The Gilded Hour (22 page)

Her tone was very even, and when she raised her eyes to his they were clear.

She said, “I don’t know if it would help or hurt Rosa to see her father. I really haven’t known her long enough to anticipate her reaction.” And then: “What are you thinking?”

The urge to move closer was one Jack resisted in that moment. He said, “I’m thinking that you weren’t with either of your parents when they died.”

She jerked as if he had struck her. “I’m aware of that. Obviously.”

“I’m thinking that somehow, as logical as you are, you still blame yourself for their deaths because you weren’t with them. I can see it in your face when you talk about it.”

“I was a little girl,” she said, her voice catching. “I was just a baby.”

Jack put his arm around her and pulled her into his side. She came to him without hesitation, letting herself be held. They stood just like that at the rail and watched as a storm came in from the west, moving like a great wave in the sky to overpower the sunset and displace the night itself. In the distance the first flicker of lightning and the breeze that washed over them made her shiver. He felt it.

When she turned in the circle of his arm she had to put her head back to look at him, and so he kissed her. It was a gentle, almost-nothing kiss and still through all the clothes between them he felt her tremble, as aware, as alive as the light that forked through the sky. He kissed her again in just the same way, a question without words. In reply she raised a hand and cupped his cheek. Her palm was cold—he had forgotten to give her back her gloves, he realized now—but her touch was sure. This time she met him halfway, her free hand curled into his lapel, her kiss open and warm and welcoming. A strong woman, fragile in his arms.

•   •   •

A
T
HOME
THE
little girls had already been put to bed and Sophie had gone out on a call. There was no sign of Mrs. Lee or Margaret, either, but Aunt Quinlan was waiting for her in the parlor. There was a fire in the hearth, which was a welcome counterpoint to the rain on the roof. All the drapes had been drawn shut with the exception of one, where Aunt Quinlan sat to watch the storm.

She had an open book in her lap but no light except the fire and the occasional blue-white splash of lightning. Anna sat down beside her and watched the trees bending in the wind.

“Did Mr. Lee get things in the garden tied down in time?”

“He always does,” her aunt said with a small smile. “I’m looking forward to the garden this summer. I might move out there entirely, dressing table and clothes closet included.”

Aunt Quinlan had grown up in a small village on the very edge of the northern forests, a world different in every way from the one she inhabited now. Anna had been born in that same village but had only the vaguest memories of it.

Now she said, “Is it the spring that makes you more homesick than usual?”

“I suppose it must be. My da has been on my mind today. Now are you going to tell me why it is Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte just helped you out of a cab, or must I torture you to get that information?”

“No torture necessary,” Anna said. “He came to the hospital to tell me that he found—” She glanced behind herself to be absolutely sure they were alone. “Mr. Russo. The girls’ father.”

She related the details as briefly as she could manage. The story of the Infant Hospital she kept to herself, and might never tell at all.

It was true that Aunt Quinlan was not easily surprised, but Anna had expected a little bit more of a reaction when she heard about Mr. Russo’s condition.

Her aunt said, “I didn’t think we’d ever know for sure. That will be a comfort to the girls. Not tomorrow or the day after, but in time. And Rosa has such an imagination, she might have gotten lost in all the things that could have happened to him.”

“You think I should tell them right away?”

The lily-blue gaze met hers calmly. “You are the one to make that decision.”

“I don’t want to lie to them.”

“You don’t want to hurt them,” Aunt Quinlan corrected her. “But it will hurt, there’s no avoiding it. You know that.”

“As a doctor, yes, I know that. But it’s different—”

“When they are your own. Yes.”

It was an odd thought, but one she couldn’t deny. Somehow in the space of a week, Rosa and Lia had become one of them.

“Now tell me about the detective sergeant.”

Even if she wanted to lie to her aunt, Anna knew from past experience that she would fail. Instead she said, “I’m not ready to talk about him yet.”

