“He’s very personable with the girls.”
“He’s personable with girls of all ages.”
That made her pause. “Bambina never met him before today.”
“That doesn’t seem to matter. He’s got a way of looking at young women that turns their heads. In Bambina’s case that means she’s going to go on the attack.”
“Something has to be done.”
He turned toward her. “You’re afraid that if he’s around more she’ll do what, exactly?”
Anna frowned.
“You don’t need to worry about him. He’s had a lifetime of standing up to far worse than Bambina.”
“That’s just it,” Anna said. “She’s too fragile for the kinds of games he plays.”
“Bambina. Fragile?”
She shook her head. “Never mind. I see that the male mind is not nimble enough to deal with this situation.”
“But yours is?”
“Of course. Wait,” she said, as he reached for her.
“I completely forgot to say that there was a letter from Sophie and Cap yesterday. There were separate letters for everybody, and this one for you and me. I waited to read it with you.” She leaned back to take an envelope from her bedside table. “Do you want to hear it?”
She was already opening the envelope.
Dear Anna and Jack,
We are arrived here in reasonable good health and are, I think, settled. Or as settled as we can be. I know Anna will want all the details about the clinic and treatment plan, but for the moment I will just say that I am very satisfied that Dr. Zängerle knows what he’s doing and has some promising ideas.
The journey was almost more than Cap could bear, and for the first two days I feared the trip was a mistake that would take a quick and unhappy end. Then on the third day he rallied, as he has done so often in the past. Now he is distinctly cranky, and what a fine thing it is to have to listen to complaints about the rug on his lap and the sound of cowbells coming from higher pastures in the night. I said I found the cowbells oddly comforting, an alpine counterpoint to the screech of the omnibuses he slept through so easily at home. That made him smile. No one here is put off by his mood, and thus he has already given up on it.
This morning we sat on a wide balcony overlooking the mountains and valley below, the air cool and refreshing and the sun mild enough to be pleasant. I was reading aloud from a newspaper, when I realized that he had fallen asleep. He looked no older than seventeen, one arm thrown up over his head and his face turned away from me.
For one moment I thought he had gone. That he had slipped away without a word of farewell, and I sat struck dumb. I remember thinking I shouldn’t begrudge him a peaceful end to such a terrible and drawn-out illness, but in my heart I was so angry at him for going without me. Then he stirred, and my heart began to beat again.
Now, many hours later, I realize that this trip is as much for me as it is for him. I am learning what it will be like, and when it does happen, I think I will be able to bear it.
This letter was meant to offer you the kind of comfort I took from the day’s events. I hope I have succeeded.
Tomorrow or the next day I will write with more details. In the meantime ask the girls about their letter. They have a story about a cow in the garden and the very, very ugly dog who sits next to Cap at every opportunity, tail thumping hopefully for the tidbits Cap gives him.
We are together, and content to make the most of the time left to us in this beautiful place.
With great affection and love from both of us.
Your Sophie and Cap
Postscript. Cap instructs me to say that he wants news of the Campbell situation, gossip from Waverly Place, and a report on how you find marriage. I just want to know that you are happy.
36
ON FRIDAY MORNING Jack asked Anna over breakfast if there was a difficult case that was robbing her of sleep. It was true that she was sleeping badly, but she had made every effort to keep her restlessness to herself.
“Nothing so worthy,” she told him. She thought for a moment and chose her words carefully. “Life is so full, it feels like a waste of time to be sleeping.”
“What we need is a rainy Saturday,” he said. “With no chance of being called out on an emergency. You might remember then how nice it can be to spend time in bed. I could remind you.” He waggled both brows at her.
She made a face at him. “You’re not talking about sleeping.”
“I am. Maybe not exclusively, but sleeping—” He stopped and smiled widely. “In between.”
“So then, Detective Sergeant. Order up a rainy Saturday, would you?”
Mrs. Cabot came to refill their coffee cups and Anna reminded herself to send Jack’s aunt Philomena a thank-you note for finding them the housekeeper. She had sent three; Mrs. Lee had interviewed them one by one and hired Eve Cabot, a Yankee of the first order, born and raised in Maine, an excellent housekeeper and cook. She moved into the bedroom off the kitchen with one suitcase, a pot of violets she put on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, and Skidder, a genial Jack Russell terrier who hung on every word she said.
Anna liked Mrs. Cabot for her dry humor, her refusal to be taken aback by the oddities of the household, and the easy way she was with the girls.
“Anna,” Jack said, and inclined his head toward the pocket watch he had put on the table.
She jumped up, kissed Jack’s cheek, gathered up her things, and rushed out, but not before Ned came in the kitchen door. He had had his breakfast under Mrs. Lee’s watchful eye, and now would allow Mrs. Cabot to feed him too. It made them happy, and he lived for nothing so much as pleasing the women who fed him.
Anna waved a hand over her head, meant for both hello and good-bye, and studiously ignored the question that followed her out the door. She was almost as far as the Cooper Union when Ned caught up with her, brushing bread crumbs from his shirt.
“I don’t have time to stop,” Anna said.
