A Fall of Marigolds (3 page)

He looked down at his feet and hiked his satchel higher onto his shoulder.

We were close now to the collection of isolation wards at the far end of island three. There was no reason for me to step into the halls where scarlet fever, typhus, and cholera slithered like demons. On days we didn’t have a reason to go inside, we didn’t. I wasn’t due to rotate to the isolation wards for another three days.

When we arrived at the door to Ward K, I stopped and handed him his papers. “Go inside. Give these to the nurse at the desk. Understand?”

He didn’t answer.

“Mr. Gwynn?”

“I understand, Miss Wood.”

We stood and stared at each other. I knew then that he had understood everything I had said. And everything Mrs. Crowley had said, including my name. His shock and grief had silenced him. He reminded me of me, on the day of the fire, when there was no language for how I felt inside. The urge to reach out and touch him nearly overcame me.

“Will you be all right, Mr. Gwynn?” I asked instead.

He looked up at the bricked front of Ward K. “I don’t know.”

I needed to get back but I felt compelled to stay a moment longer, in that little space that we shared. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

He turned his head back to face me. “I would like my trunk, please.”

The common moment gently evaporated and after a second’s pause, I delivered the answer I had been trained to give when immigrants sent to the contagious wards asked about their luggage. “Your trunk will be kept for you in the baggage room on the main island. When you are ready to leave, you may retrieve it then.”

“I would like my trunk now, please.” His eyes were languid and his tone cordial, but underneath the polite tone was a tendril of desperation.

“I’m sorry. They won’t let you have it, Mr. Gwynn. Not in the contagious wards.”

Andrew closed his eyes against my words as though I had tossed sand in his face. “I must have my father’s pattern book,” he said. “I have nothing else. I want my father’s pattern book.”

“A pattern book?”

“He was a tailor. I am a tailor. The book is all I have left. Please. If the trunk is stolen I will have nothing.” He opened his eyes and they shone with determination.

“The baggage room is quite safe, Mr. Gwynn.” But I could see he did not believe me. And there was no reason he should. With detainees numbering in the hundreds every day, the baggage room was a busy, crowded place. I would not wish anything I valued to be stowed there for longer than a day.

His compounded loss proved too much for me. Andrew’s homeland was far behind him, his wife was dead, and he was about to enter the scarlet fever ward for who knew how long. All that was left to him now were his grief and his trunk. He was in an in-between place like me, but his was much worse. I knew that if I asked for permission to get the pattern book out of Andrew Gwynn’s trunk, I would not be granted it. A sick man didn’t need sewing patterns. And a well man would have them back in his possession within the week. But I also knew that I would have to try.

“I can’t bring the trunk to you, Mr. Gwynn. No one will allow it. But I will try to get the pattern book for you. I will need your trunk’s claim ticket. And is there a key?”

A measure of his dread lifted and he reached into his coat pocket and drew out a folded card with the claim numbers for his and his wife’s luggage. He also handed me a looped shoelace with two keys dangling from it. “It is wrapped in canvas. On top.”

I took the key and card from him and slipped them into my apron.

“Thank you, Miss Wood,” he murmured, and I saw the hint of a grateful smile.

“I can only try, Mr. Gwynn. I may return to you with nothing but your keys and card.”

He nodded and the thick layer of dazed astonishment returned, as though he might at any minute wake from a dream, for surely none of this was real.

I wondered whether he had family already in America who were waiting for him. “Do you need me to contact someone for you? Is anyone expecting you onshore?” I asked.

“My brother, Nigel, and his wife. In New York. Greenwich Village.”

“Would you like me to send word to them that . . . where you are?”

“I sent a telegram this morning. From the ship.” He looked off toward the harbor behind us.

“That’s good.” I didn’t know what to say next. Andrew made no move to turn from me and enter the building. He seemed to be lost in a new thought.

“He won’t believe me.”

“Pardon?”

He turned back to face me, surprised, it seemed, that I had heard him. “I’d only been married a week. And I had only known Lily for twelve days before we married.” He shook his head and looked off in the distance. “Nigel will think I’m a fool,” he said to the teasing August wind.

A vision of Edward handing me my umbrella filled my mind, and the scent of macaroons and Earl Grey tea crowded in around me. I knew how fast the heart could learn to love someone. A jab of sorrow poked me and I flinched.

“I don’t think you’re a fool,” I said.

The scarf billowed up between us, soft and eager to fly. I caught a whiff of fragrance in its threads, delicate and sweet. In the sunlight it looked less like fire and more like a burst of monarch butterflies. I could see a cascading fall of marigolds splashed across the fabric.

Andrew caught the twin tails and smoothed them down over his chest.