“Ah.” Aunt Quinlan smiled. “That’s encouraging. When will you see him again?”

“On Sunday,” Anna said, knowing that her color was rising. “The Society for the Protection of Endangered Children, I think that’s what Jack said.” She realized she had used his first name, and found that almost funny. She had yet to use it to his face, even after what had happened on the ferry.

What exactly had happened on the ferry was unclear to her, except that it felt right and good and utterly alarming. Before her thoughts could be read off her face, she leaned forward and took the mail from the table and began to look through it.

Aunt Quinlan went off to bed but Anna stayed just where she was, unopened mail in her lap. It was full dark now, but in the circle of light thrown by the streetlamp just opposite she could see the rain falling, buffeted by the winds so that it almost seemed to be dancing. A man ran past the house holding a newspaper over his head.

A cab pulled up, the door opened, and Sophie’s umbrella emerged and opened all at once.

Anna listened as Sophie opened the door, hung up her things, and then came into the parlor, her color high and her face wet with rain. She fell onto the couch across from Anna, put her head back to look at the ceiling, and let out a long, whistling sigh.

“You know how slimy the cobblestones can be at the produce market,” she began. “Like ice in January.”

“Broken bones? Concussion?”

“Both, and worse,” Sophie said. “She was six months pregnant. Four children under ten at home, and a clueless father.”

“A familiar story,” Anna said. “And a sad one.”

Sophie lowered her gaze to send Anna a puzzled look. “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“You always assume dire things for large families.”

“I do no such thing.”

“Anna, I can give you a dozen examples without trying.”

As sleepy as Anna had been, she came awake at this unusual tone in her cousin’s voice. For a long moment they studied each other, and then Anna put her head back and blew out a breath that made the loose hair at her temple jump.

“I am cynical, it’s my nature. You’ve decided all of a sudden that you need to change me?”

Sophie leaned forward to take a peppermint drop from a candy dish. “I don’t want to change you.”

“What do you want to change?”

“Nothing. Everything.”

“No word from Cap, I take it.”

Sophie took her time unwrapping the peppermint. She tucked it into her cheek and then spread the small square of waxed paper out over her knee, smoothing the wrinkles.

“Something else then, if it isn’t Cap. Spit it out, Sophie, would you?”

“I am worried about Cap, but I also have to tell you about Sunday.”

“This coming Sunday?”

She shook her head. “Last Sunday. When you went to see Cap, I went to Brooklyn.”

Sophie watched Anna think this through and saw when the realization hit her.

“I had to do something, Anna. And there haven’t been any repercussions.”

Anna closed her eyes. “Yet.”

She could argue, but Sophie knew that nothing she could say would ease Anna’s worries. Instead she told her about the Reason family, about Weeksville and the cab ride and the fact that no one had asked her for medical advice, not even the new mother.

“You liked it there.”

“Yes,” Sophie said. “I did like it there.” This wasn’t a conversation they had ever had, really, for the simple reason that Anna didn’t see her as a woman of color. If she were to say
It was good being among people like me
, Anna would not take her meaning unless Sophie provided explicit detail, and then—what? Would she be surprised? Worried? Hurt? Anna’s generosity was bred in the bone, but she lived a narrow life and was often unaware of many things in her immediate surroundings.

“You’re not moving to Brooklyn.”

“Is that an order?”

Anna opened her eyes.

Sophie saw now that her cousin was very tired, and she regretted raising this topic. “No,” she said then. “This is my home. If I’m going anywhere it’s to Switzerland.”

“Let’s go find something to eat while we talk,” Anna said. “I have things to tell you too. I wish I didn’t.”

•   •   •

“O
F
COURSE
WE
have to take them to see him,” Sophie said. Her tone was matter-of-fact, no doubt or hesitation. When Anna started to get caught up in ambiguities, Sophie could be trusted to lead her out of the wilderness.

“You have reservations,” Sophie said.

