Belle Cora: A Novel by Phillip Margulies Page B

her needle and added, “Several others in the hotel had gotten it, and the vapors from—from his person—were thought to be dangerous, and so they hurried to get him in the ground. That is why you did not go to his funeral.”
    “Where is he buried?”
    “He was buried there.”
    We went on sewing in silence. We were in a drawing room on the second floor, at the back of the house. From the window I could see the lawn and garden, and Lewis with Christina and a small white dog. After another minute, I asked, “Will he be brought home?”
    “Yes,” she said quickly.
    “When?”
    “Eventually.”
    “Will he be buried beside my mother?”
    “Yes.”
    I heard Lewis cough, I heard the dog bark. I looked out the window again. A bird left the windowsill with a flutter and a swoop. Farther away, the dog dropped something at Lewis’s feet, and Lewis, with a stick, was poking whatever had been dropped. I asked, “Who was with him when he died?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Did any others in the hotel die of the fever?”
    “No.”
    We kept dipping our needles into the fabric. The bird came back. I heard it cooing. I made more stitches, and asked, “Did the fever spread? Beyond the hotel?”
    “I believe it was successfully contained.”
    I thought more and sewed more, and finally asked, “Was it in the newspapers?”
    “Stop it, I won’t have it,” cried my grandmother. It was so unexpected that for a moment I thought she might be speaking to a bird at the window or a servant in the next room. “Did your mother never speak to you about asking questions?”
    I didn’t like to hear anything that could be interpreted as a criticism of my mother. “My mother worked hard to teach me good manners.”
    A little more softly, she agreed, “Of course she did. Your mother was a good woman, and you are a well-behaved child. But you are being thoughtless. Remember that your father was my son, and these questions pain me.”
    When we went to church, my grandparents wouldn’t let us speak to anyone.
    Doctors visited the house to examine us—all of us. We did not know why, and I did not question it, assuming that my grandfather wishedto know the condition of the new members of the household and was wealthy enough to pay doctors just to determine exactly how healthy we were. Dr. Boyle came first. Then there was a Frenchman, who used a stethoscope, a novelty in those days. It came in a felt-lined wooden carrying case and was assembled from pieces, like a clarinet. We were next seen, in turn, by a Thomsonian, a physiobotanist, and a homeopath. The homeopath gave us tiny white pills. Lewis and I both still suffered from a dry cough, which all of the physicians, whatever their system, considered to be highly significant.
    We were not told the results of these observations, but a few times I heard them agreeing sagely that Lewis and I each possessed “a tubercular diathesis.” I knew what this meant. It was supposed back then, before Dr. Koch, that there was a consumptive type—refined, sensitive, and attractive. Beauty of a certain kind was a seal of doom.
    A few weeks after the last of the doctors, a servant told me to go to my grandfather’s study. When I got there, he smiled at me, but he looked troubled, and I thought that Lewis must have broken something expensive or uttered a sentiment intolerable even in a boy of seven, and my grandmother had asked that I be spoken to about him. Dust motes rose and drifted as my grandfather moved letters and ledgers off a chair for me to sit. He asked how I was feeling. I said very well. “Good,” he said. I asked the same of him, and he replied that he was in good health for a man his age.
    Christina wanted me to use my influence to get her a room of her own. She had had her own room in Bowling Green and didn’t see why she should have to sleep with the children in a much larger house, and she had insisted that I bring the subject up with my grandfather the next time I spoke to him. I