Winter Sisters

by Robin Oliveira

  Elizabeth stifled a small laugh. She recalled her grandmother’s admonition: But you must try to live, if you can.

  “I have an idea,” Jakob said, when she still didn’t answer. “We’ll pretend instead that we don’t know one another. We will walk together, but apart, as if we are strangers who have just come upon one another. I will speak indifferently of the weather. You will nod and answer something entirely lifeless. No one will suspect anything. And it might even vanquish the awkwardness. Do I offend you by offering you my company?” Jakob said.

  Practice, she thought. Practice being alive. “I am not offended.”

  “Excellent. However,” he said, “I insist upon walking you all the way home. It’s only polite. What kind of a protector would I be if I didn’t?”

  She finally relented, and they fell into wary step beside one another.

  “Perhaps,” Elizabeth said, “I should make clear to you that my unhappiness has nothing to do with you. It is about something—else.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I was very fond of Mr. O’Donnell. He was wonderful—hardworking, funny.”

  “He was,” she said.

  “And you came back from Paris for them?” Jakob said.

  “Yes.” Which wasn’t a complete lie, but nonetheless it felt dishonest to pretend that all her unhappiness was centered on losing Bonnie and her family. She cast about for something to lead the conversation away from herself. “You are in law?”

  “And in lumber. Though lumber doesn’t hold the same fascination for me as it does for my father. He breathes lumber. Most nights he comes home smelling of pinesap.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I will always smell of the lumberyard if my father has his way.”

  “And what way is that?”

  “That I take over for him when he dies.”

  “But he will be dead. He will never know whether you do or don’t.” Her unguarded words slipped out before she had a chance to censor herself.

  Jakob laughed. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Forgive me, Mr. Van der Veer—”

  “Jakob.”

  “May I say something to you? I suspect you love something else if you are so willing to give up such a lucrative enterprise.”

  Jakob cocked his head, rueful. “My father’s sole purpose in having me read law at Harvard was to understand shipping and land rights, learn the acquisition tools for obtaining timberland, and master the art of contracts. All of which I find incredibly boring. I love criminal law. Though my father will never let me practice.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I am his son.”

  They crossed to the other side of Madison to avoid the dust rising from the razing of the row houses. Blows of sledgehammers rang out like the percussive chops of a bass drum.

  In New York State, Jakob went on, the tradition was that new lawyers—junior lawyers—were taken on by more practiced attorneys and apprenticed, but it was only a tradition, not a law. Jakob, if he wanted, could set out his shingle today and work without the advisement of a more senior attorney. But that would mean abandoning his father. His father claimed he needed him, and Jakob liked to think of himself as a dutiful son.

  “You must have other interests?” Elizabeth said. “Besides law?”

  “Travel. I have always wanted to go to Paris.”

  “I wouldn’t set my sights on Paris. It is a great disappointment, not what one dreams it will be.”

  “Such weary knowingness,” he said, eyeing her.

  “I am sorry. You should go,” she said. “To see for yourself whether or not it is what people say.”

  “Perhaps I will,” he said.

  They strolled up the avenue, easier in their silence now. On the southern edge of the park, only a few houses besides the Stipps’ had been built. In the distance, the dirty bricks of the almshouse hulked, and boys playing stickball kicked up shimmering wakes of dust.

  “Will I see you there when I go?” Jakob said.

  “No,” Elizabeth said. “I won’t be returning.”

  “So you are finished with your studies?”

  “I have given up playing,” she said.

  “What a shame.”

  They’d reached home. She could feel the weight of his gaze.

  “So, it was you who loved something once—and now you no longer do?” he said.

  A sparrow flitted in the branches of a red maple above her head. She tucked her book to her chest. He had turned her question back on her. The problem with trying to live, she thought, was that it was impossible to hide.

  He smiled at her. “I see. You may ask probing spiritual questions of me, but not I of you. I understand the rules. If I agree to ask you nothing personal, ever, may I come another day to call on you? Or perhaps instead you would like to go to the ice regatta with me next week, if the ice holds? We would be lost in the crowd. You could pretend you don’t know me.”

  Elizabeth ducked her head and smiled. She couldn’t ever recall meeting anyone this charming. “Thank you for the flowers yesterday.”

  He grinned. “Wear a warm coat. It gets cold on the ice.”

  Chapter Ten

  No,” Amelia said, a look of intense pain clouding her features. “No.” She’d been saying no ever since Mary had started talking.

  Though Mary had had some time to accustom herself to the idea, she still was not able to keep the fear from her voice. In the past few minutes, she had recounted Darlene’s suspicions to her mother, along with Mantel’s visit, whispering to keep her voice from carrying. Beyond the closed pocket doors of the dining room, the last of William’s patients colonized the parlor, waiting his turn to be seen in William’s clinic on the other side of the stairwell.

  Amelia was pacing, following the pattern of inlaid mahogany in the dining room floor, tracing a path from the glassed-in medicine and instrument cabinets to the exam table, strands of hair working loose from the lilac ribbon holding her silver strands in place. Her dress was muted lavender silk, with a line of simple buttons decorating the neck and wrists.