Anna wrapped her hands around her teacup. “I do have some concerns. Thinking back now, would you have wanted someone to take you to see your father, at the end?”

Sophie didn’t answer that question. Instead she said, “The choice is whether we cause them pain now, or later.”

“I think knowing is better than not knowing,” Anna said.

“Well, then, we’re decided. Do we need special permission to take them to the island? Can the detective sergeant arrange it for us?”

“I mentioned the possibility to him. He said he could make arrangements. I think he’ll come too, if he can manage it,” Anna said. “Having someone there who speaks Italian is a good idea. If not Mezzanotte, then maybe Detective Sergeant Maroney might be willing.”

Sophie laughed. “You call him Mezzanotte? Why?”

Anna grimaced into her empty teacup and tried to construct an honest answer. “I suppose I’ve been trying to keep some distance.”

“And failing.”

“Oh, yes. Miserably.”

Sophie put a hand on Anna’s shoulder and squeezed but said nothing more. It was a kindness, and Anna managed a smile.

E
ARLY
S
ATURDAY
A
note came from Jack, written on the police headquarters stationery: he had had word from the island. Carmine Russo had died the previous evening and would be buried at noon. If she wanted to attend with the little girls, he would arrange it. Detective Sergeant Maroney would call for them, take them to the burial, and then see them home. The message boy would wait for her answer.

All through that difficult day she wondered about the least important issue of all: Jack Mezzanotte sent his partner to accompany them, instead of coming himself.

Standing at the graveside with a trembling Rosa pressed against her side, Anna tried to block out the dull monotone of the chaplain reading from a funeral service in order to focus on the girls. What she could do for them. If anything could be done for them. What to say, or not say. Over the years she had developed a way to tell an adult that a mother or sister or daughter was gone. She tried to answer the questions, and she listened patiently. She was empathetic, but calm. None of that seemed possible standing by this particular grave and a coffin of cheap pine.

Rosa’s sorrow was palpable, but Lia seemed to be in a kind of waking dream. Her expression was almost blank, her eyes fever-bright, and she made no noise at all. Oscar Maroney was holding her for the simple reason that when he tried to put her down, her legs wouldn’t support her. Even Sophie, who had the gentlest and most compassionate of touches, could not get Lia’s attention. When she reached out to put her hand on Lia’s back, the girl turned her face to press it against Oscar Maroney’s shoulder.

It was Maroney who got through to Lia, on the ferry ride back to Manhattan. She sat on his lap with Rosa close beside him, and for the whole journey he told them what Anna took to be children’s stories. He changed
his voice and hunched his shoulders, opened his eyes in mock surprise and whispered.

And this, she told herself, was why Jack had sent Oscar. Because he knew that Oscar had a talent for dealing with children in distress.

If only he could do that much for lady doctors in distress, too. She was embarrassed by this thought but could not deny the underlying truth: she had hoped to see Jack Mezzanotte, had wanted his support and help. Such a short amount of time she had spent with him, and already she had unrealistic expectations simply because he had flirted with her a bit. It was good that he had stayed away, she told herself. She would go home and nurse her hurt pride and wounded ego, and tomorrow she would start over again. A highly educated physician and surgeon, with work that satisfied her, and a loving family that now included two little girls.

•   •   •

S
HE
HAD
ALMOST
convinced herself of this when they got back to Waverly Place to find a letter waiting.

Savard: If you are free tomorrow I suggest we go together to talk to the people at the Society for the Protection of Endangered Children about the boys. Unless I hear from you I’ll expect to see you at the Washington Monument in Union Square at one. We can walk from there.

I’m sorry I couldn’t come with you today to help with Rosa and Lia.

—Mezzanotte

•   •   •

A
S
J
ACK
CAME
out of the front door of the shop on Sunday afternoon, he saw Anna. She walked right by him, lost in her thoughts. He called her name and she came to a sudden stop and turned toward him.

“Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte.”

