The Gilded Hour
Page 22

When Oscar held out his arms, Lia collapsed toward him, pushed her face into the wool of his coat, and sobbed openly.
“She could have told us she was looking for the Quinlan place,” Pettigrew said to Jack, gruff embarrassment in his tone. “Everybody knows the house with the walled garden. All they had to do was speak English.”
•   •   •
COUSIN MARGARET WAS reading aloud to them from the paper, something she liked to do because, Sophie understood, it was the only way to introduce the subjects she wanted to discuss. Margaret, raised in this house by Uncle Quinlan and his first wife, had only a few interests: her sons, the way she was perceived by the other old Knickerbocker families, keeping the memory of her husband alive, and crime.
She read many papers every day and kept a ledger detailing all the crimes that happened within a square mile of home. Now she sat in an elegant but understated day dress, her posture perfect, her head held erect, and read to them about a burglary on Greene Street, just two blocks away, in that neighborhood she referred to as French Town. If she went on any longer in that tone there would be an argument; Aunt Quinlan could tolerate only so much of Margaret’s fearmongering and even less of her distaste for immigrants. Eventually she would be compelled to remind her stepdaughter that her father’s grandparents had been immigrants. It was an old and exhausting argument, and Sophie was thinking of ways to deflect it when she saw two men coming up the street, the older of the two carrying a very little girl in a ragged coat far too big for her. A second girl of eight or nine years was looking up at the houses as they passed, pointing to gates and lampposts and doorways and explaining something. The girls looked as though they had been living on the street and had had a hard time of it.
Margaret said, “Sophie, have you lost your hearing? I was asking—”
The strangers had stopped and were looking at Aunt Quinlan’s door with its frieze of angels and lilies.
“We have company,” Sophie said.
Aunt Quinlan sat up, cheered as she always was at the arrival of visitors. “And still no sign of Anna. I wonder if Sister Ignatia has taken her hostage. Maybe we should send Mr. Lee with a ransom.”
•   •   •
JACK COULDN’T QUITE believe that Anna Savard might actually live in this particular house, but there was the door with angels and lilies, finely carved along the stone lintel. He had gone down this street hundreds of times and always he had wondered about this substantial limestone house of four stories, with mature pear and plum trees visible over the garden wall.
“Do you know that lady?” Oscar pointed with his chin to the window where a young woman stood.
Jack didn’t recognize her and neither did Rosa, whose whole face collapsed. “No,” she said. “That’s not Dr. Savard. But the angels and the lilies—”
“Remember Sergeant Pettigrew said there were two ladies named Savard living here.” There was no sign of Maroney’s legendary impatience and volatility; he had been tamed by a little girl with a dirty face.
The door opened. The woman standing there was not Anna Savard, though she had the same bearing and the air of confidence. This woman’s features were fuller, and her eyes were a color he couldn’t name, not green or blue but somewhere in between, just as her skin was somewhere between old honey and copper. While these thoughts went through Jack’s head, Oscar was dealing with introductions and explaining what had brought them to her door on a spring evening. Jack heard the words Hoboken and orphan and Sister Mary Augustin.
As it turned out this was also a Dr. Savard, another female physician. Jack had gone most of his life without ever encountering such a creature and now they seemed to be everywhere.
Rosa was saying, “Is the other Dr. Savard here? Can we see her, please?”
This Dr. Savard had a kind smile, one that would put a child’s worries to rest. “She isn’t here right now, but we expect her any moment. Would you like to come in and wait for her?” And then her gaze shifted, first to Oscar and then Jack. “Detective Sergeants, please do come in.”
She introduced them all to another woman, this one called Margaret Cooper—middle-aged, a little nervous in disposition, a war widow, if Jack was any judge—and to the older lady, Mrs. Quinlan.
“I sense a mystery and its unraveling all at once,” Mrs. Quinlan said. “Very exciting. Come in and sit down. Mrs. Lee, we will have guests for supper once Anna is come, but right now we’re in dire need of tea.”
