by Sara Donati
“My mother was the youngest in her family by quite a lot but she was the first of her generation to die. Family came from everywhere to say good-bye. My grandfather Savard came from New Orleans though he was very feeble. Ma trained with him, you realize, and she was a great favorite of his. A month later my father died—his only son—but by then he was too sick to make the trip again. It was just at the beginning of the war and there were cousins and uncles in uniform. My brother was in uniform. Everyone said he looked like our grandfather Nathaniel.
“My father was there at Ma’s funeral, but it was Paul I wanted. I wanted Paul more than anyone. I don’t think he left my side for more than five minutes at a time. When I woke up he was there, and when I wanted to see Ma’s grave he took me. Our father was—I don’t know where he was. Working, I think. He kept going out on calls. They were both doctors, you know that. People get sick and have babies, and he was better dealing with them than he was with me.”
Jack took her hand and pulled it to his chest, where he held it so that she could feel the beat of his heart.
“Little children have trouble sometimes separating thoughts from actions. I think that’s what happened in my case. I didn’t want Paul to leave after the funeral. I didn’t want him to go back to school. West Point seemed to me to be the other side of the world.
“It’s not as though he left me alone. I was anything but alone, there were aunts and uncles and cousins enough, and they were all eager to do what they could for me. But I wanted Paul to stay and I didn’t keep that to myself.
“That night before Paul was supposed to leave, our father went out late on a call. On the way home the rig lost a wheel and flipped into a ravine.
“So I got what I wanted. Paul didn’t leave, he stayed for the funeral. I don’t remember the next days at all, but Aunt Quinlan and Aunt Martha have both told me that I was in a trance of some kind. I’ve thought about it for a long time, and I think I believed I had caused my father to die. That it was my fault, because I wanted Paul to stay. I realize that it doesn’t make rational sense, but children aren’t the most rational creatures. Don’t interrupt me, Jack, or I won’t be able to get through this.”
He squeezed her hand. “Go on.”
“There was a lot of talk about what to do with me. I told them that I wanted to go to West Point with Paul, and I refused to listen to the reasons that wasn’t possible. In the end Aunt and Uncle Quinlan brought me home, here to Waverly Place. Because she wanted me, she said, but I know it was also because West Point is closer to the city, an easy trip by train. That meant I could see Paul more often, and that’s what she wanted for both of us.
“My earliest clear memories are of Paul coming to visit me. He’d bring me small things. A carved horse, a peppermint stick. He read to me and taught me to read, he said so that I could read the letters he wrote to me. I took that very seriously. At four I could read the simple letters he wrote, and at five I could write one, of the simplest kind. ‘Dear Brother, Today a cat got into the garden and chased the chickens and Mr. Lee was very put out with that cat but we had pie for supper.’ Very laborious sentences.
“And that’s how it went on. I had Aunt and Uncle Quinlan and Mr. and Mrs. Lee and Cap, by that time, as a playmate. When Paul came over a weekend we sometimes went to a play or a museum, but mostly we just went for walks. I didn’t want anything else.
“And then the war.”
* * *
• • •
JACK FOUGHT THE urge to stop her. He knew what was coming, and he wanted to spare her, and himself. But it would be a disservice, and so he drew her closer, settled her against his side and listened. Even so part of his mind went away, back to that first summer of the war when he had been thirteen years old to Anna’s six. Isolated as the Mezzanottes had been on the farm at Greenwood, they were a household of boys who had lived for news of war. Every day one of them would find an excuse to get to town and bring home a newspaper.
Anna told him about the day her brother showed up unexpectedly with an announcement: he was on his way to report to General Scott at army headquarters in Washington, where he would be given an assignment and a rank, most likely second lieutenant.
Jack knew enough military men to imagine all this clearly. Paul Savard was a product of West Point, but more than that, he had been raised in an abolitionist household, brought up in the simple certainty that slavery was an abomination that had to be banished, once and for all, and if it meant bloodshed. Of course he looked forward to the war, and of course Anna hadn’t understood any of it. He could not say this to her without risking that she would not be able to trust him with the rest of the story, and so he drew a deep breath and stilled.
She was saying, “I can’t remember any of the details. It just flowed over me, the whole discussion. Paul was very even tempered, even serious. I asked when he’d come home, how long he’d be away, and he wouldn’t answer me. I understood that he would be shooting guns, but it didn’t occur to me that anybody would be shooting back at him. Not at Paul. Until that day he left for Washington, it hadn’t occurred to me.
“When he left to get his train I turned my back and wouldn’t say good-bye. I cried for hours. I don’t think I stopped crying until his first letter came a few days later. I remember thinking, as long as he writes to me I know he’s alive.
“His second letter came the same day as the telegram that said he had been wounded at Manassas.
“You remember Aunt Quinlan talking about how Uncle Quinlan had been a regimental surgeon in the Mexican war? Well, he still had friends and connections, so he went down to the telegraph office to see what he could find out. He was gone all day. By three I was finished with waiting, and I packed a little bag and took my savings and set out for the train. I thought if I could get to the hospital in Virginia and remind him of his promise that we would always be together, Paul wouldn’t dare die.
