City of Light (58 page)

CHAPTER XXXVIII

I
passed the weeks after Grace’s death in a daze. I recollect people coming up to me at school, on the street even, offering condolences, their faces familiar although often I could not recall who they were. There was a funeral of course, at Trinity Church. A burial on a hillside at Forest Lawn, beside Margaret. At both services I was only a godmother, allowed to stand near the front of the crowd next to her godfather, Mr. Albright, but not at the very front where Tom and the Winspears stood. I tried not to let anyone see how much I cried.

After the burial Mr. Rumsey—kind, generous, as supportive as a father—took my elbow, led me to his carriage, and drove with me to the Albright estate because Mr. Albright as her godfather was giving a luncheon in her honor. No children attended this luncheon. Amid the board members and their wives, Miss Love, the Winspears and their friends, and various businessmen who’d worked with Tom, I heard no commemoration of Grace. For these people she had become merely an excuse for a party, an opportunity to lunch with Mr. Rumsey. My friends weren’t here, not Francesca, not Elbert, for what right did I have, as godmother, to invite my friends to this luncheon? Even though none of Grace’s schoolmates was there to remember her, the Albright house seemed to burst with children, “three under four,” Susan Albright described them at the club. Their nannies shooed them away from the guests, and their tears or laughter were heard from corridors, or from outside as they played chasing games across the lawns—reminding Tom and me, as we stood silently side by side at the windows to stare at them, of what we’d lost.

Turning to Tom, I studied him, the strong features, the pale-brown hair, and a memory pushed through of the night he’d come with the news about Grace. We’d gone into my study, and he had begun to cry. As a sense of disassociation seeped through me, bewilderment was all I’d felt. Who was this large person, weeping in my arms, telling me that he’d done this dreadful deed, telling me that through neglect he’d murdered our daughter? As that night wore on, I’d felt myself separating from him, not because I blamed him, but because there was no room inside me for any feeling but the loss of Grace.

That day I realized Tom and I would never marry. Not because of the machinations of others, but because Grace would be always between us. Indeed she
had
always been between us. Tom and I had always known one another through Margaret and later through Grace; to one another we had been simply necessary adjuncts to the people we truly loved. Nonetheless I felt connected to him, because of all we had shared and the memories we had in common; I trusted we would remain friends.

Within a week, Tom closed the house, paid the staff for a month, arranged for a caretaker, and left the city. He wasn’t ready yet actually to sell the house. He spoke briefly of giving it to Macaulay, so the tennis court could become the school’s and the formal garden turned into a place for girls to play field hockey. He smiled a bit at the thought of a troop of girls playing field hockey across his lawns, but held off making a final decision. In the meantime, he took very little with him. He was accustomed to moving from one place to the next, he explained. He gave me the keys so I could sort through Grace’s things, which we would donate to the Fitch Crèche, and then he went to hide himself in the West. He had his cause, and gradually it seemed to sweep him up in its embrace, allowing him some respite, at least, from the anguish he suffered each day. Yes, he continued to blame himself. Years have gone by and have not relieved Tom of the burden of blaming himself.

I was luckier. I hadn’t been on Goat Island that day. I couldn’t hold myself immediately responsible for her well-being at the picnic. Nevertheless, night after night I imagined her death, the image of it twisting through my mind, my imagination supplying every detail. I never realized how fervent my imagination could be, until it filled in the feel of the wind and the warmth of the sun and the whiteness of her skin, as a doctor (who happened to be on a visit to the Falls) tried to resuscitate her on the shore. Soon I found as much blame to put upon myself as Tom did: I should have gone with her to the Falls that day, even though I hadn’t been invited and my presence would have been inappropriate. I should have disciplined her more strongly from the time she was little. I should have, I should have … Every day of her life played over in my mind as I searched for ways I might have saved her. But then again, she’d always been heedless, boundless, rushing from one place and one thought to the next. Tom and Margaret were reluctant to curb her, offering only love to restrain her. And my love for her, well, it was different from the love I gave my students. For them I held the firm stance, the rational evaluation, the commitment to make them sit still and listen. With Grace I could never muster such resolve.

Over the years I have come to believe that there was a certain inevitability about what happened to her. Her
being
created her death. Because of the way she was, she died the way she did. Accident followed character—the character which put her on the rocks to begin with. Accident followed society—the watching mothers who were afraid to offend the daughter of their husbands’ employer. And it also followed medical knowledge, which was so limited that a woman who suffered a miscarriage had a good chance of dying from it, and eventually her death destroyed the child she left behind. If Margaret had been at that party, Grace might have splashed in the water, but she never would have been allowed to spin on the rocks. But of course she would have had no need to spin on the rocks, for she did that only to create a fleeting vision of the woman she missed so much….

Such were the thoughts which coiled ceaselessly through my mind, leading always back to myself. What if I hadn’t given her to Margaret and Tom? What if I’d stayed with her in New York City among the faceless masses? Would we have done better, perhaps, living in a room attached to a schoolhouse on a prairie in Kansas, where I would call myself a widow? Or somewhere in the South, where I could have taught the children of freed slaves? Would we have done better alone together in Chicago or San Francisco or in any city wild enough and new enough that the only thing that mattered was what you could do in the here and now, not what you’d been or done in the past?

