City of Light

by Lauren Belfer

  I glanced out the tall, wide windows toward the elm-tree forest of Bidwell Parkway. If I could walk through the mullioned glass, I would enter a winter woodland of dryads and nymphs—a chilly Midsummer Night’s Dream, filled with intrigues as complicated as those among the girls right here.

  I smiled at myself, for my fantasies, and realized once again that I loved this school. Like Grace, it was among the few things I could love. I loved the leaf-patterned shadows the sunlight threw across the walls; the hidden library nooks where girls went to read and dream; the stained-glass window at the stairway landing of young women walking boldly into the future; the long hallways, their wainscoting carved into birds and beasts; the Elizabethan dining hall with its oaken tables and high, arched ceiling; the flagstoned central courtyard with its fountain, its urns of flowers, its marble benches, covered now with ice.

  This was my home. I had a family here, a family I myself had created. The faculty was a band of scholars; the staff approving and supportive; the girls forever themselves. A sense of belonging filled me and held me close and grateful. Someone opened the front door and the scent of cinnamon rushed through the air. Mrs. Schreier, the school secretary, baked cinnamon sugar cookies at home and brought in a fresh batch every few days, placing them on a large platter on the reception desk just outside the office. Whenever anyone opened the front door, the incoming wind carried the scent through the halls, enveloping students, staff, faculty—and me. When I was away, the smell of cinnamon was always a wistful reminder of home.

  After checking the afternoon mail, I was about to return to my own office upstairs, when a newspaper on Mrs. Schreier’s desk caught my eye. Was It an Accident? was the headline blazoned across the sensational Buffalo Evening News. I hated the yellow press, but I couldn’t resist reading such papers when they came my way. Reaching for the newspaper, I was smug enough to believe the incident in question was indeed an accident. No doubt tomorrow’s edition would declare this to be so. When I opened the paper to read the story, however, I was shocked. Engineer Hero Dies, read the inside banner. The accompanying article took up the entire page:

  World-famous Karl Speyer, chief engineer of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company as well as the Niagara Frontier Power Company, was visiting the Queen City from Pittsburgh to meet with leaders of the hydroelectric power project….

  On and on went the article, describing what was known of Speyer’s visit to the city, his professional credentials, his work for Westinghouse, his wife and two children in Pittsburgh, the shock and grief with which George Westinghouse received the news.

  I paused to catch my breath and then read on: As best as the reporters could ascertain, Speyer had attended an evening meeting at the Buffalo Club with the leaders of the hydroelectric power project, including Mr. Francis Lynde Stetson of New York City, chief legal counsel to Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, and Mr. Frederick Krakauer, Mr. Morgan’s local representative. From what I understood about the financing of the power station’s construction, J. Pierpont Morgan was by far the chief investor, although the consortium included such names as Astor, Vanderbilt, Biddle, and Rothschild, as well as several local men of great wealth. Tom (undoubtedly an investor as well) was the working director, answerable only to the consortium—which for practical purposes meant Mr. Morgan himself.

  According to the article, after the meeting Speyer refused offers of a lift back to his hotel. He said that he was going to walk—not unreasonable, for the Iroquois Hotel, at Main and Eagle, was less than a mile away. He needed some air, he said. But instead of returning to the hotel, he went to the park. The time was after eleven P.M.

  Where was I when this was happening? I thought back. At home. Asleep, after reading in bed. Yes, by then I was asleep, when several blocks away a man I had seen that evening was dying.

  The men who’d been at the club reported that Speyer was abstemious in his personal habits. I understood this to mean he wasn’t drunk when he set off on his midnight walk. The newspaper considered the possibility that he hadn’t walked at all but had hailed a cab when he was out of sight of his colleagues to take him on the two-and-a-half-mile journey to the Delaware Park lake. The driver was asked to step forward, if such were the case.