After a full minute of silence she realized why he was walking along with her, and what he was waiting for.
“You are a sincere and dedicated teacher,” she said to him. “And I pay your fees happily. But sometimes Italian can’t be the first thing on my list of priorities.”
She had stopped in spite of herself, and now set off again.
He said, “What’s going on with Staten Island?”
That made her pause again, but only momentarily. “What do you mean? Jack and I got married on Staten Island.”
“There’s something more,” he said. “I heard Margaret talking about it to Mrs. Lee.”
Anna had no intention of telling Ned about the Mullen family. They hadn’t even decided on how, or whether, to tell the girls. The inability to come to an agreement was starting to fray the nerves on all sides, but Margaret was having the hardest time.
Ned said, “Does it have something to do with the Russo boys?”
That did bring her up short. “What exactly did you hear?”
“Not much.” But he looked away.
“I will strangle Margaret,” Anna said, without heat. “In the meantime we need to keep Rosa especially clear of such conversations.”
“So it is about her brothers.”
Late as she was, Anna stopped to consider this young man who was fast being drawn into both households on Waverly Place, simply by making himself indispensable. He spent his afternoons working for the Howells at the newsboys’ lodging, but the rest of the day he was busy making himself welcome among the Savard and Mezzanotte clans. He was a favorite of Margaret, who loved having a young man to mother; of Aunt Quinlan, who liked his banter and quickness of mind; of Mr. Lee, because he was as tireless as a workhorse and would turn his hand to anything; of Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Cabot, who alternately fed and scolded, ordered around and spoiled him. He was polite but more
formal with Chiara and Laura Lee when they were working in the house, probably, Anna thought, because he knew the danger of showing favoritism. Jack had had more than one private conversation with Ned to be sure he understood the boundaries, but Anna hadn’t asked for details.
Bambina was the only person he hadn’t won over. When she and Ned were in the same room she made a science of expressing her dislike and disapproval in such a way that it was hard to correct or admonish her. Even this didn’t seem to worry Ned. Just the opposite.
Jack thought Bambina was jealous because the girls were so enamored of him, and Mrs. Lee agreed. “Things come so easy to him. He only has to snap his fingers and the little girls let everything else drop. We’re going to have a talk, Mr. Baldy-Ned and me.”
Everyone was talking to Ned. Anna was as sure as she could be that he would behave himself. Now it seemed like the time had come to take him into closer confidence.
“Can I trust you to do what you can to keep the girls safe and calm?”
He nodded. “Of course.”
“Staten Island does have to do with one of the boys, but it’s a very delicate situation. Telling Rosa at this point would make things much more difficult, but we do need a plan. We can talk about that tonight once the girls are asleep. I’m trusting you to keep an eye on things until then.”
He gave a sharp bow from the shoulders, as neatly as a soldier. “I’ve got to get back. Bambina is coming over to hang some curtains, and you know how she looks forward to insulting me.”
Anna watched him run off, switched her Gladstone bag to her other hand, and picked up her pace.
• • •
ELISE GENERALLY SAW little of Anna during the workday, and when they did cross paths she made herself small. She had begun to make some friends among the nurses and medical students; she didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that Dr. Savard—who frightened almost everyone—had taken Elise under her wing. They were likely to accuse her of getting special treatment, which was in fact the case.
But there was another truth, one she reinforced with all her energy and concentration, every day: She didn’t take advantage. She worked very hard, asked no favors, and offered her help wherever she could, both at the hospital and on Waverly Place. And still today, just as she was finishing her shift Anna sent for her. Elise found her with her advanced medical students, all of them getting ready to leave the building.
“I thought you might want to come with us,” Anna said. “To see a thyroidectomy. It’s a very challenging operation. I myself have never done one. Not yet.”
Ten minutes earlier Elise had been looking forward to the garden and putting her feet up for the twenty minutes she allotted herself; now she felt as though she could sprout wings and fly.
They set off for New-York Hospital on foot, matching Anna’s quick pace. Elise was curious about the surgery, but she kept her silence and listened to the snatches of conversations that came to her about exams, a visit home, a lost notebook, a recent case they had been called on to write up as an assignment and how strictly Dr. Savard marked their efforts.
She wondered if these young women talked about Anna when she was out of earshot, and decided that they almost certainly did. About her classes and expectations, but also about her recent marriage. One of the nurses had approached her and asked straight out was it true, Dr. Savard had married an Italian? Because she couldn’t indulge in irritation, Elise feigned confusion. Better to be thought a little dim than to gossip about the person who had made this new life possible.
Even when the subject wasn’t forbidden, Elise often found herself at a loss, listening to the young women talk among themselves. They were hardworking, ambitious, and serious about their studies; they had made choices knowing full well that the goals they set for themselves would likely cut them off from the things most young women hoped for. Some of them would marry, according to Anna, but most would not. And still they admired men, and thought of them as potential mates, or at least bed partners.
Chiara had been the one to point out to Elise that men watched her.
“Watch me? Why?”
“Why not? You’re pretty.”
“I’m odd looking.” She ruffled her short hair.
