The Last Days of Ellis Island Page 3

  In a few days I, too, will be leaving this place, so melancholy and so familiar. And I shall have to bid farewell to the grassy plot where Liz has lain for so many years. The tree I planted on her grave gives shade now, which is how I measure the passing of time. There are other graves in this enclosed space, for people died here just as they do everywhere. There is one in particular I avoid; one of the gray stones marked with a cross and etched with a name and a date is located a little away from the others, as I had requested. It is almost entirely covered in weeds now: long, supple grasses that shiver in the wind, dark-green clover with mauve flowers, buttercups, their incongruous color almost indecent in this setting; it was as if the vegetation was trying to bury what had happened for a second time. I have cleared my desk, everything is neatly filed in glass-fronted cabinets, with the records of each and every immigrant sorted according to year and in alphabetical order, and a record of every steamship, as well as all medical records, and the maintenance and logistics ledgers. Only one is missing, the Cincinnati, the steamship from Naples that docked on April 21, 1923. I made that boat disappear. I only wish I could erase it from my memory as well.

  ELLIS ISLAND, NOVEMBER 4, 9 O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING.

  This morning, as every morning, I did my tour of inspection, even though there is almost nothing left to check—but I still have this job to do, my daily round of the site. If nothing was expected of me, why have they waited till today to bring me back to the mainland to rejoin the living? They could have simply sent someone over when required. Every morning, notepad in hand, I walk around the island and write down what will go in my report. This is written up into a weekly summary that I send on to the federal bureau, where a division head might cast a distracted glance over it before handing it to a secretary to file with the rest. That’s what they pay me for. To maintain the place in decent repair, notify whatever is necessary, and send my report. Nothing else now.

  As I do every morning, I visited the little cemetery where Liz waits for me. Maybe it’s a foolish thought, but that is what I believe. I shall have to tell her that my daily visits are coming to an end. As soon as I can, I’ll ask for her grave to be moved to the cemetery in South Brooklyn where my parents are buried. It’ll be a lengthy process, but I don’t want to leave her here alone. I’ve already requested authorization; it’s the only favor I am asking before I leave.

  Liz was my guiding light. Nothing triumphant or blinding like the light that is brandished for all eternity by Lady Liberty. My poor Liz, the very idea would have made her smile. No, she was mellow, constant, serene. We were married only a few years. Too little time, but is the intensity of an experience measured by its duration? The interminable pace of my life today has no significance for me anymore. I get up, work, go to bed and wrangle with the memories I have tried to build walls to keep out. I barely manage it, and anyway it will all come to an end one day or another.

  Liz worked here as a nurse, and we lived in the lodgings I still occupy, originally just a single room for employees who lived on the premises. When I’d gotten my promotion I was given permission to knock down the dividing walls to the adjacent rooms to make a more spacious apartment. Liz had so little time to enjoy it, and the images I’ve held on to of those years are of our one room, ingeniously arranged by Liz into different areas: a small bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and a dining nook. That meant we didn’t have to join the rest of the staff in the evening in the noisy dining room, and it gave us a little privacy, so sorely lacking in this place.

  When I met her I was already employed here, but in fact I had known her for a long time without having ever paid her the slightest attention. She was the younger sister of Brian MacPherson, my closest friend. I was an only child. Brian and I spent all our childhood and adolescence together, lived in the same neighborhood, and went to the same school. Our mothers looked alike, energetic and solid, their bodies grown stout with the years, wrapped in dark aprons, strands of gray hair escaping from their untidy buns. They were never slow to lay down a smack on a child they caught dawdling, and for nothing in the world would either of them ever forget to put on her hat, fixed with a long pin tipped by a fake pearl, when she went to sing in church on a Sunday morning.

  I must have seen Liz dozens of times since I first became friends with Brian. She was a little younger than us, in other words entirely uninteresting. I paid her no more notice than I might have a pet or an umbrella stand. I might have a vague memory of a girl in braids and long socks, silently moving around their cluttered and cramped apartment.

  Brian and I spent our childhood together, with its games, fights, and cruelty, and then our adolescence, talking about girls and fantasizing about the dancing girls whose photographs we saw in magazines, with their shapely arms, ringlets, and smoldering eyes. Brian started out as a clerk in a Manhattan insurance company, the New York Life Insurance Company, which he would say as if it were all one word, catching his breath slightly after. I found a job at the Federal Immigration Service. They were taking on people to deal with the endless waves of people washing up at Ellis Island. I took a job that wasn’t very defined, the main thing was I had to be there, sleep there, and obey orders. I could read, write, and count; I was pretty resourceful and I didn’t balk at working hard. After the first few weeks it became clear that I was good at dealing with a group of men and knew how to garner respect.

