The Gilded Hour

  When Father Moreno returned, he voiced the same objections to this arrangement that Anna had heard from Sister Ignatia, in a tone only slightly less irritated. The pledge of a significant contribution to the poor box finally swayed him.

  The priest looked at her suspiciously. “Are you trying to buy forgiveness for some sin? The Church no longer sells indulgences, Dr. Savard.”

  “I’m not Catholic, Father Moreno. I would guess my idea of sin isn’t much like yours.”

  She blotted the bank draft she had written out on his desk and handed it to him.

  “And Sister Ignatia? Who will explain this to her?”

  “I suppose it will fall to me,” Anna said. “I hope that will count as sufficient penance.”

  The priest’s mouth quirked, stopping just short of a smile.

  “The boy needs to be vaccinated,” Anna said. “Before he goes to his new employer. That is possible, I trust?”

  Father Moreno said, “It will be arranged.”

  As she was leaving he called to her, and Anna paused in the doorway.

  “I don’t doubt that your concerns for these children are real and your intentions good,” he said. “But you are more like Sister Ignatia than you might like to admit.”

  • • •

  ON THE FERRY, surrounded by the children and the other passengers, Sister Ignatia did not hesitate to raise the issue of the Bacigalup boy. “You interfere,” said the older nun. “You interfere in ways that could have terrible consequences.”

  “Doing nothing has terrible consequences, too,” Anna said calmly.

  “Do not congratulate yourself. This is not a charitable act.”

  “Of course it isn’t,” Anna said.

  Sister Ignatia pulled back a little, surprised.

  “No one ever does anything out of charity,” Anna went on. “Every choice we make benefits ourselves directly or indirectly. Even if it looks like a sacrifice, the alternative would be unbearable in some way. If I hadn’t helped I wouldn’t sleep well, and I need my sleep.”

  Gray eyes moved over her face, looking for some clue that would account for such an odd and disturbing philosophy. “Such cynicism is unattractive in a young woman.”

  “That may be. But it is necessary for a doctor and a surgeon.” Anna tempered her tone with a small smile.

  After a moment Sister Ignatia said, “It was a mistake to ask for your help. I won’t do it again.”

  “That would probably be best,” Anna agreed. “But I will still come and make sure everyone is vaccinated.”

  • • •

  ONE BENCH FARTHER on, Giancarlo Mezzanotte was in deep discussion with Rosa Russo. Wedged between the man and girl were Tonino and Lia, while Rosa still carried the infant.

  There was something familiar about the man’s posture, though Anna was certain she had never met him before. When he inclined his head toward Rosa to listen more closely, she realized that he held himself like a doctor taking a patient’s history, weighing and measuring each piece of information, not because he thought the child was lying, but because her tone and expression told him more than her words ever could.

  It was an odd thought. The man was still dressed in his work clothes; he might be a carpenter or a stonemason or even a mill worker himself, but unlike most men of her acquaintance, he had a talent for talking to children. Which probably meant he had children of his own or had grown up with many brothers and sisters. Or as an orphan.

  He looked over his shoulder as if she had reached out to tap it and raised one brow. Somehow he had heard her unvoiced questions.

  Anna gave a brief shake of her head. When he turned away again she asked Sister Mary Augustin the question she couldn’t hold back. “What kind of farm is Santino Bacigalup going to be working on?”

  But Mr. Mezzanotte had heard her. He turned around again, hooking his elbow over the back of the bench to speak to her directly. He had a very deep and resonant voice, but he still had to raise it to be heard. “I sent him to my parents. They are floriculturists and apiarists. Beekeepers.”

  The urge to tell him that she knew the meaning of apiarists and didn’t need a definition was strong, but she bit down on it, banishing with it the long list of questions that sprang to mind. Such as, if this man farmed in New Jersey, why was he on his way to Manhattan? And why did he speak as though he had been educated for work other than farming?