“You’re pretty in an uncommon way, and you move like a ballerina.”
Upon close questioning it turned out that Chiara had never seen a ballerina except on a poster, but she stuck stubbornly to her assessment.
“I am a dumpling in the making,” Chiara insisted. “It’s the family curse. Age fifty, I’ll blow up.” She puffed out her cheeks to demonstrate. “But you’ve got long legs and a long neck and skin like silk. Men watch you because you’re nice to look at.”
The whole subject made her uncomfortable, but Chiara had started something that Rosa picked up on. When they were out in public together they kept a constant vigil and pointed out every admirer, some of which Elise truly believed they manufactured solely to fluster her. On the omnibus, a fair-haired man with a stack of books on his lap. A clerk at the notions counter at Denning’s Dry Goods with ears that stuck out from his head. The grooms standing outside Stewart’s stables, cheeky monkeys, every one. They swore that there were three different young men living in the Jansen Apartments—just across the way—who had gotten into the sudden habit of walking past the house at least twice a day, morning and evening. Chiara made up names for each of them, and jobs too: Alto was the tallest one and an assistant manager at a bank, Bruno had a big dark brown beard and taught at the Academy of Music, and Bello, with a face like an angel, was a passenger agent on the White Star Line. And all of them lived for a glimpse of Elise.
“If you’re right about this,” she wanted to know, “why haven’t any of them said a word to me?”
“Because you are pretty but distant. What’s the word—”
“Uninterested.”
“That’s not it. Distante. Aloof!”
Elise wondered if it was true. Did strangers see her as arrogant? Conceited? These were serious character flaws that were dealt with summarily in the convent. Had she learned them in the few weeks since she left?
This line of thought stayed with her until they reached the hospital, where they filed through the doors like so many schoolgirls. The smell of carbolic and lye soap stripped away all the trappings and just that easily they were physicians in training, sober, observant, somber.
It was a relief to be back in a familiar environment, where there were things to occupy her beyond the mysteries of men. There was, in fact, a delicate, dangerous procedure that involved wielding a scalpel to remove the thyroid, cocooned in veins, embedded in the platysma, sternothyroid, and sternohyoid muscles at the base of throat, without damaging carotid arteries, leaving the trachea and the larynx intact. She wondered if they might get a piece of the tissue to study under a microscope.
• • •
ANNA SENT HER students back to the New Amsterdam and went in search of an orthopedic surgeon she knew, hoping he’d have a minute to discuss a case. His office door stood open and the office was empty, but she could hear a conversation going on farther down the hall and so she went to investigate.
Dr. Mayfair stood with two colleagues in a triangle, their heads bent together. She began to back away, but David Mayfair looked up and caught sight of her.
“Dr. Savard.” He gestured for her to come closer. “Let me introduce you.”
There were reasons for her to be on her way, but it was a rare opportunity to meet with male colleagues who saw her not as an upstart or a threat, but as an equal. It made her nervous, she could admit that, because she so much wanted to be accepted. Striking the right tone was far more tiring than surgery, this kind of interaction.
“We were just talking about one of Dr. Harrison’s cases,” Dr. Mayfair said. “A young mother, and a terrible loss. You do more gynecological surgery than anyone here, maybe you cou
ld make more sense of it.”
All thoughts of the cuneiform osteotomy she had wanted to discuss disappeared. She cleared her throat. “What kind of case?”
Emil Harrison was a slight man of average height with a luxurious head of hair and the habit of picking at his beard. Anna couldn’t recall ever hearing his name before, but there were so many physicians in the city, that was nothing unusual. He seemed to be hesitant, and Anna was ready to excuse herself when Albert Wesniewski spoke up.
“I’d like to hear her opinion.”
“Fine, let’s go have a look.” Harrison didn’t sound as though he relished the idea.
David Mayfair said, “It’s too bad your students have gone already, Dr. Savard. This would have been an excellent experience.”
• • •
THE PHRASE THAT kept coming back to Anna later was excellent experience. David Mayfair wasn’t purposefully trivializing what had happened to the dead woman, and in fact he was more respectful than most. But it was an irritation, and one she could do nothing about, especially when he had gone out of his way to include her. Young women studying medicine would have to learn this lesson as well.
On the way to the morgue Emil Harrison gave her his patient’s history. He had been treating Irina Dmitrievna Svetlova for five years, and knew her quite well: age twenty-eight, born in St. Petersburg, the wife of a professor of Russian language and literature at Columbia College. Two sons, both born in New York and delivered by a German midwife without incident. The boys were thriving, and neither had there been anything wrong with Irina Svetlova except the fact that she was pregnant and did not want to be.
Dr. Harrison didn’t perform abortions, and did not refer her to any other doctor who might have done the procedure, for obvious reasons. But on Thursday morning he had been called to their home.
“The note said only that she was unwell,” Harrison went on. The Svetlovs lived in an elegant French flat on Fifth Avenue, where he found her in danger of her life.
“My first inclination was to attend her there so that she could die at home with her family nearby, but her husband insisted on a laparotomy.”