  “No,” Amelia said again. “It can’t be. We buried Emma and Claire yesterday.”

  “But we didn’t, did we?”

  Amelia turned away, looking out the back window into the garden, where a wash of late afternoon light was filtering through a western bank of low clouds. “No.”

  All those weeks she and William had wasted going from orphanage to orphanage, Mary thought. And now every second, every minute, seemed wasted. She ought to be down on the waterfront right now, going from brothel to brothel, at least the ones she knew. The women would admit her, happily. All that goodwill from her medical care would stand her in good stead. They all knew her, or at least of her. She could count on that.

  “But think, Mary,” Amelia said, gripping Mary’s wrist. “Do you think it’s possible that you are merely reaching, out of hope?”

  “Maybe. Perhaps. I don’t know,” Mary said, giving in to doubt again. One minute Darlene’s theory seemed brilliant and the next completely implausible.

  “And,” Amelia said, “do you think it’s possible that the captain could be right about Darlene, that she might be planning to extort money from you in exchange for information? Information that might turn out not to be true?”

  “I trust her, Mother. She’s no opportunist. If she’d wanted money, she would have asked me for it then, wouldn’t she have, if she intended to lie? And besides, none of that matters, does it, if we go looking ourselves? The brothels are the single place we haven’t looked. What harm can come from looking? I can’t understand why Captain Mantel refused. Oh, damn him. The police know exactly where the brothels are. It would be so easy for them.”

  “But the captain doesn’t believe that they’re alive.”

  “But what does that matter—”

&n
bsp; Mary broke off at the sound of footsteps and the rustle of skirts coming down the back stairs. Elizabeth emerged from the butler’s pantry, her hair tied back with a thick band of striped ribbon. The narrow worry line that had cropped up between her eyes had deepened.

  Mary pasted a smile on her face. “Did you enjoy Madame Hubbard’s?” She was aware that her voice was far too bright, but Elizabeth flared so easily these days, like tinder, that it was impossible to strike the right tone.

  “Not especially. Should I help Uncle William with his patients?”

  “Are you well, Lizzie?” her grandmother asked. “You seem—”

  “I’m fine.”

  Not even Amelia could loosen Elizabeth’s tongue—Amelia, who could pry anything from anyone.

  “Well, then, I’m certain that your uncle would appreciate your help,” Amelia said. “He’ll be happy that you want to.”

  Elizabeth padded through the room, opening the pocket doors wide to the now empty parlor as a sudden, brief cry from William’s clinic resounded throughout the house. They watched Elizabeth quicken her pace, round the staircase, and disappear down the hall.

  “Was that enthusiasm?” Mary said.

  “I hope so,” Amelia said. “It would be good if she could find something to do. If Bonnie were here, she might be able to—”

  “Mother.”

  “I’m sorry,” Amelia said. “Sometimes—”

  “I know,” Mary said.

  But Elizabeth wasn’t needed. William was following his patient to the front door, calling after him as he stumbled onto the veranda, a sling supporting his right arm. Soon he was lurching down Madison Avenue in the opposite direction of downtown.

  “The other way, Mr. Matthews. The other way!” William yelled, waving him in the other direction. The man swung around, nodded, and trotted back down the street. Just then, an omnibus lurched by and stopped for him, and he clambered aboard and scrambled onto a seat, dazedly staring out the window.

  William shook his head as he came into Mary’s clinic. “He insisted on going right away, but I don’t think he was altogether right when he got here. I’ve set more than a thousand bones and he’s the only one who’s bellowed like a cow in heat. And for a tiny fracture, too. He’d never have made it during the war,” William said, shaking his head. He turned and looked at Mary. “Good God, what’s the matter?”

  —

  William was seated, holding his head in his hands. “I’ll go tonight. I’ll go now.”

  Mary and Amelia threw one another a furtive look. “We’re going with you.”

  William looked from his wife to his mother-in-law, both of them equally insistent, both of them more than capable of prolonging the conversation beyond his level of tolerance. Though he frequently accused them of being in the habit of deciding what to do and only then informing him of their plans, he rarely disagreed with them. But he did now. “Neither of you is going.”

  “We know where the brothels are better than you do, William. At least I hope that’s the case,” Amelia said, shooting a grimly amused glance at Mary. “And they know us. We’ve helped them. Mary certainly has, in ways that no one else—”

  “I shall point out the obvious,” William said. “At night, if a man and a woman enter that particular type of—enterprise—together, it will look suspicious. It will be easier for a man alone to make inquiries.”

  “I’m going,” Mary said.

  “We don’t have to go at night,” Amelia said. “Tomorrow morning, instead, then.”

  “No. Tomorrow is too late,” Mary said. “So much wasted time already.”

  “Mary,” William said. “Your going would be broadcast within seconds between the houses. I will draw no special notice. And the chances that they are alive—”

  “I know. I know. But what if they are? We have to look again, we have to—”

  “Hush,” Amelia said, laying a hand on Mary’s shoulder. “Where is Elizabeth?”

