by Sara Donati
Sophie watched Elise as she told the story of the fire, the Anglican sisters’ rescue efforts, the servants standing watch over a small hill of valuables, and the way Mrs. Griffin had come barreling through to take over.
“She does love a catastrophe,” Conrad said finally. “I’m relieved to know the damage was limited to that one building.”
“I walked by your house a few days ago,” Elise told Sophie. “It is very beautiful.”
“And large,” said Aunt Quinlan. “As big as this old boat of a house. But your plans will put every inch to use, I think.”
Elise raised an eyebrow, as distinct as a question mark painted on her forehead.
Sophie said to her, “I need a big house because I’m going to start a scholarship program for girls who want to study medicine. Girls like me, colored girls. I’ll cover all the costs, tuition and books and supplies, but because they won’t be allowed in the dormitories, I intend to house them myself, as part of the scholarship. Room and board, books, and all the rest of it.”
“It’s a wonderful idea,” Aunt Quinlan said. “Just a block away from the Woman’s Medical School. A project that will be rewarding in all kinds of ways.”
“Well, there’s all this money suddenly,” Sophie said. “I want to put it to good use. Cap liked the idea. And he especially told me that as a charity must have a board of directors to be established under the law, he hoped Anna would agree to serve.”
She had caught Anna by surprise.
“Too busy?” Sophie asked.
“No, that’s not it. I’d be pleased to help, but—” Anna paused. “Don’t you mean to take up practicing medicine again?”
“Certainly,” Sophie said. “But I am committed to this project. I’m going to hire someone to organize and run it, with Conrad’s help.”
Conrad said, “There’s nothing I’d like more.”
Elise straightened suddenly, as if she had been stuck with a pin.
“I forgot in all the excitement,” she said. “You’ll never guess who I saw at Mrs. Griffin’s house, Anna. Dr. Lambert.”
“From Bellevue?” Sophie asked.
Conrad said, “That would be Nicholas Lambert who’s on staff at Bellevue, yes. Mrs. Griffin is his grandmother’s sister, and he is the only family she has left. How do you know Dr. Lambert, if I may ask?”
“I’ve been going to his lectures,” Elise answered. “I’m interested in him. In his work, I mean. Forensics. Pathology.”
There was a small silence around the room while everyone tried to make sense of this odd statement and the young woman who sat there, blushing furiously. Sophie took matters into her own hands.
“Dr. Lambert is one of the few doctors at Bellevue who allows women medical students to attend his lectures. You’ll learn a lot from him.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.” Elise drew in a deep and shaky breath, like someone who had almost lost her footing on a steep flight of stairs. She cleared her throat. “It’s just that he said something in lecture that made me look at the study of medicine in a new way.”
Anna said, “Now you’ve got my attention. Go on.”
“You hear people say sometimes that the exception proves the rule, but that never made sense to me. In lecture Dr. Lambert said, it is by the exceptions we come to understand the rules. I wrote it down on a piece of paper to pin over my desk.”
“I can tell you one thing,” Conrad Belmont said. “If medicine ever starts to bore you, you would make an excellent lawyer.”
“Oscar Maroney thinks she’s a natural detective,” Anna said.
“You may both be right,” said Aunt Quinlan. “But compliments don’t sit well with her. She’s as red as a poppy. Have pity on the girl, please.”
Elise was blushing, but there was also something almost defiant in her expression.
She said, “I thank you kindly for the compliments, but I am studying to be a doctor, and that is what I will be.”
“That’s no surprise,” Mrs. Lee said. “It’s our Anna, all over again.”
5
ANNA AND SOPHIE set out for Stuyvesant Square on foot. They could have had Mr. Lee drive them, or gone in Conrad’s carriage, or flagged down a cab, but Sophie wanted to stretch her legs.
The weather was very good, the first really fine day this spring, Anna said. “Half the city is out to enjoy the weather. It will be slow going.”
