The Gilded Hour (12 page)

Evening classes—always oversubscribed—were about to start. Anna watched small groups of students as they picked up the pace for fear of being late. Most of them were men intent on engineering classes, but there were women too, here and there. None of them were expensively dressed and all of them looked as though they had a long day’s work behind them.

Someone dropped an armload of books and crouched down to gather them together, his dark hair lit by the gas streetlamps. Anna stopped, catching her breath, until he stood again and saw that he was a stranger, a man she had never seen before.

Flustered, irritated with herself, she hurried on. How very silly, to imagine Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte would cross her path again so soon, less than twenty-four hours since he had put rosebuds in her hair. She couldn’t imagine how she might see him again in the wide expanse of Manhattan, as unbreachable now in her imagination as the Atlantic.

D
ESPITE
HER
ORIGINAL
intention to vaccinate the Hoboken orphans the day after she had first examined them, Anna’s week had been so busy that she had had to postpone from Tuesday to Wednesday and again to Friday. Worse still, Sophie was called away to an emergency, and so Anna would have to deal with Sister Ignatia on her own.

The cab was drafty. Anna tucked her scarf more firmly into the neck of her cloak and counted herself lucky to be out of the weather. Mr. Lee’s prediction had proved correct: winter had returned and swept away every trace of spring. From her relatively dry and warm spot in the hired cab, Anna watched men walking into the wind hunched over, hands clapped tight on hats lest they be torn away. Sleet pooled in the gutters and streets and dripped off ledges, and every doorway was packed with bodies huddled together out of the wet, faces creased in some combination of discomfort and irritation and dull acceptance.

In the street, vendors and deliverymen vied with each other for right of way, all of them jumping out of the path of omnibuses and drays, oxen bellowing bass as if to harmonize with the screech of iron on iron. An omnibus shouldered through the intersection, the horses enveloped in the steam that rose from their broad backs. Urchins slipped through the crowds with clear purpose, alert and nimble despite the weather. They were making the best of the late storm; twice the usual number of pockets would be emptied of wallets and watches by the end of the day.

Going through Madison Square, she saw that the weather had not discouraged the beggars, who claimed spaces around the park that they defended with violence, when necessary. She saw three or four who were familiar to her but many others who weren’t. A woman with a disfigured
child in her arms, both of them wrapped in a dripping blanket coat. A man on crutches who wore an old and much abused uniform he was too young to have worn in the last war.

Anna had a reputation among the poor who lived on the streets, the people the city government dismissed as
the outdoor poor
. Those who were truly destitute she would stop and talk to for as long as time permitted, but the others—the professional beggars who made a living by faking injuries or, worse, by sending lame or injured children out to beg—knew that she would see them arrested and testify, if necessary. The streets of Manhattan were overrun with the poor and the merciless both.

Less than a week ago she had been out on these streets in a gown that bared her shoulders, with only a shawl to keep her warm and on her way to a party that had cost a million dollars or more. There was nothing predictable in this life, and very little that was fair.

•   •   •

T
HE
CAB
PASSED
St. Patrick’s Cathedral and turned onto Fifty-first, where the orphan asylum took up two entire city blocks, with a building for boys and one for girls. Between them was a convent, a fortress of stone hulking in the rain.

The cab stopped in front of the girls’ building and Anna dashed for the entrance. Once inside she took out her handkerchief to pat her face dry, and then looked around herself for the porter.

Instead she was intercepted by an ageless, humorless nun who introduced herself as Sister Peter Joseph. She reminded Anna of Sister Ignatia simply because she wore a black habit rather than a white one, in contrast to the younger Sister Mary Augustin.

Sister Peter Joseph’s spine had begun to curve with old age, but she moved as quickly as a girl, gesturing to a young woman in yet another habit, this one gray, who came to take Anna’s coat and scarf and hat to be whisked away to a cloakroom, she supposed, well out of sight.

