The girl stared at her, incredulous. “But the—”
“Yes, it was a terrible presentation,” Anna said, taking care to keep emotion out of her voice. “Enough to make an experienced surgeon blanch. But the patient comes first, and no matter how bad the situation, you have to push through your inclinations and keep your head. Which you did not.”
“The—smells disoriented me,” Nurse Hawkins said in a small voice. “I do know anatomy.”
Explanations and rationalizations. Anna had no patience with either, but she made an effort to soften her tone. “However well you think you know anatomy, that knowledge abandoned you at a crucial moment. It was your job to assist me, not to hinder me in my efforts. Do you think you met that very basic obligation?”
Mute, she gave a tight shake of the head.
“So, your decision?”
“You want me to decide between giving up nursing altogether and repeating a semester of training. But I can’t afford to do that, Dr. Savard. I couldn’t pay my rent.”
“Of course not,” Anna said. “You’ll have to move back into the nursing residence.”
The pale face flushed red.
“You have until tomorrow to reach a decision. If you want to continue at the New Amsterdam I will arrange for your reenrollment to begin on Monday. That should give you time to see to the practical matters. I realize this is difficult for you, but in the end I hope you’ll understand why I find it necessary.”
She watched the girl leave, and wondered whether she would see her again. She wondered too if she should have said something more encouraging. I hope you decide to stay, for example. But the truth was, she wasn’t sure that it would be good for anyone if she did.
There was a murmuring in the hall, not unexpected. Hawkins’s friends would have come with her to provide support, and no doubt they were now venting their outrage. One of them would be suggesting a letter of protest to be signed by all, while others argued that a letter would only draw more attention and make things more difficult. She hoped the calmer heads would prevail, but she could and would deal with whatever came her way.
For the next hour people streamed in and out. Clerks with questions and letters to be signed, students asking questions about assignments, assistants with updates on the conditions of the patients they were assigned. At four one of the boys who ran errands for the Mulberry Street police station popped in, dropped a note on her desk, and backed out again, as if she were a regent and he a commoner. Which might seem to him to be the case.
“Jimmy.”
He paused, one brow raised.
“Have you had your lunch?”
The other brow joined the first while he contemplated the question. If he told her yes, he had eaten, he would never know what she had been prepared to offer him. If he said no, she might cause trouble at the station house, where he was supposed to get his meals as the only payment for his services.
“Never mind,” she said, and reached down to take something out of her bag. “I have a half sandwich that’s going to waste. Can you find someone who might want it? Roast beef.”
He disappeared with the sandwich clamped tight in one dirty hand. Anna made a note to herself to speak to the Mulberry Street matron about providing water and soap for the messenger boys.
The note was in Jack’s strong handwriting:
They are safe away, in calm good spirits. I’ll be by to walk home with you at six.
Anna let out the breath she had been holding for what seemed like hours. It was done, then. Cap was gone, and she would never see him again. What an odd idea, really, to know that someone so very necessary in your life was lost to you and couldn’t be called back. Of all the people she had lost, Cap would be the first since she gained adulthood. She reminded herself that there would be letters, but then thought that it would almost be like communicating with someone from beyond the grave.
How Cap would laugh to know she was thinking like the spiritualists whose tappings and whispering she truly abhorred. She could almost hear him. In mock solemnity he would promise that when he passed on, his first project would be to learn Morse code so he could really communicate, none of this silly one tap for yes, two for no. He would provide a travelogue, of sorts, from the other side.
She would miss him for the rest of her life.
Tonight she would write a letter of her own, one that would be waiting when they got to Switzerland if she sent it express. It would be worth the cost to think of Sophie reading it out loud while they sat on a veranda overlooking the mountains that were glacier bound all through the year. That was the picture she would hold on to.
Another knock at the door jarred her out of her thoughts, this one almost timid. Irritated, she got up and went to open it, ready to speak her mind, and very plainly.
The young woman standing there was a stranger: she carried a valise in each hand and wore an old-fashioned skirt and jacket, much mended at the hems and far too large. Anna had little sense of fashions in color, but even she knew that a true redhead—as this young woman was, her mop of thick hair shorn short—could not wear a green and brown dress. Only the sharp angles of cheekbones and jaw saved her from looking like a tomato coming into full ripeness on the vine.
The young woman’s expression, open and hopeful, gave way to something like sadness. She said, “You don’t recognize me.”
It was the voice that made the difference. Anna stepped backward in her surprise. “Sister Mary Augustin?”
“Elise Mercier,” said the young woman who was, apparently, no longer a nun. “Might I please come in?”
• • •
ANNA TRIED NOT to stare and failed.
“To say I’m taken aback would be an understatement. I thought you had gone away for good. That’s the impression I was given.”
An honest smile replaced the uncertainty. “You asked about me?”
“Well, yes. Was that a mistake? Did my letter cause you problems of some kind?”
“Oh, no,” said Elise Mercier. “I’m glad to hear it. I thought maybe you’d just turn me away.”
“You have to start from the beginning and tell me about—this change in your circumstances.”
“It’s not very complicated,” she began.
