THE ESTABLISHMENT kept by Señora Guiomir (“Gussie”) Lasquez at 5 Stanhope Lane was too shady to be a lodginghouse and too grim to be a brothel. The sinister façade was pockmarked by grimy windows in which roller curtains of green scrim were drawn day and night. Rusty cast-iron balustrades flanked its brownstone stoop, and above the dangling bell pull hung the sign No VACANCIES. The sign told a literal untruth, because many rooms in the house of Señora Lasquez were unoccupied. But because the place was an abortion mill, Gussie could not risk opening her door to room hunters who might turn out to be police. Bolted and chain-latched from the inside, the front door was opened only to admit a certain type of caller—desperate young women with fifty dollars who could utter the password, “Dr. Ramón sent me.”
Fifty dollars would move Señora Lasquez to exercise her skill with rare herbs and ingenious packs—or, if all else failed—blunt instruments not unlike knitting needles. The herb-and-pack method took a little time—three or four days, perhaps—and during this curative interval Gussie lodged and fed her customers according to their ability to pay. The fee for her front parlor was a straight two dollars a night, but third-floor rooms could be rented for as little as $2.50 a week. Meals extra. No plumbing or heat went with these quarters, but inmates of the Casa Lasquez, gazing through the unwashed windows on the top floor, could get an excellent view of Boston’s South End, with the spires of the Cathedral in the near-to-middle distance.
On a sheetless mattress in one of these upper rooms lay Mona Fer-moyle, approximately eight and a half months along in pregnancy. She had come to 5 Stanhope Lane three weeks ago, much too late for the exercise of Señora Lasquez’s principal art. But because she showed splendid credentials, and because she had twenty dollars in her pocket-book, Gussie had consented to don the Samaritan mantle of midwife and give the pale, terrified girl refuge. She took Mona’s twenty dollars, assigned her to the third-floor back, and fed her patient whenever she remembered to do so.
Mona lay on the sagging cot and traced with her eyes the gaping crack in the plastered ceiling. She did not know enough about the rivers of the world to realize that the crack bore a striking resemblance to the Amazon. She knew only that her baby might come any time now. It thumped inside her like a rabbit trying to escape from a snare drum. Each percussion shook Mona with guilt and terror. Guilt, because her body gave swollen proof of what she had done; terror, because she was ill, penniless, and alone.
Of a certainty, ill. Not quite penniless though, because she still had a dime in her pocketbook—the remnant of two dollars a pawnbroker had given her for her coat. And not wholly alone either, because by twisting her head more, she could see the paired spires of the Cathedral. For three weeks now, ever since her creeping, compulsive return to Boston, she had drawn from those upraised arms some childhood recollections of protective comfort. In the fading light of a January afternoon, Mona levered herself onto an elbow and gazed at the symbols of goodness and security she had willfully left behind. A wild longing claimed her childish soul. If only she could snuggle back into the safety of those arms. Regret squeezed full tear glands. Like an exile dreaming of home, or a small girl waking fearfully in the night, Mona wept.
The tears, as tears will, purged away her accumulated anxieties. For the first time in many months, hope made a pattern, a plan, in a pattern-less world of guilt and misery. Mona rose from the cot and looked into her purse to be sure the dime was there. Feverishly she brushed her hair, dirty gold at the ends, ebony-black at the roots, where no bleach had been applied for weeks. Then, bareheaded and coatless, she felt her way down the dark, uncarpeted stairs, noiselessly unhooked the chain latch on the front door, and slipped out of Señora Lasquez’s house into a world of falling snow.
At first the cold braced her, but by the time she reached the Spanish Pharmacy at the corner of Washington Street, she was chilled and spiritless. The drugstore had a soda fountain; to revive her strength, Mona ordered a cup of hot chocolate, the first nourishment she had taken in twenty-four hours. She slid her dime onto the marble slab; a splotch-aproned proprietor shoved a nickel back. The coin of her salvation! Mona sipped the sweetish liquid slowly, trying to summon up courage to enter the phone booth at the end of the dark shop.
As she passed the rubber-goods showcase, a thin icicle of fear pierced the inner membranes of her heart. Who would answer the phone? What would they say when they heard her voice? At the cosmetics counter she wavered. The salesman eye of Mr. Hernandez passed over her coatless figure, lighted hopefully on her two-toned hair. He wiped his hands on his splotchy apron. Perhaps he could sell her a bottle of peroxide. No sale, he concluded, as he watched her move heavily toward the pay station. When a woman lets her hair go like that, she no longer cares.
Coin clutched in her thin hand, Mona entered the telephone booth and closed the door behind her. The dimensions of the box, its darkness and stuffy air, reminded her of—of what? The confessional! Soon a little panel would slide back; she would hesitate for a moment, take a deep breath, and say: “This is Mona, Father. I want to come home” … Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.
