But as I neared the entrance, I realized I had no good answer for why I was choosing to bring it to him now, at eight o’clock on a Saturday night, when I was off duty. Perhaps he would be so cheered at having it he would not bother to wonder why I was there after-hours, handing it to him.
The night nurse at the main nurses’ station looked up when I entered the building. I told her I’d left something in the scarlet fever ward. She went back to her charting and I walked quickly past her.
The rooms were dark, as most of the patients had turned in for the night. A few lamps burned here and there. When I reached the scarlet fever ward, I saw that Andrew’s bedside lamp still glowed, but he appeared to have fallen asleep reading.
For several moments I contemplated what I should do. Leave and come back with the book tomorrow? Not with everyone awake.
Leave the book on his bedside table?
But he would wonder where it had come from unless I wrote a note. I stepped over to the ward’s nurses’ station and withdrew a piece of paper and a fountain pen. Then I walked to Andrew’s bedside, masking my footfalls as best I could. In the soft glow of his lamp, his splotchy skin appeared almost normal. An open book lay across his chest: The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
I waited for a moment to see whether he was merely resting, but when he didn’t open his eyes, I moved the metal chair that was near the foot of his bed closer to the light. The chair squeaked a little as I lowered myself onto it.
I placed the paper on top of the book and uncapped the pen.
Dear Mr. Gwynn, I wrote. I found this book when—And then I stopped.
I couldn’t summon the professional words to say what I had done and why. For several long seconds I just stared at the paper. And then I was acutely aware that I was being watched. I lifted my head to see Andrew looking at me.
“Nurse Wood?” he said softly, as if I were an apparition.
“I’m sorry I woke you.” Heat rose to my face for the third time that evening.
“I nearly didn’t recognize you. You . . . you aren’t wearing your uniform.”
I looked down at my clothes and then I remembered my hair was down around my shoulders and Dolly’s beautiful comb was probably glinting in the lamplight. “I just . . . I just needed to bring you something.”
I withdrew the book from underneath the piece of paper. The second Andrew saw it, I knew something wasn’t quite right. I expected to see the same joy as when I had returned Lily’s scarf to him. The look on his face was very strange, almost like dread.
“Where did you get that?” he whispered.
Accusation tinged his voice. My heart began to pound inside my chest with something like shame. I felt as if I had stolen it. “I . . . I happened across it the day you had me look for your father’s pattern books. I opened your wife’s trunk by accident, thinking it was yours, and when I saw this little book—”
“That’s impossible.”
Again the tone was unmistakably one of utter disbelief.
“I . . . I swear I meant no harm. It looked like a book your wife had loved and I thought you might like to have it with you while you recover. You are finally past the worst of it, so I thought I’d bring it down to you.” I handed it to him and he slowly took it from me.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “I lost this the day before we set sail. You found it in Lily’s luggage?”
Now it was my turn to sound dumbfounded. “You lost it?”
“This was my mother’s.” The timbre of Andrew’s voice was now as tender as it was incredulous. It was plain the book was a precious keepsake he’d believed he would never see again.
For a moment I was as perplexed as Andrew was, but then the words in Lily’s letter came hammering back to me.
From the day I met you I planned to run back to the hired cab for a forgotten glove, and to find someone on the street to give you the message to look inside my trunk, where I knew you would find this book. . . .
Lily had taken the book from Andrew the day before they left England and hidden it in her own luggage with the note and certificate. She knew that when Andrew was given the message from whomever she’d hastily paid on the street to deliver it, he would open the trunk and he’d see—to his great surprise—his mother’s book. He’d pull it out, this treasured book that he’d thought was gone forever. He’d open it and then he would find what Lily had left inside for him. With the beloved book planted there, he was assured of finding the letter and the certificate.
Tears had sprung into Andrew’s eyes as he stared at the book. “I just don’t understand. Why would she do that? She knew I was looking everywhere for it. . . .”
He did not really expect me to know the answer. But in that horrible moment I nearly told him everything. Had I not still been smarting from the sting I’d suffered earlier when Ethan Randall had unwittingly assured me that for me, the Triangle fire still burned, I might have. Just that little bit of deception on Lily’s part seemed to weigh so heavily on Andrew.
And yet . . . A breach had opened in his in-between place just as it had in mine. His new bride had taken a book from him that he’d clearly valued and she’d hidden it from him in her luggage. Now a tiny fissure marred his perfect memory of her. If I gave him those terrible papers when he left Ellis, they would not have as great an impact after tonight. Because the fissure would widen in the coming days. Of course it would widen.
He inhaled heavily, like one starved for oxygen. “If you hadn’t opened Lily’s trunk by mistake the book would be gone now. Yes? Burned with everything else of hers?”
“Yes, I suppose it would.”
“Then I am so very grateful to you. Thank you.”
“It was nothing.” I didn’t want his gratitude. And because I knew I didn’t deserve it, I blurted another confession. “I read from it. I shouldn’t have. I am sorry.”
He didn’t seem surprised. “Had you not read ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ before?”
He’d figured it out—why Dr. Randall and I were discussing Keats.
“No,” I answered. “If you hadn’t told me what it meant, it would still be a mystery to me.”
