Where the Light Enters

by Sara Donati

  “Scrofula?” Elise said. “How common is it for tuberculosis to start in the cervical lymph nodes?”

  “I’ve seen it more than a few times,” Anna said.

  “Will you do a blood count?”

  “As soon as possible. And to that end we need to be going. I have to pick up supplies at the New Amsterdam and call on the Jacobis after we stop at Stuyvesant Square. Can I ask you to explain the situation to Laura Lee and Mr. Reason and start getting rooms ready?”

  Mr. Lee came into the kitchen and took the first basket just as a knock sounded at the front door.

  “Go ahead,” Anna said to Elise. “Let me see who this is and I’ll be right out.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ANNA GAVE THE Western Union boy a nickel tip and then stood staring at the telegram envelope until she worked up the energy to open it.

  CHANGE OF PLANS. CARMELA WITH JOE AND LOLO ALSO COMING. SOPHIE WANTS THEM ALL UNDER HER ROOF. FERRY DELAY ONE HOUR. AMO IL TUO CORAGGIO CARA MIA. JACK

  “A telegram from Jack,” she told Elise and Mr. Lee. “Things have gotten a little more complicated.”

  “How so?” Mr. Lee asked.

  Anna told them, but kept for herself the fact that her husband loved her for her courage. It would sustain her through the days to come.

  38

  BEFORE ELISE HAD even come up the short flight of stairs, the door to Sophie’s house opened and Laura Lee was there. Capable, down-to-earth, cheerful Laura Lee was one of them, and thank goodness. She drew Elise into the foyer where two men stood, looking uncertain. Elise knew who they were; she had heard about them both at Mrs. Quinlan’s supper table.

  Sam Reason was a quiet, serious man, cloaked in a formality that suited his position here. Noah Hunter was his opposite physically; very tall, broad, and heavily muscled, his complexion the color of the copper liard her father kept as a good-luck piece. But his manner was similar: calm and keenly focused. All three of them were watching her with open curiosity and just a tinge of alarm.

  It was Laura Lee who came out and asked. “Is somebody hurt?”

  “Not the way you mean,” Elise told her, and then she took a deep breath and explained: Tonino, seriously ill, was on his way here so that Sophie could oversee his medical treatment. With him were his two sisters, Rosa and Lia; his foster mother, Carmela, with Joe and Lolo, her two youngest; and Ercole Mezzanotte, Jack’s father. All of them would be staying here on Stuyvesant Square, and there was only a little time to get ready for them.

  Instead of rushing off, the three had sensible questions about sleeping arrangements and how best to prepare. Questions about Tonino’s condition they kept to themselves, but Elise told them the little that she knew: the young boy who was coming to take up a spot in the household had suffered a great deal over the last year, and bore the scars, both physical and emotional, of those events. And now he was ill, and seriously so.

  “It’s good you brought more linen,” Laura Lee said. “As soon as I’ve got the bedrooms in order I’ll start supper. First things first, though; some furniture has got to be moved around upstairs.”

  The room Tonino was to have was good-sized but crowded. There was a large bed with side tables, an armoire, and a wardrobe. A broad upholstered chair stood in front of the little hearth.

  “This won’t do at all as a sickroom,” Elise said. “We need a single bed, one dresser, a table, and let’s say, one side chair and one rocking chair. Two washstands, one large enough for sterilizing instruments. Anna will bring all that from the New Amsterdam. Everything as simple as possible. The India rug will have to be taken out and the curtains down for the sake of maintaining hygiene. The window shade can stay.”

  Noah Hunter said, “We’ll need a half hour or so to shift all this to the attic.”

  “And replacements?” Elise asked.

  “I took an inventory yesterday,” Sam Reason said. “I think we can get everything down here without too much problem.”

  Elise was surprised that Mr. Reason was so willing to help with such a menial task—she had heard a lot about his long list of accomplishments—but she managed to keep that from her tone when she thanked the two men for their help.

  “Let’s you and me go get started with the bedding,” Laura Lee said. “It will go twice as fast that way.”

  As soon as they were out of the room Elise tried to make her position clear. “This is your household to manage,” she told Laura Lee. “I’m happy to follow your lead. What do we have to work with?”

  There were, it turned out, six empty bedrooms in all, two on this floor, four on the third floor. They would make up all the beds and let Sophie and Anna decide who would sleep where.

  Laura Lee said, “I imagine the girls will have strong opinions.”

  Even given the seriousness of the situation, Elise had to smile at that. Rosa without an opinion was as odd a thought as Rosa without her mane of curly hair, or Lia without a grin.

  They had almost finished with one room when Laura Lee asked the question she couldn’t hold back any longer, the one Elise had been waiting for.

  “What’s the matter with the boy? How sick is he?”

  When Elise hesitated, Laura Lee held up a hand. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “It’s not that,” Elise told her. “I’m just not sure how to answer. I know the symptoms, but there isn’t a diagnosis, not until they get a blood count and Dr. Jacobi examines him.”

  “A blood count,” Laura Lee echoed.

  She was very quiet as they started in the next room but soon enough she stood up straight, hands on her hips, and said what was on her mind.

