Good luck made you feel giddy and invincible.
Good luck didn’t leave you desperately needing a place that was forever in between yesterday and tomorrow.
My parents wanted me to come home to Pennsylvania when word of the fire reached them. My father assured me that he still had a place for me at his medical practice, that he would always have a place for me. But I didn’t want to go back to what I had been, back to the rural landscape where everything is the same shade of brown or green. I had just celebrated my twenty-first birthday. I was living in New York City, where every hue audaciously shone somewhere, day or night. I had been on the cusp, or so it seemed, of the rest of my life. Edward would have asked me to dine with him or see a show if the fire had never come. We were destined to fall in love; I was sure of it, even though I had known him for only two weeks.
But as ashes and burned fabric fell like snow on Edward’s broken body and on so many others, none of whom I could help, I knew I would need a place to make sense of what I had lost and yet never had. Only an in-between place could grant me that.
Three
THE hospital’s two islands were made from dirt and stone pummeled out from beneath New York’s streets to make way for the underground railway. I was amazed that you could dump shiploads of earth into water and convince it to stay in one place. Sometimes I wondered: If there should be a tremor below, would these islands crumble away? God didn’t put them here, so was He inclined or disinclined to protect them? Long ago, when the finger of God was on the bay, there were long stretches of tidal flats and acres of oyster beds, or so the story goes. What God made disappeared long ago.
My parents came to America from Europe the year before I was born, before Ellis’s hospital existed. The second and third islands rose up from the seafloor, one after the other, years after Ellis opened, when it was apparent that something had to be done for immigrants who arrived in America ill and contagious.
It didn’t occur to me to seek a post here when I first completed nursing school in Philadelphia. I wouldn’t have chosen this set-apart place. It was the streets of Manhattan that beckoned me. The vibrant hues of New York had attracted me since I was seven, following a visit to see a show that I never forgot. I had wanted to be a part of its stunning energy for as long as I could remember.
My sister, Henrietta, would likely never leave Pennsylvania. She had married there and was having babies there and she would rock her grandchildren there. Nothing surprising ever happened to her and this suited her. To her, there was only one shade to every color. This was the difference between us. She was happy with the one shade.
I had always been drawn to color. Always. The more vibrant or intense or deep or unique, the better. I never swooned like my sister did when Papa had me assist in the surgery and our sponges and instruments turned crimson. The color of blood mesmerized me, even if the pain of the patient kept me from admiring it outright. Henrietta said blood was the color of death. I told her it was the color of life. Isn’t it? Isn’t it the color of life?
When the bodies landed on the pavement on the day of the fire, it was their lives that spilled out of them.
Sometimes at night, I dreamed of the fire, and my mind conjured the blood puddles on the sidewalk, like flattened red bouquets. I was not aware of making a sound. Surely I must have been doing so, for Dolly would rouse me and whisper, “You are safe, Clara.” Other times the part of me that orchestrates my dreams would create a scenario in which Edward survived the fire. Why couldn’t my dream weavers just skip the blaze altogether? I would like to dream that there was no fire.
My island made no demands of me. It wasn’t here when time began and no doubt it would not be here when time ended. The people in the wards came and went. Other nurses came and went. It was a convenient place to linger.
I saw tiny glimpses of the life I knew, which surely waited for me still, in the faces of the hopeful.
• • •
ON days when multiple ships arrived in New York Harbor, the ferries began arriving at dawn. Immigrants by the hundreds passed through Ellis. Their landing cards would be checked, their names recorded, and their health assessed. Those who failed the health inspection would make their way to us, either by gurney or wheelchair or on foot, most with chalked initials on their outer clothing to inform us what illness or disability they were presenting signs of. I tended a dozen people every day in my rotations in the contagious wards. On multiple-ships days, the number of new arrivals could easily grow beyond what I was able to keep track of.
On one cloudy day in August, my fellow nurses and I rose before the sun and ate our eggs and toast by lamplight. The first ferry arrived just as the sun broke across the face of Ellis’s palacelike front. By noon the hospital was bustling with new arrivals from the farthest corners of the world, much like the day before and the day before that. But there was only one new arrival who caught my gaze that day and kept it.
The copper-colored scarf around the man’s neck as he waited in the hospital’s receiving line was the one spot of color in the montage of brown and gray jackets. It seemed to call out to me, as if it knew it resembled the necklace of fire Edward had around his neck when he took to the sky. The scarf looked as soft as lamb’s wool. I knew the moment I saw it that it was a woman’s scarf and this also intrigued me.
An orderly had opened the door to the outside and a bullying breeze yanked on the immigrants’ hats as they walked up the steps of the main building, where we waited to receive them. Ahead of the man in the scarf, a woman holding the hand of a fair-haired child let go to reach for her bonnet when it whirled away from her. I watched the man catch the hat as it danced toward the water behind them. He handed it back. The woman clutched it to her chest with a nod of gratitude, something I’d seen often in my five months on the island. The clash of languages did not rob the immigrants of their desire to communicate thanks when a snippet of good fortune found them. Somehow, they figured out a way.
