Jack ran his knuckles over her shoulder. “It’s not a sin to leave your patients behind for a few days.”
“I know that. Or let’s say, I have learned that.” She looked back toward the house, where someone was banging on a bell with great abandon.
“The dinner bell,” Jack said. “Time to get back.”
He stood up and offered his hand, pulled her to her feet.
“So what’s next?” she wanted to know. “What will we be doing?”
“Eating,” he said. “For hours we’ll sit around the table and watch the kids run themselves ragged until they’re tired enough to be rounded up and scrubbed down and put to bed. The cousins will play their instruments and if Mama has had enough wine, she’ll sing and make all of us sing with her. We’ll toast Massimo’s birthday, and my parents’ anniversary. The old stories will get told, about how Mama and Pa met. Every couple has to tell that story, and they’ll want us to tell ours, too.”
She must have made a face, because he laughed and squeezed her hand. “I’ll take care of that, no need to worry.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll tell a story,” she said, trying not to grin.
“Then we’ll eat some more and talk some more. A little before sunset—about three hours from now—we’ll walk over to that rise”—he pointed—“and watch as the longest day of our year comes to an end. How does that sound?”
“Good,” she said. “So what are you going to say about how we met?”
“You’ll have to wait and hear it for yourself.”
“I think I had better come up with a contingency plan.”
“You think I’ll embroider the truth?”
“Jack,” she said, rubbing her face against his sleeve. “You’re a lot like your sisters that way. Everything has to be embroidered, or it’s just not finished.”
• • •
DINNER WAS NOT quiet, but quieter than Anna had imagined. There were two reasons: the food demanded attention, and when voices did start to rise and conversations to cross, Jack’s mother would half stand up, her palms on the table, her arms straight, and cast a gaze over her family. Conversations settled down again to a steady patter.
At the next table the children made far more noise, and no one seemed to mind. Aunt Quinlan pointed this out, with some satisfaction.
“I wish Margaret were here to see that boisterous, happy children can in fact grow up to be reasonable adults. No straightjackets or corsets required.”
There were spots of high color on her cheeks, which could be attributed to the strong red wine she was so clearly enjoying, or simply to the fact that she was content. More important, she was holding a fork without any hint of pain, and eating with an appetite.
“You like it here,” Anna said to her aunt. “It reminds you of home.”
“I suppose it does remind me of Paradise,” said her aunt. “In all the ways that matter most.”
“You grew up in a town called Paradise?” Elise looked intrigued at this idea.
“I did,” Aunt Quinlan told her. “Long ago and far away. Now almost all my people are gone from there. Time is a river, my girl. Don’t ever forget that. Don’t any of you forget that.” And she smiled at Anna, to take the sting out of the truth.
• • •
LATER, WHEN IT was their turn to tell the story of their first encounter, Jack stood up and put a hand on Anna’s shoulder while he talked.
Jack said, “I walked into the church basement and there she was, in the middle of examining a little boy, a baby, really, who was sitting on her lap with his hands fisted in her jacket, as if she were all that kept him from drifting away into deeper waters. And she was just that. Then she realized that some of the children weren’t vaccinated, and how angry that made her. So she marched right up to a dragon of a nun—Elise will back me up, just ask her—and scolded her. She took up for those children like they were her own and she wouldn’t back down. And I knew it was her, the one I thought I’d never find. A strong woman, a smart, beautiful, uncompromising woman, and sure of her place in the world.”
His mother was smiling at Anna. “And what did you think when you first saw our Jack?”
“I heard his voice before I saw him and I thought, Oh, there’s a priest come to help. And then a little later, when I did look at him and saw him smiling at me I thought: He’s a priest. How sad.”
• • •
WHEN THE FIRST hint of twilight slipped across the sky just an hour later, Anna sat with Jack on the rise that overlooked all of the farm and the countryside beyond. They were alone, and not alone: the elder aunts had shepherded all the children off to bed, but the grown-ups were nearby, scattered over the hillside in twos and threes. Now and then a voice came to them, cajoling or scolding, singing or laughing.
An earthy, clean scent rose up from the ground as it gave up the day’s heat, mingling with punk-stick and wood smoke, the pennyroyal and sweet everlasting and wild bergamot that grew wild along the edges of fields and pastures. All the smells mingled together to float on a breeze that rose and fell like the sea.
She let her eyes roam over the farm buildings, the hothouses and greenhouses and barns and the apiary. The river wound its way along the fields to disappear into a small pond where the reflected blue of the sky began to give way to deeper reds and pinks and oranges all limned with gold. Colors so saturated and alive Anna imagined them falling to layer on her skin like flower petals.
In a silence threaded with whip-poor-will song and the low buzz of bees Anna tried to reconstruct the afternoon for herself.
She said, “I never once saw him talking.”
Jack pushed out a deep sigh that ruffled the hair on her nape.
“Not a word,” she said. “Though the girls never gave up petting and hugging and whispering.” Tonino hadn’t resisted, but neither had he shown any particular response.
