The Inverted Forest (8 page)

He gave her a quick nod and blink.

“You don’t have to be afraid.” She waited. “Are you afraid?”

“No,” he said. “Why do they swing back and forth like that when they walk?”

“They were born with a disease. Or a defect. Or they had an accident. The man who just left, Mr. Peirpont, fell off his tractor and hit his head.”

She wasn’t beyond inventing a cautionary tale, at least the part about the tractor. She’d seen James turn his eager boy-gaze toward the maintenance staff’s tractor and brush hog, a roaring and violent contraption. If her falsehoods were casual enough and attached to
something James knew to be true, then she could make him reflect. She could guide his thoughts a bit. No doubt he was presently thinking about the sharp blades of the brush hog or Leonard Peirpont’s tottering walk or the hazards of swimming at night.

He was a handsome and determined thinker, the way he raised his chin and half-squinted. His hair was dark brown and would have fallen into loose waves if she didn’t cut it short. His complexion shone a few shades lighter than Harriet’s—not just lighter but composed of different tones. People looked at her son and wondered.

“I’ve got medicines to organize,” she said. “If only you could help me. But I bet you’re busy, aren’t you? What are you doing in there?”

“Building bridges.”

“Yes,” she said. “I thought that’s what you might be doing.”

She returned to her charts and medicines and he settled back down onto the floor of their living quarters and resumed work on his bridges. Bridges to islands. Bridges across chasms and rivers. Bridges to other bridges.

Twenty minutes later Maureen Boyd from the kitchen came by with two very large oven pans, or muffin trays to be exact, industrial-size, sixty-four muffin holes in each tray. Harriet looked up from her desk, puzzled.

“For your medications,” Maureen said.

She still didn’t understand. But once Maureen explained, Harriet realized that muffin pans were perfect. A camper’s name could be taped into each muffin well. She could sort and arrange breakfast, lunch, and dinner meds. At mealtimes she could go from one mess hall table to the next with her muffin tray balanced in one hand.

After Maureen left, Harriet practiced walking waitress-style around the infirmary beds. She stopped at the window, pulled back the curtain. The crowd of campers had thinned. Across the meadow Schuller Kindermann had just stepped out of the camp office and was making his way toward the infirmary. She wasn’t at all panicked.
Given his methodical pace, there was plenty of time for Harriet to turn her attention to the folded paper bag and conduct whatever investigations she thought necessary.

She weighed the bag in her hand. The sides of the bag had been expertly folded down and stapled shut, meticulously so—a neat row of three tight staples.

The first of these Harriet removed with a hemostat. But this method proved too painstaking. The remaining staples she simply cut in half with a nail clipper.

Inside the bag were stacked sheets of birth control pills, dozens of sheets, one for each female state hospital camper of childbearing age. Their names were taped to the edges of the sheets. M
RS
. R
AMONA
K
AISER
, M
ISS
B
LANCHE
N
AGEL
, M
ISS
M
ARY
A
NN
H
ORNICKER
.

Because these names had been neatly handwritten on adhesive labels, you might think that each woman had pondered her circumstance and then made a practical choice. But of course that wasn’t it. Someone at the state hospital had decided—wisely—on their behalf.

Could it be that Mr. Kindermann had misunderstood these intentions, or misunderstood the workings of birth control pills?

Or did he plan to hold back these pills for the duration of the state hospital session—the act of an old-fashioned Catholic, a principled man?

It was hard, if not impossible, to know his intentions. At that moment all Harriet could do was dump the birth control pills into the bottom drawer of her work desk and searched for a reasonable replacement. Seltzer tablets? Gauze bandages? Stool softeners?

In the end she chose throat lozenges, twenty or more sheets’ worth. A ridiculous substitute. She placed the lozenges in the bag, folded down and restapled its sides.

Maybe the real difficulty of reading Schuller Kindermann’s intentions
had to do with his age and appearance. At first glance he looked properly, reassuringly paternal. Grandfatherly. His face was pale and kind, his hair vibrantly white. He had the fussy manners people seemed to approve of in the elderly. (Easy to imagine a man like Schuller Kindermann fixing clocks or cobbling shoes in some quaint Bavarian village.) If you looked close, you could see an age-softened version of the child he’d once been: a tidy, well-mannered boy of ten or eleven, a boy not so very interested in other children or in pleasing adults, but not at all troublesome, either, just wholly devoted to his own interests and pursuits—self-sufficient, determined, a bit aloof. You looked at seventy-eight-year-old Schuller Kindermann and expected a grown boy’s sly humor, or at least a willingness to be playful.

What you got was altogether different.

The infirmary door creaked open, and Schuller hoisted himself inside. A carefully placed step. A slow turn. He carried with him the expectation that each of his slow and deliberate movements was somehow interesting for others to watch. “Well,” he said. “Linda Rucker tells me we have one hundred and four campers. Eight more than last year.” He glared at the infirmary floor, waiting, it seemed, for Harriet to take his simple statement—a hundred and four campers—and turn it into a lively and inclusive conversation. Several tepid moments slipped by and he lifted his face and took a squinting glance out the window at the buses and the bright afternoon. “These attendants from the state hospital,” he said. “They really ought to do a better job unloading the buses.”

Again Harriet was struck by the oddness of it. The incongruity. To be so primly lectured to by such a seemingly mild and kindly old man.