  “How do you count blood? It’s not like you could measure it like milk or water. I can’t quite see it, and anyway, how much would it help you to know if I’ve got a couple spoonfuls more or less than the next person?”

  While they took dust covers off the furniture in the largest bedroom on the third floor and folded them, Elise told Laura Lee about white and red blood cells. “Too few white blood cells means one kind of problem, too many means something else. The same with red blood cells.”

  “White blood cells? I doubt I got many of those.”

  “You do,” Elise told her. “Everybody does. You can’t see them, but you have them.”

  “I’ll have to take your word on that,” Laura Lee said. “But what I’m wondering is how you all figured it out in the first place. It’s another mystery,” she said. “Like electricity or yeast.”

  She straightened, holding a folded sheet from the basket to her breast, and looked Elise directly in the eye. “It’s bad, isn’t it. With Tonino.”

  “I fear so,” Elise said. “But the thing right now is to make sure that he’s comfortable, and that Sophie has what she needs to treat him. Of course I don’t know how possible it is to make him comfortable, as he still hasn’t found his voice.”

  “That child has been through too much,” Laura Lee said. “You got to wonder what the good Lord is thinking.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE ROOMS HAD all been made ready and Laura Lee had just gone to figure out how she would feed such a crowd when three cabs pulled up in front of the house.

  Elise’s heart began to beat double time, as it did before an exam or a difficult procedure. Yesterday eight people between the ages of twenty and eighty-five had left for Greenwood accompanied by one very small dog, but an entirely different company was returning. She opened the door as Sophie came up the steps and found herself hugged, firmly and with palpable relief. Over Sophie’s shoulder she took inventory and realized that some faces were missing.

  “Mrs. Quinlan?”

  Sophie said, “We sent her home in a separate cab, with Mrs. Lee and Bambina and Ned. Anna?”

  “The New Amsterdam to get the medicines you’ll need. What i
s that?”

  Sophie glanced behind herself. “Oh. That’s Primo, Joe’s dog.”

  “He’s three times Joe’s size.”

  “Just about, yes. I’m so glad you were able to get things organized. And I see you had a lot of help. Let’s get everyone inside and figure out where to go from here.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT EVENING WHEN Sophie finally went to her bed she was truly tired, exhausted in a way she hadn’t experienced since medical school. She should have fallen immediately to sleep—as Pip did, without hesitation—but instead she lay awake and listened to the sounds the house made.

  She had gotten used to living alone, as it turned out, even in such a short time. Since the day she moved in the only other person to sleep in the house had been Laura Lee, in her room off the kitchen. Now under this one roof were four adults and the five children who had come through the door hungry and frightened and overtired. Even Lia and Lolo, two of the most genial of children Sophie had ever come across, had fussed and wept by turns.

  Rosa hadn’t been immune either. She had fallen asleep over soup, despite her determination to sit by Tonino’s bedside through the night. Now both girls slept in the room down the hall, and Sophie was certain that it would take a cannon blast to wake them.

  Sleep was not in her own immediate future, and so Sophie got up, slipped on her robe, and went out into the hall to look in on Tonino. His door stood open to show his small form in the bed, outlined by the light of a candle in a hurricane shade that stood on a dresser top. She watched until she saw a shifting in the blanket that covered the form.

  At his bedside Jack’s father sat watch in a rocking chair, a blanket on his lap and his head cupped in one hand.

  She went to her study, turned on the electric lighting—it startled her a little, how quickly she had become dependent on that switch that turned night to day—and made sure the drapes were closed. For a long moment she stood considering the bookshelves and then pulled down three volumes: On Cancer, Its Allies and Other Tumors: With Special Reference to Their Medical and Surgical Treatment; Malignant Disease in Infancy and Childhood; and Intestinal Disease in Children. All of them were well used, the covers sprung and pages loose. She paused to read what she had written in a margin about the evaluation of lumps:

  Consistency

  Attachment

  Mobility

  Pulsation

  Fluctuation

  Irreducibility

  Regional lymph nodes

  Edge

  She hadn’t been looking for this list, long ago committed to memory, but it was a good enough place to start. She gathered paper and pen, checked her inkwell, added some of her old notebooks to the short pile of texts, and sat down to begin a case history file for Tonino.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE MORNING Jack woke before Anna, startled out of sleep by a confused dream about the Russo children and dogs as big as horses. He had sweated through the bed linen, his mouth was the texture of parchment, and he itched. But Anna didn’t stir, which was a relief. He slipped away to the bathroom, where he stared at himself in the mirror. Overnight he had produced two white chest hairs that stood out like candles on a moonless night.

  As he washed and shaved and scoured out his mouth, he told himself that a few white hairs were the least he had to look forward to.

  Behind him Anna said, “What are you staring at?”

  Jack rubbed a towel over his face and turned to her. “Nothing important.”

  They looked at each other for a long moment, and then, very slowly, Anna leaned toward him and pressed her face to his shoulder.

  “You love my courage,” she said. “But if you only knew how I’m dreading today.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I do know. The point is you’ll go on and do what needs to be done anyway. You’re delightfully soft on the outside with a core of steel.”