“Rosa came to me,” Jack said. “She doesn’t understand why he won’t talk to them. I wasn’t sure what to say except that he needed our patience and understanding.”
“I wonder if we’ll ever know where he was for those weeks.”
Jack shrugged. “Maybe. He might be able to tell us himself, once he starts to believe that he’s safe.”
Just after dinner Anna had gone to check on the children where they slept in a single broad bed, Tonino tucked in between his sisters. Rosa’s breath hitched a little, a serious child even in sleep, no doubt making plans that would put everything right. She dreamed of a world in which little brothers were whole and unscarred and full of stories that came tumbling out like a stream over rocks. Time is a river.
“If he had come to us with broken bones I would know what to do for him. As it is I feel helpless, but I can’t let the girls see that.”
“Or Tonino,” Jack added.
“He’ll come back to us when he’s ready,” she said, mostly to herself, and kept back the logical next thought: if that day ever comes. She could be sure of Sophie coming home one day, but Tonino was another matter.
“We’ll do our best for him,” Jack said. And that had to be comfort enough, because it was true.
Anna said, “This has always been my favorite and least favorite time of year. On the cusp between the light and dark. Dusk always strikes me as the wrong word.”
Jack rubbed his cheek against her temple. “It’s funny that you should say that. When I was young I couldn’t understand how it could be that light and color flooded the world even after the sun disappeared. Later when I understood the geometry of it, that the sun drops below the horizon by a few degrees—and still, it doesn’t seem like enough of an explanation. It’s more than light and color, and it lasts for such a short time. And here it is now, do you feel it?”
They sat in the trembling light, Anna cradled against Jack to feel the beat of his heart against her spine, separated by nothing more than a
few inches of muscle and bone. Caught in the gloaming, suspended in the gilded hour, she saw herself in a landscape of years stretching into a horizon she had never dared imagine for herself.
When the light was gone and the first fireflies rose in the fields she said, “Thank you, Jack. Thank you for bringing me here to see this.”
The night came in gently, but even so the gooseflesh rose on her arms and she shivered in his arms.
“Time to go in,” he said.
Anna meant to agree, but instead she produced a great yawn.
With a laugh Jack lifted her to her feet, and then up into his arms. She relaxed against him, content to be carried in this time and place, watching his face as he brought her home, to the house where he had been raised and their family waited.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As ever, I am very thankful for the friends and colleagues who took the time to read drafts of this novel and provide feedback. They include my super-agent, Jill Grinberg; my original, home-again editor, Wendy McCurdy; Cheryl Pientka and Katelyn Detweiler at Grinberg Literary Management; and Penny Chambers, Jason Kovaks, Frances Howard-Snyder, Patricia Rosenmeyer, and Audrey Fraggalosch. Penny listened to me read the whole novel out loud, word by word, some parts more than once. Don’t know what I’d do without her.
Readers and friends active on Facebook and on my blog were instrumental in putting together a list of phrases in a whole army of Italian dialects. Thanks to every one of you.
Jason Kovaks rescued me from the quicksand of nineteenth-century legal documents, while Drs. Carl Heine, Janet Gilsdorf, and Margaret Jacobsen answered a lot of questions about medical matters in general.
Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine alone.
Finally, I am thankful to my husband for his support and patience in difficult times, and to my daughter Elisabeth. Who is.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849, The Wasps
(or in other words)
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner, 1950, Requiem for a Nun
TWO THINGS:
The idea for this novel originated with my paternal grandmother, Rosina Russo Lippi, born in 1882, the first daughter and eldest of four children of immigrant Italians employed in the silk factories in Paterson, New Jersey. When she was about eight, her parents died or disappeared; there is some inconclusive indication that they were living in Brooklyn twenty years later with an additional six children. How the first set of children were separated from their parents is one of many mysteries.
I’ve never been able to track down where the four oldest Russo children were for the first years they were orphaned or abandoned or lost. I do know that the only boy was eventually sent west on the orphan trains and later died in a factory explosion in Kansas. My grandmother’s youngest sister, an infant, was adopted, while she and her sister May were eventually taken into the Mother Cabrini home for Italian orphans, where they grew up and lived until they married, both before age twenty.
My grandmother had ten children who survived into adulthood, and she died at age seventy-two in 1955, six months before my birth. In accordance with Italian custom, I was named for her. This rather mundane fact is actually more complicated than it might seem. Here’s the thing: No one was ever really sure of her name.
It is spelled phonetically on her baptismal record; on marriage, birth, and death certificates it appears as Rosa, Rose, Rosie, or Rosina, with a surname that varies just as widely: Russo, Russ, Ross, and Rose. Her children each had a different story about her name and origins. The first seed for this novel was planted when my aunt Kate told me her version: Your grandmother’s name was Rose Rose, and you were named after her.
It was in researching my grandmother’s life that I first began to think about Manhattan in the 1880s, and to imagine a story. This is not my grandmother’s story, which is still to be discovered, but one of my own making.