“Uncle Quinlan intercepted me before I got very far, and carried me back home though I wailed and struggled.
“Aunt Quinlan finally made me settle down so I could listen to what news Uncle Quinlan had brought. Now I realize that it was very bad news, but then all I heard was that he was leaving right away to find Paul and bring him home. That seemed to me the right thing to do. In an hour he was packed and gone.”
She pressed her lips together until they were bloodless. Jack waited, and finally realized that she was hoping for his help.
“I’m thinking that your uncle didn’t get to Paul in time.”
“No,” Anna said. “He never got to him at all. There was tremendous confusion in the aftermath at Bull Run. They were so poorly prepared. The ambulance service didn’t have what they needed, and the wounded who got transported at all could end up anywhere. They had moved Paul but nobody was sure where they moved him to. But Uncle Quinlan didn’t know how to give up on a thing once he started.
“I wish you could have known him. He was very strong for his age, really very fit, he could work for hours in the garden or in an operating room. His mind was so sharp, nothing seemed to ever even slow him down. But even for him, it was too much.
“What happened next is unclear. We never were able to find out the details, but we know that Uncle went from field hospital to field hospital looking for my brother, and never found him. Because Paul was already dead, you see. But the camps were full of disease, and Uncle came down with typhus.
“They both died without family beside them.”
She disentangled herself from Jack’s embrace and sat up. Then she went to her dresser, moving like a sleepwalker, and from the top drawer she took a box. On the bed she opened the box and took out a small bag of a dark color.
The photo she slipped from the bag was set in a simple silver frame. Jack angled it to catch the bit of light from the street lamp and saw a young man in the uniform of a West Point cadet. His hair and eyes were like Anna’s, and there w
as a similar stubborn set to the jaw. But mostly he looked young, unformed; a boy was waiting for his life to begin.
“It was taken a month before he died, at the academy. It’s a very good likeness, though I wish he were smiling. When I let myself think of him at all, I think of him smiling.”
She climbed back onto the bed to lean against Jack, the portrait held between them.
“I remember the details very clearly, what they both looked like in their caskets, and who came to call and what things they said. I remember being glad that they were being buried next to each other. After that I was quiet for days. That’s when the nightmare started. In it I’m always in a hospital crowded with wounded soldiers, looking for Paul. And every bed has a dead soldier in it, and they all have his face.”
She shuddered again, but there were no more tears to wipe away.
“What finally made you speak?”
There was the flicker of a smile, the vaguest hint of a dimple. “Sophie’s mother wrote a condolence letter, and Sophie added a paragraph for me. The mails were terrible, but we started to correspond. I wrote to her about Paul and Uncle Quinlan. All the things I felt I couldn’t say out loud, I wrote to her. And then I took the next step, though I didn’t see it that way at the time. I started showing the letters to Cap, and a three-way conversation got started. Cap and I would sit down with Aunt Quinlan and work out what to say and how to spell the words, and she would write out the address and we all went to the post office together.
“By the end of the war Sophie had lost everything, and so Aunt Quinlan sent for her. All three of our families were torn apart, but then Sophie came from New Orleans, and Cap was here. The three of us together, we held each other up.”
“Good fortune wrapped up in misfortune,” Jack said. “You were here, where you needed to be, with the people who loved you best.”
Anna gave a jerky nod of the head.
“Did something happen today to trigger the nightmare?”
Another jerky nod. “Nicola Visser’s husband came to see you, and I spent some time talking to him. He had the children with him. They looked like puppets, Jack. Not quite real children. The person who took their mother took their childhoods and everything good and safe from them.”
“And you hate that you had no news to give them,” Jack said. “You hate it when you can’t fix things.”
“I do.” She gave a half laugh. “As ridiculous as it is, I feel as though I have failed them. They will never know what happened or why she was taken away. The children will always wonder if they were at fault; even when they grow up and understand that it cannot be the case, there will be a gnawing fear.”
Jack considered telling her that they might still be able to solve Nicola Visser’s murder, and then held his tongue. Because she was almost certainly right, and she would not thank him for false hope. While he was wondering how to respond, her exhaustion gained the upper hand and she slipped away from him into sleep.
19
SOPHIE PAUSED TO flex her cramped writing hand and considered the piles of correspondence before her. Just yesterday she had sent Conrad a note asking if there was any progress toward finding a secretary, and this morning there was a reply. A carefully worded and encouraging reply that might have been fit into a single word: no.
She was disappointed but not surprised; a secretary was someone with valuable training and experience. And, it seemed, most secretaries—at least those four who had thus far answered the advertisement that directed applicants to Conrad’s office—saw her and this venture as frivolous, or objectionable, or beneath a serious man’s notice. To Conrad’s face they were at least polite in the way they withdrew their names from consideration. Sophie imagined they would have been more plain spoken if she sat across from them.
