Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

During Mrs. Temple’s tenure, and also Mrs. MacDonald’s, he was careful not to cross that line: he might have seen inside the room inadvertently, or they might have looked out at the birds and trees and been disturbed by the sight of his prancing. In this house, so packed with people, everyone’s careful to guard each other’s privacy. Yet Nora, so private in other ways, was the one who most often broke through his caution. She seemed to sense his movements, even when she couldn’t see him; as he finished the last of his exercises she’d rise from her reading chair, tap on the glass, and wave as he stepped into view. Sometimes she’d ask him in for a minute, before they both returned to the duties of the day.

She might tell him, then, about a new remedy she was concocting. He might describe something interesting he’d seen, or confide some worry. Once he told her about a swimming companion who complained, weeks after they’d spent an afternoon splashing in an isolated stream, that he could hear frogs croaking in his stomach. They’d seen frog spawn, Andrew explained — he hadn’t mentioned this to Elizabeth, for fear that she might laugh at him — floating in the brook. His friend believed that he’d swallowed some, which in his stomach had hatched and, after dining greedily on his own food, metamorphosed into frogs. “Can he get them out?” Andrew said.

Nora, listening attentively, asked a few more questions and then replied that in Ireland, where she’d grown up, people took it for granted that toads and frogs might live inside a person. “Once,” she said, “I saw a man vomit a live toad after drinking one of my grandmother’s herbal infusions. Wait here for a minute.” While he sat gazing into the fire, she gathered leaves and powders from her stock in the attic and bound the mixture into a square of white muslin. Soon after Andrew gave this to his friend, the croakings vanished and he was cured.

The truth, Andrew thinks now, breathing hard and bending at the waist, is that they never saw the frogs expelled; perhaps they slipped out while his friend was asleep. But what matters is that his friend got better, not how Nora did it. So sharply does he miss those brief, private conversations, from which he always emerged restored, that he wonders how Elizabeth, whose friendship with Nora was both older and deeper, lives without her.

As Elizabeth, at the cottage on the lake, kisses Nora’s grandchildren good-bye and accepts the pencil Eudora offers her, Andrew folds his jump rope and strides toward the trees, wanting a better view of Martin’s porch. Why not, it suddenly strikes him — why not run a strand of wire around the entire frame? He could fix magnets to either end so the wind, blowing down from the hill past the stand of sugar maples and through the screen, would carry healing waves directly to Martin’s bed. The magnetized chimney on one side of him, a magnetized porch frame on the other — perfect. He’ll do this tomorrow.

He bounds back into his room and Elizabeth, eager to return to her duties, presses Gillian’s hand and murmurs that she has to wire their mother later about some business, and will tell her the children are fine. Martin and Andrew are waiting for her, so is everyone else; she has to go.

8

Before Elizabeth had a house of her own, before Dr. Kopeckny arrived and changed the way they thought, Nora and her friends had their own ideas about the nature of consumption. Bessie had heard it was caused by perverted humors and hidden inflammations; Olive, that it ran in families and affected only those of a melancholy nature. Jane and Lillian had been taught by their mother that it rose directly from damp, cold air trapped inside a room crowded with people: a miasma, open the windows against a miasma. Their cousin thought, more straightforwardly, that dirt meant rot meant smells meant sickness: everything must be clean! Nora herself, as a girl in Ireland, had been told by her grandmother that consumption arose from putrid phlegm, draining into the chest from the head. If you lit a dried cow patty and let it smoke, and then inhaled the smoke through a reed, you’d be cured. Or if you ate the cooked and powdered lungs of a fox, or the blood of a goat. The fore-quarter of a dog that had drowned, claimed one of her grandmother’s friends, would if boiled and made into a stew cure the sickest patient.

One of Ned’s guests, a Dr. Fuller from Baltimore, ridiculed everyone’s theories but his own. Hearing that Nora nursed invalids wintering in the village, he sniffed and said, “What do you know about phthisis? It takes a good solid classical education and medical school and some years in a hospital after that before you can even think of understanding this disease. What can you do for those men?”

Nora explained the diets she and her friends had devised, the arrangements they made so the invalids could rest, as their doctors back home had ordered. The astringent teas she made and the soothing syrups. Another guest leaned forward and said, “But don’t you worry you might catch it from them?”

Dr. Fuller thrust out his chin. “It isn’t contagious,” he said. “It’s inherited, the result of constitutional peculiarities inflamed by indulging in unhealthy living and excessive emotions.” Just then Elizabeth — this was during their second summer — coughed.

“The mountain air seems clearly helpful,” Clara said nervously. Around the table everyone was suddenly embarrassed. “Our Elizabeth has suffered from bronchitis, and still has a bit of a cough. Summers here seem to help her. Perhaps the winter air is even more beneficial to Nora’s friends.”

“I was taught that cold and stormy weather was the worst possible thing for the consumptive patient,” Dr. Fuller said. “That a warm and sunny climate was essential and that staying in a place like this through the winter was tantamount to suicide. Yet now there are fashionable doctors claiming quite the contrary.” Frowning, he turned to Michael and started a conversation about his spaniels.

Another doctor, Jacob Kopeckny, offered a different perspective. Two hemorrhages, less than a month apart, had brought this even-tempered young man to the mountains; a summer at an inn on another lake, where he regained much of his strength, had convinced him to close his practice in Rhode Island and settle in the woods. He’d built a small house near the river, between the village and the lake. Each time Nora passed his porch on her way to the village he called out a greeting to her.

Soon she began to stop so they could talk at more length. He had clear brown eyes, a gray streak in his beard, and a wife at whom he gazed with obvious affection. They’d known each other, he confessed with a laugh one day, since they were ten. When Nora asked him if he felt bitter at having his life and career so disrupted by illness, he shrugged and gestured toward his wife. “This place has its own charms,” he said. “And wherever I am, I’m lucky enough to live with the person I’ve loved since I was a boy. How many people can say that?”

Not many, Nora thought. They spoke so easily together that after a while it seemed natural to welcome him when he asked if he might join her on her rounds. The invalids were delighted to see him, particularly as he charged no fees: he was still too sick himself, he said, to actually practice. He was simply getting acquainted with his fellow sufferers. With Nora’s permission he also joined her friends for their occasional gatherings, answering questions and demonstrating his stethoscope. Only Nora had seen one before.

During his second winter in the village, once he’d gotten to know all the women who took in sick boarders, Dr. Kopeckny invited them to visit the room off his kitchen he referred to, somewhat fancifully, as his laboratory. There, after his wife served scones and jam and the women gave him news of the invalids, he said that he had something astonishing to show them.