“But it always looks like pandemonium at first,” Schuller added. “There was a summer four years ago when a dozen of the state hospital campers arrived with the stomach flu. By the next day we had an
epidemic. All the infirmary beds were full. We lined up cots in the mess hall. But I probably told you about that, didn’t I?”

“Yes, Mr. Kindermann. You did.”

“Awful for the nurse that year.”

“Yes,” she said. “Awful.”

“These new counselors. Have you met any of them?”

“I haven’t had a chance.”

“Well, they look good. They’re frazzled, of course. Who wouldn’t be? But they’ll catch on. Say, did a nurse from the state hospital, a Ms. Dunbar, drop off a package for me?”

Almost funny, the effort he made to act as if this request were of no importance. When she pointed the bag out on the counter, he picked it up as if it were an afterthought. “They’ll do Salisbury steak and potatoes for dinner,” he said. “And I wanted to drop by and make it clear that you and James are welcome to join us at the director’s table.” He waited.

“Thank you.”

“But I’ll let you get back to your business,” he said. He took a few carefully measured steps and was out the infirmary door.

He had not, during the entirety of his visit, looked her in the eye. She’d never sensed in Schuller the bashful unease some white people had in her presence. Nor did she think he’d been made shy by having seen her naked a few nights earlier in the swimming pool shower room. He hadn’t indulged in the sight of her. He wasn’t interested in her that way.

Hard, if not impossible, to imagine what he was
interested
in. He was an odd man, Mr. Kindermann. He almost certainly wasn’t a good camp director. He might even be a fool.

And yet, in the three days since she’d been discovered at the pool, she found it difficult, even painful, not to address Schuller Kindermann directly, to seek his pardon by saying, “Look here, Mr. Kindermann.
I’d like to explain myself . . .” But what could she say? None of her reasons were noble.

Look here, Mr. Kindermann.

Best to start at the Meadowmont Gardens Nursing Home. (That was how Harriet had come to work at Kindermann Forest; Schuller had approached her one day and asked if she and her son might like to spend the summer at camp.) In the very back of Meadowmont Gardens, in the oldest and longest wing of the building, was a corridor called Special Unit C, where the patients—mindless or insensible or, better yet, cataleptic—thrashed away or trembled or simply weighed down the mattresses with their comatose bodies.

The human body, in its last phases, could fall apart in such dreadful and astonishing ways. To be a nurse was to see it up close and, over time, grow accustomed to the dread and wonder.

But all this was just a potent reminder, not the lesson itself.

For the lesson Harriet had to spend time caring for an entirely different class of Meadowmont Gardens patient—different corridor, different world altogether. They called themselves the Garden Ladies because their rooms were private, with little parlors and kitchenettes and French doors leading to the Meadowmont flower gardens. They were all ladies of a certain type: elderly, white, meticulous dressers, absorbed in books and crossword puzzles, particular about tablecloths and butter pads and hairdressing appointments. They could be trusted to operate a toaster oven but not to self-administer medication. Each evening they brought their own silverware to the dining hall and, after the meal, returned to their rooms and scrubbed the tines of the forks and the dull blades of the knives in their kitchenette sinks.

No surprise that the Garden Ladies were great traffickers of gossip. Certain details—book titles, recipe ingredients—eluded them.
But how keenly they remembered stories of a personal nature: the ill-timed remark, the cheap gift, the wrong dress, or Mrs. Perrault on Hall 1B, who drank too much wine and slept through her stepson’s wedding reception, or Mrs. Decker, who, during a twelve-city bus tour of Europe, developed an unseemly crush on her Swiss tour guide (while her husband dozed in the bus seat beside her). Even now, Mrs. Decker still wrote the tour guide effusive notes and made her dull husband carry them to the front desk for mailing.

As for the Garden Ladies themselves, their lives had been much tidier: one marriage (inevitably a portrait of a dead husband, a mild-looking man, propped on a dresser top), one career (a homemaker, a grade school teacher, a city clerk), a small family (a child or two so carefully reared and independent they were now fulfilling important career duties three states away).

You learned these details over time if you were their nurse. And eventually you watched the Garden Ladies falter. They fell or stroked out or succumbed to a weakened heart. For some there were a few days of clarity before they died or were moved to Special Unit C. It wasn’t as if they wanted Harriet to listen while they reviewed their lives. But they did hold her hand, even those who, upon first meeting Harriet, had gone to the front desk and wondered why they’d been assigned a “negro” nurse. Now they called her “dear” and asked about her home life. They wanted to see photos of her son. Such a handsome little boy, they said. She was brave to raise him alone, though, surely, it would be an easier task with the right man at her side, wouldn’t it? Why not marry and give the boy a father? There were several nice young men in housekeeping. Not that she shouldn’t set her sights higher, because she was pretty and there were a few eligible doctors who saw patients at Meadowmont Gardens each week. Why not Dr. Marshburn? He was married, of course, but everyone knew his wife lived in Columbus, Ohio, and the two rarely occupied the same residence. Or why not Dr. Silverman,
only thirty-three and rumored to be a playboy, but if he took Harriet to dinner or away for the weekend, it would almost certainly be someplace very nice.

The Garden Ladies never mentioned the fact that all these possible suitors for Harriet were white men. Had the picture of James tipped them off? Or did these distinctions no longer matter?