Where the Light Enters

by Sara Donati

  She thought like this when she was especially tired—which was a lot of the time—or when she felt things were getting away from her. As they were this morning.

  The simple truth was this: the more she learned, the less she knew; she ran and ran but never quite caught up.

  This morning, at the end of her twelve-hour shift, Dr. Janeway had kept Elise back with a snap oral exam on quinine dosages. It wasn’t possible to evade by claiming she had somewhere else to be—true though that was—because Dr. Janeway was not fair; she was easily offended, and she was especially offended by Elise for reasons that she could only guess at. So now she was going to be late for the most important appointment of her short career.

  The omnibus lumbered by, kicking up more mud. Just the week before she had seen a patient who had lost both legs—and then her life—to an omnibus’s wheels. It put things in perspective to realize that there were, in fact, some fates worse than facing a censorious or disapproving Mrs. Griffin.

  * * *

  • • •

  “DON’T LISTEN TO the stories,” Anna Savard had told her just the evening before. “It’s a tradition, the way the older students try to unsettle you. Mrs. Griffin is not only generous, she’s a very sensible and reasonable person.”

  Elise didn’t point out that Anna was describing the way she saw herself; in fact, Anna Savard was generous and reasonable and sensible, but she still managed to scare her students and the nursing staff half to death on a regular basis.

  “So you met with Mrs. Griffin too?”

  “Sophie did. This timing is unfortunate. She’ll be home any day and you might have asked her yourself. What have people been telling you?”

  Elise hesitated. “Well, that she knows everything about you before you get there. And I don’t know anything about her except that she came here from Belgium. And that means—”

  “She’s Catholic.” Anna finished for her. “You think she’ll challenge you about your background. That’s not the kind of thing that interests her.”

  They were standing on the pavement between two houses on Waverly Place: the first, called Roses by the family members, where Elise boarded with Anna’s Aunt Quinlan, and the second, called Weeds, where Anna lived with her husband. This was an unusual and very advantageous situation for a medical student: she lived in comfort because Anna Savard—a graduate of the Woman’s Medical School and a respected surgeon—had taken Elise Mercier under her wing.

  “So you think there’s nothing to worry about.”

  When Anna didn’t answer, Jack Mezzanotte nudged his wife gently. “You’re scaring her.”

  “I was thinking,” Anna said. And then: “Here’s my best advice. Don’t prevaricate. Don’t make excuses. Answer the question completely or admit that you don’t know, and then be quiet until she asks you something else.”

  “Sound advice in any interview,” Jack said. “But I’ll add this. You work like a mule, and you have a talent for medicine. As Anna has said to me more than once. So have some faith in yourself.”

  Anna shot her husband an exasperated glance.

  “Encouragement is called for,” Jack told her, unmoved by her disapproval.

  “She has every reason to be confident. As well she knows,” she countered.

  “Anna,” he said patiently. “Few people are as fearless as you are.”

  Eventually I will be that fearless, Elise said to herself. I’m working on that very thing, day by day.

  They went their separate ways, Jack and Anna to a good supper and conversation and Elise to her shift at the infirmary. She went happily, and never regretted a moment spent in a classroom or laboratory or infirmary or operating room, because every experience, no matter how frustrating or challenging or nauseating, was another step toward a license to practice medicine.

  Mrs. Griffin was one more obstacle to be overcome, certainly not as bad as some. For example, the long search for General Jackson lost in the bowels of a four-year-old who had found an ingenious way of hiding her brother’s toy soldiers. Assigned to assist in the emergency surgery, Elise spent frantic minutes examining the girl’s bowels, inch by inch. She evacuated six lead Confederate soldiers and then started again when old Stonewall refused to show himself. The mother had wept in relief, until Dr. Lowenstein took her aside to talk about lead poisoning, with a recommendation that toy soldiers be hidden away.

  Conversations with the parents of ill children seemed as much a challenge as surgery itself. In general, talking about medicine to people who had never studied it was difficult. Which reminded her of where she was going, and the time.

  Elise was not quite to Rutherford Place on the far side of the park when a boy she recognized—the son of one of the infirmary nurses—went flying past her in the other direction, his face a wide-eyed study in alarm. Alarmed herself, Elise called out to him, but his pace never faltered.

  As soon as she turned back, the reason for the panic came to her on the breeze: something burning. She raised her head to see smoke rising up into a clear, pale blue sky, sprouting like dark feathers from the top of the very limestone and marble town house that was her destination. The home of Mrs. Minerva Griffin, a patroness of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and the attached Woman’s Medical School. The lady who made it possible for Elise to study medicine, and who could put an end to the whole venture, if today’s meeting didn’t go well.

  She understood now that Louis was running to the firebox on the next corner, but it took the span of three more heartbeats to recognize that it wasn’t Mrs. Griffin’s house that was on fire, but a building across the street from hers on Seventeenth Street.

  Just then the church bells began to sound an alarm, and all over Stuyvesant Square people were pouring out of their houses. In a city where buildings were separated by mere feet, a fire was an invading army that had already breached the gates; whether you lived in the neighborhood or miles away, every fire was your business. Whether you could actually be of help or just stand there gawping and getting in the way, you came when the bells began to toll.

