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 had once gazed upon her with unreturned affection. She put on a kettle to make him some tea, and then puttered around feeling flustered, not knowing what to ask him first or what to get hold of next. She was all too aware of her drab brown dress, the stains of her difficult work on it, the labor-scratched hands, the short unpolished nails.
She saw herself as if through a looking glass, a reflected plain Gina, not the blaze she had once been, but a working woman wan of face and devoid of makeup, with no embellishments in her skirt or sparkles in her auburn hair. Deeply self-conscious, she busied herself with their cups of tea. They sat down at the tiny table in the corner by the window, where she sat by herself during the brief breaks in her day.
“You’re dressed too well for someone who’s been digging in mud for a decade,” said Gina.
“Digging is a weak word for what we’ve been doing. I won’t miss that part.”
“So tell me everything—where to start—what in the world are you doing here?”
“Here in Boston or here at Rose’s?”
“Yes!”
“I could ask the same of you.”
“I help out on the weekends. They’re always short-staffed.”
“I thought you had to be a nun to work here?” he said, teasing her.
She chuckled at the memory of her silly fifteen-year-old self being mortified once by that question, but she was not discomfited anymore, not blushing. “Well and truly, the time for the nunnery has passed,” Gina said. “But don’t change the subject. What are you doing here?”
“I came to pay Rose a visit. She told me you were here, in the back. It would’ve been rude not to stop by and say hello.”
“Pay Rose a visit?” Gina was flustered. “How could you possibly know her?”
Ben smiled. “Have you forgotten? My family knows her because of you.” He reminded her that it was through her intervention that Rose had come to Boston and ministered to his aunt Josephine Shaw Lowell who had been terminally ill with cancer. “Months after you brought them together, Aunt Effie died with Rose at her side.”
So much had happened, Gina had forgotten indeed. She nearly cried at the sharp, stinging memory of that awful night, when she first discovered what a torment it was for Harry to face up to the truth of immutable things.
“Aunt Effie left a good portion of her estate to Rose’s Home, here and in New York,” Ben told her. “Twice a year, still, the Shaws and the Lowells do a blowout charity bash for Rose and Alice.” When Gina winced at the sound of the name Alice, he frowned. “I meant Alice Huber.”
“I know,” Gina said. “Who else could you possibly be fundraising for?”
“Quite right.” Ben tilted his head sympathetically. “Listen, you must feel bad about the way things turned out. Don’t. This is what was meant to be.”
“Who says I feel bad?”
Ben smiled. “Unlike your husband, I’m not the black sheep. I still keep in touch with everyone. I hear certain things.”
“Oh. Like what? What did Esther tell you?”
“Nothing. What I’m trying to say is, don’t worry about Alice. She is fine.”
Gina sniffed skeptically. “If you say so.”