  “I see I neglected to introduce you properly,” Sister Ignatia said dryly. “Dr. Savard, this is Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte. Of the New York Police Department.” Her jaw set hard, as though she had to bite the words off to let them go.

  An unexpected turn, but it made sense to Anna. He had a natural authority and an air of quiet competence. What he lacked was the condescension that she had encountered in police when she dealt with them professionally.

  “I was under the impression that most of the detectives are Irishmen.”

  He flashed a smile that changed the very shape of his face. A wide, honest, open smile that felt to Anna like a physical touch.

  He said, “That’s true, the police force is primarily Irish.”

  “Just as most physicians are men,” said Sister Ignatia, which put an end to the conversation.

  Anna had the distinct feeling that the older sister liked the detective sergeant and thought well of him. More than that, she seemed to believe that he needed to be protected from her, Anna Savard. She might have calmed the nun’s uneasiness by assuring her that she had no interest in the detective sergeant, and even if she did, she had never learned how to flirt with any degree of comfort. It occurred to her then that she wished she could flirt with him, just to see Sister Ignatia’s reaction.

  Sister Mary Augustin brought her out of her thoughts. “I’m glad Detective Mezzanotte is here to explain things to the little girl. To prepare her. It’s terrible when it comes as a surprise.”

  Anna’s attention shifted to the four Russo children. Despite Rosa’s sincere intentions, they would not be able to stay together. The orphanages were segregated by sex, so that Rosa and her sister would go in one direction while her brothers went in another. Most likely they would lie to her to make the separation less troublesome, Anna was well aware. They would tell her that she’d see the boys again soon.

  People told lies to children as they told fairy tales, with complete certainty that disbelief would be suspended. Rosa Russo was not likely to be so easily misled. Anna wondered if she would lash out or beg or weep, or if she would keep her dignity as a way to protect the three children she saw as her responsibility. She would fight, that Anna knew with certainty.

  The agents of the health department were waiting at the dock, middle-aged men with great showers of facial hair, scowling even before the first of the orphans came onto the dock.

  Anna set off at a brisk clip, not stopping to take leave of anyone at all.

  • • •

  AFTER FOUR YEARS of study at the New York Woman’s Medical School and another four years in the clinics, hospitals, asylums, and orphanages of Manhattan, Sophie Élodie Savard had earned the title of doctor. And still, when the door of the clapboard house on Charles Street opened to her knock, Sophie introduced herself to the man standing there without any title at all.

  Archer Campbell had an unruly head of red hair and skin that was almost translucent, as tender as a child’s. He was a slight man, the kind who would never grow fat no matter how well he ate. His hands, large and as hard as a drover’s, were ink-stained.

  A man might be distracted or distraught or coolheaded when his wife was in labor, but Mr. Campbell seemed mostly irritated. He scowled to learn that the doctor whose fees he had been paying was not coming. Instead there was a woman, and worse still: a free woman of color, as Sophie had been taught to think of herself as a girl in New Orleans. One with a calm, professional demeanor who was well spoken a
nd willing to look a man straight in the eye.

  Mr. Campbell was the kind who would have just closed the door in Sophie’s face had the note she held out not tripped his curiosity. This one was scrawled under the letterhead of the New York Women’s Hospital and was short to the point of rudeness:

  My dear Mr. Campbell:

  Miss Savard is come in my place because I have been unavoidably detained. She is an excellent practitioner with much experience, and she asks only half my fee.

  Dr. Frank F. Heath

  As was usually the case, the combination of the low moan issuing from the back of the house, the note, and the lowered fee bought her entrance.

  Sophie glanced back at the driver who had brought her. She had paid him to wait an hour in case she needed to send for assistance, but she wouldn’t be surprised to find him gone as soon as she turned her back. She would have to send Mr. Campbell himself, if it came to that. It almost made her smile to imagine the affronted face he would make if she had to give him orders.