Back to the formal, then. He inclined his head. “Dr. Savard.” Her gaze moved over the sign above the door: M
EZZANOTTE
B
ROTHERS
F
LORISTS
.

“Oh,” she said. “This is where you live. I don’t know why I didn’t realize; I pass this corner all the time.”

She was nervous, and embarrassed about being nervous.

“I don’t live in the shop,” he said, and turned to point. “The house is farther down, behind the brick wall. If you’d like to see—”

She shook her head, flustered now. “Another time, maybe.”

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s stop for coffee, and you can tell me how it went yesterday.”

•   •   •

I
T
WAS
A
reasonable idea and something concrete to do; a chore to focus on. As soon as they found a table in the coffee shop across the street, Anna started talking and she didn’t stop until she had related the whole grim story.

“It would have been so much worse without Detective Sergeant Maroney,” she said. “We owe him—and you—a great favor. The girls needed more help than we could provide.”

“You don’t owe me anything.” He paused as the waitress put down their coffee cups. “But if you feel strongly about it, there is something you can do for me.”

Anna drew in a deep breath. “If it’s in my power, of course.”

He leaned forward—something he did a lot, she was noticing—and smiled.

“I’d like you to relax. There’s nothing to be anxious about.”

She let out a small laugh. “I’m normally a very composed person,” she told him. And in a fit of honesty: “You make me nervous.”

“That much is obvious.”

For a minute there was a silence between them while they tended to their coffee cups.

She said, “I didn’t realize that there was more than greenhouses behind that wall. It must feel like an oasis in the busiest part of the city, living there.”

“The house was part of the original farm,” he said. “With a walled garden. My uncle Massimo bought it when he first came from Italy, thirty years ago. There were still orchards then.”

He talked easily about the extended Mezzanotte families, the uncles who came from Italy, one by one, and were all involved in the florist business in one way or another, about the cousins who worked in the shop and greenhouses, and about his aunt Philomena, a benevolent dictator, her supremacy in the kitchen unchallenged.

“She made the sandwich you liked so much.”

“I still think about that sandwich,” Anna said, a little wistfully. “So you live with your aunt and uncle while you’re here in the city.”

“No, there are two houses. Massimo and his family live in one on the far end of the original property. In the other it’s just my two sisters and me.”

“The sisters who embroider.”

“Yes.”

He was easy to talk to and slow to take offense, and so she let her curiosity rise to the occasion. She said, “When did you come to the States?”

It was a question he had answered before, most probably many times, no doubt sometimes put to him by people who were unhappy about immigrants or Italians or both. But he answered her in what she imagined was more detail than was usual with nothing in his tone but friendly interest. He had been three, he told her, with one younger and one older brother. They came at the invitation of an uncle who had bought a large farm about fifteen miles outside Hoboken.

“Massimo, the one who manages the business?”

“A different uncle. I’ve got a crowd of them.”

When they had left the coffee shop and had started uptown, she gave in to her curiosity and picked up the subject again.

“Then you don’t really remember Italy.”

“Sure I do. I spent two years at the University of Padua.” And in response to her raised brow: “Reading law. But I wanted to be home. My parents weren’t happy, but it was the right decision.”

After a moment he said, “How much do you know about this organization we’re going to?”

He was changing the subject, which might mean she had asked too many questions, or questions he didn’t care to answer. And really, she told herself, she shouldn’t be surprised if he did take offense.

She cleared her throat. “Almost nothing, I have to admit, but even Sophie couldn’t tell me much about it. She said she thought it was fairly new. She knows most of the orphan asylums, some of them quite well.”

He struck his brow softly with a half-curled fist. “That reminds me. We’ll have to get a sister from St. Patrick’s to come with us when we go to the Foundling Hospital, or we won’t get very far. Preferably someone who
had personal contact with the Russo children. Maybe Sister Ignatia, since you got along with her so well in Hoboken.”

He was grinning at her.

“You’re teasing me.”

“And you like it when I tease you.”