Oh, impossible declaration! Guilt too great for absolving! Yet of necessity the confession must be made. With trembling fingers Mona dropped the nickel into the coin box and gave the operator the number of the telephone 47 Woodlawn Avenue. She heard the muffled brr-r, brr-r of the little bell under the mission-oak table in the Fermoyle front hall. Long ago, Florrie had stuffed the bell with a piece of cotton because it jangled too loudly. Brr-r, brr-r. Now the sound was echoing through the chenille portieres into the living room where Bernie would be playing the piano while Din raised his voice in accompaniment of song. At the kitchen stove Celia would hear the brr-ring and hope that someone less busy than herself would answer the phone. Upstairs in her quiet sanctuary, Ellen would hear the bell, too. …
Clickingly the receiver came off its hook. Then Mona heard the gruffest, sternest voice in the world—the male voice that had filled her childhood with the thunder of its authority. The voice of Dennis Fermoyle said, “Hello.”
Mute fear paralyzed Mona’s tongue. It would not make the words that must be made: This is Mona, Father. I want to come home.
“Hello, hello,” Din was saying, “who is it?”
Shaken by old fear and sin too shameful for utterance, Mona hung up the receiver. She waited till her knees were strong enough to bear her, then wavered from the booth, and clung for a moment to the cosmetic showcase. Unsteadily she walked out of the drugstore and stood on the freezing pavement of Washington Street.
Swollen with the wickedness thumping inside her, where could she go? To whom could she turn? This troubled, foolish girl had never heard the trusting cry of the Psalmist: “If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.” She had never read a book in her life, and she could not know the promise of the poet’s line, “Fear wist not to evade, as love wist to pursue.” But better than familiarity with poet or Psalmist was Mona’s recollection of the comforting Presence streaming from the altar. Remembrance of that Presence drew her towards the steps of the Cathedral. Into its tenebrous silence she entered now, knelt in a pew at the back of the church, and gazed down the long vista of the center aisle where the sanctuary lamp glowed in crimson comfort above the altar. She felt neither ecstatic nor pious. An emotion older than these cradled her. She felt safe.
A pyramid of candles with flames like fiery apostrophes burned before the shrine of St. Anthony. Mona could not remember when she had last lighted a candle, but she could never forget the first one. It had been lighted to this very saint—the patron of lost things. Her mother had sent her downtown to buy a flatiron holder, and on the way home Mona had stopped to play jump rope with some little girls on Maude Street. When it came time to go home, Mona could not find the flatiron holder. “Why not light a candle to St. Anthony?” suggested Kathleen O’Donnell. “I haven’t got a nickel,” sobbed Mona. “Oh, he’ll trust you,” soothed Kathleen. “I owe him a dime already for two things I’ve found.” At the head of a party of supplicants Mona had walked into the church, lit the candle to St. Anthony, said three Hail Marys—then suddenly remembered that she had left the holder on the counter at the hardware store.
O marvelous St. Anthony, patron of lost things! Would another candle, lighted on credit, solve the woman’s problem as easily as it had solved the child’s?
He’ll trust me, thought Mona as she approached the rail of the shrine. With a taper she lighted the highest candle in the pyramid, then, kneeling before the dusky statue of the saint, watched her candle flicker timidly on its prong. The flame caught hold, and when she saw it burning as fierily as the others, Mona said three Hail Marys. For the first time in all her vacant years, the prayer was not a jumble of nothingness. Her specially tuned ear caught the central phrase of the Angelic Salutation, “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” The words supported her like a prop under a laden bough, and the splendor of bringing forth new life warmed her with a proud fire.
Twilight was a purple veil dotted with snow when Mona left the Cathedral. She stretched out her hands, palms upward to catch some falling flakes, then, happier than she had been for a long time, trudged past the pharmacy of Senor Hernandez, turned left, and disappeared into the shadows of the South End.
Her pains were beginning as she reached the cast-iron stoop at 5 Stanhope Lane.
IN THE MAGISTRATE’S COURT at Roxbury Crossing, the usual number of Monday-morning drunks, streetwalkers, and sneak thieves were on the receiving end of justice as dealt out by Judge Peter J. Stranahan. His Honor had a bad head cold, and he sniffed angrily at a menthol inhaler that was doing him no good at all. Calendar and courtroom were overcrowded; nothing marched right, and as the day grew longer Judge Stranahan’s patience grew shorter. At 3:22 P.M. he listened irritably to the evidence given by Patrolman No. 677. “The defendant was found lying in a hallway at 10 West Springfield Street in a state of alcoholic intoxication induced by a bottle of Jamaica ginger discovered on his person.”
“Guilty or not guilty?” asked His Honor, and, on hearing the answer, pronounced irreversible judgment, to wit: “Ten days on Deer Island. … Next case.”
“The next case,” explained Assistant District Attorney Schultz, his eye on the court clock, “involves the theft of a bicycle from the premises of Ignatz Lazlo, repairman, 1144 Washington Street. The defendant, James T. Splaine, a minor with a record of delinquency, admits taking the bicycle without permission of the owner and selling it for four dollars.”
