by Sara Donati
* * *
• • •
WITHIN A HALF hour of working in the sun Jack took off his shirt and folded the arms of his undershirt to his elbows. Oscar held out a little longer.
It had been four days without rain so they started by hauling water from the well and filling the barrels. From there they went to shoveling manure, spreading compost, and weeding. It was work Jack had done all his life until he left the family farm, and Oscar peppered him with questions.
“Carrots?” He stared down at the neat line of feathery sprouts. “Look nothing like what bobs around in my sister’s stewpot.”
“Now you’re pulling my leg.”
Oscar’s sly grin was answer enough. For all his claims that he preferred cobblestones and brick to grass and trees, he was humming to himself as he worked, comfortable and at ease. When he caught Jack watching him he straightened.
“Sun feels good.” Almost belligerent in tone.
“It does.”
Oscar went back to weeding. He said, “What do you make of this business with the Reed woman?”
“What part of it?”
“Start off with, nobody knew she was gone for good. Not even the accountants at the bank.”
Jack said, “I’d guess that she’s still getting paid, that would be part of the pension.”
“But they don’t know to send it someplace other than the house on Gramercy Park.”
They went at these smaller questions one by one, Jack spinning out possible solutions that Oscar poked holes in. The most likely situation, in Jack’s opinion, was that Charlotte Louden had planned to tell the accountants about Mrs. Reed’s change in circumstances but hadn’t yet gotten around to it when she disappeared.
“It strike you as odd that Amelie should know Leontine so well?”
Oscar jerked a shoulder. “Not at all. She had a lot of friends when she was still in the city. There were always people in her kitchen in the winter and the garden in the summer.”
Jack considered this. “And if she was off at a birth?”
“She hung a blue cloth next to her door, so people knew to come back another time. Do you think we should check in, see if she found what she’s looking for in her day-books?”
Jack gave him a pointed look, and Oscar went back to the carrot bed.
* * *
• • •
SHE BROUGHT THEM water and damp cloths to wipe their faces at about four, by Jack’s reckoning. They’d have to be leaving soon to intercept Pittorino, and it seemed they would be going without any new clues on the Louden case.
Except she pulled a roll of pages tied with string out of her apron pocket.
“These are from my day-books.”
Jack took the roll and saw that the pages had been neatly cut at the margin.
She said, “You’ll need Anna or Sophie to explain a lot of it to you. I want these pages back as soon as you’ve had them copied.”
When she paused Jack held his breath for fear she would change her mind, but when she looked up there was no doubt in her expression.
“I fear that this may end up in a courtroom and if that’s the case I will testify. I hope it won’t come to that, but I’ll be here if you need me.”
Oscar opened his mouth and she silenced him with a sharp look. “Detective Sergeant Maroney,” she said. “Make me no promises before you’ve read those pages.”
He cleared his throat. At a loss for words for once.
“You’d best be off to catch your Italian painter,” she said. “I’m guessing you’ll be back here soon enough.”
Oscar said, “If you hear from Leontine Reed—”
She had already turned to walk toward the cottage, but Amelie raised her hand to acknowledge the request. Nothing more or less than that.
41
IN THE MORNING before the children woke Sophie gathered all the adults in the parlor and together they came to a few conclusions. Anna would be bringing Dr. Jacobi at eleven; until that point, they must do their utmost to keep Tonino calm, which meant, first and foremost, that Rosa’s fears had to be kept within bounds.
“She will have questions,” Carmela said. “Many, many questions. And she will ask and ask until she believes she has heard the whole truth.”
“Most of her questions will be for me,” Sophie said. “I will do my best to give her what she needs.”
But at breakfast Rosa was silent. When someone spoke to her she replied politely; she helped the younger children without prompting, cut Lolo’s sausage into bits for her, poured more milk for Lia, reminded Joe about his napkin, and pushed her own food around as if she had no idea what she was supposed to do with it.
When she had peeked under the table for the third or fourth time, Sophie realized her plan.
“Pip is in the garden with Tinker and—Joe, what’s your dog’s name? I can’t recall.”
He grinned at her, showing the gap where his front teeth were just beginning to emerge. “Primo. Can I go play in the garden too?”
“Not until you finish,” his mother told him, once in Italian and once in English. “Then we’ll all go out in the garden to play.”
Rosa was staring at her plate, her mouth set in a firm line. She said, “I don’t want to play in the garden.”
“You don’t need to,” Sophie said.
“I don’t want to play in the garden, but I want to see Tonino.”
At this Lia looked up, her eyes full of misery. “Me too, I want to see Tonino.”
Lolo banged her cup on the table. “Nino,” she said. “Anch’io. Me too!”
Joe looked at each of the girls and shrugged as if to concede defeat. The garden could wait a little longer.
Sophie said, “We have to let Tonino sleep so he can get better. But if you are very quiet you can peek in. And while you’re at it, you can say hello to your nonno, too.”
“And then play in the garden?” Joe asked. “With the dogs and the Indian?”
