Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

He should say that, he could start with that. Or with the disturbing sound that is filtering up to him now, causing his pencil to pause — the sound of the lidded brass containers boiling on the kitchen stove. Stripped of their pasteboard liners, and of the bits of lung and life which he and his fellow boarders cough up, the nine apple-sized cuspidors clonk gently together. With the strange, upsetting acuity that has come to him in these last two weeks, he can hear them rolling, bumping each other, as he can hear the damp tea leaves falling from Livvie’s hand onto the wooden floor, the soft swish-swish as she spreads them around, and the crisper noise of them being gathered, along with the dust that must not be allowed to rise, into neat piles by the broom.

He will write to his mother, he thinks, that the dull collisions of the cuspidors boiling reminds him of the eggs she boiled by the dozen, and tried to force him to eat, during the year before she finally let him come here. She would not believe he was sick; his father was dead, he could not be sick too. If he was sick he would lose his job, their new neighbors would despise them, they’d have to move yet again. If she didn’t believe it, why did she keep showing up at his bedroom door with a bowl lined with strips of buttered toast, onto which she’d cracked the eggs?

He will write that he came here too late. That he is dying. Later she’ll want to know that he knew the truth.

Everyone knows, he thinks. Maybe not Andrew, who shares his mother’s ability to rebuff unpleasant facts — but certainly Elizabeth and Mrs. Temple, and probably his fellow boarders too. They know what will happen once he’s gone. What’s left of him will be sealed up, sent home on the train to his family; no concern to anyone here. But some of the boarders will flee the house on the day his room is cleaned and disinfected, spending hours walking briskly through the woods. Others will pace the hallways, both watching and trying not to watch as the walls and woodwork and floors and ceiling of his room are washed and painted with carbolic acid, as the curtains and bedclothes are taken away to be boiled and every smallest item that once was his is steamed or burned. He has himself, on similar occasions, both walked the halls and walked the woods.

Surely he should explain some of this to his mother. She kept him from coming here early, when he might still have recovered. As his aunt, who swooped down with her two loud sons and, on the pretext of comforting his mother, settled her family into his house, has kept him from returning home to die. Once she’d grasped the nature of his illness, she’d convinced his mother to urge him to stay in the mountains. Too much of a risk to her boys, she said; too awkward to explain his case to the neighbors. Better to wait until he was wholly cured. Together they have stranded him here, among strangers.

He might blame them, or forgive them. He might describe what it feels like inside his chest. Instead his hand writes, as it always does, The weather continues to be fine, and I am feeling much improved.

Ned, still thinking of the morning when he and Martin fished for trout, remembers something Clara wrote him recently and says, “Your father is headed to Alaska.”

“Again?” Elizabeth says, wondering if this means he won’t be back in time for a summer visit. When her parents come up they stay not with her — she seldom has a free room — but here at the inn, where Clara can be near the children.

“Right after Christmas,” Ned continues. “Last week they went to the opera with some of your cousins. Iris and Hermione send their love.”

Iris and Hermione, Julia and Otis — her cousins, her uncle George’s children — grown now, with children of their own. As a girl she’d disliked all of them, along with the crowded, noisy, smelly city where everyone mocked her accent and where she knew no one. But her father had made connections in New York, and promptly found work that pleased him. Clara had been comforted to have her brother and his family next door during Max’s chronic absences. This was home now, she’d told her daughters. And slowly England had disappeared, house and garden and landscape and birds, watery sky and secret hedgerows fading one by one.

Rising, Elizabeth says to Ned, “I appreciate your suggestion about the nurse.” She puts the kettle on the stove and looks through the larder to make sure he has plenty of supplies. Tea and coffee and sugar and oats, a fresh loaf of bread, half a steak and kidney pie, preserved plums, and two kinds of jam — really there is nothing for her to do. Returning to Ned’s side, she adds, “I’ll wire my mother today.”

As she leans over to kiss his cheek, he plucks from the table a small crimson book, which he hands to her. Poems, she sees. The work of a young woman who lived for eighteen months in the sanatorium on the hill. “Would you give this to Martin for me?” Ned says. “And tell him I’m thinking of him.”

“He’ll be glad to know that.” She slips the book into her pocket and turns away.

“You might stop by the cottage on your way back,” Ned says.

6

In the summer of 1882 a group of poplars stood, shivering their leaves, where the cottage next to the inn is now. Near them was the landing where the afternoon stage set down Clara Vigne’s family, along with seven other guests anxious to settle into their rooms and start their holidays. Among them, only Clara hung back. Her stillness caught Ned’s eye, and her air of being completely self-contained. Otherwise her looks — middling height, middling weight, smooth brown hair, and deep-set, grayish blue eyes — were not remarkable. Surrounded by her luggage and flanked by two young women, she stood calmly as Ned approached.

“Is your husband arriving separately?” he asked.

“He’s in Borneo,” Clara said, one hand tracing a serpentine path in the air. “Collecting plants.”

“Then you must let my nephew help you with your things.”

Even as he called Michael, Clara touched one hand to each daughter’s arm and they said, simultaneously, “We don’t need help.” How could it be, Ned would wonder later, that their words made him long, paradoxically, to protect them?

They bent toward the bags as their mother introduced them. Gillian, whom Ned had assumed was older — she was taller by several inches, with sturdy shoulders and light brown hair and an easy, expansive manner — was actually younger than Elizabeth. Yet it was Elizabeth, gray-eyed like her mother, who yielded her bag to Michael with a smile. As it was Elizabeth, Nora saw later that afternoon, who stood by the edge of the beach, watching Michael from the unreliable shade of a pine.

He was standing over his boat, which was drawn up on shore. While he fiddled with an oarlock, Elizabeth pretended to examine the hills across the lake — as if her feet, hiding beneath her bell-shaped skirt, were not moving invisibly toward him. Flushed and narrow-chested, she was the opposite of Michael in everything but age; both were twenty-one that summer but Nora had, until that moment, still thought of her son as a boy. His friends were Ned and the guides and the dogs; she’d never seen him court anyone. Unless he was standing right before her she pictured him as he’d been years ago, galloping behind Homer and Virgil and chasing the wind in the grass.

The guides, who’d once made a pet of him, later made him their apprentice. By the time he was eighteen he worked alongside them as an equal. He dwarfed the men in Nora’s family and resembled Francis only vaguely; he could carry a guide boat over his head and return for the guns and the oars and the packs while his clients were still catching their breath. With Homer and Virgil, who were ancient now, or with the new puppies, Helen and Dido, he joined his friends’ hunting parties. Off-season, he worked in the shop with Ned, growing more skilled each winter. A vixen and her kits by their den, a family of ravens, twin fawns and their mother — whenever one of Ned’s clients wanted not just a simple head or full-body mount but a lifelike tableau of several specimens, Ned proudly gave the project to Michael.