The next week was a blur of long, harried days and even longer sleepless nights. Una hadn’t realized what a bright, anchoring presence Dru had been for her. She missed Dru’s cheery smile first thing in the morning. She missed their nightly cups of milk and honey. She even missed their tedious hours of study and Dru’s endless chatter.
On the ward, Nurse Hatfield was back to scrutinizing Una’s every move. The bedsheets were not smooth enough, the mustard poultices she mixed not thin enough, the beef tea she brewed not strong enough.
With Dru still gravely ill and Edwin off at his symposium, Una felt a strange, new sensation. Loneliness. It settled at the base of her throat like a lump of dry bread. She tried to ignore it. Tried to swallow it down or vomit it up. But the irksome feeling remained. She’d been on her own for years. Why should it bother her now?
To make matters worse, the rough from the Bowery with the bullet wound, who at first seemed to be on the mend, had slowly grown more ill. Pus began to ooze from his wound when she changed his dressing. He no longer could keep down what he ate or drank—not even his laudanum—so nutritive and anodyne enemas were ordered. Dr. Pingry continued to insist the man’s condition was stable and his chances of recovery favorable. Instead of cleaning and dressing the wound with disinfectant-soaked gauze, he prescribed the open-air treatment wherein the wound was left uncovered, free to excrete pus and poison until it healed on its own.
The man, who’d been robust as any bruiser when he first came in, now looked gaunt as a skeleton, his limbs spindly as matchsticks and his ribs protruding beneath his skin. Even the obsequious Dr. Allen tried to suggest a more sanitary course of treatment. But Dr. Pingry would not be moved. Any ill effects the patient was suffering, he insisted looking squarely at Una, were due to dangerous odors and pestilent vapors not properly vented from the room.
When Edwin arrived back from Philadelphia and joined the other doctors for morning rounds, his face went blank with shock when he saw the man. “Have we tried to wash out the wound with carbolic acid?”
“Open air is the best option,” Dr. Pingry said blithely. “It’s draining fine on its own.”
The color and animation returned to Edwin’s features. “Open air! That’s absurd. He’ll develop blood poisoning if he hasn’t already.” He looked to Dr. Allen as if for support but got only a shrug.
“Need I remind you who’s in charge here, Dr. Westervelt? You’ve come back from that symposium altogether too bold. Are you a germ hunter now?” He pointed at a spot on the floor. “Look, there’s a bacillus. Catch him!”
Dr. Pingry laughed and walked on to the next patient’s bedside. Edwin drew in a deep breath, clenched his jaw, and followed, glancing furtively at Una as he passed her. His eyes softened, but she could see the rage kindling behind them.
That afternoon the patient died.
As she bathed the man for the last time, Una reminded herself she hadn’t known him. What was one less Bowery rough? That seemed to be the attitude of Dr. Pingry anyway. Never mind the wife and small daughter that had come to visit the man every evening. Una thought of them arriving tonight, trudging up the stairs to the ward, praying to see some sign of improvement, only to be sent away to the morgue.
Tears mounted in the corners of her eyes. She cursed under her breath and blinked them away. She remembered her own journey to the morgue with her father. He made the identification quickly, but Una had broken free of his handhold and drawn closer to the body to be sure. She circled the grimy table, trying to find some bit of unburned flesh that might be recognizable. A few of her mother’s fingers had escaped the flame, the nails neatly trimmed. Bits of her beautiful dark hair. A few threads of her blue dress. Her mouth, so often set in a smile, stretched in a grimace across her once-lovely teeth.
These and more Una recognized, but she hadn’t wanted to believe it. For days after the wake and funeral, while her father sat in the kitchen working through a gallon of brandy, Una had curled herself on the sofa and watched out the window, waiting for her mother to come home. Clinging to the hope that the body they’d identified in the morgue had not been hers.
Slowly that hope had hardened into hatred. Her mother had abandoned her. She didn’t have to go inside that ramshackle tenement that day. Her father was always saying she ought to steer clear of that low, run-down part of the city. There were plenty of other places in need of her charity.
“That’s what you get, a stór,” he said to Una in a drunken slur as dusk was falling over the city, and her mother still hadn’t returned. “What you get when you look out for others above your family. Above your own self.” Then he gave her a quarter to fetch more brandy from the grocer down the street. She’d taken a nip of the drink on her way home and abandoned her window-side vigil.
Now, as Una finished washing the Bowery man, her hands shook with such violence she spilled half the basin of sudsy water onto her apron. It bled through her skirt and petticoat. Two orderlies arrived, heaved the body onto a stretcher, and carried it away.
