It was clear to me from Simon’s expression that he considered my reasons for tolerating Mrs. Richards insufficient, but he kept his thoughts to himself as we continued the last block up Madison and turned left onto Ninety-Second Street. Although most of my neighbors’ houses were dark, the lights were glowing softly at number 7. I slowed my pace as we approached, reluctant to bring the evening to a close, already wondering when I’d see him again. I knew that, come August, he’d be spending every spare minute at his fledgling stable in Saratoga, and I was hoping to spend as much time together as possible before then.
At the bottom of the steps, we stopped and turned to each other. I gazed up at his face—the face that had figured so largely in my daydreams when I was hardly more than a child, and that had grown only dearer with time—and waited, acutely aware of the moment’s potential.
He returned my gaze, his dark eyes inscrutable.
What would Kitty do now, I wondered, to make him take her into his arms? Feign a swoon? Murmur something suggestive in his ear? I remembered how she’d fluttered her eyelashes to such charming effect, tucking her chin toward one shoulder in a way that managed to look both seductive and vulnerable at the same time. Perhaps that was something I could try. Rotating my shoulder upward and inward, I ducked my head and batted my lashes, gazing at him sideways.
He frowned at me. “Somethin’ wrong with your shoulder?”
I stifled a grimace. “My shoulder’s fine,” I said, batting my lashes more vigorously, in case he hadn’t noticed.
He leaned closer, his frown deepening. “Something in your eye, then?”
I dropped my shoulder in defeat. “Yes, but it’s gone now.” I could never be like Kitty, I realized. I could only be me.
And yet…he wasn’t backing away. Was it possible, I wondered, that just being me was enough? I turned my face up to him and searched his eyes, not caring if he saw the longing and confusion that were warring within me, needing to know if he felt the same for me as I did for him.
I thought I saw his shoulders soften, as some strong emotion I couldn’t quite read flashed across his face. He raked a hand through his hair, his gaze moving from my eyes to my mouth and back again. Yes, I inwardly coaxed, recalling the exquisite sensation of his lips against mine, trying to mentally bend him to my will…
He straightened and pulled away.
I bit my lip to suppress a groan. Was it some absurdly rigid notion of gentlemanly conduct that was restraining him? Did he think that that was what I wanted or expected? I grasped his hand and pressed it between my palms. “Simon, I do hope you know it would be all right if you wanted to…that is, I wouldn’t mind at all if you…well, if you felt like—”
“I’d better get a leg on,” he broke in, easing his hand from my grasp. “I was supposed to be at an assembly district meeting thirty minutes ago.”
I shut my mouth and stepped back, feeling as though I’d been slapped. “Yes, of course. Good night then.” I started clumsily up the steps, my humiliation complete.
He waited like a proper gentleman until I was over the threshold and then, shoving his hands into his pockets, turned and walked quickly back the way we’d come.
Chapter Five
I spent Friday morning visiting the pastors of three nearby churches, hoping to drum up some referrals for my practice. While the first two merely heard me out with polite disinterest, the last was familiar with the benefits of mental therapy and promised to recommend me to his parishioners should the need arise. Not even this bit of good news, however, could lift the despondency that had settled over me since Simon’s unambiguous rejection the evening before.
There was no reason—or more accurately, no reason I wished to embrace—for Simon’s refusal to engage in even the smallest of physical intimacies. He was neither a prude nor a slave to social convention, which meant the only possible explanation was that his feelings for me had cooled. I’d tried hard to reject this conclusion as I’d lain sleepless during the wee hours, holding on to the many recent instances when I was sure I’d sensed his keen regard. Ultimately, however, I’d had to conclude that I’d only been seeing what I wanted to see. Apparently, Simon’s interest in me was no more than the interest one had in an old and valued friend. If I wanted to preserve a shred of dignity, I was going to have to adjust my own feelings accordingly and stop chasing after him like a lovesick schoolgirl.
Immediately upon my arrival home, I went into the telephone closet and put a call through to the Barge Office. The only thing that had distracted me from thoughts about Simon, as I’d tossed and turned in bed the evening before, was the equally distressing memory of young Rosa’s entreaties. Plagued by the persistent feeling that I was betraying the girl’s trust—however much I’d tried to refuse it—I’d decided that I would at least try to ascertain whether her missing friend had taken the steamship to New York as originally planned.
The official who answered my call told me that a Teresa Casoria had indeed arrived in New York on the steamship Madonna nine days earlier, traveling second-cabin class. According to the ship’s manifest, she was in good health upon her arrival and allowed to disembark at the Thirty-Fourth Street pier. I slowly hung up the receiver, unsettled by the news. So the girl had not changed her mind or been detained as I’d proposed. I could only hope that she had forgotten about her promise to visit Rosa in the excitement of reuniting with her fiancé.
After a quick lunch of cold ham and toast, I sat down to finish writing my lecture on the influence of the mind in the causation and cure of disease, which I was planning to present at the next meeting of the East Side Ladies’ Guild in hopes of winning some patients from its fold. I found myself struggling to focus, however, and after two unproductive hours, I finally decided to clear my head by walking down to the Wieran clubhouse to collect the vase I’d left there the previous evening. The vase was one of my mother’s favorites, and I was eager to retrieve it before someone used it for a game of ninepins.
