A Fall of Marigolds (2 page)

“Molly just got the new issue of
People
.” Celine nodded toward our coffee shop neighbor.

“So?” I didn’t read newsmagazines anymore.

“Some photographer found a memory card inside an old camera bag she had in a storage unit. She thought she had lost it. She hadn’t seen it in ten years.”

I laughed nervously. Celine wasn’t one for dramatics, but she was scaring me a little. “And?”

Celine hesitated and then moved aside. A magazine was opened to a two-page photo spread titled, “Tenth Anniversary Preview: Newly Discovered Photos from 9/11
.
”
The largest photo was of a man and woman standing at a curb, staring up at a horror that the camera lens did not show.

I recognized the scarf I was clutching, with its splash of marigolds, before I saw my own face staring back at me.

Time seemed to crunch to a stop.

I leaned toward the table’s edge so that I could grasp something solid as the full memory of that captured moment swirled around me.

“That’s you,” I heard Kendal say, and I closed my eyes to reorient myself to the here and now at the Heirloom Yard, at the cutting table, surrounded by yards and yards of beautiful fabric. A long-ago voice crept out of the folds of my memory.

Give me your hand.

I couldn’t breathe.

Give me your hand!

I couldn’t breathe!

“Taryn!”

Celine’s arms were around me, pulling me back.

“You were there? You saw it?” Kendal’s words stung, but I welcomed the pain that assured me of where I was. Safe. Alive. With Kendal beside me.

“I’m all right,” I whispered to Celine. I felt her arms around me relax a little.

“I’m sorry, Taryn,” Molly said. “I just thought you needed to see it before, you know, people start asking you about it. It will be on all the newsstands tomorrow.”

“Is my name there?” I whispered.

“No,” Celine answered quickly. “You’re not identified in the photo, just that man behind you.”

I steeled myself for a second look, but my eyes were drawn again to the photo itself, not to the caption beneath it.

The scarf shone like a flame as I held it to my mouth. Behind me, a man in a florist’s uniform held a cell phone to his ear. His gaze—like mine—was skyward, toward the burning spectacle across the street. The embroidered script under A
THENA
F
LORIST
told the world his name was Mick.

The photo didn’t show that a second later I would be on my knees and the man named Mick would be grabbing me, pulling me to my feet as the world fell to pieces around us.

My gaze traveled to the caption.
The streets were crowded with bystanders and evacuees seconds before the South Tower fell. Manhattan florist Mick Demetriou (pictured above) said escaping the crush of people and debris was harrowing. “I didn’t think we would survive,” he said of himself and the unidentified woman next to him, whom he helped to safety. Demetriou’s cousin, a New York City firefighter, perished in the North Tower.

“I didn’t know you were there,” Kendal said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were there? What does ‘harrowing’ mean?”

“Not now, Kendal,” Celine said, and bent to look at me. “You can call the magazine and tell them not to print your name in any subsequent uses of this photo, you know.”

I couldn’t make sense of what she had just said. “What?”

“A lot of our customers are going to recognize you. They might call the magazine to tell them they know who the unidentified woman is. Want me to tell them you do not want your name to be released?”

I couldn’t answer Celine. I couldn’t explain to Kendal why I hadn’t told her I’d been near the towers that day. Or what “harrowing” meant.

I could only stare at that other me on the shiny page, clutching the scarf of blazing marigolds that had saved my life, and Kendal’s too.

But not Kent’s.

An old, familiar companion rose up from the flat folds of the scarf, the same invisible tagalong that had haunted me for years after Kent died.

A rush of sound filled my ears as I stood there among the hushing bolts of cloth.

All the fabric in the world could not muffle the roar of my regret.

CLARA

Ellis Island

August 1911

IT
was the most in-between of places, the trio of islands that was my world after the fire. For the immigrants who arrived ill from wherever they came from, the Earth stopped its careful spinning while they waited to be made well. They were not back home where their previous life had ended; nor were they embracing the wide horizon of a reinvented life. They were poised between two worlds.