This didn’t seem to surprise him either. “Poetry speaks slowly. My mother told me that. We are usually too much in a hurry.” He sighed at this remembrance. “Hurried people miss many things. They see only what is right on top. . . .” His voice fell away.
“I should let you rest.” I rose from my chair. “Good night, Mr. Gwynn.”
But Andrew didn’t say good night back to me. He seemed not to have heard me at all. His eyes were on his mother’s book, practically entreating it to reveal how it came to be in Lily’s trunk. I could not leave him without offering him some snippet of the truth I was holding just out of his reach.
“Sometimes people do things for reasons they aren’t ready to explain,” I said.
He turned his head in my direction, and seemed to consider what I’d said. His gaze drifted to the butterfly comb in my hair and then his eyes were tight again on mine.
“Everything is turning out so very differently than how I imagined it would,” he said.
“I know.” But I could say no more. My throat thickened with dread at the thought of what I would be bringing to him on the day he left. “Good night, Mr. Gwynn.”
“Thank you, Nurse.”
I left him and returned to my quiet room. I filled the basin in my shared bathroom with warm water, cleaning solution, and a few drops of lavender. I returned to my room for the scarf, withdrawing it from the pillowcase I’d carried it in. I took it back to the bathroom and plunged it into the soapy concoction, massaging its length to purge its threads of any remnant of Lily’s terrible disease, knowing I couldn’t possibly wash away everything she had done. The thought of handing over her letter made me shudder as if a winter wind had blown open the tiny window above my head. The cowa
rd in me wanted to find an easier way. . . . Perhaps I could place the letter and certificate into the folds of the scarf when I returned it to him on discharge day. He would take the scarf from me and not realize there was something nestled inside. Then when he arrived at his brother’s and unpacked, Andrew would find the letter. He would know that I’d had it, and surely had read it, but I wouldn’t have to see his face.
I’d be here on the island.
Almost a world away from him.
It was as merciful a plan as I could come up with, not only for him but for me as well. I would wrap the scarf in tissue, tie it closed, and hand it to him at the last moment, just before he left. He would thank me. And that would be the last thing I would hear him say to me.
As I washed, my fingers rubbed the slender bit of metal I’d felt the day before, when the Italian had the scarf in his suitcase. Thinking it to be something left mistakenly behind by the seamstress who made it, I picked at the stitches on the turned-under edge to work the metal fragment free. It clinked onto the porcelain sink, and I could see that it wasn’t a sewing implement. It was a small brass key. When I picked it up, I saw that tiny words had been hand-etched into it. I held the key up to the light above me and squinted to make out the words: 92 Chambers Street.
A New York City address, carved into the metal by a slender hand.
I held the key for several seconds, unsure what to do with it.
I set the key on the shelf above the sink while I rinsed and squeezed out the excess water, bringing the garment close to my nose to gauge whether there was any lingering scent of Lily’s cologne. I smelled only carbolic and lavender and soap.
Spreading a towel over the back of the tub, I laid the scarf on it flat. Then I sat on the edge of the tub beside it and worked the key back inside the hem.
The truth would wound Andrew, and he would likely hate me for inserting myself into his private affairs, but surely Dolly was right. Surely knowing the truth about Lily would be less grievous—and less prolonged—than mourning a lie.
A braver person would march right down to the ward at that very moment and hand over to Andrew what belonged to him.
But I wasn’t that brave person.
Nineteen
SUNDAY morning dawned cloudy and clammy, as if it had just been let out of a simmering teakettle. I stepped outside before heading over to Ward K, as much to prepare myself for the week that lay ahead as to gauge the conditions for getting the patients outside for air, as Dr. Randall had ordered. There was no scent of rain but the air felt heavy with purpose. It seemed there would be clouds and late-summer heat but no soothing rain to calm the hours.
The men in the scarlet fever ward were awake and finishing breakfast when I arrived, including Andrew, who was sitting on the side of his bed. He looked up when I entered the room and nodded a hello. In the sallow morning light I could see three new arrivals from the previous evening’s shift, whom I hadn’t noticed last night when I’d brought Andrew the book.
“A late-arriving ship from yesterday,” the night nurse said as she briefed me on the new additions before heading back out to the main nurses’ station. I greeted the new arrivals, all of whom were being quarantined for a low-grade temperature and suspected exposure to scarlet fever. The remaining five patients, including Andrew, would need to be scrubbed today, at least once or twice, to rid their scalp and skin of the flakes of disease that still clung to them. A male attendant named Mr. Charles, an ebony-skinned, soft-spoken man whose accented English reminded me of faraway islands, arrived to help with the baths and short strolls outside. After the scrubbings, we would take the men out, one by one, for a dose of fresh air.
While the breakfast trays were being cleared away, I filled the tub in the tub room with hot, soapy water and lined my cart with scrubbing sponges and towels. While Mr. Charles helped the first patient step safely into the water, I put on gloves. Then I proceeded to scrub the man’s head, back, neck, and arms. He spoke no English, so I cleansed the unreachable areas of his skin in relative silence. Mr. Charles left us to change the sheets so that the patient could return to a freshly made bed.