The club rooms were dark when I arrived, as I’d expected for this time of day. Groping for a match and taper, I crossed to the dining table and lit the mantle on the overhead lamp. The light fell over the yellow roses on the center of the table, still fresh and dewy in my mother’s vase. I eyed them dispiritedly, seeing in the flowers a reminder of my dashed hopes of the evening before. I lifted the vase and carried it into the kitchen, tempted to toss the roses into the bucket for the rag and bone man, but transferred them into a jar instead before emptying and drying the vase. I started back through the dining room, and was halfway to the hallway door, when I heard a noise from the adjoining meeting room. I stopped to listen. There it was again: the distinct sound of somebody crying. Lowering the vase back onto the table, I crossed to the meeting room door and cautiously turned the knob.
The crying stopped.
I cracked the door open and looked inside. Frankie “the Pipes” Dolan lay on a cot against the wall with a rumpled sheet pulled up over his chin, his tearstained cheeks shining in the gray light from the window. “Frankie?” I started toward him.
He watched my approach without speaking, his eyes far too sad and hopeless for an eleven-year-old boy.
“What’s happened?”
He didn’t answer.
“Are you hurt?”
“Arrghh,” came his muffled reply.
I tugged down the sheet that was covering his face. “What?”
“Arrghh,” he said again.
His mouth was hanging in a fixed, open position. Peering closer, I noted that the pillow beneath it was wet with drool. “Can’t you close your mouth?”
He shook his head.
Crouching beside him for a better look, I saw that there was an abrasion along one side of his jaw and that his bottom lip was bruised and swollen. “Did somebody hit you?”
He nodded.
The blow, I deduced, must have either fractured or dis
located his jaw. I cradled his face between my hands and peered inside his mouth. There was a cut on the inside of one cheek, probably made by his teeth, but no bruising or bleeding around the jawbone. Nor could I feel any deformity of the mandible when I pressed on it. I palpated the area in front of both ears and felt telltale depressions where the condyles had moved out of their sockets. “I think it’s just dislocated,” I told him in some relief.
He closed his eyes, squeezing out a fresh trickle of tears.
“Don’t worry, Frankie, you’re going to be fine. I’m going to bring you to the hospital, and they’ll fix you up in no time.”
His eyes flew open and he shrank back on the cot, pulling the sheet up over his nose.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you want to go to the hospital?”
“Ahh ahr,” he said, shaking his head.
“It won’t hurt, I promise. I’ll make sure they give you a few whiffs of ether first.”
“Ahr ahr,” he said more vehemently, his eyes pleading now.
I sat back on my haunches, wondering if there was something else he was afraid of besides the procedure. Why had he come here to the empty clubhouse, after all, instead of going to someone for help? My mind drifted back to the last few times I’d seen him, and the answer hit me like a blow to my own jaw. “Oh, Frankie… It was your father, wasn’t it? He hit you when he found out you’d taken the van.”
He turned his face away.
That would explain his reluctance to go to the hospital; he was afraid they’d set the “Gerry man” on him. Elbridge Gerry’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was the bogeyman of the tenements, the stuff of nightmares for children who’d rather suffer a parent’s beating than be separated from everything they knew.
“But we have to fix it,” I said, stroking back his hair. “And the sooner the better. I could do it myself, but I don’t have any ether on hand, not to mention a proper inhaling apparatus.”
His face swiveled back toward me, eyes alight. “Yah!” he exclaimed. “Yuh juah!”
“What?”
He bolted upright on the cot. “Yuh juah!” he said again, pointing at me.
“You want me to do it?”
He nodded so vigorously that I was concerned for his jaw. “I can’t, Frankie, not without sedation. Now come on, let’s get you down there…”
He grabbed onto the edge of the cot with both hands, his freckled brow buckling in determination.
I considered my options. I couldn’t very well drag him to the hospital if he didn’t want to go. And it was true that I was familiar with the latest reduction technique. I’d only actually performed the procedure once, however, for an asylum inmate who’d dislocated her jaw while biting another resident—and only after she’d been given so much ether that I could have driven a screwdriver through her head with no reaction. I wasn’t sure I could manage it without relaxing the musculature first. The last thing I wanted to do was put Frankie through more distress.
I rose from my crouch to ease my stiff thighs, reviewing possible sedatives. He couldn’t swallow properly, so a tablet of Veronal or a shot of whiskey was out of the question. I supposed I could administer a few drops of chloroform—I had a vial in my kit at home—using a handkerchief for a mask. But chloroform had been known to stop the heart of pediatric patients, and I wasn’t sure I had sufficient experience to safely dose him…
I looked down in surprise as Frankie grasped hold of my hands.
“Yuh juah,” he said again quietly, waggling my hands to and fro and nodding in encouragement.
I slowly released my breath. His bravery put my own self-doubts to shame. “All right, Frankie. Let’s give it a try.” Fortunately, with a saloon directly beneath us, the implements I required were right at hand. I told him to lie down and rest until I got back, then made my way downstairs.