Anna followed the old nun down hallways, her boots slipping a little as they rounded corners on the highly polished floors. They stopped in front of a door with two words printed across it:
Mother Superior
.

Anna said, “Is there some problem?”

Instead of answering, Sister Peter Joseph opened the door and gestured
Anna inside, followed her, and then adjusted the skirts of her habit as she took the chair behind the desk. Anna was a little amused to realize she had assumed that Sister Ignatia was the head of the orphanage. She was glad to have been mistaken.

“I first want to thank you for the interest you took in the welfare of our charges,” Sister Peter Joseph began. “As you are aware, Sister Ignatia does not approve of vaccinations; she believes they are dangerous.”

“Yes, I gathered.”

“Nevertheless, it is our policy to vaccinate and I was surprised and displeased to learn that this had been neglected. I have had more than a few surprises this week. At any rate, the children—all of them—have been vaccinated against smallpox. This was done by staff from St. Vincent’s Hospital over the last two days.”

She took a folder out of a drawer and pushed it across the desk to Anna.

“The vaccination records, if you would like to examine them.”

Anna didn’t open the folder, and she didn’t try to hide her irritation. “If everyone has been vaccinated, you might have sent a message—”

“—and spared you the trip in such unpleasant weather. Yes, I might have. But I am hoping that now you are here, you would be willing to examine some of the sisters.”

“You don’t have a physician who visits regularly?”

Eyes the color of autumn oak leaves assessed her coolly. “Am I asking too much?”

Anna felt herself flush. “I would be happy to be of assistance.”

Another folder appeared and was pushed across the desk. “These are the records for the sisters who need to be seen. There are two novice nursing sisters waiting for you in the infirmary to assist. If there is something you need that you don’t find, send one of them to me and I will see what can be done. The convent infirmary is at the end of this hall, then to the left. It’s clearly marked.”

At the door Anna hesitated. “Is Sister Mary Augustin available this afternoon? I was hoping to speak to her.”

There was a long pause, as well as a new set of furrows between the sparse white eyebrows.

“Or do I ask too much?” Anna finished.

She had earned herself an amused smile. “I will send her to you before you leave.”

•   •   •

T
HE
INFIRMARY
WAS
a large rectangular space, as clean as any treatment room at the New Amsterdam. Along one wall were supply cabinets, a table for the preparation of medicines, a tall glass-fronted case of instruments, sterilization equipment, and a deep sink. A pair of examination tables took up the middle of the room, each surrounded by a privacy curtain that could be pulled closed. She had a moment to wonder whether the children’s infirmary was as well equipped, and then she chided herself for assuming the worst.

Her first patient was a nun about thirty years old with a sprained wrist. After that she treated an eye infection, lanced a boil, wrote out a receipt for a liniment that would loosen stiff joints, and finally diagnosed what was almost certainly the start of tubercular kidney and would need to be closely monitored. She wrote her observations and advice on a sheet of paper left in each nun’s folder and hoped they would be read.

The sisters were all quiet and cooperative and utterly stoic; they asked no questions but answered the ones she put to them without hesitation. It was all very routine until a fifty-two-year-old Sister Francis Xavier introduced herself as the orphanage and convent procuratrix. At Anna’s blank expression she explained.

“Food,” she said. “Drink. I’m the one who makes sure there’s enough to feed all these little faces, like birdies in the nest they are, always peeping and opening their mouths wide enough to see right down their pink gullets. And the sisters, too.” She patted an ample belly. “I like my work.”

Sister Xavier had a mass in her breast the size of an apple. As Anna palpated it the sister asked, “Do you think I’d get a blue ribbon at the state fair? Hurts like the devil. Waxes and wanes like the moon.”

“How long has this been with you?”

The smooth brow creased as she thought. “Twenty years, maybe. Seems to me if it was the cancer it would have killed me long ago, but now it’s got so big it throbs like a rotten tooth. Can it be got rid of?”

“It can,” Anna said. “Or at least, I can do a needle aspiration today and then remove it for you surgically sometime soon. With any luck it won’t come back again after that. You’ll have to come to the hospital for the procedure.”

