The Woman with the Cure

OTHER TITLES BY LYNN CULLENThe Sisters of Summit AvenueTwain’s EndMrs. PoeReign of MadnessThe Creation of EveI Am Rembrandt’s Daughter BERKLEYAn imprint of Penguin Random House LLCpenguinrandomhouse.comCopyright © 2023 by Lynn CullenReaders Guide copyright © 2023 by Lynn CullenPenguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Cullen, Lynn, author.Title: The woman with the cure / Lynn Cullen.Description: First Edition. | New York: Berkley, 2023.Identifiers: LCCN 2022025642 (print) | LCCN 2022025643 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593438060 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593438077 (ebook)Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.Classification: LCC PS3553.U2955 W66 2023 (print) | LCC PS3553.U2955 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20220624LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025642LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025643First Edition: February 2023Cover design by Vikki ChuCover image: Miguel Sobreira / ArcangelBook design by Daniel Brount, adapted for ebook by Kelly BrennanThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.pid_prh_6.0_142517364_c0_r1 CONTENTS CoverOther Titles by Lynn CullenTitle PageCopyrightDedicationEpigraph1940–1941A WifeChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 71942A GrandmotherChapter 8Chapter 91944A NurseChapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 151945A SecretaryChapter 16Chapter 171948A WifeChapter 18Chapter 191949A MotherChapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Chapter 23Chapter 241950–1951A ScientistChapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Chapter 281952A WifeChapter 29Chapter 301953A StatisticianChapter 31Chapter 32Chapter 33Chapter 34Chapter 351954–1956A SecretaryChapter 36A WifeChapter 37Chapter 381959–1960A GrandmotherChapter 39Chapter 401963A DaughterAcknowledgmentsReaders GuideBehind the BookQuestions for DiscussionAbout the Author For the children in my life, Keira, Ryan, Will, Maeve, Vivi, Olivia, and Sloane,with thanks to Dr. Dorothy Horstmann for her hand in protecting them All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.—GALILEO GALILEI 1940–1941 A WIFE 1940Arlene would never get over the empty swimming pools. It was July 1. The water should have been frothing with kids. A lifeguard should have been twirling his whistle up on his white wooden throne. Moms should have been unpacking egg-salad sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and Kool-Aid in a thermos, and whisking grit from the concrete skirting from their toddlers’ saggy diapers. But now the pool gaped open like a gum just relieved of a baby tooth, its only visitor a short-haired black dog eating a candy wrapper.Their dresses already damp with sweat, Arlene’s little girls, ages two and a half and four, were trying to mount the seatback to invade the front. She blocked them with her arm as she read a sign nailed to a telephone pole:DANGER!INFANTILE PARALYSIS!POLIO!POOL CLOSEDBY ORDER OF THE NASHVILLE MUNICIPAL HEALTH DEPARTMENTNO SWIMMING ALLOWED“Girls! It’s closed. Get back!”She didn’t think it would be open. It hadn’t been most of the summer. She’d paused here on the way to taking her husband lunch at the hospital only so they’d see for themselves and stop begging her to go swimming.Arlene drove on, through the wooded park, past empty swings, past a motionless merry-go-round, past teeter-totters frozen at a tilt. Soon they were in a neighborhood of white frame houses, where aproned women hung clothes in their backyards, cats sat on side porches next to the milkman’s wire basket, and men pushed mowers over their lawns. There were no children anywhere, a Norman Rockwell picture with the kids painted out.She remembered reading in the paper a few years back of towns hit with polio being quarantined like plague villages in the Middle Ages. She’d been horrified to learn of policemen stationed at roadblocks at the edge of town, sealing the polio victims in and the healthy out. They didn’t do that now. You could travel around in the summer all you wanted, as long as you didn’t mind being terrified for your kids.The kids scuffled in the backseat as she waited at a stoplight. Through her idle thoughts paraded Mikey Brown clanking into church in leg braces and a little girl being wheeled into Kroger by her staunchly smiling mother. She recalled one of Barry’s little patients in an iron lung, watching her from the mirror angled over the contraption. There but for the grace of God go her girls.At the hospital, she parked along the curb, then coaxed her oldest, Suzie, off the coveted shelf under the rear window. She straightened her daughters’ hairbows and fluffed their topknots and skirts, then dabbed her own perspiring neck with her handkerchief before grabbing the brown paper bag with Barry’s lunch.On the way up to Barry’s floor, a stern lesson was delivered to the girls about the importance of being quiet in a hospital. They must not wake the sick people. The elevator operator pulled open the door, revealing Barry at the nurses’ station, grinning in the lab coat that she’d bleached, starched, and pressed. The girls clattered out. “DADDY! DADDY! DADDY!”With a child clinging to each leg, he stumped over to the reception desk. The secretary behind it stopped her typing. “Aren’t they cute?”“May I?” Barry indicated the cut-glass bowl on the counter.“Go ahead.”He fanned out two lollipops for the girls. “Who wants a sucker?”They grabbed them greedily. “They’re new,” he told Arlene as they handed them to her to open after a brief tussle with the wrappers. “Saf-T-Pops. The handle is looped so if a kid falls on it, it won’t jab the roof of their mouth.”“Clever.”The family strolled down the hall thick with the tang of rubbing alcohol and iodine, the girls sucking on their candy, Arlene listening as he told her how busy he’d been. Oh, she knew. He came home late many nights since he’d started his two-year residency last July, too tired to do anything but eat the dinner she