April 1940
Wallum Lake Sanatorium, Rhode Island
Everyone had started to notice the way the handsome Dr. Larson lingered too long on his rounds at the bedside of Cecily DuMonde.
Cecily didn’t mind the talk. Being the center of attention had never bothered her. Anyway, it gave the women on the ward something diverting to think about—though the nurses did not, of course, approve.
But Cecily had done nothing to encourage the attentions of the man. In fact, she’d been borderline unfriendly for much of last summer and fall. She distrusted doctors, as a rule. Also, obviously, he only felt sorry for her. Once she was better—which she intended to be soon—he’d move on to try to fix the next broken thing.
But it was difficult to actively dislike a man who, after Cecily happened to mention that she missed hearing music, had set up a gramophone record player on the ward—“I told my supervisors we needed to experiment with the effect of cheerful music on recovery,” he’d said, kneeling to plug it in—and continued to bring in new music for the women to listen to. Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman—all her favorites, which she’d confessed when he’d pressed her, plus a few like The Andrews Sisters and Frank Sinatra to placate the other women. They were allowed to listen only after breakfast for one hour, and they were not allowed to dance, of course, and only Barbara, who had out-of-bed-two-hours privileges, was allowed to change the records. But still. Cecily knew he’d bought it with his own money.
And then there were the books.
The day he’d announced, with his secretive little smile—she did like that smile—that she was well enough to be allowed to read for an hour a day, she’d instantly started to cry.
He’d looked crestfallen. “What is it now?”
She’d tried to explain how much it meant to her—how lonely she’d been without books, which had been her most reliable companion in life.
“I know what you mean,” he’d said, and, from that day on, he almost never failed to bring her a new book. “This is one of my favorites,” he would always say. She had the idea that he spent part of every evening perusing his shelf to choose his next bestowal. Soon, she had a stack of them by her bedside. And she began to think that, even though he was a doctor, he had some redeeming qualities.
She could not get through the books in one hour a day; not even close, though she was a fast reader. She was better at following rules here than she had been at other points in her life—perhaps because the doctors had said it was a matter of life and death, and she understood, if nothing else, that she was at their mercy. Anyway, the nurses watched you like hawks here; you could get away with nothing.
She begged Dr. Larson for her privileges to be extended. “Even an hour and a half!”
He sadly told her no. “For your own good. I’m sorry.” He always asked her for a report on what she was reading; that was the reason, she had to think, that he’d started lingering so long. He wanted to be told he was right, and admired for his good taste, that was all.
Then, she had to have another artificial pneumothorax, which meant a great deal of pain and absolute rest, flat on her back, for days.
When she was pronounced fit to be propped up on pillows and then, finally, to read, he brought her a beautiful first edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence and Other Poems. “For you to keep,” he said, quietly enough that no one else could hear, making notes on her chart.
Then, it was Christmas, and he brought her a box of candy.
“You just feel sorry for me because I never have visitors,” she said, twirling the red ribbon around her finger. The other women were forever spending their Sunday and Thursday mornings getting ready for potential guests: setting their hair, applying their makeup, hoping someone would come. Cecily just read. She thought it was better not to have hope, the crucifying ups and the nauseating downs of it. Yvonne, for example, spent hours each Sunday getting ready for the man she referred to as her “fiancé”—Cecily wasn’t so sure about that—and he showed up maybe one Sunday of four, and stayed for half an hour at most, tapping his foot, eyes darting around like he feared being arrested. After he left, Yvonne invariably ended up in tears. If he didn’t come at all, she’d also cry, but more quietly, letting her mascara run, saying she just didn’t care, anyway. Or she’d blame the train schedule, or the fact that the San was so out of the way that the nearest stop was miles away, and staff only drove out to pick up visitors on Thursdays, and her fiancé worked then, so if he couldn’t borrow his father’s car on any given Sunday to drive up, there was no way for him to come. “It just isn’t fair,” she’d wail.
“Me, sorry for you? No,” Dr. Larson said, with that smile, and Cecily cocked her head and popped a chocolate into her mouth. She ate them all that Christmas Day, savoring them slowly one by one, so they wouldn’t freeze overnight and break a tooth in the morning. She had enough blankets to keep her warm out here on the porch, and wore a wool cap day and night. Anyway, being cold wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
“Listen to this,” she told him, one day in late January. The daylight hours were lengthening, and she loved watching the light play across the snowy field, the shadowy skeletons of the trees at twilight. She read out loud from the last page of the Millay book. “‘I looked in my heart when the wild swans went over. And what did I see that I had not seen before? Only a question less or a question more.’” She looked up.
