A Flickering Light

  Balance

  ST. MARY’S HOSPITAL, WHERE THE Mayo brothers and their father practiced medicine, was held in high regard. By 1904, the team of physicians had already performed more than three thousand specialized surgeries and now employed other physicians in all sorts of new medical studies. The men traveled around the world and learned the techniques of doctors in other places, bringing in new ideas to Minnesota.

  It was toward this promise that the Gaebeles took a horse-drawn cab from the train station to the hospital, where the building’s tall spires made Jessie think it looked like a church. She said that, and her mother told her she was sure there’d be a chapel inside.

  Once there, Roy and their parents were taken into a room while the girls remained behind in a cavernous waiting area. “I thought they needed us all,” Selma said.

  “Someone will come out later,” Lilly said. “I’m sure. Don’t be impatient.”

  Selma stuck her tongue out at her older sister.

  Jessie looked around. Many other families waited, and off to the side a group of Gypsies literally camped: colorful scarves hung across the backs of chairs, making an awning for the many small children who played on a thick rug placed over the cool marble floor.

  Mr. Bauer had once told Jessie that he’d trained as a physician in the military and had only one more year of study to complete before he would have been a doctor. Maybe he could have diagnosed his conditions earlier. He certainly wouldn’t have had to suffer the mercury poisonings if he’d been a doctor. He also told her that it was a mistake he’d made, leaving something he enjoyed doing that would have given him a livelihood and helped others too. He wished he had found another way to deal with the horrors of war.

  “I was impatient,” he’d said. “Young people often are. And I didn’t realize that I was wounded too, like the men I treated. Their pain infected me, but I didn’t know I carried that disease long years after their wounds healed. I imagine they hid wounds as well,” he’d mused. “You’ll find yourself compulsive like that sometimes too, Miss Gaebele. You must guard your heart and do what you most love, and don’t get pulled away into something…less settling.”

  She wasn’t being pulled away into anything she didn’t wish. She guarded her heart. It belonged to her family first and attended to what they needed, as with Roy. She looked to her faith to help guard her heart too, though she had more questions than answers. Photography was next, and that did fill her up and make her heart sing. Photography gave her a plan and a path to pursue. Mr. Bauer had given her that path. Mr. Bauer.

  She felt agitated, wasn’t sure why.

  “I’m going to walk around,” Jessie said. “I could use the exercise after that bumpity ride.”

  “Mama told us to wait.” This from Lilly.

  “There’s no reason to just sit. I’ll be close enough that when they come out to get us, I can be here in a flash. I’ll take some pictures.” It would keep her from always thinking of Mr. Bauer.

  Lilly stitched a blouse she’d brought with her, and Selma had her book. As Jessie walked past the Gypsies, she made eye contact with an old woman, who motioned her to come over. Jessie shook her head. Mama wouldn’t like that. But a child crawled onto the woman’s lap and put a finger in the old woman’s mouth. Neither had teeth, and the old woman laughed. The baby cooed as the woman motioned for Jessie to join them. There was a photograph here. What could be the harm?

  “I tell your fortune for you,” the woman cackled.

  “No one can do that,” Jessie said.

  “Ah, the soul speaks in mysterious ways. Give me your hand.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jessie said. She was glad she still had gloves on.

  “It hurts nothing. Come. Enjoy. You’re a pretty young girl. It is for fun. To entertain the children and an old woman.”

  Jessie turned back to look at her sisters. They hadn’t noticed that she’d paused. “May I take your pictures?”

  “First, your fortune.”

  She set the camera down, removed her glove, put her palm out for the woman.

  “Ah…you will live a long time for such a little person.”

  “Where do you see that?”

  The woman pointed to a line bisecting Jessie’s palm.

  She sniffed. “It doesn’t say old age to me,” she said. “But I do see a few grains of lint in there from my glove.” She brushed at it. The woman held tight.

  “And five children. Five. All healthy, all living long lives too. You’re a fortunate woman.”

  “Five? I should get started then.” Jessie laughed. This is ridiculous. She pulled her hand free, or tried to.

