June 1939
Wallum Lake Sanatorium, Rhode Island
Sam may have been fresh out of medical school and new to the staff at the sanatorium, but there were a few things he knew for sure. One: he wasn’t supposed to play favorites.
But he couldn’t help it. He already had a few. The eight-year-old boy, Patrick, who staged vast battles with toy soldiers across the hills and valleys his body made in the bed, ending each day with an earthquake that toppled both sides. The ten-year-old girl, Betty Drake, who had straightaway informed Sam that everybody who was anybody called her Tootsie and that she was going to be a doctor when she grew up. (He’d already started sneaking her back issues of The Lancet.)
And then there was the beautiful dark-haired girl-almost-woman—her chart said she’d just turned nineteen—who wouldn’t stop crying.
She was on the women’s ward, an open-air porch that ran the length of the front of the building. The beds—fifteen of them—were lined up with their headboards against the wall, so each patient had a view of the distant lake. The women stayed out here day and night year-round, even as the snow flew in and covered their blankets while they slept.
It was mid-June now, though. The Rhode Island weather was nearly perfect. Not too hot during the day, pleasantly cool at night. The maples and big copper beeches, the azalea and larkspur, were in full bloom; birds were singing. There weren’t the terrible mosquitoes here like back in Sam’s home of northern Minnesota. There could hardly have been a lovelier place to convalesce. Of course, there were disruptions to the quiet, due to the repairs that continued on the roof and the sawing of blown-down trees from last September’s hurricane, and a lot of rules and things that patients weren’t allowed to do, but those things—the absolute rest, the gradations of restrictions—were all for their own good.
So why was this girl-almost-woman crying so incessantly?
Every day, as Sam made his rounds up and down the porch, he couldn’t help pausing to ask her what was wrong. Was her pain intolerable? Every day, she’d smile through her tears and make up something new. The moon is so far away. I don’t think Goldilocks really ever found the right-size chair. Bessie Smith will never sing again. Spiders die as soon as they lay their eggs. So many people are starved for love all their lives.
Her dark eyelashes were always spiked with tears; her eyes were an extraordinary sapphire blue.
Sam knew it was true there were plenty of things to be sad about in this world. Especially here at the San, where most of the patients stayed for years to take the rest-and-fresh-air treatment; where many of them were released only by death. There was no cure for TB, not yet. Only the hope you might, inexplicably—by God’s grace?—get better. Though God knew the doctors were always trying to figure out a way to help, trying for a cure. Sam had assisted Dr. Overholt on one artificial pneumothorax procedure so far, collapsing the patient’s lung so that it could rest and heal. Dr. Overholt was also a pioneer in pneumonectomy, having been the first in the world, in 1933, to successfully remove a patient’s right lung.
As interested as Sam was in seeing that revolutionary procedure performed and in assisting the legend—Dr. Overholt’s mortality rate overall was just 22 percent, versus the 47 percent other surgeons worldwide averaged now on the pneumonectomy—he hoped things would not come to that, in this case.
The girl-woman’s chart said she was five feet tall and ninety-two pounds and had been here at the San since last November; that she’d been ordered here by the health department off the hurricane-ravaged streets of Providence after her sputum test had come up positive. The police had been enlisted to bring her, and one of the officers got a black eye for his trouble.
Had she been crying ever since? There was no note in the chart. Sam asked one of the nurses, who frowned and told him it had started three weeks ago, and they had no idea what had brought it on.
The girl’s name, the chart said, was Cecily DuMonde.
Sam decided that he would try to make her stop crying.
“Tulips,” he said to her the next day. It was not exactly a direct refutation of “Percy Bysshe Shelley died before he was thirty, before he ever knew the impact his poetry would have.” But close enough, he thought. He pretended to be studying her chart, but he was smiling a little, and, when he looked up, she was gazing at him with those sapphire eyes. Her tears had actually stopped. She folded her hands atop her blankets and pointed her chin.