If Mrs. Crowley knew the scarf had belonged to Andrew Gwynn’s dead wife, she would have likely insisted it be taken from him to be incinerated.

Andrew seemed to notice I was staring at the scarf and putting the obvious together in my head. He looked down at it, and then tucked it quickly into his coat.

“Thank you for your help, Miss Wood,” he said.

Then he opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind him.

MY
father said I was good at nursing because I didn’t panic. Mama and Henrietta could sweep the floors of my father’s practice and roll bandages and take medicine to those who couldn’t get to town, but neither of them could help my father in the surgery like I could. I think it surprised him when I didn’t head to nursing school the moment I finished high school. I was in no hurry to learn officially what I already knew unofficially. I stayed at my father’s practice, working by his side, pondering what I might do with my life as my closest childhood friends married or went away to teachers college. I wanted to be in the city. Marriage to a Pennsylvanian farmer wouldn’t take me there, and teachers college held no attraction for me. There was comfort in knowing it would be easy to find work as a nurse in Manhattan, and there was no other employment that called to me, despite my affection for color. I didn’t paint and I didn’t arrange flowers, and needlepoint and sewing bored me. The world was an immense, vibrant place. I knew this was true, despite my sole experience with the quiet country life. I wanted to see it in all its colorful vitality. New York was the place to be.

When I thought about what was taken from me, this secondary loss came to mind. The fire robbed me of a future with Edward in it, I am sure of that, but it also stole from me my affinity for the wild and wonderful. The hospital was busy, but it was not wild, or wonderful. It was a steady place, with its hum of ten thousand words that were unknown to me. Despite the hammer of illness, it was a very tame place. I saw only what I had lost when I slept at night. I didn’t see it on that calm slab of earth surrounded by water.

•   •   •

AS
I walked away from Ward K with Andrew Gwynn’s trunk keys and claim ticket in my apron pocket, I was glad I’d already been requested by Mrs. Crowley to see that we had more interpreters. It gave me a bona fide reason to go to the main island, though I doubted more interpreters would be spared. If Ellis was as busy as we’d been led to believe at breakfast, all the interpreters would be needed in the great hall.

More of the infirm and the suspect were heading across to the hospital as I walked through the ferry house to the main immigration building. Several of them made eye contact with me, silently questioning me, it seemed, to explain how the medical inspectors could so adamantly insist they weren’t well enough to chase their dreams. I kept my head down and moved quickly past them. The farther into the ferry house corridor I went, the more people I passed who were either just arriving or heading out to American shores at last. Once past the ferry house, I was on the main island.

Ellis’s primary immigration building stood palatial on its rectangle of land. I loved its red bricks and creamy limestone trim, and its little towers and their domes. It was designed in the French Renaissance Revival style, which made me wonder what the Europeans thought when they saw it. Did it make them feel at home, or a little unsettled that their first glimpse of America was not so different from the place they had left?

The main building still smelled and looked new. The first station had burned to the ground more than a decade ago, a fact that had not gone unnoticed by me. That original building was made entirely of wood. Ellis’s new buildings were made of stone and brick. There were no traces of that fire here.

As I made my way inside, I encountered a hive of activity, and as I suspected, there was a desperate need for interpreters at the inspection stations. I managed to convince someone from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to pay a visit to the hospital later. And one of the nurses assisting the doctors in the medical inspection, who spoke German, said she would come over in the late afternoon, but the others could make no promises. That first errand complete, I set off to see about completing the second one.

I knew the baggage room would be bursting with commotion. On days with many ships arriving, trunks and cases would be coming and going until nightfall. That would work either to my favor or against it. If the handlers were too busy to attend to me, I would have to return to island three empty-handed. If they were too busy to wonder about my request and simply let me look inside the luggage, I could get Andrew his book and be in and out without much scrutiny.

Once inside the baggage and dormitory building behind the main station, I excused myself to the front of the queue. Transfers of luggage moved at a consistent pace and the reception area was busy but not chaotic. I looked for a baggage clerk who seemed young and new at his job. I spotted a lad not much older than sixteen—as near as I could tell—and handed him Andrew Gwynn’s claim ticket.

“We’ve a patient in the hospital who needs something from inside his trunk,” I said. “It’s important.”

The young man looked unsure; he’d no doubt been told that luggage came into the room and luggage went out of it. I wasn’t a porter checking luggage and I wasn’t an immigrant retrieving it.

I straightened my nurse’s cap to draw attention to my uniform. “It’s important,” I said again.

“I’m not sure that—”

I cut him off. “Mr. Gwynn, the gentleman I am speaking of, arrived just this morning. He’d come for this himself but he’s in isolation at present. Shouldn’t be hard to find. He just arrived. I have the keys.”