  It was when I went to spend a Sunday with Brian’s parents on Heyward Street that I met Liz, or rather I met her again, like a new version of herself. She opened the door for me—Hey, John, you’re late already—and smiled at me without apparent surprise, as if I were a relative she didn’t need to make any effort for, or someone she was expecting whose appearance was the most natural thing in the world. I had to say that this smiling young woman in a pretty dress who welcomed me bore no resemblance to the little girl with scrappy braids and woolen socks. Brian was, as usual, taking his time getting ready, so she had me wait with her and asked about my work as if nothing in the world interested her more. She told me she was about to finish nursing school and then start looking for a job. More than her slender figure and her pretty face, I think it was her eyes that struck me the most that day, her direct, attentive way of listening without shyness or flattery, flirtatiousness or superiority. The way she listened to me, it was as if I were handing her the keys to the universe, and when Brian eventually appeared I had to make a considerable effort to end the conversation, which did not escape his notice.

  I started going back to Brooklyn as often as I could, and it was no longer Brian I wanted to see. He was courting a young woman whose job was selling perfume on 7th Avenue in Manhattan, and he was gracious enough to let me woo his sister and spare me his comments. Maybe it amused him, but I suspected he was keeping an eye on my developing love affair with the younger sister he so adored with more attention than he cared to admit. I realized later that this affection, which he managed to keep lighthearted and teasing, in fact concealed a concerned tenderness. I understood from his allowing me to court her that he trusted me, but also that our friendship would not withstand Liz’s tears if I were the cause. I loved Liz, and desired her. It felt as if she had been waiting for me all her young life, and it seemed to me inconceivable that she could be destined for anyone else.

  8 O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING.

  I asked her to marry me one day in June. She flushed the color of the cherries on her hat and burst into tears. That was when I knew she was in love with me too. My mother was fond of her, though she lamented how slender she was—She’s real skinny, that sweetheart of yours—and my father, who by then was working on the trams, having driven a hansom cab most of his life, contented himself with a growl—Your honey is pretty cute.

  It was 1915. Europe was at war and America had not yet entered the conflict. We had a simple wedding, with flowers, sparkling wine, tears, and many warm embraces. Brian was more moved than he wanted to admit judging by the number of times he poked me in the ribs over the course of the day. He sported a pale gray tie for the occasion and had brought his sweetheart, his almost-fiancée, a young woman who worked as a salesgirl in a hat shop; she had a strident, nasal voice, and was wrapped in a dark feather boa and enough perfume for all the women there. She was the latest in line of Brian’s salesgirls, they all worked in some boutique or other selling hats or jewelry, were all equally strident and nasal, prickly and perfumed. The young lady of the moment, Daisy, had this habit of wrinkling her nose when she laughed; I imagine someone had once told her it was a charming mannerism, or that it made her look like some vaudeville starlet.

  It was before Prohibition, which meant we were legally permitted to attain the state of blessed cheer and universal love that a few glasses confer. Our fathers were already fast friends and busy making plans for future Sundays, which, when they could, they liked to spend out of the house. Our mothers confined themselves to keeping a watch on them out of the corners of their eyes, dreading the moment when their cheerful good humor would open the floodgates to lewd jokes and wild laughter.

  It was precisely at this time of restrained festivity that we enjoyed the greatest and probably the only luxury of our lives: a few days’ honeymoon in Sterling Forest, fifty miles from New York, in a small hotel by a lake. We boarded the train for Tuxedo at Penn Station, me carrying our two suitcases and Liz following as if I were beating a path with a machete through virgin jungle, beheading snakes and howler monkeys at every step. Upon our arrival, a horse-drawn carriage took us through Sterling Forest to Evergreen Lodge, where for the first time I proudly signed the guestbook Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell.

  I had never seen so many trees in all my life, the clear, dark outline of pines as far as the eye could see, the water a dazzl
ing, icy blue. Liz observed, asked questions, gathered wildflowers that she reluctantly left behind when we returned to the hotel, where we ate alone in the dining room, overwhelmed by everything we had seen that day. Let me simply say that Liz was curious about matters of the flesh and responded eagerly to my ardor. I was a happy man. That in my life I have known such moments remains, so many years later, an inexhaustible source of wonderment. When we returned, I succeeded in having her engaged as a nurse on Ellis Island, where she joined the hardworking medical staff. She worked in the infirmary that took in the sick, the wounded, and the crippled, and she also assisted the medical officers in carrying out compulsory medical examinations of newly arrived female immigrants.

  They were looking for lice, evidence of trachoma, or the early stages of pregnancy; they might listen to a worrying cough, change a dressing, disinfect a wound, hand out thermometers and medication, or even occasionally assist a surgeon during an operation. The sufferings of the body are endless. Liz performed this demanding work without showing the slightest disgust or impatience, with a gentleness for which she was criticized by some of her nursing colleagues, who saw her kindness as little more than a waste of time, given the queues that stretched far beyond the glass doors of their station.

  Often, back in our room late at night, she was drained, exhausted, and close to tears, distraught about some hopeless case or tragic story she had heard about or intuited. I, who had always been happy simply to keep the station running smoothly, was discovering with her the meaning of abject misery, separation, and hope. I was learning to discern a person’s fate, their history, in a veiled expression or a hesitant step. Oh, John, if you only knew … Sometimes she couldn’t say anything more, so I had to take my time, despite all the other things I’d have liked to talk about, to wait for her words to come, without forcing them, because it was essential that my dear sweet Liz rid herself, before the day ended, of the burden of all the things she’d heard, impotent and helpless; and it was only after she told me everything that she would at last relax a little, show me the gestures of affection I was hoping for, and receive mine.

