Where the Light Enters

by Sara Donati

  For a moment Elise tried to imagine what would happen if the old woman simply refused to let Bellegarde take his son. She could see the girl worrying about that same thing in the way she gripped her folded hands in front of herself.

  Elise, frustrated, tired of the posturing, turned to the closest cot. Three very young infants—less than three months—were lined up in a row, like rolled towels placed in cubbyholes by an exacting laundry maid. They were all of them deeply asleep. The linen was clean and crisp, not a stain to be seen. She thought briefly of dolls on display at a toy store. Then she leaned down to sniff gently.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The old woman was directly behind her, her face pale with rage.

  Elise had been trained by the nuns to be honest, forthright, and respectful. At this moment she knew herself incapable of respect and so she ignored the question and walked to the sink. There she selected one of the corks on the drying rack to examine it.

  Bottle-fed children were prone to colic. Even fresh cow’s milk was difficult for infants to digest. Worse, it soured quickly so that without scrupulous attention to the sterilizing of bottles and teats they were often contaminated by decomposing milk. For those reasons but also as a matter of economy, most nurseries cut cow’s milk with barley water.

  None of the corks or teats or bottles Elise looked at here had the cloying smell of spoiled milk, but there was another smell, unmistakable.

  “I asked you a question,” the older woman said behind her. “You have no right to be here. Leave now or I will send for the police.”

  “Mother Crowley.” The maid’s voice trembled.

  The sound of flesh against flesh made Elise turn to see a handprint rising like a brand mark on the girl’s pale cheek. Before she could think how to intercede, Bellegarde leaned forward and grabbed the old woman’s wrist, which was already raised to deliver another blow.

  She opened her mouth to protest. In profile her teeth worked like yellowed ivory, too large for her mouth, filled with spit. But whatever she had thought to say, her voice failed her. Confronted with Bellegarde’s anger, she stilled.

  To Elise he said, “Go on with what you were doing.”

  She walked down the line of cots and cribs and paused to look closely at each of the infants. All wore clean swaddling and slept on good linen, and every one of them was deeply asleep for a reason that was now quite clear. At the last crib she found him.

  “This is your son,” she called to Bellegarde, and gestured for him to come closer.

  He stopped well clear of the cot, uncertain and awkward, and for that reason, she felt a swell of empathy.

  “Are you sure?” He was looking at the baby with something that might have been shock or panic, nothing so simple as pleasure.

  “This is the youngest child in the nursery, and by the blue stitching on his bonnet, a boy. But I am sure they keep records and can confirm his identity.”

  Bellegarde sent the old woman a hard look, one brow cocked.

  “The child came to us as Denis Bellegarde, yes.”

  Elise picked the baby up and examined the sleeping face while she drew in his smells. The ones she expected, and the one she dreaded.

  “He’s been dosed with paregoric. I suspect they all have. To keep them quiet and asleep.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It is not,” said the matron from halfway across the room. “Paregoric is used widely for unsettled infants. A peaceful nursery,” she said in a brittle voice, “is crucial to the well-being of infants.”

  “As is breathing,” said Elise. “Some of these children are close to respiratory distress. I assume the overuse of paregoric explains how quiet it is in the rest of the house.”

  She turned her attention back to the baby and listened to him breathe until she could be certain that his respiration rate was somewhat slow for his age, but not shockingly so. A healthy newborn’s pulse would range anywhere from one hundred twenty to one hundred eighty beats per minute. This child’s heartbeat was closer to a hundred, which was worth noting, but not worth panic. Not yet.

  The first thing to do was to get him out of this place. She wondered what Bellegarde would say if she suggested that they take all the children, and decided that one battle was enough for the moment. She adjusted the boy’s swaddling and turned to put him in his father’s arms.

  Bellegarde looked startled, but not unhappy. He studied his son’s sleeping face and his own expression shifted. Maybe he had convinced himself that he would never find the boy, and now had to accept the idea of himself as a father. As a widower.

  When he raised his gaze it was to see Reverend Crowley coming toward them.

  “You have what you came for,” said Crowley. “You see that the boy is well. I believe that a donation would be in place.”

  Elise felt rather than saw Bellegarde’s posture shift. “How much has the city paid you for his care?”

  “We receive two dollars a week for a newborn. But that barely begins to cover the costs incurred. Food is dear. A donation would be both welcome and appropriate.”

  Bellegarde considered the man for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Elise could imagine him arguing that he owed nothing for the care of a boy as young as his son, who had been here for such a short time. Instead he pulled a bill from his pocket. He leaned closer to Crowley and looked him directly in the eye. His voice went rough and low, a threat no one could overhear.

  “If whatever you’ve been feeding this boy causes him harm, you will pay for it. That I promise.” He dropped the money on the floor and walked away.

  * * *

  • • •

  WITH THE BABY tucked against his chest, Bellegarde first slowed his pace and then stopped as they turned onto Sixth Avenue.