  She laughed feebly, shaking her head. “I need to get moving. I have a surgery this morning and then Dr. Jacobi—” Her voice trailed off.

  Jack had never met Abraham Jacobi, the physician both Anna and Sophie revered so highly, but he liked the man on principle, in part because he had agreed without hesitation to take on Tonino’s case. Anna would meet him on Stuyvesant Square later this morning, where she and Sophie would sit down with him and work out a plan.

  “I can be there too,” Jack said, not for the first time.

  And not for the first time, she smiled at him and shook her head. “Let us do what we do. You go to work, and at the end of the day we can go over things together.”

  In all honesty, Jack was glad not to be spending the day at Sophie’s; he wasn’t sure he was up to dealing with a lot of anxious, frightened children. Fortunately his father had insisted on coming with Tonino and the girls, and his father was far better in such situations.

  “Your stomach is growling,” Anna said. “So, breakfast, and lots of it. Then we’re off to slay dragons, the both of us.”

  39

  OSCAR WAS AT his favorite table at MacNeil’s, an empty plate in front of him, an unlit cigar in one fist and his attention fixed on the newspaper he had propped against his empty coffee cup.

  Jack sat down across from him, gestured to MacNeil for his own cup of boot—you ordered something, or you were tossed out, detective sergeants no exception.

  Whatever Oscar had been eager to say was simply wiped off his face once he looked at Jack.

  “What?”

  Jack accepted the coffee cup and waited until MacNeil went back to the kitchen.

  “Somebody sick at Greenwood?” Oscar leaned closer.

  “There was, but now he’s here. Tonino is at Sophie’s, and the girls are there with him. And my father. And a whole assortment of Mezzanottes.”

  He told Oscar what he knew, what he suspected, and what he feared.

  Oscar’s normally florid complexion had gone pale. He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck.

  “When will they know for sure?”

  “You mean, a diagnosis?” Jack shrugged. “I got the idea that it might not be so easy to pin things down. But there’s a specialist coming this morning to examine him, someone Anna and Sophie both admire. Then maybe we’ll know more.”

  For a half hour they talked through the complications that could arise and how they’d deal with them. If Tonino died, whether it was tomorrow or a year from now, the girls would be inconsolable. Would sending them back to Leo and Carmela be a comfort, or would it make it that much worse? The legalities added another layer of uncertainty.

  These were things he could talk to Oscar about in plain terms. With Anna and Sophie and the children, such subjects were likely to be drawn out and hampered by self-doubt and second guessing.

  “Not that I would have wished the reason on anybody, but it’s a good thing Sophie was away during the custody hearing,” Oscar muttered. “Licensed and all as she is, there’s not much Comstock can do if Leo and Carmela asked her to take on the boy’s case.”

  Jack didn’t put much past Anthony Comstock, but for the moment he decided to let the subject go.

  “You should get yourself away home,” Oscar said. “Or at least to Stuyvesant Square.”

  “No, I’m just in the way. The house is full of women, and there’s no patience with our kind. So better to put in a good day’s work. What’s that you’ve got there?”

  “Just what we talked about,” Oscar said. One corner of his mouth jerked in barely contained satisfaction as he turned the newspaper, rotating it so Jack could see the headline.

  “You pulled it off.”

  “Reporters can be useful on occasion.”

  Jack read silently to himself.

  WHERE IS MRS. CHARLOTTE LOUDEN?

  The Herald has learned that Mrs. Charlott
e Louden, a distinguished lady of good birth and breeding, the heiress to the Abercrombie and Co. shipbuilders’ fortune, has been missing for close to three weeks.

  The lady’s husband is Mr. Jeremy Louden, Senior Vice President at Chatham National Bank on Union Square. The Herald was unable to secure an interview with the missing lady’s husband, with her mother, Mrs. Ernestine Abercrombie, or with her son, Charles Abercrombie Louden, the President at Abercrombie & Co. Inquiries at police headquarters were rebuffed. Nevertheless, sources near to the investigation and the Louden family provided some insight into this disturbing case.

  Mrs. Louden set out to visit her mother at the Abercrombie home on Fifth-ave., but never arrived. Exhaustive investigation by detectives of the Pinkerton Agency and our own city police department have failed to uncover a single clue.

  Mrs. Louden is remarkable not only for her exemplary character but also for her beauty and youthful appearance. The missing lady is blond, slender, and so elegant and distinctive in her person that given the mysterious circumstances, foul play is feared.

  Also missing is Leontine Reed, the lady’s maid who has been with Mrs. Louden since she married. Mrs. Reed is a colored woman of sixty years, very small of stature with white hair. On her right cheek and neck she bears the scars of a scalding suffered as a child. There is some reason to believe that the two women were not together at the time of Mrs. Louden’s disappearance, but information on the whereabouts of either of them should be brought to attention of the detectives’ bureau on Mulberry-str. The family will reward information leading to the safe recovery of Mrs. Louden generously.

  “If this doesn’t make things start to move, nothing will,” Jack said. “Louden agreed to the reward?”