City of God

by Swerling, Beverly

  “Come, Dr. Chance, we’ve not got the whole day. Have a good listen and tell me what you think of what you hear.”

  Chance pressed his stethoscope to the patient’s chest in the same place as Dr. Turner, then moved it in what seemed to him exactly the same fashion. “The lung sounds clear to me, sir,” he said after a long few moments of attentive listening. “I hear none of that gurgling sound of consumption.”

  “Quite right, Dr. Chance. The patient is not a consumptive.” Then before the junior doctor could bask in the confirmation, “But there’s something else to be learned. You try, Dr. Klein.”

  The patient understood no English. He stared stoically straight ahead. Klein leaned forward with his stethoscope, moved it twice, just as both the fully fledged doctors had done, and took no more than a few seconds over the exercise. “There is tissue in one area, Dr. Turner, and a cavity next to it. What we hear illuminates the physical structure of the organ.”

  “Exactly. Well done, Doctor.”

  Monty Chance kept his face immobile.

  Nick explained further how clinical practice could inform and enliven what the laboratory revealed, then gave it up and dismissed them. Apart from anything else, the ward’s stench was getting to him. He’d asked for a few more women from the workhouse to augment the cleaning staff of the hospital, but Grant sent him prisoners instead. Slatterns. Swished a mop over the middle of a floor and called it done. Mind you, given the crowding of the place, little more was possible. He had to thread his way through a dozen men on floor pallets to get into the hall.

  The air out there was a bit fresher but not much. He’d step outside for a bit and see if that helped. Not a great deal, probably. When the wind came from the south, the whole city still reeked of smoke. Nonetheless, he needed a breath of whatever sort of clean air he could find.

  He was a few steps from the front door when it opened to admit Manon.

  “Cousin Nicholas. I hoped I’d be able to find you today, and now yours is the first face I see.”

  “I’ve been hoping to see you as well, Cousin Manon, to wish you the joys of the season and inquire after your well-being. I trust the fire did you no personal damage.”

  “None. Though I can’t help but think where I’d be if I hadn’t so recently sold the house on Wall Street.”

  “Burnt out, like so many others. Come, step in here a moment.” As usual, the director’s office was empty; Tobias Grant spent almost no time in the hospital. “Tell me how you’ve been.”

  “Well,” Manon said. “And you, Cousin Nicholas? You look a bit worn.”

  Because of how badly he’d been sleeping, no doubt. “Nonsense. I’m very well and all the better for seeing you. We’ve missed you over the holiday period.”

  “Yes, well…” Manon was not inclined to tell him how she’d spent the days from Christmas to New Year. “I’m here now. Nothing’s changed, I’m sure.”

  “In this place nothing ever changes.”

  “You sound discouraged, Nicholas. That’s not like you.”

  “It’s such an uphill battle. I want this to be a decent hospital, but there’s so little I’m able to do.”

  “Yes, but that’s the same as it’s always been. Come, we agreed fully a year ago now. You will use the opportunities this place provides to further your research and wait until the time is right to do something more. There’s an increase of talk, you know, about how bad Bellevue is. Tobias Grant is bound to be called to account sometime soon.”

  “I hope you’re right. Incidentally, that’s not all there is to talk about. What do you think of this Maria Monk and her revelations? I thought with all your Catholic connections you’d have an opinion.”

  Her Catholic connections. Manon turned her head as if he might read guilt in her face, though she had no idea why she should feel guilty. “It’s utter twaddle, Nicholas. I’m sure it must be.”

  “That’s what I think as well. Never mind that it’s supposed to have taken place up in Canada. Nuns made to be the mistresses of the priests who confess them, babies buried in the walls. When you think of Mother Louise and Sister Mary and the others we know, it sounds ridiculous. Still, for it to actually be a published book…”

  “Not just in a book,” she said brusquely. “They printed bits of it in the Sun, and as you might expect, in the Protestant Vindicator. But I don’t think something is true, Nicholas, simply because it is written down and a lot of fools believe it. But enough about salacious gossip, tell me about you. I insist you look tired. You have been working too many hours, I suspect.”

