The birth of their third child, a boy born soon after the 1850 death in office of President Zachary Taylor, nearly killed Carolina, but she was nonetheless most agitated about what he would be called. “I’ve already got a Zachary,” she said, “so we won’t be unpatriotic by not giving this lovely boy that name. Must he be Millard, do you think?”
Nick shook his head. “Much as I dislike the shenanigans of Tammany Hall Democrats, I’m no Whig. And I don’t think this fellow Fillmore will amount to much.”
They called him Simon, for no reason other than that they liked the name. Nick gave Carolina pearls to mark the occasion, but what he celebrated most was that both his wife and his son lived. Carolina had labored two days and three nights and still she was barely dilated. In the end he’d pulled the infant out with his own two hands, literally plunging them both inside her. As a boy visiting a farm, he’d once seen a man deliver a calf that way. The procedure apparently made no difficulty for cows; it was not so easy for a woman. Nick had never seen such damage to the female organs and found it hard not to blame himself as being—twice over, so to speak—the cause. “There will be no more children, my love. And you must take at least a year to recover from this ordeal. No more dawn meetings with Danny Parker. I absolutely forbid it.”
She’d agreed to that at once. Easy enough to do, he discovered three months later. Danny had retired—a rich man thanks to his quarter interest in Hell Witch’s first three cargos, and his son Seth Parker was now the yard’s chief shipwright. Carolina met Seth at Thirty-fourth Street after dark on days when Nicholas went to Crosby Street and was himself late home to Sunshine Hill. “Strictly speaking, I did not break my word, Nicholas. The meetings were not at dawn and they were not with Danny Parker.”
So Carolina built her third clipper, East Witch. She set out on her maiden voyage on September 14, 1851. Carolina was far too conscious of jinxing this marvelous new ship to say so, but Nick knew she thought East Witch, sailing with yet another Paxos relative at the helm, this one named Plato, would set new records.
It was, however, still too soon for her to be climbing up to the turret to watch through her telescope for East Witch’s return. Nick, however, now had the daily pleasure of a fully equipped laboratory in an outbuilding a short distance from the house. Carolina planned it for him with the same motives that had originally caused him to want the turret for her. What if he missed the old life too much? What if this exile made necessary by their unorthodox union seemed to come at too high a price?
“I thought first to put a laboratory in the cellar, dearest, but then, what with all the grisly things you study, a separate place of your own seemed wiser.” It was in fact perfect. So too the library, which was on the ground floor across the hall from the room they called the long parlor and functioned as well as Nick’s study. All his old books were close to hand, and the room’s proportions were so generous he could order new books and periodicals without fearing he’d nowhere to put them. The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal had a prominent place on his shelves. He kept all the back issues, including the one that described the demonstration at Massachusetts General Hospital in October of 1846 which proved beyond doubt that sulfuric ether did indeed make patients insensitive to pain. The phenomenon was much discussed these days. No less a figure than the prominent physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes had lauded the practice and said it should be called “anesthesia” from the Greek for without sensation. Despite such endorsements, there was considerable argument about whether the use of ether or its derivative, chloroform, was a moral and ethical practice that should be further studied, much less used.
Bloody nonsense, Nick thought. Bloody clerics getting their oar in as always. Never mind. Science would trump that nay-saying form of religion when sufficient numbers of individuals were faced with the choice of going under the knife asleep or awake and made the to-be-expected choice. It wasn’t the battle about anesthesia that most occupied him these days. Nick took as well the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal from London, because it was in Europe that the argument raged loudest as to whether germs could be the cause of disease or were simply spontaneously generated as a result of it.
Carolina was always threatening to have the oldest copies of his magazines thrown out lest the family should have to move out to make room for all of them. Nick knew it to be an idle threat and ignored it. But scientific journals were not the only things cluttering up—Carolina’s term—the library. Sometimes, living as they did in this isolated place, even Nick craved everyday sorts of intercourse.