  “Tell me about this medicine they gave him.”

  “Paregoric. It’s a liquid that’s made up of opium, benzoic acid—”

  Bellegarde blinked.

  “Not acid as you know it,” she assured him. “It’s derived from the styrax plant. Also some camphor, anise, clarified honey, and alcohol—those are the basic elements. It’s a medicine used when the digestive system is malfunctioning.”

  A look came over his face, half amusement and half irritation. “Do you always talk like a book?”

  In her surprise Elise laughed. “Forgive me. I do spend all my time reading medical textbooks. Really it just means that paregoric can be useful when the bowels are griping. It’s given to soothe colicky or teething babies.”

  “And why is that bad?”

  Elise might have told him the simplest truth, that troublesome children were given paregoric by adults who couldn’t or did not want to deal with their needs. Instead she focused on the medical, because, she told herself, that was the information he must have.

  “The younger the infant, the bigger the chance that the paregoric will do its work too well and the baby will stop breathing. Children die all the time of accidental paregoric overdoses. And it’s habit forming, like anything with opium or alcohol in it.”

  This seemed to make sense to him, but something entirely different occurred to Elise. She had no idea where they were going, and so she asked.

  “My mother is on Greene Street,” he said. “You must know the boulangerie. She keeps house for her brother, the baker.” He pulled up suddenly and glanced at her. “The boy will need bottles and teats like they had there at the asylum, won’t he?”

  “Unless there’s a woman who can nurse him,” Elise agreed. “Won’t your mother have those things?”

  The muscles in his jaw fluttered again. “She doesn’t even know she has a grandson.”

  Elise gathered her thoughts. “There’s an apothecary on the corner, they may still be open.”

  In fact, the shop was just closing. A woman was about to draw the shade on the door,
but she paused when Bellegarde waved at her. For a moment it seemed that she would ignore them, but then she focused on the swaddled infant in his arms.

  She turned the key in the lock and opened the door partway. The clerk was tall, her posture so straight Elise wondered if she had some kind of injury that restricted movement. And she was visibly pregnant, her free hand resting on the curve of her belly.

  “Yes?”

  “I need things for my son,” Bellegarde said.

  The clerk studied the bundle in his arms for a long moment, and opened the door.

  * * *

  • • •

  AS ELISE GOT to know the city, she had begun to think of different areas as belonging to one immigrant group or another. There were whole blocks where you might have believed yourself to be in Germany, just listening to the talk in the shops and reading the advertisements and posters tacked up on walls. Beyond Little Germany up against the East River was a smaller neighborhood of Russians, who were fewer and less well established. The Irish were everywhere the Germans weren’t, but there didn’t seem to be much animosity between the two groups.

  By contrast the Irish had a bone-deep aversion to Italians, who were determined to make a place for themselves and not averse to spilling Irish blood when the opportunity presented itself.

  The gangs that roamed in the immigrant neighborhoods seemed to mostly be either native—men whose families had been on the island so long that they rejected any connection to Europe—or Irish. From what Elise heard and read in the paper, and from the stories Jack and Oscar told, the gangs all had one thing in common: their loyalties were to their pocketbooks first and last.

  The Chinese who ran steam laundries were scattered through the city, but the largest concentration was to be found settled around Chatham Square, where, she was warned, no respectable or sane individual went after dark. The newspapers saw it differently: they reported at length and with notable glee that the rich flocked to the Chinese gambling parlors, the opium dens, and most especially to the disorderly houses where money could buy anything.

  This idea frightened her at first, but finally Elise had worked up her courage and approached Anna to ask what anything might mean. A good number of the women who came to the Women’s Medical School Dispensary on Stuyvesant Square and to the New Amsterdam worked in disorderly houses, after all. What did she need to know?

  Quite a lot, it turned out. First, there were the diseases that came out of houses of prostitution. Anna explained how these diseases were transmitted in clinical terms that made it possible to remain objective, and still the numbers were shocking. There wasn’t a block in the city that didn’t have at least one disorderly house, Anna told her, and in some neighborhoods there might be thirty prostitutes from one corner to the next.

  Now Elise found herself walking with Denis Bellegarde into the neighborhoods south of Washington Square Park and north of Houston, ten square blocks where prostitution flourished. To an outsider the streets would seem no different than they were anywhere else in Manhattan, but in fact many of the blocks were honeycombed by tiny lanes and crooked alleys lined with cottages that had been built before the Revolution, when Canal Street was as far north as the city went.

  There was a small but growing Italian neighborhood just south of the park, and a few blocks farther on was the area some people called Little Africa, a nonsensical name, Anna had pointed out, as most of the black families had been on this island when it was still an English colony.

  Across the street the door to a charcuterie opened and the air filled with familiar smells of smoked ham and bacon and fresh blood. The man standing there must be Monsieur Roux, the charcutier himself. Bellegarde kept his gaze focused forward and didn’t see—or didn’t want to see—the hand raised in greeting.

