City of Light (39 page)

“You were wonderful. You were a heroine! A heroine for all of us! I’m so proud of you. All our friends are so proud of you!”

Looking aside in her modest way, Millicent seemed pleased.

“I’ll always remember the day you were a heroine!” Mrs. Talbert exclaimed. Silently I blessed her, for she had found precisely the way to redeem all that had happened.

That day, Millicent slept on and off, and when she was awake Mrs. Talbert or I read to her from Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
. In the late afternoon we helped her to dress, and slowly, with our help, she made her way downstairs. At first she looked around in bewilderment, as if she didn’t recognize her own home: the vase of peonies on the drawing room table, the tree branches tapping the long windows. She ran her fingers along the carved backs of the wooden chairs. At five o’clock we sat in the drawing room for afternoon tea, including cucumber sandwiches and little round cakes. Millicent ate in small, furtive bites. She seemed exhausted, which was natural of course and relieved my mind precisely because it was natural.

At about six-thirty, as we sat by the windows enjoying one last cup of tea, an impressive brougham drove up. Miss Love emerged. She regarded the house with narrowed eyes, then strode up the walkway. She banged on the front door and pushed past the astounded servant to find us.

Without greeting Mrs. Talbert or Millicent, she announced, “Louisa, you must come with me.”

Mercifully she was no longer attired as the Spirit of France.

CHAPTER XXIV

E
ven as the brougham drove away and I turned back to look, the neighbors came silently to the Talbert house. They must have been waiting all day for me to disappear. Miss Love and I drove through the neighborhood in the early evening glow of this long summer day. We passed the plain, brick Michigan Street Baptist Church, where Mary Talbert did much of her work. Once the church had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and men and women slept on its padded pews and ate in its cellar. I felt a rush of optimism—for my friendship with Mary Talbert, for my own future.

“Don’t upset yourself, Louisa. We’ll find out who did this.”

Startled, I turned from the window to face Miss Love. “I wasn’t upset.”

“You can’t fool me, the way you were looking out the window. I can read your mind like an open book.”

“Oh.” Worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep the irony out of my voice, I said nothing more.

“Mr. Rumsey has sources.” She seemed to swish the word around in her mouth like fine wine. “Don’t tell the Talberts,” she cautioned, placing a restraining hand on my arm. “It’s not that I don’t trust them, but their acquaintances may not be—well, I’m sure you know what I mean.”

Feigning innocence: “No, what?”

“My dear Louisa. The fact is, Mr. Rumsey is giving this matter his full attention. He told me so this afternoon.”

“He visited you?”

“I visited him. To learn what took him from the party. Dexter keeps no secrets from me!” She laughed complacently. Dexter Rumsey and Maria Love had been children together, romping on Delaware Avenue when much of it was still forest and farmland. “I imagine we’ll be hearing shortly about an unfortunate accident befalling an unfortunate man or men. A slip along the slippery shore of the Niagara River, for example,” she said with a disturbing hint of glee.

“What are you saying? You believe Mr. Rumsey would order people murdered—I don’t believe it!” Even as I protested, an image of Speyer and Fitzhugh came into my mind.

“My dear girl.” Again she placed a restraining hand on my arm. “I was only joking. Your night’s adventures have made you sensitive. But don’t you wish to see justice done for young Miss Talbert? You know very well there would be no justice for her in a public court. And I’m sure you don’t want her name in the newspapers. I certainly don’t want the Crèche publicly involved with this—and it is involved, don’t forget, since she was walking home from the Crèche when she was … taken.” Miss Love wrapped her large, gnarled hand around my upper arm. “I will not have my life’s work besmirched. I’m grateful the Talberts saw fit to keep this matter private,” she hissed. “Dexter’s initial thought was to order a full police investigation—so he told me today. In this case the Talberts had more sense.”

She let go of my arm. We rode in silence while the brougham turned onto Ferry Street, crossed Main and Linwood, and finally came to Delaware. As we drove up the avenue, the gardens and mansions resplendent around us, she said with reluctance, “Louisa, the time has come that I must warn you of something. Dexter doesn’t know that I’m warning you, and I’m putting myself at risk by doing so. Nevertheless, it must be done. And I must rely on you to keep the matter
entre nous.”

I looked at her quizzically.

“You are poised on the brink of disaster.”

I laughed at her melodrama. “I am?”

We turned onto Chapin Parkway. “Beck,” she called to her driver, “continue to Lincoln, circumnavigate the park and the exposition.” In a lower voice, she repeated, relishing the word, “Disaster.”

“Miss Love, with all due respect, you must be exaggerating.” I spoke lightly, indeed without due respect. But after missing a night’s sleep, I had lost the ability to make myself tiptoe around her.

