Two Wars and a Wedding, page 30
No one shuffled; no one whispered. Betsy looked around the group, making eye contact with each man, one after the other.
“If you—any of you, all of you—were to give up your cabins, it could make all the difference. You could save a man’s life. Many men’s lives. These men have mothers at home, wives, children.” Betsy’s voice caught as she thought of Kit, Kit talking about her children. “Won’t you help them go home to them?”
There was a moment of quiet. Betsy stood there, feeling painfully conspicuous, the cold of exhaustion seeping through her, the weight of failure heavy on her. This had been her one shot at this. If she’d failed—
“You can bet I will!” shouted Coolidge, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he waved his hat in the air.
The Swedish naval officer bowed his head, his face grave. “My cabin is at your disposal, as am I.”
“Thank you,” whispered Betsy.
The Russian representative didn’t want to be behindhand. He cast a dirty look at the Swede before bowing to Betsy. “Mine as well.”
The German officer clicked his heels. “I am at your service.”
“Sure, you can have mine,” said one of the newspapermen. He frowned at the end of his cigar. “But you should know, Sylvester Scovel’s wife is laid up in the cabin next to mine and she’s in a pretty bad way.”
Another newspaperman let out a whistle. “Scovel, eh? That—er.” He remembered Betsy’s presence. “Don’t tell me he’s on board.”
“Course not,” said the first man sourly. “Shoved his wife aboard and left her to fend for herself—he wouldn’t miss the fun.”
“When you say she’s pretty bad,” Betsy broke in, before the men could get going, “what do you mean?”
“Fever,” said the first man laconically. “She was moaning like anything last night.”
The Russian officer cast a sideways glance at his counterparts. “Lieutenant Akiyama, as well.”
“The representative of Japan,” explained the Swedish officer.
Two more patients for her roster. “Is there anyone else I ought to know about?”
One of the newspapermen shoved the other. “Herbert here was ill over the rail last night.”
“That was the bully beef,” protested Herbert with an attempt at dignity.
Betsy ignored them. “Right. Thank you so much to all of you who have offered to sacrifice your own comfort for the good of others. I’ll look in on Mrs. Scovel and Lieutenant Akiyama as soon as I have the worst cases transferred from the hold.”
She spoke as briskly as she could and just hoped none of them could see how she was shaking, from exhaustion and relief and fear.
“Ma’am?” A man stepped forward, the others parting to let him through. He was a distinguished-looking man of middle years, with an impressive beak of a nose. “Captain Robert Dowdy, US Army. You say you are the only nurse aboard. I cannot claim any experience of nursing, but I do have a sound pair of arms and can follow instructions. A few of us back here have had a quiet word, and we’d like to help. Say the word and I’ll make a list of volunteers and set up a rota.”
Betsy was overcome. Volunteers. A rota.
You’re not in this on your own, Holt had said.
“I don’t know what to say other than thank you. And yes, please.” Betsy cleared her throat, hoping they’d put any suspicious scratchiness in her throat down to the salt air. “Our first order of operations is moving the men up from the hold. If you’ll indicate to me which cabins are now free and how many there are, we can designate some for fever patients and others for the most gravely wounded. And now if someone could help me get down from this chair?”
The Turkish military observer retreated into his cabin and pretended not to understand her French, but the rest of them were good-natured about gathering up their personal belongings and the odd pillow or two and making nests for themselves in the corners of the smoking room.
When Betsy went down to the hold to inform the doctors of her success, she found Dr. Baird with a lung-shot patient, examining two open wounds oozing quantities of foul pus.
The doctor didn’t look up as Betsy came up beside him. “Sergeant Pagelow—he was shot through both lungs the first day of the fighting at Santiago.”
Betsy straightened, ready to work. “What can we do for him?”
“Nothing,” the doctor said bitterly.
