I could think of only the one name at that moment. Just the one.
“Keats.”
He smiled. “Keats. I’ve read him. Shall we say later tonight? After supper?”
I shook my head. “I can’t tonight.”
“Tomorrow, then?” He dried his hands and turned to face me.
“I’m not . . . ready.”
“Not what?”
“I’m . . .” But the next words dwindled away unrepeated. To my relief, at that very moment one of the patients called out for a drink of water. “I’m needed,” I said, smiling with effort. “Good day, Doctor.” I rushed to fill a pitcher of water and then made my way to the bedside of the man who had asked for it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dr. Randall leave the ward.
When I had finished helping the man with his drink, I heard another voice ask me for water. Andrew.
I went to his bedside and poured his water. He sipped slowly and with effort as I held the glass.
“I like Keats, too,” he said when I took the glass away. I was surprised he had heard the conversation at the sink. My eyes must have grown wide. “Wasn’t trying to listen. The doctor’s voice echoes in this tiled room,” he continued.
I smiled a bit uneasily. “Then I shall have to be careful what secrets I tell in here.”
He lay back on his pillow. “Your voice doesn’t carry like his.”
And it was as if he were really saying, Your secrets will be safe with me.
As I replaced his glass on his bedside table I wondered whether he knew Lily had also liked Keats. Did he know she had a volume of his poems in her baggage?
I didn’t see how he could know that, considering what had been slipped inside it.
Thirteen
MY parents came to New York three days after the fire, arriving on the noon train with no luggage. Their plan was to help me pack my few things and then the three of us would be on the four o’clock to Philadelphia, where my father had no doubt left his motorcar for the hour drive home.
I should have met them at the station, but I couldn’t summon the strength to do it. I hadn’t been outside since the grocer’s delivery boy escorted me home three days earlier. A cab brought my parents to the brownstone where I was renting a room on the top floor. It was a nice room in a well-kept building owned by a spinster named Miss Hatfield, who felt it was her mission in life to protect young single women from the perils of city living.
They arrived a few minutes after noon and Miss Hatfield insisted on making us lunch while we used her sitting room for our visit. It was clear she didn’t want to lose me as a boarder, and she could tell, as I could, that my parents intended to take me home that day. She surely hoped her hospitality would nudge my parents into securing my room until my return, since I surely wouldn’t be able to keep paying for it myself if I left with them.
My mother folded me into her arms as soon as Miss Hatfield left us to prepare our meal. I had not cried since the fire, and as I stood wrapped in motherly care, I felt a great wave of emotion rise to the surface of my being, as powerful as a storm surge. I pulled away from her so that we both wouldn’t drown in it.
“I’m all right, I’m all right,” I said, as I pushed back against the tide. “Let’s sit.”
We took seats on upholstered chairs adorned with lace doilies on their padded armrests. A canary in a bell-shaped cage twittered as we arranged ourselves.
“Oh, my darling. I can’t believe this happened so soon after your arrival!” My mother leaned toward me and patted my arm, and I noticed for the first time that she was wearing a cornflower blue dress and matching hat that I’d never seen before. This suddenly struck me as odd. I had never seen her in a dress that I didn’t know already. I’d been home for only a week in between graduation and moving to New York, and before that I had been away at nursing school. It occurred to me that if I went back with them, I would see that everything was slightly different—the size of the apple trees in the garden, the height of the little boy who lived across the lane from my parents, and even the dresses hanging in my mother’s wardrobe. Everything would be slightly different except for me. I would go back to the exact spot where I’d been before I had met Edward. For me, that little tiny sliver of time and place would still be there, but only for me. For everyone and everything else, the world would have changed.
I couldn’t go with them.
And I knew I couldn’t stay.
Repairs to the top floors were under way at the Asch Building and I’d received a message from the clinic manager that businesses on the undamaged floors, which included the doctor’s office where I worked, could expect to resume operating by the end of the week.
But I could never step inside the Asch Building again. Not ever.
“It must have been dreadful for those people who couldn’t get out,” my mother went on. “I feel so bad for their families, especially when we are so lucky that you—”
“It was dreadful. It was the most dreadful thing I’ve ever seen.”
I’d been taught never to interrupt when someone else was speaking, and my intrusion surprised my mother. Surprised me, too.
“Seen? Did you . . . So you were on the street?” my father asked, unsure how to ask me what I had witnessed.
“From the time I got out of the building until the fire was out.”
“The whole time?” My mother’s eyes were wide.
“The fire burned for only half an hour.”
“All . . . all those people and the fire lasted only half an hour?”
An ugly boldness seemed to sweep over me, as if I wanted to blame someone for how I felt that day. “Yes. All those people died in half an hour. None of us on the street could do anything about it. I’m a nurse and I could do nothing.”
I hadn’t meant to sound so blunt, and my mother was certainly not expecting it. She sat back in her chair as if I had struck her.
I looked down at my feet and summoned the apology I owed her. “I’m sorry. None of this is your fault. I don’t know what came over me.”
