“Don’t ever say that again,” said O’Toole with a growl. He nodded toward the chapel. “Trust in the Good Lord. He has a plan for you.”
Cora harrumphed. So far God had given her no reason to trust Him. But, she thought, if He saves Elena, that would be something. A sign.
The words of the benediction wafted through the open windows, and Cora realized she hadn’t listened to any of the pastor’s sermon. With little else to distract her during the weekdays, she often studied the corresponding passages in the Bible she’d received from the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society. This week, she would have to search on her own for stories that might give her suffering meaning. Then, as always, she would question whether those miracles had actually happened.
Beside her, O’Toole grunted as he clambered to his feet. Cora sensed that the other convalescents had begun to return to their wards. She stayed put, waiting for Dr. Gettler so she could ask about Elena as soon as they began their customary stroll. Her heart pounded like a caged squirrel knocking its teeth against the bars. If Elena had passed, Cora didn’t know what she would do. Five people dead—one her own sister—because of her? How could anyone take another step beneath the weight of that shame and guilt?
The door of the church banged open, and the resident staff’s children, laughing and screaming, darted outside.
O’Toole rushed forward to embrace his two boys and girl, all with ruddy complexions and hair as orange as his. Oddly, they’d never contracted any of Riverside’s germs.
“Why doesn’t he study them?” Cora had asked a few weeks ago while she and O’Toole had been watching Dr. Gettler give the children a drawing lesson.
“Because,” O’Toole had whispered, cupping his hands over his mouth and bulbous nose, “I won’t let him.”
Cora sucked in her breath.
“Darn it.” O’Toole grunted in irritation at his mistake. “The doctor’s a good man. If anyone can cure you, so you can git home to your mamaí, it’s him.”
She nodded in agreement and reminded herself of Dr. Gettler’s dedication to eradicating her germs. He genuinely cared about her. Whenever he cut her open to extract a much-needed tissue sample, he maintained a nearly one-sided dialogue as a means of leading her thoughts elsewhere. Often, he would tell her of microbiology’s daring pioneers, whom he’d studied while at Oxford, and his dream of becoming one. His favorite: Spallanzani, who’d debunked Needham’s theory that microorganisms, or “wee beasties,” could arise spontaneously from a “vegetative force.”
“Similarly,” the doctor liked to say, looking at Cora over his spectacles and surgical mask, “your immunities cannot be caused by a vegetative force. I will get to the root of dieses Geheimnis—this mystery.”
She believed that he would succeed.
Hopefully soon.
Nurse O’Toole, a Clydesdale of a woman whose coal-black mane gave away her Sicilian descent, joined the rest of her family. After a kiss on her husband’s lips, so unreserved it made Cora’s cheeks feel like they’d just been slapped, nurse O’Toole shepherded them toward the cafeteria for lunch, leaving Cora once again alone.
Her stomach rumbled from envious hunger. At mealtime, one of the line cooks always left her a tray outside the service entrance, beside the pails of garbage that would travel via ferry to the incinerator on Governor’s Island. In good weather, she would eat on the western shore, from which she could just make out the triumvirate of high-rises that housed the reporters and editors for the New York World, the New York Tribune, and the New York Times. Across the street from City Hall, “the center of the world,” those journalists ravenously consumed events as they transpired, whereas she foraged for secondhand, stale news.
The crowd exiting the chapel had thinned, yet Dr. Gettler still hadn’t emerged. The city had mandated that at least one doctor stays on duty at Riverside at all times, and this was Dr. Gettler’s weekend. He should be here, she thought anxiously.
While she felt terrible that his children lost so much time with him, she couldn’t help but look forward to their constitutionals. Away from his lab in the main hospital building, she didn’t have to face the apologetic look in his eyes before he penetrated her skin with a needle or knife. Here, beside the river, she could enjoy his stories of Ingrid’s and Ulrich’s antics, as well as his vision for Cora’s future once she could return to Manhattan.
Finally, the doctor’s brown boater appeared in the doorway behind a cluster of nurses who served as the church’s choir. With an image of Elena’s frail little body, as cold as Maeve’s, in her head, Cora stood up.
The women, who looked out of place on the island in their slim skirts, smart blouses, and deep-crowned, small-brimmed hats, veered toward the staff house to change into their Mother Hubbard gowns and rubber boots, giving Cora a clear view of the doctor, as well as the man beside him.
Her heart flitted at the sight of Linnaeus Jones, a hospital orderly and the most dashing man on North Brother Island. Aside from Dr. Gettler, he was also the cleverest. From what she’d overheard of the nurses’ gossip, only the high cost of medical school had kept him from becoming a doctor. At age ten, Linnaeus had begun working in the Marvin Safe Company’s sweatshop to help meet rent for the family’s room in a boardinghouse that Cora imagined must have been far more squalid than the Bowery, where she’d lived. It was a wonder he’d managed to obtain his position here at Riverside.
Absorbed in a conversation, the two men shrugged off their suit jackets, rolled up the sleeves of their collared shirts, and walked toward the seawall. Not until Linnaeus returned to his duties could Cora approach the doctor and ask him about the ill child.
Neither man glanced in her direction, which wasn’t surprising. Dr. Gettler had an uncanny ability to intensely concentrate on
