Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

“Everyone feels this way the first time,” Nora had told her. “The first few times. As if we’re the only ones to understand what really lies at the heart of the world. Until you get used to it, nothing can make you feel more alone.”

What does it mean, to get used to it? That, after nearly twenty years of this work, Elizabeth can think, Martin might have a week , and still be able to plan calmly all she’ll arrange for his comfort and consolation, and all she must also arrange to spare her other boarders during his last days. And that, although she’s desperate with worry, and although Andrew has hidden his head inside the fireplace, his back muscles clenched with panic, she’ll cook an excellent dinner and he’ll sit at the head of the table, making pleasant conversation. He’ll carve the roast mutton, she’ll add potatoes to the plates. Upstairs Martin will cough and cough — he’s coughing now, she’ll bring him some syrup — and downstairs Livvie will pass through the swinging doors with dish after dish after dish.

“I can’t talk about this,” Elizabeth says to Andrew. “Not if you’re going to be so stubborn.”

Who will she find to move into this room? Dorrie spread her hands and said she didn’t know of a single free nurse in town. Emeline shook her head and offered her a muffin and an advertisement for an electrified carpet sweeper. Elizabeth tries to imagine a stranger folding freshly laundered nightdresses and slipping them into the second drawer, where Nora kept hers. A stranger in Nora’s armchair, reading by the afternoon light. Even with Andrew inserted into the fireplace, head and shoulders invisible and legs rising like andirons above the grate, she feels Nora’s presence. But that feeling lasts only a minute, like so much else in her life: what presses her most is the ceaseless ticking of the clock. Breakfast, the ten o’clock trays, and then dinner — she should be cooking now. After dinner she’ll have a tiny breathing space before the four o’clock snack: but then there’s supper, almost right away, and later the bedtime trays. For the consumptive invalid, she hears Nora saying, food is life.

Andrew’s voice comes from inside the chimney, muffled by the bricks and so distorted he might be speaking through the two stuffed pheasants splayed above the mantel. “Don’t be angry at me,” he says.

Is that what he says?

She backs out and closes the door behind her. Martin may have another month, but no more than that. For his sake, for Andrew’s sake, she must find another nurse right away.

Andrew waits a minute, until he’s sure she’s gone. Then he slides his head and shoulders down, backs away from the chimney, and searches his workbox for the two smooth bits of metal he was about to seize when she appeared — magnets, one in the shape of a star, the other a disk, like the moon. Magnets may, he’s read, shift the shape of the aura surrounding each person into a new and more healthful alignment. And a stream of heat carrying the magnetic waves — this part he’s hypothesized for himself — might increase the benign effect. On its way to the roof this chimney runs between the outside wall of Martin’s room and the inside wall of his porch. Ideally situated, Andrew thinks. When placed above the damper, on the brick ledge he’s just chiseled clean, the magnets will exert a quiet, beneficial influence on Martin’s health.

Back into the chimney he goes, his head and shoulders once more disappearing. He is his own boss, he thinks. Quite independent, capable of aiding Martin in his own way: not, whatever Elizabeth and her friends may think, simply Elizabeth’s husband. All through the house, in fireplaces and windows and under the eaves, behind the boilers, beneath the compost heap, are hidden other objects that some — Dr. Davis among them — might scorn as superstitious and that his own wife might dismiss as useless.

But not Nora, he thinks. He’s perfectly aware that today is Nora’s birthday; he’s placed the magnets in her honor. Nora, with her caches of herbs and bitter powders, her screens covered with drying leaves and flower heads, would have seen the possibilities in his metal shapes. The life she’d led, each of the places she’d called home sending unexpected shoots toward the next, had made her open to almost anything.

2

Nora Kynd was twenty-three when she reached Detroit in the summer of 1848: strong and active and eager, after a long journey down the St. Lawrence and over the lakes, to leave behind all that had happened to her in Quebec. At first she shared a dirty room and heels of bread with six other young women who, like her, were looking for employment. All she found was day-work, cleaning attics or windows; dismissed at nightfall to look again the next day.

One morning, discouraged after two weeks of this, she paused while wandering through the market in the Cadillac Square and stood staring greedily at the contents of a stall. Fancy game, food for the rich: quails and woodcock, venison and partridge. The quails lay on a pale plank, nested together as if they were sleeping, the soft speckled feathers of one supporting the claws of the next. She stood there drooling like a dog, until the stallkeeper scowled and told her to be on her way. She was stepping back when a hand touched her shoulder blade.

“Have you eaten today?” A woman with faded hair, gray eyes, a kind smile revealing a few missing teeth.

“Porridge,” Nora said. “Not that it’s anyone’s business.”

“What’s your name?”

“Nora Kynd.”

The woman bent in an odd little bow. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Fannie McCloud.”

She drew Nora away from that stall and toward another, where she purchased an orange and shared the succulent pieces. Amid the pleasure of the segments she extracted, without Nora quite knowing how, an account of Nora’s difficult first two weeks in Detroit. Then she convinced Nora to walk with her to Corktown, to the small house — she’d been a widow for years — that she’d once shared with her husband. As they wound through the narrow streets, she asked Nora why she’d chosen this place to settle and Nora offered the only facts she could bear to tell: that she’d left Ireland in the midst of the famine, after all her family but two of her younger brothers had died. What else could they do? she’d thought. Where else could they go? She had taken charge of her brothers, pretending more confidence than she felt — but on the passage over she’d taken sick and nearly died. On Grosse Isle, at the quarantine station not far from the city of Quebec, a kind doctor had kept her alive but had sent away the two little boys. While she was lying sick and unconscious, they’d been shuttled upriver with those still apparently healthy. By the time she could ask for them, they’d disappeared.

“Where were they sent?” Fannie asked.

Nora kept her eyes fixed on the gutters. “No one knows. I have asked everyone, everywhere.” Were those pig tripes lying there, outside the butcher shop? “I’ve even had people put advertisements in the newspapers for me. But it’s like a wind picked them up and blew them to the North Pole. Part of the reason I came to Detroit was because I heard some who traveled on the boats had made their way here. But so far I’ve not found a single trace of Denis or Ned.”

Fannie shook her head and led Nora a few more blocks, to her house with its bright blue door. The spare room that she rented out, always to Irish girls, was free; the newly washed curtains, white with a soft green sprig, moved in the breeze. After Fannie asked what Nora was paying for her squalid shared lodgings, she said, “You may have the room for that. I’m an orphan myself, I know what it’s like to be lost in a strange place.”