AT THE VERY beginning of her medical training Sophie had realized that the most difficult challenge she would face was not chemistry or pathology, but what Aunt Quinlan called her tenderhearted nature. Medicine demanded calm, rational, reasoned thinking and quick decisions. The ability—the willingness—to cause discomfort and even pain in pursuit of a cure. Sophie learned to think of her heart as something she had to put away, lock away while she worked.
Children died of diseases that were preventable. Women died in childbirth despite the very best medical care. They came to her with cancers of the breast and womb and mind, with hands crushed in factory accidents, with burns and broken bones, with their fears and their stories. She listened, and where she could, she helped. She sometimes—too often—failed.
As now she feared she was failing Rosa. Certainly she had had no real comfort to offer when they took the girls to Blackwell’s Island to see their father buried.
Lia took comfort in being held and rocked and read to. Rosa, calm, efficient, ferocious Rosa had retreated into her sorrow and anger and would accept nothing from anyone. The only time she seemed to relax at all was when she was in the garden with Mr. Lee, and it was only with Lia that she allowed herself to bend when her little sister remembered, suddenly, that they had found and lost their father on the same day.
Rosa wanted nothing for herself and was almost impossible to engage in any conversation, unless it had to do with her brothers.
For almost three weeks now Anna and Jack had been visiting child welfare institutions, whenever they both had a few hours to spare. Twice or three times a week he would come for supper and then afterward sit at the kitchen table with Rosa and go over where they had been and what they had discovered. It was an impressive list, and a disappointing one. They had interviewed staff and children at the Society for the Protection of Endangered Children, the Children’s Aid Society office and lodging house, the Howard Mission, the Shepherd’s Fold, the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and orphan asylums run by the Episcopal, Protestant, Baptist, and Methodist churches. Within the next few days they would start visiting Roman Catholic orphan asylums together.
They made other inquiries, too, that they did not tell Rosa about, and might not simply because they hoped it would never occur to her that her brothers could be someplace far worse than an orphan asylum.
Just now Jack and Anna were in the kitchen talking to Aunt Quinlan and Rosa. From the open door came the sound of voices rising and falling in a regular rhythm, and then Rosa’s voice rose and wobbled and broke. She so seldom cried that Sophie wondered what news Jack had brought.
? ? ?
SOPHIE GOT UP from her spot in the garden and held out her hand to Lia. “Shall we go for a walk?”
The little girl had begun to show some of the roundness that was appropriate to her age, her hair had taken on a glossiness, and her coloring was high. Where her sister was weighed down by worry, Lia was relentlessly calm, cheerful, and affectionate. Mrs. Lee reported that the only time she had seen the girl cry was when Margaret and Aunt Quinlan had been arguing about the relative importance and value of corsets, a difference of opinion that was aired daily. Lia’s unhappiness, Mrs. Lee believed, came from the inability to climb into both laps at once to offer comfort.
Now Lia skipped along at Sophie’s side, singing to herself, a melody Sophie didn’t recognize. She held one of the old dolls from the attic firmly by a leg, and seemed unaware of or unconcerned by the doll’s head dragging along behind her. When they sat down on a bench in the early evening light, Lia began to undress the doll, holding a conversation with her that sounded very much like Margaret talking to Lia herself. Suddenly she stopped and looked up at Sophie.
“What’s a corset?”
Sophie had been waiting for this question, but she had assumed it would come from Rosa, who was at the center of the disagreement between Margaret and Aunt Quinlan.
“A corset is a kind of chemise.”
Lia’s expression was puzzled. Sophie doubted that even Aunt Quinlan knew the Italian word for chemise, and so she touched the doll’s old-fashioned undergarment, knee length and low in the bosom, with sleeves that came to the elbow. “This is a chemise. You wear one, shorter than this.”