  “Some late nights in the laboratory perhaps. But it’s the thing that keeps me sane in this place.”

  Manon cocked her head and studied him. “Nicholas, I hope the fire did you no personal harm…”

  He did not answer immediately. He had not seen Carolina since he had taken her home that dreadful night, getting her maid to put her to bed and ordering hot tea with laudanum as a sedative. He’d returned the next day, but she wouldn’t receive him and sent word she was indisposed. It was the same on three more occasions. “No, no personal harm. Now I must go. But I wish you a happy new year, Cousin Manon.”

  “And I you. The happiest possible, Cousin Nicholas. With all the good things you deserve.”

  Manon watched him leave. Late nights in the laboratory indeed; something more personal she’d warrant. He looked utterly exhausted. Perhaps she was not the only one who had somehow missed out on peace on earth and good will to men.

  The hewers of wood and the drawers of water…Manon had used those words to describe Catholics when she took Nicholas Turner to St. Patrick’s Orphan Asylum. The flotsam and jetsam of society, that’s what the immigrants were these days. Wreckage washed up on the shore. Not, Manon thought, the finer sort of seeker of a new life who used to come in her papa’s day.

  God forgive her. She’d never thought of herself as a snob.

  Mother Louise would say it was the Devil tempting her not to go inside St. Joseph’s Church.

  It was dark and cold at not quite six in the morning on this frosty January Wednesday. The church on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place in Greenwich Village was only now emerging from the deep night shadows. It had been built to serve the mostly Italian contractors and builders who lived in the district, decent working men, not the rowdy sort of Irish immigrants who—

  She must stop this. Get thee behind me, Satan. If God were to be found in St. Joseph’s Church, then what did it matter what sort of people might be in the pew beside her? If. A very big condition indeed.

  Come along, my girl, take yourself in hand. Straight up the broad stairs to the pillared entrance and through the tall double doors.

  She knew what was customarily done with the stone basin beside the inner doors, the ones leading to the sanctuary. Dip the forefinger of your right hand into the water—blessed by the bishop on the night before Easter Sunday, Holy Saturday as Catholics called it, so said Mother Louise—and sign yourself with the cross while saying silently, In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. The nuns’ holy water stoup beside the chapel at St. Patrick’s was the first she’d ever seen. Spotted that spring Saturday afternoon three years past when Mother Louise gave her a tour of the place. It was Manon’s first visit and she had arrived with a basket of baked goods. Because, she said, she’d seen the sign outside and thought perhaps the bread and cakes might be welcome. Welcome indeed the nun had said, and wished her the blessings of God and invited her in, and smiled at the way Manon was staring at her clothes, and began the first of many explanations of all things Roman.

  And that had led to this, her furtive entrance into a Catholic church to hear Mass.

  A woman had entered just ahead of her and performed the little ritual with the holy water quickly, as if she were not really thinking about it. It’s a sacramental, my dear Mrs. Turner. A small thing that brings us closer to God. We don’t think the water miraculous, whatever some may say. It puts us in mind of
Him and the water of our baptism.

  And would a bolt of lightning come and strike Manon because she put into the blessed-by-the-bishop water two fingers, not one? The same two fingers that had been stained with Eileen O’Connor’s blood? Probably not.

  Her first Mass was on Christmas Day, at the quite splendid St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the corner of Prince and Mott streets. Except for the sermon that dwelled (as did every sermon preached in the city that day) on how all must look to the counsels of religion to strengthen them after the calamitous fire, she found the service utterly bewildering and frankly boring. A lot of bowing and scraping and ringing of bells and mumbling of prayers in Latin, a language of which she understood not a single word. Meanwhile the air was filled with the smoke of so many candles and the smell of so much incense she thought she might be present at some mysterious pagan rite.

