Servants of the Map

by Andrea Barrett

  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.

  8

  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 t
he 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.”

  The women left his kitchen in a clump, talking furiously among themselves and delegating Nora to learn, as quickly as she could, whatever else Dr. Kopeckny was willing to teach her. As the cold deepened and the snow kept falling, Nora visited his house repeatedly. He talked to her, he thought out loud in her presence, he gave her things to read. Some of the articles startled her. Criminals condemned to death might well be experimented on, one doctor wrote. There is nothing cruel nor revolting about this idea; for a certain period prior to the execution, the criminal should be exposed to the dried sputum of one known to be sick. After execution a careful necropsy would show if tubercles had developed. Thus might useful results be secured.

  She stared at the pages, thinking about her days, so long ago, at Grosse Isle. If Dr. Grant hadn’t been there, what else might have happened to her? We must be scientific, the paper said. The white plague puts all of us at risk. But meanwhile another doctor claimed that the presence of the bacillus in the sick might be only a harmless concomitant, useful perhaps as a diagnostic sign but in no way a convincing demonstration of the germ theory.

  “What does he mean by ‘germ theory’?” Nora asked.

  “I shouldn’t have assumed you knew that,” Dr. Kopeckny replied. As simply and swiftly as he could, he told her about Pasteur, in France, who’d proved that all life came from earlier life, and that putrefaction and decay were not spontaneous but were caused by living germs. He’d found germs that fell from the air or lived in the soil, that made wine go bad or killed cows and sheep. Under the microscope Dr. Kopeckny showed Nora the creatures swarming inside spoiled meat and then those that lived in her own saliva: brethren to the brilliantly blue sticks.

  For weeks she looked in that eyepiece, always seeing something new. On her way home the world would seem utterly different to her, every surface quivering with a thin secret film. There was life on the leaves and in the rivers, on the food she ate, and on her clothes; it was wonderful, it was horrifying, some days she couldn’t eat and she wanted to boil her hands. The world was alive in a way beyond the way she knew. What did that mean?

  Nora went back to her friends and together they worked through the implications of what she’d learned. The bacilli come into the lungs, Dr. Kopeckny had said, attached to dust particles in the air. Infected dust might be spread about by the swish of a skirt or a vigorous broom; the worst things they could do were to raise any dust or allow infected material to dry before it was disinfected. Most of their habits still made sense in the light of this new information. They’d never used carpets or curtains in the invalids’ rooms; they’d always damp-mopped the floors instead of sweeping, and wiped down the walls and woodwork frequently, simply to keep the rooms tidy and fresh. But now they figured out, together, that the invalids’ laundry might best be kept dampened until it could be washed. That scraps of torn paper, used only once, might be better than handkerchiefs, and that the papers should be burned.

  For a while, some of the women kept more than their usual distance from their guests. But after the initial fright they relaxed, partly from habit—they’d been doing this work for years, it was hard to think about it differently—and partly because they realized that what Bessie had said was true. Not a single person in the village, not even those who cared directly for the invalids, had ever gotten sick.

  To Nora’s surprise, it was not people in the village but guests from the cities who first began to shun the sick. The following summer, a wealthy widow objected to sharing a table with Elizabeth, whose cough had grown much worse. She had not paid good money, the widow said, to be in contact with the same germs the filthy immigrants assaulted her with in Boston.

  Ned moved the woman to a distant corner of the dining room, and later took Nora aside. People were getting ideas, he said. From articles in the paper, from conversation with doctors. After all the years when people might share a bed with a consumptive family member, sleep in the same room, share dishes and food, suddenly they were being told about invisible, lurking germs that leapt from person to person. It might be better, Ned said, if Elizabeth took her meals separately for a while, and if Nora didn’t talk about her work. A few guests, he said, had left simply after hearing what she did in the winter months.

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I didn’t want to upset you,” he said. “But if you could do something about Elizabeth …”

  “She might have bronchitis,” Nora said. “Or hay fever—she coughs more when there’s a breeze and when the weather changes. I’m not sure what’s wrong with her.”

