City of Light (3 page)

But Tom wasn’t the only one devastated by Margaret’s loss. Grace and her mother had been unusually close, and for weeks Grace had seemed dazed, going through the motions of daily life with little awareness of the details around her. I too had felt desolate. Struggling with my own loss, with the emptiness inside me which once had been filled by Margaret’s warm, joyful laugh, I hadn’t been as precisely attuned to Grace as I would have been otherwise. I’d seen her at school, I’d invited her out on the weekends; observing her slowly regain her equanimity, I’d gone no further.

That had been my mistake. Today I’d checked with Grace’s teachers, who reported her to be “sensitive.” I’d asked for specifics: abrupt shifts in mood, argumentativeness, a tendency to run away when challenged. Her teachers had responded to her actions with sympathy rather than strictness, as I myself would have reacted under the circumstances. Next I needed to consult with her father. This morning I’d sent Thomas Sinclair a note at his office, telling him to expect me at this hour. I opened the gate and made my way up the slippery flagstone path.

Grace herself answered my knock. She filled the doorway like an angel, the brightness of the hall making a halo around her. She wore a costume of scarves and shawls draped over one of her mother’s tennis dresses.

In a life like mine, there are not many people to love. I loved Grace Sinclair.

“I raced from the third floor, Aunt Louisa.” Breathing deeply, she gave me a quick hug and then curtsied with a teasing smile. “Good evening, Miss Barrett,” she said in an Irish accent, acting out the role of an upper-class maid. “The master asks that you come upstairs to the library, if you please.”

“Thank you,” I replied, playing along with her. She grinned and beckoned me inside.

The hall was brilliant with a steady, glowing light. The sliding doors into the drawing room and dining room were open, and there too this odd light prevailed, revealing every detail: the classical pillars and coffered ceiling in the drawing room; the mahogany wainscoting and intricately carved mantelpiece in the dining room; and beyond, the willowy plantings and stone fountain of the glassed conservatory.

But Grace was oblivious to the peculiar brilliance of the light and was already making her way up the wide, curving staircase. I hurried to follow, smiling as I always did at the delicate statue of Hebe, Greek goddess of youth, which stood in the nook on the landing. The Tiffany stained-glass window above the statue was dark at this hour, but I remembered its woodland landscape of greens and yellows and the stream meandering into distant hills.

Suddenly, as I turned on the landing to begin the second flight of stairs, I realized how the house had changed. Instead of flickering gaslight, an electric glow as steady as day filled the rooms.

I stopped, leaning against the banister to look. To gawk. I had never been in a house lit by electricity. The change was—miraculous. I’d heard that in cities like New York and Chicago, the rich had been showing off their wealth by installing steam generators and electrifying their homes for the sake of novelty. But here in Buffalo, the old families had no need for novelty, and the nouveaux riches emulated the old. Compared to this, the other homes I visited were shadowy and claustrophobic. Here the air itself seemed clear, vibrant, and somehow invigorating. All at once I knew why: Gaslight consumed the oxygen in a room; electricity did not.

Knowing that Thomas Sinclair was the director of the power station at Niagara, I realized the light around me came not from a steam-powered generator at the back of the house, but from the lines of the Niagara Frontier Power Company. These lines already carried electricity from the Falls to light the city’s streetlamps and to operate its streetcars. I felt the awe of witnessing magic: Thomas Sinclair had turned water into light.

“Grace, when did your father bring electricity into the house?”

Six or seven steps above me, she turned. All at once she looked like Margaret—the tilt of her head, the inquiring gaze, the way she leaned into the polished banister, with its scrollwork posts as if posing for a portrait. The resemblance was like a knife in me, reminding me of the companionship and happiness Margaret had offered me each day from the moment we met.

“That was one of the first things Papa did, after Mother—” She stopped. Her wide-set eyes seemed to go blank.

“Grace?”

She stared past me, her face a deadened mask.

“Grace?”

Startled, she stepped back, then recovered. “And will you be wanting some tea, then, ma’am?”

I had been away from this house too long. I felt my absence with a cutting sense of regret. Margaret would have expected more from me.
I
would have expected more from me. But where Grace was concerned, my confidence faltered. That was the problem with love: It made me doubt myself.

