I turned to go, then turned back and asked him about the coffins. Nothing to worry about, he said; they were the empties, ready for the next batch. The occupied ones left the town discreetly, he told me, on the 9.55 p.m. train, under cover of darkness.
I left the Union Depot and walked into town. I found the Berkeley Hotel that the station clerk had recommended at the junction of Broadway and Main. It was one of many hotels I’d passed; as I reached it, it stopped snowing. The streets were still quiet, but the town was waking up, shopkeepers were already opening their shutters. I was passed by several horse-drawn farm wagons, a logging truck and a jitney. As I reached the hotel, a Cadillac swished past: white-wall tyres, huge chrome headlamps, driven by a uniformed black chauffeur. I glimpsed a woman in furs bundled in the back, an imperious face, a gloved hand and the improbable glitter of a diamond bracelet.
The Berkeley proved to be a clapboarded, many-gabled edifice, with verandas and turrets. Inside, I was in a cluster of pioneer, log-cabin rooms, hung with moose heads on wooden shields. Log fires blazed; the receptionists seemed familiar with dazed, disorientated passengers from the night train. As promised, they provided a map, a guidebook and information. Flattening the map on the counter, the youngest desk clerk jabbed at streets with his finger; he was smartly dressed, in brown suit and vest, stiff collar, shiny patent-leather shoes; his hair, parted in the middle, was greased slick to his skull. I felt ice-cold, cold as a camera that day, so I can still see him. Click, and I’m looking down seventy years at the silver ring he wore on his little finger.
He was anxious to emphasise that Saranac Lake was not some hick town; whatever folks needed, it could supply. The skiing season would be under way soon, but meantime I’d find Saranac Lake understood entertainment. Too late in the year for canoeing, but I could ice-skate or hike up the trails through the Adirondacks; there was one fine view from Mount Pisgah, and that was close to where I was headed. The Winter Carnival was coming up: then there’d be ice-trotting races on Moody Pond and––
‘Ice palaces,’ he said, startling me, and reaching for an album. ‘Famous for them. Take a look here, ma’am.’
I gazed at the transparent palaces with fixed attention: Winter palaces – and they were vast: some had ice battlements. Saranac Lake had its very own wireless station, he went on; there were three movie-theatres; there were glees, a barber-shop quartet and Negro minstrels; fancy-dress parties and dances – every week, regular as clockwork. The town boasted one library, two newspapers, four speakeasies, five drugstores, eight general stores, fifteen hotels, twenty pharmacies – and four hundred and fifty-six cure cottages. I must not miss out on the number one sights: these were the Trudeau sanatorium, the Franklin Falls and the Robert Louis Stevenson cottage.
‘You’re looking kind of white, ma’am,’ he added, folding the map. ‘Didn’t sleep on the train, I reckon? Sit by the fire and I’ll get them to rustle up some breakfast. Not here to cure? No, I guessed not. I can spot a curer at a hundred yards. English? You jest make yourself right at home now.’
I sat by the fire. A moose head looked down upon me, its glass eyes squinting and doleful. After a very brief interval, coffee arrived and a huge plate of pancakes, syrup and bacon. I managed to eat a little. I turned the pages of the guidebook. At sea. I needed bearings, compass readings; Robert Louis Stevenson was one of my literary heroes, so I turned to him first – pages were devoted to him.
He had come here, I read, in 1887, and quickly formed a close friendship with the doctor who founded Saranac Lake’s famous sanatorium, Edward Livingston Trudeau. For six months he had lived in one of the town’s cure cottages and followed the strict regime Trudeau had initiated. Like the many other patients brought here by the curative powers of Saranac’s dry pure air, and by the proven success of its treatment methods, RLS spent much of each day in enforced rest, even sleeping in the open air on the uniquely designed porch that was a feature of all cure cottages.
He had eaten the small, frequent and nutritious meals prescribed, and had drunk the daily quarts of fresh milk stipulated. He was instructed to avoid all stimulation – that category included writing – and to eschew all strife: Trudeau believed that a state of psychological equanimity was essential to the well-being of his patients. When Stevenson’s condition improved, he was encouraged to take brisk exercise by the lakes and in the pine woods. He obeyed all these dictates… up to a point: he had recently published Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and while at Saranac continued both to write and to chain-smoke ferociously. Even so, when he left in the spring of 1888, his health was restored and his pulmonary tuberculosis was in full remission. He lived on for six years, and it was not TB but a cerebral haemorrhage that killed him, the guidebook stressed – this despite the fact that Stevenson was by then living in Samoa, a place that, unlike Saranac Lake, had a climate inimical to consumptives.
