“So he was in contact with Z?ngerle more than a year ago. But why a year? Why set this up and wait a year?”
Anna spread her hands out over her lap and considered. “He was aiming for your tipping point. The day you would be lonely enough for him to say yes to this—” She touched the letter.
“But Z?ngerle’s letter, how could he have timed that?”
“By holding off and then delivering it himself. It wasn’t dated, if I remember correctly.”
Sophie felt herself flushing with anger and amusement, frustration and resignation. “What a stupid chance he took. What cheek, the underhanded swindler. Could he have really been so desperate?”
“Hold on,” Anna said. “We’re just speculating. This might not be what it seems.”
Sophie let out a sputtering laugh. “Oh please. Once you pointed it out, it’s obvious that it’s one of his schemes.” She put her face in her hands. “He kept us apart for a whole year to force this marriage.” Her shoulders shook, but she wasn’t sure if she was on the brink of laughter or tears.
“He knows you too well,” Anna said. “A year ago, would you have accepted him under the same circumstances?”
Sophie tried to imagine how she would have reacted to this particular proposal. She had been so sure of herself when she refused him. “I don’t know. I doubt it.”
Anna said, “I can’t get over the fact that he drew Dr. Z?ngerle into this scheme.”
“Really?” Sophie said, taking out her handkerchief to wipe her eyes. “Now that I think about it, I’m wondering why it took so long.”
She rolled over and pressed her face into Anna’s pillow so that she could scream without rousing the house.
? ? ?
LATER, BUTTONING HER shoes, Anna watched Sophie put the last pins in her hair. There was another subject she wanted to raise. She just couldn’t imagine holding her own news back for a whole day.
When she looked up again, her cousin was studying her.
Sophie said, “What is it? Jack?”
Anna drew in a deep breath and nodded.
“Has it come that far?”
She lifted a shoulder and held out a hand, palm up. “Let’s just say that I need to speak frankly to him before things go any further.”
Sophie’s usual calm manner had returned, and Anna was glad of it. She said, “What are you going to tell him, exactly?”
“Everything,” Anna said. “I have to tell him everything.”
“Yes,” Sophie said. “Do that, and leave no room for misunderstanding.”
? ? ?
THEY WENT TO work as if it were any other day, Anna off to the New Amsterdam where she had three surgeries scheduled, students to meet with, and patients to see; Sophie took the el and then an omnibus all the way north to the Infant Hospital and made the rounds with medical students, examined incoming patients, signed three death certificates, and taught a nursing student how to care for a surgical incision that was still draining. She put everything into her work, and still when she allowed herself to look at the watch pinned to her bodice, the hands seemed not to have moved at all. At three, when she had finished with a difficult case she went to see Dr. Granqvist, who served as the hospital’s administrator.
Pius Granqvist was a fifty-year-old native of Sweden, a man who had been working with sick children for all of his career. He was nondescript, fairly short and thin with a frizzle of dark hair on the very top of his head and bushy eyebrows that he twisted at the ends into kinked horns. On first meeting him she had wondered if children found him frightening, but then she saw how his smile transformed him. His whole face changed shape, his mouth too wide, his nose too small, and his eyes disappearing into a mass of wrinkles. He looked like a sprite or an elf, but he was as gentle as any mother when he examined a frightened child.
With his staff he was neither gentle nor amusing. He ran the hospital like a dictator; where he had no authority he took it anyway, and narrowed his eyes at anyone who would gainsay him. And he did not like Sophie’s news at all.
“You can’t leave,” he said shortly. “You’re the best we have.”
“Thank you for the compliment,” Sophie said. “But I am leaving to get married.” Saying the words out loud made her swallow hard.
The director’s mouth puckered as if he had taken a mouthful of vinegar. “Anybody can get married, Dr. Savard. Few people can do what you do. Your fellow can find someone else to marry, but I can’t find another doctor like you.”
Because Sophie had anticipated this reaction, she had taken the time to write out her resignation in very formal language. Now she put the document on his desk. He jerked away and wrinkled his nose as though she had put a decomposing rat in front of him.