City of Light (56 page)

“Well, well, there’s been so much news lately I can barely keep up,” Mr. Rumsey was saying. “I’m so pleased that Mr. Krakauer’s employer has seen fit to call him away to more pressing duties. I never liked Krakauer, I can tell you now,” Mr. Rumsey admitted with a wry look. “Always tagging along, everyone feeling obligated to invite him everywhere—good riddance.” Mr. Rumsey waved his hand through the air as though brushing away a fly. As he spoke of Krakauer, I made a decision. If Tom and Grace were leaving, I would leave with them—with
her
, come what may. I would be Mr. Rumsey’s pawn no longer.

“Mr. Rumsey, I believe after our long acquaintance I may be frank with you.”

“I certainly hope so. If ever I can be of assistance …”

“If Grace is leaving the city, then I’m sorry to say I must leave with her. I must resign my position at Macaulay. Mr. Sinclair and I have discussed marriage, and I realize you would disapprove, but it remains, well, not a certainty but a possibility between us. But no matter, I must be with Grace, whether married to her father or not.”

“Oh, my dear girl,” he sighed deeply. “I feared you would say as much.” He shook his head sadly. “Now I must say more, and with regret.” He took a long breath, summoning the strength to continue. “Here is how it is. Through a great deal of effort, I have saved your daughter’s life. I have saved Mr. Sinclair’s life. I have maneuvered a compromise. And I have convinced Sinclair to give up his plans to become a Robin Hood.”

Rigidly … hesitantly, because he waited for the question, I asked, “How have you done that?”

“Through you of course,” he replied smoothly.

“Pardon?”

“I simply told him that if he didn’t give up his position and his plans, things simply wouldn’t go well for you, my dear. Certain facts that we would all prefer to keep private would become common knowledge. I must say Sinclair immediately understood the logic of avoiding this situation—absolutely understood,” Mr. Rumsey assured me firmly. “For you see he is a gentleman after all. I hadn’t entirely thought so, given his background and whatnot, but now I must accept that he is, for who but a gentleman would sacrifice his own good to uphold the reputation of a lady? Well, well, well.” Mr. Rumsey leaned back in his chair. “Everything is resolved, and so neatly too. There’ll be a bit of time before Mr. Sinclair can organize himself and the power station for his departure. At least two weeks. Plenty of time to get everyone acclimated to the idea. We may even arrange a hero’s farewell for him.” He gazed at me contentedly.

Through this long peroration my shock had turned to rage. Maybe Tom wouldn’t fight him, but I would—for if I lost Grace, if she went to the West, I had nothing left to lose. “Mr. Rumsey, perhaps Mr. Sinclair didn’t feel comfortable discussing this with you, but I myself have seen proof of bribes being given to state inspectors to make them ignore the extent of water use at the power station. If the public were to learn of this—”

“Oh, please—do not speak to me of bribes,” he said with deep frustration. With one hand he rubbed his forehead and eyes, his public mask slipping away. I saw that he was exhausted; he was seventy-four years old, and weakness gnawed at him. “The notion of these bribes has been advertised far and wide. No one has ever proven that there’ve been bribes—
I’ve
never seen any proof of bribes. And besides, I haven’t heard any groundswell of opposition to the idea of bribes, except from a few discredited nature fanatics—and I praise God that Sinclair managed to get them to discredit themselves, saving me a lot of work in the process.”

I had never heard him speak so unguardedly.

“Nobody cares about those bribes—if there were any—and no one ever will.”

Abruptly his tone shifted to the gentle and cosseting: “But what are bribes compared to your reputation, Louisa? I have devoted myself to your reputation all these many years.”

How he twisted the meaning of words, pretending to one thing while we both knew he meant another—for of course he was the very man who’d created the situation by which my reputation was put at risk. His counterfeit kindness left me chilled.

“I sincerely believe that this is by far the best course. I believe I am protecting you from yourself and from any impetuosity that might carry you away. I only wish the best for you.”

Suddenly the room was lit by lightning, and then we heard the crash of thunder. Mr. Rumsey paused, as if to count the seconds, to know how far away the lightning was and whether it was coming closer. I counted too—ever since I was a child I’d counted the beats between the lightning and the thunder. My father and I used to count together during huge electric storms in the mountains of Colorado, when the sky was almost green with rain and I felt I could reach across the valleys to touch the peaks beyond.

