The Masks

The gauze came in a flat cardboard box from the Red Cross rooms, four hundred of them cut and stitched by the women on Sunday, and Patrick Fitzgerald took two off the top before the box went out to the barbers and the bank clerks, one for himself and one he folded into his coat for his mother.

He tied his on in the mirror at the station and looked at a stranger. Forty-three years old, twenty of them in the uniform, and he had never once in that time been afraid of the thing he was sent out to enforce. He was afraid now. The closing order had come down the week before, when the cases in Washoe County stopped being rumors and started being names: the high school shut, the theaters, the churches, the saloons, the pool halls, any room where more than a few people breathed the same air. The chief had read it to the day shift off a sheet of paper and then had folded the paper twice and put it in his pocket, the way a man does with a thing he would rather not be holding.

Patrick’s beat that morning was the easy part of it. He walked Virginia Street from the river to the depot and looked in the windows of the places that were supposed to be dark, and they were dark. The Majestic had a notice pasted on the box office glass. The saloon doors along Commercial Row were shut and the men who would have been inside them were standing on the sidewalk instead, in the cold, in twos and threes, arguing about whether standing outside counted. He told them it counted. He told them to go home. They went as far as the next corner. At the depot the trains were still running, because nobody had figured out how to close a railroad, and he stood on the platform a minute and watched the eastbound let off its passengers, a dozen of them, coughing into their gloves, coming down the steps into his town from wherever the thing had been the day before.

The hard part was on Second Street.

A doctor had not been sending in his cases. That was the whole of the complaint. The board of health had put it in the paper that every physician in the city was to report every case of influenza he saw, the same day he saw it, and that a man who did not would be prosecuted, and the paper had printed it twice, and still there was a doctor on Second Street whose name had not once appeared on the sheets the board kept, though half the block had been sick. The chief had handed Patrick the summons the way he had handed him the closing order, held out at arm’s length, and said only that the man was to be brought down.

The office was up a flight of stairs over a druggist. The waiting room was empty, which was wrong, because every waiting room in Reno was full that month, and the door to the back was open, and Patrick went through it with his hat in his hand and found the doctor sitting on a kitchen chair beside a cot with a woman on it who was not going to see the evening.

She was young. Her lips were the color of a bruise. The doctor had his sleeves rolled and a basin on the floor and a wet cloth in his hand, and he did not get up when Patrick came in, and did not ask what he wanted, and after a moment Patrick understood that the man knew exactly what he wanted and had decided it could wait.

He stood in the doorway with the summons in his coat. He could hear the woman breathing, which was a sound like someone working a pump that had lost its prime, and he could hear the druggist’s bell ring downstairs, and a wagon in the street. He thought of his mother, who had cooked for the men on Commercial Row for forty years and had buried a husband and was seventy-two and had spent Sunday at a long table in the Red Cross rooms with a needle, and who would be at the lunch counter this minute, mask or no mask, because closing the counter had not occurred to her and no order had told her to.

“How many,” Patrick said. “This week.”

The doctor did not look up. “Thirty-one,” he said. “That I have seen. I have not seen all of them.”

“You have not sent in one.”

“I have not had time to sit down and write.” He wrung the cloth. “I will sit down and write when I have a minute to sit. Take me in or do not. It will not change how many there are.”

Patrick had taken men in for less. He had taken men in for standing in the wrong doorway that same morning. He looked at the woman on the cot and at the basin and at the doctor’s hands, which were shaking a little, not from fear, from not having stopped, and he took the summons out of his coat and looked at it and put it back.

“The board wants the names,” he said. “Not you. The names. Write them on anything. I will carry them down myself.”

The doctor looked at him then, for the first time, over the top of the mask he was not wearing. Then he reached for a prescription pad on the windowsill and began to write, quickly, in a hand that leaned hard to the right, thirty-one names and the streets they lived on, and when he tore the sheet off and held it out Patrick saw that the last name on it was the name of the woman on the cot.

He went down the stairs with the sheet folded inside his coat next to the mask he had brought for his mother. On Virginia Street the wind had come up and the men were gone from the sidewalks at last, and a barber stood in his own doorway with a square of white gauze over his mouth and nose like a man who had been told to hold his breath and was doing his best. Patrick went past him toward Commercial Row. He would take the names to the board. Then he would take the mask to the counter and tie it on his mother himself, and she would let him, because she would see his face, and she would not ask what he had seen.

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