Chaulmoogra

Chapter 1: The Patch

The morning Lillian Sheppard's life ended began like any other Tuesday. She stood at the blackboard of the Emerson Grammar School on Tremont Street, her chalk tapping out the cursive letters of the day's vocabulary words—"magnificent," "parliament," "chrysanthemum"—while thirty-two children in pressed collars copied them into their composition books. The October light fell through tall windows and made gold bars on the wooden floor, and somewhere outside a horse-drawn milk wagon clattered past, and everything was ordinary, and nothing was wrong.

Except for the patch on her left forearm.

She had noticed it six weeks earlier, a pale oval the size of a silver dollar just below the crease of her elbow. It did not itch. It did not hurt. That was precisely the trouble—when she pressed the tip of a pin to its center, she felt nothing at all. She had mentioned it to Dr. Farnham during a routine visit, and he had gone very still, and then he had asked her to wait while he made a telephone call. Two days later she sat in a sterile room at Massachusetts General while a specialist named Whitworth scraped a sample from the edge of the patch and examined it under a microscope and then excused himself without speaking. A week after that, a letter arrived at her boarding house on Marlborough Street, requesting her presence at the State Board of Health offices on Beacon Hill.

She had told no one. Not her landlady, Mrs. Brennick, who kept African violets on every windowsill and called Lily "dear girl" without irony. Not her sister Adelaide in Worcester, who had three small children and a husband who sold insurance and who would have come immediately on the next train, wide-eyed and trembling. And not Edward Cabot, her fiancé of nine months, who was finishing his clerkship at a law firm on State Street and who brought her roses every Saturday and who believed, with the steady conviction of a man who had never been surprised by anything, that their life together was as certain as the tide.

She told no one because she did not yet believe it herself.

The specialist at the Board of Health was a thin man with steel spectacles and a voice like a filing cabinet closing. His name was Dr. Albrecht, and he sat behind a mahogany desk and folded his hands and told her, with the careful diction of someone who had delivered this news before, that the scraping from her forearm had tested positive for Mycobacterium leprae.

Leprosy.

The word hung in the air between them like smoke. Lily heard it and understood it and simultaneously felt it bounce off some interior wall, as though her mind had decided to return it to sender. She looked at her hands in her lap—ordinary hands, a schoolteacher's hands, ink-stained at the right middle finger—and thought: No.

"Miss Sheppard," Dr. Albrecht said. "I understand this is difficult."

"There must be a mistake."

"The bacteriological findings are conclusive. We have consulted with Dr. Whitworth and with the federal laboratory in Washington. There is no mistake."

She stared at the window behind him. Through the glass she could see the gold dome of the State House, brilliant against a sky the color of slate. She had walked past it that morning on her way here, had admired the maples turning crimson along the Common, had stopped to buy a newspaper and a roasted chestnut from a vendor on Park Street. She had been a person then. A woman with a future.

"What happens now?" she asked.

Dr. Albrecht removed his spectacles and polished them with a handkerchief. "Massachusetts law requires the isolation of persons diagnosed with Hansen's disease. You will be transferred to the state facility on Goosewing Island in Buzzards Bay. The transfer will be arranged discreetly."

"Discreetly."

"For your protection as well as the public's."

"My protection." She heard her own voice as though from a great distance, flat and strange. "I am a schoolteacher, Dr. Albrecht. I teach children. I have an apartment and a cat and a fiancé and a sister in Worcester and—"

"All of this will be addressed. Your family will be notified through appropriate channels. Your employer will be informed that you have been diagnosed with a communicable illness requiring extended treatment. The specifics need not be disclosed publicly."

"Need not be disclosed," she repeated. The words were like stones she was turning over in her hands, trying to find the sharp edge that would cut through the unreality of the moment. "You mean you will lie."

"We will protect your privacy."

"And my fiancé?"

Dr. Albrecht replaced his spectacles. "Mr. Cabot will be examined as a precaution. He will be advised that the engagement cannot proceed."

The room tilted. She gripped the arms of her chair. "You cannot—"

"Miss Sheppard." His voice softened by exactly one degree. "I am sorry. Truly. But you must understand that this disease, while rare in this country, carries obligations under law that neither you nor I can set aside. The isolation order will be signed by Commissioner Crayton this afternoon. You will have three days to settle your affairs. A state vehicle will collect you on Friday evening."

Friday evening. Three days to dismantle twenty-six years of living.

She walked home through the Common in a kind of trance. The chestnut vendor was still there, and the maples were still crimson, and a boy was sailing a toy boat on the Frog Pond, and none of it had changed, and all of it had changed. She climbed the stairs to her room and sat on the edge of her bed and looked at the pale patch on her forearm and thought of the lepers in Scripture, the unclean cast out beyond the city walls, ringing bells to warn the healthy of their approach.

She did not ring a bell. She sat in silence until the light failed and the room went dark.

---

The three days were a blur of small cruelties.

Edward came on Wednesday evening, summoned by a telephone call she could barely remember making. She met him in the parlor of the boarding house, where Mrs. Brennick's violets bloomed purple and oblivious on the sill, and she told him. She used the clinical term—Hansen's disease—because it sounded less like a curse, and she watched his face go through a sequence of expressions she would remember for the rest of her life: confusion, disbelief, horror, and then something worse than horror, something that looked like the careful rearrangement of furniture in a room where someone has died.

