He touched her often, in ways that a more strictly brought-up woman would not have allowed. She felt his hand on her shoulder, very briefly, or he touched her lower back when they made their way through one room to another, so lightly that she might have imagined it, if not for the satisfied look on Mrs. Lee’s face.
He was playful with the little girls and could make even Rosa laugh, while Lia giggled so hard that she would dissolve into hiccups. He told tall tales in English and Italian, he produced butterscotch drops out of a seemingly bottomless pocket, and all the time his gaze returned, again and again, to Anna.
One early evening on an omnibus traveling down Broadway he had picked up her hand and examined it as if it were some strange object found on a park bench. He undid the three mother-of-pearl buttons at her wrist, and then, too late, looked to her for permission.
“May I?”
She wanted to say that he should not, but somehow his manner was so disarming that she just nodded.
“The only time I’ve ever seen you without gloves in public was on Randall’s Island, when you treated that infant with—” He couldn’t recall the name.
“Ankyloglossia,” Anna supplied. “He died that same week.” After a moment she said, “I only take off my gloves when I’m working, or when I’m at home without chance of company.”
With a few quick tugs he slipped it off and cradled her hand like an injured bird. And it was pitiful, rough and red and swollen, the nails cut to the quick for the sake of antisepsis. There was no denying that her hands were terrible.
“I wash—I scrub my hands and forearms dozens of times every day.”
“What exactly do you use?”
“We used to scrub nails, hands, and lower arms with potash soap and then rinse with a five percent carbolic acid solution.”
“Used to?”
“It worked fairly well. You can tell by dipping your hands in nutritive gelatin just after finishing the process. If no microbes grow in that culture in three days, that’s proof that the regimen is killing all infectious agents. Unfortunately it also was horrendously hard on our hands. So now we start with scrubbing, as before, but rinse first with eighty percent alcohol for a minute and then a three percent carbolic acid solution. It works as a sterile procedure and isn’t quite so hard on the hands. Still, Mrs. Lee’s hands are not nearly as bad, and she’s been scrubbing floors for all of her life.”
She was rambling, but it was hard to watch him studying her hand while her fingers twitched, ever so slightly. “The whole thing is made more complicated by the fact that I can’t operate if there’s even the slightest break in my skin. Then I put myself at risk. Someday they will come up with a better way to protect the patient and the surgeon both from infection.” And then, more hesitantly, “Are you put off by my hands?”
She had startled him. He raised his head to frown at her. “That would be very narrow-minded of me.”
Anna tried to draw her hand away, but he held on to it, his grip gentle but unyielding. For a moment she had the sense he might kiss her palm, and the idea of his tongue against her skin made her squirm.
“Don’t,” she said quietly, and, with fingers that were almost numb, put the glove back on.
“What you need,” Jack said after a long moment, “is some kind of glove made out of thin material. Not cloth, that wouldn’t work. Something like—”
His expression went momentarily blank, and then cleared. “Something like condoms, for the fingers and hands.”
The image that came to mind was outrageously funny. And intriguing, somehow.
He said, “Condoms are made out of lamb intestines, I think. If they could be sterilized and sewn into a glove, wouldn’t that work?”
Anna couldn’t help smiling. “This must be the oddest conversation of all time.”
“But wouldn’t it work?”
She thought for a moment. “That particular material is permeable, so the surgeon would still have to scrub diligently. I don’t think soap alone would be enough.”
“But say for a minute that it’s possible to sew a sterilized glove out of lamb’s intestine or something similar. You could test it with your gelatin—what did you call it?”
“Nutritive.”
“—to see if microbes grow. And if they did, you could experiment with different kinds of materials and sterilization and how you treat your hands, first. Until you got the right combination.”
“That would likely take years,” Anna said. “And someone willing to do the labor. The curing and sewing and sterilizing.”
“But it might just work,” Jack said. “It’s worth thinking about, at the very least.”
That evening when he walked her to her door, he paused in the shadow of the garden wall to kiss her.
“Savard,” he said, against her mouth. “I spend a lot of time thinking about you. Night and day, I think about you. And it’s not your hands that first come to mind.”
He kissed her again, thoroughly, roughly, and then waited until she had opened the door.
“I’m thinking about those gloves,” he called up to her. “Even if you aren’t.”
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