them on the platform while Lars went off to make arrangements for a ride to the hospital.
“No need to hire a cab,” Lars told Rosa when he returned. “A station clerk recommended a boardinghouse near the hospital, and a streetcar can take us almost to the front door. The fellow says the rooms are clean and the food is better than what we’ll find elsewhere for the price. Sound all right to you?”
Rosa nodded. Although her first impulse was to make haste to the hospital, she reasoned it would probably be best to find a place to stay and make themselves more presentable first. With Lars’s help she distributed the luggage among the six of them, and they followed Lars from the platform. The brisk streetcar ride up and down the steep hills of the city offered the children another adventure, and if not for Miguel’s weakness and Ana’s drawn face, Rosa could almost forget they were not an ordinary family out for a holiday—but they were far from ordinary, and although their lives would be forever intertwined, they were not a family.
They disembarked on a street corner a block away from the boardinghouse, a quaint, two-story residence in the Spanish style with stucco walls, a roof of curved red tiles, a deep front porch, and a patch of neatly mown green grass for a front yard. As they climbed the front stairs, they passed between two trellises covered with a deep, rich blush of climbing roses. Instinctively, Rosa glanced at Lars only to find him watching her, and although she quickly looked away, she knew he too was thinking of how, long ago, he had called her his Spanish rose—in affection, in amusement, in longing, in exasperation, in the heat of passion, in the anguish of farewell. Now her bloom had faded and she was simply Rosa Barclay, his rival’s wife.
Lars raised his hand to knock upon the front door, but then he hesitated and knelt down until he was eye level with Lupita. “Girls,” he said. “We’re going to play a game of Let’s Pretend while we’re here, all right?” Lupita nodded eagerly, Marta and Ana, with some caution. “I’m going to pretend to be your father, and your mother and I are going to use pretend names. You can call us Mama and Papa, okay?”
Lupita nodded, adding, “I want a pretend name too.”
Before Rosa could urge him not to make matters more complicated than necessary, Lars said, “All right, Little Miss. What will your name be?”
“Maria.”
Rosa felt a wrenching tug of heartache. “No, not that.” Not the name of a daughter she had lost.
“Lupita is such a pretty name,” Lars said, with a glance to Rosa that told her he understood everything. “It’s perfect for a pretty girl like you. Why don’t you keep it?”
Lupita’s expression was a changeable sky, her delight at the compliment hidden and revealed again by the shifting clouds of stubborn annoyance at being denied her own way. Eventually pride won out and she agreed to remain Lupita, so Lars nodded as if impressed by her good judgment and knocked upon the door. A gray-haired wisp of a woman in a faded calico housedress opened the door. “Yes?” she greeted them, her eyebrows rising at the sight of the four children and inching even higher at the sight of Rosa’s bruised face.
“Good afternoon, ma’am. My name is Nils Ottesen and this is my wife, Rose.” He put his arm around Rosa’s shoulders and drew her forward, where she managed a smile and a nod. “Our family needs rooms for the night, possibly longer, and we’ve heard you run the most comfortable boardinghouse in town.”
“Do you have any vacancies?” asked Rosa, shifting Miguel to her other hip, thankful that the children had chosen that moment to be quiet and well behaved.
“Well, I might.” The woman’s mouth thinned in suspicion as her gaze traveled from Rosa’s bruised face to Lars’s somber one. “But I can’t have any trouble here or you’ll have to leave at once.”
“We won’t be any trouble,” said Lars, “and we can pay up front.”
The landlady needed only a moment to consider before she opened the door wider. “That’s fair enough. I can give you two rooms, but the children will have to share beds.”
“That’s fine,” Rosa said promptly, ushering the girls inside before the woman could change her mind. In the foyer, Lars signed the register with his alias and handed five dollars to the landlady, who introduced herself as Mrs. Sharon Phillips. She took two keys from a desk in the corner and led them, lugging their satchels and suitcases, upstairs, to two small rooms on opposite sides of a narrow hallway. She recited the hours and rates for meals and left them to settle in, but before she departed, her glance fell upon the quilts in Rosa’s basket.
“Did you make these?” she asked, stooping over to flip over the edge of the one Elizabeth had called Arboles Valley Star.
“No, they’re old family quilts.” Rosa resisted the urge to nudge the basket out of the way so the landlady would stop pawing through her things. “My mother made the star quilt as a gift for me and—and Nils, and my great-grandmother brought the octagonal quilt with her when she
came to California to marry my great-grandfather.”