The man was in so much pain. “There must be something! What if we—” Betsy came up blank. She might have had a fair bit of experience nursing, but there had always been doctors to direct her. And actual implements. Even on the battlefield at Domokos they had been better prepared than this.
“Don’t you think if I could, I would?” Dr. Baird turned to face her and Betsy realized he was near tears. “If I had a proper operating theater I could help him—or just a set of sterile instruments. But here? Nothing.”
Betsy took a deep breath. “We can move him upstairs.” It seemed so little, but it was something at least. “The passengers have agreed to give up their cabins. Almost all the passengers.”
The doctor blinked at her. “We’ll have to find a way to move them. . . .”
“Don’t worry,” said Betsy, patting him on the shoulder. He looked like he needed a pat on the shoulder. “We’ve got that worked out too.”
True to his word, Captain Dowdy organized stretcher bearers. The cabins weren’t large—the boat had been a coastal steamer, designed to house passengers for one night on the trip from New York to Norfolk, Virginia, not a grand ocean liner like the one Betsy had taken to Greece—but even so, that was thirty men they moved out of the hold.
Thirty men and Kit.
Fever cases and the worst sorts of wounds were given priority for cabins; the rest stayed in the hold or, if they were well enough, had blankets set out for them on the deck. There were some cases that would have made Betsy rage if she’d had time to rage; as it was, she could only do what she could do with what they had, making her rounds with malted milk for the wounded and beef tea for the feverish, bathing foreheads, changing dressings, taking temperatures.
Down in the heat of the hold, one man told her sheepishly it would make such a difference to have a handkerchief to mop his brow. So Betsy took her petticoat and cut it into squares. Another patient had taken a bullet in his left side, a bullet that couldn’t be extracted for want of surgical tools. Every time he rolled in his sleep, the pain woke him. Betsy appropriated a pillow and squished it into a sort of bolster, strapping it to his side. Crude but effective. It felt good to be effective, even if only in small ways.
It was the ones they couldn’t help at all that hurt; the men with shrapnel in them that could so easily have been removed if they’d only had the tools. Like poor Private Allen, who couldn’t straighten his leg because of the metal shards lodged in his knee. They had to move him every so often, so he wouldn’t get bedsores, but every movement was such agony that it felt like torture. One of the volunteers came to Betsy in tears, saying the poor man was begging to be left alone. But they couldn’t leave him alone, not if he wasn’t going to develop other nasty conditions, so Betsy moved him herself. Or did until Holt saw her wrestling with him and took over.
Holt was hardly well himself, but Betsy was too exhausted to complain. Some of the other wounded had quietly taken up places on the rota as well. She would have hugged each and every one if only there’d been time for it and she hadn’t been afraid of spreading disease. That was her biggest fear, that the fever patients would infect the rest of them. She’d tried to isolate the fever patients in the cabins, but with her one thermometer giving out on her, sometimes it was more guesswork than actual nursing.
Day bled into night into day again.
Three days. She just had to keep everyone alive for three days.
Malted milk, beef tea, tiny sips of water. Betsy checked in on Kit whenever she could, but it was hard to force herself past the door of the cabin, hard to look at Kit without seeing Charles, Charles as they hadn’t let her see him at the end, delirious and muttering.
It was one thing to soothe a stranger in his delirium, quite another to have Kit grabbing at her hand and calling her Dorothy and telling her it was time to put her hat on. There were times when Betsy came in and Kit was having conversations with people who weren’t there, and Betsy had to pretend to fit into whatever story was playing out in her mind to get a few sips of beef tea into her.
And then there were the times when Kit wasn’t conscious at all, collapsed into a sort of coma, and those were worse still.
Betsy had been through this so many times with so many men. Usually, by the time they came to her, they were done with the first phase: the headache and the cough. Then came the distended stomach, the high fever, the delirium. After that—sometimes there wasn’t an after that. The biggest fear in Lamia had been peritonitis, the inflammation of the intestines. They’d had special food for the peritonitis patients. And doctors on hand, to try to save the patient if something ruptured.