The man, golden haired and slender, wore a black felt cap and carried a simple satchel. I guessed him to be in his late twenties, perhaps younger. His face was stippled with a shimmery new beard that covered slightly hollowed cheekbones. The voyage across the Atlantic had no doubt thinned him, as it had thinned all third-class passengers who landed at Ellis. But there was an aching weariness in his eyes and even in the set of his jaw. The hard voyage lingered there, and something else, too.
He approached the table where I and three other nurses waited in our starched white uniforms. The matron, Mrs. Crowley, sat next to us, looking at registration tags and chalked collars, checking off names, and directing the immigrants to one of several hospital buildings, depending on their condition. A child reached up to rub a swollen, watery eye and his mother swatted his hand with a whispered reprimand. The child stuffed his hand into his pocket. If the eye was infected with trachoma, that child would never see the shores of New York and neither would his mother. The attending doctor—not me, thank God—would tell the mother that they would have to go back to their homeland. No one with trachoma made it to shore.
I stood ready to assist with any French-speaking immigrants. I’m not fluent, but my French-born mother taught me enough to understand simple sentences, such as, “But I’m not sick,” and, “I’m supposed to meet my cousin in New Jersey,” and, “I don’t have money for a doctor.” When a French speaker hears me begin a sentence in his native language, he will invariably launch into an impassioned entreaty that I never understand. Mrs. Crowley insists it doesn’t matter that I don’t understand. I need only know how to say, “For now you must report to the hospital building you have been assigned to. There are no exceptions at this table. I’m sorry.”
Several in the first group of people at the table spoke German and Swedish. Another spoke English with a thick Scottish brogue. Since no one needed my limited French, I found my attention drawn to the scarf-wearing man, whose eyes glistened wit
h something other than sickness. Our gazes met and the momentary connection surprised me. I didn’t hear the matron speak to me.
“Miss Wood!”
I jumped slightly and the clipboard I held poked me in the ribs. “Yes, Mrs. Crowley?”
“I asked if you know any Hungarian!”
“No. I’m sorry.”
The matron whipped her head around to the other nurses. “Anyone know any Hungarian?”
A chorus of nos rose up around us and I chanced a look at the man. His gaze was drawn to the sky that shimmered outside the tall windows next to us, or perhaps to the land in the distance. Or maybe he was looking for the ship that had brought him and now lay at anchor in New York’s harbor.
“You’ll need to take that up with the doctor when you see him,” Mrs. Crowley was saying to the dark-haired woman who stood at the front of the table.
The woman began to cry and the man in the scarf turned from his reverie and toward the sound of sobs laced with a lyrical dialect that seemed to fall around the room in tatters. No one knew what the woman was trying to convey.
“I can’t help you here, love,” Mrs. Crowley said, soothingly but with authority. “You will need to report to the ward where you’ve been assigned. Miss Wood, if you please?”
I took a step near the woman to gently take her arm, but she pulled away from me and arched across the table, imploring Mrs. Crowley with words no one under stood.
Mrs. Crowley turned to orderlies lounging at the back of the room. “I need a little help here,” she shouted. Then she swiveled back to me. “Tell her the instructions in French, Miss Wood. Perhaps she will understand that.”
“I’m sorry,” I said in French. “There are no exceptions at this table. The doctor must see you.”
The woman grabbed me by the shoulders and my clipboard clattered to the floor.
“Je ne suis pas malade! Je ne suis pas malade!”
I am not sick.
Her accent was like mine. French was not her native language. But she knew enough to tell me that much.
“Orderly!” the matron yelled over her shoulder.
The man in the scarf bent to pick up the fallen clipboard as an orderly strode toward the distraught woman.
For several seconds there was only the sound of feet on tile, the orderly’s and the woman’s, and her soft cries.
“Next in line, please,” Mrs. Crowley said, her voice shaking a bit.
The man in the scarf took a step forward. He handed me my clipboard but his eyes trailed the woman in the gentle hold of the orderly as they walked away.
“Thank you.” I extended my hand to take the clipboard.
“And your name?” Mrs. Crowley asked.
The man in the scarf slowly turned his head back around. He said nothing.
“Mrs. Crowley stretched out her hand toward the registration tag clipped to the man’s jacket lapel. “Your tag? Yes, your tag.”
The man handed it to her.
Mrs. Crowley studied his card and checked her list. “Ah. Yes. Andrew . . . Gwynn.” Then she looked up and past him to the others waiting for their turn. “And your wife? Lily. Is she with you?”
The man named Andrew Gwynn stared at his hands, wordless.
“Do you understand what I am asking you? Where is Mrs. Gwynn?” Mrs. Crowley asked.
Mr. Gwynn opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it.
The matron looked at his tag and then turned to the nurses behind her. “Good Lord. He’s a Welshman who doesn’t speak the King’s English. Can anyone ask him where his wife is? She’s on the list.”
“She’s not here,” Mr. Gwynn said softly, his Welsh accent lifting his words like musical notes on a breeze.
“What was that?” Mrs. Crowley said.
Mr. Gwynn sighed, as if saying it had been all he could manage.
“He . . . he said she’s not here,” I offered.
