When there was a pause in his storytelling Anna pointed something out. “You’re trying to rob me of my mood.”
Jack stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles, put his hands behind his head, and tilted his face to the salt breeze. He grinned without looking at her.
“How am I doing?”
Anna bit back her own smile but conceded defeat; it was too fine a summer morning to fret over things that could not be changed or even prepared for. It all had to be left to Conrad Belmont, for the moment at least.
“Surprisingly well.”
“That’s a relief. It’s bad luck to scowl on your birthday.”
Anna closed her eyes and put her head back. “Sophie has been telling tales.”
“It’s not your birthday?”
Anna hummed.
“You don’t want any presents, she told me. You dislike birthdays.”
“True.”
“I like presents,” Jack said.
“Is it your birthday?”
“It is not, but if you’re not using yours—”
Anna turned toward him. “So what is it you want for your not-birthday?”
“I’ll think of something,” he said. Then he roused himself to take a wrapped package from his valise while he talked about progress he had made arranging repairs to the old Greber house. Except he didn’t call it the old Greber house or my new house or even our new house, but Weeds.
The Russo girls had given the new house that very odd name to distinguish it from Aunt Quinlan’s, now renamed Roses, as in We’re going over to Weeds to play, or They’ll be wondering about us at Roses. Without comment or discussion, everyone had taken up the new names. Anna feared that even after Mr. Lee had transformed the neglected garden into a showpiece the name would stick. In fifty years, quite likely, few people would remember why.
He handed her the package wrapped in brown paper.
“Not a birthday present,” he said. “Wallpaper samples. My sisters want to know what appeals to you.”
Anna unfolded the samples and spread them out on her lap. Huge fussy sunflowers against a background of maroon and brown, scrolling agapanthus in olive greens and grays, cabbage roses in pink and red rioting over a trellis interrupted here and there with blue globules that were meant, she thought, to be songbirds. She folded the samples and retied the bundle while she thought.
She said, “Do we have to have wallpaper?”
He let out a relieved sigh. “Maybe together we can convince my sisters that we don’t. I’d get a headache looking at any of those every day.”
“Tell them—never mind, you shouldn’t have to speak for me. I’ll take them to a friend’s house that I admire. Maybe that will be enough.”
“Friend?”
She looked at him closely. “You sound surprised.”
“Not in the least,” he said. “I’m just remembering you told me once that you didn’t have many friends.”
“It’s very rude of you to remember everything I say.” She made an effort to sound severe and produced only an indigent huff. “And I do have a few friends. This one’s name is Lisped; her daughter went to school with us at the Cooper Union. Annika married a Swede and moved back there, but her mother is still here.”
“Wait, you and Sophie went to the Cooper Union? I thought they only taught classes for adults.”
“The institute has a class for the children of faculty members. Aunt Quinlan taught drawing and painting, Cap’s uncle Vantroyen taught engineering, and Annika’s father taught mathematics. That’s how I met Cap, at a lecture the grown-ups went to hear, before we even started school.”
“You’ve never told me much about any of this.”
“Haven’t I?” Anna considered. “I don’t think the stories are anything out of the ordinary. We were overindulged, I suppose, when it came to school. Any curiosity was to be encouraged, and everything was a game, from mathematics to Latin. We took every opportunity to go off on our own to explore. Annika and her brother Nils sometimes joined us.
“But my point was, I very much like her mother’s house. Lisped is someone I admire greatly. If there’s time to go visit, I wonder if your sisters would be shocked.”
“They might surprise you.”
Anna thought, That would be nice.
For a long time they didn’t talk at all, and Anna was free to take in the ocean air and the sun on the water, and the promise of what just might turn out to be a perfect day. Little by little she was aware of her mood floating away from her to disappear without a trace. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding, put her head on Jack’s shoulder, and fell asleep. It was such a deep sleep that she was disoriented when he woke her an hour later, his breath on her ear sending a shiver running up and down her spine.
He said, “Vanderbilt’s Landing, Savard. Rise and shine.”
• • •
“YOU KNOW, YOU could call me Anna at this point,” she told him as they made their way from the ferry landing to the Stapleton train station. As they walked she was scanning the shoreline and all the mansions that overlooked the sound, the homes of men who traveled to Brooklyn or Manhattan by ferry, mornings and evenings.
He said, “You still call me Mezzanotte for the most part.”
“Because I like the sound of it. If your last name were Düsediekerbäumer or Gooch or Quisenberry—” She shrugged.
“You would never have talked to me at all?”
“Well,” she said, stepping neatly away. “Of course I would have talked to you. But I couldn’t marry someone with the name Düsediekerbäumer. In fact, it’s odd that I’m marrying anybody at all. I didn’t think I ever would.”
She was in a lighter mood, even playful, but not far beneath the surface she was still exhausted. Standing next to him on the platform she almost swayed in the breeze, blinking owlishly in the bright sun.
“What about Anna Mezzanotte, do you like the sound of that?”
She jerked and came fully awake. “Um,” she said.
Jack had wondered if this would be an issue, if she would resist taking his name. He hoped he wouldn’t have to convince her, because this was one point on which his parents—his father, most especially—would balk.