She glared. “You think it’s a joke,” she said quietly. “But it isn’t.”

With grand irony I replied, “Of course not.” I felt giddy. Warnings in a carriage—whatever was she thinking of?

She didn’t like my tone. “I know you young women make fun of me. Don’t think I don’t know it,” she said bitterly. “But you don’t realize how hard I had to fight to get what I wanted. It took years of fighting to be allowed to set up the Crèche. Years of fighting to get a woman like you named headmistress of Macaulay, to secure architectural commissions for Louise Bethune and Francesca Coatsworth. All in secret, this fighting, all in the background. Small steps, one at a time, that you and your friends take for granted, acting as if women were always allowed to enter the public domain. But we weren’t—when I was young, we weren’t. I couldn’t fulfill a quarter of my dreams, not a tenth. Instead I had to spend my time charming and cajoling pompous fools like Ansley Wilcox to grant me ‘favors.’ I had to manipulate even Dexter, to make him think everything was his idea and pray he wouldn’t realize. So don’t laugh at me, Louisa Barrett.”

Feeling like a schoolgirl, I inched away from her. “I’m sorry, Miss Love.”

“Of course you are,” she said sardonically. She gazed dully out the carriage window as we circled the exposition. “I wasn’t always the wrinkled old lady you see now. I was young once too. Once I was the belle of the ball, not just pretending to be. Not just trying to steal the attention from the girls.”

Were there tears in her eyes?

“Once I led the dances; once I gave the winner’s cup for the sleigh races in the park. Once I even thought I would marry; I dreamed of being carried off by a shining knight—what girl doesn’t?” she added derisively. She turned to me. “I will confess to you, Louisa, because you’ll understand: I’ve known temptation. I’ve felt passion. I’ve punished myself for years, for minutes of indiscretion.”

I studied her wrinkled skin, her ever-bright, flashing eyes. I’d never heard even a rumored hint of what she was telling me.

“I’m your friend, Louisa,” she said with sudden, gentle reassurance. “For all these years I’ve protected you. Dexter and I, we’ve protected you. We’ve watched you develop and mature. And you’ve fulfilled our expectations. More than fulfilled our expectations. We’ve congratulated ourselves for choosing you. This community takes care of its own—have no fears on that score. You serve us well, you become one of us. Only this afternoon, Dexter said to me, you are one of us. You undertook a great sacrifice for us.”

Cautiously I said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Of course not.” She patted my leg as if I were a child. “That’s as it should be. That’s why I’m giving you this warning, heedless as you are.” She paused, staring vacantly out the window. “They are planning a comeuppance for Thomas Sinclair. One that he deserves.” She didn’t look at me.

“I beg your pardon?”

She gave me a shrewd, evaluating glance. “Let us say they are displeased with his ambitions for the power station.”

“His ambitions? Whatever do you mean?” Surely, I thought, the directors must be pleased by his plans to “waste” no water.

She smiled thinly. “I don’t want you caught in the whirlpool, shall we say, when it comes. Who knows how things will turn out in the end? I fear they’ve met their match in Thomas Sinclair.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“Men,” she said, spitting out the words. “Who else? Thinking they control the world.”

“What men?”

“Dear, dear Louisa. Disingenuousness does not become you.”

So John Albright had once told me. Why did everyone assume I knew their secrets?

“You should extricate yourself from any … entanglements, as quickly as possible.” She studied me for a moment. When she continued, she was completely matter-of-fact, without a hint of emotion, but she didn’t meet my eyes. Like Patty Milburn, she gazed slightly over my shoulder. “And if you don’t, or can’t, rest assured that I shall look after Grace for you.”

I couldn’t breathe; there was a terrible pressure against my chest. All I could say was, “Pardon?”

“You need have no fear on that score. I will treat her as my own.”

She couldn’t know the truth.

“Grace will live at 184 and enjoy every advantage—as she should, given her true parentage. Her elevated heritage.” Her face took on a look of smug complacency that terrified me. It was
impossible
that she should know the truth. And yet seemingly she did.

I called to Beck, “Please stop. I wish to get out.” I couldn’t listen to any more of this. “Please. Stop.” He began to slow the horses.

Miss Love looked startled and displeased, caught off-guard. “Where are you going?”

“It’s hot. I’ll walk home.”

“You can’t do that. Beck, continue,” she called.

“Beck,
please
. I am unwell.”

At this—the threat of a passenger being sick in his brougham—Beck did stop, promptly pulling over at the curb. With Maria Love’s useless protests surrounding me, I got out and hurried away. Away from her warnings, and her knowledge.