She continued up the stairs. “Mrs. Sheehan and the others are out at a
wake,”
she said, using the quasi-ghoulish emphasis typical of her age. Mrs. Sheehan was the housekeeper. “I’m looking after things for her until seven.” She ushered me to the library. “Will you wait here, please, ma’am, while I see if the master is ready to receive you?”

She raced down the hall while I stood at the library door, watching. “Papa, Papa, Aunt Louisa is here!” she called. She knocked on a door at the end of the hall and went in without waiting for a reply.

Grace had always been boisterous, because no one had ever curbed her except to the limits necessary for her safety. She wasn’t proper, or prim, or demure, or any of the other adjectives young ladies were supposed to be. She was both seen and heard, and openly cherished by her parents. The gossiping ladies of society said, disparagingly, that Tom and Margaret indulged her. They were indulgent, in the sense that they simply loved her, as odd as that would be in some of the other homes of the neighborhood, where the children were polished and groomed by nurses and nannies and presented to their parents for inspection once a day. Even more odd (according to the dictates of society), Tom and Margaret actually enjoyed spending time with Grace. Margaret organized her day around Grace’s school schedule, using the housekeeper only for an occasional pickup or drop-off. Now and again I’d wondered whether Margaret and Grace spent too much time together, preventing Grace from learning how to be alone. However, in the context of the parental neglect which I typically saw, Margaret’s excess was forgivable—especially in light of the secret of Grace’s birth.

Apart from the doctor, I was the only person who knew that Tom and Margaret had adopted Grace. Often I wondered which other of my students were adopted, for surely some were. But all was kept hidden. After more than a few years of childless marriage, Margaret had feigned pregnancy when she learned that a child from a good family might be available for adoption. She’d worn padding and undertaken a confinement. Dr. Perlmutter had visited her regularly—
and
collected a fee for the nonexistent delivery, just to make everything appear normal.

I had been the intermediary, telling Margaret and Tom that because of my work, I was in a position to hear about such things. I had been the one who gave the assurances that Grace was from a good family, a family in which a properly raised daughter had been improperly supervised for one brief moment during which she’d made a devastating mistake. If this mistake became known, the girl would have no future—no possibility of marriage, no opportunity for college or work. No life, in short. Such was the punishment society exacted.

Margaret did a great deal of charity work and had enormous compassion. But in one of the—to me—incomprehensible hypocrisies of her class, she never considered taking an infant from the orphanage. Of course with a child from the orphanage, secrecy would have been impossible. There would have been forms to fill out. Legalities. There would have been hushed rumors and endless speculation about the infant’s true parentage. As the child grew up, he or she would be forever judged by the community as a product of the poorhouse. But with Grace there were no legalities. No rumors. Only a good family, eager to forget. Grace could be presented to society as Tom and Margaret’s true daughter. As she grew, becoming more and more like Margaret, copying her mannerisms, her tone of voice, her easy laugh, Grace did indeed become the true daughter that Tom and Margaret wanted.

Grace emerged from the bedroom and skipped back to me. “The master says will you forgive him, he returned late from the power station and he will join you as soon as he changes. Please make yourself at home in the library. I will leave you now, ma’am, having too much homework to dawdle!”

After a quick curtsey, she turned and ran up the stairs to her third-floor rooms. In most houses of this kind, the third floor was devoted to billiards and ballrooms, but not here. Grace had the entire floor to herself, divided into nursery, playroom, and art studio. If she hadn’t learned how to be alone when her mother was alive, she must surely be learning now. I ached for her, even as I ached within myself, yet at this moment at least, she appeared as rambunctious as ever.

After her footsteps ceased and I could imagine her at her desk, I went into the library. This was the room where Margaret and I had always sat together, Grace playing at our feet. There was only one light on, the lamp on Tom’s desk. The bulb was faint enough to give an impression of the gaslight I remembered. The room was exactly the same: the worn Persian carpets, the glass-doored bookcases, Grace’s miniature rocker, the ceiling with its quatrefoil design. Newspapers and magazines, folded back to mark the articles Tom was reading, were spread on the table. Papers covered his desk. He often worked at home. In the far corner atop a half-pillar was a plaster cast of the Nike of Samothrace. Scattered on the carpet between the two tall windows were Grace’s pastel chalks and a pile of her drawing paper, untouched by the maid, a sign of Grace’s unusually immediate presence in the daily life of the family.