“It’s quite all right,” my mother whispered, grace lacing her words together.
“Look, Clara,” my father said gently. “Everything is all set for you to come back home with us. You don’t have to give any of this another thought.”
I smiled in spite of myself. He could not know that thoughts are not things you can give or not give. Thoughts are thrust upon you. You can only hope that thoughts that you don’t want will tire of you at some point and flutter away. I think it was at this very moment that I realized I needed to be in an in-between place. Not home in Pennsylvania where my parents were. Nor in Manhattan where Edward had been. But someplace in between where I could wait for the heaviness to lift.
“I’m not going back with you,” I said.
“Beg your pardon?” My father cocked his head as if he hadn’t quite heard me.
“You . . . you want to stay here?” my mother asked.
“No. I don’t want to stay here.”
“I don’t understand,” my father said.
The truth was, I didn’t understand either. I just knew that sitting with my parents in that room in Manhattan, I found I could barely breathe; it was as if I were suffocating on the fire’s ashes. They were falling on top of me like January snow and if I didn’t move, I would disappear underneath them.
I remembered then that in nursing school there was a fellow student, an aloof girl who kept to herself, who wanted to be stationed at Ellis Island Hospital when she graduated. When I asked her why, she told me it was because it was new, and big, the latest equipment was in use there, and nurses didn’t have to enlist in the medical corps to work there like the doctors did. And she told me it was in the city without being in the city, and she liked that because she didn’t like feeling pressed in. I had said something about its surely being a busy place
nonetheless, and she said, “Yes, but it’s a different busy. No one stays there for long. It’s a place for the next thing to happen. It’s Ellis. People don’t live there. It’s nobody’s address.” She dropped out before she graduated, but I remembered how she looked when she described it to me. It was the most animated I had ever seen her.
And her words were echoing in my head. It’s nobody’s address. Nobody’s address. An in-between place.
“I want to get a post at the hospital on Ellis Island,” I said. “I have heard there is a need for nurses.”
My mother gasped, albeit quietly.
“Ellis? You want to work on Ellis? In public health?” My father blinked several times.
“It’s such a . . . such a . . .” My mother couldn’t finish.
“Such a what?”
“You don’t want to work there,” my father said soothingly, as if I were ten. “Cholera, typhus, measles, influenza—that’s what they deal with there. It’s no place to be, Clara.”
And again my mother gasped. Even I started a bit at the mention of cholera and typhus. But I held my ground. “Unless you’re a nurse. Then it’s a perfectly reasonable place to be.”
“Clara, what’s happened to you?” My mother said it so softly I almost couldn’t hear her. Before I could decide whether I truly had, my father spoke.
“I understand you’ve been through something . . . traumatic . . . and if you don’t want to come home with us, that’s fine. But don’t punish yourself for surviving the fire by taking a post among the world’s worst diseases. It’s not your fault you couldn’t save anyone.”
For a moment I was rendered speechless. Punishing myself for surviving the fire? Was that what I was looking to do? The answer came swiftly.
I didn’t need an island to do that.
“Clara?”
“If I wanted to punish myself, Papa, I could do that by staying here and stepping back inside that building. Or going home with you.”
“You can’t mean that?” My mother was now on the verge of tears.
“I don’t mean home is a terrible place, Mama. I mean I am in a terrible place. And if I come home with you, nothing will change.”
“Of course it will!”
“No, it won’t.”
My father cleared his throat. “You think that now because you witnessed a terrible fire, but when we get you home, what you saw will start to fade, Clara. You must trust me on this.”
I turned to my father and saw strength and determination in his eyes. He was a fixer like me. He thought he could fix this just as he’d fixed every broken person whom he’d stitched back together. I had seen him do it a thousand times. But this was not a broken thing to be fixed. Or a disease to be cured. It was an abyss to climb out of.
“It’s not what I saw, Papa. It’s what I lost.”
“What did you lose?” my mother asked, still clutching my hand.
I wanted to say, “Someone I was meant to love,” and have the six words fall from my lips as sure and quick as the words “Merry Christmas” on the twenty-fifth of December. But I didn’t think I could explain what I meant, and surely those words would need an explanation.
“I’m glad you came,” I said instead. “And I know you think coming home would somehow make it seem as if I never left, that none of this happened. But in here”—and I pointed to my heart—“I know that it did.”
“But do you have to go there?” my mother said, her eyes glassy with fear for me. “Those diseases . . . they are insidious; they are foreign!”
“I will be careful.”
“But there are hospitals right here in Manhattan,” she continued. “Why can’t you work at one of those?”
“I promise I will be careful.”
She turned to my father. “Tom! Talk to her!”
My father had grown silent in the last few moments, no doubt contemplating the last thing I had said to him.
It’s what I lost.
I could see him turning the sentence around in his head. Examining it as he would a wound or an illness. And I saw in his eyes the moment he realized that fixers like him and me can easily mend broken things. But we can’t easily find lost things.