Just like me.

The windowed walkway of the ferry house connected the hospital’s bits of borrowed earth to the bigger island known as Ellis: a word that by contrast seemed to whisper hope. Beyond the hospital where I worked as a nurse was Battery Park in Manhattan, a short boat ride away. In the opposite direction were the Narrows and the blue satin expanse that led back to everyone’s old country. The hospital at Ellis was the stationary middle place where what you were and what you would be were decided. If you could be cured, you would be welcomed onshore. If you could not, you would be sent back where you came from.

Except for this, I didn’t mind living where the docks of America lay just beyond reach. I looked to her skyline with a different kind of hunger.

Five months had passed since I’d set foot on the streets of New York. I could see her shining buildings from my dormitory window, and on gusty mornings I could nearly hear the busy streets coming to life. But I was not ready to return to them. The ferry brought me everything I needed, and the nurses’ quarters were tidy, new, and sea-breeze fresh, though a bit cramped. I shared a room with another nurse, Dolly McLeod, who also worked and lived on island number three, the bottom rung of Ellis’s E-shaped figure. Our dormitory stood a pebble’s throw from the wards where the sick of a hundred nations waited. Their sole desire was to be deemed healthy enough to meet their loved ones on the kissing steps and get off the island. We cooled their fevered brows, tended their wounds, and nurtured their flagging hopes. Some were sick children, separated from their healthy parents. Others were adults who had diseases they had had no idea they were carrying when they set sail. Others were too feebleminded to make their own way in life, and despite their healthy lungs and hearts, they would be sent back to their home countries.

They spoke in languages that bore no resemblance to anything familiar: long, ribboned sentences looped together with alphabetic sounds that had no rhyme or meter. Some phrases we nurses had learned from hearing them so often. It seemed there were a thousand words for dreams realized and only one common whimper for hopes interrupted. Many would leave the hospital island healthier than when they arrived, but not all, of course. A few would leave this world for heaven’s shores.

The work kept us busy from dawn to dusk. Sleep came quickly at night. And there were no remnants of the fire here.

Dolly and a couple of other nurses looked forward to going ashore on their off days and they would come back to the island on the midnight ferry smelling of cologne and tobacco and salty perspiration from having danced the evening away. In the beginning they invited me to join them but it did not take them long to figure out I never left the island. Dolly, who knew in part what kept me here, told me she had survived a house fire once. When she was eight. I wouldn’t always feel this way, she said. After a while the dread of fire would fall away like a snakeskin.

I was not afraid of fire. I was in dreadful awe of how everything you were sure of could be swept away in a moment.

I hadn’t told Dolly everything. She knew, as did the other nurses, about the fire. Everyone in New York knew about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. She and the other nurses here knew that I, and everyone else from the seventh floor on down, had escaped to safety when fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building. They knew that one hundred and forty-seven employees of Triangle Shirtwaist had not.

They knew that the door to the stairs for the Washington Street exit was locked—to prevent stealing—and that the only alarm signaling the blaze came from the fire itself, as there was no siren to warn anyone. And they knew that garment workers by the dozens—mostly women—fell from windows to die quickly on the pavement rather than minute by agonizing minute in the flames. They knew the death toll was staggering, because it was in all the papers.

Dolly and the others didn’t know what it was like to have watched as people stepped out of high, fiery windows, and they didn’t ask, because who would ask a question like that?

They didn’t know about Edward because I had said nothing about him.

I had only just started working as a nurse at the doctor’s office on the sixth floor and had few acquaintances in New York. Not even Dolly knew that Edward Brim stole my heart within hours of meeting me in the elevator on my first day.

I had dropped my umbrella and he retrieved it for me.

“Are we expecting rain?” he said, smiling wide. He was first-generation American like me. I could tell from the lilt in his voice that his parents were European. Like mine. His nut-brown hair was combed and waxed into place with neat precision, but his suit was slightly wrinkled and there was a tiny bit of fried egg on his cuff—just the tiniest bit—convincing me without a glance at his left hand that he was a bachelor. He was tall like my father, but slender. His eyes were the color of the dawn after a night of wind and rain. But he had the look of New York about him. His parents surely had stayed in the city after they had come through Ellis, unlike my parents.

