Where the Light Enters

by Sara Donati

  She was trying not to stare, but it was very difficult to look away from someone who so closely resembled her Mohawk family members. Pip rescued her by leaping from Noah Hunter’s shoulder into her arms. He gave her cheek one delicate lick, leapt once more to the ground, and trotted off.

  “Do you like dogs, Mr. Hunter?” Not the most sensible way to start the conversation, but it was all that came to her.

  “I do. I have one of my own I would be bringing with me, if we come to an agreement.”

  “Well, then, let’s sit down and go over the details,” Sophie said, squaring her shoulders. The odd truth was she felt as though she were about to take an exam instead of giving one.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY SAT DOWN together at the kitchen table, where Laura Lee had put out coffee and cake. It was a pleasant, sunny room but it was a kitchen and not a parlor. That seemed wrong, somehow, and yet unavoidable. Mr. Lee had never been comfortable in the parlor at Roses, and really, Sophie asked herself, why should it bother her to sit here instead of there?

  “Mr. Hunter.” She had to clear her throat. “Where are you from, may I ask?”

  He looked for a moment into the coffee cup he held cradled in both hands, as a man might examine a fragile bird’s nest.

  “Don’t know anything about my people except they were most likely Seneca or Cayuga. I was left on the porch of a farmhouse a few miles from Taughannock Falls in Tompkins County when I wasn’t more than a week old. A dairy farm, belonged to John and Martha Hunter. They took me in and raised me along with their own boys. I was seventeen when I set out on my own, twenty years ago now.”

  He was thirty-seven years old, then. She could see it now in the fan of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and a crease line between his brows.

  Without prompting he told her about his work history, first as an apprentice with the landscapers who had built Central Park, then managing a small horse farm near Newburgh and finally his own small holding in Connecticut.

  “What you need to know is, I gambled almost everything away. The farm and stock, everything except my tools. That’s why my wife left me and moved north to Canada. I don’t blame her, it was the right thing for her to start over.”

  Sophie, taken by surprise, had to clear her throat before her voice would come. “And when was this?”

  “Two years ago. Drink ain’t ever been my problem, I can leave that be. Gambling is what brought me low, but I won’t go down that road again.”

  His gaze was unapologetic and unflinching. Most men would have had trouble looking at her directly for fear of her reaction. It was as if he was challenging her, asking her to see him as he was.

  She said, “I’m glad to hear it. And more recently?”

  “The last two years I’ve been working mostly landscaping and livery. Looking the way I do, it ain’t always easy to get hired.”

  “Oh yes, I am familiar with that problem.” She meant to reassure him and remind him, too, that she must know what it meant to be openly scorned because she was something other than white.

  He said, “I’m not making excuses. I managed to get work and I built up a reputation as I went along. Also I want to make it clear that I have never took a thing that didn’t belong to me and I never spent a night in jail. Mr. Lee knows all this, but you need to know it too. So it’s up to you at this point, now that you know the worst. For what it’s worth, I like your property and I would take pride in keeping things safe and orderly, in good working order, and pleasing to the eye. You’ve got a well-laid-out garden and two good horses that need more exercise and grooming, and that carriage needs some work, too. Those are all things I can do.”

  Sophie felt Mr. Lee watching her. This was indeed an exam, one she thought she could pass in Mr. Lee’s eyes, at least.

  She said, “Mr. Hunter, I am pleased to offer you employment. We need to make the rooms over the stable ready for you, but beyond that issue, when can you start?”

  “I don’t need much,” Noah Hunter said. “A cot and a table and a chair, and I’ll tote what needs toting myself. So I can start tomorrow, if you like.”

  She glanced at Laura Lee, who gave a firm nod.

  “Please let Laura Lee know if there’s anything you need,” Sophie said. “And welcome.”

  * * *

  • • •

  JUST AS ANNA was thinking about starting for home Elise brought her a note from Aunt Quinlan about supper under the pergola.