  The house was small but beautifully kept, nothing out of order, every surface polished, fresh curtains at the windows. While Sophie went about the business at hand, her patient’s husband blustered at her and muttered to himself, his eyes turning again and again to the clock on the mantel as he paced up and down, chewing on a cigar stump. He wouldn’t allow her to close the door to the room where his wife labored, and so he was there every time she looked up. Sophie wondered whether it was his wife’s labor or the fact that he had no place to sleep that accounted for his growing irritation.

  “The first three gave her no trouble.” He stopped in the doorway to interrogate her some hours later. “Why is this one taking so long?”

  “This child is very large,” she told him. “But your wife is strong and the baby’s heartbeat is steady. It will just take longer than you might have hoped.”

  It was a relief when he left for work.

  Mrs. Campbell said, “I never wanted Dr. Heath. He’s so rough.” She had an accent Sophie thought of as New England, her vowels abrupt and all r-sounds clipped away. “I wanted a midwife, but Mr. Campbell”—she glanced into the empty hall and still whispered, as if her husband could hear her from anywhere in the city—“Mr. Campbell thought the wife of someone of his high position must have a doctor.”

  Because there was nothing she could say to such a statement, Sophie asked instead about swaddling clothes and clouts and a basin.

  “You sound strange,” Mrs. Campbell said to Sophie. “Not American.”

  “French is my first language.”

  “Mine too.”

  Sophie turned in surprise.

  “I was born and raised in Benedicta, in Maine,” Mrs. Campbell said. “Lots of Francophones in Benedicta, but I moved to Bangor when I was fifteen, and I gave it up for English.”

  Sophie said, “I came here as a child from New Orleans.” She hoped that the contraction that began to peak would distract her patient from this line of questioning, but Mrs. Campbell picked up where she had left off.

  “I’ve never seen anyone with your coloring. Your eyes are such an odd shade of green, and your skin—”

  “I am a free woman of color,” Sophie interrupted. And at the blank expression Mrs. Campbell gave her: “My grandparents were French and Seminole and African, but I have never been a slave.”

  A frown jerked at the corner of Mrs. Campbell’s mouth. “Not white,” she said. “But your hair—they’ve got a name for somebody like you, I just can’t—”

  Sophie interrupted. “I was very young. I remember almost nothing of New Orleans.”

  Which was a lie. She had been ten full years old when she left the city of her birth, and she remembered far too clearly what New Orleans had been, the smell of seawater and bougainvillea, how cool the tile was under her feet when she played in the courtyard, the children’s rhymes that still came to her now and then when she was very tired. She remembered the sound of her father’s voice and the way he cleared his throat before he said something he thought would make her laugh. She remembered her mother’s tone when she was happy and when she was worried and when she decided she had enough of work and wanted to go exploring and Sophie to come with her. She remembered the baker’s wife who came from the islands and told stories of the Iwa of Saint-Domingue, and Jacinthe who had only three teeth but ruled the kitchen and could make the servants tremble with a look. She remembered the quality of light that fell across her bed when she woke in the morning.

  She remembered the war and the way the ground shook and the air itself seemed to scream. And when the worst had passed and everything and everyone was gone, she remembered the day Mrs. Jamison came to fetch her away from home. They boarded the steamboat Queen Esther on the big wide muddy green Mississippi and she watched the city disappear behind her.

  Sophie would not share her story with Mrs. Campbell because people—most especially white people—born and raised in the north could not, would not understand what New Orleans had been. Sophie hardly understood it herself.

  But her unwillingness to answer questions roused her patient’s suspicions. Between contractions she wanted to know how long Sophie had been a midwife, how many births she had attended. A deep line had appeared between her brows. “You do have training, I hope. Dr. Heath wouldn’t send someone without training.”

  “Yes,” Sophie said, unable to keep the sharp edge out of her voice. “I am a fully trained physician.”

  There was a startled pause. “Oh come now,” Janine Campbell said with a half laugh. “You don’t believe that yourself.”

