“You don’t have a physician who visits regularly?”
Eyes the color of autumn oak leaves assessed her coolly. “Am I asking too much?”
Anna felt herself flush. “I would be happy to be of assistance.”
Another folder appeared and was pushed across the desk. “These are the records for the sisters who need to be seen. There are two novice nursing sisters waiting for you in the infirmary to assist. If there is something you need that you don’t find, send one of them to me and I will see what can be done. The convent infirmary is at the end of this hall, then to the left. It’s clearly marked.”
At the door Anna hesitated. “Is Sister Mary Augustin available this afternoon? I was hoping to speak to her.”
There was a long pause, as well as a new set of furrows between the sparse white eyebrows.
“Or do I ask too much?” Anna finished.
She had earned herself an amused smile. “I will send her to you before you leave.”
? ? ?
THE INFIRMARY WAS a large rectangular space, as clean as any treatment room at the New Amsterdam. Along one wall were supply cabinets, a table for the preparation of medicines, a tall glass-fronted case of instruments, sterilization equipment, and a deep sink. A pair of examination tables took up the middle of the room, each surrounded by a privacy curtain that could be pulled closed. She had a moment to wonder whether the children’s infirmary was as well equipped, and then she chided herself for assuming the worst.
Her first patient was a nun about thirty years old with a sprained wrist. After that she treated an eye infection, lanced a boil, wrote out a receipt for a liniment that would loosen stiff joints, and finally diagnosed what was almost certainly the start of tubercular kidney and would need to be closely monitored. She wrote her observations and advice on a sheet of paper left in each nun’s folder and hoped they would be read.
The sisters were all quiet and cooperative and utterly stoic; they asked no questions but answered the ones she put to them without hesitation. It was all very routine until a fifty-two-year-old Sister Francis Xavier introduced herself as the orphanage and convent procuratrix. At Anna’s blank expression she explained.
“Food,” she said. “Drink. I’m the one who makes sure there’s enough to feed all these little faces, like birdies in the nest they are, always peeping and opening their mouths wide enough to see right down their pink gullets. And the sisters, too.” She patted an ample belly. “I like my work.”
Sister Xavier had a mass in her breast the size of an apple. As Anna palpated it the sister asked, “Do you think I’d get a blue ribbon at the state fair? Hurts like the devil. Waxes and wanes like the moon.”
“How long has this been with you?”
The smooth brow creased as she thought. “Twenty years, maybe. Seems to me if it was the cancer it would have killed me long ago, but now it’s got so big it throbs like a rotten tooth. Can it be got rid of?”
“It can,” Anna said. “Or at least, I can do a needle aspiration today and then remove it for you surgically sometime soon. With any luck it won’t come back again after that. You’ll have to come to the hospital for the procedure.”
“Hospital!” Xavier huffed a laugh. “Not me. You can draw it out with a needle, didn’t you say? That will do.”
“I can drain it for you here, but that will only give you relief for a short time. Surgery is called for. I’ll talk to your mother superior about it. Unless you’d rather someone else operated.”
Sister Xavier scowled at the ceiling in a way that made Anna feel sympathy for the sisters who worked under her in the kitchens. She puffed out an irritated explosion of breath.
“If it must be done, better you than one of the doctors at St. Vincent’s. I don’t care to let a man take a knife to me.”
“Good,” Anna said. “For the moment, let’s see what we can do to give you some relief. It will take me a few minutes to get a sense of the mass, and then I have to sterilize my instruments and the operating field. The aspiration itself will take less than a minute.”
“Endless bother,” Xavier said. “Get on with it.”
But while Anna worked, Sister Francis Xavier couldn’t keep quiet. She talked and asked questions but never lost sight of what Anna was doing, stopping her now and then: what was in that bottle and could she smell it and if the hypodermic needle had been used on someone else before and how it was cleaned.
Where the others had been adamantly silent, she was determined to fill the room with words. It was an opportunity Anna could not ignore, this nun who was so willing to talk.
“I wanted to ask about some Italian children who came in from Hoboken this past Monday, orphaned in a smallpox epidemic. Two boys, two girls, Russo is the family name. Would you know anything about them?”