City of Light Page 5

“Ah, yes. I see what you mean.” He gave me a knowing look. “You’re very … sneaky, Louisa.”

  “Oh, indeed. I’m rather ashamed of all the things I’ve been able to give my students through the subterfuge of training them to be better wives.”

  Why did I confess that to him? I chastised myself immediately. Granting him the leverage of such knowledge certainly wouldn’t help me. That’s what came of engaging in repartee: I lost sight of my own self-interest.

  “You can’t fool me, Louisa. I’m sure your ‘sneakiness’ makes you more proud than ashamed. Once Margaret said—well, never mind about that.”

  “No, please. What did she say?”

  “Forgive me, Louisa, I promised myself I would never become the sort of person who spends his life quoting the dead.” Sadness filled his voice. “But this reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Margaret has the most beautiful clothes.” I ached, that he referred to her in the present tense. “Three closets full. The latest fashions, needless to say.”

  Margaret had always loved beautiful clothes, and she’d always chosen them wisely: items that accentuated her own grace and beauty rather than making her into a mannequin.

  “Grace uses the clothes for dress-up—with the results you’ve seen. But it’s a pity they should go to waste and turn unstylish. I was thinking—you’re about the same size as Margaret; maybe you’d like some of them.”

  I was so close to tears I couldn’t answer; he must have realized, for he continued without waiting for my response.

  “At home we always passed along the good clothes—and the not so good—when someone died. It was a bit of an honor, you know.” His Irish brogue was stronger now. “Uncle Rob’s Sunday suit going to little Tommy whether it fit him or not. Whether it needed patching or not.” He stopped, and I saw that he too was close to tears. “Anyway, if you’d like to come over and look through some afternoon, just send a note to Mrs. Sheehan. Any day is fine for her, I’m sure.”

  I said nothing. I could never take Margaret’s clothes. They would make me feel as if I’d shrouded myself with a ghost. Margaret, I thought, how could you have left us? Unmooring us both, and leaving us to drift alone.

  “I don’t feel ready, somehow,” he continued, staring at the darkened windows, “to give those beautiful things away to strangers.”

  There was a heavy knocking upon the front door. Grace bounded down the stairs to answer. Tom checked his watch. “Odd, having a visitor at this time of the night.” He turned his head to listen.

  We heard the sound of a low voice identifying himself, and Grace’s clear, high-pitched Irish accent: “Do you have a card, sir?” Apparently he did, and Grace brought it upstairs on a silver tray.

  “Excuse me, sir, ma’am.” She nodded at each of us. “A mister Karl Speyer to see the master.”

  “What?” Abruptly Tom stood. He took the card from the tray and studied it, as if doubting her words. “Excuse me, Louisa. This is”—he reached for the proper phrase—“an uncommon intrusion. Mr. Speyer is a business acquaintance. I’d planned to see him at a meeting at the club this evening. A problem may have come up that I must attend to immediately.” He moved toward the hall. “Thank you, Grace.” When he passed her, he touched her lightly on the shoulder.

  As he went down the stairs, she walked slowly to the banister and stared after him, looking bereft. I joined her, putting my hand on her shoulder in the same place he had touched. I shivered when I realized what I’d done and pulled my hand away.

  “Good evening, Speyer,” we heard Tom say.

  “Mr. Sinclair,” was the curt response.

  “No problems, I hope, to bring you here this evening?” Tom’s tone held an ironic cast. “Come into the parlor.” The parlor was a small room at the front of the house, next to the staircase and opposite the drawing room, which Margaret had designed for Tom to use when he conducted business meetings at home.

  Grace turned to me with an odd expression on her face, like an appeal, for what I didn’t know. “I wonder why he came here,” she said, playacting no longer.

  “He’s just here on some business,” I reassured her. “Something to do with the exposition, probably.” We heard the parlor door close.

  “But since Mother died, no one comes to see us, except our family, like you.” Silently I blessed her for calling me family.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. Everything’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not! We’re in mourning. No one is supposed to come here.” She began to wring her hands together, her knuckles reddening with the pressure. Tenderly I separated her hands by taking them within my own. I couldn’t understand why she was so upset.

