A Fall of Marigolds

Clara thinks about the nature of disease, particularly scarlet fever. She notes that though disease is “powerful” it “has no intent. It doesn’t want anything. It has no malevolent desire to kill” (111). When people have contracted a deadly illness, however, “the disease seems heinous, deliberate, and personal” (112). This is easier, Clara thinks, than acknowledging the fragility of the human body or confronting one’s mortality.

Clara cares for Andrew and the other men who have contracted scarlet fever, and as she makes the rounds with Dr. Randall, he compliments her nursing skills and makes small talk, asking her what she likes to read. Clara blurts out that she likes poetry, only because she has Lily’s book of poems in her room, and Dr. Randall asks if she would like to “discuss a book together in the staff commons after dinner” (118). Clara admits to herself that she “longed for something to do in the evening besides read the social pages of the newspaper with Dolly and the other girls and listen to them gossip about people” (118); however, she does not want anyone to think she is interested in Dr. Randall romantically, and she manages to put Dr. Randall off without committing to anything. 

Clara recalls what happened after the fire, specifically, her parents coming to New York to take her back to Pennsylvania. Clara notices that her mother is wearing a new dress, and she realizes that if she returns to Pennsylvania, everything will be “slightly different” except her: She “would go back to the exact spot where [she’d] been before [she] had met Edward” (122). Furthermore, her parents do not seem to understand the enormity of what she has been through, and she feels for the first time a desire for an in-between place. She remembers a classmate in nursing school who took a job on Ellis Island, describing it as “in the city without being in the city,” that “[p]eople don’t live there. It’s nobody’s address” (124).

Her parents are not pleased that she wants to stay in New York, and they are frightened at the thought that Clara could be endangered by the diseases carried to New York by the immigrants. Nonetheless, they allow Clara to stay; her father, at least, seems to realize that Clara needs to stay, that he cannot fix her because “this was not a broken thing to be fixed. Or a disease to be cured. It was an abyss to climb out if” (126). He even uses some of his contacts in the medical field to help her get a place on Ellis Island.