“I really don’t mind,” Sophie said. And it was true; she was feeling a little light-headed and was glad of the slow pace.
Anna said, “All the traffic must be a shock after the quiet of the mountains.”
Sophie took in a deep breath and wrinkled her nose. “The smells are a different matter, but the noise, I don’t mind that at all. I missed the commotion. Or it might be more accurate to say that silence can be deafening, too.”
As they turned north on University Place, Sophie leaned toward her cousin and bumped her, gently, shoulder to shoulder.
“We never got over to see your house. You still call it Weeds?”
“We do,” Anna said. “But it always makes me think about Rosa and Lia and the silly names they thought up for everything. Hand-socks for gloves, and straw-babies for strawberries. The funniest of all was what Lia called Reverend Samuels—” She paused to give Sophie a raised brow, the question not put into words.
“From Church of the Strangers, I remember,” Sophie said. “I haven’t been away that long.”
Anna bobbed her head in agreement and apology both. “You know how he passes the house twice a day when he walks his dogs in the park? While you were gone he took in three more strays, and he walks them all at once, five dogs. One day Lia said to me, ‘You’re late for work. It’s way past Waggy Daddy.’”
She laughed, thinking about it. “Lia had it in her head that I was supposed to be off to the hospital before Reverend Samuels went by with the dogs—”
“I get it,” Sophie said. “Waggy for dog and on that basis she called Reverend Samuels Waggy Daddy. But not to his face, surely.”
“No,” Anna said. “Mrs. Lee was as exact with Rosa and Lia about titles as she was with us. To his face Lia called him Reverend Waggy Daddy.” She shook her head, smiling. “It amused him, which was fortunate. I’m talking about Lia in the past tense, did you notice?”
Sophie said, “Lia and Rosa are your girls. It is natural for you to miss them.”
Anna thought about that for a moment. She had never envisioned herself as a mother—marriage was especially hard for female physicians—but the sudden acquisition of two little girls and then their brother had changed that. She had been a mother to them, though they called her Auntie.
“It hurt to see them go,” Anna agreed. “But not nearly as much as it would have hurt to see them returned to the orphan asylum.”
“Oh,” Sophie said. “That reminds me. In one of the last letters I got from Auntie, Mrs. Lee wrote a comment in the margin, you know how she does—”
“Green ink,” Anna supplied. “She did that to the letters she took down for Auntie when I was in Europe, too.”
“Yes. And in the margin she wrote that I shouldn’t worry about the children being sent away to a bad situation, because Oscar Maroney would make sure it didn’t happen. What did she mean by that?”
Anna hesitated and then glanced around herself. “A subject for a more private discussion,” she said. “But let me say now, it never came to that. Leo and Carmela were very happy to have Rosa and Lia and Tonino, too. They fit right in with the other children and that makes all the difference. So I suppose I have come to accept the situation. Or at least I’ve learned to live with my anger. Jack is a big part of that.”
“You are happy,” Sophie said. “Your sharp edges have been buffed away.”
Such a statement from anyone else would have irritated Anna, but this was Sophie who knew
her as well as she knew herself. “I don’t think I really understood the idea of happiness, before Jack. I loved my work and my family, but I never really let myself consider the things outside those boundaries I set for myself.”
“He woke you up.”
Anna laughed. “I suppose, though I wouldn’t put it to him that way. It would go to his head. Sophie, you should probably carry Pip from this point, and let’s hurry. If one of the Mezzanotte cousins looks out the shop window and sees you it will be an hour before we can get away. There’s nothing they like more than a homecoming.”
Sophie slowed down just a little to observe the profusion of spring flowers in tall florist’s buckets, lined up like so many soldiers along the front of Mezzanotte Brothers Florists.
“But the shop is full of customers,” she said. “I doubt they will look up and see us. Which one is that, that middle-aged man behind the counter?”
“Jack’s Uncle Alfonso, married to Philomena.”
“The one who is such a good cook.”