He had developed a passion for newspapers and arranged to have seven dailies delivered to his Crosby Street office. He collected them when he was there and brought stacks home to be read at leisure. In fact, he’d just added a promising new one to his list, The New-York Daily Times. The first evening edition of the first printing was dated two days before, September 18, 1851. Like the other broadsheets, it had mostly news from Europe on the front page. Nick took special note of an announcement that on the seventeenth the Royal Mail steam packet Europa had arrived in Boston from London, and her mail had been sent on by the New Haven Railroad train which left Boston at nine P.M. and arrived in New York at ten the following morning.
“That’s the new paper, isn’t it?” Carolina had come in and was looking over his shoulder. “The Times.”
“The Daily Times. And you can probably answer a question that has just occurred to me. How long does it take a steam packet to travel between London and Boston these days?”
She turned from the paper and picked up the mail, also brought home from the Crosby Street office, and was thumbing through it while she spoke. “Rather depends on whether it’s one of Mr. Cunard’s austere Canadian workhorses or one of Mr. Collins’s American luxury fillies. On average, on the voyage west, twelve days.”
“And a railroad train can go from Boston to New York in thirteen hours.”
“A letter from Zac at last,” she said, without looking up. Her eldest had gone across the Hudson to Princeton in New Jersey for further education, and he did not write as frequently as his mother thought he should. “And to answer your question, yes, I believe it takes the steam train from Boston thirteen or fourteen hours to get here to New York. I also believe you are thinking my clipper ships will soon be obsolete.”
“I admit the idea has occurred to me.”
“Would you weep if that turned out to be true?”
“Only for you, my dearest. Only because I know what stock you place in your accomplishments in the world apart from Sunshine Hill.”
“I do, Nick, I don’t deny it. But nothing is more important to me than you or the children or our life together.”
“I never thought otherwise. But you haven’t said whether you think the clippers are to be overtaken.”
“On the European run they already are. And if they ever manage to build a transcontinental railroad, I suppose it will be the finish of getting to California under sail.” For a time they’d thought the end of the gold rush in ’49 would mean a stop to huge numbers wanting to book passage on West Witch, but in 1850 California had been admitted to the Union as a free state. That caused the South to fear a free state majority in Congress and set off a political row that ended with the formal declaration that Utah and New Mexico were officially territories, meaning they could look forward to eventual statehood and that in neither place were there to be explicit restrictions on slavery. It was yet another of those compromises that was supposed to put the vexed issue of slavery behind the nation and allow it to move forward, but that somehow never did. The one thing Carolina was sure this compromise had accomplished was to encourage a stream of settlers to head west, for the time being at least traveling on the clippers. “But to China,” she continued. “Unless people are to sprout wings and fly, I think we’re unlikely to lose the clippers’ superiority in sailing halfway round the world and back.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “Anyway, a railroad rig
ht across the continent from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic seems a mad idea, doesn’t it?”
“Absolutely daft. Though there was another story about it in the Tribune a week or so ago.”
“I keep telling you, the Tribune is a dubious source. Mr. Greeley believes in socialism, vegetarianism, abolitionism, Irish rights, and that women should be allowed to vote.” Nick held up a hand to forestall her explosion. “And, I don’t doubt, free love.”
She’d not give him the satisfaction of rising to the bait about women’s suffrage. “I entirely agree about free love.” She kissed his cheek and he patted her rump.
“As do I,” said Nick, “as long as you are free only to love me.”
Carolina laughed. “I absolutely promise that shall be the case. But now, my one and only paramour, you must get ready to go. You’re to be at Cousin Manon’s hospital at three this afternoon, and since we can’t provide either a clipper ship or a steam train for the journey, you’ve not a chance of getting there on time unless you leave by half past one.”