Another flash of lightning … three seconds to the thunder. Another … five seconds. A third … four seconds. The storm was hovering over us. “Now then,” Mr. Rumsey said, “do please accept a ride home in my carriage, won’t you? I don’t like to think of you out in the rain alone.”

The storm continued through the night with increasing ferocity. I didn’t attempt to sleep, I didn’t even change. Instead I sat in my study turning my choices over and over in my mind. By midnight I decided to walk to Tom’s. What did I care anymore that someone might see me entering the Sinclair home at midnight? With Grace leaving me, my reputation seemed worthless—even more so when compared to the goals Tom had given up for me.

During the rain-swept hours, I had made a resolution. I would break loose from the control of men like Dexter Rumsey and take Grace away. With Tom’s financial support, escape would finally be possible. We would change our names if necessary. And we would be together. Nothing was more important than that. Once Grace and I had found our freedom, Tom would regain his freedom to do what was right.

While walking through the storm, I reviewed what I would tell him. He would see the reason of it—I knew he would—and he would acquiesce. For how could he raise Grace without me? It wasn’t possible. A child must be with her mother, or at least with a woman who cared for her. Even my father relied on my grandmother to maintain our household and tend to my daily needs. Tom would understand this—or so I told myself.

When I arrived at the Sinclair gate, Grace’s third-floor lights were off, but the library light was on, so Tom was still awake. The house was no longer guarded. I walked up the path and knocked on the front door. After several minutes Tom himself answered. This was like him, not wanting to wake a member of his staff simply to answer the door when he was up and dressed. He still wore his business suit.

“Ah, Louisa. Come in.” He took my folded umbrella and put it in the stand by the door. He helped me to take off my cloak, then hung it, dripping, on the peg in the vestibule. With both hands, he rubbed my shoulders to warm me. “Come into the parlor. I’ll light the fire. It’s the warmest in the house; I’ve never been able to figure out why.” He sounded very calm. Taking my cold hand, he led me to the parlor and pulled a chair close to the fireplace. In a few moments, the logs were blazing. He closed the parlor door to keep the heat in, so the only light in the room was from the fire, touching us with its glow. He pulled a chair for himself next to mine.

“I assume you know, or you wouldn’t have come here.”

“Yes. Mr. Rumsey asked to see me at nine. I saw your carriage leaving.”

“Did you? I wish I’d realized. I wanted to tell you myself, but I didn’t feel comfortable visiting you so late. I see you have no such compunctions about visiting
me.”
For an instant he smiled.

I was too upset to respond to his small joke. “Tom, all these hours since I left Mr. Rumsey, I’ve been thinking….” I began the speech I’d formulated in my mind and practiced on the walk over, although it now sounded stiff and trite: “I appreciate what you’ve done for me, but you shouldn’t give in to this. You should fight on. What you’re doing is too important. You can’t let them win. And besides, if Grace leaves, there’s no future left here for me. You must understand that. You go ahead with what you’ve been planning, and I’ll take Grace somewhere. We’ll change our names, with your help we won’t have any difficulties. If Peter Fronczyk could do it, I …” That’s where my planned speech ended, and I found I had nothing more to say; I was drained of words and had only the strength to wait for him to agree.

He took my hands within both of his, pressing them together, and he blew his warm breath onto my fingers. “I’ve used these hours to think too, and I’m grateful for what you say. But you see, if you lose your reputation, Grace loses hers as well. No one will chase after Peter Fronczyk, he’s not important—not like you and Grace. If you tried to hide, the moment I went to visit the two of you, you’d be discovered and exploited again and again. That’s not the kind of future I want for Grace. And you’ll need to teach too, or be involved in some kind of work. You wouldn’t be happy hidden away in the woods somewhere with a child.”

“But—”

“Someday we may decide to marry—who knows? I don’t want to worry about this whole sorry story being brought up over and over.” His words were firm, but his tone was sad and resigned. “Our only choice is to give in. Accept defeat now, and hope to fight another day.”

“How, ‘fight another day’?” I felt numb.

He brightened a bit. “This new project I’ll be going to, did Rumsey tell you about it?”

I shook my head no.

“It’s still in the planning stages, but it’s a huge dam project. In a canyon of the Salt River, in Arizona. About seventy miles east of Phoenix. For electricity and irrigation. It’s a tremendous opportunity, a tremendous challenge. I’m surprised they offered it to me, all things considered. Shows how desperate they must be for people who can do this kind of work—self-interest never being far from their minds, of course. Grace can visit you here at Christmas, and you can visit us in the summer.”