  Elise picked up her pace and joined the crowd, Mrs. Griffin forgotten.

  * * *

  • • •

  SHE TURNED ONTO Seventeenth Street to see flames punching out of the third-story windows of the St. George, an elegant building of French flats overflowing with all the modern amenities. Now stone cherubs and gargoyles lined up over doorways were already darkening from the soot and smoke.

  Through the shifting crowd Elise caught sight of men plunging into the building and then ushering out women and children, old men, and servants through billowing smoke, hacking up their lungs with every step.

  Elise had been ready and even eager to help, but her logical mind told her that even if she could shove her way through the mass of onlookers she was unlikely to find anyone who would need the help she could provide. As this thought came to her, the far-off rattling clangs of the fire engine bells made themselves heard. In what seemed like defiance of the coming of the firemen, windows on the second floor burst and flames shot out.

  The crowd let out a sound, awe and excitement and an almost gleeful terror, and drew a little farther back from the heat. All except an elderly man who paced back and forth, so close that embers settled on his shoulders and raised burns on his bald head. A younger woman ran up and pulled him to safety, but his gaze never left the building.

  Next to Elise a boy pointed and shouted a question to his mother. “Why isn’t that man dressed? He’s wearing his nightclothes.”

  “Rich people,” his mother yelled back. “Rich people sleep as long as they like. Except these rich people ain’t so rich anymore, are they?”

  Some smug satisfaction in her tone. As if tenements and boarding houses where carpenters and shop clerks and charwomen lived never burned down.

  The boy’s attention shifted up and he pointed ag
ain, his expression so completely astonished that Elise turned to look too.

  To the right of the St. George was the red brick residence of the Anglican Sisters of St. John the Baptist, a community of women who clearly did not believe in waiting for anyone—not even firemen—to come to the rescue. They had found a ladder somewhere, carried it up to their roof, and propped it just below a window where a woman hesitated, her hands on the shoulders of a young boy.

  It shouldn’t have struck Elise as odd or even surprising—the Anglican sisters were hardworking and independent sorts—but she couldn’t help but smile at the sight of eight women between twenty and sixty gathered around the ladder like the Boodle Gang, calling out a dare. Common sense or the fire itself prevailed, and the woman helped the boy onto the ladder and then followed. As soon as she was down safely the sisters began to move the ladder to another window where a man wearing a very elegant suit and an old-fashioned beaver top hat was waiting. He was coughing into a handkerchief held in one hand, while the other was clamped securely around a fat cigar. He had a potted plant tucked into the crook of that arm, its long fronds waving in the breeze.

  The fire engines came clanging around the corner, and with them a new crowd of gawkers surged in from Third Avenue. As the crowd swelled, Elise backed up farther onto the pavement in front of St. Giles, a small Catholic church with a pretty garden that was being trampled into oblivion. In the middle of the mess was a bench where four women stood, all of them wearing dark gray dresses covered by aprons that had once been white but were now dripping wet, smeared with soot. They stood like soldiers on guard, three in front of and one behind the bench, which was piled high with a jumble of valuables: a few paintings in heavy gilded frames, a crystal pitcher, a stack of china dishes, double-cut velvet and watered silk and figured damask in a tangle of draperies and table linen and beautiful gowns. A wicker basket full of what looked like women’s wigs teetered on top of it all.

  Elise wondered where their mistress was, if she had gone back into the building to save more of her valuables, but understood that a woman who had servants and riches would have sent someone else. And the maids seemed agitated but not especially worried. The three older women had put their heads together to talk, pausing to cough into a cocked elbow now and then. All of them were holding large wooden boxes, highly polished, carved, or enameled, inlaid with mother-of-pearl or ebony. Jewelry boxes rescued when people were still waiting to be saved.

  The youngest of the four stood behind the bench, swaying on her feet and trembling. The box she held under one arm was quite large and clearly heavy because she had to struggle to keep it from slipping out of her grasp. This was made more difficult because her other arm was held tightly bent against her waist, the cuff of her sleeve bloodstained.

  Elise started forward just as it became clear that the girl was about to collapse. In three long strides she was there; she let her book bag slide to the ground and grasped the girl by the shoulders.

  “Steady,” Elise said. “Let me help you—”

  The girl roused and grasped the box to herself more firmly. “No,” she said. “I can’t. You can’t have it. This is the property of a famous actress. What will happen if Miss Serafina Gallo comes home from her tour and finds all is lost? I’ll tell you.” She leaned forward a little, wobbling. “They’ll blame me. Because I’m the youngest and the newest. And they”—she glanced at the other maids—“don’t like me.”

  This could be true, but at the moment all the maids’ attention was focused on a house where an elderly couple stood poised at the top of the stair blinking and coughing, as timid as rabbits. If not for the servants crowding behind them, they would almost certainly retreat back into the house, less frightened of smothering than of the crowd waiting to swallow them up.

  The girl began to sway again, and Elise recollected the problem at hand.

  “You need to sit down—”

  “Leave me alone.” She jerked a shoulder. “Stay away. You can’t have it.” Her voice was low and hoarse, but her expression was clear to read: she was terrified.