And it seemed she was right. Elise Mercier, was, after all, still the young woman Anna had liked for her simple ability to express herself, for her intelligence and curiosity. With no fanfare she explained she had come to question her calling to the religious life, primarily because she could not push away the bone-deep itch to study medicine. She went to her superiors with these doubts, and in response they had sent her back to the Mother House where she could contemplate in solitude. Not a punishment, she added quickly. Just the opposite; the sisters had encouraged her to consider all the consequences of her choice. She could be a servant of God, nun or layperson.
“I decided to leave the order,” she ended. After a moment she added: “It was the right decision, I knew immediately. Like suddenly putting down a burden. The sisters gave me their blessing and these clothes—” She looked down at herself and grimaced.
Anna bit back a smile.
“I know, it’s awful. But there wasn’t much choice.”
“If you have no clothes, what’s in your bags?”
Elise blinked. “Some books and my notes.”
“From your studies?”
“I’ve kept a journal or a daybook, I suppose you’d call it, since I began training as a nurse. There wasn’t really anyone to talk to about the details of the cases I saw, so it seemed important to at least record my observations and the questions that couldn’t be answered. It’s very odd of me, I’m sure.”
“Just the opposite,” Anna said. “It bodes well for your education. So the sisters just—waved good-bye?”
“They gave me train fare and arranged a ride to the station.
I’m embarrassed to say that they thought I was going to go home to my family and I didn’t correct them. I took the first train into the city. I had just arrived when it occurred to me that I should have written to ask first. You might have changed your mind.”
“About?”
She raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Well, I would like to study medicine. After I’ve served as a nurse for as long as necessary, of course. But I do want to be a doctor, if I can fulfill the requirements and be accepted into Woman’s Medical School, on a scholarship—” Elise bit her lip. “Saying it out loud like that makes me sound either very conceited or unsophisticated or both. I don’t expect it to be easy. But if you meant what you said, and you’re willing to help me get started—or have I assumed too much?”
Anna said, “Not as far as I am concerned, but then I’m hardly an objective observer. Will you regret your decision, do you think?”
The question didn’t surprise her. “Sometimes I’ll regret the things I gave up,” Elise said. “But isn’t that always the way? Everyone makes choices and most people doubt themselves at one time or another. I may miss the solitude of the convent, but I know now that it wasn’t right for me.”
“Your family will object.”
“I think my mother will understand. What she wanted for me was a life free from the drudgery of a household and family.”
And this, Anna thought, was the time to say that her own thinking had changed on the subject, and that like Sister Mary Augustin—Elise Mercier, she corrected herself—like Elise, she had made some fundamental changes. But she couldn’t think how to start.
Instead she said, “If you apply yourself and work hard, I don’t doubt that you will be an excellent physician. Now we can go talk to the head of the nursing staff, and see how best to put you to work. Would that suit?”
So many things had been pressing on Anna, so many changes in such a short time, she hadn’t realized how unsettled she had been. But somehow the ability to help this sincere young woman, to put something important within her reach, that helped. A success to hold on to in a world where good young men went and stayed away.
30
IN THE YEARS since Anna came to the New Amsterdam she had heard the emergency alarm go off just three times: once for a fire in the next building; once when a staircase collapsed, casting dozens of orphans to a cobblestone courtyard; and the last time when an omnibus and a delivery wagon collided right in front of their door. She was introducing Elise to the nursing matron when the alarm sounded again, the rough clanging of the bell being yanked, and hard, from the porter’s desk in the entry hall.
There were rules for how staff conducted themselves when the alarm rang; first and foremost, the patients must not be unduly alarmed. Nurses and orderlies stayed in the wards until they got further instructions, and they kept the halls and stairways clear. Doctors and nurses not currently with patients walked as quickly as they could without breaking into a run.
Anna explained this to Elise as they made their way downstairs, voices raised around them as people wondered out loud what had happened.
They came into the lobby to find a total lack of chaos. There were a half-dozen children, and every one of them was surrounded by staff. Anna would have turned back and stayed out of the way—there was no obvious need for a surgeon, as of yet—but for the sight of Jack, his face bloody and his clothes torn. A nurse was taking a boy of about five years out of one crooked arm. The other hand he had fisted in the shirt of a wild-eyed boy about twelve.
She saw that he was not seriously hurt, but she went to him anyway. The matron grabbed Elise and took her off somewhere else, a baptism by fire.
He said, “There was a panic on the new bridge; somebody tripped on the stair and somebody else screamed and started a stampede. I saw it from the el platform. It was all over in a half hour, but what a mess. Marron, che macello. Maybe twenty dead, kids torn away from their parents. I stopped a wagon and piled these six in. Broken bones, but nothing life-threatening, I don’t think.”
While he talked she pulled his head down so she could look at his pupils and examine his scalp for lacerations.
“Not my blood,” he said. “There was plenty to go around, but none of it is mine.”
He drew in a deep breath and seemed to notice for the first time that he had a death grip on a boy who had all the markings of a street arab, from his bare feet and ragged clothes and hollow cheeks to an expression as black and hard as a frightened dog. But there was no sign of injury at all, save for a bruise on a cheekbone.