“They’re charming.” Mrs. Phillips straightened and regarded Rosa with new friendliness. “Old scrap quilts have so much character. It’s good to see young people appreciating them. Nowadays everyone fancies quilts made from kits they get in the mail from back east, and that’s if they bother to quilt at all. Can you imagine? That’s cutting corners when they should be cutting templates, if you ask me.”
Rosa didn’t agree with the landlady’s opinion, but in the interest of diplomacy, she made a noncommittal murmur and nodded.
Lars couldn’t conceal his amusement. “Your quilts won her over,” he said after the landlady disappeared down the stairs. “Maybe you should carry them wherever we go.”
“Maybe,” Rosa said, smiling, although she hoped she wouldn’t need to win over anyone else.
They stowed their luggage, by unspoken agreement placing Rosa and the children in the larger of the two rooms and Lars alone in the other. Rosa took a moment to freshen up before washing Lupita’s and Miguel’s faces and brushing their hair, and instructing Marta and Ana to do the same for themselves. In the meantime Lars returned downstairs to ask the landlady for directions to the hospital. Before long they met him on the front porch and walked a few blocks to Clay Street, where they found the Stanford Hospital, a narrow, four-story building that appeared to have been fairly recently built.
Inside, Lars gave their assumed names at the registration desk and they settled in to wait. Not knowing when they would arrive in San Francisco, unable to linger in Oxnard until they received a reply to Lars’s wire, Rosa and Lars had known they were taking a chance that Dr. Reynolds would be able to see them that day. As the minutes ticked past and the children grew bored and weary, Rosa began to worry that Dr. Reynolds might be too busy with other patients to see them, or too annoyed by her presumption at showing up without a proper appointment. If they were turned away now after coming so far—
She felt Lars’s hand close around hers. “Rosa,” he said in a low voice. “It’s going to be okay. He’s going to help us.”
Rosa wished she could be so sure. She managed a smile and squeezed his hand in thanks. His hands were rougher than she remembered, calloused and dry, but they were warm and strong and comforting. She wished she did not have to let go.
A nurse clad in a white cap and dress entered the waiting room carrying a brown clipboard. “Mr. and Mrs. Ottesen?” she inquired, looking around expectantly.
When Lars squeezed her hand and stood, Rosa quickly got to her feet, silently berating herself for forgetting their aliases. “Marta,” she asked quietly, “will you please stay here with Lupita until we get back?” When Marta nodded, Rosa picked up Miguel, took Ana by the hand, and followed the nurse down a corridor to an examination room, with Lars close behind.
After settling Ana and Miguel side by side on the examination table, the nurse took their temperatures, weighed them, and listened to their heartbeats, smiling pleasantly all the while. Charmed by her friendliness, Miguel beamed and chatted with her, but Ana sat quietly unless asked a question, her expression tired, patient, and resigned. Rosa wished she could promise her daughter a cure and see hope light up her wan, pallid features.
Soon a short, stocky man with small, round glasses and a full, bushy black beard strode into the room carrying a folder of papers. Setting the folder aside, he smiled at the children and introduced himself as Dr. Reynolds. “When Dr. Russell telephoned me yesterday, he left me with the impression that he intended to treat your children himself based upon my recommendations,” he remarked to Rosa and Lars, his eyes twinkling. “I’m flattered that you made the long trip north to bring your children to see me instead.”
His gracious humor put Rosa at ease, even as he commenced with the same tests and asked the same questions all the other doctors had. As Rosa described their symptoms and the progression of the mysterious ailment in the children she had lost, Dr. Reynolds nodded thoughtfully and examined Ana’s and Miguel’s eyes and throats and abdomens, drawing out more information from Rosa and from Ana too with peculiarly specific questions no other doctor had posed. At last he patted Miguel on the head, lifted him down, and handed him to Rosa. “Your children have celiac disease,” he said, helping Ana down from the table. “They cannot digest sugars, starches, or fats. The resulting chronic, debilitating diarrhea causes malnutrition, and as you know, it can be fatal.” The doctor smiled kindly, compassionately, and he rested his hand on Miguel’s soft, dark curls. “However, I assure you that Ana and Miguel can avoid that fate.”
Rosa drew in a quick, shaky breath. “You know of a cure?”
“I’ve heard of a treatment,” Dr. Reynolds clarified. He glanced around for the folder he had set aside earlier, and he took from it a dog-eared medical journal. “Dr. Sidney V. Haas of New York City published a fascinating study in the American Journal of Diseases of Children last year. He’s treated many children suffering from the same affliction as your son and daughter with great success. Simple but strict changes to his patients’ diets resulted in a complete elimination of their symptoms and a return to vigorous good health.”