“Smells like rain,” I’d responded.

His smile widened as the elevator lurched upward. “Does it?”

“Can’t you smell it?” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Of course he couldn’t. He was from the city.

The man next to him laughed. “She’s a country girl, Edward. They always know what’s coming.”

“Well, then. I guess I’m glad I didn’t bother to shine my shoes this morning!” Edward and the man laughed.

He bent toward me. “Be glad you know when rain is coming, miss. There aren’t many things we’re given warning of.”

I smiled back at him, unable to wrest my gaze from his.

“New to New York?” he said.

I nodded.

“Welcome to the city, then, Miss . . . ?”

“Wood. Clara Wood.”

He bowed slightly. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Wood. Edward Brim, at your service.”

The elevator swayed to a stop on the sixth floor and the doors parted.

“My floor.” I reluctantly nodded my farewell. Edward tipped his hat. And his eyes stayed on mine as the doors closed and the elevator resumed its lumbering ascent.

I saw him later that day as he ran for a trolley car in the rain. And I saw him nearly every day after that, either on the elevator or in the lobby of the Asch Building. I heard him talk about his work as a bookkeeper at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the tenth floor, and I knew the coworker who often rode the elevator with him was a fabric buyer named Oliver. I knew Edward liked Earl Grey tea and macaroons and spearmint, because I could smell the fragrance of all three on his clothes. I knew he liked baseball and his mother’s pastries and English ales.

He always said good morning to me, always tipped his hat to me, always seemed to be on the verge of asking me something when the elevator arrived at my floor and I had to get off. The day of the fire, just as the elevator doors parted, he asked me whether I might want to see the work floor just before the shift ended. It was a Saturday. The seamstresses on the ninth floor would be finishing at five. I said yes.

The nurses on Ellis didn’t know I watched Edward leap from the ninth floor to meet me on the street, a screaming girl in tow, her hair and skirt ablaze. The girl had been afraid to jump alone and Edward had grasped her hand as the fire drove them out the window.

Dolly and the others thought I was spectacularly fortunate to have escaped.

“You’re very lucky, Clara,” they said.

I didn’t feel lucky.

When I was little, luck was finding something you thought was lost for good, or winning a porcelain doll at the county fair, or getting a new hat, or having every dance filled on your dance card. Good luck made you feel kissed by heaven and smiled upon by the Fates.

Good luck made you feel giddy and invincible.

Good luck didn’t leave you desperately needing a place that was forever in between yesterday and tomorrow.

My parents wanted me to come home to Pennsylvania when word of the fire reached them. My father assured me that he still had a place for me at his medical practice, that he would always have a place for me. But I didn’t want to go back to what I had been, back to the rural landscape where everything is the same shade of brown or green. I had just celebrated my twenty-first birthday. I was living in New York City, where every hue audaciously shone somewhere, day or night. I had been on the cusp, or so it seemed, of the rest of my life. Edward would have asked me to dine with him or see a show if the fire had never come. We were destined to fall in love; I was sure of it, even though I had known him for only two weeks.

But as ashes and burned fabric fell like snow on Edward’s broken body and on so many others, none of whom I could help, I knew I would need a place to make sense of what I had lost and yet never had. Only an in-between place could grant me that.

THE
hospital’s two islands were made from dirt and stone pummeled out from beneath New York’s streets to make way for the underground railway. I was amazed that you could dump shiploads of earth into water and convince it to stay in one place. Sometimes I wondered: If there should be a tremor below, would these islands crumble away? God didn’t put them here, so was He inclined or disinclined to protect them? Long ago, when the finger of God was on the bay, there were long stretches of tidal flats and acres of oyster beds, or so the story goes. What God made disappeared long ago.

