A Fall of Marigolds

by Meissner, Susan

  Not long after the doctors had moved on to another ward, aides arrived to help me with sponge baths and bedpans. The men who were able walked to the toilet room just outside the ward as we steadied them. Andrew watched as one of the aides helped the man across from him, with only the smallest of privacy curtains, use the bedpan. Then he sat up slowly and swung his legs over the side of his bed. He started to stand and I rushed over to him from where I was changing sheets two beds away.

  “Careful there, Mr. Gwynn.” I reached for him, putting my arm around his back. I could feel the heat of his fever through his bedclothes. “What do you need?”

  “I need to see if I can do this.” The lilt of his words made me think of a faraway place with half-timbered cottages and thatched roofs.

  “Do what?”

  “Walk to the toilet.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “I don’t want to trouble you.”

  I tightened my grip around his waist. “Let’s just stand for a minute and see how that feels.”

  “I don’t want you to help me . . . use the toilet.”

  His modesty was strangely alluring.

  “How about we get there and see how you feel?” I said.

  Andrew nodded and we made our way down the corridor in between the beds. He eased himself away from me a bit to test his steadiness.

  “How are you doing? Feeling all right?”

  “Yes. Yes, thank you.” He paused, swallowed gingerly. “I’m very sorry about that fire.”

  The careful equilibrium that I had salvaged from the earlier conversation with Dr. Randall wavered a bit. But I did not feel the same blast of hot embers that I had felt before. It didn’t seem to matter as much that Andrew spoke of the fire. I nodded.

  “So many people died,” he added.

  “Yes.”

  “Were they not able to get out?”

  “No. They couldn’t.”

  “Were some of them your friends?”

  I hesitated a moment. “One of them was.”

  He reached up to rub his throat. “I’m very sorry.”

  “I am sorry, too. Rest your voice now, Mr. Gwynn.”

  We reached the doorway and crossed the main hallway to the toilet room. I asked him whether he felt strong enough to go in alone.

  “Yes. Thank you.” He stepped into the room but then he turned toward me, held my gaze for a moment. “I’ll be fine.”

  He shut the door gently.

  • • •

  AT my lunch break I found Dolly, Ivy, and a few of the other nurses at our usual table. I put down my tray and took the empty chair beside Dolly.

  “Having a good day?” Dolly wanted some kind of cryptic message that would let her know whether I had made any headway with my secret quest.

  “Busy,” I answered. “I’ve ten men in the throes of scarlet fever.”

  Dolly frowned, but knew enough not to tell me that was not what she meant.

  There would be no veiled conversations at the table about Lily Gwynn and her letter. Not with all the girls there.

  Especially not with Ivy.

  As if on cue, Ivy put down her fork to address our table. “Did everyone meet the new intern this morning? Isn’t he dashing?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Dolly said. “He’s too skinny.”

  Ivy laughed and turned to me. “Don’t you think he’s handsome, Clara?”

  I swallowed the bit of potato I had in my mouth. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Margaret, a frequent member of Dolly’s Saturday-night dancing entourage, piped up. “I’ll fight you for him, Ivy. He’s from Boston and he’s a doctor. I wouldn’t care if he had three eyes and a harelip.”

  “I heard he took a shine to Clara,” another one, Nellie, said.

  I snapped my head up. “What? He did not!”

  “He came to the women’s measles ward after yours. My ward. I heard him ask Dr. Treaver what your first name was.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” I protested.

  “He’s just interested in the fire, that’s all!” Ivy chimed in, obviously wanting to claim the Boston doctor for herself and deflect any attention that might have erroneously fallen on me.

  And, of course, she had to mention the fire.

  “You told him about the fire?” Dolly was aghast, bless her.

  “For heaven’s sake, everyone knows about the fire. And he mentioned it first, not me. I told him there was a nurse here who was there that day.”

  “What did you do that for?” Dolly demanded.