Una asked the second-year to cover for her for a few minutes and climbed out onto the balcony. She’d thought about sneaking a sip of brandy but brought a cup of tea with her instead. It clinked against its saucer in her still shaky hands. Dusk would soon fall, and the yard below was cast in shadow. But the air retained the day’s warmth, perfumed with hints of crocus flowers and witch hazel. The waning sunlight glinted off the river as it flowed southward toward the nearly finished Brooklyn Bridge. She sipped her tea and gave up trying to hold back her tears.
It had been years since she’d broken her rules and allowed herself to cry. Tears made you look weak. Weakness got you picked on and exploited. But what a relief it was to let them come, to let them cloud her eyes and dribble down her face. She wasn’t sure what or whom she cried for. The man from the Bowery? His wife and daughter? Mr. Knauff and the accident with ether? Diedre? Dru? The tears came harder, mucus clotting her throat. She crouched down, set her teacup aside, and wrapped her arms around her knees. It was her mother she was thinking of. And herself.
She remembered going together to Washington Market to buy oysters and vegetables. On lucky occasions, her mother would add an orange to their basket and peel it for Una on the way home. She remembered sitting on her mother’s lap by the fireplace, listening to her read the rare letter her father sent home from the battlefield. Her voice never wavered, not even when news came of the minie ball that had ripped through his leg. That night, though, she let Una crawl into bed with her and held her until dawn.
The years before the war, Una remembered only in flashes and snippets
—her mother’s laughter, her father’s jaunty fiddle playing, the smell of coddle and soda bread wafting from the kitchen. On Sundays they’d walk hand in hand to church, Una in the middle, swinging between their arms.
It was true; her mother had taken to her charity work with particular fervor in the years after her father’s return. But by then home had become a solemn place. Her mother seldom laughed. Her father’s fiddle went unplayed. They ate supper in silence.
Now Una realized she couldn’t blame her mother for needing time away any more than she could blame her father for returning broken from the war. Any more than she could blame her nine-year-old self for mistaking heartbreak for hatred and never truly mourning her mother’s death.
Una wept until footfalls rattled the balcony. Glancing up, she saw Edwin approaching. She stood, turning her face away and blotting the mess of tears with her shirtsleeve as he hurried to her side.
“Una, what’s wrong?”
She backed away, tripping over her cup and saucer. Tea spilled and splattered, dripping through the lattice of iron onto the balcony below. Thankfully the stoneware hadn’t shattered. She and Edwin both bent to pick it up, their fingers brushing as they reached for the saucer.
“I’ve got it, Doctor, don’t trouble yourself.”
Edwin frowned and stood, leaning his forearms on the railing. “I hate when you do that, call me ‘Doctor’ like I’m some stranger. Like I haven’t kissed you a hundred times. Like I haven’t—”
“Shh, someone might overhear you.” “I don’t care if the entire world hears.”
She clanked the cup atop the saucer and stood. “Easy for you to say. You don’t have anything to lose.”
“I’m sorry. I only came out to see that you were all right.” “I’m fine.”
He shook his head. “I hate that too. When you lie to me.”
She moved to the railing, far enough apart from him not to draw suspicion but close enough to hear the breath whistling in and out of his nose.
“How do you manage when there’s so much death here?”
“I try to remember those who live, I suppose. Those whom we help get better.” His voice softened. “Is that what’s bothering you?”
“No.” She looked out over the lawn. A patient with a crutch hobbled along the path amid the newly budding flowers. An attendant sat on a bench alongside the river, smoking a cigarette. A nurse stepped onto the lower balcony catty-corner to where they stood and flapped open a bedsheet, draping it over the rail. Una waited until the nurse returned inside before continuing. “Did you really mean it, before when you said I could tell you anything?”
“Of course I did. I want us always to be open and honest with each other.”
“People don’t want that—honesty. Not really. They want half-truths and trumped-up stories and sugar-coated lies.”
“I do.”
She looked at him from the corner of her eyes. Always that damned earnest expression.
“When you got back from New Orleans with your father’s body, did you tell your mother how he died? Did you tell her about the bastard brother you’d met there?”
Edwin was quiet a moment. “No.” “That’s what I mean.”
“I was only sparing her feelings. She’d endured enough indignity at his hands.”
“Lies aren’t always meant to do harm.”
“That’s it, then? You would rather spare me whatever it is you think I can’t handle and suffer alone?”
Alone. Is that really what she wanted? She ran her hand along the cool iron rail, letting it stop halfway between them. Edwin slid his hand out as well until it rested beside hers, their pinky fingers touching.
“No, that’s not what I want anymore.” She took a deep breath. “You must promise that no matter what I—”
“Miss Kelly.”
The sound of the second-year’s voice made Una jump. She pulled her hand away and turned toward the open window.
The second-year poked her head out. “Superintendent Perkins is asking for you.”
