“It’s a good time of year to have a baby,” Anna offered, because it was true. “Will you stay here on the island?”
She felt Jack’s attention focus as he realized what she was up to. Anna elbowed him gently to let him know he was not to jump in or offer any comments and heard him huff his resignation all too clear. In her experience mothers and daughters had a set way of telling their maternal histories, and she must let it run its course.
The mother, born and raised herself on Staten Island, had had all of her children right at home with the help of Meg Quinn, the midwife who had delivered almost everybody on the south end of Staten Island.
“She’s only ever lost two children and one mother,” the daughter said. “In thirty years of catching babies.”
“That’s an excellent record,” Anna said, and saw them both relax a little. “We’ve seen quite a few babies this weekend,” Anna went on. “Twins, about three months old—”
“The Dorsey girls,” the mother suggested.
“I wouldn’t care for twins,” her daughter said, but her nervous smile said she wasn’t so sure. Most young women her age did like the idea of twins but found the reality more than they had imagined or wanted to deal with.
“I heard a very young baby crying when we passed a house on the main street this morning—”
“Mrs. Caruthers’s first, poor thing’s got the colic something terrible.”
“—and, then yesterday—” She paused to look at Jack.
“Yes?” the mother prompted, also turning to Jack and smiling in a way that made her look more her daughter’s age.
“We were on the beach very near Mount Loretto,” he said. “We met a family with a friendly little girl who introduced us to her parents and grandmother and her new baby brother.”
“That would be Eamon and Helen Mullen, don’t you think, Allie? Helen is a good friend of both my daughters. She married the same week as my older girl, my Jess.”
“They looked very happy,” Anna said.
“Oh, yes,” said Allie Reynolds, her hand returning to rub her belly in gentle circles. “But they have had some heartache.” She lowered her voice. “Helen lost her own little boy to a fever when he was just three months old. He was gone so quick, they couldn’t even send for the doctor.”
The story went on for a while, mother and daughter reconstructing the death of the Mullens’ son.
“Then she couldn’t catch again,” said the daughter. “Three years, they tried. It was hard to see her so unhappy.”
“She seems very satisfied now,” Anna said.
“That little boy was a blessing, it’s true. They adopted him, you know. There’s no lack of little Irish orphans in the city, is what we hear. So the new priest arranged for them to get one and it’s made all the difference to the Mullens. Brought them all back to life, you might even say.”
? ? ?
THE PASSENGERS WERE coming off the ferry just as Jack and Anna left the train station, a small crowd of people on their way to Tottenville. The last person they passed was a priest in a Roman collar, a man in his fifties or more, rotund, with blazing red cheeks and sharp blue eyes. This would be the evasive Father McKinnawae, Jack was fairly sure. But there was no time to stop and introduce themselves. It was a conversation that would need careful planning.
“Maybe I should write to him again,” Anna said when the ferry had begun its trip north on Raritan Bay.
“It would be better if I approached him,” Jack said. “If you can leave that to me once the inquest is over. At least we know the baby is healthy and in good hands.”
“Yes,” Anna said. “That’s one less thing to worry about. I don’t mind admitting, my head is spinning.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Jack said, slipping an arm around her shoulders.
She gave him a half smile. “It will be a very strange honeymoon. I have surgery all tomorrow morning and then in the afternoon—”
Her expression was almost blank when she was thinking about the inquest. Out of self-preservation, Jack thought. Distancing herself in any way she could in order to better see and understand and analyze.
“We’ll have to be inventive,” he whispered against her ear, and she smiled and shivered a little.
Then he saw her attention shift to the empty seat beside her where an abandoned newspaper fluttered in the breeze. She leaned over to pick it up, and Jack saw the headline, each word like a slash:
FOUR CAMPBELL SONS MISSING
INQUEST INTO MOTHER’S DEATH STARTS TOMORROW
? ? ?
CAP SAID, “YOU must have that telegram by heart now. How many times have you read it?”