by Sara Donati
He said, evenly, “Go on.”
“There are other clusters in his groin, on both sides. They extend up into his abdomen, but it’s hard to know how far. If they begin to press on the major blood vessels, well.” She shook her head. “It could be very drawn out and very painful.”
After a long moment she said, “There’s no treatment, nothing to do but try to keep him nourished and hydrated and to do what we can to ease the pain. To be truthful, I’m more worried about Rosa. Lia will take comfort where it’s offered, but Rosa. She may cut herself off from us all. From me, especially.”
“You think she blames you?” He couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice.
“Oh, no,” Anna said. “She blames herself, as usual. It doesn’t matter how often she’s told that she isn’t responsible for what’s happening to her brother, she is convinced that she failed him. And I don’t know what to do about that.”
She turned her head to yawn into her shoulder.
“All right,” Jack said. “Enough for now. We can talk more in the morning.”
“Do you think the light of day will make a difference?”
Jack thought of the pages from Amelie Savard’s day-book, neatly folded and still in the pocket of the jacket that he had hung over the back of a chair. He had promised Oscar not to show them to Anna or Sophie until the four of them could sit down together. Now he had to wonder when that might be possible.
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING Oscar said, “I don’t like to trouble them with this until they’ve got their feet under them. Let’s you and me have a look at those pages. In a few days if things settle down we can ask them to have a look.”
They had barely gotten started when they were called into the captain’s office to be congratulated on Pittorino, interrogated about the Louden case, and sent off to Brooklyn to follow up on a tip about Guido Santorini, who made a living selling fake lottery tickets to Italian immigrants, men who had very little money to spare and even less English. The tickets made it plain that Guido—referred to by coppers throughout the city as Righteous Bear—wasn’t too comfortable with English himself. Oscar kept one in his pocket to show to friends when he needed a laugh.
In the evening they came back to Manhattan without Santorini, but with some ideas on where they might find him. They talked about the case all the way to Stuyvesant Square, where they found everyone, excluding Anna, but including Tonino, on the terrace. There was the remains of a light supper laid out on a long table. An unusual quiet was explained by bowls of ice cream in every lap.
Oscar headed straight for Rosa, who sat a little aside in the shade, frowning into her bowl; Jack went to his father, who was sitting beside Tonino with Lia in his lap.
Jack had never seen such a blank expression on Lia’s face. Even in the worst times, she had managed a smile for him when he came into the room. He crouched down and kissed her cheek, and got little more than a quirk at the corner of her mouth.
“No smile for Aunt Jack today?”
He spoke Italian in an effort to get Tonino’s attention. It still wasn’t clear to him how much English the boy understood.
In response Lia climbed down from Ercole’s lap, took Jack’s hand, and led him into the house. They passed through the hall to the parlor, where they stopped in front of the hearth.
Still holding on to his hand Lia said, “Look. Seven ships, seven mens, seven womens, seven mulini a vento—” She waited for the translation.
“Windmills,” Jack supplied.
She nodded. “Seven windmills, seven Bible stories, seven animals, seven trees, seven houses, but just one kind of bird, colombe.”
“Doves,” Jack provided.
Lia nodded. “Doves. This is the house of the Doves now.”
“What about the twin house, next door?”
She led him back the way they had come, but this time they went through the gate in the hedge, through the garden into the second house. It was essentially the same house, but in reverse.
In the parlor Lia began her recitation again. “Seven ships, seven mens, seven womens, seven windmills—” And then, impatient, she jumped to the end. “Not doves, but a different kind of bird, allodole flying. Licks?”
“Larks,” Jack corrected. “So the houses have names now. Larks and Doves, is that right?”
“Good names?”
“Very good. Very clever. Come sit a minute.”
It was clear to him that Lia, who was usually able to start a conversation about anything, didn’t really want to talk at all. She sat because he had suggested it, but her feet could not be still.
Jack said, “Do you want to go back to finish your ice cream?”
Apparently he had presented her with a dilemma, because she began to chew on her lip.
She said, “You know about Tonino?”
“I do. I’m very sorry, Lia.”
Her head wobbled from one side to the other. Then she raised her gaze to his and something fierce came into her expression.
“I want to stay here with him until he’s better. Rosa says I have to go back to the farm, but if she can stay then I want to stay. Will you talk to Auntie Carmela and ask her to let me stay?”
At least he knew now for sure what she had been told: less than the whole truth.
Jack cleared his throat. “It isn’t Rosa’s decision to make, cara. I’ll talk to Nonno and to your aunts. I can’t promise you anything, but I’ll do my best to convince them. I think it would be good for you to be here with Tonino.”
“Even if he doesn’t talk to me?”
“Even then,” Jack said. “Especially then.”
