Anna bit back the response that came to mind. There was no need to distress the girl any further, but neither could she simply forget the look on her face, the deep sadness she saw there.
“The change in my duties will make it easier for me to help look for the Russo brothers,” Mary Augustin offered, as if she needed to console Anna.
As a girl, Anna had often been told that she didn’t know when to retreat. Uncle Quinlan had likened her to his terrier called Bull, who weighed no more than ten pounds but stood up to other dogs as though he were three times the size.
“It’s not really a fault,” he had explained to her in his patient way. “Or it’s not a fault in his nature, I should say. It’s built into him, like the shape of his ears. But it is my responsibility to make him understand that it is often better to retreat and live to fight another day.”
Many years later Anna often thought of that conversation, which had taken place on a sunny winter morning when she had been deeply frustrated by a math problem. It had taken time for her to fully learn the lesson he meant to teach, one that she drew on now: it would do no good to badger Mary Augustin about something so clearly distressing to her. She would put it aside for the moment, then. For the moment.
Once Jack had turned his attention back to the road she took the opportunity to look at him more closely. He had taken off his coat and folded his shirtsleeves up to just below the elbows. This was shockingly informal of him, and completely reasonable given the heat. He teased her about the fact that she attended meetings of the Rational Dress Society, but he was a member himself, whether he wanted to acknowledge it or not.
And still she had to admit that it was a distraction to have him sitting there in the bright sunshine, his wrists and forearms in plain sight. The human body was no mystery to her, after all, and should not demand so much of her attention. Just a few days ago she had spent hours operating on the hand and forearm of a brawny sixteen-year-old with an arm shot full of splinters, pulling them out of muscles and tendons. She knew how a man’s wrists and arms were put together, and there was nothing unusual about Jack Mezzanotte. His wrists, broad as they were, twisted and flexed in exactly the same way as her own.
Which only sidestepped the fact that she was attracted to him in every way a woman could be attracted to a man, and he was leaving tomorrow for Chicago. A week or ten days, no amount of time at all. He would be back before she even began to miss him. But she hated the idea of his being gone, which made her realize, once and for all, that Jack Mezzanotte was nothing like Karl Levine, or more exactly: that she had been one person with Karl, and was becoming someone else with Jack.
She had liked and admired Karl for many reasons. He had a slow, thoughtful manner that masked a hot intelligence. He made her laugh. He was kind. He was unattached and not interested in a permanent relationship because his primary interest in life was medicine, and it demanded all his energy and attention. He knew that she would be in Vienna only a short time.
Before she had known him a week Anna had decided that he was her opportunity to experience that act which was at the center of so much of a woman’s life.
Most important, she realized now, was the fact that they were both utterly consumed by work, which meant they had something else in common: ignorance. Two people who knew everything about the anatomy and physiology of the human body, about procreation and sex except, as it turned out, how to make it work. To mean something. She came away mystified and confounded both, with more questions than answers. Just looking at Jack gave her ideas about those unanswered questions.
She had left Karl to go on to Berlin without hesitation or qualms, and he seemed to have recovered just as easily. At the New Year she had had a card from him, all collegial politeness, and she had felt only a moment’s guilt that she had not thought to write.
“Dr. Savard?” Sister Mary Augustin touched her shoulder, and Anna saw that the Foundling and its hospitals had come into view. It was an impressive sight, a central large brick building of some eight stories with two connected wings, and on either side of those wings, separate brick buildings, each four stories high.
“On the far right is St. Luke’s, the new children’s hospital.” Mary Augustin pointed with her chin. She seemed to think Anna had never been here before, but the girl took such enjoyment in sharing information that it would have been mean-spirited to stop her.
“St. Anne’s—the lying-in hospital—is on the far left nearest us, and in the center the offices and classrooms and the orphan asylum itself. The convent and the new chapel are behind the main building; you can’t see them from here. This is where I trained.”
Anna hadn’t thought to ask about her training, but clearly Mary Augustin wanted to talk about it.