City of Light (19 page)

“Of course,” Tom said. “As I recall I donated some old boots to him too.”

“I remember, Papa.” She hugged him with pleasure. “I remember.”

“And then
I
came over to admire him,” I said.

“Yes, Aunt Louisa, I remember! I wrote you a special note of invitation.”

“I still have it.”

“I remember everything about that snowman,” she said proudly.

Remember, remember, remember. So much of our lives had turned into remembrance.

“I’m sure Mama sees us now. She watches everything I do,” Grace assured us. “So I always have to do the right thing. That’s why lately I never do anything wrong.” She gave Tom and me an impish grin. “Sometimes I like to pretend she visits me. Sometimes when I spin around really fast like this”—she twirled and twirled in the snow—“I get dizzy and I can see her out of the corner of my eye, just like she’s sitting over there!” At the end of a twirl she stopped suddenly and pointed at a gravestone farther up the hill. She looked stricken, as if she’d truly expected to see Margaret; or as if she had seen Margaret, just at the edge of her vision, and now Margaret was gone. “Did you two see her?” she asked.

“No, darling,” Tom said gently. “We didn’t see her.”

“Neither did I,” she said, bereft. Grace took Tom’s hand and mine, making a chain of us, and we stood for a long moment looking through the trees toward the park lake and the half-built art gallery beyond it. In the sharp, clear air, the towers of the asylum seemed close upon us. I studied Grace’s now-placid face. I wasn’t surprised that she would attempt to conjure up Margaret’s being. Children were always telling ghost stories, and at church the ministers made angels and the afterlife sound like a certainty. Therefore why wouldn’t her beloved mother always watch over her, and even visit her now and again? I grasped at something Dr. Hoyt had said, that Grace simply needed to pass through the time of mourning and then all would be well. I tried to believe this was true. Yes, I said to myself over and over, at heart my goddaughter was fine, and she always would be.

I glanced at Tom, to find him looking at me. He seemed to be searching my face, for what I didn’t know. Then, almost as an afterthought and only for an instant, his searching look turned into a shy smile.

When we returned to our sleigh at the bottom of the hill, we came upon Seward Cary, one of Maria Love’s adult nephews. He was a thin, long-faced man with a passion for polo, who never seemed to have enough to do to fill his time. “How about a race, Sinclair?” he called, standing in his cutter. His breath steamed in the cold. “Up on the flats.” He motioned toward the northern part of the cemetery.

“You’re on, Cary,” Tom responded. The gentlemen of our city had a love of sleigh racing. On Richmond Avenue, on Delaware, even here in the cemetery, they liked nothing better than to race in the brisk air.

Hesitantly Grace said, “I don’t want to race.”

“Now, now, little girl, a bit of a race will do you good,” Tom said, with more than his usual touch of Irish brogue.

Up on the flats, Tom pulled alongside Cary’s sleigh. Earlier races had drawn a small crowd. The route was discussed, positions were adjusted. Both men stood. Someone offered to give the signal: A whip snapped against a tree trunk—and with it Seward was off, whipping his horse and whooping, Tom right beside him. The bystanders shouted. The wind lashed against us, burning like ice crystals into our skin. Our sleigh heeled as we curved around a bend, and I gripped the railing.

“We’ve got him,” I thought I heard Tom say into the wind.

Grace clutched my hands and pressed her face into my skirt, making a mewling sound and trembling—altogether more scared than she should have been. At her age, she should have been enjoying it. Nonetheless she was terrified, and I couldn’t see her this way and do nothing to help her.

“Stop, Tom!” I shouted. My eyes watered in the wind. He did nothing to stop. He couldn’t hear me. I shouted again. Still he couldn’t hear me. I pulled at his arm. “She’s frightened!”

He glanced at me, bewildered, and looked down at Grace, her arms wrapped around my legs, her face hidden. Then he did slow the horses, from a gallop to a trot to a walk until he stopped them completely—or they stopped on their own accord, feeling the strength leave his hands. He sat down. Up ahead Seward Cary gave a cheer in the joy of his victory.

“She was frightened, Tom,” I said quietly. “Even if she had no reason to be.”

