City of Light (54 page)

He meditated for a moment. “In fact I’m afraid I must ask you to stay as far as possible from Thomas Sinclair. Things may happen to him. It’s unfortunate but unavoidable—and quite outside my control. For your own safety, and for the reputation of the school, I would urge you to keep your distance.”

We came to the grape arbor, the fruit hanging in heavy clusters of translucent green. Each year Bronson Rumsey let the grapes freeze upon the vines, picking them in January to make ice wine.

“And my daughter?”

For a full minute at least, he said nothing. Then: “I know I’m requesting a great deal of you, my dear. Therefore I will tell you that as far as I’m concerned, it’s out of bounds to involve a child in matters of politics or business. Unworthy of gentlemen.”

This, I sensed, was meant to be his promise that Grace would not be harmed and that Millicent would be avenged.

“Thank you.” I forced all emotion away. I needed rationality to deal with him, not pain, not anguish.

“I wish I knew a young man who would be your equal. I’d like to see you married—and still the headmistress of Macaulay, of course. It would please me, to see you married.”

He paused. Then, as if surprising himself with the idea, he said, “Young Franklin Fiske has much to commend him. A thoughtful young man, artistic, apparently, but hardworking. And thoroughly respectable, from a fine old family, and Susan’s cousin to boot—what more could you ask for?” His eyes twinkled. “He’s got a wicked sense of humor, but he’s well-intentioned nonetheless. A thoroughly honorable man. Furthermore he’s probably got no notion of asking a wife to supervise dinner parties and flower arrangements—at least not to the extent that she must give up her good and decent labor. Being artistic he isn’t likely to object to … previous entanglements. He’s more likely to find them interesting. He has altogether much more to recommend him than the complexities of a Thomas Sinclair. Yes, yes, Franklin Fiske.” As he considered this, he looked more and more delighted.

“Thank you for your concern, but I shall never marry Franklin Fiske.” Regardless of my feelings for Franklin, I wouldn’t allow Rumsey to manipulate me on this too. I made myself impassive. Unreadable. Up ahead, a single elm tree was taking on its autumn colors, becoming a patchwork of yellow and green.

“Yes, yes, I’m meddling, I know. You have every reason to be annoyed. I know you young people like to work these things out yourselves. It’s just a thought, anyway. Thank you for indulging an old man by listening. And no matter what you decide, rest assured that you are under my protection. You and Grace, both.”

The path turned, the trees thinned, and we were within sight of the house. In the sunset the windowpanes glowed like fire.

“My deepest protection. As you always have been.”

CHAPTER XXXV

O
n Friday afternoon, September 6, at 4:07 P.M., President McKinley was shot at point-blank range at a public reception at the exposition’s Temple of Music. His assailant, Leon Czolgosz, was a twenty-eight-year-old former factory worker born in Detroit of Polish immigrant parents. Czolgosz called himself an anarchist, although the anarchist parties quickly disavowed him. Yet his faith in himself and his deed remained strong. At his arraignment, Czolgosz said, “I have done my duty.”

In the days that followed the assassination attempt, the city seemed to retreat into a state of suspended animation, with nothing but the newspapers to define the days. The details of the events at the Temple of Music came out bit by bit: The president, the newspapers explained, had a passion for shaking hands with the public. He had insisted on the open reception at the Temple of Music as a way to exercise this passion. He prided himself on being able to shake upward of forty-five hands per minute. There was an art to it: Face a line of citizens arrayed perpendicularly to yourself. With your right arm, reach to the left, grab a hand, squeeze hard, pull the hand to the right, let go with a little push and swing your arm back to the left for the next citizen.

McKinley had enjoyed a magnificent day on Friday, the culmination of three magnificent days during which he’d toured the exposition; given a speech on trade policy before an audience of over fifty thousand; toured Niagara and put Powerhouse 3 on-line. By the time of his reception at the Temple of Music, he was in an ebullient mood and eager to greet the common folk of the Republic. He was shaking hands at full speed—potted palm trees framing the line, star-spangled bunting all around, an organist playing Bach—when suddenly the next man to approach him held a pistol concealed within his handkerchief-wrapped hand.