Some time later, a taxi took me to the Highland Park district. Consumption, consumptive, I thought. I could see what the ticket clerk meant when he said this area was swell. Set a little outside the town centre, it consisted of a few long streets. Park Avenue, the largest and evidently the most prestigious of them, curved along the base of pointy Mount Pisgah; it overlooked the saucer of the valley and the icy rush of the Saranac river. I wound down the window as we began to drive along it; the antiseptic air smelled of pines and, wafting towards me – crisp as new dollar bills – came the unmistakable scent of money.
The houses, well distanced from each other, surrounded by cropped lawns dusted with snow, fine gardens, graceful plantings of sugar maples and aspens – all leafless, for fall came early this far north – were imposing and architecturally surprising. We passed a Gothic mansion, then a French chateau, then a Scottish baronial.
‘No cure cottages allowed up here,’ the driver said, jerking a thumb as we passed a schloss, then a Cotswold manor house. ‘Exclusive. The cure cottages back in town rent rooms by the week, see. No saying as who might rent the room next door: could be Polacks, Jews, Eyetalians, Greeks, Hispanics – we get us a whole lot of Hispanics, ma’am, up from New York City, the Lower East Side factories send them, they got a big problem with it, it’s endemic… But this district, single occupancy only. Someone in the family gets the disease and they’ll hightail it up to Saranac, home in on Park, build them a house and settle in for the cure… Strict regulations, though. Only so many houses per acre.’
He pronounced the word ‘disease’, as ‘die-sease’. He was slowing and finally pulled up outside a very large, clapboarded, colonial-style house.
‘Used to be called Talbot-Aldritch Cottage, after the family as built it,’ he said, and from out of the past came the unwelcome sound of my father’s voice, that Cambridge scholar’s voice, thin and high-pitched, peevish and irritable: A cottage with twenty bedrooms by the sound of it… Why do our American cousins infallibly under- or overstate? I climbed out of the car. I thought: the hell with you, Daddy.
The house was a beautiful one, elegant in its proportions, harmonious in this landscape. A large open veranda ran around two of its sides; a Stars and Stripes fluttered from its flagpole. On the first storey, I could see the porch area used for treatments, with its distinctive floor-to-ceiling windows: they were wide open; I could see nothing beyond them but a flutter of white curtains. I walked up the path – the snow was already melting. As I reached the front door, it was thrown open and Helen Winlock held out her arms to me. I stepped into her embrace, and neither of us spoke for some while. When Helen was calmer, she drew back, and held me at arm’s length.
‘We got the cable this morning… Lucy, you shouldn’t have come. Frances shouldn’t have asked you. You mustn’t see her. She’s – it’s contagious.’
I told her I didn’t care – which was the truth – and she began to cry. ‘How obstinate you are. You always were, Lucy. And Frances too – such obstinate little girls. Frances is resting. We mustn’t disturb her – it’s a very exacting regime. So strict, so many rules and regulations. Bu
t they are working. She’s much stronger. Her appetite is good, most days it’s good. When it’s sunny, she can go for walks. You remember how you used to walk to the Valley?’ Tears spilled down her face. ‘Come inside. You must be tired. We need to talk before you see her.’
She drew me into a large hall. It had the same pure tranquil light as a Vermeer – it was like stepping into the pearl dusk of a Vermeer painting. The house hummed with silence. We looked at one another without speaking. The guidebook at the hotel had not confined itself to details of buildings and amenities: it had also contained information as to the disease that was Saranac’s raison d’être and prime industry. I’d read that section with close attention.
I said: ‘What stage is the TB at, Helen?’
‘Advanced.’ She lowered her gaze. ‘It was already advanced when they admitted her.’
I was allowed to see Frances later that day, after she had eaten lunch alone in her room, and had had the regulation one hour’s sleep. Helen capitulated: I was to be allowed to stay – but I had to be careful.
