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.”
• • •
THE 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 lif
ted in a shrug. “They’re more at home down there on Mott Street, among their own kind.”
• • •
IT 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.
For a long moment Anna waited, standing beside a window to watch as a spring rain replaced the sleet. She would have to go hunt down a cab. The thought was still in her head when she felt a light touch on her elbow.
“Pardon me,” said Sister Mary Augustin. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but I’m so glad I caught you before you left.”
They sat on the visitors’ bench in the little lobby as the light rain gave way to watery sunshine, light falling in stripes to make a checkerboard on the cool gray stone floor.
“Mother Superior gave me permission to talk to you,” Sister Mary Augustin said. “But I don’t have long and there are things you should know”—she swallowed, visibly—“about the Russo children.”
“You sought me out to give me bad news, I take it.”
Many emotions moved over the younger woman’s face. Fear, regret, guilt all came and went, but finally she nodded and the story came out quite quickly. She told Anna about the drunken brawl on the docks and the rush back to the orphan asylum. Somehow, she said, the boys had gotten separated from the rest of the children.
“Separated?”
“They never arrived here.”
Anna sat back, and Mary Augustin went on. They had instituted a search once this was discovered, but without success. The boys had last been seen four days ago, on Monday. Rosa was beside herself with worry.
Anna offered to talk to the girl, and color rose in Mary Augustin’s face.
“They’re gone,” she said. “They were transferred to the old St. Patrick’s on Wednesday. The priest there is Italian.” She offered this as if it were explanation enough, and in fact it did lend credence to what Sister Ignatia had told her. Mostly Italians and Irish lived in the tenements crowded together along the East River.
“All right,” Anna said. “I’ll go there straightaway and talk to them.” She was very tired, but she would not sleep if she let this stand while Rosa waited for word.
“That’s the trouble,” Sister Mary Augustin said, her voice taking on a bit of a wobble. “You won’t find them.”
“I think I can find a Catholic orphan asylum on Mott Street.”
“No doubt,” Sister Mary Augustin said. “But they aren’t there anymore. Sometime after eleven at night and six in the morning they went out into the weather and disappeared. The whole area was combed multiple times, but there’s no trace of them.”
Struck silent by surprise, Anna asked herself why Rosa would do such a desperate thing.
“Were the girls punished or treated badly?”
Mary Augustin looked as though she had been anticipating this question. “I don’t know. My guess is that Rosa wouldn’t stop asking about her brothers and one of the sisters lost her temper and was harsh.”
“Harsh,” Anna echoed. “And you have no idea where they might be. So now all four children are missing.”
“Yes,” Mary Augustin said. “I’m afraid so.”
Anna, at a loss for words, stared for a full minute. “Then we’ll have to find them. Immediately.”
• • •
SUPPER BREAK AND Jack sat at his desk in the detectives’ squad room watching Oscar pace back and forth, grumpier with every step. He was hungry and required feeding, and soon Jack would have to get up and go out into the weather or simply resign himself to Oscar’s mood.
“You’d think you’d never got wet before in your life,” Oscar muttered. And: “Now we’re in for it.”
A runner had appeared at the door waving an assignment sheet: on Washington Square a patrolman had come across Italian trespassers on university grounds who wouldn’t be shifted. He had called his roundsman, who was requesting a translator.
“I’ll miss supper,” Oscar groused.
With a pointed look at Maroney’s middle, Jack grabbed his overcoat and hat and headed for the door.
• • •
THE WET SNOW gave way quite suddenly to a warmer and gentler wind, and with that the feel of spring had come back into the air. In Washington Square Park Jack felt the subtle stir of things growing, as tangible as sunlight on the skin.
New York University sat across from the northeast corner of the park. More like a church with its tall arches and spires, to Jack’s mind, except for the noise that a crowd of undergraduates were making trying to get a game of baseball going in the park. They’d be covered in muck and mud in no time, but Jack understood the urge to be moving. Oscar did too, from the looks he threw in the direction of the players. He would join in with very little encouragement.
