City of God (21 page)

“No more, my lord. Never once since you said I must not.” Mei Lin had rejected the animal milk at first, turning her head away when Ah
Chee tried to spoon it into her mouth and making fists of her tiny hands and screaming so fiercely her face turned bright red. Then they got the idea of soaking a cloth in the stuff and letting the infant suck on that, and she was pacified or maybe too hungry to refuse any more. Never mind. It was good to learn very young that no woman could have everything she wanted. Not in the Middle Kingdom. Not here.

“Only for you now,” Mei-hua said as she held her breast to his mouth. “Only for my lord.”

“Pectoriloquy, gentlemen. The differences in what you hear should tell you what’s physically there.” Nick bent forward to demonstrate the process, pressing the black stethoscope first to one place on the man’s chest, then moving it an inch or so to the right. “Different sound,” he said, standing up and stepping out of the way. “You try, Dr. Chance.”

Monty Chance glanced at the student standing next to Nick. Ben Klein, naturally. The Jew was a great favorite of Dr. Turner; he had been made Turner’s laboratory assistant a couple of months back. Fair enough. Chance hated the stink of the formaldehyde and the putrefying flesh, and doing research, as they called it, wasn’t the way to get ahead in a place like Bellevue. More important to make friends. Even with the likes of Frankly Clement and one-eyed old Jeremiah Potter. Even with Jews. Chance nodded in Klein’s direction and slightly raised an eyebrow. Turner, the look said, was all right, but perhaps a bit of an eccentric. Klein stared straight ahead and seemed not to see. Damned sheenies. Not to be trusted. Do a Christian dirt any opportunity they had.

“Come, Dr. Chance, we’ve not got the whole day. Have a good listen and tell me what you think of what you hear.”

Chance pressed his stethoscope to the patient’s chest in the same place as Dr. Turner, then moved it in what seemed to him exactly the same fashion. “The lung sounds clear to me, sir,” he said after a long few moments of attentive listening. “I hear none of that gurgling sound of consumption.”

“Quite right, Dr. Chance. The patient is not a consumptive.” Then
before the junior doctor could bask in the confirmation, “But there’s something else to be learned. You try, Dr. Klein.”

The patient understood no English. He stared stoically straight ahead. Klein leaned forward with his stethoscope, moved it twice, just as both the fully fledged doctors had done, and took no more than a few seconds over the exercise. “There is tissue in one area, Dr. Turner, and a cavity next to it. What we hear illuminates the physical structure of the organ.”

“Exactly. Well done, Doctor.”

Monty Chance kept his face immobile.

Nick explained further how clinical practice could inform and enliven what the laboratory revealed, then gave it up and dismissed them. Apart from anything else, the ward’s stench was getting to him. He’d asked for a few more women from the workhouse to augment the cleaning staff of the hospital, but Grant sent him prisoners instead. Slatterns. Swished a mop over the middle of a floor and called it done. Mind you, given the crowding of the place, little more was possible. He had to thread his way through a dozen men on floor pallets to get into the hall.

The air out there was a bit fresher but not much. He’d step outside for a bit and see if that helped. Not a great deal, probably. When the wind came from the south, the whole city still reeked of smoke. Nonetheless, he needed a breath of whatever sort of clean air he could find.

He was a few steps from the front door when it opened to admit Manon.

“Cousin Nicholas. I hoped I’d be able to find you today, and now yours is the first face I see.”

“I’ve been hoping to see you as well, Cousin Manon, to wish you the joys of the season and inquire after your well-being. I trust the fire did you no personal damage.”

“None. Though I can’t help but think where I’d be if I hadn’t so recently sold the house on Wall Street.”

“Burnt out, like so many others. Come, step in here a moment.” As usual, the director’s office was empty; Tobias Grant spent almost no time in the hospital. “Tell me how you’ve been.”

“Well,” Manon said. “And you, Cousin Nicholas? You look a bit worn.”