  “No. I see eight. Yes, eight.”

  Jessie shook her head and laughed again.

  “Your time will come. And here, here I see that you will travel far. There will be many hills to climb and many valleys, but you will keep going and arrive back to where you began.”

  “With my eight children,” Jessie said.

  The woman folded Jessie’s fingers into her palm and smiled. “It is a pleasure to meet so enduring a young woman.”

  Enduring? That was a strange word to use with her in mind, Jessie thought. It was a silly thing. Her mother wouldn’t like that she’d indulged in it even in jest. But then, hadn’t she read that God uses many people to fulfill each person’s purpose? Even a Gypsy might be a prophet of some sort. At least she hadn’t asked her for money or threatened to put a curse on her if she’d didn’t give it.

  “Now your picture.” Jessie said. She removed her Kodak and took the photo, the baby still cooing with his finger in the woman’s mouth. Maybe she’d take a series of baby photographs, Jessie thought, of people who could afford to pay her with more than strange fortunes.

  A few people stared as Jessie walked the halls, swinging her camera. She stopped to photograph a statue of Mary and the baby Jesus in the lobby. A skylight gave the artwork depth, and Jessie thought she had enough light for a closeup of the Virgin’s hands. She’d have to wait to find out. Large paintings of landscapes and the sea hung on the walls, but Jessie saw no photographs until she took a side hall, carpeted and not quite so wide but with high-back chairs pressed every few feet against the plaster. There she found framed oil portraits of the famous Dr. William Worrall Mayo and his two doctor sons, Dr. Will and Dr. Charlie. She evaluated the posing and thought the backgrounds were a little dark and somber for men who had such generous smiles on their faces and brought joy to so many. She thought she’d take a photograph of one of the portraits, held the Kodak up, but the light wasn’t good. And besides, she hadn’t had much luck in retaking pictures. She still owed Mr. Bauer money for the plates used to make prints of the baptized girls. Her only hope was to have a camera that allowed her to develop her own plates and prints.

  She’d save the pictures she had left for the ride home tomorrow. Maybe someone interesting on the train would pose, but if not, she’d be more selective about what she photographed, truly frame the picture before she ever took it. If she couldn’t see what she wanted to see, she’d wait. She’d be more patient. She could do that. She felt tears well up. She felt so grateful to have discovered this love of capturing a moment in time and sometimes making it even more perfect than it might otherwise be—a fragile moment retained as it really happened.

  A side hall beckoned her, and she turned into it. A series of statues cast fascinating shadows on a carpeted floor that led to an office. She pretended to frame a practice shot of a statue of a large bird when the door opened. A man wearing a suit and a shiny tie held securely by a gold pin stepped out. “What are you doing?” he asked her just as Jessie heard her name called.

  She looked toward Selma’s voice, looked back at him. “I was just… I’m not really photographing.” She realized how ridiculous that response must seem with a camera pointed his way and a bag slung over her shoulder.

  “Jessie!”

  “We don’t allow pictures here,” he said. He sounded angry, upset. “It’s to prot
ect the patients.”

  “I didn’t… No patients, just interesting things.” She pointed the camera at the bird statue. She remembered the Gypsy and the child, but they had agreed to pose.

  She stepped away from him, her glasses slipping down her nose. She turned and saw Selma waving her arms at the end of the corridor. “They want us now,” her sister shouted.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to… I didn’t think anyone would mind. I was just—” She walked backward. He took a step toward her. She turned, moving quickly around the corner.

  “What were you doing?” Selma asked when she caught up with her. “Who is that man?”

  “Is he following us?”

  He’d stopped, any threat she posed apparently diluted, and Jessie breathed relief that she’d escaped without consequence. As they hurried, she told Selma about the pictures while attempting to put her camera into the bag she’d taken from her shoulder, then at the intersection where the carpet met the smooth surface of the marble, Jessie stumbled. She should have secured the Kodak. That thought fleeted through her mind just as Jessie lost her grip on the camera. Like a ball, her precious Kodak bounced from one hand to the other, catching on the bag and forcing her off balance further, until, like a bad dream she ran from slowly, Jessie watched her camera crash to the stone floor. Behind it, Jessie sprawled out like a cat on an ice pond, watching her spectacles fly.

