Chapter 3

3

EIGHT MONTHS BEFORE ADA BUNTING BOARDED A MAIL SHIP THAT TOOK HER AWAY from the only home she had ever known, Marian Oswald, with her husband, John Oswald, eagerly stepped aboard a United Fruit Company steamer departing from New Orleans and heading to Panama. Prior to the steamer, Marian and John had traveled by passenger train from Bryson City, Tennessee, near where they lived, a trip of nearly a full day during which Marian sat with her hands in her lap, gazing happily at the world rushing by, while next to her John read. The train was outfitted with a dining car that had crisp white tablecloths and also with a drink car staffed by two attendants who kept urging John, who did not drink, to have a whiskey sour and who were baffled when he ordered only a club soda instead. In still another train car, John had taken the opportunity to have his shoes shined by a Negro porter whom Marian had urged him to tip, although John said, “He is doing his job. A man should not be rewarded for doing what he ought.” Marian was carrying no money with her, but if she had been, she told herself, she would have found a way to slip the porter a coin or two.

The accommodations on the ship were similarly luxurious. The steamer, one vessel in what would come to be known as the Great White Fleet, carried thirty-five thousand bunches of bananas in its hold and fifty-three passengers in staterooms above. The Oswalds stayed in a stateroom spacious enough for two twin beds with a dressing table in between and two windows that would have offered a view of the sprawling ocean had John not closed the small curtains over them on the grounds that seeing the waves constantly rise and fall would surely make them feel ill. The closed curtains did not help. Or, they helped John but not Marian. Marian had never been at sea, and she spent the majority of the five days of the voyage vomiting into a tin pail that the ship’s doctor, who attended to her, poured out over the side of the ship each time it was full. The doctor brought water, but Marian could not keep it down. Water, she wanted to tell him, was precisely the problem. She was desperate for land. When the signal went up that they were approaching the Panamanian shore, Marian had never been more grateful in her life.

To everyone else on the ship, the sight of the port town of Colón was evidently reason to grouse. Marian herself had not known what to expect, but as she watched from the deck, she saw in the distance a row of brown wooden buildings and, on the street in front of them, people walking about, men carrying beams of lumber on their shoulders and women carrying baskets of fruit on their heads. Half-clothed children crouched on the ground. There were donkeys and mule carts, wandering chickens and stray dogs. The water by the pier was as brown as everything else. Marian overheard one woman call it “a dispiriting hodgepodge.” That seemed unfair. Marian was curious more than anything else, and the only thing that bothered her as they anchored was the foul smell of the tremendously humid air. As soon as she caught a whiff of it, she threw up again over the side of the ship. John, standing beside her, glanced at her and frowned. She wished he would offer her his handkerchief, but he did not, and she wiped her mouth with her own hand instead.

A ginger-haired Marine from Louisiana who had become friendly with John over the course of the voyage—they had played, according to John, a mean game of checkers while Marian was ill in the room—was standing with them at the rails of the ship. He said, “Why, we sailed to a swamp!”

John nodded. “That’s right. And we shall clean it all up.”

***

THE OSWALDS TOOK a carriage to the house. In time they would learn that to get anywhere along the canal line, it was far easier to travel by train, but that day, the day of their arrival, they traveled by carriage. The two gray horses that led them were emaciated and weak, and the driver, a Panamanian boy, slapped them repeatedly with a switch as though it were punishment, not better care, that would make them walk faster. Marian cringed each time the switch struck. The Oswalds had horses back in Tennessee, two magisterial stallions that they kept stabled on their property. The horses had been a wedding gift from John’s father, who believed that every man should know how to ride. At the wedding, his father had laughingly told a crowd of people how, as a boy, John had shown little interest in learning how to mount, how to canter, how to gallop at full speed. “That is a deficiency I intend to amend.” But even once the horses were his, John never enjoyed them. Instead, it was Marian who every day went out to the stables to groom them with a curry comb and feed them apples as treats. She had named them Horace and Charles, after writers she loved, and unless it was pouring rain, she saddled one or the other and rode every day over the lush green acreage the Oswalds owned, which was framed by the Great Smoky Mountains. When she was riding, Marian felt free, even though she never went beyond their plot of land.