  A diagram showed the trail of his footprints across the iced-over surface of the lake, the weak spot where he fell through, and the place some five or six feet beyond the hole where his body had been discovered, contorted beneath the ice. The reason his body was discovered so soon, the News explained, was that a Mr. Jacob Hoffman, the manager of the boathouse restaurant, had been standing at a second-story window of his domain enjoying a morning cup of cocoa when he saw the footprints, the hole in the ice, and the suspicious bulky darkness just beyond. He telephoned the police immediately.

  The News speculated about whether Speyer had drowned or died of exposure; doctors offered varied opinions, awaiting the autopsy. The paper also raised several obvious questions: Why was Speyer walking across the ice in the middle of the night? Was anyone with him or following him? Did he see the posted danger signs and choose to ignore them? Thus far, the News reported, the police had discovered no indication of foul play.

  The report concluded with this comment:

  “His death is a tragedy for the development of hydroelectric power throughout the United States,” Thomas Sinclair, director of the Niagara Frontier Power Co., told the News this morning. “I was privileged to work closely with him for many years. We enjoyed a pleasurable reunion at the Buffalo Club last night. I hadn’t seen him in several months. He was like a brother to me, and I shall miss him,” said the shocked Mr. Sinclair.

  Quickly I folded the newspaper and put it away. For what possible reason had Tom neglected to mention Speyer’s visit to his home? Why had he lied? What possible reason could there be to lie, except some personal involvement? Had Tom used the telephone in the parlor after Speyer’s visit, as I’d assumed last night, and if so, whom had he called? To make what arrangements?

  Even as these questions riveted my thoughts, another came too, one more personally pressing: Surely Tom knew that I would read his lie in the newspapers. Now I, as well as he, carried the burden of this secret.

  CHAPTER III

  If Frederick Law Olmsted had been a painter, Buffalo would have been his canvas. Beginning in 1868, he created in the city a vast system of parks linked by forested roadways wider than the boulevards of Paris. Olmsted had come to Buffalo at the invitation of a group of civic-minded business leaders, many of whom had served on the Macaulay board of trustees. Each time I stepped out of the school, I entered Olmsted’s vision as if I were walking into his mind, surrendering to the eloquent unity of every avenue.

  Delaware Park, where Karl Speyer drowned, was about a half-mile from school, within easy walking distance. After reading the News, I completed a few items of work and by four-thirty I put on my cloak and set off. I followed Olmsted’s regiments of trees, rows of six across, up Bidwell Parkway, around Soldier’s Place, and onto Lincoln Parkway. The clouds were gray, the air damp and cold. I crossed streets slushed with a winter’s worth of snow. Water seeped into my boots. At Forest Avenue, in front of the Sinclair estate, the west wind—the ice wind, from Lake Erie and the Niagara River—whipped around me, burning my cheeks. Olmsted’s vision embraced me nonetheless. I felt exhilarated by the majesty of the trees.

  At the end of Lincoln Parkway, atop a slight hill, Delaware Park opened into a startling vista of three hundred fifty acres. From where I stood, I could see a wide expanse of open meadows, gentle valleys, and tree-covered hillsides, all shaped around an ornamental lake, its shoreline gently curving. Just north of the park (primarily outside the park boundaries, on land which had been a cow pasture), the Pan-American Exposition was nearing completion, its gaudy Spanish Renaissance turrets and domes rising above the park trees. Of the dozens of structures in the exposition only two were designed to be permanent, destined to remain standing within the park itself: the New York State Building,
a white marble Parthenon which I could just glimpse to the northwest; and beside me, on a knoll to my left, the half-finished Albright Art Gallery, inspired by the Erechtheum. The Albright Art Gallery and the New York State Building were surprising additions to the park. The other park buildings, such as the boathouse and the bandstand, had been designed by Olmsted’s partner Calvert Vaux, and they retreated into the trees, leaving nature preeminent. But these two edifices dominated their hillsides as if trying to prove that man, not nature, was the most noble creation on earth.

  The gallery looked far less than noble this afternoon, however. Idled, horse-drawn delivery wagons surrounded it. A disordered collection of union men on strike marched back and forth in the mud. Some of their placards advertised the various socialist workers’ parties.