  Sophie could have recited the names of the seven black women who graduated from medical schools in Philadelphia and Montreal and New York before her, but it would do no good; she could no more relieve Mrs. Campbell of her willful ignorance than her labor pains. Instead she said, “I’m going to make you some tea that will help move this child along.”

  • • •

  MIDMORNING SOPHIE PUT a large, very loud boy with tufts of gingery curls in his mother’s arms. Mrs. Campbell, panting still, lay back against the pillows and closed her eyes.

  “He’s a fine healthy baby,” Sophie said. “Alert and vigorous.”

  “He is disgustingly fat,” said his mother. “I wanted a girl.”

  The baby rooted and found the nipple; she arched her back as though to dislodge a pest and let out a small shuddering sound.

  As Sophie worked to deliver the afterbirth Mrs. Campbell lay staring at the ceiling and ignoring the infant at her breast. From the window Sophie had opened came the sound of the street on a busy Monday morning. Horse carts, omnibuses, hand trucks; knife sharpeners and fishmongers calling out for customers, the wind rocking the spindly apple trees that took up most of the tiny yard behind the house. Nearby a dog barked a warning.

  Sophie hummed to herself while she bathed the baby, cleaned his umbilicus, dressed and swaddled him. He was solid and hot and full of life, and he had been born to a mother who could see him only as a burden.

  There were tears running down Mrs. Campbell’s face to wet the pillow when Sophie put her child back into her arms.

  Women cried after giving birth for all kinds of reasons. Joy, relief, excitement, terror. Mrs. Campbell’s tears were none of those. She was exhausted and frustrated and on the edge of the dark place where new mothers sometimes went for days or weeks. Some never returned.

  “I don’t like to cry,” she announced to the ceiling. “You’ll think me weak.”

  “I think no such thing,” Sophie said. “I imagine you must be very worn out. Do you have no sisters or relatives to help you? Four little children and a household is more than anyone should have to manage without help.”

  “Archer says his mother raised six boys and never had a girl to help. He told me so when he first came courting, back home, that was. I wish I had thought it all through right then and the
re. I’d still be working at the Bangor post office. In my good shirtwaist with a sprig of forsythia pinned to my collar.”

  The most Sophie could do for her was to listen.

  “The worst of it is, he wants six sons of his own. It’s a competition with his brothers, and I fear he won’t let up. He’ll keep me breeding until he’s satisfied. Or I’m dead.”

  As Sophie worked, Mrs. Campbell told her things she would be embarrassed to remember in a few hours. If Sophie said nothing, the new mother would be free to forget about the secrets she had whispered, and to whom she had said them.

  Mrs. Campbell was drifting off to a well-earned sleep when she suddenly shook herself awake.

  “Have you heard about Dr. Garrison?”

  Sophie was glad she was facing away in that moment, because it gave her a chance to school her expression.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve followed along in the newspaper.”

  There was a long silence. When she turned around Mrs. Campbell said, “If you are a physician, could you—”

  “No,” Sophie interrupted her. “I’m sorry.”

  Mrs. Campbell heard only the regret in Sophie’s voice, and she pushed harder. “Another one too soon will kill me, I know it. I have money saved—”

  Sophie set her face in uncompromising lines as she turned. “By law I can’t even talk to you about contraceptives or—anything similar. I can’t give you a name or an address. If you know about Mrs. Garrison, you must know that the mails are not safe.”

  Mrs. Campbell closed her eyes and nodded. “I do know about the mails,” she said. “Of course I know. Mr. Campbell makes sure that I know.”

  Sophie swallowed the bile that rose into her throat and reminded herself what was at stake.

  2

  WHEN THEY HAD shepherded the children off the ferry, Mary Augustin let out a sigh of relief to discover that there were three omnibuses waiting for them. Even better, as far as she was concerned, were the four sisters who had come to help with almost thirty desperately frightened and unhappy children. Ten children and two sisters in each omnibus was manageable. Sister Ignatia was difficult in many ways, but she had no equal when it came to planning.