Not long after they acquired the horses, Marian had persuaded John to ride with her—once. It was early morning, and the sun lit the underside of the clouds. As soon as the horses broke out of their trot, John lost his balance and fell onto the ground, flat on his back. Charles, the horse he had been riding, galloped ahead a few more strides, then stopped.

Marian circled back and dismounted Horace, holding his reins in one hand. John’s glasses were on the ground and she picked them up. She knelt next to him and asked if he was okay. She worried that something might be broken, and later that worry was confirmed by a doctor who told them John had broken two ribs. When she asked, however, John merely said, “My glasses, please,” and then looked away, as though embarrassed, after she gave them to him.

Marian got him back to the house. He walked slowly beside her while she guided Horace and Charles by the reins. Neither John nor she spoke. After Marian hitched the horses in the stable, she went to the bedroom where John had gone to lie down.

“Where does it hurt?” Marian asked.

He pointed to his chest.

They had been married for six months by then.

“May I?” Marian said, reaching for one of the buttons on his shirt.

John nodded.

Standing over him, Marian undid all the buttons and looked. She was not used to seeing his bare chest, especially in the daylight. Usually John slept in his underclothes, covered from his neck to his ankles, and because he slept clothed, she did, too. Every night after John put out the lamp and they lay next to each other in the dark, Marian waited for his hands to find her, to unbutton her nightgown and do the things a husband should do with his wife, all the things Marian desperately wanted him to do, but John never so much as rolled on his side and draped his arm over her, never nibbled her earlobe or trailed his fingertips down her neck. Night after night she waited. Weeks passed. Months. And when she grew tired of waiting, Marian turned to him instead, tugging her fingers beneath the collar of his shirt, feeling the soft, thin skin at his throat. That became their pattern, and if she reached between his legs as she did sometimes, then she could get him interested enough that he would take her in a kind of blind rush, all brusque action and speed, as if he were charging toward some finish line, and suddenly he had a roughness about him, a roughness that thrilled her. They were a storm in the night, tempest-tossed and blustering, though in an instant it was done, and as soon as it was, John went back to his side of the bed.

The day John fell off the horse, there was no immediate bruising Marian could see. Still, she went to the washroom for a roll of cotton gauze and returned to the bedroom with it. She slid her hand under the small of John’s back, threading the cotton through and bringing it up around his torso.

He flinched.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

John gazed up, but not at her. In all the time she would know him, there would always be something inscrutable about him, something she could not quite unlock.

“No,” he said at last. Then: “I’m sorry.”

Silently and with care, Marian tied off the cotton wrapping just tight enough that she hoped it would heal what might be broken underneath.

***

THE CARRIAGE STOPPED at the base of a hill. There was no way the horses could make it up the incline, so in the broiling heat of the day, John and Marian had to get out and walk. Someone else would bring their bags later that afternoon.

They followed the footpaths worn into the grass, making their way past banana trees and lime trees with small, spoked blossoms. In between the trees, scattered all over the hillside, were crude shacks, planks of unpainted wood holding up thatched roofs. Some had water barrels out front and some had clothing hanging from sticks that had been staked in the ground. A Black man in overalls who was standing outside watched the couple walk past.

“Hurry,” John told Marian. “The house is just up there.”

He pointed to the top of the hill, where a large white house stood alone, graced by the sun. It was two stories tall with a broad, screened veranda that swept across the front and wrapped around to the sides.

“It’s too much,” Marian said.

John said, “It’s our own house on the hill.” Theodore Roosevelt, whom John admired, had a house in Oyster Bay that he referred to as such. “It is our bit of paradise above everything else.”

