Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Last week, while Elizabeth was preparing the grocery order, Corinne ran down the stairs so quickly, calling out so breathlessly, that Elizabeth rose from her desk in alarm: nothing but a hemorrhage usually generated such noise. Corinne cried, “I’m bleeding, I’m bleeding!” but this was triumph, not dismay — she’d not had her monthlies for more than two years, they’d stopped even before she knew she was sick. Almost all the female boarders, as well as Elizabeth herself, are similarly afflicted. But Corinne, after months observing every rule of the cure, has been rewarded.

“It’s such a good sign!” she said to Elizabeth. “You know what Dr. Davis says, he says it is a splendid sign for one’s monthlies to return, it means my system is restored …”

Elizabeth made a special cake. Corinne proudly blew out the candles and, without embarrassment, told the other boarders what they celebrated. Where else but in this village could such a scene take place? In this village, in this house, which is Elizabeth’s place. The minute she slips inside the door, she’ll feel like herself again. Her house holds her as a shell holds an egg, giving form and structure to a substance that is worthy in its own right, useful and nourishing, but which would otherwise drain away into nothing.

Again she passes the train station — the coffins have disappeared — and the hotel, the cobbler, the greengrocer, Phoebe’s house, where she met Andrew, and Bessie’s. How fortunate she has been with her own house. At Gillian’s wedding, which was held here, and not in New York, because that was what Gillian wanted, she could not have anticipated any of this.

That day she sat in the dining room of the Northview Inn, a room crowded not with her own relatives but with guides and their families, including all the women she’d gotten to know; with Dr. Kopeckny and his family and his patients; with guests who’d been visiting the inn for years. Gillian had looked beautiful. Nora had looked old. Clara had cried, and clung to Max’s arm — Max, who’d arrived not the week before, as he’d promised, not even the night before, but the very morning of the wedding.

Elizabeth watched Michael and Gillian stand side by side, speak words she couldn’t hear, turn to face each other. She saw this through a haze of shimmering color, as if it were taking place on a slide, below the lens of Nora’s microscope: distant bits of protoplasm darting and flaring and colliding. By then she no longer wanted Michael for herself; already it was hard to remember what she’d seen in him. But as Gillian turned toward him, and as Clara, despite Max’s presence, dropped his arm to seize Elizabeth’s, Elizabeth felt a baffled sense of failure. If she fit nowhere, if her only work was to keep her mother company …

A few weeks after the wedding, pale and quiet and coughing into a handkerchief, Elizabeth convinced Clara that she needed to leave their stuffy house in New York and return to the Adirondacks for the winter. This time the village felt like home as soon as she arrived, and within days she was working side by side with Nora, living among the invalids as one of three boarders in Phoebe’s pleasant house. It was there that she met Andrew, who despite being sick was amusing and kind and even-tempered.

On his good days Andrew took her snowshoeing, guiding her along a creek to a frozen waterfall glinting in the sun. They walked, they skated on the lake, they ate picnic lunches on sheltered mountain ledges. When he had a relapse, Elizabeth nursed him; he thanked her with pots of hyacinths he forced after he’d recovered. Ten months after their meeting they married outside, in a grove of white pines on a hill that would, a decade later, be covered with new houses.

By their second summer together — Andrew’s health was much improved, but his money was running out — they too began building a house, one ample enough that Elizabeth could take in boarders. A different kind of house, she said, when she approached Nora. A house that would take sicker patients than did the regular boardinghouses, a house in which there’d be a resident nurse: “You’d live here,” Elizabeth said. “With us. I’ll manage the business end, and do the cooking, and hire whatever other help we need; and you’ll supervise the health of the invalids.”

Nora’s face lit up and her eyes glowed; she seized Elizabeth’s hands in both of hers and said, “ Really ?” As if Elizabeth, in offering her hard work and a daily acquaintance with sickness and death, were giving her an enormous present. As if, Elizabeth thinks now, it hadn’t been Nora who’d given her everything. For seven years they worked together, building a reputation that extended far beyond the village. For seven years, while Andrew took care of the house itself, they shared the care of the boarders, the surprises of their lives, and, occasionally, their deaths. When Nora finally sickened—“It is my heart” she said, with peculiar pleasure. “My heart, not tuberculosis”—she chose to spend her last days in her room at the house. Michael and Ned came daily; often Gillian appeared with the children; Andrew spent hours with her. But it was Elizabeth who was with her through the nights.

The disjointed, delicate, fragmentary conversations they held then, a phrase dropped one night, picked up the next, Elizabeth has never repeated, not even to Andrew. During the nights she spent in Nora’s room she felt her friend’s life sliding through her body. Separate stories, different aspects of her journey lay adjacent one moment, passed through each other and merged the next — a ship filled with fever, a hedge filled with finches, a hospital filled with broken men. The astonishing sight, after so many years, of Ned; or the no less surprising discovery, under Fannies patient guidance, of her own gift.

During the hours when Nora couldn’t talk, Elizabeth told stories of her own. She kept back only this, which still no one but Andrew knows: although she’s never let Dr. Kopeckny test her, she’s always been sure, despite what she told Nora, that in fact she’s mildly tubercular herself. She can feel it, she can read the signs she conceals. She’s never worried about catching it from her boarders because she’s already infected: an excellent thing, she thinks, it has made her fearless in certain respects, stripped concern for herself from her acts. To be fearless in other respects — to give her heart, as she did with Nora, and has with Martin — is another story. Again and again, she pays for that. Still, there’s nothing she’d change. Long ago she decided to keep her house always open to the sick.

Recently she saw, in a magazine read by the invalids, an article about a window tent. The illustration showed a grotesque structure meant to offer, to the poor trapped in city tenements, a version of the out-door life. On a narrow cot, in a shabby room, an anonymous man’s legs and lower torso were outlined beneath heavy blankets. Head and shoulders and chest were enclosed in a tent that formed a quarter circle: one edge sealed to the cot, the other clamped, like a lamprey’s mouth, to the open window. Fresh air blew in, the caption claimed. And foul air out. In this way, the article noted, the patient may benefit without protruding his cot through the window. Such a sight, viewed by the neighbors, might result in the unfortunate sufferer being obliged to seek other quarters.

That stifling, useless tent, or her own large, airy rooms with their private porches: no choice at all. Had she stayed in the city, had she not met Nora, she might be sleeping in such a tent herself. What difference does it make that she will always be an outsider here? So was Nora, so are half the residents.

For a minute, Elizabeth misses her friend so sharply that she grows dizzy. She stops, she draws a deep breath, she thinks again of the faceless man trapped beneath the window tent and then of Martin, still waiting for her in his room, trusting that she’ll replace Mrs. Temple with just the right person and, during the coming weeks, know exactly what he needs at each stage. She bends to the ground, grasps what has caught her eye, and then straightens, slipping the speckled feather between the pages of Ned’s crimson book. The poetess died before she finished her work, before she saw it printed; yet the poems exist. Martin, Elizabeth thinks, will take the book and its page marker gladly, knowing it came from both her and Ned. Not knowing that what they’d most like to give him is Nora.