He stared at Grace and then at me. Not in anger or regret, or even with concern for his daughter. He simply looked confused, as if he were in a foreign land and the language I spoke—although he was supposed to know it, had even studied it—was so different from what he expected that he couldn’t begin to comprehend it.

By the time we left the cemetery, however, all was forgotten. Grace seemed happy again, rubbing her father’s arm, pressing against him once more. He too seemed to have put the incident from his mind. But as I gazed at her, watching her glance flit from one spot to the next, I realized that she defied my understanding, defied every small reassurance at which I grasped. She was like water slipping through my hands.

We turned onto Delaware Avenue, heading downtown. The late afternoon sun left bands of color across the snow. The horses went at a steady trot, the mansions and churches flashing by, the lawns broad and snow-covered, the branches of the double row of elms meeting overhead. Suddenly downtown opened before us in its glory: City Hall, its Gothic tower surmounted by statues representing Justice and Commerce, Agriculture and the Mechanical Arts. The post office, with its tall, slender campanile. And the new skyscrapers, taller than church spires. Yes, we had skyscrapers in Buffalo.

We passed the Prudential Building, designed by Louis Sullivan: thirteen stories high, built of steel, covered with terra-cotta carvings of vines and trees that soared upward like an impenetrable forest to surround the oriel windows at the top. The decorations made the building seem even taller than it was, and the terra-cotta glowed deep ocher in the sunset.

“Look well at that, Grace,” Tom said. “Thirteen floors and no electricity. Steam-powered elevator and gaslights. I don’t know how the workers stand it, being in the gaslight all day. Well, we’ll improve on that soon, eh?”

“Yes, Papa,” she said, though I sensed she wasn’t listening. “Look, there’s where
you
work!” Excited, she stood and pointed to the Ellicott Square Building, a few blocks ahead.

“Right you are, my girl.”

Designed by Daniel Burnham, the Ellicott Square Building was ten stories tall and covered an entire city block. It boasted six hundred offices, forty stores, sixteen counting rooms. It was the largest office building in the world, but it too had no electricity.

There were other magnificent buildings everywhere around us. Downtown Buffalo was designed in the early 1800s by Joseph Ellicott, whose brother had worked with Pierre L’Enfant on the design of Washington, D.C. The downtown streets radiated from wide public circles that created an aura of nobility and civic triumph. At the end of every southward-running street, the grain elevators rose stark on the horizon. Beside the elevators were the coal trestles, the biggest in the world, and the railroad yards; and in the harbor were the masts of the lake schooners and the funnels of the freighters, symbols one and all of where the money came from to make this magnificence possible.

When I was a child, and later at Wellesley, Boston was the city I visited for a treat, but Boston was staid and self-protective compared to Buffalo: Here we had the freedom of the frontier, the freedom of never-ending expansion. We were a city “full of beans,” as I’d once heard it described. A city of wonder. We’d sent two presidents to the White House. We were an exposition city, like Chicago and Philadelphia. Suddenly a sense of gratitude swept through me—to be here, now, in this sleigh, gliding through the most exuberant city in the nation. The city’s exuberance was mine; the city itself was mine.

I felt overwhelmed; shaken by my sense of belonging.

This winter, hotelier and restaurateur Ellsworth Statler had opened a Viennese café, the first café we’d ever had, in the central light court of the Ellicott Square Building. No matter how many times I visited the Ellicott Square Building, when I entered the light court I was astonished. It was covered with glass supported by curved metal braces. Huge chandeliers hung from central arches. At each end of the court, curving staircases with intricate banisters led to the shops on the balcony. The building was designed around this central court for a very practical reason: to bring natural light into the inner offices.

Now that dusk was upon us, gaslight suffused the court. Everyone of importance was here. Mr. Statler himself, a net of smile lines around his eyes, a thick mustache dominating his thin face, showed us to a table. Francesca waved from a corner, where she sat with Susannah Riley, who had her back to the crowd. Maria Love was at a center table (naturally), surrounded by her rambunctious little Carys and Rumseys, their faces now covered with evidence of hot chocolate and cake. Nearby, Susan Fiske Rumsey sat with her cousin Franklin, his photography equipment piled on the floor beside them. Mrs. Rumsey smiled her greeting, while Fiske simply nodded at me by way of recognition, and I appreciated his discretion. For the first time, I focused on the fact that I was the only person to whom he’d revealed his secret. Knowledge, of course, is power; why had he given me such power over him? Why had he trusted me? I caught myself staring at him for a beat longer than modesty dictated; hastily I shifted my gaze away. Tom and I continued our peregrination across the room. We said hello to everyone we passed and everyone said hello to us, each strand of the city knit tightly together.