“That’s right. Their house is halfway down the block. I’ll have to tell him that you called him middle-aged, I believe he’s close to seventy.”
“There’s not a gray hair on his head,” Sophie said, slowing still more to get a better look.
“They are robust, the Mezzanottes,” Anna said, and touched her temple where a few white hairs stood out. “Jack will still have dark hair long after I’ve gone to gray.”
Just ahead Union Square was a kaleidoscope of sound and color, constantly shifting, jarring, the very air jangling. Theaters and restaurants and stores in a ring around Union Square and the park at its heart. A dog Pip’s size would get trampled in short order. He was perched on Sophie’s shoulder, clinging there like a pasha out to survey his kingdom on an elephant’s back.
They wove their way through shoppers and tourists, dodging newsies and pretzel sellers and girls peddling limp nosegays tied with string. A crowd of children coming out of a dime museum fastened right away on the sight of Pip tucked between the brim of Sophie’s hat and her shoulder. They followed along, calling questions and making yipping noises, wanting to know was that a real dog or a mechanical one or maybe a monkey, what he was called, if he could kill rats, and had they ever heard of a dog circus, because Pip looked like he would be at home there. Sophie answered the questions she could catch while Anna kept a sharp eye on their bags and pockets. As anyone who had grown up in the city knew to do when being distracted by street urchins.
At Third Avenue Pip’s admirers abandoned them, and they turned north. Sophie put him back down, looped his leash around her wrist, and then took her cousin’s arm. “I’m wondering now if I should be so far away from Waverly Place.”
“The beauty of the arrangement is that you can be here or there, on Waverly Place or Stuyvesant Square, whatever suits your mood of the moment. We’ve got four unused rooms at Weeds and one of them is yours.” She paused, hoping Sophie wouldn’t pursue the subject of empty bedrooms and how they might be filled.
She went on. “You know that Conrad had Cap’s carriage and horses brought over, so you’ll be able to come and go as you please without looking for a cab. In any case, you will certainly need solitude on occasion, and that will come to you more easily on Stuyvesant Square.”
“I didn’t realize there was a stable,” Sophie said. “I’ll have to hire somebody to look after the horses.”
“Conrad has already seen to that,” Anna said as they turned onto Seventeenth. “He’s put some of his people there until you get around to hiring help. Do you smell that? The fire Elise told us about.”
The sour, tarry stench of recently put-out flames hung thick in the air. The fire engines were long gone, but there were still street cleaners, their faces and hands and long coats black with soot, shoveling debris into a long line of wagons. Patrolmen sauntered up and down at a leisurely pace with batons in hand, keeping an eye out for looters.
“Look,” Anna said, inclining her head to the other side of the street. A small group of children appeared out of the shadows between two buildings, saw one of the patrolmen, and disappeared again. Bands of street arabs would haunt the site of a fire until they had raked through the last thimbleful of ash, looking for stray coins and whatever else might have survived. These were children who were nimble enough to get around any kind of barrier and hungry enough to try, despite the danger and the very real repercussions if they were caught looting.
Sophie drew in a sharp breath. “There’s something I didn’t miss, children fighting over the chance to get killed.”
“Yes well, there’s complaining enough about them in the papers, and it has nothing to do with their needs. A blight upon the city, is the general theme. Comstock has been making a point of it lately. I wouldn’t wish his attention on anybody—”
“Certainly not on children,” Sophie interrupted.
“Not on children,” Anna agreed. “But I can’t deny that life is a bit easier when his attention shifts away from us. He’s after lottery ticket sellers just recently.”
They were silent for a moment, each of them contemplating Anthony Comstock, a demagogue with too much power for such a limited understanding and narrow mind. Many saw him as nothing more than a sanctimonious buffoon, but those who paid attention knew him to be malicious and calculating. Over the years he had managed to build on and expand his powers, and he did not hesitate to bring their full measure down on anyone who crossed him and his sense of what was right and moral. And he took such smug delight in enforcing his will on others.