  “We’ll be late,” Elise said.

  “Not if we run.” All Anna’s weariness disappeared just that easily.

  They ran all the way to Waverly Place, Anna wondering to herself if Jack had gotten word and hoping he would be there. Because it was important to Aunt Quinlan, and also to her. She was as smitten as a sixteen-year-old, still, and wondered how long that would last.

  They circled around to the back, past the carriage house and stable, dodging chickens. At the garden gate Jack’s laugh came to them, low and easy and full of good spirits.

  “What is it?” Elise asked.

  Anna realized she had stopped to look into the garden, sun-drenched and full of color. The pergola itself was almost lost in cascades of white wisteria just come into flower, each cluster of blossoms alive with light. Alva Vanderbilt’s mansion on Fifth Avenue glowed at night like a fairy castle, every room drenched in the harsh light of electric bulbs, but Anna would not trade what she saw in front of her for any money.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Beside her Elise’s posture relaxed. “Yes,” she said. “It is. One of those moments when everything seems to be in balance in the world.”

  As they walked over the lawn Anna heard Sophie say, “Jack, I’ve never heard the story about you going back to Italy, how that came about.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard the whole story myself,” Anna called.

  Everyone gathered there turned toward the sound of her voice.

  “We ran all the way from the New Amsterdam,” Elise said as they ducked through the swaying curtain of wisteria clusters. “I hope being a few minutes late doesn’t mean we’ll go without supper.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Aunt Quinlan turned up her cheek for Anna’s kiss. “The sight of you two gives me back a full ten years.”

  Jack took Anna’s wrist and pulled her down beside him on the chaise longue. There was a plate waiting for her, and a glass of Mrs. Lee’s first iced tea of the season.

  “Elise, there’s a place for you right here beside me,” Aunt Quinlan said. “Come get settled.”

  Sophie said, “Jack was just going to tell us the first story of the season, about why he went back to Italy when he was—how old were you?”

  Jack settled back and draped an arm around Anna’s shoulders. “Seventeen.”

  “Eighteen,” Bambina corrected him.

  Jack raised a brow in his sister’s direction. “I was seventeen when I sailed, and eighteen when I arrived in Genoa. First I went to Livorno to visit family. In the fall I enrolled in the university at Padua.”

  Ned said, “You couldn’t study law here?”

  Jack shrugged. “Not the way my father wanted me to. Sophie, were there any Italians in Cap’s class at Yale?”

  Sophie shook her head and Ned nodded, conceding the point.

  Jack said, “I was there about three and a half years. And then I came home.”

  Anna bumped his shoulder. “You never have explained to me why you didn’t stay. Not that I’m complaining.”

  “I hope not.” He waggled an eyebrow at her. “Mostly it had to do with my mother. She lived in fear one or all of us would enlist in the Union Army behind her back, and just when the war here came to an end and she thought she could relax, my father announced he was sending me to Italy to study law.”

  His gaze moved around the tab
le. “You know Italy was at war for something like fifty years, trying to get shut of Austrian rule? The Hapsburgs had a stranglehold on Lombardi and Venetia in the north and on Rome too. That stuck in the craw, but the Italian army never could rout them.”

  “Until Prussia stuck its nose in,” Oscar offered.

  “That was the turning point,” Jack agreed. “The Prussians got the idea that a united Italian republic would be real trouble for the Hapsburgs—”

  Ned said, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

  Jack inclined his head in agreement. “So Prussia stepped in, and in sixty-six the third war for independence got going. That was just when I was packing to leave for Padua. Padua’s not far from Venice, and Venice was a prize Austria wanted to hold on to.”

  He rubbed his jaw and his beard stubble rasped like a file against seasoned wood. “So Mama put her foot down and said she wouldn’t let me go unless I promised that I wouldn’t join Garibaldi’s army and that I’d come home if it looked like I couldn’t stay out of it. And that’s your Italian history lesson for today.”