“Is Splaine represented by counsel?” asked the judge.
“Yes, Your Honor. The Catholic Charities Bureau has engaged …”
“Skip the details,” snapped Stranahan. “Put the defendant on the stand.”
The defendant turned out to be a gangling, scab-complexioned youth in need of a necktie, a haircut, and a month of good meals. Examined by District Attorney Schultz, he sullenly admitted the charge as drawn, then gazed piteously at a sunken-eyed woman on a front bench as if to say, “Honest, I didn’t mean to cause you no more trouble, Ma.”
Counsel for the defense, a fledgling barrister named George Fermoyle, began a gentle cross-examination. “Where do you live, Jimmy?”
“Twenty-two High Street, Maiden.”
“Who lives there with you?”
“My mother.” Jimmy motioned with a dirty knuckle at the haggard woman with the sunken blue eyes.
“Where’s your father?”
“Dead. Got killed in a barroom fight three years ago.”
Magistrate Stranahan sniffed at his inhaler. “Counsel will please not range all around O’Houlihan’s barn, or we’ll never get out of this court tonight. What do you intend to show by this line of questioning?”
“I intend to show the family background of this boy, Your Honor. He is the product of a home invaded by death and economic want. His mother works all day as a domestic servant. I hope to demonstrate that the defendant is a virtual orphan who needs social care and psychiatric guidance.”
Stranahan could scarcely credit his ears. “What kind of guidance, did you say?”
The Fermoyle temper exploded in Stranahan’s face. “I said ‘psychiatric guidance,’ Your Honor. If this boy were physically ill he would get free medical care. Yet now, during critical formative years …”
“Critical formative rats,” scoffed Stranahan. “He stole the bicycle, didn’t he? Sold it, didn’t he? Spent the money too, heh?”
“We admit all that, Your Honor. But …”
“But now you ask this court to coddle him.” Justice Stranahan dropped his inhaler, snatched up his gavel, and banged twice. “What this young thief needs is not coddling, but discipline. If you’ve finished your argument, Counselor, the Court will pronounce judgment. Six months in the Concord Reformatory. Court adjourned till tomorrow.”
Tears coursed down Julia Splaine’s cheek.
“Better luck next time, Counselor,” said the assistant D. A. “Even Rufus Choate didn’t win his first case. But seriously, Fermoyle, don’t try to pull that psychiatric line on P. J. Stranahan.”
“It’s not a line, it’s the dreary truth,” said George. He stuffed his papers into his brief case and turned to the melancholy business of consoling Julia Splaine. “It’s lucky that Stranahan didn’t send Jimmy to State’s Prison,” he told her. “They’ll teach him a trade at Concord. He’ll be a credit to you yet, Mrs. Splaine.”
“It’s the kind heart of the Fermoyles that makes you say that, George, but my boy’s a stray, and I know it now.” She shook her gray hairs in bewilderment. “The question I’m asking myself is why should my Jimmy be so bad, and my Jemmy so good?”
Having no offhand answer to this classic problem, George patted Julia Splaine’s bony shoulder and walked out into the gloom of a snowy twilight. Roxbury Crossing was an X-shaped traffic tangle; trolleys, trucks, and pedestrians crawled in slow motion across slushy cobblestones. While George waited for the Park Street trolley that would take him back to his office, he bought the Globe and scanned its headlines. “Pope Benedict Sinking”; “New England Battens Down for Hurricane”; “Italian Superliner Enters Boston Harbor on Maiden Voyage.” With the ominous expectancy that always accompanies a falling barometer, George Fermoyle found a seat in the warm streetcar, and settled himself for the ride to his office.
“So that was due process of law,” he murmured, gazing out the car window at the mean shops along Washington Street. Anger at Strana-han’s stupidity flared once more, then lost its heat in a cooler tide of reflection. Julia Splaine’s question, “Why should my Jimmy be so bad, and my Jemmy so good?” provided more meditative fare. Sons of the same parents; products of the same environment—and here was Jemmy heading for the priesthood and Jimmy heading for the penitentiary. If you threw Jeremy Splaine overboard in mid-ocean, he’d strike out for heaven’s beach—and make it, too. Whereas if you tossed Jimmy into a horsepond he’d sink without a struggle into the muck at the bottom.
Strange.
Along Washington Street, bums with a dime were already gathering in gaslit speakeasies, and bums without a dime were standing in hallways or shuffling along on snowy sidewalks. This was the South End, the terrain of down-and-outers, the irrevocably lost. At the stop nearest the Cathedral, the trolley halted to take on a passenger. Ding-ding. As the conductor gave his go-ahead signal to the motorman, George Fermoyle saw his sister Mona standing on the steps of the Cathedral. By the sputtering blue glitter of a street lamp, he could see that she was coatless, hatless, pregnant. And she was holding out her hands to catch a flake of falling snow.