Normally Nick hated leaving Sunshine House for any reason other than his practice, but this occasion was different. He was to attend a meeting to inaugurate a fund-raising drive at Manon’s St. Vincent’s Hospital on Thirteenth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. The Sisters of Charity had opened the facility two years earlier in 1849.
“Not just a dispensary. Cousin Nicholas, it’s to be a proper hospital. These last few years, with the potato crops failing in Ireland, the numbers of immigrants…well, we can do with nothing less. The bishop has given us the land, and kindly private citizens are contributing funds. Remember years ago when you asked me why there were not more wealthy Catholics to help the Catholic poor?”
“I do. And you told me that in New York Catholics were the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. Not so any more, I take it?”
“Not entirely. For one thing, Bishop Hughes agrees it’s a good idea and will help us.”
Nick remembered her telling him earlier that the New York Sisters of Charity had separated from Mother Seton’s original congregation in Maryland because there were disagreements between what the Mother General wanted and what the bishop wanted. And that these days the group to which Manon belonged had as their superior the sister of Bishop Hughes. “Quite,” he had said.
“Don’t look like that. It’s not just because of family connections. Bishop Hughes realizes that religious orders have their own ways of doing things. He’s allowed the Redemptorists to establish Catholic parishes where everyone speaks German. He’s even let the Jesuits in.” And when she saw that this meant nothing to him, “Jesuits are said to have the ear of most of the crowned heads of Europe and be great political meddlers. Many bishops want no part of them, but Bishop Hughes has allowed the Jesuits to establish a college up near the village of Fordham, and a school for boys here in town on Sixteenth Street.”
“Whatever you say.”
“I am boring you, dear Cousin Nicholas.”
“No, of course not. I’m simply tired. I was up late last night with a patient.”
A likely enough excuse, but Vatican politics had obviously been making his eyes glaze over. “We have skilled laborers among the Irish immigrants now,” Manon had said. “And enough work for them to earn a living. They are very generous to the church.”
Nick was familiar with the Irish enclaves in the Bronx and Harlem and along the route of the Hudson River Railroad they had helped to build, but there seemed no fewer Irish paupers in Five Points, a worse hellhole than ever these days. Better not to say that; Manon had grown defensive about her adopted allegiances. “Must one be a member of your religion to receive treatment at this hospital?”
“Absolutely not. We will care for anyone who comes to us without respect to creed. Or color,” she added pointedly.
“Be careful you’re not branded abolitionists. You’ve enough to bear simply for being Catholics.”
“I believe the word is papists in that context. Never mind, I think when one is sick enough and poor enough, such considerations seem to matter less. Nick, will you be a member of our board of prominent lay advisors?”
He had agreed, though he’d told her “prominent” was not a word he thought applied to him and that in any case he had no desire to be such. Manon replied that he was prominent whether or not he wanted to be, that his reputation had grown in spite of himself. She did not mention Carolina and said nothing about the illicit life Nick lived with her and their children, though he had no doubt she knew about it. However, it had never occurred to him that Manon had any knowledge of Mei Lin, Linda as she’d asked him to call her. Be that as it may, when Nick arrived for the board meeting at a few minutes to three Mei Lin was standing beside the hospital door.
“I went first to your office, Dr. Turner, but Dr. Klein said you were not seeing patients there today. He suggested you might be coming here.”
Nick had long since taken Ben Klein into his confidence. As for Linda, she would be sixteen in a few weeks, and even dressed in her exceedingly modest school uniform he found her exotic beauty quite breathtaking, perhaps because he didn’t see her frequently. Carolina tried to do the right thing, but she could never be easy with the girl; the memories were too bitter. Still, apart from a sense of duty, it was vital to both of them to remain informed about Sam Devrey and so Nick had taken over dealing with the Cherry Street situation. “I wasn’t expecting your visit for another month,” he said. “Otherwise I’d have arranged to let you know I wouldn’t be at my office today. Is something wrong, Linda?”
“My father…”
“Yes?”