  All this lasted just a few years, barely five short years, and despite the challenging episodes that we were witness to, we were truly happy. Then tragedy struck. When the Germania docked here on September 27, 1920, the captain immediately informed us that there had been several deaths during the crossing. The doctor on board had been discreet enough not to frighten the 2,400 passengers, three-quarters of whom were traveling in the notoriously overcrowded steerage. Five bodies hastily wrapped in sheets had been quietly thrown overboard after dark during the crossing, and he had begun to panic. I can still see his nervous gestures, the uneasy way he spoke, his anxious expression. An epidemic on board. Typhus. Contagion. Ten new cases had been isolated in the quarantine area.

  Liz was on duty over those days. She hardly left her post and had her meals brought to the infirmary that had been transformed into an isolation ward. She spent one night on a folding bed, along with a colleague, trying to soothe the sick as best she could. One night, not long after, she complained of a headache, which was unusual for her, and abdominal pain. Desperately worried, I went to fetch Doctor Graham, whose calm and compassion I appreciated. Initially he was furious at being woken when he had just finished his duties and was desperate for a few hours’ sleep, but he turned pale when I described her symptoms. What are you saying? He ran after me down the corridors towards our room and immediately placed Liz in quarantine. She smiled and told me not to worry. I was allowed to see her briefly the next day, when she had finally fallen asleep after hours of fighting a fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. I couldn’t bring myself to wake her and simply held her hand and stroked her forehead. I thought her drawn expression was easing, her face seemed a little less tense. I stayed for a long time at her bedside, with no awareness of time, holding her hand in mine, hoping to sense some slight pressure in response. I thought I felt it, though I had no idea that would be our last exchange and our farewell. I was persuaded to go and rest awhile. A few hours later, the sound of knocking woke me. Doctor Graham was at the door, his hair slick with perspiration, his spectacles pushed up onto his forehead. I’m so sorry about Liz, sir. So terribly sorry. It’s over.

  When I reached the infirmary I was greeted by tearful nurses and heavy silence. How deeply Liz was loved. I had always known it, and here I was reminded of it one last time. Someone asked me if I would like to see her. At that moment, I truly wished I had never been born.

  Because of the risk of contagion, the funeral was held almost immediately. My parents and Liz and Brian’s parents, overwhelmed with grief, crossed the bay to Ellis Island. Liz’s mother regarded me with unconcealed hostility. In her eyes it was I who was responsible for her daughter’s death, I was guilty of having brought her to this sewer that gave shelter to the dregs of the earth. She seemed afraid that she was going to be attacked by germs and bacteria. I saw her flinch from touching anything and she carefully lifted her skirt and held it close to her. I couldn’t blame her. Maybe she was right. She kept casting suspicious, appalled looks at everything around her. Brian was there, not even trying to hold back his tears. He’d come alone; Daisy, whom he’d married, was pregnant, and he didn’t want to force her to travel in circumstances that could not have been more difficult.

  The ceremony was brief and low-key; there were bouquets and flowers tied simply with ribbons, placed on the coffin one by one, each person awkwardly scanning the others’ faces, eyes lowered and ill at ease. I refused the sober black cloth with silver tassels that I’d been offered to drape over the coffin: Liz loved color. Most of the station personnel were there, except for those who couldn’t leave their posts. The doctors and nurses stood together, their expressions both more inconsolable and more impenetrable than the others. Their grief was sincere, I had no doubt, and accompanied by the abrupt realization that Liz’s fate might have been theirs, and could indeed still be one day.

  I staggered as the coffin was lowered into the ground, steadied by two thick ropes held by officers. I heard the wood as it touched the ground, and the ropes were pulled up, relieved of their burden. I don’t know who it was who took my arm to draw me away, but I do recall following him like a child.

  Immediately after the funeral, two orderlies came to collect Liz’s soiled bedlinen and laundry for burning. I found that more unbearable than the funeral. I was stunned, devastated, in shock. The infirmary witnessed three further deaths in the days that followed. I had to log everything, including Liz’s death, in my daily reports. I would not wish such suffering on anyone. At just twenty-seven she was gone. I had never thought such a thing possible. I know that it was just one injustice among many, one tragic event among so many others, but it was mine.

  ELLIS ISLAND, NOVEMBER 5, 11 O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING.

  After Liz’s death, I rarely left Ellis Island. During the first few months I made an effort to visit her parents in Williamsburg. I went feeling that I was paying off a debt, because I knew they expected it of me. Her mother’s hostility towards me had given way to a certain compassion. They had a need to talk about their daughter, about the happiness she had brought them that they would never know again. They portrayed a woman who really only existed for them. My Liz had little in common with the person they described; the childhood scenes they brooded on and their memories frozen in time meant nothing to me. I held on to the image of a gentle, intense, loving, and joyful young woman. It was an image that was impossible to share.