Finding something you lost takes a different kind of skill.
“Clara needs to handle this her way, Helene.” He held my gaze and then faced my mother. “She will be careful.”
“Tom.”
But my father turned back to me. “How long do you want to work there?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know.
But in my mind I answered him.
As long as it takes for what I lost to become what I release.
Lunch at Miss Hatfield’s table was a stilted affair. And poor Miss Hatfield could sense it. By the time she served us slices of chocolate cake, she knew she was losing a boarder and my father’s good money.
My father asked whether I wanted his assistance in getting a post on Ellis. He had an acquaintance in public health he would contact if I wanted him to. I would have turned him down were it not for the pressure of the invisible ashes inside my chest, bearing down on my soul. I agreed. And while he left to make his inquiries, my mother helped me box up the few trinkets in my room that I would not need in a dormitory room at Ellis Island Hospital.
When they left for the four o’clock train, I promised I would write them, that I would be careful, that I would tender my resignation the moment I didn’t want to be at Ellis anymore.
As they drove away in a hired cab, I waved from the steps of Miss Hatfield’s brownstone, breathing in the outside air tentatively.
There wasn’t a hint of smoke or ash or death.
The pounding in my chest was the only evidence within and around me that I did not belong there anymore.
Fourteen
THE next few days of the fever were the worst for Andrew and the rest who’d come down with the disease after they arrived at Ellis. Another nurse, an older woman named Mrs. Meade, was assigned midweek to help me with the men in my care. We split the room in two, with those who were sickest at the back half of the room and those who were in various stages of recovery in the front half. I volunteered to take the back half, and Nurse Meade put up no protest.
I wanted to give every man there my kindest attention, but I found myself continually gravitating toward Andrew. Caring for his physical needs was the one thing I could do for him, and he was sick enough by Thursday not to care whether he needed help with a bedpan. Dr. Treaver made rounds Thursday, so I did not have to worry whether Dr. Randall would ask me again about joining him in the commons after hours to talk about a poet I’d lied about liking.
When I arrived at the ward on Friday morning, there seemed to be a slight improvement among the men at the back of the room. When I came to Andrew’s bedside and placed my hand on his forehead, he opened his eyes and looked at me, something he had not done in the previous two days. The angry rash on his body was prickling into a poxlike explosion that would annoy him but hopefully would do no worse.
“Might you be feeling better today, Mr. Gwynn?” I asked.
He nodded.
I reached into the basin at his bedside, where fresh water had been brought only minutes earlier. I added some carbolized oil, plunged the rag into the cool water, and wrung it out. He closed his eyes as I laid the cool cloth on his forehead, and a soft sound escaped his throat.
“Does that feel all right?”
Again he nodded. “What day is it?” he whispered.
“It’s Friday.”
“It seems . . . seems longer.”
I pressed the cloth now to his cheek and throat. “I think your fever is on its way out, Mr. Gwynn. The doctor will be here soon and he can tell you more.”
He blinked slowly as I moved the compress over the top of his chest. “Lily died on this day. The fifth day.�
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“Yes. I am so sorry about that.”
“She didn’t even recognize me on this day.”
It seemed he was inviting me into a conversation about his dead wife, the very thing I wanted to have so that I could reach a conclusion about her letter. And yet I felt like an intruder. “I’m sure you gave her the best care you could, Mr. Gwynn. Surely you did.”
We were silent for a moment as I soaked the rag in fresh water and then began to press the cool cloth against his forehead again.
“Would you like to tell me how you met her?” I asked.
His face brightened in a wistful way, as if he needed a moment to consider what it was going to feel like talking about his deceased wife. When he began to speak, his Welsh accent glittered on his sentences like something made of sugar. “I met her by the ship’s ticketing office in Liverpool. I’d received a letter from my brother that day that my sponsorship was in order, and I’d come to buy my passage on the next ship that could take me. It wouldn’t leave for another two weeks. Afterward I walked into a little restaurant there by the ship’s offices to get a cool drink—it was a blistering-hot day—and Lily waited on me. She was so beautiful and friendly. Dark hair and violet eyes—her mother was from India, she told me. She asked what had brought me to the docks on a hot day and I told her I’d just bought my passage to America. She brought me my pint, and a sandwich, too, though I hadn’t ordered one. I’d spent the last bit of cash in my pocket on the pint. I told her she’d given me someone else’s sandwich by mistake. But she said she’d made no mistake. And when I whispered to her that I had no money on me to pay for it, she whispered back to me that she was celebrating my happy news of soon being on my way to America. I saw such longing in her eyes when she said it, they glimmered with it.”
“Is that the day you fell in love with her?” I said it in a lighthearted tone so he wouldn’t think I had a vested interest in gauging the depth of his grief.
He didn’t answer right away. “She fell in love with me that day,” he finally said. “She told me so. I don’t know when it was that I fell in love with her. I didn’t really fall. It didn’t feel like falling.”
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