“He’s very poorly. I thought…I mean my mother thought…” The this-place-red-hair yi, he will fix. Go get him.
Nick glanced at his pocket watch. The board meeting was to start in ten minutes. He could not get to Cherry Street and back in that time. “Is it urgent, Linda? Does he need a doctor at once?”
She shook her head. “No. He’s been ill for some time. Taste Bad has been treating him, but he doesn’t improve. My mother thought you might be able to help.”
“Very well, I’ll go with you back to Cherry Street as soon as I’m finished here. I’ve a meeting to attend. Come wait inside. It won’t take long.”
Mei Lin was careful to sit as Mother Stevenson instructed in deportment class, hands folded in her lap, ankles crossed, and feet flat on the floor. She could not, however, manage to gain merit in heaven by keeping her back from resting against the chair for all the time Dr. Turner was gone.
The nun sitting behind the small table near the front door seemed indifferent to how Mei Lin sat. She bent her head over a ledger of some sort and did not once look up. Still Mei Lin was sure she was being watched. At school the nuns always knew everything that was happening, even when their backs were turned. Perhaps the ability to see without looking came with holy vows. Never mind that these were different sorts of nuns wearing a different sort of habit. Though they did seem a great deal less…ethereal, that was the word. The Mothers never seemed to touch the earth when they walked. Some of the girls wondered if they had to do ordinary things like use a privy. Maybe God took that need away when they entered the convent.
Mei Lin sighed. She was assuredly not ethereal. Right now she had an itch above her left ear under the straw bonnet fastened beneath her chin with a black bow tied precisely as the Madams of the Sacred Heart said it must be tied. Mei Lin tried to ignore it, but the itch got worse. A young lady does not remove her bonnet in public, mes enfants. It is not permitted. One of Ah Chee’s chopsticks would be perfect, the long ones used for cooking. She could poke it up under the bonnet and scratch as much as she needed to. Never mind, she would say three Hail Marys and an Our Father, and if the itch hadn’t gone away by then she’d just—
The door to the room at the end of the hall opened and a gentleman came out.
The meeting must be over. The nun quickly left her place behind the table and went to stand by the door, ready to o
pen it for the distinguished visitors when they left. Mei Lin stood as well, but no one else followed the gentleman into the hall. He pulled the door of the meeting room shut behind him with an air of trying not to disturb the people still in the room. Mei Lin sat down again. The man walked towards her, stopped directly in front of her, bowed politely—he was carrying his silk topper under his arm, so he couldn’t tip it—and said, “Chi le fan meiyou?” Have you eaten rice today?
Mei Lin’s gray-blue eyes opened as wide as was possible. The man was white, but he had spoken to her in perfect Mandarin. An ordinary greeting, but apart from her father, he was the first white man she’d ever heard speak Chinese words, and his accent was considerably more natural than Baba’s. “Chi le. Chi le,” she managed after a long moment. Eaten. Eaten. An equally ordinary and polite answer to his greeting. The man bowed again, then turned and left.
It was years since Nick had been on Cherry Street, and the first thing he noticed was that the neighborhood had changed. The houses were more run-down, the people on the street surlier and almost entirely men, the two women he did see looked very much like doxies. Another surprise was how many of the men were Chinese. He’d always had the impression that Sam Devrey’s lodgers kept their heads down and traveled the city only to get to and from their jobs, but here on Cherry Street he saw idlers and small groups talking, a great many of them Chinamen and certainly more than could possibly cram themselves into the two Cherry Street houses. There was even a tiny shop with a Chinese shopkeeper selling sundries. That at least looked a respectable enterprise. “Mei Lin—excuse me, Linda—what does your mother think of all this?”
“You can call me Mei Lin if you like. It’s only with white people that it matters.” She suddenly realized what she’d said. “I mean, you’re white, but…”
“It’s all right. I understand what you meant. But there certainly seem to be many more Chinese people here than I remember. Does your mother find that unsettling?”
City of God Page 40