Sophie glanced at Laura Lee, who was trying not to smile. Carmela, flustered, dropped her gaze. She looked like any mother whose child had said exactly that thing he had been warned not to say, and for the moment at least, she was powerless to do anything about it without making the situation worse.
Sophie had seen this too many times to count; children knew few bounds and veered into the impolite and beyond without hesitation. To take offense would be nonsensical. Early in her career one of Sophie’s favorite patients had asked if her skin tasted like chocolate and then said, very shyly, that she had never had any and always wondered what it was like. When Aunt Quinlan heard this story she had gone to the New Amsterdam to visit the girl and brought her a bar of chocolate, a new suit of clothes, and sturdy shoes.
To Joe, Sophie said, “You mean Mr. Hunter. You’ve never seen an Indian before?”
His eyes as round as pennies, he shook his head.
“You don’t know this, but my grandparents were Indians. My grandmother was of the Mohawk tribe and my grandfather was Seminole and Choctaw, and African, too. Would you like to see a painting of them?” She held out her hand to him but cast her glance around the table. “Come see, all of you.”
* * *
• • •
AFTER THE CHILDREN had studied the portrait in the parlor and admired the fireplace tiles—even Rosa’s mood was lifted by something so unusual and intriguing—they followed Sophie upstairs and peeked in on Tonino, who was in fact asleep. Ercole came out into the hall to talk to them, and then the younger three went to play in the garden.
Rosa took up a place at the kitchen table where Laura Lee, Carmela, and Mrs. Tolliver were busy talking about laundry, planning meals, and making shopping lists. Rosa seemed content to listen to them, translating now and then for Carmela, but otherwise she was quiet. Sophie wondered if Rosa had put all her hope and faith in Dr. Ja
cobi, and more important, how she would react if his examination resulted in the worst possible prognosis.
Sophie had just started up the rear staircase with a fever tea for Tonino when she heard Sam Reason come into the kitchen. He had been to the bank first thing today to see about financial arrangements, but that discussion would have to wait.
She heard him say to Rosa, “How are you coping this morning?”
Sophie froze in place, because that simple question caused the floodgates to open, and Rosa began to talk.
“Cope? I can’t cope because I don’t know what there is to cope with. Nobody will tell me what I need to know. They all say they don’t have answers but I can tell they do, they know what’s wrong with my brother, they just don’t want to tell me. So now this Dr. Jacobi is coming and they won’t let me in the room when he’s with Tonino, and then the grown-ups will talk and decide what’s wrong and what to do, and Dr. Jacobi will leave, and I still won’t know. Because he won’t answer questions either. Old white men don’t answer questions when I ask them. Except Nonno.”
There was silence in the kitchen. Sophie imagined that the other women were as surprised as she was at this speech. It made her almost sick to her stomach to imagine how Sam Reason would respond with one of his curt, unsympathetic assessments, and so she turned to go back down the stairs, pausing when he made a sound in his throat. A low, humming sound that reminded her of Mr. Lee in a thoughtful mood.
“Well,” he said. “Miss Rosa, I understand how frustrating this has to be for you, never getting answers to your questions. If I can make a suggestion—” There was a pause, and he went on.
Sophie heard his tone mellow and his accent thicken, and realized that he was talking to Rosa in his own language, in his own way, the way he spoke to family and friends and children. The careful vocabulary that he used with her, the formality, was gone.
He was saying, “What I like to do is, write things down. I write down the things that got me confused or worried, and that way I can make better sense of it all. So I write and then I read it to myself, and new ideas come to me and other things come clear, and I keep writing, and sooner or later I come up with one or two questions at the bottom of it all. The most important questions. Now, my guess is that if you was to write one or two or three such questions down, you might could give them to this Dr. Jacobi. He’s supposed to be a good man, and he’ll see how important it is to you.
“Of course it could be he won’t have a lot of time to talk, but in that case you should make a second copy of the questions for your aunts. You know they don’t mean to ignore you—don’t make a face, now, you know it’s true, even if it’s hurtful. Later you’ll look back and see they was doing the best they could. And I would bet my last nickel that they will take your questions serious, and do their level best to answer.”
Rosa murmured something Sophie couldn’t make out.
“We got whole drawers full of paper and pencils, and I’ll tell you what, you can work in the office across the table from me. I’ll be coming in and out, but you are welcome to sit there to read or write, any time at all. It’s a quiet place, peaceful, and I’ll share it with you gladly.”
Somewhat louder now, her tone almost apologetic, Rosa said, “English words are hard to spell.”
“That’s the God’s own truth,” said Sam Reason.
She said, “You see, I forgot my dictionary because we came away so fast. It’s called Webster’s Practical Dictionary of the English Language Giving the Correct Spelling, Pronunciation, and Definitions of Words. Auntie Anna gave it to me for Christmas. Do you know if Aunt Sophie has a dictionary I could look at?”
“She got at least three and I can show you just where they are because I use them almost every day. Do you want to come to the office with me now?”