The only person we didn’t say hello to was Frederick Krakauer, “Morgan’s man” as Fiske called him, who slouched, hands folded across his broad abdomen, in a straight-backed chair near Maria Love’s table—near her table, but pointedly not at her table. Looking as if he were lightly dozing, eyes half-shut, he regarded us all with a forbearing smile while Miss Love studied him speculatively.

Once we were settled, Grace ran off to join a group of children who were playing a complicated game of hopscotch across the marble mosaic floor. She received an effortless welcome from them. All the girls were Macaulay girls, all the boys went to the Franklin School and then to Nichols. How wonderful it was, to gaze upon children who had nothing more to do with their time than devote themselves to the self-imposed rules governing jumps across a patterned floor.

Tom too gazed at the children, but with a preoccupied look. Perhaps he was remembering his own youth, or perhaps he wondered only about the propriety of lighting a cigar in mixed company. Grace’s hair flew as she jumped. And then Tom startled me.

“You know,” he said, almost to himself and still watching Grace, so that I had to lean close to hear him, “sometimes I look at her and realize that I’ve completely forgotten, for weeks or for months, that she’s not really my daughter. That’s surprising, isn’t it?”

He turned to me, and because I had already leaned close to hear him, we were now very near to one another, his eyes dark in the gaslight. Suddenly I felt shy and flustered.

“Well, no, it’s not surprising. You’ve had her since she was a newborn.”

“At the beginning I used to wonder, what did the father look like, and the mother. I used to conjure them up in my head. Then after a while it didn’t seem to matter anymore. But now, when she makes some gesture I don’t recognize, I wonder if it’s something she’s gotten from … those other people.”

“Or from herself.”

“Yes, but what is a self?” he asked with a hint of a smile. “She’s so much like Margaret. I remember catching her when she was very young, just two, maybe three years old, following Margaret around the house and imitating her walk, arranging her shoulders and her head to be like Margaret. It almost broke my heart. You can’t even imagine what it feels like to remember now. It haunts me, how much like Margaret she is.”

His voice caught. Shifting his body, he looked away. I started to reach out to him, to comfort him, then pulled back my hand, frozen by the impropriety of touching him in a public place. After a few moments, his knee brushing mine beneath the narrow table, he turned to me again, his face composed.

“You’re still the only person who knows, Louisa. Apart from the doctor, of course.” He glanced around. “Sometimes I wonder which of my neighbors’ children aren’t really theirs, and they have to keep the truth hidden the way Margaret and I do.” There it was, the present tense, cutting into us. If Margaret were here now—well, she and I would be chatting together while Tom most likely would have gone off to join the gentlemen who were smoking and discussing business by the balcony stairs. “Do you ever wonder what happened to the poor girl who gave birth to Grace? Do you think she ever thinks of her?”

I felt myself blushing. But before I was forced to answer, the bulky form of George Urban, Jr., arrived at our table, on his way, he told us, to bring the good news to Frederick Krakauer that despite the unexpected storm—and extremely icy it was, out at Niagara—the lines had held, the electric power had not gone down. The generators were still transmitting current, the factories were still churning out aluminum, the streetlights of Buffalo were still illuminated.

The truth of this we later discovered ourselves when we left the Ellicott Square Building and found the streetlamps ablaze. Grace gave the lamps not a thought; we’d had them nearly five years now, virtually a lifetime to her. She took them for granted. But to me, they remained a small evening miracle, like a nightly blessing.

As we rode home, bearskin blankets covering our legs, Grace fell asleep. She leaned against her father, her face like an angel’s. I wished there were a way to keep her close to me forever. I ached, that soon she would go to her home, and me to mine.

On Chapin Parkway, Tom said, “Would you mind if I took Grace home first, to get her out of the cold?”

“No, of course not. That’s best.”