  “Do what? The fire was months ago.” Ivy turned to me. “Right, Clara? Before I even got here.”

  “Right.” I shoveled a piece of meat in my mouth and found I could not chew it. An awkward silence fell around us.

  I stood and gathered my tray. “My meat’s tough. I am going back for the soup.”

  I sensed the girls watching me. And I heard Dolly scold Ivy in a whisper as I walked away. “Just because it happened before you got here doesn’t mean you can go tellin’ people about it. That poor girl watched people jump from a burning building to their deaths! Dozens of them. She saw it all!”

  I deposited my tray and kept walking.

  Twelve

  MY instructors at nursing school taught me there were three elements of responsibility I needed to be mindful of when nursing patients with scarlet fever. First, I had to understand the relationship between patient contact and aseptic care so that I would not also become infected. Second, I had to be vigilant regarding complications: secondary maladies brought on by the fever, such as nephritis. And last, I had to carefully safeguard anyone else in close proximity to the patient.

  My father had told me the same general advice, only in far fewer words. Respect the disease. It is powerful.

  He also told me the disease has no intent. It doesn’t want anything. It has no malevolent desire to kill. If it could talk, it would not say, “I want to make you ill! I want to bring you to the brink of death! I want to kill!” It would say only, “I make people ill. I bring them to the brink of death. I can kill.”

  The disease is like the machine that does what it does but has no cognizance of self. When a machine stops working, it does not care. And it doesn’t celebrate when it starts working again.

  I have seen enough cases of scarlet fever to know that to those who have it and to their loved ones, the disease seems heinous, deliberate, and personal. And of course I know why they feel this way. When you are in a fight for your life, then surely there is an adversary. There is something opposed to you. Something that desires to defeat you.

  You want to believe your enemy is the disease.

  You don’t want to believe even for a minute that the enemy is your own body, this weak tent of flesh that cannot stand up against a speck of contagion, this fragile weave of muscle, bone, and soul that also cannot resist the power of flame nor the pull of the ground below it.

  • • •

  ANDREW and several others who had been on his ship developed the crimson rash on the second day. It showed up first on their chests and necks and rapidly spread. This rash is not like measles, where the skin appears as if someone has dotted it with a red pencil. The scarlet rash looks more like smears of rosy-red paint applied by the haphazard strokes of a mad artist.

  The rash’s angry blisters will not show up for another three days, and after they’ve had their way, their crusted remains will erupt into a sloughing, scaly waste that will have the men thinking they’ve been turned into lepers. The bits peel off like the scales of a fish, and the process is celebrated for only one reason: With each passing hour it signifies you will likely survive. But it is a nasty business that can last for days and it is often the reason clothes and belongings are burned. The confettilike debris is akin to powdered poison.

&n
bsp; Today my main concern as I entered the ward would be monitoring the men’s fevers and the swelling in their throats. The fever and the swelling were always heightened on the second day. I went from bed to bed, checking on each patient, assisting with sips of water and a bedpan or two. I intentionally saved Andrew for last.

  When I approached his bedside, Andrew barely acknowledged my presence. I placed my hand on his forehead and the heat of his skin warmed my hand like an iron. Andrew leaned into the coolness of my palm, moaning softly. The night nurse had written in his record that Andrew’s temperature had been hovering at one hundred five degrees since before dawn. There was only one thing I could do for him as I waited for Dr. Treaver to arrive on his morning rounds: Draw the heat out with a cool cloth.

  I had given hundreds of baths to men of every age, but I felt an unfamiliar bond with Andrew as I pressed a wet compress to his neck, chest, and back. I might have been running alongside him as he fought a dragon, handing him what he needed to fight. The dragon’s hot breath seared into the cloth, wanting to take me on, too, it seemed. But I kept dousing the flame as I plunged and wrung out my cloth, again and again. Andrew shuddered at my touch, and each time I imagined him running toward the dragon with his sword raised high, poking the reptilian hide and looking for the place of weakness in the serpent’s body.