“The nature of time,” she said. “How you can never get it back, once it’s gone.”
“Molasses cookies.”
“The great Boston molasses flood of 1919. Haven’t you read about it? People drowned in the stuff.”
She had a point. But. “Children,” he said. He smiled, thinking of Patrick, Tootsie, the others he was doing his utmost to help.
But the girl-woman’s mouth trembled. “Children,” she said, and she was crying again.
“You can’t rescue everyone, Sam,” he heard his mother telling him.
Sam, who, at age five, had dashed into the street to scoop up a kitten who’d been hit by a car, run home with her in his hands, and demanded that his father—who was not one to be demanded upon, in normal circumstances—operate to save her. The operation was a success, and Tabby was part of the family from then on, always walking with a slight limp.
Sam, who, at seven, cared for a Northern saw-whet owl with a broken wing, splinting the fracture, then helping the bird exercise until it could fly again.
Sam, who, at eight, rescued a mouse from Tabby’s mouth; then, realizing the mouse was pregnant, kept her safe and well fed in an aerated shoebox in the garage until she gave birth and for two weeks after that, until the six babies were big enough to release, along with their mother, into the woods at the edge of town.
“Not everyone deserves to be rescued,” his mother said.
His mother wasn’t one for intervention. Not in anything. “This too shall pass” was one of her favorite sayings. Or, “God’s will,” she’d say, and sigh.
Sam had decided early on that these were cop-outs.
Maybe he’d decided it the night he was seven and his mother barricaded him and his two older sisters, Margaret and Eleanor, in the girls’ bedroom with her, enlisting all their help to push a dresser in front of the door. “He’s brokenhearted, you understand,” she whispered, while their father ranted outside and pounded on the door. Having received a bottle of whiskey for delivering a baby the night before, he’d poured glass after glass with supper, then gotten angry that the roast was tough. “This too shall pass.”
“Answer me, goddamn it!” shouted their father, pounding again. Eleanor rose up slightly, her mouth opening, but their mother grabbed Eleanor’s wrist. Eleanor, even more than the rest of them, could not stand to be in their father’s bad graces, but their mother put a finger to her lips and shook her head swiftly, and Eleanor shrank down.
“Say it with me,” their mother whispered. “This too shall pass, this too shall pass . . .” On and on they incanted it, until their whispers drowned out their father’s rage and he went away.
They slept on the floor all together, and, in the morning, their mother went downstairs early to start breakfast. By the time the children had cleaned up and gone downstairs, their father was sitting at the head of the table reading the newspaper, as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
The approximate same thing happened again a month later. And again two months after that. The precipitating events were unpredictable. It always happened just when the children had almost convinced themselves that it wasn’t going to happen again. That whatever monsters had been living inside their father—for that was how their mother explained it—were dead and gone.
Only, that was never true.
Their mother said their father was brokenhearted about their little sister, Abigail, who’d been only four when the Spanish flu took her life. They’d all had the sickness—it had walked in the door on the breath of some patient or other; the entire town was scourged by it, thirty-seven dead, in their town of just eight hundred—and their father had done his utmost for everyone, from the smallest infant to old Mrs. Swenson, who was ninety-two. All the same, he’d lost thirty-seven people, including little Abigail, who had simply turned a bright shade of blue one day and died. Sam’s father, on his knees by her bedside, went on for half an hour, trying to breathe life back into her. And he could not. Sam, who was lying nearby—their father had lined up cots for his four sick children in the dining room, so he could keep an eye on all of them at once—saw the moment that their father’s shoulders slumped; saw him creak from his knees to his feet like he was eighty years old, and hang his head.
“He loves you all so much, you see,” said their mother. “He loves everybody in this town. He holds himself responsible. But not everybody can be saved.”
Sam thought he’d rather be like his father, who tried, than like his mother, who watched her life go by like she was a spectator at a parade that slightly displeased her.
