The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [60]
Lazear’s living quarters were not quite what they were in Baltimore. He quickly wrote to his mother to unpack the boxes of golf clubs, books of Shakespeare, linen napkins and dishes. They need not be shipped. Much in the style of the other buildings at Camp Columbia, Lazear’s family quarters consisted of a two-room house made of wide, pine boards. A wooden bridge connected the two wings. In one house, Lazear and his wife lived; in the other, Houston and his nanny, Gertrude, slept. There was a roof and rafters, but no ceiling. There were shutters, but no glass windowpanes. A sloping roofline covered the walk-around porch.
The small shower bath had its own dwelling about one hundred feet away from the main house, but Lazear had hopes of having a real bathroom affixed to the house that autumn. The shower bath was in essence a bathtub with sprays of water that came out the side, so that one could shower without wetting one’s hair, as one soldier described it.
Mabel had done her best to make it feel like a home. Shopping in Havana, she had found matting at a Chinese store to sew and hang as a partition, giving them a bedroom on one side and sitting room on the other. Mosquito nets, while practical, also added a web of gauze to the otherwise hard, plank-wood bedrooms. Even with the netting, nature could not be contained. Fleas would often bite the baby. And tree frogs settled into the rafters, falling with a damp thud against the beds, sometimes landing in the water bucket. Soldiers would often begin their morning shave only to look down and find a tree frog with all four feet sucking the side of the pail and its head barely above the surface of the water. Eventually, covers were issued for the water pails.
The surrounding countryside was the real charm of their situation. Only a few miles from the beach, Lazear went, almost daily, for a sea bath. Sea grapes and mangroves tangled the shoreline, where white sand sloped toward a green-blue ocean. Houston played in the sand and collected shells. Every afternoon, Gertrude took Houston on a long walk in the countryside and let him chase chickens.
Carts of fresh produce or mules strapped with baskets of vegetables regularly came into the camp from Havana. Fresh meats were shipped from Chicago, packed in ice. Mabel had brought Borden’s condensed milk for the baby. Houston also had a healthy supply of oatmeal, eggs and meat juice.
As the rainy season, and more important, the quarantine season, approached, Mabel and Houston planned to sail for the U.S. In her sixth month of pregnancy, her condition was certainly a factor, but there was also a more practical reason. Once quarantine was under way, the fumigation process in New York would ruin all of Mabel’s clothes and personal belongings. On April 14, Lazear took Mabel and Houston to the Havana harbor to ship out on the steamer Sedgwick, where he bought her a twelve-dollar ticket and said good-bye. Jesse Lazear probably had another reason to send his wife and son away—locals were already referring to this one as a yellow fever year. It must have been a sad parting. The fever seasonwould last several months, and Lazear’s work in Cuba would keep him too busy to travel back anytime soon. Houston would grow and change during those months away, and most likely, Mabel would give birth to their next child before the family could be together again.
Lazear continued with his daily work in the hospital wards and lab after Mabel and Houston left. He swam in the sea and ate with the other officers in the mess hall, where they drank red wine in an attempt to keep fever at bay. The men entertained themselves with cards, a brass spittoon at the foot of each chair, or on special occasions, smoked an old Madre rolled cigar. Potted ferns and palms climbed the walls of the social hall, as though the flora of Cuba would not be kept out. Open shutters and high ceilings crisscrossed in wooden beams helped keep the room cool. Dances