A hint of rebellion showed itself on Lia’s face, but her sister’s sharp look was enough to nip insurrection in the bud.
“You’ll like these sandwiches,” Margaret promised the girls.
And they did. A plate of small triangles, white and brown bread trimmed of all crust and filled with delicate slices of cucumber, potted cheese, and slivers of pink ham. The little girls hesitated at first and then ate up the whole platter under Margaret’s watchful eye and constant small corrections.
Anna was just starting to long for home when she saw Rosa’s face transform itself, her worries falling away to reveal a little girl whose fondest wish had just been granted. Even as Anna turned to follow Rosa’s gaze, she knew that Jack was coming toward them, bold and dark and strong in this pastel-colored place designed for ladies and children. She twisted around and met his gaze, and knew that she could not hide from him or anyone at all what she was feeling.
His fingers brushed her shoulder as he passed by her chair and to the other side of the table to stand behind Rosa, who was chattering at him in Italian. He put his hands on her shoulders and leaned down to talk to her, just a few words in Italian, but the tears that had been welling in her eyes subsided as she nodded and smiled and swallowed. Then Lia had hooked her hands around his forearm and demanded her share of his attention.
Anna watched all this and felt her own throat swell so that even when Jack came to her and leaned over to kiss her cheek, she had not a word to offer him.
The waiter brought another chair and there was a good five minutes of adjusting and moving and ordering of more sandwiches and ice cream, during all of which Anna had nothing to say. Finally Jack turned to her, pressing her shoulder with his own. Under the table he caught her hand and put it on the long hard plane of his thigh to trace her ring. Her fingers twitched, and he folded his hand around hers.
He said, “I’ve robbed you of speech.”
Anna nodded, and the little girls giggled, so delighted that they bounced on the red leather cushions of their chairs. Even Margaret was flushed with excitement. She wanted to know how Jack had found them.
“I stopped by Waverly Place,” he said. “Mrs. Lee told me where I might find you. And here you are. Though Anna still won’t talk to me.” Jack, who remembered the shape of her hands, and the texture of her skin, and the smell of her hair at the nape of her neck. Under the table he squeezed her hand. “Maybe she’s changed her mind about marrying me. Have you, Anna? Changed your mind?”
Lia chirped, “Allora io ti sposerò.”
“Ah,” Jack said, leaning across the table to stroke the little girl’s cheek. “That’s a relief. Lia will marry me if you’ve changed your mind, Anna.”
“Lia,” Anna said. “It’s a very kind offer, but you will have to find someone else to marry. Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte is spoken for.”
• • •
JACK TRACED A pattern over Anna’s palm, just to feel her tremble. This wasn’t exactly the way he had hoped to find her but there were some advantages; he had never seen her so reticent or flustered. She vibrated with the need to be kissed, and he wanted nothing so much as to oblige her.
Then the food and ice cream arrived, and there was a moment’s quiet while they turned their attention to their plates and bowls, all except Margaret, who wanted to know about the prisoners he had brought back from Chicago and where they had ended up.
“I don’t know,” Jack said, which was not exactly the truth, but close enough. “A couple patrolmen took charge of them in the station. You don’t need to worry, you know. Even if they were out on the street, you wouldn’t need to worry. They are very polite, gentlemen of the first order unless you’re getting on a train, in which case they’ll take your money, give you a worthless piece of paper in return, and bend over backward thanking you for your patronage.”
“Forgers.” Margaret sounded almost disappointed. “Not even money, but train tickets.”
“Oh, a train ticket,” Lia announced. “I love a train ticket. I got one of those at home.”
“You wouldn’t know a train ticket if it bit you on the nose,” said her sister.
Lia was unconcerned by this accusation, her mouth too full of ice cream.
“Lia,” Jack said. “Your English is almost as good as your sister’s. Did you swallow a dictionary?”
She waved her spoon like a queen with a scepter. “Oh, a dictionary,” she said agreeably. “I love a dictionary.”
“She’s got one of those at home,” Rosa finished for her, and Jack couldn’t help himself, he laughed out loud. For this moment he was content to sit with Anna beside him and talk to the little girls and even to Margaret, who had the makings of a police officer, if such things were possible, or a nun, if she were Roman Catholic. She spoke up as if she had read his mind.
“These girls need to get home, Anna. Shall I go on with them?” She managed to offer both help and disapproval in those few words, a skill that Jack had observed before in mature women who were worn to the bone by loneliness and loss.
“We’ll all go,” he said. “I’d like to say hello to your aunt Quinlan, and then Anna and I have an appointment to keep.”
In an awkward scramble they managed to get two cabs, only to be held up by the girls, who both wanted to ride with Jack. The long afternoon had begun to wear on them, and tears and tempers were ready to erupt. In the end Jack took the girls in one cab, and left Anna and Margaret to the other.
Anna was damp with perspiration and her heart was thundering in her ears, but she worked hard to maintain a placid expression that would give Margaret nothing to grab onto.
Margaret said, “It’s good to see you happy.”
