“What about my mother?”
“Don’t you have a brother?”
“Yes, but …”
“A boy also can be a good child to his mother. Ask your brother to be a good son while you help me.”
Gina took off her coat. “No use in fretting,” she said. “How about I help you now?”
Three
“THINGS ARE STILL QUITE SPARTAN,” Rose said to Gina as she took her around the ward, a long annex attached to the Wayside, and showed her where they kept the salves, the bandages, the sponges, the bedpans. “Please stay away if you become with child again. Just in case. Sometimes we have lepers staying with us. They are highly infectious. There is bacteria in the air from all sorts of sickness. If you’re blessed enough to fall pregnant, don’t breathe in the air of the dying. Promise me?”
“The danger of that while the strike continues,” said Gina, “is slim. But how do you not get sick?”
Smiling, Rose raised her eyes and palms to the ceiling. “The God of all comfort comforts us in our tribulation so that we may give comfort to those who are in any trouble.” Rose put her arm through Gina’s. “You are a good girl, and you’re going to be just fine.” She leaned in for a confidence. “You know, I had no nursing experience before I started caring for the incurably sick. Oh, yes. Don’t be so surprised. But like my dear father, I have always been fascinated by medicine. He wanted to be a doctor before he became a writer, did you know that? Not a lot of people do. What do you think? Did he make the right choice in his life’s path?”
“Hard to say no to that, isn’t it, Rose? His books bless the future generations.”
“I suppose they do. But look, please don’t tell anyone else that I have no nursing training. They’ll close me down for sure. Come with me—I hear Alice.”
Gina blanched.
“Not that Alice,” Rose said gently. “My Alice. She must be back from her walkabout. She goes around Concord twice a week, in the afternoons. Visits the sick in their homes.” The nun paused. “Though I must say, I’m surprised the other Alice is still so top of mind for you.”
“What can I say?” Gina nodded. “She left me with a few parting words I haven’t been able to shake from my heart. Her valedictory salvo, so to speak. When things aren’t going well, her words are all I can think about.”
“Clearly what catches seed is the grain of truth, no matter how small.”
“Not even that small.” Gina pointed to the door. “Let’s go say hello.”
In the front hall they were greeted by a plump serious woman. “Gina,” Rose said, “you remember my friend and colleague Alice Huber, don’t you?”
Nodding, Gina shook Alice’s hand.
“Alice used to be a portrait painter,” Rose told Gina with a proud smile.
“I’ll tell my own story, Rose, dearest.” Alice took Gina’s other arm. Flanked by the petite sisters, the towering Gina walked through the ward between the beds of the dying. “It’s true I used to be a portrait painter,” Alice concurred. “But my heart wasn’t in it. I was looking for something else. I said that when I found a work of perfect charity, I would join it. And so I did.”
“It’s not for everyone, Alice,” Rose said. “Don’t judge people.” She looked up at Gina. “My friend can be too critical sometimes, God love her. I tell her all the time—people are the keepers of their own souls, not you.”
“And do I listen, Rose?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Exactly. Do you know, Gina,” Alice continued, “that before we built this small annex, we housed the sick right in Rose’s Wayside?”
“And it wasn’t even my Wayside anymore.” Rose laughed. “Imagine how my dear Harriet felt about it.” The Wayside was the only home Nathaniel Hawthorne had ever owned. In 1879, many years after his death, Rose and George bought the beloved house to keep it in the family. Financial hardship forced them to sell it just four years later to George’s publisher and his wife, Harriet Stone, also known as Margaret Sidney, the writer of children’s books.
“We bathed them and changed their dressings right in the parlor room.”
Rose nodded. “In the summers we used the front porch for their beds. My father used to sit and have his morning tea on that porch.”
“And in New York we collected the sick into three cold-water flats on the Lower East Side,” said Alice. “We managed. They managed.”
“Well, yes,” Rose said. “Because our goal wasn’t convenience. It was to do something to comfort other hearts than ours. To take the lowest rank of human beings—both in poverty and in suffering—and put them in such a condition that if our Lord knocked on our door, we would not be ashamed to let Him in.”
“Let’s go then and comfort other hearts than ours,” said Gina, rolling up her sleeves. “Perhaps we can make our Lord proud.”
Eighteen months went by.
Four
IN OCTOBER 1914, GINA was in the kitchen at the Wayside making chicken soup for the annex patients and mopping the floor when there was a knock on the glass pane of the back door. She had been thinking about the lateness of the hour and her long trip home to Lawrence when the soft knock startled her out of her musings. She opened the door and in front of her stood Ben Shaw. He took off his hat, bowed to her slightly, and smiled.
“Ben?” She almost didn’t recognize him, having not seen him in nearly fifteen years. They hugged like the old friends they were, kissed each other on both cheeks like Europeans. Instinctively Gina’s hands lifted to adjust and pin up her always falling-down hair. She smiled with joy at seeing his kind, familiar face, fleetingly wishing she looked less grubby.
“Benjamin, I am stunned to see you!”
“Why?” he asked cheerfully. “Did you think I’d be dead by now?”
Ben had been in Panama, engineering and building the Panama Canal. His modulated tenor hadn’t changed, his amiable face was as handsome as ever. His dark eyes sparkled, the expression in them when he looked at her familiar and welcome and true, but in all else he was hardly the same person. He was a grown man now, not an eager, smitten boy. His dark hair was clipped short and graying above his ears. He had an impeccably groomed salt-and-pepper goatee, was thin like a steel pole, and extremely tanned. So tanned that if Gina hadn’t known better, she would’ve guessed he was of Mediterranean or South American stock. Lines had gathered under his friendly eyes and around his burned-by-the-sun mouth. He wore thin-wire glasses that made him look like a solemn scientist. Yet he was still inimitably Ben when he smiled.
He walked in, placed his sharply structured hat on the entry table, hung up his wool coat. He wore a smart gray serge suit, a white shirt, a silk tie. He looked modern. He looked successful. His black shoes had been recently shined. He looked as if he had been recently shined. A seamstress, a textile expert, a dreamer of high fashion, Gina knew about such things. He was put together well. Like Harry had been once, before he married her.
She was disappointed in herself, at how happy she was to see him again, to see a familiar face that belonged to a man who