A Fall of Marigolds

by Meissner, Susan

  “But if I do not survive,” Andrew went on, as if I had not interrupted him, “you will see that my brother gets the book?”

  In the same moment that he asked me this I realized I had a stretch of space for deciding what to do with Lily’s letter. If Andrew Gwynn succumbed to the fever just as his wife had, I wouldn’t have to do anything. He could die in peace thinking his lovely new wife loved him. He would surely go looking for her in paradise and perhaps learn the truth at last in heaven. But heaven seems a place where truth cannot hurt. Here, the truth can be devastating.

  If he fell ill and survived I had many days to decide.

  If he wasn’t to become ill at all, I had less than a week.

  I had time.

  He still waited for my answer.

  I didn’t want to tell Andrew that I’d make sure his brother got the book provided he came to the island to get it himself. That would have taken too much explaining.

  “Of course,” I said. “I am due to rotate into the isolation wards on Monday. We can see how you’re doing then.”

  He bowed slightly. “Thank you. I am in your debt.”

  “Not at all,” I said quickly, shaking off those last five words.

  He sat down on his bed slowly, as though contemplating what might be in store for him had exhausted him.

  “I’ll leave you to settle in, then,” I said.

  “Thank you.” He held out his hand, palm up, toward me. It was the strangest gesture. Like a poor man asking for alms. I just stared, unsure what he expected me to do.

  “My luggage keys?” he said.

  “Oh! Of course!” I reached into my pocket, my hand firmly palming the book of poetry and my fingers grazing Lily’s confession. I grasped for the shoelace and claim tickets and quickly drew them out. I placed them in his hands. “I am afraid they’ve sent your wife’s . . . the other trunk to the incinerator. It’s not in the baggage room anymore.”

  But this news did not surprise him.

  “I was told that would likely happen. They told me they planned to destroy any of the belongings of those who had died. To be sure. It was a very bad case.”

  He closed his hand around the ticket and keys.

  I started to walk away.

  “You’ve a kind heart, Miss Wood.”

  I turned to look at Andrew but he was looking out the window again.

  Kindness is always motivated by something nobler than just a desire to be kind.

  I had a wounded heart. Like his. That is what I had.

  Seven

  THE afternoon passed quickly as more arrivals flowed into Ellis, typical for a Friday. Dolly and I and the other nurses in the reception area had little time for small talk as we escorted immigrants to the rooms that would be their holding place for at least the weekend. I could see that Dolly was anxious for the day to fully be at its close so that she could find out what I had discovered about Lily Gwynn. Late in the afternoon a large contingent of the suspected ill crowded into our lobby and I heard Dolly mutter under her breath, “Will this ever-lovin’ day never end?”

  Just before the sun went down I was sent on another errand to the main island for a Polish interpreter and by the time I returned with one, the reception area had finally closed for the day. Dolly was waiting for me in the staff dining room many minutes later, but the chairs around her had filled with our colleagues while she looked for my return. There would be no discussing Lily Gwynn until later, and disappointment made her stab her potatoes in annoyance.

  When at last we were in our room in our nightgowns, with the needs of the day finally silenced, I pulled out Andrew Gwynn’s pattern book from under my bed.

  “What in the world is that?” Dolly asked as I unwrapped it from its canvas covering.

  “It’s a book of tailor’s patterns. It belonged to Mr. Gwynn’s father. He was afraid it might get stolen in the baggage room.”

  “It smells.” Dolly wrinkled her nose.

  I held the book close to my nostrils and breathed in the scent of old paper and muslin. “I like this smell.”

  “What has that book got to do with his dead wife?”

  “Nothing. It’s just the reason I went to the baggage room.” I rewrapped the book in its canvas covering and shoved it back under my bed. I sat on my folded knees and withdrew the poetry book from the pocket of the apron I’d brought to the bed.

  “Another book?” Dolly was unimpressed.