"Lily," he said. He reached for her hand and then stopped, and the stopping was the thing that broke her.

"It's all right," she said, though it was not all right, would never be all right. "You don't have to touch me."

"That's not—I wasn't—" He ran his hand through his hair. He was a handsome man, Edward Cabot, with a square jaw and earnest brown eyes and the kind of posture that suggested he had been raised to stand up straight and mean it. "Lily, there must be something. A treatment. A specialist. My father knows people at Harvard Medical—"

"There is no cure, Edward."

The word "cure" landed between them like a dropped glass. He stared at her. She watched him understand.

"They're sending me to an island," she said. "In Buzzards Bay. I leave Friday."

"An island."

"A colony. For people with—for people like me."

He stood up. He sat down. He stood up again and went to the window and looked out at Marlborough Street, where the gas lamps were being lit and a couple walked arm in arm beneath the elms, and she knew that he was seeing, with terrible clarity, the life they would not have together—the house in Brookline, the children, the Sunday dinners, the growing old.

"I'll fight this," he said. "I'll hire an attorney. There are civil liberties at stake—"

"Edward." She said his name gently, the way she said the names of her students when they were struggling with a problem they could not solve. "You are an attorney. You know the law."

He turned from the window. His eyes were wet. "I can't just let them take you."

"You can't stop them."

They stood in the parlor for a long time without speaking. Finally he crossed the room and took her hands—both of them, firmly, without flinching—and pressed them to his lips. It was the bravest thing anyone had ever done for her, and it was not enough.

"I'll write to you," he said.

"Don't."

"Lily—"

"Don't write. Don't visit. Don't wait." She pulled her hands free. "Live your life, Edward. Find someone else. Be happy."

He left without arguing, which told her he had already begun to agree.

On Thursday she packed a single trunk: books, a photograph of her parents, her mother's cameo brooch, a winter coat, sturdy shoes. She gave Mrs. Brennick the cat—a gray tabby named Thackeray—and told her she was going to a sanatorium in the mountains for her lungs. Mrs. Brennick wept and pressed a jar of blackberry preserves into her hands and made her promise to write.

On Thursday night Adelaide telephoned from Worcester. The Board of Health had contacted her. Her voice on the line was high and fractured, and Lily held the earpiece away from her head and let her sister's grief pour into the empty room like water.

"They told me to tell people you died," Adelaide said. "Lily, they told me to say you died of a fever. I can't—I won't—"

"You will," Lily said. "For the children. For Henry's practice. You will tell them I died, and you will mourn me properly, and then you will go on."

"How can you be so calm?"

Because I am not calm, Lily thought. Because I am standing in a burning building and the only thing keeping me upright is the knowledge that if I sit down I will never stand again.

"I love you, Addie," she said. "Take care of the children."

She hung up the receiver and sat in the dark and waited for Friday.

---

The state vehicle was a black motorcar with curtained windows. It arrived at half past nine on Friday evening, when the street was quiet and the neighbors were inside. Two men in dark coats helped her with her trunk. Neither of them spoke to her directly. They drove south through the autumn night, past towns she had visited on summer excursions—Brockton, Taunton, New Bedford—and she watched through a gap in the curtain as the familiar world slid past like a lantern show, bright and unreachable.

At a dock in Mattapoisett, a small launch waited. The night was cold and the water was black and the fog had come in thick, erasing the horizon. One of the men carried her trunk aboard. The other helped her step down into the boat, and for a moment his hand was firm on her elbow, and she thought: This is the last time a stranger will touch me without fear.

The crossing took forty minutes. She sat in the stern and watched the mainland lights shrink to pinpricks and then vanish entirely, swallowed by the fog. The engine chugged steadily. The water slapped the hull. Somewhere ahead, invisible, Goosewing Island waited.

She thought of the children at Emerson Grammar School, who would arrive on Monday to find a substitute teacher and no explanation. She thought of Edward, who would go to his office and eat his lunch at his desk and eventually marry someone suitable and never speak her name. She thought of Adelaide, who would stand in her kitchen in Worcester and tell the neighbors that her sister had died of a fever, and who would carry that lie like a stone in her chest for the rest of her life.

The launch bumped against a wooden pier. A lantern swung in the fog, and a figure emerged from the murk—a tall man in a wool coat, holding the lantern high.

"Miss Sheppard?" His voice was deep and unhurried, with a trace of a Maine accent. "I'm Dr. Lockridge. Welcome to Goosewing."

She stepped onto the dock. The boards were slick with fog. The lantern light caught the doctor's face: mid-forties, weathered, with kind eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and a beard that needed trimming. He offered his hand, and she took it, and his grip was warm and unselfconscious, and she realized that here, on this island, the disease that made her untouchable everywhere else was simply ordinary.

"Come," he said. "My wife has made tea. You must be cold."

She followed him up a gravel path through the fog, her trunk carried by an unseen hand behind her, and the mainland disappeared, and the life she had known disappeared, and the fog closed around her like a second skin, and she walked forward into it because there was nowhere else to go.