***

THE EVENING AFTER John had received the cable requesting his presence in Panama, Marian caught him outside, behind the house, gazing at the blue-gray mountains creased with shadows. She walked out to join him. The crickets were twisting their legs and raising a song, and the air was lovely, cool and dry.

“They want me in Panama,” John said. He did not turn toward her.

It was a summons John had wished for. Marian had expected it was only a matter of time before it arrived.

She looked out at the mountains as well. She had spent all her life in Tennessee, the only one of four children born to her parents to survive past the age of five. Her mother had been a prim woman who kept a tidy house and whose single indulgence was an occasional piece of licorice root that she chewed in the evenings until it was feathered and soft. Her father, with whom Marian got along best, had been a lumberman who used to take her on walks along the banks of the river and point out the trees: hickory, oak, poplar, spruce, fir. In the evenings, when she should have been practicing the needlework she had learned in school, she instead spent hours by candlelight reading the almanac, the only book besides the Bible that her parents kept in the house. Her parents had both passed years ago, but still Marian loved that land, the mountain laurel that blossomed in June and the rhododendron that crowded along roadsides and the elk that roamed and the hemlock that spread.

“Officially, I would oversee the laboratories of the Board of Health, but I would be given free rein to go after malaria, to eradicate it at last. As they were able to do with yellow fever, of course.” John paused. “You’re familiar with the science, Marian. What do you think? Can it be done?”

John, she knew, had watched from the sidelines with envy these last few years as other men had brought yellow fever under control in Panama. And he was right—she was familiar with the studies and the reports.

She faced him. “I don’t see why not.”

John nodded, though he kept staring out at the trees. The con tours of his silhouette were familiar to her—the slope of his nose, the sharpness of his chin.

They had been married for ten years by then. They had met in Knoxville, where Marian had gone to study botany at the Female Institute. To help pay the tuition, she had gotten a job on the side. At the time, there was a timber boom in Tennessee. All through the Appalachians, trees were coming down, and the sound they made when they fell, that terrific boom, was a word recast by humans to mean something good. There was so much burgeoning industry, so many mills and manufacturers, that demand was high not only for lumbermen but for administrative personnel to keep the companies afloat. A job at Oswald Lumber had been easy to get. The Oswalds also owned a farming company and a machinery company. They owned half of Knoxville, some people said. Of those three business ventures, each of the three Oswald children had chosen one, walking into a future that was ready-made. Marian worked as a stenographer at the lumber company for three years, drafting bills of lading and purchase orders, before she caught a glimpse of John Oswald, who was the youngest of the three Oswald boys as well as the outcast, the only one of them rumored to have the ambition to make his own way. She admired that about him before she knew anything else. John had come into the office one day for a word with his father and had taken a look at her instead. A long look that made her skin tingle. She was seated behind an unvarnished oak desk, and she knew how she appeared—distinctly unglamorous and plain. Yet he stared at her from across the room and then strode over to her and, almost before he had planted his feet, said, “If you are free, may I take you out tonight?”

It was the first time that a man had shown the least bit of interest in her. For the rest of her life, she would wonder what John had seen in her that day. She asked him once, but he looked at her with such blank incomprehension that it crushed her soul. She just happened to be sitting there, she supposed, and if it had been another girl in her place, perhaps he would have asked her out instead. That girl might have said yes or she might have said no, and Marian’s life, operating in some parallel sphere, would have gone on untouched. But no, it had happened to her , and she knew there must have been some reason for it.

He took her to an elegant ice-cream saloon in Market Square, and that night Marian learned that John was conversant in all sorts of far-ranging topics. He spoke of Oscar Hammerstein preparing to open a theater in New York City and the work of Louis Sullivan in the Midwest. He had opinions about President Cleveland and about the Wilson-Gorman Tariff that had just been passed. When he asked Marian if she had heard of a man named Nansen who was attempting to sail to the Arctic, she said, “Of course. And did you know that his ship, which he calls Fram , means ‘forward’ in Norwegian?” John had looked at her as though he were both surprised and impressed.

