Chapter 24

24

JOHN OPENED HIS EYES AT THE SOUND OF A KNOCK.

He was limp on the floor of his study. How he had gotten there, he could not recall. He remembered coming home after the funeral, the way the sorrow of the day had seized him as he was riding to the house in the carriage that was by then empty in the back. He could hear the carriage sway and creak with its emptiness, and John told the driver once to slow down so that the ride would smooth out. The driver pulled on the reins to ease the horses into a trot. After that, the creaking abated, but the slower pace meant that John spent more time with the emptiness, and that was almost worse.

The improbable sun had dried some of the mud, and the horses had less trouble getting back up the hill at the end of the day than they’d had earlier that morning getting down. John was eager to step off the carriage, to get away from its lonesome emptiness, but as soon as he turned to face the house, he realized it, too, was filled with the same, and the sorrow that had seized him during the carriage ride tightened its grip. Emptiness was everywhere now, and it would be everywhere for a very long time.

He had gone straight to his study and closed the door. There he opened a bottle of whiskey and poured himself a glass. Usually he abstained from alcohol. He had a low opinion of men who consumed enough to get drunk, men who stumbled out of brothels and saloons walking at an angle, unable to keep themselves upright. But after Marian’s passing, he had found himself craving alcohol’s anesthetizing effect, telling himself that even respectable men had a drink now and then. Somehow, “now and then” had turned into five steady days.

John groaned and rolled over onto his back. He must have fallen asleep at some point. He had started off in his desk chair—he did remember that—but he must have slumped down to the floor for he was still in his suit, and his spectacles were bent. When he took them off, he saw that the left arm was askew, the hinge at the temple having twisted. He tried to twist it back. No use. He sighed and held the spectacles loosely in one hand. His head pounded, and everything he could see from the floor—the edge of his desk, the top casing of the window, the plain painted ceiling—appeared blurry now, so despite the knock at the door, he closed his eyes again and lay still.

Perhaps he was to blame, he thought. After all, it was he who had wanted to come to Panama, and because she was good, Marian had agreed. Instinctively, she had understood what it would mean for his career. And perhaps she had known that it was more than that, too. Panama gave him the opportunity to leave Tennessee, to become something more than his family name. When he and Marian had moved from Knoxville to the mountains, he had hoped it would accomplish as much, but moving had merely stretched the cord. He wanted to sever it and never mend it again.

He had never truly felt like one of them. The youngest of three boys and, as far back as he could remember, perpetually the odd one out. His two older brothers, Thomas and James, were always conspiring with each other, compelled by pursuits—fishing, hiking, shooting rifles at trees—that held no interest for him. When they were old enough, his brothers took over different parts of the family business, and before long they had demure wives and rosy-cheeked children, and all was exactly as it should be, exactly as life for the Oswald boys was supposed to go. Except that he wanted none of it. Not the work, not the wife. In college, he had been introduced to the emerging field of tropical medicine, and it had captivated his mind. It aimed to make healthful parts of the earth that had not been healthful before, locales that had been inhospitable to men like him because of disease. What could be more important? Finding new places where Americans could safely venture and live. The West had been settled, the limits of the land reached. They required a new frontier. It could only be realized, however, if they could vanquish tropical disease. And that, John soon learned, meant understanding the mosquito, that unsuspecting insect, light as a filament, that scientists had begun to posit was the actual vector of transmission for some of the most devastating diseases yet known to man. The mosquito theory was the future of medicine. It could be, John saw, the key to the very future of mankind. To his father, however, it was a laughable pursuit. Medicine was one thing, but dedicating one’s life to studying mosquitoes? No. No son of his.

After college, John resigned himself to a role at the family’s lumber company, a nominal role that let him keep his distance from the office most days while doing enough to satisfy his father. With work settled, his mother took up the cause of finding him a wife. She arranged picnics and outings with young women she knew, daughters of friends, newcomers to town. Excruciating, all of it, and not a woman he found interesting in the least. Not one he could talk to, not one who thought at all like he did: dispassionately, empirically, interested in the rigors of science, in the discoveries that were then at man’s fingertips. But at some point John understood that his mother was not going to relent until he was wed. Aggravated, he had marched into the lumber company one day with the intention of asking out the first woman he saw, to show his mother that he had taken the matter into his own hands and therefore that she could give up the cause. In the room where all the stenographers sat, he had walked over to a young woman typing at her desk, not the most attractive among them but pretty enough, and he had said, “If you are free, may I take you out tonight?” Straightforward, without embellishment. He had felt all eyes in the room on him, all the other stenographers who had perhaps, he realized then, wanted him to ask them the same thing. A dreadful moment. He had never before asked anyone for a date, and for a brief second he experienced the horror of the possibility that she might say no. There, in front of everyone. Thankfully, she said yes.

