She gestured with her chin to a large book that lay open on the desk.
He crossed the room directly, but Anna hesitated and then went to watch Mrs. Webb, who had clearly bathed more than a few babies in her time. She rinsed the newborn quickly and carefully and, as Anna watched, wound her into a towel and rubbed her dry. The child was severely underweight, so that her head seemed far too large for her spindly neck and body; more troublesome still was the umbilical cord, which was ragged and tied with a dirty string.
“A young mother did that,” said Mrs. Webb. She had followed the line of Anna’s gaze. “In a hurry to be done with the business and away. She left this little one wrapped in rags in a doorway, not more than a few hours old when a patrolman found her and brought her in to me early today. Poor thing.”
Generally people believed that an abandoned child was illegitimate and that the mother had put it away from her to hide an inexcusable moral lapse. Anna herself had never challenged this traditional wisdom until she went to medical school and was obliged to look more closely. Abandoned children were a miserable lot, born in poverty and most of them sickly, but their mothers were often married, and desperate in their own way.
Mrs. Webb was saying, “Tomorrow all of this lot will go down to the Public Charities Office and a doctor will examine her. Maybe he can do something about the cord.”
Anna said, “Does she have a name?”
Mrs. Webb began to swaddle the child with quick, efficient motions. “Sometimes the mother leaves a note with a name, but not for this little one. Tomorrow she’ll get a name and a number too, and depending on the luck of the draw they’ll baptize her Catholic or Protestant. And off she’ll go to the Infant Hospital or the Foundling or wherever else they find a cot for her.”
Anna hoped it wouldn’t be the Infant Hospital on Randall’s Island, infamous in medical circles. Overwhelmed by an endless stream of abandoned infants, never enough wet nurses, and very little skilled care meant that three-quarters of the infants admitted to the hospital would be dead within three months, and most of the rest within a year. But it was one thing to hear the figures spoken in a lecture hall or read a report, and another to know that the children in this room would likely be dead before the summer had finished.
Jack Mezzanotte looked up from the register he had opened on the desk and gestured her over. He had put a finger on a line to keep his space.
“Here’s the day the Russo children came over from Hoboken. Forty-two children were logged in over the next seven days. This is the only one that comes even partially close.”
Anna followed the closely written entry:
Male infant, ca. three months, no distinguishing marks, no outward injuries. Warmly dressed. Alert. Found sleeping on the grass under a tree in Stuyvesant Square at 5 o’clock by a clerk walking past on her way home from work. Officer A. Riordan.
“Hard to know,” Anna said. “Without more of a description.”
Mrs. Webb came over, the newly bathed baby on her arm and read over Anna’s shoulder. “Remind me, who is it you’re after finding?”
“A boy, about three months. Healthy. Very dark hair, blue eyes. Went missing on March twenty-sixth.”
The matron was shaking her head. “No child like that come through here. When I get one that big and healthy, usually a mother comes around looking for it sooner or later. Most all of mine arrive half-dead already.” Her tone was unremarkable; a sailor talking about the tides. “But they leave clean and warm with a full belly. Every one of them. After that it’s up to the good Lord.”
? ? ?
WITHOUT DISCUSSION THEY started for Washington Square, turning left onto Bleecker before either of them even thought of talking. Then Jack said something that took her by surprise.
“You know better than to be in this neighborhood at dusk.” Not a question, not a command. A simple statement.
“Of course.”
It was always odd to be reminded how close the very worst of the city was to the house where she had grown up, where she knew all the neighbors and never felt even the slightest discomfort, no matter the hour. The city was like a deck of cards well shuffled; any corner could reveal disaster or deliverance.
? ? ?
WALKING THROUGH LENGTHENING shadows in Washington Square Park was almost dreamlike. For those last ten minutes Jack thought of what he might say, and rejected everything that came to mind.
At the corner of Waverly Place and the park she stopped and turned to him.
“Sophie and I are writing to all the smaller homes and orphan asylums, but there are several I think I need to visit personally.”
“We can do that this week.”