Within a year they were married. Marian graduated from school. There had been some thought in her mind that she could get a job in her field, as a scientific assistant perhaps, but when she brought it up John said, “Why? What would come of it? And there’s no need, Marian. Not anymore.” He meant to be reassuring, but she resented the notion that it was difficult for a woman to matter much outside of marriage, and she had found it suffocating instead.

They bought a large house in a small town in Sevier County, Tennessee, about thirty miles from Knoxville. John, whose career aspirations lay beyond the lumber company, wanted distance from his family and their influence. The town, with its general store and blacksmith shop and school and church, reminded Marian of the way she had grown up. She spent the days alone, teaching herself how to cook and bake, strolling by rivers and creeks, breathing in the fresh mountain air, wandering through carpets of wildflowers and over the needled forest floor, soft as a sponge after rain. Many afternoons, she read outside in the sun. Gray’s Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology , Principles of Scientific Botany by Schleiden, Mendel’s Experiments on Plant Hybridization. When she tired of reading, she took Horace and Charles for rides, and when she spoke to them it was often the only time all day that she heard her own voice. John had begun work at a small laboratory, researching the theory that mosquitoes were responsible for spreading disease. It was a discovery that had been made seventeen years earlier by a Cuban doctor named Carlos Juan Finlay and then put to the test by an American doctor named Walter Reed. But by the turn of the century, many people still found it hard to believe. How could this frail little insect, no heavier than a cobweb, propagate diseases that could take down men? The skepticism only made John persevere. “It is indisputable fact,” he told her once. “And we will prove it to them.” John often worked into the night, and Marian’s evenings were as solitary as her days. She had entered marriage with few expectations. She had been grateful, mostly, that anyone had wanted to marry her at all. But she had grown up an only child, without many friends, and she’d hoped that marriage, at the very least, would be an end to loneliness. It was not. Even when John was home, his mind was still on his work. He was perpetually distracted, lost in thought, physically present sitting in his armchair but mentally somewhere else. If Marian hoped to have a conversation with him, she had to ask him about work. Only then did he light up. In time she learned that if she brought up the books she was reading, then John would talk about those, too. He was interested in the science even if he was not interested in her.

When he told her about the job in Panama that evening behind the house, he had seemed relieved to hear her express her confidence in the likelihood of his success. “You’re right,” he had said. “Panama may well be the last malarial frontier. And anyone responsible for eradication... well, those are the men that will go down in history, you know.” His eyes had been fixed on the horizon when, suddenly, he had reached for her hand. Marian had startled but let him take it. That was his entreaty. She recognized it for what it was. He so rarely touched her. That he did it then signaled the depth of his determination. Perhaps, she had thought, they would be happier there. Perhaps the change would rouse something in him.

“I do know,” Marian had said, staring out at the land. “And there is no one better suited than you to lead those men.”

John had turned and looked at her with such gratitude that for an instant she mistook it for love.

***

TWO WEEKS AFTER arriving in Panama, at one of the many evening affairs that, Marian had quickly discovered, she and John were obligated to attend, Marian learned that while their “house on the hill” seemed excessive to her, there was at least one residence on the isthmus even larger. It was a house in Ancón that had been built at a cost of $100,000 for a French engineer named Jules Dingler. In the autumn of 1883, two years after the French had begun their attempt at digging a canal, Dingler had arrived with his wife, his son, his daughter, and his daughter’s fiancé.

“And do you know what he said just before he left France?” the man telling the story had asked.

Tonight’s affair was a formal mingling in a ballroom, the sort of thing neither Marian nor John enjoyed. They had somehow gotten swept up into a small group of six other people, all of whom were listening in thrall as the man told the tale.