He had been unprepared for two things: the capaciousness of Marian’s mind and how good she was. He learned, during that first evening they spent together, that she had gone to college—only a woman’s college, but still, she was educated, and even more important, she could think. She wanted to think. She was curious, especially, about the natural world. She could refer to plants using their Latinate names, could explain root systems and habitats in scientific terms. On the eve of their wedding, he had given her a leather-bound edition of On the Origin of Species meant to communicate things he did not know how to say—that he valued her mind, that he was astonished to have found her, that he would be eternally grateful he had. There was not a woman on earth with whom he had dreamed he would ever be able to talk about his work. With ease, she grasped the essence of it, the complexity of the problems, the challenges ahead. She did not laugh when he told her about the mosquito theory. She said, “My God, John, what if it’s true?” She did not complain about the hours he spent in the laboratory, peering at water and dirt samples through a microscope, monitoring larvae, poring over records of breeding habits and life spans and flying radii, studying the effects of elevation and air temperature and rainfall, mapping epidemiological patterns, dissecting infected mosquitoes, marveling at the fact that what was contained in their bodies had the capacity to so radically alter the human world, trying to understand, trying to see . Marian understood the significance of what he was doing—the fact that it was not just scientific inquiry but pivotal to the future of civilization—which he supposed was the reason why, as they had stood together on that cool late-autumn evening in Tennessee, she had agreed to come. Or perhaps it was the other reason: simply because she was good.

If only they had known what would be in store. That first day when they had stepped off the ship onto the dock, some native pranksters had run up to them and dangled long strings in the air, and when John had demanded to know just what they were doing, one of them in very good English had said, “Measurements for the undertaker, sir.” The boy had laughed. Just a joke. But perhaps he should have known then.

He had warned her to stay in the house, hadn’t he? He had told her dozens of times. Mosquitoes were rampant in the wet. Although it was not even a damn mosquito in the end, but another pernicious effect of the rain: pneumonia. Of all things. An illness she could have contracted anywhere on this earth. No number of screens would have saved her from that.

The knock sounded again. Slowly, John rose to his feet and put his spectacles on, but when he remembered that they were bent, he laid them on the desktop. It was still raining outside. He poured some whiskey and threw it back in one gulp before he said, “Who is it?”

The cook answered. For the past number of days she had been bringing him food even though he had not asked her to. Confounding, that was. He thought she should have understood without him saying so that food was not foremost in his mind. And yet she had come with roast beef and sweetmeats and stew and once even with a fresh mango pie. Of the pie, he had taken several bites before he set the fork down.

The cook opened the door and stepped into the study. Without his glasses, everything was hazy, but nonetheless he could tell that she had no food in her hands. Even more confounding.

“Yes? What is it?” he said.

“Sir, I did want you to know—it seems the girl left.”

At those words, something struck in his mind, but it had all the clarity of a bell underwater. John rubbed his eyes. He recalled that the cook had brought him ham once, too. Of that he had not had even a nibble. Had that been yesterday? Or the day before? Time was no longer a solid thing.

“You hear me, sir?”

“What’s that?”

“The girl, sir. Ada.”

There had been a bat in the house when they first arrived. John did not know why he thought of that now. After the very long journey, he and Marian had opened the door to this house to be met with a flying creature that tore through the air. John, terrified, had not known what to do. He had taken off his boot and thrown it at the thing. He missed, but he picked up the boot and threw it again while the bat, with its accordion-fold wings, darted around making small squeaking sounds.

“Ada?” John repeated. His head felt too heavy for his neck to support, and he would have liked to lie back down on the floor.

“Yes, sir,” the cook said.

He had tried multiple times with the boot, fine calfskin and suede, until Marian, who had not once screamed at the bat, screamed at him: “Don’t hurt it, please!” He had said, “But we need to get rid of it, Marian! Do you want it to live here with us?” She did not, but maybe, she suggested, there was a humane way. “We could make a great deal of noise, perhaps?” And she had started stomping her feet right there in the parlor. She stomped and yelped at the bat, which was then clinging for dear life to the top of a window frame. John had thought the stomping absurd, but when the bat stirred, craning its neck and flexing its wings, he began stomping, too. What a sight the two of them must have been, standing in an otherwise empty house, rattling the floor and whooping at a bat. But then it had flown away, hadn’t it? Out the open door. Darkness unleashed, or something like that.

