“Your cousin Margaret wanted to talk to you about your costume for that ball.” She said that ball as she would have said the fires of hell.
“Margaret should talk to Aunt Quinlan if she’s worried. She’s the one who made all the arrangements for my costume.”
Mrs. Lee’s small round face could produce a tremendous depth and variety of wrinkles when she was irritated, as she was now. “And what is a proper young lady, almost thirty might I add—”
“I’m not yet twenty-eight, and well you know it.”
“—an educated woman of good family, an unmarried lady, a physician and surgeon, what business do you have at a ball on Easter Monday—Easter Monday!—given by that greedy, vainglorious Vanderbilt woman? Why—”
“Mrs. Lee.” Anna interrupted in her sternest tone, tempering it with a smile. “I made Cap a promise. Would you want me to disappoint Cap?”
All the irritation crackling in the air was gone, just that simply. Mrs. Lee loved Cap; everybody did. Muttering, she marched back to the stove.
“You and your auntie with your heads together,” Anna heard her say. “Only the good Lord knows what will come of that. And on Easter Monday.”
? ? ?
ANNA SET OFF at a brisk pace along Washington Square Park and then, realizing that Sister Mary Augustin was almost running to keep up, stopped.
“Please don’t slow down or we’ll miss the ferry,” she said. “I can run all day.”
“We’ll be there with five minutes to spare, even at this pace.”
A flicker of doubt chased across the angular features. In the sunlight her complexion was like buttermilk, with a scattering of freckles and eyebrows the deep red-brown of chestnuts. Anna tried to remember if she had ever seen nuns wearing bonnets before, and then let the question go.
Sister Mary Augustin was saying, “And may I ask how you know that?”
“I grew up here, and I walk almost everywhere. And I have a clock in my head.”
“A clock,” Sister Mary Augustin echoed.
“A talent for time,” Anna said. “The ability to keep time without a timepiece. It’s a skill a surgeon must develop, you see.”
“Surgeon?” The little nun looked both confused and horrified, as if Anna had claimed to be a bishop. “But I thought—isn’t your cousin—”
“The other Dr. Savard specializes in obstetrics and pediatrics. I’m primarily a surgeon.”
“But who would—” She stopped herself and two spots of red rose in her cheeks. She was pretty, Anna noted, when she forgot to be solemn. She wondered how much information she could supply without causing Sister Mary Augustin to fall down in a faint.
She said, “Women generally prefer a woman, physician or midwife or surgeon, when they are very ill or in labor. If they have a choice.”
“Oh,” Sister Mary Augustin said. “You operate on women only. That makes more sense.”
Anna said, “I am qualified to operate on anyone, but I am on the staff at the New Amsterdam Charity Hospital. Just as the other Dr. Savard, the one you hoped to find, is on staff at the Infant and Children’s Hospital and the Colored Hospital. And yes technically, I am not allowed to operate on men. Or so says the law.”
After a moment Sister Mary Augustin said, “I suppose my training is quite narrow. I’ve never even seen a surgery.”
“Well, then,” Anna said. “You must come by and observe. And we are always in need of trained nurses, if you should ever rethink your”—she paused—“calling.”
For a moment Mary Augustin was struck speechless by such a shocking suggestion. Sister Ignatia would be outraged, as Mary Augustin herself should be outraged, but instead she was struggling with a sudden blossoming of curiosity. She had been in this terrifying, exciting city for less than a year; during all that time questions had piled on top of questions, none of which she could ask.
But here was someone who would not scowl at her if she put one of those questions into words. Someone who would likely even answer. She could ask this Dr. Savard what kind of medicine obstetrics might be, and how it was that a woman could become not just a physician but a surgeon. Hot on the heels of this came the realization that Sister Ignatia was right, it was a mistake to let curiosity run riot. It would drag a person to places best left unexplored.
And she still could not stop watching this very odd and unsettling woman doctor—surgeon, she corrected herself—from the corner of her eye.