He looked to me for agreement, but he must have seen the un-happiness on my face: He would be leaving for something that was wonderful to him, whereas I would be left here alone. He shook my shoulders gently. “Don’t you understand? We can’t be victimized by them if we hold on to our own goals as firmly as they hold on to theirs. Keep looking ahead, and we’ll see what the future allows us. How old is Rumsey, anyway? In his midseventies, isn’t he? Who’s going to replace him when he goes? If we hold steady and plot as they plot, we’ve a chance to win in the end.”

He was right. There was no choice but to accept this new burden and try to focus on the times I would see Grace, instead of the times I would not. After a long moment I asked, “Have you told her yet?”

“No. She was asleep when I got home. I’ll tell her tomorrow. I hope you’ll talk to her soon too.”

“Yes.”

“Rumsey wants us to go in a few weeks, so we will. What’s the point of waiting?”

“Yes.” What could I do but agree?

“My deputies will take over the running of the station, each in his own area, and the head of operations will supervise them all. I don’t want anyone brought in from the outside who might have different ways of doing things.” By this I knew he meant a more stringent approach to the unions.

The telephone rang, jolting us. Tom and I both glanced at the clock on the mantel: one-thirty A.M. The ringing continued. Grace was sleeping safely upstairs, so for once I didn’t have to fear for her. Tom and I stared at one another quizzically. Neither of us had grown up with a telephone, so to hear it clanging in the middle of the night—what could this mean?

Tom leaned toward the telephone table and picked up the receiver. His words were clipped: “Hello … yes … I see … of course … thank you for calling.” He hung up and turned to me.

“That was Albright,” he said. “McKinley collapsed this evening. He’s in a coma. The doctors say he’s dying.”

CHAPTER XXXVI

O
n Saturday, September 14, in the early hours of the morning, President William McKinley died of assassin’s wounds. I awoke to the sound of church bells ringing before dawn and immediately I understood. The jovial, kindhearted man I’d shaken hands with, gone now. The city’s frank optimism and illusions—delusions—of glory, gone too. The autopsy would show that unbeknownst to anyone, least of all his doctors, gangrene had spread along the path of the bullet through his abdomen. The widowed First Lady was reported to be sitting crouched in a chair, praying for her own death. The nation went into mourning, the newspapers were banded in black. I felt as if I were banded in black too, my private sadness playing out against the public drama on the streets as the president’s casket was taken by military escort to lie in state in the City Hall rotunda. My grief would only grow stronger as the days passed.

On Friday I’d been too busy with meetings at school to visit Grace, so it was on Saturday that I finally went to her, feeling my loss already, missing her even though she was still here, preparing myself to be cheerful in her presence. I’d checked out an atlas from the school library and held it cumbersomely in my arms during my walk up Lincoln Parkway. I tried to picture the Salt River, the Arizona Territory, the city of Phoenix—what were these places? To me they were nothing but names on a map, footholds in a wilderness. When I thought of the Salt River, all I could imagine was the Dead Sea, so salty it would hold Grace up if she tried to swim. Sitting with Tom and Grace in children’s chairs in the third-floor playroom I feigned a different view, however. “It’s like a dream come true, to live in the West!” I enthused. “The mountains are so high that some of them are covered with snow all year round. And the canyons are so deep, sometimes you can’t even see the bottom. You’re especially lucky, Grace, because you’re the perfect age to appreciate everything….”

She believed me. Her eyes came alight. “Show me where we’ll live,” she said excitedly, reaching for the atlas. “How will we get there?” She propped the wide book open upon her knees, and Tom pulled his chair close to hers to trace, page by page, the long train route that would bring them to their new home. The atlas, seldom used, smelled musty and damp, and some of its pages were stuck together, as though the book had survived a flood.

While Tom, Grace, and I studied maps, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, age forty-two, was sworn in as the twenty-sixth president of the United States. The makeshift ceremony took place in the library of the home of Roosevelt’s friend Ansley Wilcox. Roosevelt had been fetched to Buffalo from a hiking vacation with his family on Mt. Marcy in the Adirondacks, and he wore borrowed clothes—the trousers of one man, the jacket of another. A silent crowd of several thousand stood outside the house as the oath was administered. In a short speech, Roosevelt promised to uphold the policies of his predecessor “for the peace, the prosperity, and the honor of our beloved country.”