  But she brought Elizabeth her meals on a tray for the next few days, unsure how to comfort this frail, unhappy stranger. Do you think I don’t know? she might have said. Do you think I haven’t seen you looking at Michael? She’d been lucky enough, herself, to have Francis, if only briefly, and to have her son and her brother. But she thought she knew what it felt like to be the one who always stood outside, watching the others settle in contented pairs. Still she felt trapped when, just before the Vignes were due to go home, Elizabeth looked up at dinner and asked her mother if she could stay in the Adirondacks for the winter.

  “Nora would keep an eye on me, I know,” Elizabeth said.

  “I would not ask her for such a favor,” Clara said, avoiding Nora’s eyes.

  Stubbornly, Elizabeth continued, “It would help me so much, I know it would. I could stay at one of the houses in the village, like the people Nora goes to visit.”

  “Olive has a free room,” Nora said reluctantly. Did Elizabeth think that, if she were around, and Gillian were not, Michael would somehow change his mind? “At least I think it’s still free.”

  “You’ll stay here,” Ned said firmly, looking not at Elizabeth but at Clara. “No need for you to stay in the village. Our guest rooms aren’t warm enough for the winter months but we have room in our own apartment. You’ll stay with us.”

  Nora seldom went alone to the village that winter. Visiting the invalids, or meeting with the women, almost always she had Elizabeth at her side. Together they looked at the three new houses Bessie’s cousin had built in the meadow, each now rented to someone who wanted to take in invalid boarders.

  “Smart women,” Elizabeth said approvingly. “They should do well here.”

  Nora turned to her with surprise. “You have a head for business?”

  “Gillian and my mother do too,” Elizabeth said. “How else would we have managed?”

  Her strength and energy were surprising, Nora thought, after her frailty during the summer, but week by week she seemed healthier. She helped Nora order new snowshoes for the invalids, listened carefully when Nora gave Olive advice about washing dishes—a rinse in boiling water: all the dishes, every time—and seemed to absorb every word and sight when Nora stopped at Dr. Kopeckny’s to ask a question or peer once more into the microscope that soon would become her own.

  Elizabeth read what Nora read, she learned what Nora learned. Around the invalids she was clumsy at first but she knew enough to sit back and watch and listen. Soon she began to seem comfortable. Almost, Nora thought, to flirt gently with them. Was she flirting? At the inn, where Elizabeth cramped the family quarters, Nora still sometimes caught her gazing at Michael. Yet her voice at dinner was low and calm and her attention to Ned’s stories apparently genuine.

  One March day, after they’d found one of Bessie’s guests coughing frothy blood, Nora asked Elizabeth how her own health was.

  “I’m fine,” Elizabeth said. “Don’t you know that?”

  Nora stopped on the street and stared at her. “I know no such thing,” she said. “When you first came here I thought you might be in real trouble. Why else would you—”

  “I had bronchitis the win
ter before our first visit,” Elizabeth said. “But nothing worse than that—I pretended I wasn’t better so we could get out of the city for the summer. You have no idea how annoying it is to always be under my uncle’s thumb.”

  “You were faking?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Then why did you keep coming back?”

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

  Michael, Nora thought. “What did you think would happen this winter?”

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. She bent down and packed a handful of snow into a ball. “It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s done, it’s like I had an abscessed tooth and then I pulled it. Michael and Gillian are perfect for each other, I’m glad for them.” Her gaze, Nora saw, was quite steady. “I’m glad I stayed, though,” Elizabeth continued. “I like being here. And I like helping you. Can’t I stay?”

  “I didn’t ask you to go.”

  She watched Elizabeth stretch her arm back over her head, heave the snowball, and then bend and make another. Just the idea made her shoulders ache. Sixty years old, she thought. How did I get to be sixty? Michael no longer needed her, Ned managed perfectly well on his own. If he wasn’t working in the shop—he and Michael had an enormous number of commissions that winter—he was scribbling letters to Clara about Michael and Gillian’s impending wedding, or sending plans of the cottage he planned to build for the new couple. Next summer, Nora thought, the guests would come and go, the wedding would happen and then be over, Elizabeth would leave with her mother and everyone else. And then there would be, come wintertime, only her and Ned.

  There is so much left to me, Nora thought. So much left that I want to do. How am I to do it?