Surprised, Anna had to gather her thoughts before she could reply. “But I haven’t been unhappy.” She heard the defensive tone in her own voice and wondered what she was protecting: her understanding of herself, or Margaret’s? The truth was, her life before Jack was a good life. She had fulfilling work and a family she loved. There were new things for her to discover every day. And that was the key, Anna realized. Margaret thought of her own life as a thing of the past, and anticipated nothing beyond more of the same.
“You could change things,” Anna said. “You really could start out on a different life for yourself. You are not nearly so old as you feel.”
Margaret smiled at her. “I was brought up to be a wife and a mother. I never wanted any other occupation and I still don’t. Really all I want—” She stopped.
“Go on,” Anna said.
“All I want is a household of my own,” Margaret said. “With my own people, who look to me first instead of last.”
Anna thought of Bambina and Celestina Mezzanotte and of all the other women she knew who considered themselves less than women because they had no households or husbands or children to care for. And she thought of Jack, the kind of man she had never even dared imagine.
She said, “If you had broken bones or a punctured lung I could help you. I wish there were more I could do.”
The two of them sat quietly side by side swaying with the movement of the cab as it dodged one way and then another through traffic around Union Square and turned toward Waverly Place.
• • •
SOPHIE WAS STILL at Cap’s, but everyone else was in the garden when Anna and Margaret got home, Jack and the little girls included. There was a great deal of talk and laughter and then a spirited discussion about supper. Jack wanted to take Anna away to an appointment—she was still unclear on exactly what he meant with that word, but she had her suspicions—and promised to come back for Sunday dinner the very next day; there was a lot to discuss, after all.
Aunt Quinlan took his face in her hands when he bent down to kiss her cheek and studied his eyes for a long moment.
“Endeavor to deserve her,” she said, and let him go.
“It’s what her father said to her
first husband when they married,” Anna explained as they went back through the house. “Her husband said it to all her daughters’ husbands.”
Jack caught her wrist and drew her up against him while pressing her to the wall in the cool shadows of the front hall. When he had kissed her—less kiss than she had anticipated, but sweet nonetheless—he rubbed his cheek against hers.
“Did she say the same to Cap?”
“Multiple times, I’m sure.”
He kissed her again, more seriously now and with all his attention.
“Wait.” It was the only word she could get out between one kiss and the next, and in response she got only the curve of his smile pressed to her cheek.
She pulled away to say, “You can’t smile and kiss at the same time.”
“Watch me,” Jack said.
“What about this mysterious appointment?”
He let her go, nodding. “There is that. Come on, let’s get it over with.”
• • •
THEY CROSSED WASHINGTON Square Park at a sharp angle, Jack only slowing when he realized she was almost running to keep up. Her expression was one he couldn’t quite place, but the tone of her voice gave her irritation away.
“Where exactly are we going?”
He gestured with his chin to the southern border of the park. “Mazzini’s Hotel.”
She pulled up short and he stopped, too.
“Hotel?”
“Mazzini’s, yes.”
A line appeared between her brows. “For what purpose?”
And now he understood. He hadn’t been clear and her mind had gone off in the wrong direction. An intriguing direction, but wrong. She stood in front of him in the late afternoon sunshine, framed all around by dogwood and crab apple trees in blossom with her own color rising in her cheeks. The most sexually open woman he had ever known, but inexperienced, too, confused and affronted and aroused, on top of all that.
He could not resist. “You’re asking about my purpose?”
She crossed her arms and scowled at him, then stepped back when he stepped toward her. Jack advanced at a leisurely pace and she retreated, step for step.
“What purpose do you imagine I have?”
The next step brought her back up against a dogwood tree, and a flurry of petals fell, catching on her hair and shoulders. She was beautiful and irritated and confused.
“Did you think I meant to seduce you in a hotel room?” He propped a forearm against the tree trunk just over her head and leaned in to smell her hair. “Is that what you imagined?”
She pushed at him, half laughing now. “Get away.”
“But I just got back.” He nuzzled her temple as she pushed and pushed at his chest, and then, relaxing, slipped her arms around his waist and turned her face up to his.
“Did you really think I was taking you to a hotel room?”
She bit the lining of her cheek. “If you had just told me—”
“You did think I was taking you to a hotel room.”
Anna ducked as if to slip away, but he caught her up again. There were people on the paths, people who could see them and at this moment, he didn’t care and more than that, he didn’t want Anna to care, either. So he kissed her until she forgot about the tree at her back and the park all around and the people in the park and everything in the world but the two of them.
Then he took her hand and pulled her away, to run with him through the park, breathless and flushed with a youth he had thought long past.
• • •
THERE WAS A chalkboard just outside the hotel lobby bracketed by the American flag on one side and the Italian flag on the other. An announcement had been written out carefully in English and Italian both: Monthly Meeting of the Italian Benevolent Society Today at 6 p.m.
“Wait,” Jack said, holding her back a moment. “I have to confess. This meeting is being held in a room. In a hotel.”