But of course I hadn’t made that decision. I’d done what had seemed best at the time—best for Grace, for the tiny infant that she was, helpless and vulnerable. Eventually I accepted that I was right to give her to Margaret and Tom; or at least I became reconciled to the fact that she’d had a good life in their care. Perhaps the problem was that the circumstances of her life were too easy. The horse, the art studio, her every desire met. If she’d had to work in a factory, as many girls did at her age—a textile factory, say, in the Carolinas—would she have had time to spin in circles to re-create her lost mother?

What is the measure of a child? Why does one survive and another not? What is the measure of a mother? How have I endured these years? I don’t know. But my nature has always been to keep going, to work on from day to day. Grace’s nature was riskier than mine. And so each morning the sunrise surprises me—that I am still here to see it, when Grace is not. On my bedroom windowsill I keep the spyglass she left behind. Every now and again I pick it up, as if by holding it I could hold her, as if by looking through it I could find, there in the distance, a note she’d placed for me upon her window.

In the immediate aftermath of Grace’s death, I, like Tom, had my cause to keep me moving forward. Apart from the funeral, I couldn’t take time off from school. Godmothers didn’t need to take time off, to go into retreat, to let mourning consume them. It was just as well that I was busy all day. Grace could fill my mind only at night, when I tried to fall asleep, or in the middle of the night, when suddenly I woke and remembered she was gone, or in the early morning, when the time came to rise. Each day I made myself get out of bed, get dressed, brew tea, and drink it because teachers, staff, and students were waiting for me, depending on me, asking me questions from eight A.M. until six P.M., awaiting the decisions I made for them—one decision after another, all through the day, pushing Grace’s face, her words, her being, out of my mind.

Even my friends couldn’t help me. Francesca visited, but I couldn’t confide to her the level of my grief. I never wanted to hear her say, “She was only your goddaughter, you’ve got to get over it.” Concealing the truth from Francesca became irrelevant, however, because within a few weeks she was gone: She’d managed to get Susannah released from the hospital and together they were on their way to Angkor Wat, the two of them transformed into female explorers attired in khaki skirts and followed by a line of bearers.

Franklin came to see me, and he too was unaware of my shattering grief. As usual he arrived in time for tea, which we had in my study because of the early autumn chill.

“I’m sorry about your goddaughter.”

“Thank you.” I kept my hands folded in my lap. I had begun doing that lately, so I could squeeze my hands together tightly, painfully, if ever I needed to stop myself from crying.

“She was always wild, though,” he observed. He shook his head in sadness.

“Yes.”

“I mean, at least she seemed to me—” He stared at me with perplexity, obviously trying to gauge my reaction, but I steeled myself to remain impassive—impassivity was now the mask I wore each day. “I meant no offense to her memory.”

“Of course not, Franklin,” I said generously. “You’re right, she was wild. Sometimes. Now then,” I said, clapping my hands together and briskly changing the subject, “what have you been doing?”

He sighed in apparent relief that our required commemoration of Grace was complete. “Well, frankly, I’ve been annoyed. I’d thought this would be the ideal time to publish all my revelations about Niagara, especially what with Sinclair forced out, but lo and behold the death of McKinley has rendered irrelevant all other news from the Niagara Frontier. There isn’t any more space in people’s minds right now, my editors inform me, for stories that include the dateline ‘Buffalo.’”

I paused to take this in. I was finding it slow going lately, to comprehend even the simplest explanations. “So what will you do?”

“Bide my time, I suppose. See if anything else strikes my fancy. Ingratiate myself with the new operators out at the power station, in case they have anything useful”—he raised his eyebrows meaningfully—“to offer me later on. Some of what I do depends on you.”

“It does?” I asked, feigning surprise, though I wasn’t at all surprised that he’d brought the conversation around to this.

“One of my cousins once told me that many girls make it a point of honor never to accept a man unless he’s proposed three times.”

“I’m not a girl.” I smiled ruefully to hear the outrage in my voice, and I realized that most likely I would never marry. Not Franklin, not anyone. I didn’t think I’d ever have the strength to open my soul to anyone to the extent that marriage, to me at least, required.

Smoothly Franklin shifted the conversation to some gossip he’d heard at a party, to the new topics he was considering for his next story (while not leaving Niagara behind for good, of course), and my interest waned. Soon I found I could barely register the words he said. Eventually he rose to leave, and I was grateful to be alone once more.

The first Monday of October, just two weeks after her death, my salon resumed, as it always did. I couldn’t postpone, to do so would reveal a period of mourning unseemly for a mere godmother. But I was glad of the salon, in the end. So many came to show me support. How many of the board came pretending not to know the truth about Grace I couldn’t tell, but what did it matter? They were there for me. Mr. Rumsey arrived early and stayed to the end, as did Franklin, who engaged Mr. Rumsey in passionate conversation about, of all things, the Rumsey herd. In November, the exposition land would be bulldozed and sold to developers to create upper middle class housing. Would those famed cattle never return to western New York for him to admire? Franklin wondered. Mr. Rumsey regarded Franklin with bemusement and confessed that the herd would remain at the Rumsey ranch in Wyoming, where it had found refuge during the exposition. From the way Franklin kept glancing to find me—to know where I was in the room at each moment—I couldn’t help but think this conversation was staged for my benefit. Was he trying to prove to me how well he fit in? I already knew. Were Franklin and Mr. Rumsey in some sort of collusion about me? After the levels of collusion I’d previously experienced, I wouldn’t let myself be bothered by that. Nonetheless I appreciated Franklin’s concern. He looked terribly handsome, almost exotic, beside Mr. Rumsey, that paragon of ministerly rectitude. I could recognize Franklin’s attractiveness while still knowing I wouldn’t act on it.