“He said, ‘Only drunkards and the dissipated take yellow fever and die there.’”

“But that was common wisdom at the time,” one of the other men said.

“How far we have come! Isn’t that right, Oswald?”

Standing next to Marian, John nodded and said, “Quite so.”

“Poor Dingler could have used the benefit of expertise like yours.”

“Do you mean—did he... perish?” a woman wearing long satin gloves asked.

“No, no, he did not, my dear. But mere months after the Dingler family arrived, his daughter contracted yellow fever and—”

The woman gasped.

“Exactly,” the man said. “Then in short order his son. Then his daughter’s fiancé. Then his wife.”

“Every one of them from yellow fever?” someone asked.

“Yes.”

“And what about Dingler?”

“He eventually sailed back to France, heartbroken I’m sure.”

Everyone stood in a stupor until one of the men said, “You sure know how to liven a party, Badgley.”

“I thought it courtesy that our new guests should know.”

“Know what?” someone else said. “That the whole place is cursed?”

Badgley smiled. “Well, now, it may have been once, but not anymore. Yellow fever is gone, and Oswald here is going to do the same for malaria.” He clapped John on the shoulder. “Isn’t that so?”

Marian saw John redden slightly. He was more comfortable shining a light on mosquitoes than having a light shined on him. “That is the idea, yes,” he said.

With his hand still on John’s shoulder, Badgley said, “Don’t be so modest. Your reputation precedes you. We all hear you’re the man for the job. What do you say? Do you really believe it’s possible to rid this pesthole of malaria once and for all?”

John forced a tight-lipped smile, and after a moment, finally Marian spoke up to save him. “It’s entirely possible. And you’re right—he’s the man for the job.”

***

THERE WERE TWO seasons in Panama: the wet and the dry. They had arrived in the dry, at the start of the year when the evening breezes were cool, but by May, when rain started streaming from the sky, John cautioned Marian not to spend too much time outdoors. “The mosquitos are rampant when it’s wet. They thrive in such con ditions.”

“But what will I do?” she asked.

He did not answer that. “The weather will improve in January,” he said.

In all her life, Marian had never seen so much rain drop out of the sky. In Tennessee when she was a girl, she used to plunge her hands in the mud puddles that yawned across her family’s property and grab for frogs after a storm had passed. Whether it sprinkled or poured, her father always looked out the window and said the same thing: “The trees will be happy, at least.” She wondered what her father would think of the rain here. It often came in a surge. The wind picked up and sent the tops of the trees nodding about, and the rain slashed through the air. And then, abruptly, it would stop, as if the sky had snapped shut, and the sun shone again. But the intermission, she had learned, was usually brief, just long enough for the clouds to gather more rain before unleashing it again.

For several weeks after the wet season began, Marian sat on the veranda and looked out at the rain. Through the copper screens, she could see a bit of the town down below, a few buildings as well as the train station where all day long black locomotives pulled in and out. Everywhere she looked, people came and went, even in the worst downpours, and she watched them with resentment. How could John honestly expect her to stay indoors all the time? The books they had brought were covered in mold. There were no horses to ride. And she had not come all this way merely to sit on a porch.

The first time she went out, Marian simply walked down the hill and back up again, just for the pleasure of leaving the house. She slipped in the mud on her way down and landed flat on her rear, and she laughed at herself, and laughing felt nearly as good as walking itself had. When she returned to the house, she rinsed her clothes in the washtub and cleaned off her boots, and by the time John came home from work, he was none the wiser.

Eventually she ventured farther, past the foot of the hill into town. Even in the rain, life carried on. Men walked down the street with their hats soaked to the point that the brims hung straight down. Women clutched parasols and sidestepped puddles. And Marian walked, just happy to see all of it.