George plunged through the crowded aisle, shouting, “Stop the car!” By the time the conductor pulled his bell rope, the trolley had traveled fifty yards. George raced back to the Cathedral where he had seen his sister standing in the snow. She was gone.
“Mona, Mona,” he shouted. “Where are you?” He dashed into the church, ran irreverently up and down the aisles, then found himself again on the steps of the Cathedral. At the corner he saw a shop bearing the sign, “Farmacia Espanola.” He burst through the door and interrupted the proprietor in the act of compounding a prescription.
“Have you seen a girl—a woman with black hair—no coat or hat—around here?”
Mr. Hernandez remembered the girl. “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago, she had a hot chocolate here. But her hair was not black.”
George accepted the correction. “Blond, then?”
“Say half and half. At the tips blond, at the roots black.”
“Do you know which way she went? Where she lives?”
The pharmacist’s shrug said, “One knows nothing about such matters in South End. Excuse me, Señor—my customers.”
Mona’s nearness had the almost palpable quality of a person seen in a dream. By closing his eyes George could feel her presence; opening them was to grasp at shadows. And he fumbled among these shadows until he struck the solid idea:
Call Stuffy.
From Hernandez’ pay station he phoned the Cardinal’s residence, asked for Father Fermoyle. A clerically modulated voice said: “Father Fermoyle has just left his office. You’ll be able to reach him at the Cathedral rectory before dinner.”
George caught Stephen entering the rectory, looking very handsome in a white muffler, black overcoat, and suède gloves. “Salve, advocate!” cried Steve. “But prithee why so pale, young sinner?”
George laid an arresting hand on his brother’s arm. “Stuff, I’ve just seen Mona.”
Stephen’s forward motion ceased. “Where?”
“On the steps of the Cathedral, standing in the snow. I caught a glimpse of her from the trolley car. She had no coat on, and she’s pregnant.”
Stephen pulled his brother into the reception room. “Begin at the beginning—tell me everything.” George told the whole story, ending with Hernandez’ comment on Mona’s partly bleached hair.
“That clinches it, George. It’s Mona, all right. We’ll find her if we have to knock on every door in the South End.”
STEPHEN’S FIRST MOVE was to request the Cardinal for a leave of absence, and he decided to make the request in person. He found Glennon finishing a solitary dinner of pressed duck and a bottle of his favorite Chateau Cos d’Estournel. The Cardinal was in one of his lonely moods. “Join me in a thimbleful of this,” he said, pointing to the vintage bottle. “It’s the last of its kind. There’ll never be another red Graves year like ’81.”
“I’m afraid it would be wasted on me, Your Eminence.”
“A sip of port then. Try a glass of that Alto Douro on the sideboard. Product of Portugal. Tawny, very dry. … What’s the trouble, my boy?”
Stephen had not intended to drag His Eminence into the domestic affairs of the Fermoyles. He had hoped that the simple explanation “family crisis” would be enough. But Glennon’s lonely mood drew him in, and while the Cardinal finished off his wine, Stephen recounted Mona’s unfortunate history.
“How do you propose to locate her?” asked Glennon.
“My two brothers and I will make a house-to-house canvass of the South End. She’s hiding there, frightened and ashamed. We’ll knock on every door between Tremont Street and the New Haven tracks till we find her.”
The Cardinal shook his head with “that-won’t-do” emphasis. “I’m afraid you don’t know the South End, Stephen. It’s a Sargasso Sea—stagnant, chartless. In half an hour you’d get lost among its alleys and dead-end courts.” Large sympathy was in Glennon’s hazel eyes. “Why not call in the police?”
“I wanted to keep the matter as quiet as possible. Can’t you imagine the headlines: ‘Sister of Cardinal’s Secretary Sought by Police’?”
“Discretion is an excellent medicine, Stephen. But don’t take an overdose of it. I suggest that we get in touch with my friend Inspector Shea. Phone him at police headquarters and say that the Cardinal would like to see him at once.”
The Flemish clock in the front hall was bonging eight when Hugh Shea, hard hat across his knees, sat down on a gilt chair in the Cardinal’s music room. He heard Father Fermoyle’s story, then massaged the nap of his derby before venturing comment.
“Searching for your sister in the South End,” he began, “will be like trying to find the proverbial needle’s eye. A mixed metaphor, you’ll say, but it’s exactly what I mean. There are forty thousand people down there—floaters and drifters most of them—as nameless, faceless a population as ever slipped through the fingers of the law.” Shea rubbed up his hat as though currying a fine horse. “The region is a jungle of abortion mills, out-of-bound apothecaries, and fake doctors, all operating together. The drugstores sell morphine, cocaine, ergot, and cantharides—the latter, begging Your Lordship’s pardon, better known to the trade as ‘Spanish fly.’”
“A pharmaceutic dangerous to health as well as morals,” observed Glennon.