‘You mustn’t excite her,’ she said. ‘Excitement must be avoided. It can bring on an attack. So you must be calm and quiet and show no emotion. Just talk to her gently – and if she wants to talk, let her. But not too much. If she gets agitated – she does get agitated – you must leave her room at once, and I’ll go to her. If she coughs, make sure she can reach her gauze squares, there’s a stack of them on her bedside table, they must be folded so they’re four layers thick. Once Frances has used the squares, don’t touch them. You must not embrace her. Don’t kiss her. You can stay half an hour. Then the nurse will be arriving, to give her the daily massage – it opens up the breathing passages. It’s very effective.’ She paused. ‘You’ll need to lie. Can you lie, Lucy?’
‘I can lie with the best of them.’
‘Ah, you’ve changed. Well, we all have.’
I went upstairs and found Frances lying in the spacious porch that led off from her bedroom, the porch I’d glimpsed from below. Its windows were still wide open. She was propped up on one of the special day-beds Dr Trudeau had pioneered, designed to rest the limbs but promote ease of breathing. The air was bitterly cold, but crisp and dry; the porch was unheated. Frances was wrapped in a dark fur bedjacket, her thin hands lying on a white coverlet. Her face was thin too, but her complexion was clear and radiant. Two patches of scarlet stained her cheeks. Her hair dark shone. Her gaze was brilliant. When her eager eyes sought mine and her face lit up in greeting, her smile was unchanged – it spoke to me with the same immediacy that it always had, from that first moment when I met her at Madame’s ballet class in Cairo.
‘You came.’ She held out her hand to me. ‘I’m not dreaming you? Lucy, you came.’
‘I’d have come sooner if I’d known. I’d have come at once, Frances.’
‘I know that,’ she said – and there we were, as we’d always been, two pieces that fitted, our understanding exact and unchanged: no words and no explanations needed.
‘I’ve brought you a present,’ I said, some while later – I’d just heard the sounds of the nurse arriving, and knew my half-hour would soon be up.
I had been quiet; Frances had been quiet – only once had she betrayed agitation. ‘I’m so much better,’ she’d said in a gay, merry way, fixing me with her bright gaze. ‘Daddy came up last weekend – he comes most weekends, you know, when he can get away from the Museum. And I was telling him – how much stronger I am, how well I’m eating – and twice he left the room, crying. Isn’t that silly of him? He says it’s because I talk too much and that’s bad for me – but I always did talk too much, you remember that, Lucy. It makes Daddy so stern – such a long face! But I just laugh at him.’
She laughed then, and the laughter made her cough a little. She pressed one of the thick gauze squares over her mouth. When the coughing eased, she turned her bright face away from me, towards her pillows, and then told me that as soon as the weather was sunny we would go for a walk together.
‘We can go along the valley, and I’ll show you the river. It’s my favourite walk. I went there every day that first summer I came to Saranac, but I haven’t been there so often… not recently.’ She hesitated. ‘I wasn’t in this house, Lucy, when I first came here. Daddy only began renting this when we realised I might have to stay a little longer than we’d thought. I was in one of the cure cottages when I first came – over there on Kiwassa Road, the other side of the river.’
She waved a thin hand in the direction of the windows. ‘A Mr and Mrs Erkander ran it – she used to be a nurse, and he came from Michigan. I wasn’t so happy there – they were very kind, of course – she was so house-proud! Everything as clean as a whistle, you had to take off your shoes when you came in from outdoors. The rooms were disinfected every single morning. She’d bleach the sheets and the drapes and the chair covers – the whole house stank of carbolic. And the other people there, the curers – none of them stayed very long. You’d just get to know them, and we’d chat on the porch, and then they’d disappear. Mrs Erkander would say they’d moved to a different cottage, or maybe got better and gone home – but I think some of them went home via the funeral parlour. Mrs Erkander got pretty mad when I said that.’
‘Hush, Frances. You mustn’t talk too much. I promised Helen.’
‘Oh – that’s the doctors speaking! Such a fuss about nothing. I long to talk. I’ve been longing to talk to you. Well, I have talked to you, of course – such conversations we’ve had! But I imagined them – and that’s not the same, is it? It’s hard, Lucy – lying here in silence day after day. All sorts of silly gloomy thoughts creep in, and I can’t seem to drive them away. But now they’ve all gone – they’ve fled! I’m so happy I could dance.’ She turned her face away. Her breath caught. She fell silent.