“She’s on the list. She’s supposed to be here. They were supposed to stay together.” Mrs. Crowley shook her head, annoyed. “Simple instructions. How much simpler can they be? They’re supposed to stay together.” She redirected her attention to Mr. Gwynn. “Why didn’t the two of you stay together?”
Mr. Gwynn looked at her with unknowing eyes, as though he hadn’t understood a word she had said. Or didn’t know how to explain.
Mrs. Crowley threw up her hands. “They’re supposed to stay together.” She leaned toward Mr. Gwynn. “Where is Mrs. Gwynn? Your frau?”
“That’s German, Mrs. Crowley,” said the nurse next to me.
“She is not here,” Andrew Gwynn murmured, looking down at his hands.
“Does his paperwork say she boarded the ship with him?” I leaned over and looked at the sheaf of papers in Mrs. Crowley’s hands.
“They boarded at Liverpool. Both of them. Together.”
I peered over Mrs. Crowley’s shoulder. Andrew Gwynn and his wife, Lily, had crossed on the Seville. I had heard at breakfast that morning that scarlet fever had claimed thirteen people on that ship.
I looked up at Andrew Gwynn and I understood the ache of loss I saw in his eyes.
I bent toward Mrs. Crowley. “I think perhaps she died en route, Mrs. Crowley. Look. They were on the Seville.”
Mrs. Crowley’s mouth dropped open as her cheeks blossomed crimson. She shut it and furrowed her brow. “Is it too much to ask to get the right information? If they’d only filled out the paperwork right, I wouldn’t have asked him.”
With her pencil, Mrs. Crowley lined out the name under Andrew Gwynn’s. “I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Gwynn. Very, very sorry. But as you know, you were . . . you were in close contact with a victim of the fever on your ship, so you are required to be in quarantine until we are sure you are not carrying the disease.”
Mrs. Crowley looked up at the man in front of her. “He doesn’t understand a word I am saying.” She turned to me and handed me Mr. Gwynn’s papers. “You can escort Mr. Gwynn to Ward K, Miss Wood. And then, for heaven’s sake, run over to the main island and tell them to be more careful! And to send me some interpreters.”
I hesitated before taking a step toward him.
“Will you come with me, please, Mr. Gwynn?”
He neither answered nor nodded his head. I took a couple steps toward the door and he followed me with his eyes only.
“Come with me?”
Mr. Gwynn turned and walked toward me. Behind us Mrs. Crowley called for the next in line. At the door I reached for my cape on a hook, as it was uncharacteristically cool that day. When I’d pulled it on over my shoulders, Andrew Gwynn was standing at the door, holding it open.
“Thank you.”
He nodded.
We walked down the steps and into the late-summer breeze without talking. After several paces on the cement path that led to the isolation pavilions, the heaviness of the silence proved too much for me. I had to fill it with something.
“I am so very sorry about your wife.”
He looked at me, silent.
“I don’t speak Welsh. I only know some French. And only a tiny bit of that. My parents emigrated here before I was born. My father is Irish and my mother is French. They met on their ship.”
He looked down at his feet and hiked his satchel higher onto his shoulder.
We were close now to the collection of isolation wards at the far end of island three. There was no reason for me to step into the halls where scarlet fever, typhus, and cholera slithered like demons. On days we didn’t have a reason to go inside, we didn’t. I wasn’t due to rotate to the isolation wards for another three days.
When we arrived at the door to Ward K, I stopped and handed him his papers. “Go inside. Give these to the nurse at the desk. Understand?”
He didn’t answer.
“Mr. Gwynn?”
“I understand, Miss Wood.”
We stood and stared at each other. I knew then that he had understood everything I had said. And everything Mrs. Crowley had said, including my name. His shock and grief had silenced him. He reminded me of me, on the day of the fire, when there was no language for how I felt inside. The urge to reach out and touch him nearly overcame me.
“Will you be all right, Mr. Gwynn?” I asked instead.
He looked up at the bricked front of Ward K. “I don’t know.”
I needed to get back but I felt compelled to stay a moment longer, in that little space that we shared. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
He turned his head back to face me. “I would like my trunk, please.”
The common moment gently evaporated and after a second’s pause, I delivered the answer I had been trained to give when immigrants sent to the contagious wards asked about their luggage. “Your trunk will be kept for you in the baggage room on the main island. When you are ready to leave, you may retrieve it then.”
“I would like my trunk now, please.” His eyes were languid and his tone cordial, but underneath the polite tone was a tendril of desperation.
“I’m sorry. They won’t let you have it, Mr. Gwynn. Not in the contagious wards.”
Andrew closed his eyes against my words as though I had tossed sand in his face. “I must have my father’s pattern book,” he said. “I have nothing else. I want my father’s pattern book.”
“A pattern book?”
“He was a tailor. I am a tailor. The book is all I have left. Please. If the trunk is stolen I will have nothing.” He opened his eyes and they shone with determination.
“The baggage room is quite safe, Mr. Gwynn.” But I could see he did not believe me. And there was no reason he should. With detainees numbering in the hundreds every day, the baggage room was a busy, crowded place. I would not wish anything I valued to be stowed there for longer than a day.
A Fall of Marigolds Page 3