He swallowed visibly. “‘Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying,’” he answered her. “‘Tiresome heart, forever living and dying—’”
He was gazing at her in a way that seemed full of some promise that she hoped he wouldn’t try to make, because only disappointment could result.
Nurse Turner, one of the most senior nurses in the whole San, happened to be walking by. “You get that girl too excited,” she muttered to the young doctor.
And Cecily wanted to say, No, no, you’ve misunderstood, as Dr. Larson quickly went back to making his notes.
“I’m not long for this place,” Cecily said, after a moment, though she didn’t know why.
He looked up again. “I know,” he said, and he didn’t smile.
He was transferred off the ward; she heard he was assisting in the surgery all the time now. It was a promotion for him, and she was glad about that. Nurse Sheridan brought new records, and Cecily worked her way through the stack of Dr. Larson’s books, plus, of course, the library cart came around from time to time, and the girl with the newspapers. Cecily missed the doctor, a bit, but even that didn’t bother her. She’d been around the sun enough to know that nothing—good or bad—ever truly lasted.
Yvonne had been moved off to isolation, and she didn’t come back. “Discharged,” was the official word, but everyone deep down knew that she had died.
Cecily wondered if that so-called fiancé felt heartbroken or simply released; she knew it had been wise not to become close with Yvonne.
Her utmost goal was self-preservation, now more than ever.
The new doctor on rounds, Dr. Redmond, authorized her to knit, if she wanted to—she didn’t—and, more important, to attend movies in the new theater. She saw Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Destry Rides Again; Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz and Listen, Darling; Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. Many of the women were motivated to go to the movies mostly because the male patients went, also—otherwise, the men and women weren’t allowed to mix. Cecily, lost in the flickering images on the screen, couldn’t have cared less about that. She hadn’t been to a movie in over two years, so these were all brand-new to her, with their bright, beautiful, aching worlds. Yet, watching them made her feel strangely like life might be getting a little closer back to normal.
Whatever “normal” was.
Though she had no idea where she would go, if released from the San. (When released, she ought to say.) Maybe she’d find a way to get back to New York City, and really make a go of it, though she had less hope now that it would be all she’d dreamed of.
Maybe she was just getting older. Not so many stars in her eyes. At least she was getting better at not letting sadness or regret overwhelm her. The books from Dr. Larson helped, as did reading the newspapers about the war in Europe. She tried to keep in the know, to focus externally rather than internally, because that made her realize she didn’t have it bad at all. In fact, being here in the San right now was quite preferable to many places she’d been in her life before.
“It’s not often in life a human being achieves stasis,” she told Dr. Redmond. “I’m looking at it like a tiny miracle, because when does change ever cease to happen in this world?”
Dr. Redmond just looked at her quizzically—Dr. Larson would’ve understood, she thought—then said he was authorizing her to walk about the grounds for an hour a day, or even work in the gardens, if she wanted to.
Ha! Just in time for spring!
Cecily’s clothes, when pulled from storage, revealed themselves to be threadbare, torn, “ready for the rubbish bin,” in the words of Nurse Sheridan, who whisked them away and the next day brought Cecily a paper-wrapped package containing a dress and sweater. “For you to keep,” the nurse whispered, and Cecily didn’t know if they had belonged to a patient who’d died or to Nurse Sheridan herself, who was about Cecily’s size. Either way, she was not too proud to accept them. The dress was black with a subtle floral pattern of tiny mauve and pink roses; the sweater, a white cardigan embroidered with pink roses around the collar. “A perfect fit!” Nurse Sheridan pronounced, and Cecily wanted to hug her; just barely refrained. She’d worn only hospital gowns for nearly a year and a half. It had been a very long time since she’d felt the least bit pretty at all.
At the authorized hour, Saturday at two, she walked out alone across the expansive front lawn, feeling unsteady as a new lamb, giddy, set free. Everything amazed her. Daffodils were showing their yellow heads; the cloud-mottled sky was an extraordinary blue. The earth beneath her feet felt so inviting that she took off her scuffed brown T-strap pumps—they didn’t go with the new dress, anyway—and carried them, not caring that the grass was cold and damp with muddy patches, or that the women on the ward had been scandalized by her lack of stockings. She’d painted her toenails red for this occasion, and they shone through the mud and pleased her.