School did not begin on Monday as scheduled, because of several days of national mourning. Finally on Wednesday I welcomed back my girls. Instead of the somberness I expected, they showed relief to be gathered once more among themselves, away from eulogies and black bunting and the obsessive reading of newspapers. As the week continued, I sought out Grace each day and observed her in class and with her friends. I saw that her initial excitement was being tempered by sadness as she told her classmates about her move and grasped the reality of leaving. Meanwhile I struggled to convince myself of how valuable the experience would be for her. Over and over like an exercise I forced myself to put aside my own feelings and focus solely on what she would gain.

On the following Saturday morning, I worked at my desk at school as usual. In the afternoon there would be a farewell party for Tom and Grace on Goat Island at the Falls. The party was being given by the workmen from the power station and their families, so I had resigned myself to not seeing Grace today.

“Hello.” But there she stood at the door to my office.

“Good morning,” I said, surprised and happy that she’d thought to visit me before the party.

“I saw you with my spyglass.” She held it up from behind her back.

“I thought you’d be spending this morning getting ready for your party.”

Slipping the spyglass into her pocket, she came into the office. “I am ready.” She showed off her outfit: blue sailor dress, white stockings, black patent-leather shoes, and a wide-brimmed straw hat, her hair falling in perfect, Mrs. Sheehan–induced ringlets down her back. “We’re leaving at one o’clock. Papa had to do some work at his office downtown. Because we’re leaving next week. The day keeps getting sooner and sooner.”

Yes, the day did keep getting sooner and sooner. Be cheerful, I ordered myself, even though I ached. “Just think of all you’ll see on the train trip. You’ll cross the Mississippi River! It’s wider and browner than you can imagine.”

“I know.” She walked to the window and stood there, looking out. “At first it seemed exciting, but now I don’t want to go. I don’t want to be missing my friends. I want to be with them, not missing them. They’re more important than the Mississippi River. I want to be with you, not missing you.”

At first I couldn’t answer her. “I’d rather be with you instead of missing you too, Grace,” I finally managed. “But when you come to visit at Christmas, you can tell me all your adventures. I’ll give a special party for your class.” I bit my lip with the effort of not letting her see my tears. “And even though we’ll be far away for a while, I’ll still love you, and if we think about each other, we’ll still be together.”

“When Mama got sick, right before she … went away, she told me you’d always be with me and look after me. Because you’re my mother in God. And there isn’t much difference, is there, between a real mother and a mother in God? At least that’s what Mama said.”

“No, there isn’t much difference.” For the first time I wondered, had Margaret guessed the truth, seeing through my subterfuge, noticing the resemblance between Grace and me, as Tom did? Had she been afraid to speak about it to me? Had we therefore kept our mutual knowledge secure from one another, letting the truth separate us when it could have united us? If she did know, however, during her final hours this knowledge must have offered her the most profound consolation possible—she herself would be gone, but Grace would be with her mother still. I prayed now that Margaret had felt such a comfort in those hours when she was still alert, lying in bed in the candlelight, Tom and me struggling to stay awake in chairs beside her, even the nurse dozing. Throughout that final night, she—the soonest to depart—was the only one of us awake to regard the darkness.

Grace began to study the books on my shelves. “There’s another reason I’m not very happy today. I mean, not just going away.”

“Really? What?” Expecting some childish response, I rearranged the papers on my desk to give myself a moment to regain my emotional equilibrium.

“Papa is angry with me.”

“And why is that?”

She turned to look at me, her face oddly blank. “Have I always been such a bad girl as I am now?”

At once I was alert. “Bad girl.” This was the phrase she had used with Millicent Talbert on that evening in March when she had talked about killing herself. Automatically I replied, “You’re not a bad girl.” Then I was brought up short by my recognition that such a pat answer would close her off from me. “What makes you say so?”

“Papa says I’m a bad girl.” She breathed deeply, holding back tears.

“What does he say you did, that was bad?”

“I’m not sure I can tell you.”

“You should tell me. Who else can you tell?” I said gently.