Hugh Shea affirmed the Cardinal’s opinion with a vigorous rub at his derby. “But the drug traffic is merely a twig on the tree, Your Eminence. The phony doctors are the root we’re striking at. With neither diploma nor license they practice their murderous trade on ignorant girls drawn from the brothels and cheap dance halls in the neighborhood.”
Stephen shuddered at the Inspector’s unconscious description of Mona. Shea went on. “The Mayor has given orders to crack down on the whole business, and I’ve detailed six of my best men to the task of collecting evidence. Much of it will be petty stuff, but if we could lay our hands on the rascal who calls himself Dr. Panfilo Echavarria”—the professional man hunter’s glint lighted Shea’s eye—”I’d feel that the campaign was a success. He’s the prince of tomcats … the master abortionist of them all. Police from Richmond to Montreal are looking for the knave, but he travels fast and has a bagful of aliases.” Shea exhaled fervently. “I’d give a year off my pension to nab the fellow.”
The Inspector rose from the edge of his gilt chair and turned to Stephen. “Rest easy, Father. I’ll instruct my men to keep an eye peeled for your sister. We’ll search till we find her.”
“Thank you, Inspector,” said Stephen. “You won’t object if my brothers and I make our own search at the same time?”
Hugh Shea permitted himself a policeman’s paraphrase of St. Paul: “ The harvest is large, but the workers are few.’ If you had a hundred brothers, Father Fermoyle, they wouldn’t be too many. … Keep in touch with me for the next few days.”
With lay piety Shea began a genuflection—an obeisance that Glennon staved off with a man-to-man handshake. “Thanks, Hugh,” he said gratefully. “Do what you can in this matter. It is close to my heart.”
With the Cardinal’s blessing on his back, Stephen went straight to the Cathedral rectory, where George and Bernie awaited him. In the bare reception room they mapped out their campaign. Dividing the South End into three roughly equal parts, they each took a section and pledged themselves to make searching inquiries at every house in their district. The rectory was to be field headquarters, and the brothers agreed to meet there every four hours for interim reports and conferences.
“Don’t you think we should cross Hernandez’ palm with silver?” suggested George. “Mona might show up there again. If she does, our Spanish friend might get her address or even detain her.”
“We’ve got to stop thinking of Hernandez as a friend,” said Stephen. “From what Inspector Shea tells me, none of these Spanish pharmacies are above suspicion. Still, you’ve got a point there, George. A five-dollar bill might keep him on our side.”
It was ten o’clock on the evening of January 18 when the three brothers plunged into the tideless swamp of Boston’s South End. Stephen took the area between Canton and West Concord Streets—a sieve through which a mixed population of Spaniards, Puerto Ricans, and Negroes drained into an anonymous sewer of poverty. He knocked on the doors of fifty-cent lodginghouses and basement speakeasies, always asking the same question: “Have you seen a young woman, twenty-two years old, about to have a baby, around here?”
Five hundred assorted negatives answered his query. Along wretched streets, up and down unlighted stairways, he tramped for two days and nights. Of drunks, derelicts, panderers, prostitutes, stew bums, and panhandlers he saw thousands. But never a trace of Mona.
George and Bernie were equally luckless; faithful as retrievers, they combed their districts and turned up not a single clue. Nor did Shea’s men do any better. They dragged in a dozen girls, some far gone in pregnancy, but none of them was Mona Fermoyle.
“We need a break,” said the Inspector to Stephen. “And I define a break as something that comes after you’ve sawed through ninety-nine strands in the hundred-wired cable of difficulty. Let’s keep on sawing.” Shea assigned another half-dozen detectives and twenty extra patrolmen to the district, while he himself concentrated on the illegal traffic in abortion-inducing drugs. Three pharmacists were arrested in the act of selling ergot without a prescription, and seven phony doctors were rounded up. All of which enhanced Inspector Shea’s reputation and provided several heartening columns in the Boston papers—without turning up a single trace of Mona Fermoyle.
STEPHEN’S LEAVE OF ABSENCE had been twice extended. On the fourth night of the search he decided that in fairness to the Cardinal he could not remain away from his secretarial post much longer. He was a haggard, discouraged priest as he finished a midnight cup of coffee with George and Bernie. Red-eyed with fatigue, George was scanning the Globe.
“Your friend Orselli sails tomorrow at eleven A.M.,” he reported.
Orselli! Was the Italian Captain still in the world? “I forgot all about him,” said Steve listlessly. “I didn’t even phone him. His Florentine pride will be hurt, I’m afraid.”
“His Florentine intelligence will understand when you tell him what you’ve been doing,” said George. “Well, men, I’m going to get my daily dose of ‘No news, Senor’ at Hernandez’ drugstore. Anybody coming?”
They walked along Washington Street to the Spanish Pharmacy. “I need a pack of cigarettes,” said Bernie. “I’ll go in with you.”