They weren’t always successful.
The doctors treating Charles hadn’t been successful.
“Kit? I’ve got some beef tea for you.” Even with the best attempts at ventilation, the cabin smelled foul. Betsy yearned for Sister Psara’s white ward, for the carbolic, the laundry, the comfort of having Sister Psara there to tell her what to do.
Kit blinked at her. “Betsy,” she whispered.
“I’m here.” Sometimes Kit thought they were in Siboney and she was meant to be on shift. Other times she was helping Betsy find her way to the Tampa Bay Hotel, offering her candy that existed only in Kit’s imagination.
“I hurt.” Kit’s voice was the barest thread.
“I know.” Betsy knelt by Kit’s bed. In Lamia, they’d iced the food for peritonitis patients. But the ice was the only thing making the brackish water drinkable, and they had almost run out. So instead there was beef tea that Betsy had let sit out until it was as cool as the climate would allow, which wasn’t very cool at all. “I’m just going to give you a sip of something. Do you think you can swallow?”
“Betsy.” Kit stirred, or as much as she could. She was so weak that even that small movement exhausted her. Her eyes were hollows in her emaciated face. “Betsy, am I going to die?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dear Ava,
Please don’t go, whatever you do, please don’t go. I should never have said what I said back in Athens. I hadn’t the slightest notion. I didn’t know, I didn’t know anything at all about anything, but now I do and I can’t bear to think of you going off to nurse not knowing how quickly it can all happen, how quickly you can go from
There was nothing wrong with Charles and then
I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you. I’ll go for you, if you like. I’m not worth anything but you are. I’ll take your place. I don’t care what happens to me, but I care what happens to you. Please don’t go to Cuba, Ava. Please. I don’t want you to die. Let me take your place.
I don’t know if this letter will find you in time, so I’m coming to find you too. If you get this, know that I’ll be joining the Red Cross so you don’t have to. You can tell them I’m going in your place, so it’s all settled and there’s no trouble about releasing you. And if you don’t get this—I guess I’ll see you there and I can say this all in person.
But I hope you do get this and stay home safe in Concord.
With love,
Betsy
—Miss Betsy Hayes ’96 to Ava Saltonstall ’96
Loèche-les-Bains, Switzerland
January to May 1898
It would have been simpler if Betsy could have just died in childbirth, but, of course, she didn’t. She couldn’t even get that right.
Betsy’s baby was born at the end of January, in the midst of a terrible snowstorm that howled around the windows of the building that was part hotel and part hospital while being not quite either. A quiet place. A place where people could take the waters and rest. A place where a woman could, in the snowbound days of winter, give birth to an illegitimate child or pretend to give birth to a legitimate one.
It was a boy, that was all she knew. That was all they said before they took him away. They didn’t let her hold him. She had only the faintest glimpse of him, skinny limbs, a wrinkled face, a slick of hair dark with goo, as the midwife held him up and wiped him down and bundled him into the receiving blanket the baroness had supplied, a beautiful, soft, woolly receiving blanket embroidered with a coat of arms that dated back to somewhere around Charlemagne.
Betsy took an instant and unreasonable dislike to that blanket.
She wanted to pull it off him and wrap him into her arms instead. She wanted to gather him close and snuggle him and turn her body into his blanket as it had been these past however many months. But she was flat on a bed in a pile of soaking linen, exhausted and dizzy, and before she could sit up, before she could move, the blanket-covered bundle that had been her baby was whisked away, out the door, away to the woman who was covering him with her name as she had with that blanket.
Betsy turned her head into the pillow and wept, which the nurse assured her was an entirely normal thing under the circumstances, and Betsy wasn’t sure if by “the circumstances” she meant childbirth or giving one’s baby away to be claimed by another.