  “That’s absurd.”

  Grace flinched at the sound of her father’s voice raised in anger. Now I remembered Karl Speyer’s name. He was one of the engineer heroes of the power station. Working for the Westinghouse company, headquartered in Pittsburgh, he designed the turbines and generators used in the powerhouses. He was among the men extolled in the newspapers for genius and courage in the harnessing of Niagara.

  “Don’t threaten me, Speyer.”

  Tom was hesitant and shy no more. All at once, for the first time since I’d met him, I caught a glimmer of another side of him entirely; a side kept out of the drawing rooms and libraries of his private life, the side that must have filled his work life each day, to bring him from where he’d been to where he was now.

  Speyer’s voice in response was deep, his words muffled.

  “Do you know what they’re talking about?” Grace asked, calmer now.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I do,” she said carefully.

  “Really? What?”

  She gave me a sly smile that I didn’t like. It made her look older than her years. “They’re talking about electricity. About how much electricity—”

  “God damn it, Speyer.”

  She paused, as if waiting for an echo, and then continued, dreamily, “Sometimes Mama and Papa would fight about electricity. I’d listen to them, just like I’m listening now. Except I’d be in my bedroom and they’d be in the library. Sometimes I’d put my ear to the floor, so I could hear them better. Sometimes Mama would cry.”

  I didn’t know that Margaret and Tom fought about Tom’s business. Although I realized I was being foolish, I felt hurt that Margaret had never shared this secret with me. Because of my jealousy, I spoke too hurriedly. “Grace, when people are married they often have disagreements about things. Then they talk about them, and sometimes even cry, and soon they understand each other better. They reach a compromise.”

  “You’re wrong. My parents only ever had fights about electricity, and they never made a ‘compromise.’” She dismissed the long word even as she showed pride in being able to use it.

  “Electricity seems like an odd thing to fight about.” I was torn, because I wasn’t certain I believed her—especially because Margaret had never mentioned such disagreements to me. Did people really fight about electricity? After a moment’s reflection, the notion seemed absurd. Nonetheless, I wanted to reassure Grace; to find a way to comfort her. “Didn’t your mother want to electrify the house?” I asked gently.

  “It wasn’t that. Mama thought Papa was trying to take too much water from Niagara Falls. ‘You won’t be happy until we’re picnicking on the precipice,’ she used to say.” Grace’s imitation of Margaret’s voice was uncanny, even though I’d never heard Margaret speak such a phrase. “I always think about that, because the words make something I learned at school: ‘picnicking on the precipice.’ That’s called—” She glanced at me for help.

  “Alliteration.”

  “Yes! Alliteration. ‘Picnicking on the precipice.’” She seemed unduly pleased with herself, and I must confess to a touch of anger—the same kind of anger Millicent Talbert must have felt when Grace began to throw snowballs immediately after threatening to kill herself.

  The anger led me to a blunder.

  “Grace, wh
en people have an argument, sometimes they say things simply for the sake of the argument. It’s called a ‘rhetorical device.’ Your mother didn’t actually mean that people would picnic on the riverbed at the Falls, she was just saying that to make a point. It’s an absurd idea anyway. No one could take that much water, it’s not possible to build a power station that big. You’d need a hundred power stations. Besides, the state has to grant your father’s company options to use the water; the government would never grant options to use all the water.”

  She gave me that look young people have when they conclude that adults are beyond stupid. “You don’t know what happened, do you, that made my mother die?”

  “Grace, I do know,” I said firmly.

  Last year, Margaret had become pregnant. Grace and I had discussed this before. Of course Grace didn’t know a crucial fact: that Margaret had not actually given birth to her, and this was a fact which I hoped Grace would never learn. Margaret was thirty-four, considered old to have a first child, and the pregnancy was difficult from the beginning. More than once Dr. Perlmutter had been called in when there was fear that she would lose the baby.

  “I was here, remember?” I asked more sympathetically. “Your mother gave birth to her baby before the baby was ready, and the baby died, and your mother got sick from it.” Even now, I choked at the memory. Margaret, dead in childbirth, like too many women I’d known through the years.