  “Very instructive,” Oscar said dryly. “But not entirely true. Tell them about the cream puffs.”

  “Cream puffs?” Anna echoed.

  “I’m getting to that,” Jack said, throwing Oscar a peeved look.

  Everyone was leaning forward a little bit now, smiles all around. Jack put his palms on his knees in a gesture that Anna recognized. His father sat in just the same way when he was getting to the best part of a story.

  “In my third year at Padua, I went to Rome with a friend called Galeazzo San Giacomo. Galeazzo had a cousin called Dino who was a clerk in the Palace of Justice and the cousin owed him a favor. So Dino snuck us inside the building and told us to wait, he’d be back as soon as he could to show us around the chambers where the public never goes. We were excited, you know, thinking this could be where we’d end up someday.” He jabbed his thumb into his chest in imitation of his younger self. “At the top.

  “So there we were in the Palace of Justice, waiting for the cousin, and these big double doors open. Galeazzo pokes me and points to the engraving over the door where it says in letters a foot tall, Corte Suprema di Cassazione. The Supreme Court of Italy. Before we could think how to get out of the way a whole procession is pouring into the hall and we’re stuck as they march by. Monks and priests and behind them a bishop, and behind him another bishop, and then government officials in uniform and then the junior staff and then judges in black robes and finally the justices themselves with their clerks and secretaries.” He smiled and shook his head.

  “I don’t know what I was hoping for. Maybe that the justices would look like Roman gods. Jupiter with a lightning bolt in his hand and an eagle on his shoulder. But instead of gods or Praetorian guards, a crowd of old men came toddling along. All wearing heavy robes, blood red, with ermine cuffs and collars down to the floor.”

  He stroked his lapel to illustrate. “You know ermine?” He was looking at Aunt Quinlan, who had grown up on the edge of the wilderness in what had then been called the Endless Forests, with a grandfather, a father, brothers and cousins and uncles who hunted and trapped fur for a living.

  “In winter a stoat’s coat turns white with a black tip on the tail,” she said. “While a stoat is white you call it an ermine.”

  Jack nodded. “That’s it. The kings and queens and justices of Europe like ermine. They sew the pelts together so the black tips make a pattern on the white fur. Very fussy. And very expensive.”

  Oscar sighed melodramatically.

  “I’m getting to it,” Jack said to him. “So if the robes and ermine collars aren’t enough, the justices wear a kind of hat—a black felt cap, a puff, really, no brim so it sits down low on the forehead. I was hungry, and in that moment they looked to me like profiteroles, like cream puffs covered with chocolate sauce.”

  He was trying not to laugh, and just barely succeeding.

  “Now imagine a seventy-year-old man wider than he is tall, and on his bald head is a cream puff, held up and in place, as far as I could tell, by two white eyebrows like thorn bushes covered with snow. I’m standing there watching him trundle along, and I’m talking to myself.

  “I’m telling myself in English, It’s pompous on purpose. Purposeful pomposity. But no matter how I tell myself that this is all to impress on the public the seriousness of the position and the great responsibility of the office, all I could see was a big cream puff dripping chocolate.

  “At this point I’m thinking, I’ll have to close my eyes or risk laughing out loud. That thought is still in my head—don’t laugh, it would be rude to laugh—when the procession reaches where we’re standing and the little justice I’ve been watching, who turns out to be the president of the court, by the way, sneezes. He sneezes so hard that his cream puff pops off his bald head and rolls away, comes to the staircase where the first three-quarters of the procession is still moving along, and you would have thought a snake had dropped down from the ceiling. They all jumped out of the way for the cream puff and it went on down the stairs, making a plop-plop-plop sound on every step. Until it disappeared around a corner.”

  He shook his head, remembering, and let out a single bark of laughter.

  “And nobody laughed?” Elise asked, wide-eyed. “Nobody at all?”

  “Not even a smile,” Jack said.

  “Romans.” Oscar wrinkled his nose. “No sense of humor.”