It was not, apparently, an entirely normal thing to keep weeping for the next month. It wasn’t that Betsy meant to; it was just that she couldn’t seem to stop, as if the tears were coming out for everything, for her mother, for her father, for Charles, for Ava, for all the opportunities she’d thrown away, for the baby she’d thrown away. Ava had been right about everything. She knew—she knew—that this was what was best, that her baby was better off without her, better off being raised as Charles’s son, with a mother who didn’t sow destruction and hairpins in her wake, but she couldn’t seem to convince her heart of that or her tear ducts.
She cried and cried until the doctors came and examined her and pronounced her blooming—only they said it in German, of course, a long compound word that used about sixteen syllables to contain one thought. Betsy didn’t want to bloom. She didn’t want to be. It felt like an insult that her body should go on being healthy when Charles was in the ground and her baby in a cradle rocked by another woman.
She really ought to have just died.
She had seen so many people die. Why couldn’t she have been one of them? Why couldn’t she have died of typhoid instead of her mother? Betsy could picture their old house, the one in Yonkers, the one from before they moved to Boston, the one where she had played with the guttersnipes and picked up the infection that had killed the wrong person. Somewhere, there was another version of the story, where her mother survived and had half a dozen other children and Alex didn’t grow up angry and bitter and proper and marry that awful Lavinia and Ava had an entirely different roommate at Smith and Charles never met her and never came to Lamia and was there in Athens still, among his parquet and his porcelain, dreaming over the finds from Delphi.
But then her baby would never have been born, and Betsy couldn’t quite find it in herself to wish him away, even if she devoutly wished herself away. It was a paradox, and one she couldn’t solve.
The doctors argued over how best to treat her. Some thought she needed something to interest her, so they brought her books and papers. They found her American papers, whatever they had been able to scrounge, she supposed. It was kind of them. Kind, but pointless. Betsy had no interest at all in the fog that had engulfed New York, causing numerous rail collisions. She flipped listlessly past accounts of debates on Cuba in the Senate. She stared blankly at the ads. Lister’s Dentifrice thought she needed whiter teeth. Ogram’s wanted to make her beautiful with almond-and-glycerin cream. Hunyadi Janos wanted to help her with constipation, dyspepsia, and liver complaints.
What about dyspepsia of the soul? Where was the cure for that? No amount of dentifrice and glycerin cream were going to scrub her clean again.
When they found the papers wadded up, flung one by one across the room, the doctors decided perhaps stimulation wasn’t what she needed. She needed rest, complete rest.
And why not? That was the story, after all, the story that Aikaterini had put about. Betsy had gone to Switzerland for a rest cure. It was a very good story, in its way, combining the reality of her four months of war nursing with just the tantalizing hint of a total breakdown. People could feel sympathetic and superior all at the same time.
So Betsy rested. And she dreamed. But not of what she had seen. Not of the refugees at Vólos or the battlefield at Domokos. She dreamed of Delphi. She dreamed of Charles dying at Thermopylae, unaccountably attired in Spartan armor and his own panama hat. She dreamed of the angel on the coin around her neck appearing before her with a fiery sword and, for some reason that wasn’t entirely clear, an accordion. She had no idea where the accordion came from.
Nothing felt quite real, least of all herself, although that might have had something to do with the drafts the doctors gave her. Her mind and body felt strangely disconnected. Sometimes she imagined herself back in Northampton and woke with her feet already on the floor, convinced she was late for class.
Days drifted like the snow outside her window.
They kept sharp things away from her. Anything with a point, even a pen. Betsy could have told them that was ridiculous. She didn’t need to slice herself open; she was rotting from within. Obediently, she went with her attendants to take the waters at the thermal springs, as if the minerals might leach whatever strange toxin she carried within her that brought death to those fool enough to love her.
She’d spared her child that, at least.
Betsy knew that somewhere else in the spa, the baroness and her retinue were housed. While a nurse wrapped yards and yards of cloth around Betsy’s chest, binding her breasts tight to stop the milk, somewhere, not so very far away, a wet nurse was suckling her baby.