  “This one was hers. I didn’t know which of the two trunks on Mr. Gwynn’s claim ticket was his. I thought his would be the smaller of the two. But I was wrong. The smaller one was Lily Gwynn’s. And when I opened it by mistake, I saw this poetry book and thought maybe he would like to have this, too. It was hers and it looked as if it had been special to her. So I took it to give to him.”

  “And?”

  “And when I got to our room to put them under my bed until later, I accidentally dropped the poetry book. These papers fell out of it.”

  I handed the papers to Dolly and watched her expression as she read the contents of both.

  “Good Lord!” she gasped.

  “I know. Isn’t it terrible?”

  “They had known each other only two weeks?”

  “So sad, isn’t it?”

  “And he married her?”

  The depth of her astonishment silenced me for a moment. She seemed appalled more by Andrew’s marrying Lily than by Lily’s deceit. “What is so wrong about his marrying her?” I finally said.

  She held up the letter and waved it. “Need I explain? He didn’t know her!”

  A little geyser of indignation was working its way through me. “He thought he did. She wanted him to think he did. This is her terrible crime. Not his.”

  “Well, foolishness should be a crime, then. Marrying someone you just met is a daft thing to do.”

  “Give me those back.” I pulled the letter and certificate from her hands, and Dolly’s eyes widened like saucers.

  “Why are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not mad at you.” I folded the documents and placed them back inside the poetry book.

  “Yes, you are. Are you saying he was smart to marry someone he barely knew?”

  “I’m saying it’s not for anyone else to say how long it takes to fall in love with someone. Or how short.”

  “But that’s my point! She didn’t love him!”

  “But he loved her.” I huffed. “Isn’t that obvious? You saw him today, wearing her scarf around his neck, barely able to answer any questions. He speaks English, you know. He understood everything Mrs. Crowley said to him. Grief made him act the way he did.”

  Dolly shook her head. “He didn’t know her. How can you know someone you’ve only just met?”

  She said it with such finality that I felt a weight, like a little cannonball, slam into my chest. I winced and she saw it.

  “You think you can love someone you’ve only just met?” Her tone was soft and knowing, as if she had just figured something out, something that had been hidden before. She bent her head to make eye contact with me. “Did that happen to you once?”

  I met her gaze, expecting to see laughing eyes, but I saw only compassion there. Had her face been wrapped in curious mirth I might have been able to stay angry. But her sympathetic expression melted my indignation, and tears that I had been holding for months started to spill out of me.

  Dolly was at my side in an instant, wrapping her arms around me. The little book pressed against my chest, poking me in the ribs as I shook with the force of emotion unhinged. The tears ran down my face in rivulets but I refused to give voice to my sobs. I felt something deep and raging in my throat, scrabbling for release, but I locked my lips shut. A groan rumbled there but I did not let it out.

  And all the while, Dolly rubbed my back and whispered, “There, there. T
here, there.”

  After a few moments, the tears ebbed and I found myself able to gather my wits. I had not cried since the day of the fire. I hadn’t wanted to cry on the island at all. I’d been too afraid my tears would christen it with my sorrows. I wanted nothing about the fire to exist in my sacred in- between place. I wiped my cheeks with the sleeve of my nightgown and Dolly reached for a handkerchief from her bedside table. I declined it. There would be no spreading of my woes onto other surfaces.

  “Did you lose someone you cared for in the fire?” Dolly asked gently, but the words felt prickled by barbs nonetheless.

  I nodded without looking at her, embarrassed that I had been unable to keep this hidden from her any longer.

  “Had you only just met him, then? Is that what this is about?”

  Again I nodded.

  “His name was Edward, wasn’t it?”

  I wrenched up my head to look at her. “How do you know that?”

  Dolly fingered a sticky strand of hair away from my eyes. “You call out his name sometimes when you have . . . when you dream.”

  My face reddened. I felt the heat. “Do I?”

  “Yes.”

  There was apparently little I could hide from the island after all. It had already heard Edward’s name and my anguished cries—multiple times, apparently—as I lay asleep, re-creating the day of the fire over and over again in my nightmares.