“Hospital!” Xavier huffed a laugh. “Not me. You can draw it out with a needle, didn’t you say? That will do.”

“I can drain it for you here, but that will only give you relief for a short time. Surgery is called for. I’ll talk to your mother superior about it. Unless you’d rather someone else operated.”

Sister Xavier scowled at the ceiling in a way that made Anna feel sympathy for the sisters who worked under her in the kitchens. She puffed out an irritated explosion of breath.

“If it must be done, better you than one of the doctors at St. Vincent’s. I don’t care to let a man take a knife to me.”

“Good,” Anna said. “For the moment, let’s see what we can do to give you some relief. It will take me a few minutes to get a sense of the mass, and then I have to sterilize my instruments and the operating field. The aspiration itself will take less than a minute.”

“Endless bother,” Xavier said. “Get on with it.”

But while Anna worked, Sister Francis Xavier couldn’t keep quiet. She talked and asked questions but never lost sight of what Anna was doing, stopping her now and then: what was in that bottle and could she smell it and if the hypodermic needle had been used on someone else before and how it was cleaned.

Where the others had been adamantly silent, she was determined to fill the room with words. It was an opportunity Anna could not ignore, this nun who was so willing to talk.

“I wanted to ask about some Italian children who came in from Hoboken this past Monday, orphaned in a smallpox epidemic. Two boys, two girls, Russo is the family name. Would you know anything about them?”

She got a partial shrug as a reply. “Monday is as good as a month around here, and the boys would be in the other building, if they’re still here at all.”

That gave Anna pause, but she focused on what seemed nearer to hand. “And the girls?”

Sister Xavier said, “There’s talk of sisters coming over from Italy to start an orphanage for their own, but in the meantime the Guinea girls are usually sent down to the old place.”

She used the word
Guinea
—a terrible insult, even Anna was aware of that much—as easily as she might have said
house
or
child
. It took Anna’s
breath away for a moment, and then she steadied. “There will be a pinch now, but please hold still.” And then: “And here it is.”

Sister Francis Xavier let out a great sigh as Anna pulled back on the plunger and a cloudy yellow liquid filled the syringe.

“That’s better already.”

While Anna cleaned the puncture site and bandaged it, she considered how best to ask what she needed to know.

“You’re as bad as the novitiates,” Sister Xavier said, her tone grumpier by the minute. “Can’t spit out whatever it is you need to say.”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘the old place’—where is that?”

Sister Xavier sat up with some trouble. “This is the new St. Patrick’s, the cathedral buildings. The old place got too crowded, you see, and so the bishop got after the mayor until he gifted this land for a bigger orphan asylum.”

“But the older asylum is still in use?”

“It is. The Italian girls are more likely to be sent there.”

“And why is that?”

The shoulder under the black habit lifted in a shrug. “They’re more at home down there on Mott Street, among their own kind.”

•   •   •

I
T
WAS
SIX
by the time Anna finished with the last examination. She found her own way back along the corridors, passing darkened offices and classrooms. Somewhere in another part of the building bells chimed, but otherwise the halls were far too quiet to house hundreds of little girls. Little girls who learned their letters and their prayers and how to polish wooden floors along with other, harder lessons.

At the next window she paused to look out and saw the reason for the quiet. Two lines of girls were walking, quick-step, along a well-traveled path to one of the cathedral’s side entrances. Apparently evening prayer services were in order. She wondered how many times a day this process repeated itself, and whether the girls minded. She thought probably not; they wore sturdy shoes and hooded capes, and their bellies were full. Some of them had probably put up with much worse for far less.

Anna was dry and warm now, but her stomach growled and she wanted tea and a sandwich and a place to sit quietly for a few moments before she went back out into the weather. There was no sign of the young sister who
had taken her wraps to the cloakroom but Anna found them, neatly folded, on a chair in the empty hall.

It seemed that Sister Mary Augustin was not available, after all.