The other clerks were busy and I could tell the young man feared interrupting them to ask what to do for me. I played on that fear, I confess.

“Do you or do you not know how to do your job, young man?”

His eyes widened and I could see I had won. “Right away, miss.”

He disappeared among the long rows of trunks and boxes and cases. I watched from several yards away as he checked the card I had given him against two pieces of luggage at his feet. He was clearly trying to decide which of the Gwynns’ trunks was the one I needed. Lily’s, no doubt, was also in the group of detained luggage from the
Seville
.

“Just bring them both,” I called out to him.

He looked up at me, bewildered, and I smiled. “Bring them both. You are busy here. I will find what Mr. Gwynn needs.”

The lad nodded and placed the two trunks, one much smaller than the other, on a dolly and pushed them toward me. A new delivery of luggage was now headed into the room and the boy was called over to assist.

“Thank you. I will leave these right here when I am done and you can put them back in a moment. I can see you are needed.” I held out my hand for the claim ticket.

“Yes, miss.” The boy dislodged the two trunks, returned the ticket to me, and dashed off with the dolly. I quickly knelt beside the smaller of the trunks, figuring that it was Andrew’s. I tried the first key but it would not turn the lock. The second key slid in and the lock fell open. I raised the lid, eager to retrieve the pattern book and be away, but the moment the lid was lifted I saw it was Lily’s luggage I had opened. Inside was a jumble of women’s clothing, gloves, a felt jewelry box, a yellow hat, and a pair of honey-brown shoes. For a moment I just sat and stared at the spectrum of color that was Lily’s life. Such a small trunk. So few things. And it was almost as if she had packed in a hurry. I realized at this same moment that I had no business looking in Lily Gwynn’s trunk. I was about to snap the lid shut when I saw a slim book with papers sticking out of it resting just under a pair of gloves. I pulled at it and saw that it was a book of poetry by John Keats, and appeared to be well loved. Its spine was loose and the cover worn.

This woman had no doubt cherished the little book.

I pulled it completely out from under the gloves, set it on my lap, and snapped the trunk lid shut. Andrew might be spending a long two to three weeks or more battling the same terrible disease that had killed his new wife. He might like to have her book of poems at his bedside. I knew I would want it if I were him. I would take it to him. I would even read to him from it if he wanted me to.

I turned to the other trunk and opened it. The book of patterns was just as Andrew had said it would be, wrapped in a short length of canvas. The book was heavy and cumbersome and I set it on the floor as I shut the lid on the second trunk. I grabbed both the little book and the big one and rose to my feet.

There was much activity now in the area where the baggage was being arranged row by row. I sought the young lad whom I had somewhat tricked into helping me.

“I’m finished,” I called to him.

His cheeks were flushed and a shimmer of sweat had broken out across his brow as he and another clerk pushed and prodded a huge steamer trunk into place. The young man nodded back to me. As I turned to walk away, I heard his coworker ask, “What’s she doing here?” and I doubled my speed out of the room.

I hoisted the two books tight into my embrace and melted into the sea of humanity in case anyone in authority from the baggage room was to question the young man. I headed for the ferry house and the outer corridor past island two’s hospital buildings to island three. It was nearly noon and the ferry house had quieted down, as many of the day’s arrivals had moved into the dining room for a midday meal. I was also due for a meal break, but I needed to safely stow the two books in my room until I could get them to Andrew after my shift was over.

On island three I made a quick left down the first concrete path to the nurses’ quarters. The halls were quiet and empty. Those who worked nights were asleep; those who worked days were all in the wards. I made my way to the room I shared with Dolly and stepped inside, going directly to my bed to shove the books under it.

As I knelt, the cumbersome weight of the pattern book allowed it to shift, and it slid partially from the canvas wrapping. I reached to catch it and the book of poetry fell out of my hands and onto the floor, dislodging its collection of loose papers. I rewrapped the pattern book and shoved it under my bed, and then I reached for the poetry book and the papers Lily Gwynn had folded inside.

I truly had no intention of looking at those papers. My only design was to put them back where Lily Gwynn had placed them. But when I picked up the first piece of paper, I saw without wanting to what was printed across the front:

CERTIFICATE OF ANNULMENT

The two printed names were Lily Kerani Gwynn and Andrew Paul Gwynn.

At the bottom of the certificate Lily had already signed her name. The place where Andrew’s signature was needed was empty.

The second piece of paper was a handwritten letter containing a first line that my eyes devoured even as I tried to fold it quickly from my sight.

Dear Andrew, I hope in time you can find it possible to forgive me. . . .