  They could hear the sound of rushing water in the bathroom and resumed talking in a whisper.

  “You cannot go alone,” Amelia said. “What if something happens?”

  William cocked his head. “And just what would you do, Amelia Sutter, if something happened?”

  “Alert the police—”

  “Because they’ve been so helpful?”

  It was, William stated again, idiotic for either of them to accompany him.

  But when darkness fell, Mary climbed into the carriage with him. She and Amelia had scribbled out a long list of the addresses of all the brothels where they had delivered babies. William did not tell them that they needn’t have bothered, for a brothel was as obvious a structure as the nose on a man’s face. One only had to follow the trail.

  —

  Later that night, a full hour after the lamplighters had made their midnight rounds to snuff the gaslights lining Broadway, the thoroughfare began to empty of revelers, whose dissipation belied an uncanny ability to navigate their way home in the early morning blackness. They crept up the slope of Arbor Hill to the west, with its quiet hum of tenements and feral hogs rooting among the blackberry vines, or tripped up Broadway into North Albany, where lumber handlers and their families populated wooden row houses by the hundreds and sour wives awaited their drunken husbands. Some—too inebriated to make it home—bedded down next to the Erie Canal’s towpath.

  William and Mary leaned against the ridged siding of a stationer’s store, watching the nocturnal evacuation. All night William had followed fidgety, purposeful men from one bawdy house to another, where girls far too young to be in the prostitution business were secreted in back rooms. He’d scanned small face after small face for Emma and Claire, trying to see through face paint and bruises and too much of the wrong kind of experience. At the last house, the madam had traded in blackmail: You asked for young, she trilled, her hand outstretched for coins.

  A dozen houses tonight. How many more were there?

  Mary had slipped into the alleyways behind the houses, just in case some madam had been spooked and was shuttling girls out the back to avoid detection, but she found only weary ladies of the night, smoking pipes or fortifying themselves with liquor.

  All evening they had prayed both to find and to not find Emma and Claire, a state of intolerable dissonance that dogged their every footstep. Were they alive? Were they not? To hope was to defy reason. To think of them as alive and dead at the same time was to court madness. When the clock struck two, they started for home, making plans to return the next night, and the night after that, though secretly William feared they were chasing ghosts.

  Over the next three nights, William and Mary prowled the back rooms of bawdy houses and saloons all over the city, but found no trace of the girls.

  Chapter Eleven

  After he walked Elizabeth home, Jakob went home, too, to the Van der Veers’ Dutch Renaissance Revival home, which sat across Washington Park from the Stipps’. Jakob did not much like the new house. He preferred their old home on Ten Broeck Street, but his father had been the first lumber baron to forsake that old enclave, predicting that others would soon follow them to upper State Street. He had been right. Several lumber and manufacturing barons had also built new homes on the park, albeit far less ostentatious ones, and the former backwater was now gaining in prestige. But the Van der Veer house, boasting five stories, a carriageway, a back courtyard, and a ballroom that extended the depth of the house, far outdid any of its few neighbors in opulence and size.

  Now the last of the afternoon light filtered up the stairwell as Jakob tiptoed down the wood-paneled, third-floor corridor toward his mother’s bedchamber. The new house was still in the act of settling; underfoot, the wide floorboards creaked, and not even the Turkish runner could prevent the floor from cracking and popping. Upon reaching his mother’s door, Jakob hesitated. The hinges often squeaked. He had to be
careful; he had not yet once awakened his mother on this errand, nor did he want to now. How his mother reconciled the periodic disappearance of the sherry decanter from its misbegotten residence on her nightstand, Jakob didn’t know. But since so much of everything that happened around the sherry decanter in this house was never remarked upon, Jakob found the prevailing silence surrounding its migration back to the butler’s pantry not at all mystifying.

  The window curtains were drawn. The brocade drapes on the canopied bed were drawn, too, with the exception of those on the side of the nightstand. His mother lay asleep, cocooned in her tangled bedclothes, her head and shoulders propped up on mounds of pillows, her quilted bed jacket hanging askew around her shoulders, her dark hair in pin curls. Everyone who met her believed her younger than her forty years by a decade, whether from her skittish public behavior or her childish features. Her current disarray added to that impression of childishness. Jakob had feared he might find her in this state and he wondered how much sherry she had consumed this time to get through the ordeal of the tea party his father had insisted she give. His mother hated having to put on teas and parties to advance Gerritt’s standing in the community. That his mother suffered from acute shyness, preferring small, intimate gatherings with a few people to grander affairs, was of no import to Gerritt, who wished to scale the heights of Albany aristocracy.

  On the night table, a stemmed crystal glass kept the sought-after decanter company, casting rose-colored shadows onto the lace doily beneath. Several curio cabinets in the corner contained his mother’s beloved collection of Jumeau dolls. His mother had explained to him that they were fashion dolls, meant to show off the new clothes of the French couturiers. Their glass eyes looked on now as Jakob deftly took the empty decanter and glass into custody. The last he knew, the decanter had been more than half full. Stashing it under one arm, he unlatched the door.