Weary to exhaustion, Stephen leaned against the corner lamppost. Bones, muscles, and brain cried out for rest. He was in the act of making a solemn vow to the Blessed Virgin that he would abstain from meat for a year if he could find Mona, when Bernie joggled his elbow.
“Hey, Steve … Take a peek through the window. A friend of ours is inside.”
Peering through the dirty pane of Hernandez’ drugstore, Stephen saw Ramón Gongaro. High-heeled, wax-mustached, very spruce in his chesterfield and velvet fedora, the dancer was engaged in confidential business with the proprietor. A doctor’s instrument bag lay on the showcase beside him. Stephen watched Gongaro stuff some phials into the bag, pass Hernandez some money. Then with a caballero farewell, Gongaro started for the door of the pharmacy.
Literally he walked into the arms of the three brothers waiting at the door.
Stephen laid a hand on the shoulder of the dancing man’s chesterfield. “We want to talk to you, Gongaro. You’d better come quietly.”
Gongaro put up a show of indignation. “Let me go … I’ll tell the police.”
“You’ll tell us first,” said Stephen.
They led the terrified dancer down a side street and turned into an alley near the railroad tracks. George and Bernie pinned his wrists and shoulders to the brick wall of a warehouse. Stephen did the talking.
“Where’s Mona?” he began.
The Spaniard’s teeth chattered like dice in a cup. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since two months.”
“Where did you see her last?”
“In Troy. We—separated there.”
“You mean you abandoned her because she was going to have a baby.”
Hidalgo honor stiffened Gongaro. “I asked her to have an abortion.” His professional vanity betrayed him. “I offered to do it myself.”
George Fermoyle’s arm went back at full cock. “You bastard!” His fist exploded against the Spaniard’s jaw. The blow bounced Gongaro’s head off the wall, and he slumped to the ground.
“A pretty business,” said Stephen. “Our chief witness is now out cold.”
At the entrance to the alley, silhouetted against the arc light, appeared the bulky form of a patrolman, night stick raised.
“What’s going on here?”
Stephen stepped forward, all his teeth in a smile, his Roman collar gleaming. “Our friend is a bit under the weather, Officer. You know how it is—spirit willing, flesh weak.”
At the sight of Stephen’s Roman collar, the cop grinned. “Some can take it, Father; some can’t. Could I be getting your friend a cab?”
“That would be kind of you, Officer.”
The patrolman was turning away when he remembered something. “I suppose you’ve heard the news?”
“What news?”
“The Pope is dead. Passed away an hour ago. May his soul rest in heaven tonight.”
Above the patrolman’s pieties, Stephen could hear Glennon roaring: “Where’s Father Fermoyle? The Pope dies, Peter’s throne stands empty, cardinals from all over the world start their journeys to Rome. Bags must be packed, steamship tickets bought—and my secretary is lally-gagging around the South End. Fetch him, I say. Bring him here within the hour.”
Angels and ministers of grace defend me! thought Stephen. But I must find Mona first. …
He ran back to his brothers standing helplessly over the unconscious dancer. “Search him,” said Stephen. “He may have papers that will tell us something.”
George thrust his hand into the inner pocket of Gongaro’s coat and drew out a wallet and a small red address book. In the wallet were some obscene photographs, several hundred dollars, and a collection of business cards. Among the latter Stephen found a dozen bearing the legend:
DR. PANFILO ECHAVARRÍA
SPECIALIST
(By Appointment Only)
Ramón Gongaro and Panfilo Echavarria were the same man! “Poor Mona.”
George was examining the red notebook containing names and addresses from all parts of the country. “It would take six months to check these,” he said gloomily.
“Look through his bag. There may be something there.”
The professional bag was stuffed with gaudy shirts and neckties, some unmarked phials of medicine, and a mixed clutter of surgical instruments. Shea would be glad to have them as evidence, but they were valueless to the brothers Fermoyle.
“Here’s a letter,” cried Bernie. “I found it in his overcoat pocket, all crumpled up as though he meant to throw it away. It’s written in some foreign language.”
Under the arc light Stephen read the illiterate scrawl: “No puedo darle comida a la paloma si no manda veinte pesos” The letter was signed “G. Lasquez.”
“What does it say, Steve?”
Stephen translated: “I cannot feed the pigeon any more corn unless you send me twenty dollars.”
“A pigeon-fancier,” said George disgustedly.
“Pigeon!” Excitement mounted in Steve’s voice. “That was Gongaro’s pet name for Mona. I heard him call her ‘pigeon’ in the dance hall. Was this letter in an envelope, Bernie?”
“Yes.” Bernie handed his brother an envelope addressed to Dr. Panfilo Echavarria, General Delivery, Boston. Hopefully Stephen looked for a return address on the back flap. Not a line. The writer of the letter had been too shrewd for such an obvious giveaway.
“Another dead end,” said Stephen. “Extract of nothingness, triply compounded.”
