“I had a letter I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “It’s about Cap.”
It was almost exactly a year since the bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis had been isolated and identified as the infectious agent responsible for consumption, and with that Cap had withdrawn completely from his friends and family. Since that day Sophie had been writing to pulmonary specialists as far away as Russia, inquiring about promising new treatments for tuberculosis. The letter she held in her hand was the first answer that offered even a vague hope.
Aunt Quinlan had seemed very sleepy but now she roused, sitting up straighter. “From one of the specialists?”
Sophie had a moment’s guilt for keeping her aunt up, but she also knew that she would have no rest until she spoke to someone about it.
“Yes. A few months ago I wrote to a Dr. Mann in Zurich. He forwarded my letter to a Dr. Z?ngerle in the upper Engadin Valley.”
Sophie paused in the hope that her aunt would have something to say, as she had traveled widely in Europe and lived there for ten years as a young woman.
“It’s a very beautiful area near the Italian border,” Aunt said. “Very remote and quiet. And your letter is from this Dr. Z?ngerle in the Engadin?”
“He has a very small treatment facility at his own home, just five patients. A trial, he calls it. He and his wife hope to open a sanatorium if their success holds. He read the case history I sent and he’s offering Cap a spot.”
“He doesn’t have a cure.” Aunt Quinlan was not prone to unrealistic expectations or denial of hard facts, but she was also careful to mask whatever she might be feeling for fear of casting either hope or doubt where neither was warranted.
“He makes no such claim. On the other hand, his patients are much improved after treatment.”
She described the protocol, reading short paragraphs from the letter when her memory failed her.
“It sounds as though it is mostly good common sense,” Aunt Quinlan said finally. “Proper nourishment and rest and fresh air at a very high altitude. Do you think it might do Cap some good?”
Sophie raised a shoulder and let it drop. “It’s possible. Even likely, if these figures are accurate. But the real question is, could he be persuaded to go so far?” Her calm was countered by a twitch at the corner of her mouth that she could not control, the perfect demonstration of why medical professionals weren’t supposed to treat family members. In fact, she knew that if Anna were here, she would insist that they hand the whole business over to another physician.
Purposefully, she had excluded Anna, and on Aunt Quinlan’s face she could see that this fact had not escaped her.
“You can’t take this proposal to him.”
Sophie swallowed a grimace. “You know I can’t. I can’t even write to him about it; he doesn’t read my letters.”
“Anna?”
Sophie turned her face away. “She would disapprove. She wouldn’t want him to travel so far.”
Her aunt might have challenged this assumption, but she seemed satisfied to let it stand for the moment. Instead she said, “It is true that Cap couldn’t make this journey alone. Someone will have to go with him. I can see that you’ve already sorted this through in your mind. Who are you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” Sophie said, frustration creeping into her voice. “I find I can’t think clearly about this.” An understatement of the first order.
“But you think he should go.”
Sophie took a deep breath. “I do. I can’t explain exactly why, but it feels to me like a chance worth taking.”
“You are so much like your grandmother,” Aunt Quinlan said after a while. “Medicine was more than science to her.”
“What do you mean by that?” Sophie asked, her temper welling up, something that happened so rarely that Aunt Quinlan was looking at her with both alarm and concern. But now she must go on. “Am I less of a physician than Anna, or is she less than I am?”
Aunt Quinlan did not hesitate. “It is not a criticism, but an observation. Anna is in the first line a scientist.” And then: “I see I have upset you.”
“Anna is an excellent physician,” Sophie said, her voice catching.
“She is an excellent surgeon.”
Sophie folded the letter and slid it back into her pocket, her hands shaking a little.
“You think I am being unkind, or disloyal, or both,” Aunt Quinlan said finally. “But that’s not the case. I am not finding fault in Anna; I am pointing out to you that in a case like this, you have an advantage that she does not. You understand it in the bone, you know it with a part of your mind that you deny because it frightens you.”
She raised a hand to stop Sophie’s protest. “When you say that Cap should go to Switzerland but you can’t put words to the why of it, I understand what you are trying to say. And I know that you require help. That I can provide.”
It was what Sophie wanted to hear, but it still brought her up short to hear it stated so plainly.