I’d given dozens of descaling baths during my nearly six months on the island, and had politely turned my head away as men of all ages lowered themselves into the tub. It had taken me a few weeks to get used to seeing men that way. As I had not had brothers nor been married, my exposure to the male body had been limited to photographs in the nursing textbooks, rounds at teaching hospitals, and one abscessed thigh wound the week I first arrived in New York. But on the island, where it seemed that for every sick female immigrant there were two males, I had quickly gotten used to my role as caregiver for grown men. I had stopped wondering how my touch might affect a man who had been my responsibility for two weeks, separated from anyone he cared for. My goal at this stage of the disease had always been largely singular—rid the skin of the scales using as aggressive an approach as possible. Most welcomed the scrubbing, as the scales tended to itch, but as I rubbed Mr. Oliveri’s skin and scalp I was acutely aware of how personal my ministrations were.
I’d changed the tub water four times before Mr. Charles brought Andrew Gwynn to the tub room. He seemed surprised to see me there and this produced an anxiety in me that I had not felt since my first week on Ellis. None of the other men that morning seemed to care that I was in the room.
“How are you feeling this morning, Mr. Gwynn?” I attempted a bright tone.
“Very well. Thank you.” He was politely guarded.
“Your bathwater is ready for you.” I forced a smile.
“I can take my own bath.” His tone was polite but firm.
“I’m afraid I must scrub the areas you can’t reach.” My voice sounded meek in my ears and I cleared my throat. “But I promise to give you your privacy as you step into the tub. Mr. Charles here will help you into the water.”
I turned away before Andrew could protest. I heard water sloshing as he got into the water. When I turned around, Mr. Charles moved past me to go change Andrew’s sheets. Andrew was now sitting in the tub, his legs bent against his chest and his arms crossed over his knees.
“Let me know if you feel light-headed or if you need me to stop,” I said as I pulled on gloves and reached for my sponge. “I’ll just be scrubbing your scalp, back, and shoulders.”
“That’s a grand relief,” he said, and I laughed nervously.
As he held his head back, I plunged the sponge into the water and brought it up again, squeezing it over his head and neck. Then I began to scrub his scalp the way a mother might wash mud off a little boy who’d been playing in puddles. Again and again I doused his head and neck and shoulders with water and scrubbed away at the mottled skin, exposing hints of rosy pink. The more I rubbed, the more it seemed Andrew relaxed.
At least, I hoped it was a relaxed state that made him close his eyes, and not pain.
“Does that feel all right, Mr. Gwynn?” I asked. “Am I hurting you?”
The sound of my voice seemed to rouse him as if from sleep. “It’s fine. I mean, you are not hurting me.”
And so I kept at it. The rhythm of my hand strokes sounded like a swishing skirt on a dance floor and there was no other sound but that of water dripping off his body. As I moved my sponge across his shoulder blades, I was overcome with the intimacy of this act in a way that I never had been before. I felt a stirring inside me that I had not felt since I had met Edward on the elevator. It nearly took my breath away. I opened my mouth to explain to Andrew what I was doing, to remind myself I was only a nurse washing skin ravaged by scarlet fever.
“This is the last stage of the disease, the skin peeling. Underneath the damaged skin is a new layer. It won’t be long now—” I would have prattled on, but he unhooked one of his hands from around his knees and covered mine as I washed just under his jawline.
My hand stilled under his.
&nb
sp; “I think I can take it from here.” He gently pulled the sponge out from underneath my hand.
“Of course,” I managed to say as I eased away from the tub. “I’m sorry if I was rubbing too hard.”
“You weren’t.”
“Yes, but—”
“You’ve been nothing but kind to me, Miss Wood.”
After a moment of watching him scrub his damaged skin, I backed away, and waited at the doorway for Mr. Charles to return.
When I was free to leave the tub room, I made my way to the nurses’ station to dutifully record that the morning scrubbing baths had been completed. But it was several moments before I picked up the pen to write anything down.
I had been so tuned to Andrew’s loss I hadn’t noticed how much I was tuned to his presence, his gentle manner, even his deep affection for his dead wife. I had let myself get too emotionally attached to a patient, something I had been warned in school not to do. And it wasn’t just our common grief that drew me to him.
I had let my loss become entwined with Andrew’s such that I was now having a hard time distinguishing between where mine ended and his began.
Andrew’s loss, I reminded myself sharply, began with vows he had spoken to another woman the day before he sailed. Mine began with an elevator that opened its doors to hell. This attraction I felt for Andrew was simply validation that I wasn’t stupid to think you could love someone you’d only just met.
That was all it was.
As soon as Andrew was clothed in clean pajamas and making his way to his bed with Mr. Charles helping him, I went back into the tub room to let the water out. I watched as the water swirled away, hurrying down the drain.
I wiped the tub clean with considerable force to reorient myself to the task at hand: following the doctor’s orders so that the patient would be successfully discharged. There would be days ahead filled with scrubbing baths and taking walks outside. A week of them, no doubt. The baths and the walks were doctor’s orders, nothing more. I could think of them as nothing more.
A Fall of Marigolds Page 15