And so she had picked up her pen and opened her inkwell and got to work with the result that she had three addressed envelopes before her that needed to be mailed. A walk to the post office seemed such an excellent idea, but first she would finish her letter to the Rational Dress Society informing them that she could not attend the annual meeting. The trick was saying no in a way that soothed the ego. Usually a donation was the simplest solution and in fact she did want to support the society, but it was a sensitive business. The necessary subtleties would come naturally to an experienced personal secretary.
She was acting like a spoiled child, she told herself. She must make do. She was still lecturing herself on this point when Laura Lee knocked on her study door to say that someone had come to call at the unlikely hour of ten in the morning on a Thursday.
Laura Lee leaned down to scratch behind Pip’s ears while she talked. To Pip she was the queen of all things edible, and he worshipped at her feet.
“Not a stranger,” she was saying. “That Mrs. Reason you wrote to, she’s here. I can see by the smile on your face you don’t want me to send her away.”
“Oh, no,” Sophie said. “Please tell her I’ll be right down. Offer her tea or coffee—is there any cake?”
“At this hour?” Laura Lee was more confused than disapproving.
“Offer her something,” Sophie said. “The Reasons have been kind to me in the past and I very much like and respect Mrs. Reason.”
Laura Lee ducked her head. “In that case I’ll see what I can find for your guests.”
Sophie turned toward her with a suddenness that gave a great deal away. “Guests?”
“Her grandson brought her, introduced himself as Sam Reason.”
“Ah.” Sophie heard herself make the sound, and knew Laura had interpreted it correctly because she lifted one eyebrow. Asking for an explanation, without asking.
“Sam Reason isn’t one of my biggest admirers.” Sophie’s tone made clear that she had nothing more to say on the subject, but Laura Lee was not so easily dismissed. She pivoted, closing the door behind herself.
“What do you mean, he isn’t one of your admirers?”
“I offended him when we first met last year. Unintentionally.”
Laura Lee’s whole face pulled together in an elaborate frown. “What does that mean?”
“It’s complicated, but I can tell you that he didn’t approve of my marriage.”
Sophie stopped herself, because she didn’t need to say more. She had married a white man of means, a son of one of the city’s most prominent families: there was disapproval enough to go around, from white and colored both. Then again, her difficult encounter with Sam Reason last year had to do with another issue entirely, but she decided that this was not the time to go into details.
“I hope he learned some manners in the time since you last saw him,” Laura Lee said grimly. “For his own sake.”
* * *
• • •
IN THE FIVE minutes she needed to make herself presentable for company, Sophie resolved to treat Sam Reason with every courtesy. For his grandmother’s sake. What she didn’t understand and couldn’t imagine was why he had come along on this visit at all.
And all her good intentions were for nothing, because when she came into the parlor she found that Mrs. Reason was alone.
The older woman came to her feet. “Please forgive this unannounced call.”
In a few steps Sophie was beside her, taking both her hands in her own to draw her back down to the sofa. Sophie held on to those hands for a long moment.
“I’m very glad to see you,” Sophie said. “You are always welcome here.”
As they talked, one part of Sophie’s mind—the part that was always a doctor and could be nothing else—took an inventory. Mrs. Reason had aged ten years in the year since she lost her husband, but the changes Sophie saw had to do with far more than grief. Last spring she had been a strongly built woman, but now she was so thin that the bones in her face seemed to strain against her skin. Skin almost the exact same shade as Sophie’s own, caught in the eternity between
white and black. More telling still, deep lines had dug themselves around her mouth and eyes. There was something in her expression that Sophie recognized: the calm of a person who has come to accept that the end of life was near.
Mrs. Reason was saying, “It’s an exciting undertaking you’ve got in mind.”
“It is,” Sophie said. “Very exciting.”
“But if I could make an observation—”
“I hope you will.”
“You need a good name.” She spoke in the soft rhythms of her native New Orleans. Another thing they had in common, one that had forged an immediate bond.
“‘Educational charity’ is awkward, I agree.” With some effort Sophie forced her thoughts in this direction. “I have been struggling with the question. ‘The Verhoeven Medical Scholarship Program’ is far too clumsy but I can’t seem to come up with anything else. Mrs. Reason, please pardon me, but I have to ask about your health.”
The older woman touched Sophie’s clasped hands, squeezed them gently, and let go.
“You can see for yourself, I think. Cancer.”
Sophie drew in a deep breath, and waited. After a moment Mrs. Reason went on.
“That’s part of the reason I’m here. I wanted to tell you in person that I won’t be able to serve on the board of directors of your charity. But I am honored by the invitation.”
Sophie swallowed hard and reached for the right words. “You have faith in your doctors?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Reason said. “I do. You must know Dr. McKinney.”
There were a number of highly qualified colored physicians in Brooklyn. Susan McKinney might be one of them, but Sophie knew little of her beyond the fact that Dr. McKinney was a homeopath. Homeopaths were not well regarded by more traditional physicians, and in fact if Sophie’s Aunt Quinlan were to declare her intention to go see one, Sophie would have tried to dissuade her. But it was not a subject she could broach with Mrs. Reason. To suggest she give up her homeopath was tantamount to challenging her religious beliefs. And so she must say nothing.