The town of Empire was at the highest point of the canal route, roughly midway between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic. It was perched on a ledge that overlooked the immense Culebra Cut, the nine-mile-long segment of the canal impeded by the mountains, which had to be dug through. Sometimes Marian walked out to look at that, too, peering down over the steep descent, and each time she was dizzied by the scale, which was so colossal that it almost seemed inhuman. Three million years earlier, Marian had read, underwater volcanoes had erupted and sent great reservoirs of sediment up through the surface, connecting two continents and forming the bridge of land upon which they all stood. Now, evidently, the task was to divide it again, to open the land from sea to sea. What nature had accomplished, men wanted to undo.

***

MONTHS HAD PASSED, and the rain was still falling.

Inside the house, Marian took a commissary booklet from the cupboard in the kitchen and pulled on a rain cape. The cape covered most of her dress but stopped at her knees. Past that, she would just have to get wet.

The cook, Antoinette, was standing at the stove, lifting the lid off a large iron pot of fish stew. When Marian said she was going out, Antoinette arched an eyebrow and asked if she thought that was wise, with so much rain coming down.

“I think it’s just fine,” Marian said, pinching a fold of the cape. “That’s why I have this.”

Antoinette had come recommended by another couple on the isthmus who hailed from Georgia and whom the Oswalds had met early on at a welcome supper that had been organized on the Oswalds’ behalf. Marian had worn a silk voile dress with repoussé lace and had done her hair in a softly coiled pompadour, neither effort which John recognized, and on the ride over, he had wanted, as ever, only to talk about work. He sought her opinion on a statistical anomaly that had been brought to his attention that day, and though she urged him simply to gather more data, the problem distracted him through six courses of food. Quietly, he had eaten his turtle soup and roast turkey and everything else they had been served while all around the other guests reveled and laughed. At one point when he reached for his glass, he knocked over a lit candlestick and set the tablecloth on fire for a brief moment until one of the other men at the table jumped up and doused it with water from his drinking glass. John shrank in his seat, and the host made a joke to smooth over the moment, and no one spoke of it after that. But Marian knew it was the sort of thing for which John would chastise himself. The only good that came out of the whole evening was when the woman seated next to Marian, the one from Georgia, asked whether Marian had managed to find any help yet. “Help?” Marian said. “The options here are dreadful,” the woman said. “The Negroes here are not like the Negroes back home. They will not do what you say, and it seems no amount of scolding can make them work any faster than they do.” She did know of a good cook, though, a woman from Antigua, and she gave Marian the name. Marian had never had a cook or a maid or any help in that way—not when she was young and not in her married life, either—but John, who had grown up with such people, convinced her to give it a try. “It was one thing in Tennessee, but it is all different here. Don’t tell me you would know what to do with a coconut. And I quite like to eat.”

Now Antoinette lowered the lid of the pot and wiped her hands on her apron. She was forty-seven years old and still as shapely as she had been as a younger woman, though her hair was graying at the temples and the veins on the backs of her hands were more prominent than they used to be. She looked at those veins in displeasure sometimes, wishing for the days when she had been more supple, more ripe. In Antigua she had made a living cooking stewed saltfish and goat water with yams and callaloo, the last of which was her specialty, and people in the neighborhood were willing to pay because her food was so good. But as good as it was, she still did not make much. A few years back, her husband, whom she had loved for twenty-three years, had gone and plucked some young flower that was half his age. She had not suspected him capable of such a thing, but he had done it, and the reason, Antoinette assumed, was because a flower newly in bloom smelled sweeter than one fading fast. She had borne four children for him. Not long after her husband ran off, her brother fell on hard times, so he and his two children moved in with her, too, and that was three extra bellies to fill. Though she was a cook, a total of eight people to feed, including herself, in addition to all the other paying customers in the neighborhood who numbered about a dozen or so, was far too much cooking for such little reward. In Panama, someone told her, she could cook half as much and earn twice the amount. As it turned out, that person’s calculation had been off by a bit. In Panama, Antoinette learned, she could cook less than a fifth of what she had been cooking before and earn three times as much.