  It’s what I deserve, Jessie thought. It’s what I’ve deserved all along.

  Selma helped her sit, then retrieved her glasses. Jessie hooked the wire rims around each ear, feeling foolish and sad all at once.

  Jessie listened carefully to Miss Jones, as the woman sitting across from them had introduced herself. Jessie’s glasses were smudged, but she didn’t remove them to clean them. Her knees were sore from her fall, but she put that discomfort from her thoughts. Miss Jones had been gathering information from their parents and talking with Roy, she told them. The sunlit room held all sorts of things a child would like: wooden horses and wagons, iron train engines, dolls, and books, lots of books. Roy held a book of buildings with rounded domes and spires and elephants wearing colorful strings of beads draped across their foreheads. He looked up and waved when the girls came in and then returned to his story. Jessie ached for him.

  “The doctors will see him before long,” Miss Jones said. She wasn’t a nurse, because she wasn’t wearing a blue-striped dress with a white apron and white hat as so many others wore as they fast-walked through the high-ceiling halls. She looked like a working woman, dressed as Jessie and Voe did when they met the public, except her linen suit molded to her slender frame more perfectly. She looked chic.

  “They like me to talk first with everyone, to see how each of you sees your little brother,” Miss Jones explained to the girls. “We’ve had a nice chat already, haven’t we, Roy?” He nodded and smiled, those dimples sinking into his round cheeks like toe tracks in wet sand. “What do you notice about Roy’s speech?” She looked at Lilly first. “You’re Lilly, correct?”

  Lilly had the same olive skin as Roy did, and really, those two looked more alike than either she or Selma, Lilly’s thick dark hair doing what she wanted it to do. “He talked a lot as a baby,” Lilly remembered. “Sometimes too much.” She laughed and fussed with her perfect hair. “Not that we minded. He asked lots of questions, little ones like, ‘What’s that?’ and, ‘Why?’ He still asks, but the questions take a long time for him to get out. It’s like a motor getting started in one of those new cars,” Lilly said. “Yes, that’s what it’s like. Only he never gets going any faster.” She laughed again and touched her hair.

  “Does he get frustrated when people don’t understand him? Lose his temper?”

  “Oh, we can always understand him,” Lilly said. “We just have to wait for him to finish.”

  “Y-y-you d-d-don’t,” Roy said.

  Lilly turned to him. Jessie thought Lilly would disagree, but she didn’t. She nodded. “I guess that’s true enough,” she said. “I don’t wait.”

  “J-J-Jessie w-w-waits.” He finally got those words out.

  Lilly frowned.

  “Which of you is Jessie?” Jessie raised a gloved hand. “What do you notice?”

  Could she tell them that what she noticed every time she looked at him was the lost opportunity of his life? Could she say that because of her, Jessie, her brother wouldn’t have what he deserved? Could she say that it was Jessie who had gotten in the way of what Roy’s talents would have given to the world? Could she?

  “That he wants to say so much more,” Jessie said as she gained her voice. “But it tires him, to get his mind and mouth to work together. It’s as though they’re out of tempo with each other.”

  “Temper?” Miss Jones asked.

  “No, tempo. He’s out of rhythm. He’s very good-natured about it though. I suppose maybe Lilly’s right that I wait for him because…” She looked at her parents, then dropped her eyes. She may as well confess it. She had dozens of times in her prayers, to no avail. She still felt that terrible ache each time she saw him try to speak and knew that any great joy in her life was undeserved because she’d stolen Roy’s joy from him. “Because I feel so bad that it happened, that I wasn’t watching him. I feel sad that he…that I didn’t…well, that the door…I don’t know. I guess I wait for him to speak because each time I do I feel like I’m rubbing away a brick of blame.”