Anna pinched him with her hard surgeon’s fingers and was satisfied with the yelp he produced. Then they were in the lobby and surrounded by a crowd of men who came toward Jack as if he were a long-lost son, stopping in an almost comic way, all at once, when they saw Anna. Jack put his arm around her waist in an overtly possessive gesture that should have irritated her. But she could not be agitated about his willingness to claim her publicly, nor could she even deplore that inability in herself. Because Jack was home and he had brought her here to show her off. She was vain enough to be pleased, and embarrassed too.
They were shopkeepers, carpenters, restaurant owners, cigar makers, laborers, masons, stable owners, grooms, manufacturers of pianos and pipe and hairbrushes. And they all held Jack in high esteem, and extended the same to her.
There was a meeting during dinner, all of the discussion in Italian. Anna recognized some words now, thanks to the Russo sisters and Jack: orphan, family, money, school. While she picked at her food—small square noodle packets filled with spiced meat, all in a combination of soft cheese and cooked tomatoes—Jack was asked a question and he answered in a tripling Italian that made Anna realize how slowly he had spoken otherwise.
Finally the liquor and cigars came out and Jack squeezed her hand and gestured with his chin toward the door. Anna felt like a child let out of school, but she resisted the urge to hurry. She was a highly educated, mature woman who did not have to give in to every impulse. But the urge to skip stayed with her all the way home.
All the way home they talked. About Chicago and the taciturn chief of detectives, about Anna’s cases over the last week, about Bambina and Sophie and the wedding. Not once did Jack stop to kiss her. She wondered why, and then explained it to herself in a half-dozen reasonable ways. He was exhausted after such a long and difficult trip; his sisters were waiting at home and would begin to worry; he still had to go into the station to make a report, and so on and so on until they turned onto Waverly Place and her disappointment got the upper hand.
“You’re just taking me home?”
His brow quirked. “You have an early surgery tomorrow, didn’t you say?”
She found herself staring at him, dropped her gaze, and lifted it again, unsure of herself suddenly.
He was saying, “Tomorrow will be busy for me, too. It may be late evening by the time I’m finished. Should I come by then?”
“Yes.” Her voice sounded a little hoarse. “I would be glad to see you.” She tugged on his hand and he looked down at her. “I’m glad to see you now, Mezzanotte.”
But all she got for her trouble was a chaste kiss at the door and a promise about the next day. He was truly tired, or he was making the point that he could be patient. Something Anna had not asked him to do or be, because it was a skill she lacked herself.
• • •
OVER THE NEXT few days Anna saw Jack often, but never for more than a half hour at a time and always in the middle of a crowd of people who wanted to see him almost as much as Anna did.
She realized that the inability to keep Jack to herself for any amount of time at all was making her cranky, but there was no easy solution. His cousin Umberto’s lodgings at the greenhouse had been claimed by a different cousin whose rooms had been damaged in a fire, news Bambina shared with Anna when they met for dinner on Monday. Bambina’s tone was entirely too satisfied.
Out of his sisters’ hearing Anna told Jack about this. “She knows about—you know.”
He raised an eyebrow in mock confusion. “About?”
The rotter.
“About the night before you left for Chicago.”
And when he still pretended ignorance, she poked him so hard that he captured her hand and held it still in self-defense. He was trying not to laugh.
“They don’t know anything. And if they suspect, does it really matter?”
It didn’t matter, but it felt as though it did. And that irritated. She was
a seething mass of irritations.
Bending low to speak directly into her ear, Jack said, “Are you feeling deprived? Because—” He tightened his hold ever so slightly. “I am.”
Somehow that made it all better, and Anna went back to the dinner table with Jack right behind her, so close that she could feel the heat of his body all along her spine.
Celestina, always the peacemaker, asked Anna about the search for the Russo brothers, a subject that made both girls put aside their gifts and turn toward her.
“I’m afraid there’s not anything of substance to report. We’ve written to forty-six—”
“Fifty-one,” Rosa corrected her. “As of last night, fifty-one.”
Anna smiled at her. “—different places, asylums and child welfare agencies, individuals who might have some information. I hired a young man who was once a newsboy and is very well connected to ask questions. But we’ve had no positive responses.”
“Sixteen letters weren’t answered at all,” Rosa said in a low voice.
“Rosa keeps track of the correspondence,” Anna explained.
“You can read English?” Celestina asked, and Rosa sat up very straight. “I’m practicing every day. Auntie Margaret says I’m making excellent progress.”
“That she is,” Anna said.
Lia took hold of the conversation by telling Jack’s sisters about the stories they were hearing at bedtime. She got off her chair to act out part of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, so delighted with this opportunity to pass the story on that they had to laugh with her.
The little girl had managed something that had seemed to Anna too much to hope for: the tense expectation that radiated from Bambina let up and then disappeared. And another thing for which Anna was very thankful: the impromptu storytelling crowded out any questions that might have been coming her way about wedding plans.
• • •
LATER WHEN JACK walked her home, he said, “They are trying not to be impatient, but it’s hard to hold back the questions. My mother is just as bad; I get a letter almost every day.”
Anna’s life had always been busy. She could spend every waking hour at the hospital and never run out of things to do, and now there were two little girls, two missing brothers, Sophie’s wedding, Cap’s farewell, and the entire Mezzanotte clan, and the idea of her own wedding to juggle. And Jack.