  Here and there on the construction site, Negro men labored, self-consciously ignoring the shouts of the unionists. The Negroes were strikebreakers, of course; unions did not accept Negroes as members.

  As I continued down the park roadway in the direction of the ornamental lake, I heard the protesters shouting at one another in languages incomprehensible to me. I spoke German, French, and Italian, but I couldn’t even identify the languages these men were speaking. Hungarian, perhaps, or Slovak.

  Reading the placards, I did understand that today’s strikers were stonemasons and plumbers. The gallery’s construction had been plagued by strikes, and people now accepted that the Albright would not be completed in time for the exposition. Whispered jokes claimed that Mr. Albright himself arranged the strikes, to deflect attention from the fact that he couldn’t afford to pay for the marble needed to complete the project. I had personal reasons for hoping these whispers weren’t true: Mr. Albright, the man who’d sponsored Tom at college and encouraged him to come to Buffalo (and who was also Grace’s godfather), was on the Macaulay board of trustees. I didn’t want to lose his yearly donations.

  I was about to cross the roadway when one of the strikers, a thin, small man with a neat beard, broke ranks and, still holding his union sign, ran across a field of metal pipes. Without warning he began to beat a colored worker. The colored man attempted to shield his head with crossed arms. Again and again, the striker lifted his placard as a weapon. Blood began to pour down the face of the colored man. Other Negroes ran from far-flung parts of the construction site to help, but they were so few compared to the strikers who now joined their comrade, shoving the Negroes aside, that nothing could be done. Two foremen, recognizable because they wore neckties with their work clothes, observed from a safe distance.

  The colored man was now on the ground. All I could see of him were his trousers, dirty and gray.

  What could I do?

  What could I do?

  I glanced around for assistance but saw no one.

  In a sick agony of helplessness, I turned away. I had read about incidents like this—many incidents like this—in the past few years, but I had never seen one. I felt as if there were a private civil war going on in the nation, one that people like me were sheltered from. Should I have thrown myself between the colored man and the striker? Would that have been courageous, or foolhardy? How could I judge? How do any of us make the judgment of how far to place ourselves at risk to help others? Finally I spotted a lanky police officer lounging nearby. He gave me a lopsided grin and shook his head, as if to say, what will these savages think of next?

  Shaken, trying to close my mind to the shouts reverberating behind me, I crossed the road and walked toward the broad flight of stairs leading down to the water, struggling to keep my steps straight and steady. I tried once more to surrender to Olmsted’s vision as it spread before me: the lake, curved and meandering; the bare trees, thick upon the hillsides; and on the distant shore, about a half-mile away, Forest Lawn Cemetery steeply rising, stone angels reaching their arms to heaven.

  Down on the lakeshore promenade, barricades blocked access to the ice as policemen, detectives, reporters, and photographers vied for space, unaware of—or ignoring—the strife I had just witnessed. To them I suppose it was simply one more addition to the genre labeled “labor unrest,” whereas the drowning of a world-famous engineer hero in an ornamental lake—well, that didn’t happen every day. Near the lakeshore bandstand, a crowd of twenty or so of the curious had gathered on the promenade. The crowd included more than a few nannies; their small charges, looking fat from layers of blankets, were strapped tightly into wooden sleds. Ponies pulled several of the sleds, the nannies pulled the others. The entire area was covered with dirty snow warmed by the steam of horse manure.

  I made my way down the wide row of steps, the wind at my back, and took my place among the crowd. All these people, come to see where a man had died. They moved along quickly. A nod, an homage—a sense of, well, it wasn’t me, not this time, at least—and the person walked away, replaced by another. The ponies tossed their heads, their harness bells jingling. The clouds were low and dense. All at once I was at the front of the shifting crowd, pressed against the barricade at the edge of the frozen lake. Part of the lake was devoted to skating, the ice smooth and well-tended. The area beyond was roped off, its rough surface marred by hard, irregular snowdrifts. Speyer could not have strayed beyond the ropes accidentally.