The weapon was a .32 caliber, short-barreled, six-shot automatic Iver-Johnson revolver which Czolgosz had purchased easily for four dollars at a local firearms store. After the attack, as he gripped his abdomen in pain, McKinley’s first thoughts were apparently for the man who’d tried to kill him: “Go easy on him, boys,” he cautioned the police and security agents who were grappling Czolgosz to the ground—or so reported the
Evening News
. “Let no one harm him,” was the stentorian quote offered by the more respectable
Express
. Other newspapers offered their own variants on this statement, and I considered them one by one until realizing that I would never know what McKinley had really said. I was left understanding only that on some basic level history itself was forever unknowable.

After the shooting, the president was taken by automobile ambulance to the hospital on the grounds of the exposition. There he underwent emergency surgery to repair internal damage and remove the single bullet which had entered his body. Much was made of the fortitude of the surgeons: Because there was no electricity in the operating room, Dr. Rixey, the president’s personal physician, had held up a mirror to the lowering sun to reflect light into the abdominal incision.

The surgery was deemed successful—even though the bullet was never found—and afterward McKinley was taken to John Milburn’s home to begin the process of recovery. The weather was hot, and huge blocks of ice were brought in; electric fans, powered by a portable generating system, were set up beside the ice to cool the kindly president, who never complained.

In the hours that followed, chaos seemed to rage across the nation, whether real or invented by the newspapers was difficult to determine. In Pittsburgh, fifty thousand men continued their strike against the United States Steel works; their women burned the cots intended for nonunion laborers. In McKeesport, Pennsylvania, rioting Hungarian strikers set upon a group of replacement workers and beat them. Editorialists assured us that a massive anarchist, socialist, or “Red” revolt was at hand. If I should see any anarchists, socialists, or “Reds” lurking behind the trees, the
Evening Times
assured me, it was quite all right to shoot them—particularly if they were Polish.

Alas, such ridiculous notions did inflame the common people on the street. At Katarzyna’s local shops, the butcher and the grocer refused to wait on her. Since the shopkeepers were German and hated the Poles anyway, Czolgosz’s supposed nationality was only one more excuse for confrontation. I told her to use the shops in my neighborhood, where the shopkeepers would assume her purchases were for me. Katarzyna’s American-born seven-year-old son was harassed by older boys while playing baseball with his friends in the street—he was punched within clear sight of a police officer, who did nothing. She would keep her son home now, she said, lock him in, were she not afraid that their tenement would be set ablaze. I told her that she and her son could move in with me. This did not console her, because with me, she would be far from her sisters, and she refused.

That Friday night, after I learned the news from the evening paper, my first thought was for Grace. I needed to be with her, to explain what had happened and console her if she was afraid. After closing the school, I went to the Sinclair house, where a guard at the gate stopped and questioned me, a welcome surprise. I found Grace peacefully swimming laps in the pool. Mrs. Sheehan, who was hemming one of Grace’s dresses, made a grateful escape upon my arrival. I sat in her place and watched the sky turn from pink to magenta with the sunset. I resolved not to break the serenity of the evening by telling Grace about the shooting yet.

I heard steps and turned to see Tom coming toward me, a glass in his hand. He had planned on speaking to McKinley privately in the late afternoon, but then came the assassination attempt, and so his hope to enlist the president’s help in providing electricity to the poor had come to nothing. Grace called her greeting, then continued swimming; she was trying to break her own record for uninterrupted laps.

“I went to the club,” Tom said wearily, sitting beside me. He seemed drained. “I thought I could get some new information on his condition, but there wasn’t much to come by.”

I studied him. The light had almost faded; we were surrounded by shades of bluish-gray. It was dusk, that time between light and darkness when the air itself seems impenetrable and details turn indistinct. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“You may still have a chance….”

“Yes,” Tom sighed, “but timing is vital. Politicians have to see what’s in it for them. Agreeing to it now, after putting Powerhouse 3 on-line, McKinley would have been riding a path to glory, as it were. After what’s happened, I doubt he’ll be in that frame of mind again. I could simply go ahead with the plan on my own, of course. But it’s so complicated, setting up the lines, increasing our output. It would be a massive project, and I’m not sure I can manage it without federal support.”

I said the unsayable: “If he dies, perhaps Mr. Roosevelt would …”

“Perhaps,” he agreed.

“Tom, on Wednesday, when I was at the reception for the McKinleys, Mr. Rumsey indicated that, well, that if you didn’t give up on this idea …”

“Curious, isn’t it,” Tom observed after a moment, “that men like Rumsey and even Albright think of you as the best conduit to me?” Quickly, in case I’d mistaken this for an insult, he touched my arm. “I’m well aware of these … indications, so please don’t worry yourself.”