The stew needed to simmer for another few hours. She would serve it for supper that night. After she served it she would go back to the room she rented in a crowded tenement in Panama City, and think about her four children whom she had left behind under her brother’s care, and wonder whether the money she sent back every two weeks meant they were eating well, especially her youngest, Arthur, who was eight and who had always been undersized.

“I expect I’ll be back in an hour,” Mrs. Oswald said now, and before Antoinette could ask another question, she left.

***

THERE WAS A commissary store at nearly every town along the canal line. The Commissary Department also oversaw an ice factory, laundry services, a bakery that baked over twenty thousand loaves of bread a day, a printing plant, and a train that went out each morning to deliver orders directly to people’s houses. But the stores them selves were the principal draw. They were stocked to the brim with canned vegetables, biscuits, matches, shoes, baseball gloves, camphor balls, cornmeal, corned beef, hair pomade, soap, nail buffers, towels, handkerchiefs, satin ribbons, taffeta ribbons, Vaseline, parasols, fabric, lace, fingerbowls, ice-cream dishes, butter dishes, hangers, clocks, codfish, sugar, Welch’s grape juice, cigars, sponges, grass rugs, furniture oil, rattraps, eggs, sausage, lamb, pork, livers, steak, cream cheese, Neufchatel cheese, Roquefort cheese, Swiss cheese, Gouda cheese, Edam cheese, Camembert cheese, Pinxter cheese, MacLaren’s cheese, St. Charles evaporated milk, Nestlé condensed milk, Quaker oatmeal, Quaker corn cakes, grapefruit, cranberries, beets, tomatoes, celery, spinach, sauerkraut, turnips, parsnips, squash, eggplant, silverware, ladles, graters, sifters, tongs, whisks, coats, stockings, buttons, hats, pipes, every luxury and convenience imaginable.

Marian needed none of it. Going to the commissary was just an excuse to get out of the house.

By the time Marian arrived and stepped inside, her rain cape was heavy with water and her kid-leather boots were wet all the way through. She slipped back the hood and stomped her feet a few times. Molly, the young cashier, glanced up and, upon seeing Marian, smiled and waved. Marian had always found the girl, who had come to Panama with her parents, to be unfailingly friendly. She had long straight blond hair that, against the custom, she wore down. Perhaps it was nothing, but Marian interpreted it as a small act of rebellion, and she felt a fondness for Molly because of it.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. It’s still raining, I see?”

“It will be raining until January, I’m afraid.”

Molly smiled. Before Panama, she had lived in Hawaii, where it rained, of course, but not as much as it did here. With her parents she had also lived in Cuba and the Philippines, but so far, despite the rain, she liked Panama the best. She had a camera, a 4x5 field camera about the size of a loaf of bread, that she had lugged with her to every place she had gone, but unfortunately in Panama she hadn’t had many opportunities to use it yet. She thought she might like to be a journalist one day, even a female news photographer traveling the world with her camera, but she had not told anyone that. In any case, it was only a hobby for now.

When Mrs. Oswald did not move from where she had stopped just inside the door, Molly called, “Is there anything I can help you find today, ma’am?”

Marian stayed by the door because the rain cape was dripping, and she did not want to trail water all through the store. At Molly’s question, she glanced around. The things she longed for in life—companionship, knowledge—were not to be found in any store on this earth.

“I don’t know,” Marian said. “Is there anything new?”

“Well, we did get a shipment of papaya just this morning. It’s from Florida, I believe.”

“Papaya?”

“Yes, ma’am. I stacked it up there.”

Molly pointed, and Marian turned to see, up on a table, large yellow papayas—the largest she had ever seen—stacked in tiers like a cake. She looked back at Molly. “But papaya grows here.”

“Here?”

“In Panama.”

Molly, unsure of the point, thought it best just to agree. “Yes, ma’am, it does.”

“Then why has it been imported from Florida?”