“And who is this?”
“Ah. This would be Jem O’Malley, also known as Trotter, grandson of Jem O’Malley, also known as Porker, of the Boodle gang. Porker masterminded the hijack of a two-hundred-pound pig from a butcher’s shop—” He shook the boy. “When was it, Trotter?”
The boy bared a mouthful of rotten teeth in something approximating a grin. “Eighteen hundred and sixty-two, the first of September. We celebrate it every year.”
Jack grimaced. “The industrious younger members of the Boodle gang decided to take advantage of hundreds of people crushed half to death by helping themselves to wallets and pocketbooks and watches and the like. Trotter here didn’t trot away fast enough, so he’s off to the Tombs.”
“Fine by me,” the boy said. “Could use a rest.”
Jack’s expression wasn’t hard to read, disgust and exasperation layered on top of each other. He glanced around the lobby. “I’ll let the patrolmen match up these little ones with their folks. Be back here in an hour to walk you home.”
And then he was gone before Anna could say even one more word.
• • •
SHE EXPECTED HIM to come back in a dark mood, but there was no sign of that at all; beyond the torn clothes it might have been any normal day. More than that, Jack recognized the former Sister Mary Augustin right away, which Anna found just a little irritating. His powers of observation were superior to her own in some very specific ways that had to do with his profession: he had an uncanny memory for faces, something she had never been very good at for reasons Aunt Quinlan would attribute to her introverted nature.
He gave them what news he had about the trouble at the new bridge. “Panic,” he said. “One person falls, another person screams, ‘The bridge is coming down!’ And they’re off like a herd of buffalo across the prairie.”
There were twelve confirmed dead, and twice as many injured, many of those in hospitals, from St. Vincent’s to Bellevue. To Elise he said, “An exciting day to move into the city, though I’m sure you could have done without it. I wonder what Mrs. Lee has got for dinner; I am starving.”
Anna told Jack about Elise’s plans, drawing her into the conversation wherever possible.
“Sophie’s room is available,” Anna said to her. “You are welcome to stay until you’ve gotten settled. You may want to live in the nurses’ boardinghouse for convenience alone. But I can predict with some confidence that my aunt will ask you to stay on.”
She paused. “Another thing is your clothes. You’ll need new—”
“Everything,” Elise supplied. “This dress is ugly, I know. But my funds are also extremely limited.”
Jack said, “We’ll cover your expenses until you get your first pay envelope. It would be our pleasure.”
Elise dropped her eyes and looked away, apparently embarrassed by Jack’s offer. Anna was trying to sort out the reason for it, but Jack got there first.
“Of course,” he said. “You don’t have any way of knowing. There’s nothing improper about the offer. I managed to persuade Anna to marry me, just this past Saturday. So you see, you’re not the only one with surprising news.”
“Oh,” Elise said, flustered. “May I—should I—wish you every happiness?”
“Thank you,” Anna said, almost as embarrassed as Elise was herself.
“It’s
very good of you to wish Anna every happiness,” Jack said with a grin. “But you’re supposed to congratulate me. Apparently it’s rude to do it the other way around, or so my sisters claim.”
“She’s confused enough as it is,” Anna said. “Have mercy.”
“No, it’s all right. I have to learn. So I congratulate you, Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte, and wish Dr. Savard every happiness.”
Elise Mercier was practical, intelligent, and eager to learn, and Anna sensed in her a steadfast dedication. Women who pursued medicine as a profession had to be stubborn, but most of all they had to have the courage of their convictions. It seemed to her that Elise did. She hoped she was right.
She was saying, “And I would be thankful if you would help me with a few dresses and a pair of shoes—” She looked at her feet with a slightly bemused expression. “And I will, of course, repay everything. Including room and board, for as long as I stay with you. If you are really sure.”
Anna said, “I am really sure, and I know Aunt Quinlan and Mrs. Lee will both be very happy to have you. Mr. and Mrs. Lee are Catholic, so you won’t be entirely out of familiar territory.”
Some of the color left the girl’s face. “They won’t approve.”
“They will approve,” Anna said. “I can promise you that much. What I can’t promise you is that Aunt Quinlan will take any money from you, no matter how long you stay. If anything is likely to put her in a sour mood, it would be you insisting on paying her for room and board. She won’t have it.”
Elise glanced at Jack as if looking for confirmation. Jack nodded, to the girl’s obvious discomfort.
Whatever awkwardness Elise might have worried about, her concerns were put to rest by Aunt Quinlan’s inability to be surprised or put out by the arrival of an unannounced houseguest. Of course Elise was welcome to stay, and how nice it would be to have her. Mrs. Lee went off straightaway to make sure Sophie’s old room was ready, Mr. Lee took her valises up, and the little Russo girls did cartwheels of joy to see her again. The news that she wasn’t going away again anytime soon had them hatching plans. They waited impatiently through an impromptu family meeting over tea where the adults discussed practicalities, and then they pounced. Elise must have the grand tour, without delay.