The Address(66)
Men in black-and-white-striped uniforms marched by in tight formation, each man pressed into the back of the one in front of him, while guards with rifles and sticks watched. One of the men noticed the women and whistled, and the guard lifted his stick and beat him soundly across the shoulders.
Unwilling to draw any further attention to themselves, Sara and Natalia crept away. Natalia pointed to the building next door. “The hospital.”
Indeed, women in nurse uniforms stood outside the front entrance, enjoying the warm summer sun.
“Come with me.” Natalia led Sara up to the side of the building. “Nurse Alden said the place for the women and babies is on the first floor.”
They peered in one window. The room had clean floors, whitewashed walls, and a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. Plain linens and pillows adorned the beds, the blankets tucked in neatly around the corners. A couple of women sat in chairs, holding their babies as a nurse fussed around them.
Tears came to Sara’s eyes. “It’s so civilized.”
“Wish I could get a pillow. Almost forgot what it was like to sleep with one until now.”
“This will do, won’t it?” Sara looked to Natalia for confirmation that she wasn’t imagining things.
“It will do very well. Tomorrow you go to Nurse Alden and tell her the truth. Ask her if she can arrange for you to have the baby at the Charity Hospital.”
“But we don’t know what will happen after I’ve had the baby.”
“Women without husbands are put out on the street after two weeks. You’d be on your own after that, and with a child. No one will take you in or have you, but you can leave the baby with the Foundling Asylum on Lexington and Sixty-Eighth.”
“I couldn’t do that, put my own child in an asylum.”
“You could until you found work, a place to stay at least.”
Natalia was right. Sara would be unemployable with a baby. But she didn’t want to consider that right now. “One step at a time. First, I have to get Nurse Alden on my side and get placed here when it’s time.” She gave Natalia a hug. “Thank you for taking such good care of me.”
“Of course.”
“If I do get out, I’ll come back for you, I promise.”
“I know you’ll try.” Natalia’s chin gave a wobble, the first time Sara had seen her friend break down. “Maybe I can get with child as well, and follow your lead.”
“With Superintendent Dent, you mean?”
Natalia laughed in spite of herself, and Sara put one arm about her friend as they headed back to the asylum. When the baby kicked, Sara gave it a reassuring caress.
Deep in the night, she dreamed that Nurse Garelick was punching her in the stomach. She woke up in a sweat, rolled tightly into a ball, but the pain wasn’t imaginary. Every muscle in her body contracted as a wave of agony rolled through her. She willed herself to go back to sleep; maybe she could go back into the dream and make it stop. But as her cries grew louder, the other women woke and shouted for her to be quiet. Doing so only made the pain worse. It was as though the baby was trying to claw its way out. With sweat pouring down her forehead, Sara managed to call out for Natalia in a weak voice before falling away, down a deep, dark hole, into nothingness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
New York City, September 1985
The morning after her AA meeting, Bailey woke early and lay in bed staring up at the ceiling. In the past, the first few hours of the day were devoted to recovering from the evening before, the remainder to the business of figuring out where the best party was that night. She never drank alone. Instead, drinking and doing drugs were how she connected with others. After a couple of lines of cocaine, her life turned into one of those 1940s comedies starring Katharine Hepburn, with zingers flying back and forth, the world in sharp focus.
Now the world was no longer quite as zippy, and she had yet to figure out how to fill that void. Or at the very least, how to sit with it for a while and see what transpired. Digging around the basement helped, as did her quest to discover more about Theodore Camden and Sara Smythe.
Bailey showered and was finishing up a bowl of granola when the workers showed up at the service entrance. She ran Melinda’s latest whim by Steve and asked the crew to finish stripping the ornamentation from the library. Even the foreman shook his head before yelling instructions to his men in Spanish.
She couldn’t watch. Instead, she walked out into the bright late-summer day and jumped on the subway. The public library at Forty-Second Street was daunting: a giant block of carved marble guarded by two fierce lions. But she ventured inside and went up to a librarian with frizzy hair and round glasses, hoping the woman would be sympathetic instead of judgmental about Bailey’s general lack of knowledge. Bailey’s father had been upset that she hadn’t applied to a “real” college, and made it abundantly clear that he considered her choice of career frivolous.
“Um, I’m looking for information on an architect from the last century, named Theodore Camden.”
The librarian didn’t laugh or look annoyed. “Follow me.” She stood and led Bailey to a cabinet full of small drawers and pulled one out. Together, they scribbled down the call numbers of several books of architecture, and the librarian showed Bailey where to find them. The librarian even offered to do research into the name Sara J. Smythe while Bailey read up on Camden.