Women who sought ways to limit the size of their families were to Comstock proof that humankind was on the brink of self-destruction. But not all women; he focused his ire on white women of good families, who were obliged, in his view of the world, to provide heirs for the ruling class. Comstock had arrested and prosecuted physicians, midwives, and pharmacists, and at one point had had an eye on Sophie and Anna. If they ran afoul of him again, he could strip them both of their licenses to practice medicine.
“Stop worrying about Comstock,” Sophie said. “I shouldn’t have raised the subject. Tell me instead about this building that burned down.” They had turned away from the chaos of the fire’s aftermath to walk around the block and approach the house from the other side.
“It’s very new,” Anna said. “Six flats, steam heat, an elevator, all the latest gadgets and fashions. And fireproof, according to the advertisements.”
When they turned back onto Second Avenue, Governor Fish’s mansion came into view. It took up the whole end of the block between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Streets, a stately house with huge old trees and a garden that any child would get lost in for days at a time.
The whole property was surrounded by elaborate wrought-iron fencing, but it was all very quiet, almost unnaturally so.
“The governor is rarely here,” Anna told her. “Spends most of his time in the country.”
“How do you know that?”
Anna gave her a broad smile. “How do you think? The minute you wrote that you were going to live here, Mrs. Lee and Aunt Quinlan started making inquiries.”
There would be disadvantages to a neighborhood like this one; that did not come as a surprise. Social niceties would have to be observed, and that meant calling on all her neighbors. She was glad to have Aunt Quinlan’s help with sorting through the maze of social expectations. This thought was in her mind when they stopped in front of the house. The home Cap wanted her to have.
Most other houses in the neighborhood stood flush with the sidewalk, but a few had been set back a little on their lots. Cap’s house was one of these, with a small front lawn behind a simple wrought-iron fence. The next house was just the same in every particular, the mirror image of this one, because Cap’s father had built them both at the same time. But here Cap had lived first with his parents, and then his Aunt May. By the time Sophie cam
e to New York he had already taken up residence on Park Place, but this was the house he had thought of as home.
The two houses stood out like exotic trees in a forest of dreary hemlock, built of brick in three colors: dark red, lighter red, and off-white, arranged into intricate geometric patterns.
“Go on,” Anna said, poking her gently. “I think I must be more curious than you are to see what Conrad has made of the place.”
In fact, Sophie’s stomach was churning with something akin to dismay. This would most likely be her home for the rest of her life, and now that life must begin. The small flight of stairs led to double doors of some dark, very heavy wood inset with leaded glass panes at eye level. She tried the knob, and found it unlocked.
For a long moment Sophie just stood there in the hall, looking around herself. The air smelled of lemon oil and beeswax, lye soap and hartshorn.
“Conrad must have had a whole army of workers come in,” she said. “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay him.”
“Don’t be silly,” Anna said, moving into the parlor. “Extend an open invitation to every meal. He won’t often take you up on it, but he’ll appreciate the thought. Now look at this, would you. Look at those windows. Cap’s father designed this?”
“Yes. He had a good eye.”
There was a distinctly European feel to the way the house was put together: tall windows and high coved ceilings, heavy pocket doors, a wide staircase that turned gracefully to the second and then the upper floors.
“You know you have electricity?” Anna asked.
“I do now,” Sophie said, and shook her head in a combination of dismay and resignation. The switches for the electric lights were hidden behind a carved wood panel that could be closed to render them invisible. Conrad hated conspicuous displays of wealth, something that always struck Sophie as odd. Not so much because he was blind, but because he had managed to convince himself that it was possible to hide who he was in a city where social position was so highly prized.
She turned her mind to other things, in particular the fireplace that she had heard so much about. The surround was composed of blue-and-white tiles that had come from the family home in Flanders, according to Cap, each with a different picture on it. He had talked about these tiles because they had occupied him as a little boy.