  “Who was he?” Dolly asked, gently inviting me to tell her.

  I wiped the last bit of wetness from my eyes. “Only the kindest man I’ve ever known. I met him in the elevator. He was an accountant for Triangle and he worked on the tenth floor. I worked on the sixth. I saw him every day in the elevator. He always tipped his hat, always greeted me, always followed me with his eyes when I got off the elevator before him. I think he waited to get onto the elevator each day until he saw me. Must’ve been nerve-racking timing it just right.” I laughed lightly and so did Dolly.

  “He had invited me to come up to see the factory floor the day of the fire.” I recalled Edward asking me, remembering the slight hesitancy in his voice lest I found him too forward. But I’d smiled and told him I would like very much to see the sewing machines at work. And he had smiled broadly back at me. I looked up at Dolly. “He was going to ask me to dinner afterward. I’m sure of it. I could see it in his eyes. And I would have said yes.”

  “And he . . . he died in the fire.”

  The memory widened to include the rest of the day. Edward, far above me, standing at the edge of his mortal life. “He stepped out a window. I saw him on the ledge. His clothes were on fire. Flames were wrapped around his neck like a scarf.”

  “Oh, Clara.”

  “There was a young seamstress on the ledge with him. Her clothes were on fire, too. It was obvious she was afraid to step out alone, so he gave her his hand so that she wouldn’t have to. He held on to her all the way down.”

  “Oh, dear sweet Jesus,” Dolly murmured.

  “He was such a kind man,” I whispered, and my cheeks were wet again.

  “And he . . . There was no saving him?”

  I shook my head. “Only one person survived the jump. And she died later.”

  “Oh! I remember that now. That must have been horrible.”

  “It was. It is,” I said. “There I stood with all my nursing skills and I could do nothing for any of them. Or for him.”

  We were quiet for a moment. I wiped my eyes, and I saw from the corner of my vision that Dolly wiped hers, too.

  After a moment, Dolly took my hands. “And here all this time I thought it was fear of fire that keeps you stuck on Ellis. It’s not the fire. It’s what it took from you, isn’t it? That’s why you never want to come ashore with us. Because of what you lost, not what you escaped.”

  “I’m not stuck here,” I murmured. “I want to be here.”

  She covered my hands with hers. “You haven’t been off the island in five months, Clara.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m stuck.”

  “But you’re here just the same and you never leave. Are you afraid you might meet someone else? That you might actually get over him? Is that it?”

  “I’m not afraid of that.” The answer fell off my lips as if I’d rehearsed it.

  “Well, what then?”

  There was no answer at the ready this time.

  “Are you afraid you’ll find out he was married or something? That maybe he was just being kind because you were new?”

  I covered the poetry book with my hand. “That’s absurd. I’m not afraid of that. And he wasn’t married.” I opened my mouth and shut it again. A buzzing seemed to fill my ears. I couldn’t think.

  “It might do you good to find out who Edward was, Clara. You barely knew him. Maybe if you did know him, you’d be able to come to terms with this. Get off this island. Get on with your life.”

  The buzzing intensified. I reached my hand up to my ear and rubbed it. “I don’t see how that would make a difference. What I knew I loved.”

  “What you knew?”

  “It was enough.”

  “If it was enough I’m thinking you wouldn’t be stuck here.”

  “I’m not stuck!”

  “Well, it seems as if you are to me. And if you care at all for Andrew Gwynn, you should give him that letter and let him move on, lest he be stuck, too. I don’t think he deserves to mourn all his days a wife who did not love him. Do you?”

  Both of my ears felt ready to burst. “I don’t know what I think.”

  Dolly leaned over and kissed me on top of my head. “Come with the girls and me to the city tomorrow night. We’re going dancing.”

  “Maybe,” I said slowly, with zero conviction.