I was hoping that Simon wouldn’t be in the saloon, for I’d like some time to adjust to our new footing before seeing him again. Normally, he made a point of being there between the hours of four and six p.m. so that the residents of his district could stop in to see him on their way home from work, but today was not a normal day. According to the morning paper, last night’s celebration had resulted in at least 196 fires and seven deaths, in addition to scores of injuries from stray bullets, exploding cartridges, and wayward firecrackers. I expected that Simon would be working later than usual as a result, paying court fines, fixing damaged property, and doing whatever else he could to help ease the holiday hangover.
When I entered the saloon, however, I saw him already seated at the bar, listening to two men with their caps in their hands who appeared to be asking for his assistance. I paused inside the door and watched from a distance, struggling with a groundswell of emotions as I tried to view him in a new, platonic light. He was wearing his court clothes, which meant he’d added a waistcoat and collar to his usual, informal attire. Unfortunately for my purposes, he had already rolled up his shirtsleeves and removed his tie to loosen the collar, which lent him an appealingly piratical air.
Although he must have been tired after his busy day, he appeared to be taking a genuine, unhurried interest in the men’s problem, listening attentively to their impassioned recital and inserting the occasional concise question. They, in turn, regarded him with the sort of hopeful respect usually reserved for presidents or popes. When they were done, he slapped each one on the shoulder and shook their hands. They walked past me out of the saloon, standing decidedly taller than they had before.
I started toward the bar. Some of the regulars saw me coming and fell silent, tipping their caps. I smiled at them, hoping to put them at ease, wondering if they’d ever get used to me. “Billie,” I called to the bartender as I drew up beside Simon, “could you spare a couple of corks?”
“Genna!” Simon exclaimed, swiveling toward me. “Where did you come from?”
From the look on his face, I could have sworn there was no one else he’d rather see. But then, everyone tended to feel that way, I reminded myself, when they were the subject of Simon’s undivided attention. Adopting a breezy tone, as if I hadn’t just been begging him to kiss me the night before, I answered, “I dropped by to pick up my mother’s vase and found a surprise waiting for me in the meeting room.”
“What kind of surprise?”
He listened in silence as I told him about Frankie’s injury, deepening lines around the corners of his mouth his only visible reaction.
“I think I may be able to fix his jaw,” I finished, “but I’m afraid it will only happen again if we don’t do something about his home situation.” Although I’d become somewhat inured to the open and casual display of violence since traveling in Simon’s world, certain kinds of violence—like that inflicted by a parent on a defenseless child—still stuck sharply in my craw. Understanding the psychological underpinnings of such behavior did not make it any easier to stomach. Nor did it point to an easy solution, in Frankie’s case at least. If his father was reported and prosecuted for assault and battery, the judge might very well refuse to convict, believing that Frankie’s misconduct deserved a good beating, in which case Frankie would likely incur another beating for his father’s trouble. If the father was convicted and sent to Blackwell’s Island, on the other hand, his wife and children would likely starve without his earnings. And if Frankie was removed from his parents’ care and sent to live at an institution or with another family, there was no saying he wouldn’t endure even worse treatment, without the small comforts afforded by being with his natural kin.
“I’ll have a talk with his da,” Simon told me.
“I’m not sure a talk will be enough.”
“I can be persuasive when I need to be.”
The edge in his voice made me look at him more closely. He had the drawn, preoccupied air I’d noticed on a few prior occasions, when the daily crises of life in the district becam
e almost too much even for him. “Long day?” I asked, suppressing an urge to smooth back the lock of hair that had fallen over his eye. Changing my feelings for him, I realized with a pang, was going to be even harder than I’d imagined.
He nodded. “And it’s not over yet. I’ve still got to find housing for a boy whose father was sent to the workhouse, and there’s a bar mitzvah I promised to go to. I just stopped by to see if there was anything urgent waiting for me here.”
I nodded in sympathy. Apparently, Simon’s job as electoral district captain was to have a finger—and sometimes an entire arm—in everything that went on in the lives of his constituents. Just this week, in addition to providing bail for the usual lot of drunk and disorderly miscreants, he had found living quarters for a family displaced by fire, solved a pushcart peddlers’ dispute, paid for a pauper’s burial, and persuaded an Irish livery operator to hire a delinquent Italian boy. This last had been especially tricky, he’d explained, because of the animosity between the Italians and the Irish in his district. He had accomplished it by promising to recommend the livery service to a florist he knew, for use in all of its deliveries. As far as I could tell, the whole Tammany enterprise was a web of such mutually beneficial relationships. Despite the misgivings of people like my father, who hated the political machine that had held the city in its grip for so much of its history, I liked to think that its activities helped more people than they hurt, and usually people of the neediest sort.
Billie slid a beer and a cheese sandwich in front of Simon, who tucked into them as if he hadn’t eaten all day.
“And these are for you,” the bartender said, handing me the corks. “Although if it’s Colombian spirits you’re brewing, you didn’t get them from me,” he added with a wink, referring to the wood alcohol that passed for a beverage in some of the more desperate parts of town.
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