  It was certainly not particularly uplifting. Not even the moment when, according to Mother Louise in a talk of which she had forgotten not a single word, the wafers and the wine on the altar were transformed into the actual—the nun’s very word—the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. “Why would we not take Him at his word, my dear Mrs. Turner? If He is indeed the Lord and Savior we proclaim Him to be, truly our Emmanuel, God with us, would He lie? This is my body. This is my blood. That is what He said. Even Protestant bibles have it so. We Catholics believe that is what He meant. Yes, it’s difficult. ‘This is a hard saying, and who can listen to it?’ John, chapter six, verse sixty,” she’d added, never having gotten over her Protestant habit of citing the provenance of any bit of scripture she quoted.

  Manon had looked up the chapter as soon as she got home. Her King James Bible said, “This is an hard saying, who can hear it?” Same thing really. And exactly the same about the body and blood part. She could find no argument against the nun’s claim that those were the Gospel words.

  But neither did she have any reason to believe such an extraordinary statement was meant to be taken literally. This is my body. This is my blood.

  I am Ruth amid the alien corn, she thought as she quietly took a place in the rearmost pew. She could not overcome the feeling that nothing occurring up front on the altar had anything whatever to do with her.

  But she had come five times in the three weeks since Christmas Day, twice to St. Patrick’s and three times to St. Joseph’s. Totally puzzled by her own behavior, but thankful that each of the eight Catholic churches in the city were in parts of town where she knew no one and no one knew her. Each time she knelt in the rear, neither sitting nor standing when the others did, certainly not approaching the communion railing, alone with her thoughts.

  Joyful, my dearest, are you a saint in heaven? Mother Louise says that since you were a good man you must be, that all who go to heaven are saints, and it doesn’t matter that you were not a Catholic. She says there is some loophole in their Catholic laws that allow non-Catholics to get in. She has a twinkle in her eye when she says it, but she does take these things very seriously. My love, you must tell me what to do. Samson Simson tried to see me recently. I know you always liked him, but I turned him away quite rudely. He wants back what he entrusted to us all those years ago. And I’m entirely unsure if that is the right thing to do. Because Mr. Simson is aligned with Mr. Astor, and Mr. Astor became involved in bringing opium into China, and you would have hated that so.

  But no matter how carefully she listened, Manon could not hear a reply, neither from Joyful nor from God.

  A pink dawn was just breaking when the Mass ended. She crept out of the church after everyone else was gone, drawing her dark cloak close and keeping her eyes on the ground so that the broad brim of her black bonnet shaded her face. Ridiculous to feel so much like a criminal. What had she done except attend a worship service in a church?

  On the opposite side of Sixth Avenue in the deep shadows of a large elm tree, Addie Bellingham had her hand pressed to her mouth so she wouldn’t scream aloud the words that wanted to rise up and fly free in the morning. Harlot! Satan’s whore! Popery is the Devil’s own tool!

  Addie had first suspected, then knew. She’d found a bit of paper in Mrs. Turner’s room with the words “St. Patrick’s Cathedral” written on it and an address. Not that she was snooping, mind. Addie was simply being kind and tidying up Mrs. Turner’s dresser top. But then Mrs. Turner refused Addie’s invitation to accompany her to Reverend Finney’s service on Christmas Day. Since the French Church was damaged in the fire, Addie said. And later, when Addie asked where dear Mrs. Turner had gone to services, she had just sort of waved the question away.

  So Addie knew. In her bones. Manon Turner had gone to the Catholics. The shame of it made Addie tremble. Mrs. Turner was leading them both into black sin, what with giving all this money to women with children and no husbands. A hundred dollars last month, doled out in ten-dollar portions, as Addie knew because after all—Lord have mercy on her—she kept the books. So those women would never understand that they must do what the Bible said and live upright lives, and not go on having more little bastard babies, and then they would be saved. And now—had she not seen it with her own eyes?—Manon Turner was practicing popery.