  Jack went on. “And that’s when I knew, even if I spent the rest of my life in Italy and made it all the way one day to be the president of the highest court, I’d never be able to wear one of those cream puffs on my head and keep a straight face.”

  His shoulders were shaking, and he blew out a long breath to calm himself.

  “My conclusion, after some thought, was simple. I’m just not Italian enough for Italy. It’s a good thing for two reasons. First, I promised Mama I’d come home, and second, if I had stayed, Anna would still be sleeping all by herself.”

  “You would have come back eventually,” Ned said.

  “I would have, you’re right.” Jack leaned down and kissed the top of Anna’s head. “To find you.”

  “So you never finished your studies in Italy?” Mrs. Lee asked.

  “Sure he did,” Bambina answered for him. “In Italy he’s a lawyer.”

  Beside Anna Jack’s posture shifted uneasily. “I never practiced law.”

  “But you could be a lawyer here, if you wanted,” Bambina went on. “Or you could work for the consulate here. Mama told me.”

  “Bambina,” Aunt Quinlan said. “This is your brother’s story to tell, or not to tell, as he sees fit.”

  “Of course,” Bambina said, sourly. “Jack always gets what he wants.”

  “Not always,” Oscar said. “There was the time he wanted a beefsteak, and he took a swim in the harbor instead. In January.”

  “Now that’s a good story,” Ned said. “I saw the whole thing.”

  “But wait,” Sophie said. “If Oscar’s going to tell a story then he should tell us about Aunt Amelie. I’ve been waiting to hear that forever.”

  They all turned to look to Aunt Quinlan, who raised a hand, palm up. “What story Oscar tells is up to Oscar.”

  “Then listen,” Oscar said. “And I’ll tell you about a slippery deck and Jack Mezzanotte, so determined to get his teeth into a beefsteak that he followed it right into the river.”

  25

  EARLY THE NEXT day Elise learned from Sally Fontaine that Tadeusz Kozlow had died in the night. It was not unexpected, and it was far from the first patient Elise had lost, but it was still a failure. She was thinking about him and wondering if the family had been told when Sally reminded her that they had to hurry if they didn’t want to be late for rounds.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Sally said. “We just have to survive McClure u
ntil Monday, and I’ve got a plan.”

  “A plan?”

  “Today I’m going to stay out of her line of sight, and every time she looks in my direction, I’ll be writing furiously in my notebook. She doesn’t like it when you look her in the eye, have you noticed? So I won’t. That way I might just avoid the worst of her moods.”

  When rounds were half over Elise decided the simplest plans were often best, because thus far she had been following Sally’s example, and both of them had been spared Dr. McClure’s temper. Just as that thought came into her head a nurse stepped into the hall with a swaddled, very quiet newborn on her arm.

  Dr. McClure’s attention fixed on the infant. She asked a question Elise didn’t quite hear just as Sally whispered in her ear.

  “Poor thing. Maybe the mother died.”

  That was entirely possible. The mother might be dead or sick unto death; she might have refused to look at or acknowledge the child. But Sally had never been a nurse or worked in a charity hospital, and none of this was obvious to her. Now she pulled Elise away a little and asked for an explanation, one Elise gave to her in a few short sentences. And still, too many, because when she looked up, Dr. McClure was watching her.

  “Miss Mercier,” she said. “Take this infant to the nursery and evaluate. Bring me your notes with a diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment plan within the hour.”

  Sally’s expression was contrite. Under her breath she whispered, “Oops. Sorry.”

  “Never mind,” Elise said to her, and managed a small smile. “It could be worse. As you may soon find out.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ON HER WAY to the nursery Elise studied the tiny face, as round and white as an underdone griddle cake, with eyelids of a bruised blue. In happier circumstances a newborn would be assigned to a wet nurse who would take her home. The city paid a small sum every week as compensation until the child died or reached six months of age. At that point she was sent on to one of the church-run asylums or in the worst-case scenario, to the infant asylum on Randall’s Island.