In the warm, humid evening air, strands of damp hair clung to my cheeks. I was trembling. Struggling to steady my hands, to control my breathing, I looked around. Slowly the scene came into focus: I was near the exposition’s Lincoln Parkway gate. People were bustling around me, alive with expectation. I followed them, separate from them and yet united with them, passing into the scene as if entering a painting. Accompanied by the brash American optimism of a John Philip Sousa march from the bandstand, I walked down to the park lake.

Now, nearing seven-thirty, the sun was low in the sky, lending everything in its path a luminous precision. The water bore the reflections of trees and rowboats, of playful birds and Spanish turrets. Well-dressed children with their stockings off threw cake crumbs to eager ducks along the shore. The boaters cavorted, splashing on the lake where Karl Speyer had drowned … how many months ago now? I had to pause, and carefully count to make up for the lack of sleep that set my mind adrift. I was floating; all my days, floating like a mist on the water. Five months, it was. Karl Speyer, the engineer-hero; no evidence, no hint of him remained here.

As I stood unmoored with my thoughts, the sky gradually turned ominous; dark clouds scudded across the horizon, sheeting the sky with an eerily greenish gray. The air itself pressed against me, as if I were breathing clouds. All at once the wind whipped up, lightning cut the sky, and with the thunder came the rain, torrential as a waterfall rippling in waves across the surface of the lake. The rain drenched me and I shivered. Then just as fast as it had arrived the wind died away and the rain became a gentle, soothing wash. In the boats on the water, men and women, young and old, lifted their faces and let the rain run down their cheeks, cooling them after the day’s heat. I too turned my face to the rain, the precious rain that washed away at last the remembered stench of the harbor and the haunted faces along the waterfront.

The boaters, in a precarious position during a lightning storm, seemed not to understand what was happening—as if they, like me, had entered a dreamscape. After several minutes of suspended animation, they began to realize their predicament and to row fiercely toward the shore, some laughing, others anxiously counting the strokes that would lead them to the safety of the boathouse. I too awoke to the fact that I was beside a tree in a lightning storm, and I took shelter beneath the boathouse’s second-floor balcony. On the broad, formal staircase leading to the lake, the water level slowly rose, first one step, then two, then three.

And so the lazy storm rested upon us for about an hour. I stayed where I was, watching the night fall. Gradually I perceived that something was different. What was it? I looked around in confusion, and then I knew: The darkness was absolute. The electricity was off. The goddess atop the Electric Tower had no power, the Pan-Am’s gaudy rooftops were invisible. We were taken back to the days before our hope.

The rain stopped. A warm mist, the consistency of floating dew-drops, hung in the air. People began to emerge from their makeshift shelters to feel their way home in the darkness. Several exposition workers appeared with emergency lanterns to light their way.

“A lightning bolt at the power station,” someone asserted with great authority.

“Happens all the time,” someone else affirmed with equal confidence.

I waited for the crowd to depart, wanting time alone. I was still in my “costume,” I realized with a start: my schoolmarm’s silk dress soaked, the skirts clinging, outlining my legs and articulating my body, a camouflage no longer.

The water smelled fragrant as I walked to the lake. What Maria Love had said in the carriage … could she know the truth? But no one knew apart from Tom, who’d guessed only because he saw Grace every day. Certainly some people knew smidgeons of the truth: Gilder, with his slick arrogance, who’d taken me to Cleveland; my acquaintance at the settlement house in New York, who’d found a doctor for me; Dr. Perlmutter, who’d brought the infant Grace to Buffalo at my instigation. Each of them knew a thread of truth (even Tom guessed at only one thread) but no one could weave the threads together into a complete picture; no one except me. I had to believe this—I couldn’t survive otherwise. I searched my mind: There had to be a rational explanation for every one of Miss Love’s pronouncements.
Rest assured that I shall look after Grace for you:
I was Grace’s godmother, therefore I had a sacred duty toward her, especially after Margaret’s death; Miss Love was referring to my position as godmother. Grace’s
elevated heritage:
Through Margaret, Grace was a Winspear, undoubtedly quite elevated enough for Miss Love, especially when compared to Tom’s background. And what of Miss Love’s words about a comeuppance for Tom? Well, Miss Love had always spoken disparagingly of Tom and would be quick to exaggerate anything that might threaten his position. Most likely Tom was already aware of the dangers she alluded to, which were probably embedded in Albright’s message, as well—the message Tom had laughed off. With every inhalation of the sweet, vaporous air, I felt my confidence growing, my equanimity returning, until finally I had convinced myself: Maria Love knew nothing about Tom or Grace. I could return home; I could resume my life.