Because of how badly he’d been sleeping, no doubt. “Nonsense. I’m very well and all the better for seeing you. We’ve missed you over the holiday period.”

“Yes, well…” Manon was not inclined to tell him how she’d spent the days from Christmas to New Year. “I’m here now. Nothing’s changed, I’m sure.”

“In this place nothing ever changes.”

“You sound discouraged, Nicholas. That’s not like you.”

“It’s such an uphill battle. I want this to be a decent hospital, but there’s so little I’m able to do.”

“Yes, but that’s the same as it’s always been. Come, we agreed fully a year ago now. You will use the opportunities this place provides to further your research and wait until the time is right to do something more. There’s an increase of talk, you know, about how bad Bellevue is. Tobias Grant is bound to be called to account sometime soon.”

“I hope you’re right. Incidentally, that’s not all there is to talk about. What do you think of this Maria Monk and her revelations? I thought with all your Catholic connections you’d have an opinion.”

Her Catholic connections. Manon turned her head as if he might read guilt in her face, though she had no idea why she should feel guilty. “It’s utter twaddle, Nicholas. I’m sure it must be.”

“That’s what I think as well. Never mind that it’s supposed to have taken place up in Canada. Nuns made to be the mistresses of the priests who confess them, babies buried in the walls. When you think of Mother Louise and Sister Mary and the others we know, it sounds ridiculous. Still, for it to actually be a published book…”

“Not just in a book,” she said brusquely. “They printed bits of it in the
Sun,
and as you might expect, in the
Protestant Vindicator.
But I don’t think something is true, Nicholas, simply because it is written down and a lot of fools believe it. But enough about salacious gossip, tell me about you. I insist you look tired. You have been working too many hours, I suspect.”

“Some late nights in the laboratory perhaps. But it’s the thing that keeps me sane in this place.”

Manon cocked her head and studied him. “Nicholas, I hope the fire did you no personal harm…”

He did not answer immediately. He had not seen Carolina since he had taken her home that dreadful night, getting her maid to put her to bed and ordering hot tea with laudanum as a sedative. He’d returned the next day, but she wouldn’t receive him and sent word she was indisposed. It was the same on three more occasions. “No, no personal harm. Now I must go. But I wish you a happy new year, Cousin Manon.”

“And I you. The happiest possible, Cousin Nicholas. With all the good things you deserve.”

Manon watched him leave. Late nights in the laboratory indeed; something more personal she’d warrant. He looked utterly exhausted. Perhaps she was not the only one who had somehow missed out on peace on earth and good will to men.

The hewers of wood and the drawers of water
…Manon had used those words to describe Catholics when she took Nicholas Turner to St. Patrick’s Orphan Asylum. The flotsam and jetsam of society, that’s what the immigrants were these days. Wreckage washed up on the shore. Not, Manon thought, the finer sort of seeker of a new life who used to come in her papa’s day.

God forgive her. She’d never thought of herself as a snob.

Mother Louise would say it was the Devil tempting her not to go inside St. Joseph’s Church.

It was dark and cold at not quite six in the morning on this frosty January Wednesday. The church on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place in Greenwich Village was only now emerging from the deep night shadows. It had been built to serve the mostly Italian contractors and builders who lived in the district, decent working men, not the rowdy sort of Irish immigrants who—

She must stop this. Get thee behind me, Satan. If God were to be
found in St. Joseph’s Church, then what did it matter what sort of people might be in the pew beside her? If. A very big condition indeed.

Come along, my girl, take yourself in hand. Straight up the broad stairs to the pillared entrance and through the tall double doors.

