Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Nora, like the men who first wintered there, was a stranger to the village. During the long hours of their exile in the freezing air, the strangers talked. Nora learned how the men had discovered they were consumptive, who they’d left behind, why they’d chosen to stay in these mountains. At first, as she’d later tell Elizabeth, this had mystified her — she couldn’t imagine why anyone not bound by family would choose the harsh climate. The dark, close-crowded trees, hemlock and cedar, spruce and pine, balsam fir with here and there the shocking light of a birch — how wild this place could seem! Snowshoe hares and deer and skunks, birds she’d never seen before and the slithering, weasel-like fishers and minks, which she despised although some of the men had first come to the mountains just for the pleasure of hunting them. Others, like Mr. Cameron, who’d taught astronomy in Connecticut before moving into Olive’s house, came solely for the air. He’d been assured, Mr. Cameron said, that the pure air of these mountains was as dry and bracing and curative as the more famous air of a place called Davos.

The atmosphere was rich in ozone, a powerful disinfectant, while the trees themselves exhaled purifying balsamics. The frequent rain and snow of the Adirondacks Mr. Cameron claimed meant nothing; from his bed he lectured Nora in a stern voice, coughing between every sentence. The soil was so extremely porous and stony, he said, that no dampness could ever linger. This on an April day when the ground was soaked with melted snow, when for a week they’d woken to rain, seen the clouds rise a few feet above the rooftops only to descend again; when there was mist then rain then fog then sleet then wet snow then fog again. Shivering in a heavy sweater and a knitted hat, Mr. Cameron claimed stoutly that the air was actually dry.

Nora let him talk, she let all of them talk. She brought them herbal decoctions she’d made at the inn, and teas and salves and a syrup of horehound compounded with hyssop and licorice root. When the other women needed a hand, she aired the invalids’ blankets and freshened their rooms and occasionally bathed those confined to bed. Sometimes — or so Elizabeth has envisioned from Nora’s stories — when the snow was dry and the sun was bright and the air was perfectly still, Nora borrowed her brother’s cutter and his gentle mare and took the men for drives or a lunchtime picnic.

If she were alive, she’d be eighty today — which no one, Elizabeth thinks, seems to remember. When she mentioned Nora’s birthday, Dorrie, who as a girl had stood openmouthed before a microscope while Nora showed her pollen grains and the nettle’s tiny stinging spines, had said only, “Is it?” Emeline didn’t mention Nora at all and Andrew, who’s working on the chimney in the nurse’s room — Nora’s old room — claims simply that the flue has been temperamental. How can he not feel Nora’s presence? The room, despite having been occupied for eleven years by first Mrs. MacDonald and then Mrs. Temple, still speaks to Elizabeth most strongly of her dearest friend.

White walls, white ceilings, smooth, polished oaken floor, and a narrow bed with a white metal frame: Nora’s, all Nora’s. It had been Mrs. Temple, though, who several weeks ago complained about the draft.

“Is it the damper?” Elizabeth asks her husband now.

Andrew straightens, a chisel in hand. “It’s almost fixed. When’s the new nurse coming?”

“I haven’t found anyone yet.”

Andrew frowns. “You can’t do everything yourself.”

“I know,” she says. “Especially not with Martin fading so fast.”

“Martin needs to be outside more,” Andrew says sharply. He reaches back into the flue and waggles something that makes a metallic sound. “I thought I’d take him for a drive to the dam tomorrow — he needs something to interest him. I hate to see him giving up.”

Elizabeth stares at her husband. When did he last actually look at Martin? Martin weighs less than a hundred pounds and is coughing up chunks of his lungs.

Earlier, while Andrew was finishing his outside tasks, and while Livvie and Rosellen were filling glasses for the midmorning snack, each holding a raw egg garnished with salt and pepper and lemon juice, Elizabeth took a tray up to Martin. Some of the boarders will gulp down three eggs, swearing they taste like raw oysters. Martin might have swallowed two without any fuss and then gone back to sleep, but instead he’d raised a glass, taken an egg partway between his lips, and let it slip back, his face contorting horribly.

Months ago he’d told her this: that initially he hadn’t felt sick, although a strange, almost liquid lassitude sometimes gave him wobbly legs. Often, he said, peculiarly often, it was true, he’d felt a need to clear his throat; and it was also true that he’d had a trifling but persistent cough: but these things were nothing. He hadn’t suspected anything. He was at a family picnic when his cousin’s three-year-old daughter ran out from behind the hedge crying, “Catch me! Catch me!” as she hurtled toward him. He’d swooped her up, over his head: a game a girl in a white blouse and a yellow pinafore had loved. As he lifted his Daisietta he’d had the strangest feeling in his chest, a warm, quivering, sickening feeling and then a flood of sweetness. His mouth had filled with blood as he set Daisietta down.

Dr. Davis, who will never say to a patient, You are getting worse, admits this about Martin: “You have not improved.” Each week Martin loses weight; he sweats through two changes of sheets each night. His cough is ceaseless — she can hear him cough now — and he’s had hemorrhage after hemorrhage. He’s tired, he said an hour ago. So tired. She ran a cloth wrung out in witch hazel over his face and hands and neck.

“Martin needs to rest,” Elizabeth says to Andrew. “He can’t go anywhere. And I’m going to need your help with him, unless I find a new nurse in the next few days.”

Andrew’s face, usually so open and cheerful, sets, exasperating Elizabeth. It is only in this circumstance that they quarrel. When they have problems with the house itself, or with their guests — the ardent friendships that flare up so swiftly and later burn out in violent quarrels, the more secretive romances and renunciations, the jealousies and squabbles and the occasional slump into melancholia and withdrawal — they talk these over after they retreat to their own room at night. She rests her head on his shoulder while he agrees with her theories and diagnoses, or disagrees and proposes his own. Either way she counts on him completely.

But when someone is dying he disappears, clutching his own chest protectively, clearing his throat, tensing and flexing his arms and thighs as he wards off the years when he was sick himself. Convinced that he cured himself by an act of will, adhering rigorously to a regimen of exercise and nude sunbathing and frequent freshwater plunges regardless of the season, he’s both horrified and disapproving when one of their boarders fails to recover. Especially when, as in Martin’s case, they don’t pack up before the end and return home to die.

Sometimes, despite her best efforts, Elizabeth thinks of Andrew’s evasions as cowardice. Other times she’s able to see how his constant optimism balances her own grimmer tendencies. When she and Nora first lost a boarder — Aaron Brown, whom she’d liked very much — she’d been ready to sell the house and find another occupation. Andrew hid in the woods through those terrible days, with a book and a jar of double-cream milk and a lump of cornbread. Half the time she’d been furious with him; the other half simply envied his ability not to see. If this was death, she’d said to Nora, if this was where we were all of us headed — then what was the point of anything?