“What sort of changes?” asked Rosa. “We’ll do whatever we have to do.”
Dr. Reynolds paged through the papers in his folder. “Dr. Haas discovered that ripe bananas have some essential property that enable them to break up starches and convert cane sugar into fruit sugars, which are more easily tolerated by the patient’s digestive system. Once the problem of sugar and starch digestion is resolved, the proper digestion of fats follows. Consequently, patients are then able to take nourishment from the food they eat, and gradually attain good health.”
Lars studied him, his glance falling upon the folder in the doctor’s hands as if he wanted to read it for himself. “Bananas can do all that?”
Dr. Reynolds nodded. “We don’t fully understand why, but they can.” He went on to explain the specifics of what had come to be known as Dr. Haas’s banana diet. Ana and Miguel should eat as many ripe bananas each day as they were willing to take, he emphasized, ideally between four and eight. They must avoid all breads, crackers, cereals, and potatoes, with rice being the only starch permitted. In addition to bananas and rice, the children could eat healthy amounts of cheese, oranges, vegetables, meat, and gelatin, and they could drink milk. Dr. Haas had observed improvement in his patients almost immediately after they had begun the banana diet, and most had been declared completely free of symptoms within three to six months. Even so, Dr. Reynolds noted, any deviation from the protocol after that time could result in a relapse.
As he spoke, Dr. Reynolds wrote down his instructions on a sheet of paper. “I’d like to examine the children weekly,” he said as he handed the paper to Lars. “Especially in these early weeks, it’s important for me to see how well they’re responding to the diet. However, I realize you’re a long way from home. If you prefer, I could write to your family doctor and he could take over their treatment.”
“No,” said Rosa firmly. They could not go home, but even if they could, she adamantly refused to entrust Ana’s and Miguel’s health to the doctors who had urged her to feed her children “wholesome white bread,” something they should have scrupulously avoided. “You know more about this affliction than any other doctor they’ve seen. I want you to take care of them.”
“Very well.” Dr. Reynolds hesitated. “I’m mindful that you haven’t been in San Francisco long. I should warn you that in the city, the cost of food and lodgings for a family of four could be prohibitive.”
“A family of six,” Rosa said without thinking, as a restless Miguel wriggled in her arms. “My other two daughters are waiting outside.”
“You have two other daughters? Celiac disease often runs in families. Would you like me to examine them as well?”
“No, that’s not necessary,” Rosa quickly assured him, setting down Miguel but holding on to his hand. “They’ve never suffered the way my other children have.”
“Hmm. Curious.” The doctor pondered Rosa’s words for a moment before setting the puzzle aside. “If the cost of keeping the entire family hereabouts for the duration of Ana’s and Miguel’s treatment is too much, you could admit them to the Stanford Convalescent Home. It’s affiliated with Stanford University just as this hospital is, and it’s quite close. Mrs. Ottesen could remain in the city to care for them, while Mr. Ottesen would be free to take your other children home.”
“Thank you, Doctor, but we couldn’t possibly split up,” said Rosa. “We’ll stay in San Francisco, all six of us, together. The separation would be a greater hardship than the expense.”
“Of course. I understand.” Even so, the doctor appeared no less worried as he turned to Lars. “But I’m sure you’ve left a job behind in Southern California. How likely is it that your employer will hire you back after such a long absence?”
“I worked my brother’s ranch,” said Lars. “He’d take me back in a heartbeat. He has to. We’re family. In the meantime, I can find something here to pay the bills. Ranching and farming are in my blood, but I’ve held down other odd jobs from time to time. Thank you for your concern, Doctor, but we’ll get by.”
“I apologize if I’ve overstepped my bounds.” Dr. Reynolds smiled self-deprecatingly. “I’ve been told I have a tendency to do that. A hazard of the profession, I suppose.”
“Not at all, Doctor.” Lars rose and shook his head. “We’re very grateful.”
“Yes, thank you,” said Rosa fervently, picking up Miguel again and taking Ana’s hand. “Thank you for everything.”
Dr. Reynolds accompanied them to the registration desk, where they scheduled an appointment for the following week. Before they parted ways, Ana peered up at the doctor solemnly and said, “Do you really think if Miguel and I don’t eat bread and crackers and those other things, and eat bananas every day, we’ll get better?”
Dr. Reynolds knelt down and looked her straight in the eye. “Ana, I promise you that if you follow the instructions I gave your mother, and if you never give in to the temptation to eat a cookie or a slice of toast, you will get better. You may get sick of bananas, but you won’t be sick like you have been, not anymore.”
Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel Page 12