“I have a suggestion,” he said before she could think how to respond. “But let’s wait until we’ve found our seats.”
As soon as the train jerked its way out of the station she said, “Your suggestion?”
“As a doctor, you will want to remain Dr. Savard, I understand that. But at home, and when children come along—”
“They would have your last name, of course.” Relief flooded her expression. “I thought you would be unhappy about—my professional name.”
He shook his head, thinking, Pick your battles. He said, “At home you’re one woman and at the hospital, another.”
She collapsed, boneless, against her seat back, and yawned again. “I don’t seem to be able to keep my eyes open.”
“Then sleep,” he said, leaning a shoulder toward her in invitation. “Anything exciting happens, I’ll wake you up.”
She laughed, rubbing her cheek against his jacket as if to find the right spot. “I wonder what would count as exciting on Staten Island. A deer on the tracks?” She had other questions about the route—if the train line ran close along Raritan Bay, whether there might be time to walk on the beaches later—and then she was asleep again without waiting for comment or answers.
He put his arm around her to hold her steady against the sway and lurch of the train and looked up to see that they were being observed by two old women—farmers’ wives, almost certainly, by their faded sunbonnets and aprons. Watching Anna sleep as attentively as they might have watched a play on the stage. Sleep robbed her face of its fierce intelligence and turned her into nothing more or less than a woman in the ful
l blush of her youth at rest, innocent, almost otherworldly. Then the women turned to look out the window, and the moment passed.
For a moment Jack weighed the idea of getting the Times out of his valise, and then remembered the article just under the fold on the front page, where Anna’s name figured so prominently. She might not have seen it. He hoped she had not. Even more, he hoped she hadn’t seen the Post or any of the other rags that were having such a good time dissecting the Savard women. Tomorrow would be soon enough for all that, or the day after. For today they were free of everything and everyone.
They traveled along Raritan Bay for a while, slow enough to take in long stretches of dunes that revealed and then hid the shore where oystermen were hauling nets. On the horizon he could just make out boats like smudges of paint shimmering in the sun.
According to the train schedule the journey would take an hour, which Jack soon realized was more a fanciful guess than a statement of fact. He watched passengers amble along to get on and off as if they had never heard the word timetable. At one stop the conductor sat himself down on a convenient pile of luggage and launched into what looked like a serious conversation with the stationmaster, pausing only to light his pipe. So close to Manhattan, and a different world altogether, different from Greenwood, too, in ways he couldn’t quite pinpoint except that Greenwood was home.
Stapleton was a proper town, but the rest of the interior of Staten Island would be like this: farms, forest, wilderness. The next stop was in a village spread out around the train station like an apron: pretty, slightly tattered, and very quiet but for the huff of the train engine. A stand of tulip trees cast shade over the road where a leggy girl in wooden clogs was herding a couple of goats along the road. The baby balanced on her hip had one small fist knotted in the sleeve of her dress.
On the other side of the train tracks orchards spread out, apricot and plum and cherry in bloom, swaths of white and pink and red as far as he could see.
The stops were ten or twenty minutes apart, interrupted for long stretches for no apparent reason. Every station was simpler and smaller than the one before, with less of a village around it. The stretches of forest got longer, crab apples scattered between cedar and gum trees, their petals floating on the breeze. Passengers came and went, greeted each other, and talked in the way of people who knew each other’s parents and grandparents, secrets and foibles. Anna slept through all of it, unaware.
He had been told that Pleasant Plains was the stop closest to the new mission at Mount Loretto, but Jack bought tickets for Tottenville, two stops on, a more substantial village and the final train stop on the southernmost shore with another ferry station, this one with service to Perth Amboy in Jersey. In Tottenville he hoped they would be able to find lunch and directions and a livery stable to rent a horse and trap and then, finally, a hotel, if fate was kind.
When the conductor came through calling out Tottenville, end of the line, Tottenville! Jack got some basic information: the name of a restaurant where they could get a good lunch, and, when Jack mentioned they would be going to Mount Loretto, the news that Father McKinnawae had gone to the city just this morning, traveling north to the ferry on this very train. He wouldn’t be back for a couple of days, some kind of emergency at his Mission of the Immaculate Virgin, but then wasn’t that always the way with those street arabs. McKinnawae was a saint, papist or not, and you couldn’t convince Tom Bottoms any different.
“There’s nobody at Mount Loretto at all?” Jack asked.
“Didn’t say that, did I. The place is overrun with monkish types, you know, brown robes and bald spots”—he took off his hat to point to his own pate, shiny with perspiration—“they give themselves, on purpose. Like a hive of worker bees,” said the conductor. “Work till they drop.”
• • •
WALKING TO THE inn for lunch, Anna wondered why she wasn’t more upset. All this way for no good reason. Of course they would still go to Mount Loretto and ask questions, but the chance of real progress seemed unlikely. They might just as well turn around and go back to the city, but neither of them raised the subject, and Anna was glad. The very idea made her head ache.