  Now all the shop signs were in French, and the language she heard spoken on the street was primarily the kind of French she had grown up speaking but hadn’t heard used in casual conversation for more than ten years. She was overwhelmed by homesickness so suddenly that it made her stomach clench.

  As they passed Grand Street the gaslights came to life, marking the end of the day.

  Before sunset this was a neighborhood like any other; couples raised their families and small businesses thrived or failed; the poor gathered in shadowy corners and children who lived on the streets jumped about like fleas in search of a meal. At night it was something else entirely, because with the coming of the dusk the tourists began to trickle in, and the tourists were almost all male, with money to spend.

  She had heard about the French Quarter fancies, as some called them. Elise could see for herself what was meant by the term. Women who wore rouge and skirts short enough to display their ankles strolled along arm in arm, paused on corners to talk with heads bent together, sat at open windows, breasts on display in the thinnest of robes. A girl no more than seventeen leaned out and called to a man, an invitation set to giggles. She was a girl, but there was nothing girlish about her; Elise’s time at the New Amsterdam and the Charity Clinic had taught her to look closely and she took in the details: this prostitute, no more than fifteen, had limp silk flowers in her hair and cheeks so red that might have been rouge but could also be chronic fever or tuberculosis or an alcohol flush. She had a mole to the right of her mouth that might be an artificial beauty mark, but could also be a cancer. When she opened her mouth her teeth were small and brown, an incisor broken off at the gum.

  Next month or next year Elise might see her again in a hospital ward, in liver failure or beaten half to death, leaning on the arm of a sister or in police custody. She would have pneumonia or syphilis or both, kidney and urinary tract infections, genital ulcers, tears to rectum or vagina. She would come hemorrhaging from a hasty and poorly done procedure she had sought out to regulate her courses, or in labor with a child she could not afford to keep. It was hard to imagine anyone more in need of help than the laughing, teasing girl.

  Elise didn’t fear the women who walked the street, but the men who sought their company were a different matter. They might be from anywhere, of any class or setting, but as far as she was concerned, none of them could be trusted. Drunkards could be amiable or confused or combative, but they were always unpredictable.

  Three young men came rushing past them, already unsteady on their feet and loud. Bellegarde stopped suddenly and seemed to remember that he wasn’t alone, because he turned toward her. In a few quick movements he had passed the infant he still held into her arms and positioned himself to walk on the outside, between her and the street. She understood that he wanted his hands free to deal with threats, and she knew too that his son was his first concern. She was simply a way to transport the boy.

  That thought was in Elise’s mind when an older man came around a corner to stop in front of them. She stood frozen in place as he threw out his arms in welcome.

  “Denis, my boy!” he shouted in broad Québécois. “We’ve been looking for you for days!”

  “Uncle Marcel,” Bellegarde said, his voice coming rough.

  The older man’s gaze shifted to Elise and the bundle in her arms. His expression went blank as he took in the fact of the sleeping child. He blinked.

  “Is that—?”

  “Yes. A son.”

  “Catherine?”

  Bellegarde shook his head, his mouth pressed so hard that his whole face contorted.

  “Ayoille.” The shaggy head dropped low for the span of three heartbeats. When he looked up again there were tears in his eyes.

  “Such a sweet girl. Such heartbreak. Come, we must take Lucie her grandson.” A hand like a shovel, rough and red, fell onto Bellegarde’s shoulder. The fingers were flecked with healed burn scars and every crease was highlighted with what Elise took to be flour. This was Marcel Roberge, the master baker and the mayor of the French Quarter.

  Now the older man turned his attention to Elise and spo
ke to her, still in Québécois. “And who is this?”

  “Nobody,” Bellegarde said, and would have turned away but for his uncle’s sharp glance.

  “Denis. Don’t let your anger turn you into a brute. She must be someone, and she understands our language, don’t you, young lady?”

  Elise managed a very small smile. “I am Elise Mercier,” she said. “My mother is Québécoise.”

  “I hear that. But you aren’t?”

  Bellegarde made a sound in his throat, but his uncle’s withering look was enough to put an end to his complaint. Elise had uncles who could do exactly the same thing, and she understood, as Bellegarde must, that this old man would have answers to his questions.

  “I am here studying to be a physician at the Woman’s Medical School. I grew up on the Vermont side of the border,” she said. “My parents have a farm there, outside Canaan.”

  “Your mother’s people?”

  “From Saint-Armand. My father’s people too, if you go back a generation.”

  The baker gave a familiar shrug that shifted from one side to the other, as men did when they came across something unexpected and interesting.

  “From Saint-Armand, you come to this city to study medicine. That is a story I have to hear in more detail. When there is time.”

  “She’s only here to talk to Maman,” Bellegarde said. “To explain what the boy needs.”

  The baker gave a stiff nod, uncomfortable about his nephew’s lack of manners, but compassionate all the same. “Yes, I see that. When are you off again?”