Rosa must have nodded because Sophie heard them moving away toward the front of the house.
She sat down for a moment on the stair to gather her thoughts. It seemed that she could trust Sam Reason to temper common sense with compassion when it was called for. She was glad of it, because they would all be in need of compassion in the days and weeks to come.
As would he, given the most recent news about his grandmother. The time was coming when he would want to be with her, and of course he must go. But Sophie found herself shrinking away from the idea, first because it meant the loss of a kind woman she admired and cared about, but also because it would take Sam Reason away when she could least spare him.
* * *
• • •
IN THE SICKROOM Tonino was sitting up on a chair at the window that looked out over the terrace and the garden. Ercole Mezzanotte sat beside him, a bowl of broth in his great cradlelike hands.
The breeze from the window moved Tonino’s hair, damp with fever sweat. As she watched he leaned forward to rest his forearms on the windowsill and his chin on his forearms. His concentration was on the children in the garden, Lia and Joe and Lolo chasing back and forth with the dogs. Tonino was not so ill that he could ignore children at play, but she didn’t see longing in his posture. He might have been staring into a night sky without moon or stars.
Ercole said something to him in Italian, and Tonino sat up and turned toward him, opened his mouth, and took a spoonful of broth. From this angle, in the morning light, the swellings beneath his jaw and along his throat were more obvious. As he swallowed, his face contorted in a wince.
Sophie stepped away quietly. The tea was already cool; she would take it back to the kitchen to warm it again. To leave the boy this quiet moment, this peaceful hour when he had nothing to fear.
What had Rosa written in a letter just weeks ago? My brother has forgot what it is to be afraid.
* * *
• • •
ABRAHAM JACOBI WAS respected and admired as a physician, and what was more remarkable: he was liked. He was liked by everyone, despite the fact that he was an immigrant German and a Jew, despite his radical political views and his unflagging, wholehearted support of suffrage and other causes that made most men uneasy. His wife was Mary Putnam Jacobi, an excellent physician in her own right, whose opinion he sought out and valued as highly as his own.
On the street he might be mistaken for a slightly shabby shop owner, a middle-aged man of average height, simply dressed, with a luxurious head of hair and neat goatee, the dark hair streaked white. He might be someone who imported textiles or owned a small factory. It wasn’t until he gazed at you directly that you got the full force of the intelligence in the gray eyes under a prominent brow.
“It’s like a flame in the darkest part of the night.” Anna described the experience of meeting Dr. Jacobi for the first time when she was a medical student. “You can’t look away.”
He missed nothing, not because he was searching for faults but because everything interested him. And nothing interested him so much as a medical mystery when a child was involved. He had taken Sophie under his wing during her first year of medical school, and from him she had learned how to see. Watching him examine a sick child, following his reasoning as he weighed alternatives for treatment, she had developed a far better understanding of medicine as both an art and a science.
Now she waited for him to arrive, and she was comforted by the very idea of his presence.
At eleven Sophie stood in the open door and watched Dr. Jacobi get out of the cab, and remembered just then, to her shame, that he was in mourning too. Early the previous summer the Jacobis had lost their only boy at just eight years old. Sophie wondered if losing someone you loved so dearly meant you would forever suffer a little more for friends and family when they experienced such losses, if there was a kind of empathy that came with death, the ability to recognize agony of a particular kind in others.
“So,” he said as he climbed the steps to where she waited, hands extended. “Here is our Sophie. You have lost someone so precious, and I am so
rry for it. Cap was a good man. A thoughtful and kind man, and great fun. He will be missed.”
Sophie pressed her lips together until she could trust her voice. “Thank you. Anna wrote to me about your Ernst. I hope you got my note.”
“We did,” he said, squeezing her hands gently. “Thank you. My Mary would thank you, too, if she could have come today. We are a sad lot, are we not?”
Anna had finished with the cabby and was coming up to join them at the door.
“And now this little boy,” the doctor said. “Anna has told me what there is to know.” He glanced into the house and his smile gentled. “This must be Rosa, the big sister who has taken such good care. Will you introduce me?”
And this, exactly this, was why they had called on him. Because he saw children as complex creatures with many needs beyond food and shelter. Because he saw in Rosa a burgeoning sorrow that he himself knew so well.
Then, remembering something, he turned back to Sophie and drew a book from his pocket.
“You will want to read this. It’s not translated into English yet, but Anna will be able to help.”
He had used a slip of paper to mark the first article in the medical journal. Die Aetiologie der Tuberkulose. Dr. Koch’s summary treatise on tuberculosis, published just two months ago in Germany, when Cap was living the last of his days in Switzerland. She closed her eyes and willed herself to put it aside until she could give it her full attention.
* * *
• • •
LATER, AS THEY gathered around the long table in the study Anna thought of Jack and regretted sending him away for the day. It would be good to have him here, just now. It was a comfort to have Ercole sitting across from her: her father-in-law was strong and resolute and as solid as a brick wall, but he wasn’t Jack.