Mr. Nash had fallen sick soon after he arrived in Cuba—yellow fever? malaria?—and spent much of his subsequent time at sanatoriums. “Did they marry before he was sick, or later?” asked Mrs. Macalester, the club’s president. She was married to the youngest doctor in town; she had a certain bloom. “And why no children?”
No one knew. However the war had dented Edgar Nash, the mortal issue didn’t seem to have been a wound, or fever, or any tropical ailment. The consensus was tuberculosis. The ladies had been given the impression of a long dwindling, though a minority clung to the gorier diagnosis of cancer. Mrs. Nash had mentioned visiting a clinic in the area; the ladies reasoned the clinic at Eve’s Spring, but that led them back to a brain tumor.
Whether Edgar Nash had dwindled or gone out screaming, he’d been quite young—thirty, thirty-two—and any fool could imagine just how awful it had been before his body had been put on a boat to London. Most agreed Maria Nash was in a state of shock, so bereft, so literally at a loss, that she could only drift in her own thoughts and take long, silent walks. Abigail Tate, a widow herself (her husband, a deputy, had been shot by a drunken miner), said she recognized the foggy look of utter grief. Vinca Macalester said Mrs. Nash’s reticence was perfectly normal, and that she should be given time to find her way to a more social existence.
“Is she reticent, or cold?” asked Mrs. Whittlesby.
“She’s comfortable with keeping her grief in her own head,” said Margaret Mallow, not looking up from labeling circulation cards. “She has quite a sense of humor. And she reads.”
“I’d like to know why she came here to begin with,” said Mrs. Whittlesby, who didn’t read. “If she does not want to be thought a snob, she should consider a greater degree of honesty.” Mrs. Whittlesby had this opinion of everyone who didn’t kiss up. Mrs. Nash’s refusal to confide, to provide tears or a verbal wallow, drove Mrs. Whittlesby into small fits of hysteria. She had been born talking, and silence terrified her.
???
Dulcy had seen the real Edgar Nash in August of 1902, at the fever clinic near Terracina, on the coast between Rome and Naples. Fever clinics were a novel cure based on the observation that several men who had suffered from syphilis in the tropics, in India and the Congo and Manila, had managed a miraculous recovery after a bout of high malarial fever. This clinic was one of only three, and it sat on the edge of the infamous Pontine Marshes: men with tertiary syphilis were offered up to clouds of infected mosquitoes.
Walton’s symptoms—hysteria, a rash on one arm, an open sore on his leg, an aching spine, an aching liver, a fading in one eye—made malaria seem like the better disease. He joked about mixing some gin with his quinine and looked forward to life again. He loved lava-filled Campania and Lazio: earthquakes, volcanoes, refined physicians, ancient history, good food—all the area lacked was a profitable mine. He and Dulcy toured Pompeii and Herculaneum, the gassy moonscape of Campi Flegrei, where the fumaroles reminded Walton of Yellowstone. They walked through the tunnel between Cumae and Sibyl’s grotto near Averno, and picked fruit from a fig tree that grew upside down from the rock at the entrance. The Romans had claimed the lake was the entrance to Hades—Aeneas had descended into the underworld here—and believed that the fumes rising from the volcanic lake killed birds. Dulcy couldn’t recall seeing a bird anywhere in Italy, and had heard that they’d all been eaten.
After a week of tourism, they headed north. The driver swathed everyone in netting a mile before they reached the clinic, a pretty yellow villa with high windows and curvy nurses; Walton almost capered, but his enthusiasm withered within hours. He’d wondered over the genius strangeness of the fever concept and the fact that he would be allowed to wander outside like a normal human, but the true nature of the cure—the downside of being encouraged to drink, and eat, and take walks in the open air—involved being offered up to a marsh of buzzing, biting mosquitoes. Walton howled like a child, and the clinic doctor, saying this was a common reaction as patients became accustomed to insect bites, gave him sticky fortified wine, to sweeten his blood even more.
Visitors had to be swathed in netting, and because so much time was spent on intimate digestive complications, the patients’ families were encouraged to spend the curative period at other hotels. When Dulcy announced her departure, Walton wept and raged and tore at his sores. She relented and was given a screened room with a view of an unpleasant green pond. She brought a stack of books to Walton’s room and read them aloud stoically, cocooned in netting, while he tossed around his still-drab notebooks. She would be there, but she would not listen; he said she did him no good, but he wouldn’t let her leave.
On the third evening, Walton went missing from the ward and was caught hours later in the guest wing, rutting wildly with a fresh length of sheep gut dangling from what he sometimes called his instrument of doom. The woman was the elderly wife of another patient; Dulcy, listening to Walton whine in tune with insects, decided she might leave for the coast after all, if they could manage to bolt her father to his bed so that he didn’t kill someone besides himself. Walton was entirely out of her control, agreed the doctor, and he congratulated her on her pragmatism.
Bully for me, she thought. She traveled to Gaeta with two women, Enid Poliwood, the young wife of a very advanced patient, and Amelie Nadsonova, a forty-year-old Russian who’d brought her mother, an ancient ballerina who had finally lost her balance to brain rot. Miss Nadsonova laughed about her mother’s sexual misdeeds and gave Dulcy and Enid French translations of Turgenev and Chekhov and Tolstoy. She smoked and had beautiful Parisian clothes; she talked about politics and novels, and she laughed about her lovers (real lovers) over wine and grappa.