I might have been waiting for Margaret instead of her husband. A chill passed through me. Frightened, I stepped away from the shadows, for Margaret
was
here, in the portrait that hung between the windows: Margaret at the time of her marriage, her dark hair pulled back, a few curls escaping at her temples as they always did, her eyes deep brown, at her neck the five-strand pearl choker she always wore in the evening. Her face held the bright, hopeful look of young womanhood.

When I came to Macaulay as a teacher, Margaret had graduated but was staying on to complete a college-entrance curriculum (not a standard offering before my time). I tutored her in Greek and Latin. Although I was several years older than she, we became friends. Like me, she had lost both her parents, and when we met she was living with her grandmother. Margaret was a Winspear, a member of the city’s elite. Aided by a large private income, a lighthearted rebellion filled her, an irreverence which seemed to wake me up after the difficulties I’d faced upon my father’s death. With her encouragement, I transformed myself into what I thought of as a “colorful character,” in Oriental shawls and velvet hats. I cut a fine figure through society, I liked to think—tall and slender, blonde and bold. The Macaulay girls emulated me; they thought me beautiful, then.

Margaret’s grandmother permitted her to study as a way to fill the years before marriage, but when Margaret was actually accepted at Vassar, old Mrs. Winspear decided that she had to put a stop to such scholastic frivolity. She took Margaret on a world tour. This wasn’t unusual: Many Macaulay girls enjoyed the Grand Tour before their marriages. However, Margaret and her grandmother eschewed Europe, where they had both traveled before, and went instead to the East—to Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, Malaya. They spent five months in India, visiting maharajahs and walking in the foothills of the Himalayas accompanied by a troop of Sherpa guides and bearers.

When they returned, Mrs. Winspear had her victory: Margaret no longer felt a need for college. However she was now in control of her fortune, and she committed an act of rebellion more profound than going to college: She fell in love with Thomas Sinclair and chose him to be her husband. Sinclair was Irish, and he’d been raised a Catholic—two marks against him in her family’s eyes. He’d also been born into poverty of a desperate kind. As a boy he’d worked in a glass bottle factory in Belfast. He’d been a “take-out boy,” using tongs to take the half-finished bottles out of the molds and carrying them to the next step in the glassmaking process. He’d come to America alone as a teenager and risen by his wits, the gossips said—and the way they said it was not entirely complimentary.

While working at a railroad telegraph office in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Tom caught the attention of John J. Albright, a well-born Scranton native whose railroad associations would soon bring him to Buffalo. Albright paid Tom’s tuition to his own alma mater, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where Tom studied engineering. Before his fascination with hydroelectric power, Tom made a fortune in the design and construction of railroad bridges. Tom was invited to Buffalo at Albright’s urging by the private consortium of businessmen funding the construction of the power station.

Money triumphed, of course, and Tom and Margaret’s union was finally accepted by the Winspears and thus all of Buffalo society. Tom shrugged off his Catholicism, and they were married at Trinity Church, the epicenter of the Episcopal establishment.

I liked Tom from the moment I met him, mostly because he made Margaret happy, but also because there was a focus and forthrightness about him that was missing in most young men (at least in my experience). Self-educated as a boy, he was well-read and displayed an enthusiasm for knowledge that was often lacking in those whose education came easily. He was purposeful while still being reflective; he was generous, funny, and welcoming. Never once did he object to the closeness Margaret and I enjoyed.

I often wondered if Tom and Margaret were aware of the disapproving whispers about them. If they were, they didn’t care. They forged a marriage of rebellion. They gave up the endless round of dinner parties that marked formal society. Tom threw himself into the technological challenges of his position. Instead of being a hostess, Margaret made a commitment to settlement house work, teaching English to immigrant children and marketable skills like sewing to their impoverished mothers. To me she remained a loyal and supportive friend.