They entered the university through the main doors and heard the argument from across the foyer. The porter’s desk was empty, but the door behind it was open and provided a view of Harry Pettigrew facing off with a small woman who stood close, her face turned up at a sharp angle to scold the roundsman, the traditional posture of mothers with sons twice their size and a bone to pick.
“It’s Harry who’s needing rescuing, so it seems,” Oscar said. “That’s the porter’s wife got him backed into a corner.”
It wasn’t until he stepped into the office that Jack caught sight of the two little girls who sat side by side on the counter. So not intruders, after all, not even street children. These two were too fragile to survive on the street, and so, Jack reasoned to himself, they had run away, or been put out. One of them was crying softly while the other sat stony faced, her arm around the smaller girl.
“Mrs. Conway,” Pettigrew was saying. “No one means these girls any harm—”
“So say you!”
“Hold on, Mrs. Conway,” Oscar said. “Don’t be in such a rush to draw and quarter the poor roundsman.”
While Oscar negotiated a peace between the parties, Jack got a better look at the two children. They were both dripping wet and filthy, hair straggling over threadbare clothes. They shivered with the cold despite the towels that had been wrapped around them and the coal heaped up in the stove.
The older of the two raised her head to look at him directly, and in that moment Jack recognized her. Rosa, if he remembered correctly. The last he had seen her was getting off the Hoboken ferry, her brothers and sister gathered in close. She had been determined to keep the little family together, and she had clearly failed, as he had known she must. Now the last name came to him as well. Rosa Russo.
She recognized him too, because her expression shifted to puzzlement and then, quite quickly, relief. Jack remembered that she had been proud of her English, and he started with that.
“Miss Russo,” he said. “We meet again.”
 
; The argument stopped abruptly as Roundsman Pettigrew, the porter’s wife, the porter, and the patrolman turned to look at Jack.
Pettigrew regained his composure first. “She doesn’t speak English.”
“Of course she does. Don’t you, Rosa,” Jack said, keeping his gaze on her.
The girl drew herself up with great dignity, a small queen finally recognized by one of her subjects. “Yes,” she said. “I am an American.”
“Hoboken,” Jack said to Oscar, enough to clue him in to the circumstances without divulging information to the porter or his wife.
Jack said, “Why didn’t you tell these good people that you speak English?”
“It would not have mattered,” she said, looking at the adults. “They won’t listen to me no matter what language I speak. And I knew if I told them what they want to know”—she frowned at Pettigrew—“they would send us back to—”
She took note of the way Pettigrew leaned toward her, and paused. In Italian she said, “Il orfanotrofio. It took us so long to get this far and Lia is very tired.”
“You ran away.” Oscar spoke his Neopolitan Italian, very similar to the language the girls spoke.
Rosa glanced at him nervously, taken aback by the combination of an Irish face and the language of her home. Finally, she nodded.
With patient questioning Oscar was able to pinpoint where the girls had started, and when. They had left the orphan asylum at Prince and Mott before light and started north, asking directions from an Italian street musician with a monkey who wore a hat.
“But how did you ask for directions? Where is it you’re trying to go?”
“Here,” Rosa said, spreading out her arms. “Sister Mary Augustin described this place exactly.”
Sister Mary Augustin from St. Patrick’s; the face came back to him quickly. But he was missing something, so he thought for a moment and phrased his question carefully.
“Sister Mary Augustin told you how to get to here, to this place?”
“No,” Rosa said, irritation starting to rise again. “On the journey from the ferry—” She stopped herself. “On the way to that place, the omnibus went past this church that isn’t a church after all. Sister Mary Augustin pointed to it and told us that Dr. Savard lived just nearby. She told us about the house that has a garden bigger than its own self behind a brick wall, and fruit trees, and a pergola, and hens and a rooster.”