“Miss DuMonde?”
She looked over, and there was Dr. Larson, approaching from the direction of the staff cabins, which were some distance away, up among the trees. She hardly recognized him at first, as he wasn’t wearing his white coat, just a pair of belted gray slacks and a white shirt open at the collar, a pair of brown and white spectator shoes. He was thinner than she would have guessed, and looked younger without his usual doctor’s coat and necktie.
“Miss DuMonde,” he said again, and smiled. “Does this mean you’re free to walk about?”
“No, I’m making a break for it.”
He laughed. “I’m glad to see you. I was just up at my cabin, reading, and looked out and thought it was you. It’s my day off.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t you like to go to town?”
“My housemates do. I like the quiet. Most of the time.”
“I’d go to town, if I could.”
He laughed again. “I’m sure you would.” He seemed to be sizing her up. He’d never seen her out of her hospital bed before. “May I walk with you?”
“If you think you can keep up.”
He smiled at that, and they fell into step together. Cecily was pleased to think she was providing the hundred or more bedridden patients along the front porches with something to gossip about. But Dr. Larson seemed unaware of any watching eyes. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back and his head slightly bowed, listening carefully, it seemed, to her rave about the buds popping out on the trees, the squish of the mud between her toes.
The lake, which she’d been looking at for a year and a half across the rolling field, was, up close, magnificent, rippling with life. Ducks paddled near the rim. “Oh, God, they’re fantastic,” she said. “Look how you can see their feet at work, even when they seem to be so still!”
They neared a bench, which was half hidden from view by a willow tree. “Would you like to sit?” Dr. Larson asked. The bench wasn’t so hidden that their reputations could be compromised, Cecily guessed, but enough so that their faraway observers would probably get bored, trying to glimpse them through the just-budding screen of branches. Maybe that was all right.
“What a lovely tree. Thank God it survived the storm,” she said, and sat down. She didn’t like thinking of that horrible day of the hurricane, a year and a half ago, two months before she’d landed here at the San, and she was tired. This was the longest she’d walked in all these months, and both the knowledge of that and the feeling satisfied her. She glanced over her shoulder at the long porch where she’d spent so many months, then leaned back, held out her arms, closed her eyes, and blurted the rest of the Millay poem: “‘House without air, I leave you and lock your door. Wild swans, come over the town, come over the town again, trailing your legs and crying!’”
The doctor sat down beside her, not close. “You still have to be very careful, you know.”
She laughed. “I know, Doctor.”
“Call me Sam,” he said. A slight breeze ruffled the branches of the willow, and Cecily felt the tremor of it.
No way, she said to God, and directed the conversation to books. He’d been reading Don Quixote; she, A Room with a View. He did not much care for the poetry of Whitman, while she had memorized three verses of “Song of Myself.” Together, they recited “Annabel Lee,” and Cecily felt a shiver again, and said she’d better be walking back. He probably thought she was a nice girl. Down on her luck, maybe, but from a good family. Respectable. Ha.
He was twenty-eight years old, and, when he’d started the job here last June, had just graduated from the medical school at Brown University. There, on its Providence campus, the hurricane had only knocked down some trees, though Dr. Larson had (of course) rushed to try to save the people who were drowning in their cars as the waters rose downtown. “I’m not a great swimmer, but I can keep my head above water, you know,” he said, and Cecily didn’t think the modesty was false. He had grown up in northern Minnesota and had two older sisters and a real live mother, and his father was a doctor, too.
Halfway back up the lawn was where they parted. In the distance up the hill were visible the massive piles of logs that had been harvested from the pines blown down by the storm. The noise had been incessant, Cecily’s first winter here, but she’d never seen the resulting stacks before.
The doctor asked if she’d be out walking again tomorrow, or if she was going to church. “No to both,” she said. “I don’t do church, and I’m not allowed out walking again until Monday.”
He frowned slightly. “I’ll be working then.”
“Well, nice seeing you!” she said cheerfully—her way of saying goodbye forever.
His eyes narrowed. “May I visit you sometime?”
“Oh, yes, of course, I have to return the books you loaned me!” How had she almost forgotten them?
“I’m not worried about the books,” he said.
Ha. Once he got them, he’d be gone for good. “Well, I am,” she said, and tossed her hair and began climbing the slight hill back toward the San, the mud chilly between her toes.