* * *
• • •
THE REST OF the week fell into a pattern. He went to work and stopped in at Sophie’s at least once during the day. Rosa or Lia would pull him aside and he would hear the most recent chapter in the ongoing negotiations about who would be staying and who would be going back to New Jersey. Then he spent a half hour with Tonino. He would read to him or sit quietly, watching, looking for signs of the cancer that Anna had told him about. But his eye was untrained and he saw only a little boy who was pale and tired, with a swelling in the neck that was something more than measles, but not so much more that he would have known to be alarmed.
When he sat down to eat with his father and Carmela and Sophie, he’d hear more details about the children. Rosa was almost as big a cause for worry as Tonino, but she had seen Dr. Jacobi twice by the end of the week and seemed to be a little easier after those meetings.
“What do they talk about?” Jack asked Sophie, who shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Abraham. I expect he’s just trying to draw her out.”
Jack seemed to be seeing everyone except Anna, who was called in to the New Amsterdam two nights in a row for emergency surgeries and then had night duty. She left him notes, a habit that had developed over their first year together. Snippets of information about her day, the surgery she was preparing, that she had spent her lunch hour with Sophie and the little girls at the Viennese Bakery, that she was forgetting what he looked like.
At the bottom of that note he drew a pirate’s face, complete with eyepatch and parrot on the shoulder. He left her notes, too, finally broaching the subject of the visit with Amelie.
She gave us some pages from her day-book that might help with the Louden case. But she suggested that you and Sophie go over them with us and she was right, they are hard to decipher.
PS We caught up with the Righteous Bear and he’s sitting in the Tombs, but they seem to have misplaced Pittorino.
* * *
• • •
THAT NIGHT SHE came in very late, just as dawn was breaking, and he woke as soon as the door opened. He pulled her into bed, dressed as she was, and tucked her against himself.
/> “I have to leave in an hour,” he said. “Take your clothes off. Never mind, you’re yawning. You can still take your clothes off, but go to sleep.”
“My stomach has been growling for hours, so I’ll come down and have breakfast with you first. And you can tell me about your conversation with Amelie. She really gave you day-book pages? Where are they?”
Jack disentangled himself and got out of bed. “Oscar has them. Give me a few minutes and I’ll explain.”
But she got up and followed him to the bathroom, bumping into him when he stopped short at the door. “We’ve talked about this before, have we not? I prefer having the bathroom to myself.”
She raised one brow at him, pursed her mouth, and made a very unladylike noise. “You are such a prude.”
He shook his head at her. “If I remember correctly it was just a week ago you turned purple when I suggested we move the mirror—”
She threw up both palms in a gesture of surrender and marched away.
* * *
• • •
AT THE BREAKFAST table Anna found a newspaper clipping at her place. She read it while waiting for Jack, and recognized Oscar’s touch in the wording.
Mrs. Cabot came in and out with toast and butter and preserves and made none of her usual comments about the weather or what she was planning to cook for dinner. Anna realized she wanted news of Tonino but didn’t feel it was her place to ask.
“He’s about the same,” Anna began, and was still answering Mrs. Cabot’s questions when Jack came to the table, dressed and ready for work.
She held up the newspaper clipping. “So this article about Mrs. Louden, did that bring in any useful clues?”
“Yes, but not the way we expected. You remember me telling you about going to the Dakota?”
Anna nodded. “You didn’t find Charlotte Louden at the Dakota, did you?”
“No, but we stopped by to see Amelie after we talked to the architect, and we found Mrs. Louden there. Or at least, we found news of her there. It turns out that Amelie delivered all four of the Louden children.”
* * *
• • •
JACK WATCHED HER face while she tried to make sense of this information. He knew Anna trusted Amelie absolutely and believed her without hesitation, but the coincidence would sit hard with her. As it had with Jack.
He said, “What are you thinking?”
“I’m wondering why I never asked you who Mrs. Louden’s doctor is. I made some assumptions, I fear.”
Jack poured himself some coffee. “We did ask her mother about that. She said her daughter was never sick and didn’t have a doctor.”
“There are people like that, who have strong constitutions. You’re one of them.”
Jack said, “Except it isn’t true for Mrs. Louden. That’s why Amelie gave us the day-book pages, so we could learn for ourselves that her mother—that everybody—was wrong. She might not have had a doctor, but if we’re reading the pages from the day-book right, she saw a lot of Amelie.”
The expression on Anna’s face told him many things: she was intrigued, curious, suspicious, and most of all, worried. She was worried, because she knew very well that the day-book pages would make clear that the kind of help Amelie Savard provided to women in need was illegal, and that it could very well send her to prison, if it fell into the wrong hands.
“Can I see the pages today? Sophie will want to see them too.”
“If you’re going to Stuyvesant Square later, I can bring them by. You should sleep a few hours at least.”
“Bring them at noon,” Anna said. “I doubt I’ll get much sleep, but I’ll try.”