My parents came to America from Europe the year before I was born, before Ellis’s hospital existed. The second and third islands rose up from the seafloor, one after the other, years after Ellis opened, when it was apparent that something had to be done for immigrants who arrived in America ill and contagious.

It didn’t occur to me to seek a post here when I first completed nursing school in Philadelphia. I wouldn’t have chosen this set-apart place. It was the streets of Manhattan that beckoned me. The vibrant hues of New York had attracted me since I was seven, following a visit to see a show that I never forgot. I had wanted to be a part of its stunning energy for as long as I could remember.

My sister, Henrietta, would likely never leave Pennsylvania. She had married there and was having babies there and she would rock her grandchildren there. Nothing surprising ever happened to her and this suited her. To her, there was only one shade to every color. This was the difference between us. She was happy with the one shade.

I had always been drawn to color. Always. The more vibrant or intense or deep or unique, the better. I never swooned like my sister did when Papa had me assist in the surgery and our sponges and instruments turned crimson. The color of blood mesmerized me, even if the pain of the patient kept me from admiring it outright. Henrietta said blood was the color of death. I told her it was the color of life. Isn’t it? Isn’t it the color of life?

When the bodies landed on the pavement on the day of the fire, it was their lives that spilled out of them.

Sometimes at night, I dreamed of the fire, and my mind conjured the blood puddles on the sidewalk, like flattened red bouquets. I was not aware of making a sound. Surely I must have been doing so, for Dolly would rouse me and whisper, “You are safe, Clara.” Other times the part of me that orchestrates my dreams would create a scenario in which Edward survived the fire. Why couldn’t my dream weavers just skip the blaze altogether? I would like to dream that there was no fire.

My island made no demands of me. It wasn’t here when time began and no doubt it would not be here when time ended. The people in the wards came and went. Other nurses came and went. It was a convenient place to linger.

I saw tiny glimpses of the life I knew, which surely waited for me still, in the faces of the hopeful.

•   •   •

ON
days when multiple ships arrived in New York Harbor, the ferries began arriving at dawn. Immigrants by the hundreds passed through Ellis. Their landing cards would be checked, their names recorded, and their health assessed. Those who failed the health inspection would make their way to us, either by gurney or wheelchair or on foot, most with chalked initials on their outer clothing to inform us what illness or disability they were presenting signs of. I tended a dozen people every day in my rotations in the contagious wards. On multiple-ships days, the number of new arrivals could easily grow beyond what I was able to keep track of.

On one cloudy day in August, my fellow nurses and I rose before the sun and ate our eggs and toast by lamplight. The first ferry arrived just as the sun broke across the face of Ellis’s palacelike front. By noon the hospital was bustling with new arrivals from the farthest corners of the world, much like the day before and the day before that. But there was only one new arrival who caught my gaze that day and kept it.

The copper-colored scarf around the man’s neck as he waited in the hospital’s receiving line was the one spot of color in the montage of brown and gray jackets. It seemed to call out to me, as if it knew it resembled the necklace of fire Edward had around his neck when he took to the sky. The scarf looked as soft as lamb’s wool. I knew the moment I saw it that it was a woman’s scarf and this also intrigued me.

An orderly had opened the door to the outside and a bullying breeze yanked on the immigrants’ hats as they walked up the steps of the main building, where we waited to receive them. Ahead of the man in the scarf, a woman holding the hand of a fair-haired child let go to reach for her bonnet when it whirled away from her. I watched the man catch the hat as it danced toward the water behind them. He handed it back. The woman clutched it to her chest with a nod of gratitude, something I’d seen often in my five months on the island. The clash of languages did not rob the immigrants of their desire to communicate thanks when a snippet of good fortune found them. Somehow, they figured out a way.

The man, golden haired and slender, wore a black felt cap and carried a simple satchel. I guessed him to be in his late twenties, perhaps younger. His face was stippled with a shimmery new beard that covered slightly hollowed cheekbones. The voyage across the Atlantic had no doubt thinned him, as it had thinned all third-class passengers who landed at Ellis. But there was an aching weariness in his eyes and even in the set of his jaw. The hard voyage lingered there, and something else, too.