Una’s insides went cold. “I have to go,” she said to Edwin when she remembered herself enough to speak. She hurried past him and through the window.
“Her office?” Una asked the second-year.
She nodded, her grave expression compounding Una’s unease. “Did she say what it was about?”
“No, but it’s never good.”
Una found the door to Miss Perkins’s office open when she arrived. The superintendent was behind her wide desk talking with Nurse Hatfield and, strangely, Mrs. Buchanan. When she rapped on the doorjamb, the three women quieted. Miss Perkins waved her in. Una realized upon entering that she was still carrying her empty teacup.
“I didn’t have anything to do with that man’s death today. I tried to get Dr. Pingry to wash his hands and use clean instruments. I did. Even the interns tried. He refused to change—”
“That’s not why I asked to see you, Miss Kelly,” Superintendent Perkins said.
Una exhaled with relief.
“I asked to see you because Miss Hatfield has leveled a very serious accusation against you.”
She glanced at Nurse Hatfield, then back to Miss Perkins. Had Una neglected something on the ward? Forgotten to close a window or missed a spot while dusting? Surely that wouldn’t qualify as very serious. Did it have to do with Edwin? Had she seen them together? Whatever it was, Una knew better than to speak beyond a tremulous, “Oh?”
“Theft, Miss Kelly. She says you stole her silk scarf.” “What? That’s ridiculous. A bald-faced lie!”
“Then you won’t object if we return home and search your room?” “Of course not,” Una said.
She followed the women out of the hospital and across the street to the home. When they reached her room, Una opened the door, and the women filed in. With Dru gone, Una hadn’t been as scrupulous about making her bed and winced seeing the rumpled quilt and unfluffed pillow. They weren’t here to inspect her bed-making skills, she reminded herself.
Her quilt was one of the first things they removed, anyway. Mrs. Buchanan gave her an apologetic look before pulling it back and inspecting between the sheets. She peeked under her mattress and beneath her bed frame, too, while the other women rummaged through her wardrobe, turning out the pockets of her coat and dresses.
Una watched from the doorway. They would make terrible detectives, these women. She almost laughed in spite of herself. They didn’t feel along the tops of the shelves for something tucked out of view. They didn’t look for out-of-place seams in the wood where a false wall might have been constructed. They didn’t pull up the rug and check for loose floorboards. They didn’t knock on the walls and listen for the telltale ring of a hollowed- out cubby.
“See, I didn’t take anything,” Una said.
Mrs. Buchanan gave a mollifying nod. “I’m sorry, dear. We’re almost done.” She knelt and opened the lid of Una’s chest.
“There’s nothing in there but my underthings.”
“I’m afraid we must search everything.” Mrs. Buchanan unfolded Una’s nightdress and turned her spare stockings inside out. Una had stored the worn copy of Barney’s magazine at the bottom, along with his bent tie pin and the medallion of the Virgin Mother she’d gotten from the woman in Hell’s Kitchen. Mrs. Buchanan looked beneath them, then began repacking Una’s trunk.
“Check between the pages of that magazine,” Nurse Hatfield said, a hint of desperation in her voice.
Una glared at her, grabbing the magazine from Mrs. Buchanan and thrusting it into her hand. “Here. Check yourself. You won’t be satisfied until you’ve turned every page.”
Nurse Hatfield flipped carefully through the magazine, her smug expression falling and cheeks reddening as she neared the end. “I . . . er . . . I don’t understand. My scarf has been missing for days. No one but you would have taken it.”
Una snatched back the magazine and tossed it into her trunk. It landed against the bottom with a clink. “Well, as you see, I didn’t.”
“It must be here somewhere. Maybe among Miss Lewis’s things.” She took a step toward Dru’s trunk, but Una blocked her path.
“Don’t you dare touch anything of hers.” Una had intentionally kept everything—from the half-spent candle at Dru’s bedside to the fur muff and cap hanging from her peg—just as Dru had left it.
“None of it belongs here anyway,” Nurse Hatfield said. “She’s not a trainee anymore.”
Miss Perkins, hitherto silent, moved between them. “Enough! Your accusation has proven unfounded, Eugenia. I regret ever indulging you in it.
I believe you owe Miss Kelly an apology.”
Nurse Hatfield crossed her arms and looked away. She stood silently for several seconds then huffed. “I’m sor—”
Mrs. Buchanan cleared her throat, saving Nurse Hatfield the trouble of finishing. “I’m afraid Miss Eugenia might be right in her suspicions.” She held out her hand. In her palm was the silver pocket watch. “I believe this is the watch Dr. Pingry said he lost after his lecture.” She turned it over to reveal the letters engraved on the back. “See, here are his initials.”