“Wait a minute, Stuff.” George was piecing together the tags of evidence in his hand. “That pigeon letter was signed ‘G. Lasquez.’ Now if we could only find a ‘G. Lasquez’ in the red address book …” His finger ran down the L’s. “‘Labbiano, Albany, New York … Langenstein, Richmond, Virginia …’ holy mackerel, here’s a Lasquez, first name ‘Guiomir.’”
“Any address?”
George snapped the book shut. “5 Stanhope Lane … Boston! It’s a chance, Stuffy.”
A taxi horn tooted at the mouth of the alley. “You the guys that want a cab for the drunk?”
“Coming,” cried Stephen. The three brothers lifted Gongaro from the ground, and bundled him into the taxi. “Five Stanhope Lane,” Stephen directed the driver.
The jolting of the taxi stirred Gongaro into consciousness.
“Where are you taking me?” he jittered.
“To the Casa Lasquez,” said Stephen.
“And if that’s not the place”—George belted Gongaro in the short ribs—”we’ll start all over again.”
At the last house in a forbidding court the taxi halted. “This is the dump,” said the driver, “and I mean dump. How long’s this gonna take?”
“Wait for us,” said Stephen.
George and Bernie dragged Gongaro from the cab. Holding him hostagewise in front of them, they mounted the cast-iron stoop while Stephen jerked at the bell pull and pounded on the door.
“Quien estd?” demanded a woman’s voice.
George’s knee went into Gongaro’s rump. “Speak up,” he whispered.
“It’s me, Dr. Panfilo,” said Gongaro in Spanish.
“Ah, Doctor.” Señora Lasquez fumbled at the latch chain. “Am I not glad you have come.” She opened the door a crack’s width. “Something is very wrong with the pigeon …”
Her words were drowned under an avalanche of strange men crashing through her door. Señora Lasquez saw two of the strangers hurl Dr. Panfilo to the floor and sit on him, while the third stranger, wearing the collar of a Catholic priest, grasped the yoke of her frowsy flannel nightgown and asked in a terrible voice, “Where is the pigeon?”
“Third-floor back,” choked Gussie.
Up the uncarpeted stairs Stephen leapt four at a time, “Monny, Monny!” he shouted. “Where are you, darling?”
At the third landing he listened in a darkness seemingly composed of carbolic disinfectant hiding the odor of death. At the end of the hallway he heard a woman groaning. Stephen pushed open a door, and there on a filthy cot, half naked in a cold, stench-filled room, he saw Mona. She was panting like a wounded animal exhausted by a long chase, and her head moved from side to side in a delirium of pain. He was at her side, his arms around her. “Monny darling, it’s me, Stephen. Everything’s all right now.”
The grinding of her teeth told him more than her agonized plea: “Stevie, it’s awful. Take me out of here.”
He lifted Mona in his arms, caught up a torn blanket, and wrapped it around her. “Hold on tight, Monny. We’re getting out fast.” Through the reeking dark he felt his way down the stairs to the front hall.
George and Bernie were over them like a wave, hugging Mona, thumping Steve, gloating and sobbing with joy at having found their sister. Weakly she smiled at her brothers as they kissed her lips caked with dry saliva.
“I knew you’d find me,” she said, then buried her face in Stephen’s shoulder when she saw Gongaro and Gussie.
“Turn that pair over to Shea,” Stephen said to George. “I’ll take Mona to the hospital.”
Exultantly the brothers carried Mona down the front stoop, helped lift her into the cab.
“City General,” cried Stephen. “Step on it, driver.”
THE RIDE to the hospital was joyous and terrible. Stephen held Mona close, murmuring her name in an attempt to soothe her physical agony. Through an isolating mist of pain Mona’s words came wanderingly. At times she knew Stephen’s arms were around her; again the mists would rise, and her voice would trail off into childhood rememberings. Crescent Hill … the double runner … I’ll hold on tight, Teevie … jump rope on Maude Street … the lost flatiron holder. Dear St. Anthony, let me find it.
The childish mists unwound. “Stevie,” she said timidly. “You know that statue of St. Anthony in the Cathedral?”
“Yes, dear, what about it?”
Mona snuggled into his shoulder. “I owe him a nickel for a candle. Pay him, will you, for finding me? … Promise?”
Stephen promised. His lulling caresses soothed her. Mona was calm but not lucid as Stephen carried her up the steps of the hospital.
“Name and address of patient?” asked the intern on duty, preparing to take down the usual case history. “Primapara or—?”
Stephen snatched the form from the intern’s hand. “Call the resident physician and get this woman up to the delivery room.” The frightened intern set in motion the brisk mechanism of a modern hospital. An attendant wheeled Mona to the elevator. At the maternity floor, an intelligently cheerful nurse appeared.
“We’ll take care of her, Father. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Stephen sank into a white iron chair in the corridor and lifted inward paeans of thanksgiving.