  Then he opened his eyes and gazed at me.

  “Lily?” he whispered.

  A drip of water slid down his temple and I caught it with the edge of the cloth. “It’s Nurse Wood, Mr. Gwynn.”

  “Lily?”

  “It’s Nurse Wood. Remember me?”

  “Lily, those aren’t your clothes.”

  This wasn’t the first time I had seen fever bring on delirium, but it was the first time I’d been mistaken for someone’s dead wife. “You are at Ellis Island Hospital, Mr. Gwynn.”

  He said something in Welsh. At least, I think it was Welsh. He sounded very sad, and it pained my heart to hear the tone of his voice. He said it again louder and he seemed on the verge of having a fit. He raised his head a few inches off his pillow. I said something back to Andrew in French, because my mother would speak French to me when I lay sick in bed, hot with fever. It always calmed me. I hoped it might shatter the fever’s spell.

  “Ne t’inquiète pas, mon cœur.”

  Do not trouble yourself, sweetheart.

  His shining eyes grew wide and he lay still.

  “Fais des beaux rêves de lendemain.”

  Dream of sweet tomorrows.

  Andrew lay back on his pillow but his eyes never left mine.

  “Lily?”

  “Shhh.”

  “Lily?”

  I gave in. “What is it, Andrew?”

  “I don’t have money for a ring.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I wish I had my mother’s ring.”

  “Shhh, now.”

  “You would have liked her, Lily. I wish you could have known her.”

  “Yes. Hush now. Time for rest.”

  He closed his eyes like an obedient child. I left my hand and the compress underneath it on his warm forehead until his breaths became slow and measured.

  I sensed movement behind me.

  I looked up expecting to see that Dr. Treaver had entered the room, but Dr. Randall was standing a few yards behind me, fastening the protective cloak tight around his neck. I remembered what Nellie had said at lunch the day before, about Dr. Randall asking my first name, and I rose with a start from Andrew’s bedside.

  “Good morning, Nurse Wood,” he said as I made my way toward him. When I reached him I looked past the doorway to see whether Dr. Treaver was not far behind.

  “It’s just me today.” Dr. Randall smiled.

  “Oh. Of course. Good morning, Dr. Randall.”

  “And how are things this morning?” He walked over to the nurses’ desk to look at our main chart for all the men in the ward. With a glance he could see the general state of all the patients in the room.

  “Five confirmed new cases, then?” he said.

  “Yes. The rash showed up this morning.”

  “And no temperatures higher than one hundred six? No convulsions? No edema?”

  “No.” I looked toward Andrew. “Mr. Gwynn was a bit delirious. I brought down his fever some with a cool bath. He’s resting comfortably now.”

  “Delirious? How so?”

  I swallowed. “He thought I was his wife. She . . . she’s one of those who died of the fever aboard the Seville.”

  Dr. Randall looked up from the chart. “Oh. How terrible. I hadn’t heard that about him. Very sad.”

  There was nothing to say to this. I turned to prepare my cart so that I could assist him on his rounds. When I was finished readying it and tying on my mask, I turned to him and saw that he was watching me.

  “You know, you have a gentle way about you, Nurse Wood. I saw you with Mr. Gwynn.”

  My cheeks grew instantly warm and I was glad he could not see it.

  “I couldn’t hear everything the two of you were saying but I could see that he was agitated and you calmed him with just your touch and a few words. I’m sure that wasn’t taught at nursing school. Or was it?” His smile broadened.

  I laughed nervously. “Did they not also teach you bedside manners at medical school, Dr. Randall?”

  “They didn’t teach us French.”

  I bumped a bottle of alcohol on my cart and it started to topple. He reached out and steadied it.

  “That was French you were speaking, wasn’t it?”

  I pulled the bottle from his hand and righted it myself. “It was.”

  “But Mr. Gwynn is Welsh.”