I bowed my head and stroked her wrist. Her skin felt hot and dry; under my fingers I could feel the rapidity of her pulse. Helen had already told me about the spell at the Erkanders’ house – and the circumstances that had led to Frances’s admission to Saranac. It had happened fast: Frances had been nineteen, fit and well. She had left school, had come out, had rushed from one debutante party to another… had boyfriends, was planning to enrol on art courses in New York, or study in Europe, perhaps at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, or the Slade in London – but, that winter, she kept getting colds and developed a thin, obstinate cough. Within weeks of our meeting in Manhattan, and that visit we’d made to the Met, she had begun to lose weight; Helen had suspected she was secretly dieting. Their doctor prescribed cough linctus, said there was no cause for concern – but that May, when the fevers and night sweats first developed, he suggested seeing a specialist. This man confirmed the disease, and advised treatment at Saranac Lake; its reputation in America was unrivalled.
‘January to June,’ Helen said. ‘Six months, from the first little cold to the day she was admitted here. That was almost two and a half years ago. The doctors say that if it had been caught sooner, it would have made no difference. TB makes its own rules, Lucy. Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes slow, sometimes latent.’
I thought: so she was already ill that day in the Museum. I said: ‘Do they know how Frances caught it, Helen – or where?’
‘No.’ She turned her face aside. ‘They call it the white plague. It’s everywhere. The doctors say you need prolonged exposure – but what does that mean? A day? A week? Ten minutes? When you ask them that, they don’t answer. She could have caught it in a restaurant. A movie theatre. At the opera. On the uptown bus. On the subway.’
I looked down at Frances’s flushed face. Her eyes were still closed and her breathing had become gentle. I thought she might be sleeping, I thought I should perhaps steal away, but as soon as I moved, Frances stirred and clutched at my hand.
‘Don’t go – not yet,’ she said. ‘If you go now, I’ll think I dreamed you. What was I saying? I’ve lost track – ah, I know. Our walk by the river. You will do that, Lucy? You’ll stay for
that? Promise me you won’t leave until we’ve done that?’
‘I promise. I’ll stay as long as you want. I won’t walk by the river until I can walk there with you.’
At that, she grew calmer again. She remained calm when I gave her the small present I’d brought, purchased in a Fifth Avenue store, on my way to the station. The assistant had gift-wrapped it. I could hear the nurse talking to Helen in the hall below as I helped Frances undo its pretty ribbons, its shiny white paper. Inside was a lipstick in a gilded case. It was a clear true scarlet, the closest match I could find to the one of Mrs d’Erlanger’s that Frances had chosen, and sacrificed.
Frances gave a little cry of surprise and turned her brilliant gaze to mine. ‘You remembered,’ she said, turning it in her thin hands. ‘You remembered.’
‘That and everything.’ This was true: the curse of a good memory. ‘When you were grown up, you were going to wear scarlet lipstick all the time – even at breakfast.’
‘So I was. And Rose said I’d never dare.’ She laughed, which made her cough again.
‘Well, I’m a grown woman now – and red lipstick isn’t as wicked as it used to be, but even so – I’ll show Rose. Give me that looking glass, Lucy.’
I handed her the small glass and, with concentration, Frances applied the lipstick, smudged her lips together and examined her reflection. She put out a pink tongue and licked her red lips, making the paint even brighter, more glossy. ‘It’s glorious. I feel as vain as a peacock. It suits me. I knew it would. It’s the colour of rubies, Lucy. It’s the colour of blood. It’s the colour of heartbeats.’
The lipstick proved controversial: when Herbert Winlock visited, he was amused, but Frances’s doctors frowned, her mother tut-tutted, and the nurses were annoyed – this disapproval, which Frances had predicted, delighted her. She had been obedient to the cure regime for so long, that this gesture of rebellion seemed to give her strength. It was like hoisting a defiant banner in the face of the enemy – and we all knew who that enemy was: you could sense him, prowling around the house, stalking up the drive, peering in at the windows. I knew him of old: I could remember how he’d hung out in my room at Shepheard’s Hotel on my first visit to Egypt; how he’d hidden himself in its fearsome catafalque of a wardrobe. Go away, I used to mutter then. Find some other prey, I’d think here, closing the curtains as night fell. Frances wore that red lipstick every single one of the days that I spent with her in Saranac.