He said no more. Mr. Sheehan brought out a kerosene lamp to light the garden, and uncharacteristically Tom didn’t acknowledge him. Although he watched Grace swim, he seemed closed off within himself, and I simply let him be.

On Sunday after church, I went to 184 Delaware Avenue for what had been planned as a postpresidential-visit celebration luncheon for the select. The group was fairly large, perhaps a hundred people. Nonetheless Tom wasn’t there (whether he’d been invited I didn’t know) and neither was Francesca. Her absence made me ache for her. This was just the sort of event she would have relished in the days before Susannah, and I would have appreciated seeing it through her eyes. I feared I’d lost her forever, her life subsumed into another’s. Franklin Fiske was there, however, acknowledging me with a simple nod. It was only a week ago today that he’d proposed marriage, and I felt awkward about facing him so soon. And of course Frederick Krakauer was there, standing in a corner of the drawing room observing everyone. I couldn’t stop myself from keeping an eye on him from wherever I went in the room.

The canaries were under lock and key, and the mischievous grandnieces and nephews were out of sight and hearing. Without the tumult of canaries and children, 184 was a somber place, all dark-wood paneling and dark-green wallpaper. The buffet luncheon too was a somber affair. Everyone was nervous, analyzing with an unnatural urgency each bit of news about McKinley’s condition. There was no talk of heroes now. Today the conversation had a flickering edge of self-pity that our glorious exposition had been blighted by national tragedy. Hovering in all our minds was the unspeakable question: What if McKinley died?

The only person who seemed to be thriving was Mr. Milburn. He was even more pompous than usual, and his tired, hooded eyes were like a badge of pride—for he was the keeper of that most valuable possession, information. With McKinley recovering at his home, Milburn knew as much as the doctors. He apportioned tidbits of news around the room with the same beneficence and discrimination he had displayed earlier in the summer when dispensing local accommodation for visiting royalty.

After dessert, Dexter Rumsey came to stand beside me in front of the drawing room’s unlit fireplace. He didn’t say hello, and taking his cue I said nothing to him. For the first time in all the years I’d known him, he looked shaken. I realized that the assassination attempt against the president was what Mr. Rumsey and his cadre must fear above all else: the freak event, unforeseen and unforeseeable, the lone individual, acting out of nothing but his convictions, willing to sacrifice his own life for a cause. Czolgosz was a man who, with nothing to protect, could not be controlled.

Unlike myself. I remained inextricably bound to the very man who had conspired in my ruin, maneuvering to introduce me to President Cleveland right here at 184, ten years ago. I still had to appease him; indeed, behave as though I were grateful to him. After the party at Rumsey Park last week, I’d berated myself for my delusions. For a decade I’d thought myself strong. I’d once made a foolish mistake, but I’d survived it and taken pride in my survival. Then at Rumsey Park I’d learned that my mistake and even my survival had all been plotted for me, as if I were nothing but a character in someone else’s story. I felt deeply humiliated that Mr. Rumsey and the men of the board, even Maria Love, had known or at least surmised the most intimate details of my life.

And yet … as I’d prepared for the start of school, I’d gradually been able to look back on all I had done not with despair but with some sense of accomplishment. Mr. Rumsey had not given the infant Grace to Margaret and Tom, I had done that, and she had thrived. Mr. Rumsey had made me headmistress at Macaulay, but I was the one who had transformed the school and made it great. Even though I was bound by the chains of my secret, nonetheless I enjoyed a peculiar freedom, of a kind few women ever achieved. Today, standing beside Mr. Rumsey at the fireplace, I felt a hint of independence, as if in spite of all that had happened I too had become a force to be reckoned with.

After a few moments, we were joined by Macaulay board members John Scatcherd, the lumber magnate, and George Urban, Jr., the flour baron. They stood close to us and began to speak—strictly to each other, in one of the oddest interchanges I have ever heard, for they were obviously exchanging information they both already knew.

“I’ve been told the most incredible story,” Urban began. “Incredible, although I do credit its truth.”

“What have you been told?” Scatcherd asked rhetorically.

Surreptitiously they both glanced at Milburn, then brought their faces close again. Mr. Rumsey stared across the room, pretending they were nowhere near him.

“Last night, several days’ proceeds from the exposition were concealed in the automobile ambulance and taken to Milburn’s home.”