Anna quickened her pace in an effort to regain her equilibrium. “Tell me what I need to know about this organization and what help they might be to us.”

“For right now,” Jack said, “you should know that they take in children in order to place them out. Sometimes to local foster families, but over the last few years they’ve been sending boys west by train. Mostly I think they go to farms.”

“But Tonino Russo is so young.”

“As I understand it, they sometimes place children as young as four.”

Anna was silent for a long minute.

“You disapprove?”

She almost laughed. “On what grounds could I judge them? I can see that things would go wrong sometimes, maybe even disastrously wrong, but somebody is trying, at least.” And then she told him what she had really been thinking.

“I shouldn’t have to ask you or Sophie about these things. It’s a failing, I recognize that. I close myself off in my work. I don’t even read the newspapers. In some ways it feels as if I’m just waking up, and that’s Rosa’s doing.”

•   •   •

J
ACK
WATCHED
HER
color rise as she told him about something that she saw as a flaw in the way she lived her life.

“I’d be at the hospital right now,” she was saying, “if not for Sister Mary Augustin showing up at the door on that Monday morning. There was something about Rosa when I first saw her in that church basement. My history is nothing like hers, but feels as though it is, to me.” She raised her head suddenly to look at him, disquieted, embarrassed. As if he would judge her.

She changed the subject abruptly. “I haven’t told you about my visit to St. Patrick’s Orphan Asylum. I went to vaccinate the children—you remember that conversation I had with Sister Ignatia, I’m sure—and found
that in the meantime the mother superior had seen to it that they were all vaccinated.”

“They didn’t let you know?”

She shook her head. “She let me come anyway, because she wanted me to examine some of the sisters. My guess is that she knew one of them needed surgery and they don’t want to go to the Catholic hospitals where they don’t allow female surgeons.”

“And you examined them, of course.”

“Of course. And in the next weeks sometime I’ll be operating on one of them.”

“For . . .”

“That’s not information I can share, Mezzanotte.”

Back to last names; some progress was being made. “Well then,” he said. “Tell me about some other surgery, something you’ve done recently.”

She gave him a frankly suspicious glance. “You’re not interested in the fine points of suturing internal incisions.”

“But I am. Really, I’m curious.”

She started slowly. As she went on and saw that he was paying attention, that his curiosity was sincere, she spoke more freely. Jack listened closely, because he had the idea that later there might be a quiz. It was one he wanted to pass.

•   •   •

U
NLIKE
THE
DEEP
quiet at the Catholic orphan asylum that had made such an impression on Anna, the offices of the Society for the Protection of Endangered Children were chaotic. The society occupied most of an older building on Thirty-first Street, three floors of offices and children. Anna’s first impression was that the place was cramped and overextended, but then that had been true of most of the agencies she had seen thus far. There was no lack of orphaned and homeless children, but funding was always sparse.

They passed a large room where a group of a dozen boys had presented themselves for some kind of meeting, all of them subdued. Anna paused to scan the faces she saw there. Two of the boys were of the right age, but neither of them was Tonino Russo. She knew it was naïve to hope that this search would end so quickly and easily, but then she realized that Jack
Mezzanotte was studying the boys as well. It seemed that the detective sergeant was less cynical than she would have expected.

They found the door they were looking for, and Jack opened it for Anna.

•   •   •

A
NNA
STARTED
BY
relating the short history of the Russo children in as far as she knew it. Jack had added some details, watching the superintendent and not liking what he saw. Mr. Johnson swiveled his chair away to look over the street as Anna finished, running a hand over his scalp. He had long, thin fingers that tapered like candlesticks.

“Let me understand this correctly,” he said when he turned back to them. “These boys you’re looking for are not any blood relation?”

“They are not,” Anna said. “But my family has taken in the girls, and we would do the same for the boys if we can find them.”

“And why, may I ask, would an unmarried lady with such an advanced education want to take on the trouble of four Italian orphans?”