Second: To really understand Manhattan in 1883 you have to forget the Manhattan you think you know. In 1883 there was no Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty, Flatiron Building, Times Square, or New York Public Library, to name just a few landmarks. Transportation was limited to walking, horse-drawn or steam-driven vehicles, elevated trains, and the growing railroad system. In 1883 gaslight still dominated; electric light had just begun to replace gas streetlights, and very few buildings had made the switch. The telephone was on the horizon, but in 1883 a telegram was the only way to move information quickly from place to place.
This novel was a research-intensive undertaking. Some information about that research that might be useful to those interested in the history or who are dedicated fact-checkers:
I will admit to a weakness for maps, and a particular weakness for the David Rumsey Map Collection (davidrumsey.com), which was especially useful in reconstructing Manhattan as it existed in 1883. Since that time streets have disappeared and morphed, while others have been renamed. The map of the city is further complicated because in a relatively short period of time public transportation went through multiple incarnations: elevated train lines went up and came down, dozens of railroads vied for street space and custom, and the first of them were dropped into tunnels to run underground, a precursor to the subway system. In a similar way real estate boomed as the city moved northward; Manhattanites didn’t hesitate to tear down elaborate structures less than fifty years old if there was a potential for profit in replacing them with something else.
What you find here are the original names and locations of buildings, businesses, institutions, intersections, residences, elevated train routes and stations, restaurants, schools, and everything else, in as far as I was able to document them.
The exceptions are first, the residences of fictitious characters: I’m sorry to say that you shouldn’t bother to go looking for the Quinlan, Savard, Maroney, or Campbell homes or the Mezzanotte shop, greenhouses, or farm, because they never existed. Also, I should point out that I’ve appropriated a block on Waverly Place just east of the original building that housed NYU for my fictional purposes. In 1883 this block was mostly commercial in nature and home to merchants who specialized in all kinds of clothing.
The New Amsterdam Charity Hospital is also fiction, and was never to be found in Manhattan.
With very few exceptions, the names of real people have been changed to allow me more interpretive license. This is especially the case where the historical record is lacking. For example, Father John McKinnawae is a highly fictionalized version of Father John Drumgoole, who established the Mount Loretto Orphan Asylum on Staten Island and the Catholic home for orphaned boys at the intersection of Great Jones Street and Lafayette; conversely, the head of the Foundling Asylum (known still as just the Foundling) was in life (as she is in the novel) Sister Mary Irene, of the Sisters of Charity. Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi was a real person, one who deserves to be widely known, married to another physician, Dr. Abraham Jacobi, whom some think of as the founder of modern pediatric medicine. All other physicians are fictional.
Anthony Comstock’s public actions and life history are drawn from newspaper accounts, contemporaneous tracts and books, and historical scholarship. However, the people he hounded and drove to suicide—something the Weeder in the Garden of the Lord (a title he gave himself) bragged about—have been fictionalized.
The Comstock Act is not fiction. All of the incidents mentioned in the story—including Anthony Comstock’s antics in and out of the courtroom—are based on the historical record, in particular on newspaper accounts.
I was especially careful about advances in medical science, because some of the most important discoveries—the nature of infection and the importance of sterile techniques, for example—were not instantaneously accepted or practiced; just the opposite. The story of President Garfield’s death is not included
here in any detail, but it is worth looking up, if only to get a sense of how slowly some things changed. Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (2011) is an excellent place to start.
Young people today (finally, I’m old enough to use that cliché) seem to have no real conception of how bad things were for women and, more important, could be again. The problems women faced in 1883 are not exaggerated here. However, please note that I am not claiming that all women were unhappy. Far from it, but not quite far enough. Some things to remember:
1. There was a period of several decades where male physicians were free to experiment with new procedures, no matter how specious the theoretical underpinnings, with little or no oversight from their peers or the law.
2. Women who did not adhere to the ideals of the time, whose interests and behaviors were considered abnormal and unnatural, were sometimes committed to hospitals and asylums, and in extreme cases they were subjected to castration and female circumcision. This came about in part because the men who ruled their lives decided that the female reproductive organs were the source of insanity. The aspects of the story that touch on these subjects are based on medical texts and medical journal articles of the time, as well as on current academic research. Readers familiar with the time period and subject will wonder why there is no mention of Dr. J. Marion Sims, who for decades was considered the father of modern gynecology until historians looked more closely. His absence from this story has to do with his absence from New York during the novel’s time span; I am not and should not be construed as an apologist, nor would I rationalize his systematic violation of the rights of women, free or slave, white or black, in his care.
3. Women were just beginning to get access to higher education. In large cities there were women’s medical colleges, but it was a good while later that they were admitted to the traditional institutions. Research on the early history of women physicians and surgeons comes from a wide variety of sources, most especially from Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez’s work on Mary Putnam Jacobi and Mary Amanda Dixon. Susan Wells’s Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine was tremendously useful. Other authors whose work in this area I found invaluable include Arleen Marcia Tuchman, William Leach, and Judith Walzer Leavitt. Sources differ on the numbers, but in 1883 about twenty African American female medical school graduates were practicing in the United States. Sophie’s history is inspired in part by the life stories of those indomitable women.