He approached the table where I and three other nurses waited in our starched white uniforms. The matron, Mrs. Crowley, sat next to us, looking at registration tags and chalked collars, checking off names, and directing the immigrants to one of several hospital buildings, depending on their condition. A child reached up to rub a swollen, watery eye and his mother swatted his hand with a whispered reprimand. The child stuffed his hand into his pocket. If the eye was infected with trachoma, that child would never see the shores of New York and neither would his mother. The attending doctor—not me, thank God—would tell the mother that they would have to go back to their homeland. No one with trachoma made it to shore.

I stood ready to assist with any French-speaking immigrants. I’m not fluent, but my French-born mother taught me enough to understand simple sentences, such as, “But I’m not sick,” and, “I’m supposed to meet my cousin in New Jersey,” and, “I don’t have money for a doctor.” When a French speaker hears me begin a sentence in his native language, he will invariably launch into an impassioned entreaty that I never understand. Mrs. Crowley insists it doesn’t matter that I don’t understand. I need only know how to say, “For now you must report to the hospital building you have been assigned to. There are no exceptions at this table. I’m sorry.”

Several in the first group of people at the table spoke German and Swedish. Another spoke English with a thick Scottish brogue. Since no one needed my limited French, I found my attention drawn to the scarf-wearing man, whose eyes glistened with something other than sickness. Our gazes met and the momentary connection surprised me. I didn’t hear the matron speak to me.

“Miss Wood!”

I jumped slightly and the clipboard I held poked me in the ribs. “Yes, Mrs. Crowley?”

“I asked if you know any Hungarian!”

“No. I’m sorry.”

The matron whipped her head around to the other nurses. “Anyone know any Hungarian?”

A chorus of nos rose up around us and I chanced a look at the man. His gaze was drawn to the sky that shimmered outside the tall windows next to us, or perhaps to the land in the distance. Or maybe he was looking for the ship that had brought him and now lay at anchor in New York’s harbor.

“You’ll need to take that up with the doctor when you see him,” Mrs. Crowley was saying to the dark-haired woman who stood at the front of the table.

The woman began to cry and the man in the scarf turned from his reverie and toward the sound of sobs laced with a lyrical dialect that seemed to fall around the room in tatters. No one knew what the woman was trying to convey.

“I can’t help you here, love,” Mrs. Crowley said, soothingly but with authority. “You will need to report to the ward where you’ve been assigned. Miss Wood, if you please?”

I took a step near the woman to gently take her arm, but she pulled away from me and arched across the table, imploring Mrs. Crowley with words no one under stood.

Mrs. Crowley turned to orderlies lounging at the back of the room. “I need a little help here,” she shouted. Then she swiveled back to me. “Tell her the instructions in French, Miss Wood. Perhaps she will understand that.”

“I’m sorry,” I said in French. “There are no exceptions at this table. The doctor must see you.”

The woman grabbed me by the shoulders and my clipboard clattered to the floor.

“Je ne suis pas malade! Je ne suis pas malade!”

I am not sick.

Her accent was like mine. French was not her native language. But she knew enough to tell me that much.

“Orderly!” the matron yelled over her shoulder.

The man in the scarf bent to pick up the fallen clipboard as an orderly strode toward the distraught woman.

For several seconds there was only the sound of feet on tile, the orderly’s and the woman’s, and her soft cries.

“Next in line, please,” Mrs. Crowley said, her voice shaking a bit.

The man in the scarf took a step forward. He handed me my clipboard but his eyes trailed the woman in the gentle hold of the orderly as they walked away.

“Thank you.” I extended my hand to take the clipboard.

“And your name?” Mrs. Crowley asked.

The man in the scarf slowly turned his head back around. He said nothing.

“Mrs. Crowley stretched out her hand toward the registration tag clipped to the man’s jacket lapel. “Your tag? Yes, your tag.”