She gazed at her shoes, moving one foot slightly back and forth, studying the shifting reflections in the patent leather. “Well … he came to see me this morning before I got up and before he had to go to his office. He was dressed in his suit and he smelled all clean.” She gazed at me hopefully, as if asking me to confirm these facts for her. I nodded in encouragement. “He almost always stops to see me before he goes to work because he usually doesn’t get home until after I’m asleep. Anyway, this morning when he came in I was already awake and I was playing with Fluffer. He doesn’t like Fluffer sleeping on my bed because she sheds fur all over, but sometimes I let her anyway because she really wants to.” She gave me a shrugging smile. “Well, I always let her sleep on my bed. But that’s not why Papa said I was bad. He was looking at some drawings I’m doing. Lately he’s always asking to look at my drawings. I was showing him everything, especially the people doing things that Miss Riley wanted me to work on before—”

Grace paused, a look of bewilderment on her face as she realized again that Susannah was gone from us. Reassuringly I said, “Yes, I know.”

She nodded. “He really liked the picture of you playing the piano,” she told me. “And then he found, he found—” Suddenly she began to cry, slowly at first, then the tears burst from her uncontrollably.

I hurried to her and held her close. I pushed back her hat and caressed her hair. “What did he find?” I asked, filled with a sudden fear. “What was it?”

When she calmed enough to speak, she said, “Some papers.”

“Papers?” I asked, taken aback. “What kind of papers?”

“Papers from his desk.”

“Papers from his
desk?
”

She pulled away and turned to stare out the window again. To study her own house in the distance. “This is the part I’m not sure I should tell you.”

“But you must,” I insisted.

She knit her brow doubtfully.

“How can I help you, if you don’t tell me?”

This she accepted. “Sometimes, because Miss Riley asks me to, I borrow things from his desk. Papers. About water. About the power station. I only borrow them for one day,” she said, glancing at me for confirmation that this made it better. “On the mornings Miss Riley is coming to see me for my lesson. I take the papers and hide them with my drawings and then she reads them during my lesson and sometimes copies them.”

A picture came into my mind of Daniel Henry Bates standing at the podium at Lyric Hall in May, waving his folded piece of paper and threatening to reveal the names of state inspectors who had been bribed.

“I return the papers before Papa gets home from work. Except the week before last, Miss Riley was supposed to come for a lesson and she never did, because she was … and then President McKinley … and then we were going away, and everything got into a muddle and I forgot to return the papers.” She pressed her face against the win-dowpane, her breath misting the glass.

With dread, already knowing the answer; indeed the answer was obvious, making me heartsick at my own blindness, I asked, “Did Miss Riley tell you why she wanted to see the papers?”

“To help Niagara Falls.”

So it was Grace whom Susannah had meant when she told me she’d had an assistant. A child. The woman’s derangement reached even to subjugate a child.

“Miss Riley said she was trying to help Niagara Falls,” Grace continued, “so the bad men wouldn’t take all the water. Mama wanted to help Niagara Falls too. That’s what Mama and Papa were fighting about on the day I interrupted them and surprised Mama and she fell because I surprised her and …” She stopped, unable to go on.

I didn’t know which strand to follow: Margaret’s death after her miscarriage, which we had discussed before, or the “borrowed” papers. I decided, for better or worse, that I should address the papers. I have berated myself over and over, in the years since, that I followed the one strand and not the other. I have berated myself even more for the anger that crept into my voice. “Grace,” I said firmly, “didn’t you realize your father would be unhappy if he knew you were showing his papers to someone outside the family? Didn’t you know that some things have to be kept private?”

“I knew that! But Miss Riley said Niagara Falls was more important. She said I was a ‘heroine.’ She said almost nobody in the world gets a chance to be a heroine, and now I was one.”

I shivered at how close her words were to Tom’s when we stood together in the drawing room the morning after the bombing at the power station.

“She said she wouldn’t keep tutoring me if I didn’t do what she wanted me to do, and I wanted her to keep tutoring me. She said Papa was bad. She said he was more than bad, she said he was evil.” She sighed in befuddlement and despair. “But now I’m not so sure, because they put her in the state hospital. Winifred Coatsworth told me that only crazy people get put in the state hospital. Is Miss Riley crazy? Is Papa evil?”

“No, Grace, no. Of course not.” Which question was I answering? I couldn’t tell. My mind was overwhelmed and reassurance was all I could offer.

“But he was trying to take all the water from Niagara Falls.
That
was evil. Even though Papa doesn’t seem evil to me. I mean, he never acts evil—not to me, I mean.” She stared at me in confusion.

“I understand how hard it is to figure all this out.” And now I did understand: the frailty that Susannah Riley had recognized in Grace—like a thin pane of glass being pressured to the breaking point, she had described it—this frailty Susannah herself had created by forcing Grace into this terrible predicament. “Miss Riley never should have asked you to betray your family.”