  I shrugged. “My mother is French. She’d speak to me that way when I was sick. French sounds pretty. It soothes. I hoped it would soothe him.”

  “Indeed it did. How wise you were to think of that.”

  For a moment I thought perhaps he was mocking me, his smile and manner were so effusive. But he was being sincere.

  “We do what we can here to ease the patients’ discomfort,” I said lamely, wincing a little at how rote it sounded.

  “You do not give yourself enough credit, Nurse Wood. Or may I call you Clara?”

  I pulled the cart close to me, and away from him. “You may call me Miss Wood.”

  His smile did not waver. “As you wish, Miss Wood. Shall we?”

  We made the circuit from bed to bed. Many minutes later, when we arrived at Andrew’s bed, the moments of delirium had clearly passed. Andrew stirred awake as Dr. Randall listened to his lungs and heart, palpated the glands of his throat, and observed the spread of the rash. He obeyed when Dr. Randall asked Andrew to open his mouth so that he could see inside. And he was able to hold the thermometer in his mouth. I was relieved to see the number had dropped to one hundred three, even though the decrease would likely not last. The third day would probably be worse.

  “You’re in very excellent hands here, Mr. Gwynn,” Dr. Randall announced. “Nurse Wood is taking good care of you.”

  Andrew’s gaze shifted to me and I smiled politely. I had no idea whether he remembered he had called me Lily. I suspected he did not.

  We moved on to the next patient, who did not awaken when Dr. Randall performed his examination. And because Dr. Randall couldn’t interact with the man in the bed, he addressed me. “Do you like to read, Miss Wood?”

  “It depends on what it is, Doctor.”

  “Ah, yes. Of course it would. Do you like philosophy?”

  I wasn’t sure that I wanted to enlighten the doctor on what I liked to read. I thought of Lily’s book of poetry up in my room. I hadn’t read any poetry in years. I didn’t think Dr. Randall had either.

  “I like poetry,” I blurted.

  He looked up at me, happy, it seemed. �
�Truly?”

  I nodded, a bit alarmed. I replaced the chart of the man he’d been examining and pushed my cart to the next bed. The patient who lay in it was in his second week with the disease, and was awake and sipping from a glass of water. His hands and neck were pasty white with scaling skin and spent blisters.

  “Have a favorite?” Dr. Randall asked.

  “A favorite what?”

  “A favorite poet.”

  I bent toward the man in the bed. “Mind if I set your glass of water here on the table, Mr. Gianelli?” I asked, gently removing the cup from his hand.

  “Surely you’ve a favorite poet.”

  “I like them all.”

  Dr. Randall laughed. “No one likes them all.”

  I placed the glass on the table next to the bed, eager as I had never been in my life to talk instead about swollen eustachian tubes, kidney pain, and desquamation. Dr. Randall set about examining Mr. Gianelli and giving new orders for increasing the number of scrubbing baths to twice a day to remove the rash residue.

  The last two patients were also awake and conversant. When we finished, I headed for the sink at the end of the ward to scrub my hands. Dr. Randall followed me, unfastening the mask and cloak and dropping them into the bin to be sterilized for their next use.

  He stood beside me and began to scrub his hands also. “I don’t mean to pry, Miss Wood, but there is little to entertain us after hours during the week. I thought it would be nice to discuss a book together in the staff commons after dinner. I was bored out of my mind last night.”

  “You were bored your first night?”

  “It was my third night, and yes, I was bored.”

  I scrubbed and said nothing. Part of me longed for something to do in the evening besides read the social pages of the newspaper with Dolly and the other girls and listen to them gossip about people. But to sit in the commons with Dr. Randall and discuss a book? People would think I wanted him for a beau. That was an impossible scenario in my in-between place.

  I dried my hands quickly and took a step away from the sink.

  “Tell me who your favorite is,” he said. “And I’ll tell you if I’ve read him. Or her.”