She knew what was customarily done with the stone basin beside the inner doors, the ones leading to the sanctuary. Dip the forefinger of your right hand into the water—blessed by the bishop on the night before Easter Sunday, Holy Saturday as Catholics called it, so said Mother Louise—and sign yourself with the cross while saying silently,
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
The nuns’ holy water stoup beside the chapel at St. Patrick’s was the first she’d ever seen. Spotted that spring Saturday afternoon three years past when Mother Louise gave her a tour of the place. It was Manon’s first visit and she had arrived with a basket of baked goods. Because, she said, she’d seen the sign outside and thought perhaps the bread and cakes might be welcome. Welcome indeed the nun had said, and wished her the blessings of God and invited her in, and smiled at the way Manon was staring at her clothes, and began the first of many explanations of all things Roman.

And that had led to this, her furtive entrance into a Catholic church to hear Mass.

A woman had entered just ahead of her and performed the little ritual with the holy water quickly, as if she were not really thinking about it.
It’s a sacramental, my dear Mrs. Turner. A small thing that brings us closer to God. We don’t think the water miraculous, whatever some may say. It puts us in mind of Him and the water of our baptism.

And would a bolt of lightning come and strike Manon because she put into the blessed-by-the-bishop water two fingers, not one? The same two fingers that had been stained with Eileen O’Connor’s blood? Probably not.

Her first Mass was on Christmas Day, at the quite splendid St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the corner of Prince and Mott streets. Except for the sermon that dwelled (as did every sermon preached in the city that day) on how all must look to the counsels of religion to strengthen them
after the calamitous fire, she found the service utterly bewildering and frankly boring. A lot of bowing and scraping and ringing of bells and mumbling of prayers in Latin, a language of which she understood not a single word. Meanwhile the air was filled with the smoke of so many candles and the smell of so much incense she thought she might be present at some mysterious pagan rite.

It was certainly not particularly uplifting. Not even the moment when, according to Mother Louise in a talk of which she had forgotten not a single word, the wafers and the wine on the altar were transformed into the actual—the nun’s very word—the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. “Why would we not take Him at his word, my dear Mrs. Turner? If He is indeed the Lord and Savior we proclaim Him to be, truly our Emmanuel, God with us, would He lie? This is my body. This is my blood. That is what He said. Even Protestant bibles have it so. We Catholics believe that is what He meant. Yes, it’s difficult. ‘This is a hard saying, and who can listen to it?’ John, chapter six, verse sixty,” she’d added, never having gotten over her Protestant habit of citing the provenance of any bit of scripture she quoted.

Manon had looked up the chapter as soon as she got home. Her King James Bible said, “This is an hard saying, who can hear it?” Same thing really. And exactly the same about the body and blood part. She could find no argument against the nun’s claim that those were the Gospel words.

But neither did she have any reason to believe such an extraordinary statement was meant to be taken literally.
This is my body. This is my blood.

I am Ruth amid the alien corn, she thought as she quietly took a place in the rearmost pew. She could not overcome the feeling that nothing occurring up front on the altar had anything whatever to do with her.

But she had come five times in the three weeks since Christmas Day, twice to St. Patrick’s and three times to St. Joseph’s. Totally puzzled by her own behavior, but thankful that each of the eight Catholic churches in the city were in parts of town where she knew no one and no one knew her. Each time she knelt in the rear, neither sitting nor standing
when the others did, certainly not approaching the communion railing, alone with her thoughts.

Joyful, my dearest, are you a saint in heaven? Mother Louise says that since you were a good man you must be, that all who go to heaven are saints, and it doesn’t matter that you were not a Catholic. She says there is some loophole in their Catholic laws that allow non-Catholics to get in. She has a twinkle in her eye when she says it, but she does take these things very seriously. My love, you must tell me what to do. Samson Simson tried to see me recently. I know you always liked him, but I turned him away quite rudely. He wants back what he entrusted to us all those years ago. And I’m entirely unsure if that is the right thing to do. Because Mr. Simson is aligned with Mr. Astor, and Mr. Astor became involved in bringing opium into China, and you would have hated that so.

But no matter how carefully she listened, Manon could not hear a reply, neither from Joyful nor from God.