  “No, before then. Sometimes I think I made her die, Aunt Louisa. She loved me so much, and I—”

  Tears smarted in her eyes. I put my arms around her, and as if I’d finally given her the permission she’d been yearning for, she began to cry full out, leaning against me and reaching up to grip my shoulders.

  “Sweetheart.” Gently I stroked her hair. So this was the anguish that had caused her words to Millicent. “The sickness killed her. Her death had nothing to do with you. This happens so often. You know families at school where the mother has died, don’t you?”

  She nodded, even as her face was pressed against me.

  “And then the children always think their mother’s death is their fault—you can ask them at school. But it’s not their fault, Grace. Try to believe me. It’s not.”

  She pushed away a bit to look up at me. “But, Aunt Louisa, it wasn’t … I mean …” She struggled to speak.

  “Don’t worry, Grace. Everything’s going to be fine.” I squeezed her shoulders.

  “But I miss her so much.”

  “I do too. But I know she’d want us to be looking forward, to the future, not backward. She’d want us to try to be happy. Can you try to be happy for her?”

  “Are you happy, Aunt Louisa?” I couldn’t answer. “Are you?”

  “I’m not happy, Grace,” I admitted slowly, “but I’m doing my best. I’m trying to live the kind of life she’d want me to live.”

  Grace gazed off, thinking. “Well, I guess I’m trying to do what she wanted. I guess maybe she would be proud of me now.” Eagerly she looked at me. “Shall I tell you the reason?”

  Why did I have to speak at that moment? Why couldn’t I just listen to what she might have told me? I berate myself, over and over. I thought I understood. I thought I was comforting her. I thought I knew everything, but my imagination had failed me.

  “I already know. Because you’re a good girl and you work hard at school.”

  Abruptly Grace pulled out of my arms and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I hate electricity. Don’t you, Aunt Louisa? Joan of Arc didn’t have electricity.”

  “That’s true, Grace. I was just telling your father that Joan of Arc was one of my heroines, when I was your age. I used to pretend that I was Joan of Arc.”

  “You did? How wonderful,” she said with trembling glee. “I figured out today that all the people I ever loved to read about in history never had electricity. They always had candles. Queen Guinevere, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Lady Macbeth—but she’s not real, maybe we shouldn’t include her.”

  “Let’s include her, why not?” Grace was herself again, and a conviction surged through me that her demons had been defeated. Relief made me feel light-headed. “History says there may have been a Lady Macbeth, and besides, Shakespeare tells her story so powerfully, she might as well be real.”

  “That’s true,” Grace said excitedly. “I never thought about it that way. Did you know that we can make candles right here in the kitchen? Cook showed me how to do it. I’ll teach you. Come on.” She grasped my hand and began to run down the stairs, but I managed to stop her about halfway down.

  “Let’s wait here for your father to finish his meeting, Grace. That’s more polite. So he won’t have to wonder where we are.”

  “He won’t mind—”

  “We’ll stay here, Grace.”

  So we sat side by side on the stairs, and in the unwavering glow of electricity we enumerated our favorite characters from history and literature who had done quite well, thank you very much, without the lightbulb. This wasn’t the time for me to talk to her about conveyor belts or electric water pumps. My only job now was to love her.

  Suddenly she said, “I remember Mama and I used to sit right here on the stairs and wait for you to come visit us, Aunt Louisa. So we could open the door the second you got here. Did you know we waited?”

  I hadn’t known, but I did know that they were immediately at the door, always, to welcome me—drawing me in, showing me that I belonged. Even as a toddler, Grace on her chubby legs would open the big door for me, Margaret standing four steps behind her—Margaret in her exquisite dresses, with her porcelain skin and her openness to all the world, smiling with pride upon her little daughter.