Still, though, his father frightened him. And he didn’t want to be frightened of his father; he didn’t think it was right. And one evening, when he was twelve years old, the monsters came out, and Sam refused to run upstairs after his sisters and mother. “Come on, Sam!” his mother implored him from the bottom of the back stairs, their usual escape route.
Sam was in the dining room. His father had stood up, overturning his plate, spilling gravy across the lace-rimmed cloth, and he was yelling in Sam’s face so intensely that Sam felt his hair blowing back.
“Sam, please!”
Sam had ideas about justice, and that his father terrorized his family on random occasions did not seem just to him. It was 1924, and the newspapers were filled with tales of Johnny Torrio, Leopold and Loeb, the murderess Belva Gaertner, and a group of U.S. Army aviators trying to be the first to circumnavigate the globe by air. (Sam read the Chicago Tribune at the library almost daily; he was always in search of another Dave Fearless story or other novel to absorb him, transport him to other worlds, where boys had more power to change things.) Sam didn’t know where his father was getting liquor these days. Obviously, there was some source from Canada. Sam wished briefly that he had a gun, or magical powers; that he knew how to stop everything.
But he didn’t.
“Sam, for God’s sake, please!” cried his mother, and this got his father’s attention, so that his father marched four steps from the dining room through the swinging door into the kitchen and—the door was still swinging so that Sam could see—struck her across the face so hard that she was knocked off her feet. She landed on the floor with a soft “Oh!”
Sam’s father looked back at Sam, horror in his eyes. “Look what you made me do!” He ran a hand over his hair, looking for his next target, then picked up a kitchen chair and smashed it against the wall. Sam, unfrozen by the noise, ran into the kitchen, his instinct to protect his mother uncontrollable. But his father was leaving through the back porch, letting in a blast of cold air. Sudden quiet came down. The broken chair parts seemed to tremble.
His mother was sprawled across the linoleum, leaning on one elbow. It was a position he’d never seen her in. Her nose and mouth were bleeding. Her hair was falling from its pins. “Sam,” she said. “Don’t you see what I mean?”
“The sweet smell of a horse’s breath,” said Cecily DuMonde, when Sam stopped by her bed on a Wednesday. She actually wasn’t crying.
He couldn’t help it: his eyebrows shot up. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing? A source of sadness or happiness?”
“Don’t you know?” She laughed, and the pretty sound arrested him. He could think of nothing to say.
She sighed. “You know, things can be both at once. That’s called ‘bittersweet.’” She looked up. Her deep eyes magnetized him, and his heart began to cartwheel in a dangerous-feeling way.
That night, in the single bed in his cabin at the edge of the sanatorium grounds, he woke from a dream in a cold sweat.
What if she didn’t survive? What if she was one of the ones he could not save?
“Dr. Larson,” she said the next day. She was wearing red lipstick. Had even painted her fingernails to match, he was thrilled to see. “I don’t want to stay in bed for one more second!”
“You have to,” he said, even as he noted on her chart: Significant improvement in mood. Sudden belligerence = a strong will to live. In his mind, he added, Thank God. “Your X-rays still show significant cavitation in your lungs. Rest and fresh air are required, you know that.”
“And all these damn pills?”
He managed to keep a straight face. “Yes, and all the damn pills.” Each patient was required to swallow thirty-two per day.
She folded her arms and looked off at the horizon, pouting. Her dark, wavy hair was swept back so he could see the tiny mole on the side of her neck. She had a rosebud mouth. The most perfect little earlobe.
He wasn’t supposed to be noticing things like that.
“Dr. Larson,” she said, training her gaze on him again. Those long lashes blinked a slow blink. “Do you have any idea who I am?”
Her chart said she was low-income, a ward of the state, had never had a visitor. “No,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me?”
She pointed a finger to her chin, playing at pondering. The red polish on her nail had an appealing sheen. “I don’t think I will,” she said. “I don’t think you could handle it.”
Sam laughed. And then he thought maybe she was right.