Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

“But mature for your age.” He kissed her shoulder and she twitched away. “Let it harden before you kill it.”

She held the beetle as it darkened and aged before her eyes. Egg, grub, pupa, adult, egg. Holometabolous development, the most advanced form of insect metamorphosis. When Peter wasn’t looking, she tossed her specimen into a shrub. That night, or perhaps the next day, he said, “It was Lauren, you know. I mean the reason we couldn’t have children of our own — it was never me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That it didn’t work out, that everything happened the way it did.”

A few weeks later she went to a meeting in Maine and slept with a graduate student from a San Diego lab, who rode a mountain bike and wore his hair in a ponytail. When she returned to Boston Peter had bronchitis and emerged from her shower hacking and steaming, each cough making the loose flesh around his nipples shimmy. Something must have shown on her face, because Peter raised his head from a wad of tissue and said, “What? What?”

“Nothing.” But she continued to stare. It was not so much that he looked like her father as that he was so obviously of her father’s generation.

“It’s no big deal,” he said, coughing again. “I know you hate it when I’m sick, but it’s not a sign, or a symbol, or a warning. It’s bronchitis. Anyone can get it.”

“I know,” she said. The biking biochemist had meant nothing to her, but she found herself thinking of his smooth legs.

She turned and went to her desk, where a huge stack of paper awaited her; she’d been asked to write a chapter for a book devoted solely to the mysteries of ubiquitin. It was absorbing, and very complicated. Nothing Peter could understand. Can you write? Are you old enough to write? In the other room, Peter settled onto the futon with a groan.

When they parted, after a quarrel she manufactured, it was like losing her childhood all over again. It was not his fault, exactly, that he’d altered her last vivid memories of her mother, nor was he to blame for the secret she’d kept from Bianca, which increased the distance between them. She had chosen all this, she had chosen him. But years later, when she went to visit her dying father, she found her old trunk in the storeroom. Long ago she’d ransacked her mother’s closet, hauling the contents around with her even during the years when she’d owned almost nothing else. But the trunk she’d left behind, the trunk she left with Theo. Inside it she found the hand lens Suky had given her after Peter’s first visit, the stolen library book, some beetle pictures Bianca had crayoned — when was that? — and a postcard (she had forgotten this too) which Peter had sent on her eleventh birthday.

Hugs and kisses to my favorite beetle-girl, he’d written. Love, Peter. She mentioned none of this to Theo. But when she sat by his bed and stared at his creased tired hands, it was their shared past she mourned for as much as him.

1

EVERYTHING, THINKS ELIZABETH, is in order.

Everything is as it should be, exactly as she would wish it: nine o’clock, on this December day in 1905, and already breakfast has been cooked and served and cleared, Livvie and Rosellen are at the dishes, and all nine of her boarders are resting, wrapped in blankets and robes, on the lower veranda or the private porches of the upstairs rooms. In the light, airy dining room, the new napkins look well in their rings and the cloth is crisp on the table. In the kitchen — the girls look up as she walks by, smiling without interrupting the dance of dishes passing from basin to basin and hand to hand — and also in the mudroom, the woodshed, the smaller shed where the laundry is stored in enormous lidded crates until the boilers are fired up twice each week, everything is as it should be for this hour and minute of the day.

Everything, Elizabeth thinks, except that she hasn’t found a nurse to replace Mrs. Temple, who left three days ago. And that Martin Sawyer is dying; and that Andrew refuses to believe this.

Outside Andrew is burning trash in a big metal bin; the essential task he does each day after breakfast. Through the frosted window in the laundry shed she can see, after rubbing the glass with her apron, her husband poke the vents, shake the grate, and then toss in the contents of two more covered tins. One scrap of paper catches fire midair, but Andrew — no gloves, she notes with a rueful smile, no hat no scarf no coat no socks, ankles bare above his low boots and thick white curls flopping dangerously — bats it down before it flies away. A few weeks from now, she knows, he and his oldest friends will strip naked for their annual New Year’s celebration, smashing through the ice on the lake to leap, shouting and pounding their chests, into the frigid water. Along with the rest of the crowd, she’ll applaud the grizzled, wrinkling, suntanned heroes.

For now she goes back through the walkway, back through the kitchen (Rosellen and Livvie are almost done; she reminds them the woodwork needs washing down), and into the empty nurse’s room, where she tilts her head and listens thoughtfully to the ceiling. Both this and the room next door, which she and Andrew have always shared, are crowned with porches, two among those she added to the second-floor guest rooms. Everyone wants to sleep outside now; no one will rent a room without a cure porch. Sometimes she hears footsteps crossing the ceiling above her head. Today, she hears nothing.

She waits; still nothing. Not a glass clinking down on a coaster, not the sounds of a body shifting in bed. Martin, so lively when he first arrived, these days hardly moves. He’s gone back to sleep, she thinks. Otherwise she’d hear him coughing. She decides to bring up his mid-morning tray herself, before she visits her friends. Dorrie and Emeline, who also run private homes for health-seekers, grew up helping their mothers and aunts; they know everything that goes on in the village. One of them may know of a plausible candidate for Mrs. Temple’s vacant place. Or they might, on this particular day, mention Nora, from whom all three of them learned their trade.

Dorrie’s mother, Bessie Brennan, was the first to rent a room to a sick stranger. During the summer of 1875, a slender Baltimore banker named Mr. Woodruff spent six weeks at a sportsmen’s hotel here in the northern Adirondacks. His cough improved, his fever decreased; he felt better than he had in months. At the end of the season he decided to stay on, only then learning that all the hunting and fishing lodges closed down for the winter. He asked advice from Bessie’s son, the guide who’d rowed him through the lakes, built his lean-to, and cleaned and cooked his fish.

Once Bessie agreed to let the room behind her kitchen, she made Mr. Woodruff’s meals and did his laundry, mended his woolen coat and provided a chair and horse blankets for the days when, despite the frigid weather, he sat outside for hours on the porch. He gained ten pounds and lost his cough entirely. The following September, Bessie took in a Boston professor who’d summered at the Northview Inn and had the same idea as Mr. Woodruff. Her cousin Olive, eager for the extra income, then rented a spare bedroom to a young man training to be a lawyer. Other neighbors joined Bessie and Olive and soon there were eight women housing invalids through the winter.

Sturdy and competent, the daughters and mothers and wives of guides, they were perfectly comfortable tending to a finicky eater, a late sleeper, one who shivered and needed an extra log on the fire. If a boarder’s cough worsened, if his fever rose or he spat blood, then the women sent to the Northview Inn for Nora, the only one among them to have experience as a nurse. There wasn’t a doctor, then, within sixty miles.