  I climbed up a nearby snow mound to see better and tried to imagine the scene as it must have looked to Karl Speyer. Last night, a light, intermittent snow had fallen. Speyer must have thought he’d stepped into a dream: the Spanish turrets, the Greek temples, the far hillsides covered with stone angels spreading their wings. Awe must have filled him. He must have felt taken outside himself to a blessed place where ice never broke—indeed he had walked halfway across the lake. The detectives, stepping gingerly on strategically placed wooden planks, carefully examined the footsteps leading to the break where he had fallen. Speyer was a big man, wearing a bulky coat. In March, the snow-covered ice could be unpredictably treacherous. A stream moved beneath the surface, the Scajaquada Creek, flowing from the cemetery to the Niagara River.

  What did it feel like, to fall through the ice? To sense a heavy winter coat become heavier with a weight of water? How long did he struggle—searching for a bit of air, frantically scraping his soon-bloody fingernails against the ice to dig himself out, disoriented finally, unable to find the hole where he’d fallen? Could Thomas Sinclair, the husband of my best friend, the father of my goddaughter, have had something to do with such a death?

  The wind shifted. Gradually the sky cleared. Often this happened in Buffalo—the weather changing half a dozen times a day, at the mercy of the winds of Lake Erie. Did I have a responsibility to go to the police to report Speyer’s meeting with Tom, to disclose Tom’s lie? Not yet, my intuition told me … I would watch and wait, and learn what I could, before betraying Margaret’s husband, Grace’s father. All at once sunlight glared off the ice, blinding me.

  “See anything?” asked a man’s voice directly behind me on the snow mound.

  Startled, I lost my balance, slipped, and instinctively reached for the man’s arm to keep myself from falling.

  “Forgive me for surprising you.” His voice was refined, with the unmistakable inflection of the elite. I released his arm and smoothed my skirt. “See anything out of the ordinary?” he asked again.

  Instead of answering immediately, I gazed out at the lake. We hadn’t, after all, been introduced. “No, I don’t see anything.”

  “Ah. Too bad.”

  The man bounded down the snow mound and I appraised him quickly. He appeared to be a gentleman, but a man of the arts rather than of business, judging from his tweed trousers and the longish cut of his coat. Carefully he moved a brightly polished wooden camera box and tripod away from a group of gawkers.

  “Let me help you down,” he said, offering me his hand.

  “Thank you, that’s quite all right, I can manage.”

  In four light steps I was beside him. He was a rumpled figure, about my age, taller than me, his face smooth-shaven. His dark
hair curled haphazardly, yet there was an elegance in his bearing. All this I noticed in the instant before I remembered that I mustn’t allow him to engage me in conversation. I looked away, concentrating on the lights coming on in the boathouse restaurant.

  “Did you know him?” the man said.

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked, without looking at him.

  “The deceased.” He spoke the word with a grand irony. “Did you know him?”

  Did I? Did watching someone go out a door after an argument constitute “knowing” him? I didn’t know what to say, which was just as well since I didn’t want to say anything at all.

  “Forgive me for presuming to question you.” So, he was a gentleman. I turned ever so slightly toward him. He took off his hat and pressed it against his chest. “I should have introduced myself. Franklin Fiske.” He bowed. “I arrived last week from New York City. My distant cousin is married to Mr. Dexter Rumsey of this city. Maybe you know her: Susan Fiske Rumsey.”

  “Yes, of course!” My relief must have shown on my face—my feeling of, how delightful, to meet a man I can speak to!

  Fiske laughed. “I’m amazed—although after a full week of it I suppose I shouldn’t be—by how quickly any reference to my distant cousin brings me friendship in this city.”

  “Well, we are basically very friendly here—among those we know, of course,” I added with a smile. In Buffalo it was axiomatic that “to know a Rumsey is to know enough,” so I accepted Franklin Fiske without question. Dexter P. Rumsey was the president of the Macaulay board of trustees. Reliable rumor said that the Rumsey family owned half the land on which the city was built.