The parlor was large and comfortable, but Jack felt as though he had stepped, unawares, onto a train that was gathering speed. Odder still, he was too curious to even think about getting off. Instead he watched as the Russo girls were stripped of their wraps and swaddled in blankets to sit together in an upholstered chair close to the hearth. They were telling their story to the three women, Rosa in English with commentary from Lia in Italian. Little by little Rosa’s hectic tone quieted and she began to hiccup between sentences, quick sharp gulps of air. A little girl after all, ready to hand over her burdens to these women who listened so closely with such serious expressions. Looking at her now it was hard to believe she had dared so much, and survived.
In Jack’s experience most men gave children little thought; they were distractions to be ignored or resources to be trained and put to work or burdens to be fed and clothed, and often all three at once. As a police officer Jack had come to understand that the children in circumstances such as these required more—demanded more—than willful ignorance or benign disregard.
Rosa was terrified, angry, confused, despairing, but at the same time she distinguished herself by an iron force of will. There was a simple, undeniable fact she would make these women understand: her brothers must be returned to her. Their father had deserted them, but Rosa would not.
Jack let his gaze wander over the room, full of color and well lit by gaslight from crystal wall sconces and hanging lamps. Paintings and drawings crowded the walls and overhead a mural in jewel-like colors spread over the entire ceiling. There were tall bookcases filled to overflowing behind glass fronts, a basket of needlework set aside, plants in tiled pots, shiny leafed and vigorous. It was an unusual room in an unusual house, peopled by women who seemed unshakable, who took the appearance of wet Italian orphans and police detectives at their door as nothing out of the ordinary.
His sisters would look around this room, at the clothing and draperies and tablecloth, and tell him what it all meant. They might be affronted or charmed.
On a side table in a prominent spot, a dozen framed photos were grouped together. He counted eight men in uniform, the youngest no more than eighteen. On a cabinet card, elaborately framed, was a man of at least seventy.
“That is my father,” Margaret Cooper said, coming up behind him. Jack realized just then that she stood out from the others primarily because of her clothing, quite fashionable and conservative, which meant that she was trussed like a leg of lamb bound for the oven.
“Did he return to active duty for the war?”
She smiled, happy to have him open the conversation.
“He was an army surgeon, retired. The next photograph is my brother James. Aunt Quinlan—as Sophie and Anna call her—is my stepmother.”
“The other men?” he asked.
She pointed to each face in turn, her finger hovering but not touching. “This is Andrew—my husband—he fell at Chickamauga. This is Nathaniel Ballentyne, Aunt Quinlan’s son by her first husband. He died at Shiloh, fighting beside my brother. Nathaniel and James went to school together; they were the best of friends. These five”—her finger skimmed—“are some of my stepmother’s nephews. None of these men came home. Not one.”
Oscar had been standing aside but paying attention. Now he made a soft sound in his throat. “I’m sorry to hear it. My sincere condolences.”
Jack glanced at Mrs. Quinlan, still deep in conversation with the little girls, and then returned to the collection of cabinet cards. A wedding party, a fat little boy standing with one hand wound in the coat of a huge dog, two young blond women so much alike that they had to be twins. A small painting on an easel showed an Indian woman with high cheekbones, her hair threaded with white. She was laughing, her arms wrapped around herself.
Oscar touched his shoulder and inclined his head to a portrait that hung on the opposite wall. There were dozens of photographs and paintings of President Lincoln that appeared every so often in newspapers and magazines, but Jack couldn’t remember ever seeing an oil portrait, one in which the man came to life.
“That is my stepmother’s work,” Margaret Cooper said. “Mrs. Quinlan is well regarded as an artist. Or was, before arthritis put an end to it all.”
It was hard to fathom, at that moment. The old lady who spoke so kindly to the little girls had been beautiful as a younger woman, that was still clear. But she had also been capable of painting like this, President Lincoln as Jack liked to think of him, alive, sharp energy in the dark eyes. Everyone had their own memories of the day of the assassination, stories that had been told again and again and would be told today and tomorrow and all the days of their lives. The conversation could start up among strangers in a train car or at Sunday dinner.