A doctor slightly older than Stephen came out of the delivery room. From his neck hung a stethoscope; his white shoes, starched coat, and the aloof carriage of his head stamped him as the prime product of a Class A hospital.
“I’m Dr. Parks, the attending physician,” he said. “Is this woman a relative of yours?”
“My sister.”
Dr. Parks, obviously Harvard, put no gloss on his speech. “My examination shows your sister to be in a grave condition. Apparently she has been in labor for several days. Unclean hands have made repeated attempts at delivery. I am not surprised that these attempts have failed”—the physician paused to choose language for his disclosure—“because, on the basis of sheer mechanics, normal delivery is impossible in this case.”
“Why impossible, Doctor?”
Lay explanations were distasteful to Dr. Parks. How could one express obstetrical mysteries to the uninitiated? He made the effort. “Your sister’s pelvic structure is small, almost infantile. The baby’s head is unusually large. In addition, we are confronted by what is known technically as a ‘brow presentation.’”
Stephen thought he had the picture. “Can’t you perform a Caesarean?”
Dr. Parks shook his blond head. “Your sister comes too late. She is already in shock from loss of blood. Her heart tones show extreme exhaustion, and the kidney function is gravely impaired. Surgical intervention at this point would be fatal.”
“What do you advise?”
The resident measured Stephen with blue Anglo-Saxon eyes. “Termination of labor by means of a craniotomy.”
“But that’s—murder!” said Stephen.
Nettlement rasped Dr. Parks’ voice. “I am not Catholic. I am under no obligation to take your view of the matter, Father. I realize the frightful choice that you must make. But unless you give me permission to destroy the fetus, nothing can save your sister. It’s her life against that of an unborn child.”
Stephen gripped his chair. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph help me!”
His ejaculation struck the ceiling of the hospital corridor and then rebounded in the words of the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill God’s explicit injunction, binding upon all—physicians not excepted. No room for private judgment here, and no bargaining about the comparative worth of one life as against another. In the Creator’s eye, the value of human life did not depend on its phase of development. Mother and unborn child were equal in His sight. No man had the right to decide that one should be sacrificed for the other. To make such a decision would be usurping a prerogative belonging only to God.
Dr. Parks glanced at his watch. “You must make up your mind at once, Father.”
A drench of anguish sapped Stephen’s will. For support he grasped at rebel fantasies—matchwood temptations whirling down the wind of despair. Was it thinkable that he should let Mona die, when a single word—a mere nod of assent—might save her? Had human love, with its pitiful intertwining of nerve roots and memory threads, no right to plead for special mercy? Would it be presumptuous to pray: “Lift thine ordinance this once, Lord?”
“Well?” Dr. Parks asked again.
The iron fall of the question brought Stephen back to reality. His training as a priest, his consuming faith in the Catholic Church bent his whole being to a submissive trust in an all-wise, all-knowing, all-merciful God. Stephen bowed his head; he yielded to the divine will expressed in the Fifth Commandment and reiterated in the canon law of the Church.
“I have no authority to permit murder,” he said.
Dr. Parks had the good taste not to say what he was thinking: You Catholics baffle me. Aloud he said, “Would you like to see your sister?”
In the delivery room, Stephen bent over Mona’s sheeted form. Her face was a purple, toxic bloat, and her breath came pantingly between small teeth. Her once-glossy hair was a tangled mat—dirty-gold on the pillow, blue-black at the roots. She was sinking now: prolonged labor had flogged her almost to unconsciousness.
“Oxygen,” said Dr. Parks quietly to the nurse. His code bound him to sustain the life of the body as long as possible, and by every means at his command.
Stephen, too, was bound by a code—a solemn code looking beyond bodily death to the everlasting life of the soul. The thorn of personal sorrow, the lance of private remorse, must not prevent him from discharging his final obligation as a priest. He brought his head close to Mona’s.
“Make a good act of contrition, darling,” he whispered.
Mona looked up at her brother, tried obediently to speak. Her lips moved without sound.
“Trust me, Monny. I won’t let you down. Try hard. Say it after me.”
The essential words came. “Most heartily … sorry … for having offended Thee,” breathed Mona. Stephen was giving her absolution when Dr. Parks’ stethoscope caught the last flutter of her exhausted heart.
The obstetrician leaped to his instruments. “I’ve got exactly three minutes to save that baby,” he said. “You’d better get out of here, Father. It’s not going to be pretty.”
Outside the door, Shephen leaned against the corridor wall. He had scrupulously fulfilled his sacerdotal contract, and now payment was due in terms of mortal anguish and physical collapse. He wanted to lie down on the floor and beat his head against the uncaring wood. Gross forms of human lamentation beckoned to him. His lips were shaping desperate words when he heard a thin wail—a trumpet pitiful and piercing, the announcement of a new life entering the world.
A nurse appeared in the doorway, holding something in a delivery blanket. “It’s a little girl!” she said. “Dr. Parks says the baby is going to live.”