  She got into her bed and pulled up the covers. “Sleep on it, Clara. You don’t have to do anything with that letter tonight.” Dolly turned over, away from the light that still burned on my bedside table.

  I sat there for a long while, afraid to get into my bed, give in to sleep, and revisit the fire.

  I should never have opened Lily’s trunk. I should never have taken the book. If only I had left it there. It would be ashes now.

  Eight

  THE first time I fell in love I was thirteen. His name was Otto Hertz and he was three years older than me. I had known him since early school days but he hadn’t really caught my attention until he took a nasty fall from a barn roof while pushing snow off with a broom.

  His father, a German who spoke little English, brought him into my father’s surgery. It was a bitter cold and colorless day in February. My mother had been helping my father that morning, but when Otto was ushered in with a shiny point of bone poking out of the red-rimmed flesh of his arm, she promptly left the surgery holding her stomach. I stood at my father’s side and helped him as he coaxed the angry pieces of bone back under muscle and skin and sewed up the tear. When the arm was bandaged and bound, I sat with Otto as the ether and morphine wore off, holding a cold compress to the goose egg on his forehead, also gifted him by his fall. He thanked me for my concern and told me I had pretty hair.

  My immediate attraction to the blue-eyed boy was fierce and exciting. But I was alone in it. Other than his comment about my hair, Otto never intimated that he was likewise sweet on me.

  Throughout his recovery, whenever Otto came into my father’s surgery for a checkup or to have the stitches removed or the bandages changed, I made it a point to be in the room. I found ways to participate in his care, much to my father’s chagrin, but Otto apparently never caught on. When his arm was finally healed, there were no more visits to the surgery. I had to hope for chance meetings on the street, which happened only twice the year after that. Both times Otto returned my effusive greeting, as polite boys are trained to do. But he clearly felt no reciprocating attraction to me. The following year I saw a girl on his
arm when he came to town at Christmastime. A year later, when he was eighteen, he married her.

  It wasn’t until Otto married someone else that I reluctantly forced the feelings I still had for him to surface so I could release them like a bird to fly away. Hanging on to those feelings had been hard but also wonderful. At least I had had something of Otto while I clung to my one-sided affection for him.

  The second time I fell in love I was eighteen. Daniel Borden was a medical student interning with my father to complete his schooling. He lived with us for two months, and I fell for him within the first three weeks. This time, the man of my affections felt the same way about me. When it was evident to all that we had feelings for each other, my father thought it prudent for Daniel to rent a room from the headmaster of the local school for the remainder of Daniel’s four-month stay at my father’s practice.

  For the next eight weeks my feet didn’t touch the ground. Daniel brought me flowers, wrote me love poems, read books to me, kissed me under the stars, showered me with words of affection, and told me every day how sad it would be when he returned to Boston. I fully expected him to ask my father for my hand before he left. But he did not.

  The last evening before he was to leave us, he and I sat on the porch under a violet twilight and I asked him outright what he thought the future held for us. He kissed my hand and told me he wanted to be finished with school and have a job and a roof over his head before he spoke to my father about marrying me. He told me to be patient, that love would make the days go by fast.

  And love did.

  But distance also affects the speed of days.

  After the first few months of his absence, Daniel’s letters began to arrive less frequently. So I increased the number of letters I sent to him. His words of affection for me became less ardent, so I intensified mine. His promises regarding our future ceased to be included in his words to me, so I doubled the inclusions of my promises to him.

  One day his letters stopped coming. In my head I knew there was a reason for this, but my heart refused to acknowledge what that reason was. I kept writing to Daniel as if nothing had changed between us. My parents saw that there were no more letters from Daniel, and stopped asking about him. Henrietta, who was married by now and living with her husband on a nearby farm, noticed that I was unable to provide any news of Daniel’s progress in school—or anything else about him—and she told me gently that it was time to face the truth: Daniel had fallen out of love with me. Henrietta said as sweetly as she could, though I hated her for it, that Daniel likely had feelings for someone else but lacked the courage to tell me.