The man handed it to her.

Mrs. Crowley studied his card and checked her list. “Ah. Yes. Andrew . . . Gwynn.” Then she looked up and past him to the others waiting for their turn. “And your wife? Lily. Is she with you?”

The man named Andrew Gwynn stared at his hands, wordless.

“Do you understand what I am asking you? Where is Mrs. Gwynn?” Mrs. Crowley asked.

Mr. Gwynn opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it.

The matron looked at his tag and then turned to the nurses behind her. “Good Lord. He’s a Welshman who doesn’t speak the King’s English. Can anyone ask him where his wife is? She’s on the list.”

“She’s not here,” Mr. Gwynn said softly, his Welsh accent lifting his words like musical notes on a breeze.

“What was that?” Mrs. Crowley said.

Mr. Gwynn sighed, as if saying it had been all he could manage.

“He . . . he said she’s not here,” I offered.

“She’s on the list. She’s supposed to be here. They were supposed to stay together.” Mrs. Crowley shook her head, annoyed. “Simple instructions. How much simpler can they be? They’re supposed to stay together.” She redirected her attention to Mr. Gwynn. “Why didn’t the two of you stay together?”

Mr. Gwynn looked at her with unknowing eyes, as though he hadn’t understood a word she had said. Or didn’t know how to explain.

Mrs. Crowley threw up her hands. “They’re supposed to stay together.” She leaned toward Mr. Gwynn. “Where is Mrs. Gwynn? Your
frau
?”

“That’s German, Mrs. Crowley,” said the nurse next to me.

“
She is
not here,” Andrew Gwynn murmured, looking down at his hands.

“Does his paperwork say she boarded the ship with him?” I leaned over and looked at the sheaf of papers in Mrs. Crowley’s hands.

“They boarded at Liverpool. Both of them. Together.”

I peered over Mrs. Crowley’s shoulder. Andrew Gwynn and his wife, Lily, had crossed on the
Seville
. I had heard at breakfast that morning that scarlet fever had claimed thirteen people on that ship.

I looked up at Andrew Gwynn and I understood the ache of loss I saw in his eyes.

I bent toward Mrs. Crowley. “I think perhaps she died en route, Mrs. Crowley. Look. They were on the
Seville
.”

Mrs. Crowley’s mouth dropped open as her cheeks blossomed crimson. She shut it and furrowed her brow. “Is it too much to ask to get the right information? If they’d only filled out the paperwork right, I wouldn’t have asked him.”

With her pencil, Mrs. Crowley lined out the name under Andrew Gwynn’s. “I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Gwynn. Very, very sorry. But as you know, you were . . . you were in close contact with a victim of the fever on your ship, so you are required to be in quarantine until we are sure you are not carrying the disease.”

Mrs. Crowley looked up at the man in front of her. “He doesn’t understand a word I am saying.” She turned to me and handed me Mr. Gwynn’s papers. “You can escort Mr. Gwynn to Ward K, Miss Wood. And then, for heaven’s sake, run over to the main island and tell them to be more careful! And to send me some interpreters.”

I hesitated before taking a step toward him.

“Will you come with me, please, Mr. Gwynn?”

He neither answered nor nodded his head. I took a couple steps toward the door and he followed me with his eyes only.

“Come with me?”

Mr. Gwynn turned and walked toward me. Behind us Mrs. Crowley called for the next in line. At the door I reached for my cape on a hook, as it was uncharacteristically cool that day. When I’d pulled it on over my shoulders, Andrew Gwynn was standing at the door, holding it open.

“Thank you.”

He nodded.

We walked down the steps and into the late-summer breeze without talking. After several paces on the cement path that led to the isolation pavilions, the heaviness of the silence proved too much for me. I had to fill it with something.

“I am so very sorry about your wife.”

He looked at me, silent.

“I don’t speak Welsh. I only know some French. And only a tiny bit of that. My parents emigrated here before I was born. My father is Irish and my mother is French. They met on their ship.”