The restaurant was more of a café, just a few tables and a lunch counter where older men hunched over coffee cups and slabs of pie. They got the last free table, one that overlooked the ferry terminal. Through windows polished to a high shine Anna watched seagulls wheeling overhead calling to each other in voices that had always struck her as forlorn, even in such bright weather.
“We can go to Mount Loretto this afternoon,” Jack said. “And find a beach to walk on, after. Take a nap somewhere in the shade. Maybe I should write a thank-you note to McKinnawae for not being here.”
Anna thought of saying what came to mind: maybe it was time to give up. The Russo boys were gone, they could only hope to good families. But instead the waitress came, and they ordered oyster stew—the freshest on the island, they were told—thick with potatoes and carrots all jumbled together in a silky broth, served over great rounds of delicate buttery pastry.
“I can’t eat all this,” Anna said, and then proved herself wrong. She stopped just short of the last spoonful, which Jack was glad to finish off. And he was still hungry; that was obvious by the way he was sizing up the row of pies kept under glass domes. He ordered lemon meringue and offered her a taste on his fork, smooth and tart and sweet all at once.
What an oddly intimate thing, to eat from the same fork. Anna let the pie rest on her tongue, enjoying the flavors and textures, and enjoying too the way Jack’s eyes were fixed on her mouth and then her throat as she swallowed. There was no sheen of perspiration on his skin but still she thought there was a scent, maybe one that she alone could perceive. She was aware of the beat of her own pulse at her wrists and at the base of her throat and low in the very core of her being.
They were almost finished when a cranky toddler sitting with his parents at the next table let out an impatient bellow and launched himself out of his chair, so abruptly that neither mother nor father had any chance of catching him. He hit the floor chin first, and bounced to his feet like the three-year-old rubber ball he was.
For one second there was silence all around and then he realized that a sheet of blood was pouring off his chin. To Anna’s ear it was clear that he wasn’t howling in pain, but outrage, to have been so thwarted. His parents, on the other hand, looked as though they might swoon.
Anna got up.
“May I have a look? I’m a doctor.” And at their confused expressions: “A physician.”
At first she thought they would send her away, outraged at such an obvious lie. Then common sense won out, and the young man with a face almost as smooth as his son’s picked the boy up and thrust him into her arms. Anna sat down with the boy on her lap, angled so that he would bleed on his already ruined clothes rather than her own.
“His name is Ernst,” the mother offered, her hands fisted together as if she had to fight the urge to snatch him up and away.
Jack had already brought her bag over and opened it for her, crouching beside it and waiting to hear what she might need.
“My goodness,” she said to the little boy called Ernst, and pointed to an invisible spot on the floorboards. “Look at the hole you made in the floor. You must have a very hard head.”
Startled, he stopped his wailing and considered the floor. While Anna blotted away the blood with a square of gauze, she talked to him in a calm voice, offering observations that made him forget how insulted he was supposed to be.
“There,” she said, gesturing to his parents to come closer. “He’s sprung a leak, but just a small one. No need for stitches. It just needs disinfecting and a plaster to keep it clean.”
Anna looked up and caught sight of Jack watching her, his expression open and frank and unmistakable: he really did love her. She had wanted to believe it, she had set herself the task of bel
ieving it, but now she saw it as clearly as she saw the face of the little boy in her arms, round cheeks and sea-green eyes still full of tears.
Ernst looked at her solemnly and said, “I made a hole in the floor?”
• • •
IT WAS THE waitress who warned them about Mr. Malone at the livery: he liked a nap in the early afternoon, and never in the same place.
“Calling his name will do you no good,” she said. “On a good day he’s mostly deaf, and he hasn’t had a good day in a year or more.”
“Now, Nell,” called someone from the other side of the room. “Don’t be telling tales. Your old dad always shows up by two bells.”
She laughed. “Me dad can’t hear the bells. But,” she admitted, Jack thought with some affection, “he shouldn’t be too long now.”
• • •
MR. MALONE DID appear in fairly short order, with wisps of hay in his sparse gray hair. Shouting, they managed well enough to rent a horse and trap, but by that time it was already half past two, and they still didn’t know exactly where they were going.
“We’ll have to go someplace else to ask directions,” Jack said.
But Anna had other ideas. She produced a pencil and a piece of paper and put them on the counter in front of the old man. On it she printed in clear letters: Please draw a map to Mount Loretto.
You would have thought she had handed him a hundred-dollar bill, he was so pleased to be able to help. In five minutes they had a decent map, with roads marked. Anna gave the man a fifty-cent piece, and he winked at her.
“I was starting to think this whole undertaking was doomed,” Anna said, once they set off.
Jack bumped her with his shoulder. “Got to have more faith than that, Savard.”
For a few minutes the chestnut—young and up to tricks in the fine weather—demanded his full attention, and by the time he could look at Anna, she was focused on the view. He wondered what he had missed, because it seemed, just then, that she was holding back something she could not quite bring herself to say. But he wouldn’t press, not on such a fine afternoon. They passed a small farmstead surrounded by dogwood and mountain laurel in trembling first blossom. Geese were busy looking for worms and slugs in a newly turned garden plot, stark white against the dark soil.