  “We had ‘stair games’ we used to play,” Grace continued. “You know, finger games, with string. Like cat’s cradle. I can do the cup and saucer. You know, that’s the one where you …” Grace began to show me the moves in the air before dissolving into laughter at the intricate confusion of doing the moves without a string. “Mama always kept the string in her pocket, so we’d never have to look for it.” Unexpectedly she knit her brows. “I wonder whatever happened to that string? I wonder if it’s still in her pocket. In the dress those men put on her when they came to—” Grace gasped. I reached to embrace her, but she shook me aside, tossing up her head. “We can make another cat’s cradle string! I’ll show you how!”

  At that moment, Karl Speyer came out of the parlor. We could see him through the posts of the banister. He was a big man with a thick dark beard, broad-shouldered, dressed in a fur hat and a bulky coat with a fur collar. He never looked up at us, so I didn’t see his eyes. Maybe that’s why I had the impression of the type of man whom a woman would be frightened to notice behind her on the street after dark. He let himself out of the house, closing the door gently.

  Many minutes passed before Tom left the parlor. Grace was caught up explaining other finger games to me and didn’t realize how long her father was alone. The telephone was in the parlor; most likely he was using it. When finally he opened the parlor door and walked toward the stairs, he looked weary and preoccupied. But when he saw Grace giggling on the steps, her elbow resting on my knee, he stopped and smiled. He and I exchanged a happy glance, as adults so often do when they’re caught in a moment’s realization of how extraordinary children are. He began to walk up the stairs toward us.

  “Everything all right?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Oh, I suppose so. My employee Mr. Speyer has a flair for the dramatic. And he seems to think he can get the better of me if he just keeps repeating his point.” For an instant Tom paused, glancing aside at the scrollwork on the banister posts. “Well, I’m sorry you had to hear our little argument. Best if we all just put it out of our minds.” He stopped before Grace. “Now then, my little girl, have you finished your homework?”

  “It’s too hard. The math is too hard.”

  “Come on.” I rubbed her knee. “I’ll review it with you for a minute.” I stood and took her hands to pull he
r up. She looked pleased at the prospect of this unexpected treat. “But don’t tell any of your friends. I can’t have all the children asking the headmistress to help them with their homework!” We went upstairs, and soon after, the housekeeper returned and Tom left for his meeting at the club.

  And I walked home alone, the streets alive with snowflakes that glimmered in the yellow haze of our electric streetlamps.

  • • •

  The next afternoon, I stood in the school’s front office pondering the disturbing events of the night before. Speyer’s unexpected visit, the ensuing argument … Tom’s world and, although I could hardly credit it, Tom himself seemed somehow fraught with menace. By contrast, the school was like a haven of peace and predictability. Here I could offer my students, and myself and my colleagues, a respite from the perils outside. Here nothing mattered except learning and camaraderie.

  Nonetheless, I had to give my girls the ability to deal with the challenges that would one day confront them. I’d just finished teaching the seniors a weekly class pompously titled “Philosophy of Everyday Life.” There really was no other title for it, however, because we surveyed the history of philosophy with a practical goal: the discussion of moral standards and of the ethics by which the girls lived their lives. “All choices are ethical ones, opportunity and responsibility are inextricably linked”—those were the words written across the top of the blackboard. The class was my primary means of social subversion, and teaching it left me drained.

  I was alone in the office for the moment, albeit in the company of a marble bust, in the Italian Renaissance style, of a woman called “Modestia.” She stared at me with a come-hither candor that wasn’t strictly modest. A gift from a benefactor, she couldn’t be put in a closet. I much preferred the Nike of Samothrace—the Winged Victory—who urged me to glory from her pedestal in the corner. The Winged Victory was quite fashionable; it seemed no home was complete until the Nike had been placed upon her pedestal, as she had been in the Sinclair library.

  Modestia and the Winged Victory: two far different views of womanhood, and how were we to steer between them? That was the dilemma I faced every day in the struggle to turn girls into women, to give them the confidence, knowledge, and inner strength to face up to the challenges outside. Keep your rudder true. Make your lives count. These were the precepts I tried to instill in the girls every morning when we gathered for chapel, the school organist guiding our procession with Bach or Handel. Undoubtedly I was overearnest in my morning messages, but how else to inspire the girls if not in terms of the ideal?