“I... I don’t know, ma’am. But I do know that the papaya we have in the store is quite fresh. It just arrived.”

“From Florida.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Molly wrung her hands, and Marian saw with regret that she had made the young woman flustered.

“In that case,” Marian said, still standing by the door, “I will take one. Or two, actually. I will take two.”

Molly’s eyes brightened. She left the register, walked over to the tiered display, and took two papayas off the top. She liked papaya, but of all the fruits in the tropics she liked the bright-sour taste of passion fruit the best. Molly returned to the register and set the papayas on the counter while she rang them up. “Forty cents, ma’am.”

Marian tore the appropriate coupon out of her commissary booklet and paid.

The rain was still falling when Marian left, and it drummed against her rain cape as she walked. She was carrying one papaya in the crook of each arm. Like babies, she thought, and immediately, she stopped. She did not know where that thought had come from. Like babies. In the middle of a muddy street in Panama, she started to cry.

At Marian’s insistence, a year into their marriage, John and she had tried to have children. At the right time of the month, Marian would unbutton her dressing gown in bed, and John would climb on top of her, and when he rolled off afterwards, Marian lay on her back with her knees bent upright as she had heard that she should to increase the odds. She lay perfectly still and waited, her dressing gown splayed, while John drifted right off to sleep. They tried for a year without any success. Once, Marian’s cycle was late and for two whole weeks she had lived on a raft of hope, but then the blood trickled in, brown blood that left a small stain.

She went to three different doctors during that time, men who poked and prodded her only to conclude that there was nothing wrong. No one prodded John to find out the same. It was presumed that a man could not be to blame. Keep trying, was the advice.

When Marian told John, he said, “Is that what you want?”

It had stung her a little, a question like that. “Yes,” she had said.

For several months they tried. And then the following spring Marian found she was pregnant. Her cycle was four weeks late, and her breasts were wonderfully tender to the touch. She was so happy then, keeping track of each passing week on a calendar that she hid in a drawer. Two days after Marian marked the passage of the eighth week, two days after a full eight weeks during which she had held something inside her, a baby becoming, Marian found in her knickers pindots of blood so small that she had to look closely before she realized what they were. Without telling John, she balled up the knickers and threw them away. She told herself that she was far enough along now that it was not what she feared it might be. But that night Marian awoke with cramps so vicious that John immediately hitched a carriage and rode into town to bring the doctor back to the house. By morning, the bleeding was done. The baby was gone.

It was all different after that. They could try again, John said, but Marian said no, and she did not unbutton her dressing gown again, not for that reason or any other. Their nearest intimacy after that would be lying side by side in bed, and neither of them would reach for the other—never again. John did his work, and they were cordial with each other, and Marian looked at him sometimes and felt an exquisite pain. She wanted to love him, and she wanted so badly for him to love her, but neither of them, it seemed, could understand how.

By the time Marian walked back through the front door, she had been out in the rain for hours.

Antoinette was setting the table in the dining room, and at the sound of the door, she looked up, relieved to see that Mrs. Oswald had returned—though she was wet as a fish, carrying two papayas in her arms, and her cheeks were flushed to an almost scarlet red. Her rain cape dripped a ring on the floor.

“Is he here?” Marian asked, panting.

“Mr. Oswald? No, ma’am.”

Marian felt her chest unlatch with relief. She breathed, then she coughed.

“Ma’am?” Antoinette stepped toward her.

“I’m fine,” Marian said. “I imagine I need to get out of these clothes, that’s all. Will you take these?” She gave Antoinette the papayas. “Take them and do something with them if you like, but I don’t want to see them again.”

Antoinette nodded. She had never known anyone to have bad feelings toward a papaya before.

She watched as Mrs. Oswald peeled off the rain cape. “I need to get dry.”

Antoinette took the cape from her, too, and though she said nothing more, she saw Mrs. Oswald shiver as she walked up the stairs to the bedroom to change.