  She should get right out of the lodgings on Vandam Street. But where would she go? She had a little money saved, it was true, but if she gave up the dollar a week Mrs. Turner paid her for her work for the Society for Poor Widows and Orphans, and was left with only what she could earn from any paid sewing she managed to find to do and had to pay her own rent in the bargain, she’d be back in the almshouse sooner rather than later.

  She couldn’t. God in heaven—the just Protestant God to whom she prayed—help her. She just couldn’t.

  If it had not been so icy cold, Addie might actually have felt the hot tears of frustration and anger coursing down her cheeks.

  According to the newspapers Mrs. Turner frequently brought up to their rooms—the Union and the Workingman’s Advocate as well as the Herald and sometimes the Sun (to which pile Addie Bellingham sometimes surreptitiously added the Protestant, which always had lovely things to say about Mr. Finney), fully two-thirds of the workingmen in New York City were now members of one or another union. Plus, they stated with shock or pride (depending on the paper’s point of view), all of them were now bound together in the GTU, the General Trades Union. Fair wages for fair work, the papers that supported the GTU said. While according to the Herald: “In this land of law and liberty the way to advancement is open to all. Labor unions are a foreign idea unworthy of real Americans.”

  Addie was sure that must be correct, since the Herald supported Mr. Finney, but fair wages were certainly a good thing. Sewed till her fingers were bloody, she did sometimes, and earned only a dollar or two. Not that the General Trades Union would do her any good. Women were not allowed to join; the GTU treated them the same as the nigras. That didn’t seem right to Addie. Leastwise, not when a woman had no choice but to work to earn her keep. But whichever side she supported, it was still true that she couldn’t sew her way out of depending on Manon Turner. She had to continue sleeping in the little bedroom just next to Mrs. Turner’s. Even the added dollar a week from her job at that wretched charity wouldn’t be enough to allow her to move out and rent a room of her own. Not with prices the way they were these days.

  She repeated those truths to Lilac Langton every time they shared one of their pleasant outings. Today, because she was so upset about that other business, she said more than usual. “There’s nothing I can do. Even though I actually saw her go into a Catholic church.”

  “A Catholic church? You never did.”

  “Oh yes, I did too. Saw her with my own eyes.”

  “When? You never told me anything.”

  “A few weeks past, right after the fire. In January. And I didn’t like to say. It’s embarrassing, sleeping practically in the same room with a Catholic.”

  “But you sleep next door, Addie. And you said she wasn’t one.”

  Addie shrugged. “Said
she didn’t used to be. But if she’s going to their church, that must mean she’s one now.”

  Lilac shook her head in sympathy. “I simply don’t know what to tell you. It’s not as if I have room to ask you to live with me. Of course I would if I could, but…” She had never actually invited Addie Bellingham into her rooms on Christopher Street. In order to get to her living quarters they would have to pass through the sitting room, where her clients waited to purchase the anticonception powders and pills she made up in her little kitchen, and the treatment room, where Lilac used her lady needles to restore a woman’s peace of mind. Didn’t come into it that Addie would think Lilac’s suite of rooms positively lavish, nor what she would say if she knew how much Lilac earned from her activities. It would please Lilac to see the look on Addie’s face if she told all that, but Addie might tell Mr. Finney, and if Mr. Finney knew what Lilac did to earn her living he might take back her conversion, say she wasn’t saved after all. Take away all her peace of mind that would. Not much point in supplying it for others if you couldn’t have it yourself.

  So it was much better to meet Addie Bellingham in one of the little cafés in her neighborhood. Like today.

  It was nice to be with someone who didn’t know anything about her except what Lilac chose to tell. And considering the family her Mrs. Turner had married into, it seemed to Lilac that Addie had a sort of connection to the world of medicine, which wasn’t a million miles away from what Lilac herself did, if you looked at it with an open mind. So these pleasant little outings always promised the possibility of new and important information. Of course it wasn’t easy to come by. Addie wasn’t straightforward about such things. But now that Addie had said that about seeing Mrs. Turner go into a Catholic church, Lilac realized, she was clearly working up to saying something more.