  “Such bricks can build up quite a wall,” Miss Jones said, not unkindly at all.

  Jessie blinked back tears. She looked away, noticed a painting of a nurse holding a baby protectively against her chest, stared at it until her eyes no longer compromised her composure.

  “You always blamed yourself more than anyone else did, Jessie,” her mother said. Jessie heard both confusion and annoyance in her tone. “Which I never understood. We were all there in the backyard, saying good-bye to your grandparents. No one was to blame, not really. No one.” Her mother had said this often, and Jessie wondered if she had explained this to Miss Jones. Maybe she repeated it to assure herself.

  “Why, I don’t even remember where you were in the backyard. Had you gone into the house for something? We told Miss Jones that Roy had been asleep on the quilt in the shade of the maple tree and, well, there was all that commotion of people saying good-bye. If anything, it was my fault for leaving the door to the basement open after I brought up jars of applesauce to give my mother.”

  “The boy woke up and waddled away while we weren’t aware,” her father said. “No one’s fault. The girls were young.”

  “Not me,” Lilly said. “I was nearly nineteen.”

  “I just think of you all as being young and innocent,” her father said. “All of you.” He nodded toward Jessie, who dropped her eyes.

  “We didn’t even know he’d fallen down the basement steps until we started looking for him,” Selma said. “Jessie found him.”

  “Maybe that’s why you took it so hard,” Jessie’s mother said.

  She knew they expected a response.

  “Afterward we thought we might have lost two children, what with Jessie being so sad all the time,” her mother said.

  They must have told Miss Jones about the doctor being called, about Roy’s eyes rolling back and showing nothing but white before he closed them. Then there were the hours of waiting, followed by days of visits to the hospital and eventually the muted joy of Roy opening his eyes and smiling up at them. Then his slow return to speech, but only with words that stumbled and stuck to his tongue. Maybe they’d told of Jessie’s sobbing as she carried the boy up the stairs. But they couldn’t tell Jessie’s real part in it because they didn’t know. They’d never know.

  “My brother suggested the camera for Jessie because she’d so enjoyed it at the fair.” Her mother nodded toward Jessie’s camera bag. “And it helped, though now she’s become almost obsessed with those photographs and the studio she works in.”

  Selma merciful
ly changed the subject. “Roy sang with me once,” Selma said. “He didn’t do that word skipping at all then.”

  They all turned to her.

  “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that,” Jessie’s mother said. “When did you sing with your sister?” her mother’s words demanded as she stared at Roy.

  Roy opened his mouth to speak, but Selma continued. “He came along for rehearsals at church.” She brightened. “Maybe he could sing now.”

  “Would you?” Lilly asked. Roy nodded agreement.

  “He can just sing out when he wants?” their mother asked. “And he hasn’t done it? Why wouldn’t you do that, Roy?”

  Roy started to answer, but instead Selma opened her mouth and out came “Just as I Am,” with that husky tone that made her sound like a woman much older than she was. Roy’s dimples widened, and he opened his mouth to join her.

  They all leaned forward.

  But only Selma’s haunting alto filled the room.

  Jessie felt her chest tighten, and tears pooled in her eyes as she watched Roy’s face take on the look of a trapped rabbit who couldn’t even squeal about its struggle. She clasped her stomach and rocked the way her father sometimes did when his pains first began. She stopped herself.

  “I didn’t think he could,” her mother said, turning away.

  “Maybe it was the organ playing along with you, Selma, that let him do it,” Jessie said. I should take piano lessons and play for him, forget about my camera life. “Sometimes when I ask him to talk smooth and tell him to think of it like wind coming down a narrow tunnel or water flowing lazily over a smooth rock, sometimes then he can speak without taking so long.” She wanted to move past the blend of disappointment and relief she could see in her mother’s face. And in Roy’s eyes too.

  “You can sing without the stutter,” their mother said. She crossed her arms over her chest. Jessie’s father touched their mother’s hand gently. She looked startled, shook her head as her shoulders sagged, and she yielded her open palms to her lap.