  “I don’t want your mistress’s belongings,” Elise said. “Keep the box, but let me help you sit down before you fall over and crack your head.”

  “Crack my head,” the girl echoed, and then frowned. “Herself will fire me if I let you have it. You can crack my head, but you can’t have this box.”

  Elise was beginning to suspect that the maid had already had a blow to the head when a small figure appeared between herself and the girl. An old woman with a face much like a dried apple, all furrows and folds interrupted only by a nose like a swollen knuckle, a mobile mouth, and two sharp brown eyes like raisins in rising dough. A woman of means, given the day dress of black silk crowded with jet beads that winked and sparked with the light of the fire.

  “Cokkie St. Pierre,” she shouted at the young maid in an old lady’s wobbling, reedy voice. “If you don’t put the box down you’ll drop it when you faint and won’t your Miss Gallo like that, her pearls and whatnot in the muck.”

  To Elise she said, “See Greetje over there?” She pointed with her chin to the nearest of the older maids. “Poke her.”

  Elise touched the maid on the shoulder and the woman rounded with a jerk, but her furious expression lasted only until she caught sight of the old lady. Then with something less than good grace she gave an awkward little curtsy.

  The old lady scowled at her. “Take the jewel box from Cokkie and stop your jabbering, all of you. And you—” She glanced at Elise. “Help me get this girl into the house.” She set off, wielding her cane like a scythe to clear the path, hobbling at an astonishing speed given a back bent like a shepherd’s crook.

  For the next few minutes Elise did exactly as she was told, as quietly and efficiently as possible. She half carried the girl around the corner, the whole time her mind racing, trying to latch onto a single reasonable thing she might say to this odd and very irritated old lady who was, she had realized almost immediately, her benefactress.

  * * *

  • • •

  AN ELDERLY BUTLER opened the door, and two maids just as old came forward, one to offer her mistress an arm, and the other to help Elise with the injured girl. More servants were flying off in different directions as Mrs. Griffin warbled commands at them in what sounded like Dutch.

  They managed to transport the girl—who had finally fainted away—into a side parlor and onto a quilt tossed quickly over a divan. Elise was aware of other people moving in and out of the room, talking in hushed tones in something other than English. She turned her attention to her patient.

  First she loosed the girl’s clothing to aid her breathing, fumbling for a moment with the sodden knots on the corset until one of the servants came forward to offer her a scissors. The ruin of her clothes would be a blow to someone who lived on a maid’s wages, but there was really no choice. She cut and peeled until the girl was free.

  When Elise was sure that she was in no real danger—her heart rate had already returned to something approaching normal and her pupils were equal in size and responsive—she turned her attention to the injured arm.

  The things she needed appeared before she could request them: linen toweling, a basin of hot water, soap, a stoppered bottle of diluted carbolic acid, gauze. In a quarter hour she had cleaned and dressed the laceration on the girl’s hand, bound her wrist, freed her from the rest of her wet, ruined clothing, rubbed her dry, and tucked her into a cocoon of warm wool. Then she glanced over her shoulder to see Mrs. Griffin sitting in a wing chair, her hands folded in her lap. All the servants had disappeared.

  “Asleep?”

  Elise shook her head. “It’s just a faint. She’ll start to rouse soon. What will happen to her? Does she have someplace to go?”

  “I lost a maid just the other day,” Mrs. Griffin said. “I’ll take her on here. I will see to it that the others find places un
til their mistress returns, but this one—” She shrugged. “She’s very young and needs training.”

  “And her mistress—” Elise paused, unsure of the propriety.

  “A stage actress,” said Mrs. Griffin. Her nose wrinkled as if the air had taken on an objectionable odor. “Off touring somewhere. I’ve already sent Cronje to see that the possessions the housemaids rescued are locked safely away. But this one—” She flicked a finger at the prostrate girl. “I will keep here.”

  Elise wondered if the girl would have any choice, and decided that she would not. Poor girls so rarely did. And that brought her back to her own situation. Her voice came hoarse and she swallowed to steady her tone. “Mrs. Griffin, I am—”

  “Mercier,” the old woman supplied. “I saw you running across the park before you realized there was a fire. You were going to be late.”

  “Yes,” Elise said calmly. “I was.”

  The old woman studied her for a full five seconds, but Elise had spent half of her life in a Catholic convent and she knew what was expected of her in this situation. She kept her own expression neutral and never looked away. Finally Mrs. Griffin leaned forward and pushed herself out of her chair.

  She said, “I’ll send one of the maids in to sit with this sorry wretch. You come with me, Miss Mercier. We have things to discuss, but first you must make yourself presentable.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ELISE WAS SHOWN to a room where a washbasin, hot water, and soap waited for her. She took her time setting herself to rights, but there was no way to tame her hair. It had come loose in the struggle to get the St. Pierre girl into the house, and now it straggled down to her shoulders in a mass of kinks and waves. The last time it had been so long she had been ten years old, and she was beginning to remember how much work hair could be. She tucked away what she could, spot-dried her hem and cuffs, took a deep breath, and went to meet the woman who held her future in her hands.