42
WHEN ERCOLE AND Carmela had done everything in their power to make Tonino comfortable in this, his last home, all the Mezzanottes went back to Greenwood. Sophie dreaded their loss and worried that the boy, already withdrawn, would simply turn inward and never come back to the world, but at the same time she could not deny that she felt some relief. The house was large, but not quite large enough for a very sick boy, two distraught little girls, and Carmela’s two, who entertained and exhausted everyone in equal measure.
When Aunt Quinlan called to take her leave of them, she announced that she would come every day to spend the morning with Tonino and have lunch with the girls. The rest of the household would continue with their contributions; Laura Lee occupied them with small chores, and Sam Reason began to tutor Rosa for at least an hour in the afternoons. Noah Hunter kept Lia busy while Rosa was at her lessons.
As soon as Lia woke from her nap she went to find him. He had noted her interest in animals and they told each other stories about cows and horses, goats and dogs, hens and roosters. This went on until Mrs. Tolliver began to sing, as she did when she sat down with the mending.
“Mama sang to us,” Rosa told Sophie. “Mama had a low voice like that too, I don’t know what you call it.”
“Alto,” Sophie said. “Women with higher voices are called sopranos.”
“Mama sang all the time,” Rosa said. “Tonino would crawl into her lap and fall asleep when she sang.”
“Do you remember the songs?”
“Oh, yes,” Rosa said. “But I can’t sing, not alto or soprano. Papa said I was like him, I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
Another time Sophie would have laughed at this turn of phrase, but Rosa’s quiet despondency robbed her of that impulse. This was the problem with very intelligent children, in Sophie’s experience. They understood too much and could be spared so little.
Rosa said, “Do you think it would be possible for Mrs. Tolliver to do her work near Tonino? When she has sewing, I mean. She could sit in his room or on the terrace with him, if that is allowed.”
“Of course that would be allowed,” Sophie said. “I’ll talk to her about it.”
“Because he smiles when she sings.” Rosa studied her feet for a long moment. “I’ll go see if Laura Lee needs help in the kitchen now.”
Awake or asleep, Tonino was quiet. He ate the food put in front of him—custards and milksops and soups that he could swallow without pain—and took the medicine Sophie brought without question or complaint, but he rarely even looked at her. It was only when Aunt Quinlan came that he was fully awake. Sophie had no Italian so she could make nothing of what she overheard, but Rosa reported faithfully.
“Now she is telling him how to breathe, how breathing deep will help with the pain when it comes. Auntie Quinlan knows a lot about pain. I hope he is listening.”
Sophie knew that Rosa would benefit from time with Aunt Quinlan, and tried to make that possible. She gently suggested that Rosa join her.
“Auntie would like it if you went back to Waverly Place with her, so Mrs. Lee could make lunch for you. Mr. Lee would bring you back in the evening.”
But Rosa refused, politely; she simply would not leave the brother who ignored her.
Sophie’s own life had taken a turn. She now divided her day between seeing to Tonino, the girls, discussions with Laura Lee about meals and laundry and marketing, and short exchanges with Sam Reason, who had relieved her of all worries about the scholarship program. He was everything she had hoped: efficient, motivated, reasoned, and very able to carry on with their plans without pressing her for decisions. Conrad was very pleased with the progress Sam Reason was making, and told Sophie so.
She saw even less of Noah Hunter, unless she went to sit on the terrace with Tonino. Then she watched him working in the garden, often in deep discussion with Lia, until she rushed off to chase or be chased by Pip and Tinker.
On that same Sunday morning Lia came to sit with Sophie and ask a question that took her by surprise.
“Since Doves is already crowded, will the students live at Larks when they come to start school?”
Sophie needed a moment to make sense of this question. It occurred
to her first that Lia believed she would be living here permanently, a subject Sophie didn’t want to broach before she had a chance to talk to Anna and Jack and then to Leo and Carmela, who had legal custody. And more than that, Sophie didn’t know how she would feel about taking on two young girls. Even girls she loved dearly, as was the case here.
But Lia had asked a different question, and Sophie had to wonder about its origin. “Where did you get this idea?”
Lia looked puzzled. “Larks is lonely, haven’t you noticed? All the empty bedrooms and no voices to fill them up. I thought the girls who want to be doctors would be good company.”
Sophie was reminded of her Aunt Quinlan, who sometimes talked of places as if they had minds and memories and feelings. “I hadn’t thought about it,” she said now. “But you’re right, it would make some sense.”
“When will they come? Soon?”
Another question she had put out of her mind.
“I’m not sure.”
“Because,” Lia went on. “Because they could come tomorrow, if you wanted. There are beds and chairs and tables and dishes and everything they need. Doves is a house for children who need you, and Larks is for the girl doctors.”
“I’ll have to give this some thought,” Sophie said.
Pip had been asleep at Sophie’s feet through this entire conversation, but he roused suddenly and went trotting into the house in a state of high alert. Lia was right on his heels, all talk of Larks and Doves forgotten for the moment.
* * *
• • •