Through the haze, John looked at the cook again. He felt unsteady on his feet. He reached behind him and picked his spectacles up off the desk and put them on. They did not rest squarely on his ears, but even so they improved the view. His head throbbed. For a second he thought he could actually hear it from the inside out, and then he realized it was only the sound of the rain.

“What’s that you say?” John asked. He could not remember now.

The cook repeated that it seemed the girl had left. All of her things were gone from her room.

“Left?” Again, the bell struck, but John could not tell what it meant.

He tried to conjure an image of the girl. Very pretty, a man visiting the house had commented once. Was it true? Was she pretty? Was he supposed to have been attracted to her? He had not even managed to want his wife. He had tried. He had come as close as he could, close enough that what he felt—a genuine caring, a reliance on her, a gratitude for her support, a sometimes affection—could pass for wanting. The fact that it fell short of the actual feeling was not Marian’s fault, it was his. He had never wanted any woman. He was not capable of a feeling like that. And why not? What was so wrong with him? Something was. Something he had tried to bury under layers and layers of his heavy soul, something he had pushed down to a place far enough away that he could almost forget it was there. Almost. But not quite. Even far away and deep below, he felt it niggle sometimes. A tiny black seed that wanted to grow. He could cut off its light and deprive it of air, but the dark seed remained. He had not deserved Marian. The thought had occurred to him every day of their marriage. He wanted her to be happy, but long ago he had realized his inadequacy in this, how ill-equipped he was to make anyone truly happy, perhaps. She deserved someone better than he was. But he never said that out loud lest he introduce an idea that, upon hearing, she would recognize as the truth. He did not deserve her and yet he did not want her to leave. He needed her, it turned out. As a companion and partner. And because without her, the whole house of cards would collapse. He knew she never confessed to anyone how infrequently they lay together in bed, how infrequently they had been with each other, only a handful of times, encounters so ungratifying and strange that John cringed when he thought of them now, and then those times when they tried in vain to have a child, something he had wanted to give her if for no other reason than that she might have someone to love her the way she deserved. But he had not been able to give her even that. Fifteen successive months of trying to conceive, and in the end the doctor who had come to the house had said simply, “There was nothing that could have been done.” He meant it as consolation, but it was a terrible phrase, a way to make impotence out of rage, a way to deaden a feeling that one felt nonetheless. It had been enough to make him want to slap the doctor, but of course he had done no such thing. Stiffly, he had shaken the doctor’s hand instead and watched the doctor leave, watched him climb back into the carriage and ride off into the cruelly bright day.

And then, suddenly, it came back to him. The bell cleared the water. Something Pierre had told him. The girl had left. At the critical moment. That was the phrase he suddenly remembered the doctor had used. He had overheard Pierre say it in the hallway, and when the two men spoke in private, he said it again. She left at the critical moment, John. If anyone were to blame... It was all coming back to him now. Pierre had urged him to report it—such a lapse warranted punishment, he maintained—but John had first wanted to confront her himself. He had intended to do that but kept putting it off. After the funeral, he had told himself. He could only handle so much at one time. Whatever the story, he would deal with the girl after the funeral was through. Although the story did seem clear enough. Even the cook had confirmed that the girl had left the house—the one thing she was not supposed to do. And because she had done it, the only person he had cared about in the world, the only person who had truly cared about him perhaps, was gone. He was alone. Or maybe it was just that the veil had been raised. Maybe he had been alone every day of his life—born into a family that had never loved him, married to a woman he could not love—and he would remain alone for every day to come. That was how it would be. There was no way out of it without courage, and courage was just another one of the many qualities he lacked. What was so wrong with him? And why? When he had broken his ribs, Marian had asked him with great tenderness, Does it hurt? And he had wanted to scream, Yes! Something hurt. But not in the way she had meant. Why could he not retrain his thoughts and be a different sort of man, free of the darkness in the pit of his soul? Let the seed wither. Let the bat fly away. Why could he not root it out once and for all?

John reached behind him and, with a quavering hand, picked up the tumbler and raised it to his lips. He wanted a sip of whiskey, but the glass was empty. He fumbled for the bottle but found that it was empty, too. Emptiness and sorrow. That was his lot.

“Well, why did she leave?” he finally asked.

“Sir?” the cook said.

“The girl!” he erupted. “Why did she leave?”

Through his crooked spectacles, John watched the cook shrug. “Lord only know what got into her head.”