Flushed and embarrassed, angry and guilty, I hurried Grace away.
While we picnicked on the shore of a small island in the exposition’s Mirror Lake, the necessity of staying away from Mary Talbert’s battles gnawed at me. Of course I wanted to join her, if only to give John Milburn a much-deserved comeuppance. But as I gazed at Grace feeding crumbs to the ducks, I recognized my choice—which was no choice, for only one path opened before me: Grace.
After we ate, I tried to keep her away from the dubious attractions of the Midway, such as Chiquita the Cuban Midget (she entertained in a miniature house and conversed in seven languages) and Bonner the Educated Horse (he solved addition problems, but only in the presence of his trainer). The Midway, in the northwest corner, was the commercial center of the exposition, and it provided a sharp contrast to the public-spirited displays on the esplanade, which were dedicated to such elevated topics as agriculture, transportation, and of course electricity. Grace was determined to see the so-called ethnological exhibitions on the Midway, apparently at the urging of Miss Atkins, the lower-school principal. She’d encouraged the girls to seek out the mighty educational experience of watching human beings displayed as if they were animals in a zoo. Luckily I was able to steer Grace away from the Old Plantation and the “happy darkies” who were its advertised inhabitants; even so, we spent a gruesome hour going from Africa to Hawaii, from the Philippines to Japan, observing “joyous natives,” most of them barely clothed, pursuing their “usual” lives. There were rumors that the “natives” might actually be actors. However, Grace was taken with the presentations, so I hoped there was some educational value concealed in them. She especially liked the Eskimo Village, with its igloos and kayaks.
After the Midway, Grace and I decided to take a gondola ride. A maze of canals wove through the exposition to create an illusion of Venice—a sweet-scented, idealized Venice, and after the Midway a haven of peace. We glided beneath carved bridges decorated with classical sculpture; we passed hanging gardens and miniature water-falls. The exposition’s extravagant Spanish Renaissance architecture surrounded us in a riot of colors, from deep red to warm ivory. We were shaded by the orange and bay trees which had been brought in from California by the hundreds to decorate the exposition grounds.
Was it beautiful, this city of the imagination brought to life? From here on the gondola it was. From here it seemed eternal; there was no sense that it was merely a plaster stage set that in six months would be bulldozed back to farmland.
I lay my head on the cushions, closing my eyes and luxuriating in the gentle breeze that touched my skin. That was when Grace said, with the delighted slyness of a child relishing special knowledge, “I have a secret that you don’t know.”
I didn’t even open my eyes. “That’s what makes it a secret.”
“See if you can guess.”
“You’ll have to give me a hint.”
“All right. It’s something Papa said to me last night. Well, a talk we had.”
“That’s something I could never guess.”
“Then I’ll have to tell you. Open your eyes.” She shook my shoulder lightly, and I opened my eyes halfway. Playfully she confided, “We talked about whether it would be all right if he began courting a lady.” She said it in Tom’s Irish lilt; I could hear his voice. “He said he wouldn’t do anything like that without asking my permission, because if he and the lady decided to get married, then I would have a stepmother.”
I could only stare at her, a sick feeling knotting at my insides.
“You see, I have surprised you!” She clapped her hands in triumph.
“Do you know who the lady is?”
“Well it’s you, of course. Who else would it be?”
“Did he say it was me?”
“No, he didn’t say it. He didn’t have to say it, I knew it; I told him right away.”
“Grace, you’re just using your imagination.” I chucked her chin. “It could be anyone. It could be … Miss Riley, for all we know.”
“It can’t be Miss Riley. She’s too young to marry Papa! Besides, it has to be you because there’s no other lady I’ve ever even seen him talking to. I mean for more than a few minutes.”
“I’m sure he talks to ladies when he’s away from home and you don’t see him.”
“No. He doesn’t,” she assured me. “And it has to be you because you’re our best friend.”
“Well, thank you, Grace,” I said, momentarily warmed by that same sense of belonging I’d felt when Margaret was alive.
“Besides, you’re my godmother and Mama’s friend, so it’s only right that he should marry you. That’s what people do.”
“That’s what people sometimes do,” I explained. “I don’t think he was talking about me, Grace. You must put that out of your mind. Your father has never regarded me in that way.” And any time I had sensed in myself a glimmer of regarding him in that way, I’d pushed the thought aside, both because of my own anxieties and because it felt like a betrayal of Margaret.
“But there isn’t anyone else,” she insisted.
Realizing she must be nervous at the idea of a woman she didn’t know becoming her stepmother, I rubbed her hand. “I’m already your godmother. That will never change, no matter what.”
“And now you’ll be my mother! Just like my real mother!” She lunged to hug me, throwing the gondola off-balance. Water splashed into the boat. I felt staggered by the realization (one which I’d steadfastly forbidden my conscious thoughts) that simply by marrying Tom I could become her mother; legally I would be her mother. This reality superseded any passing fantasies surrounding Franklin Fiske which I’d indulged at Niagara; perhaps it could supersede even my fears. I could become Grace’s mother: The idea fixated me.
“Be still, stay in middle,” the gondola driver hissed in an accent that sounded like genuine Italian, not actor’s Italian.
Chastened, Grace repositioned herself. Suddenly she pulled at my sleeve. “You won’t say I told you, will you?” she asked, eyes wide. “We promised not to tell anyone. You’ll act surprised when he asks you, won’t you? Please?” She was begging now. She grabbed at my hands. “He’ll be angry if he finds out I broke a promise. Please don’t tell him I broke a promise!”
I didn’t answer, mystified by how desperate she seemed.
Again she demanded, “You won’t tell, will you? Will you?”
“No, Grace.” I caressed her cheek with the back of my hand. “I won’t tell.”
• • •
At four-thirty, I took Grace home to rest. There would be fireworks at nine, and despite her protests a nap was in order. While she slept, I went out on the second-floor terrace to rest on a cushioned chaise in the shade of a tall elm tree. The maid brought iced tea and strawberries with cream. The yellow light of late afternoon filtered through the leaves. The house was built on a slight elevation, and from the terrace the entire exposition spread before me: domes, turrets, and spires in a panoply of exoticism. Sunlight sparked off the sixteen-foot gilded statue of the Goddess of Light atop the Electric Tower, creating a daylight star.
All around me was the Sinclair estate. Lying on the chaise, I drifted into its luxury: tennis court, conservatory, bathing pool; the formal garden with its two-tiered French fountain filling the air with a faint murmur of falling water; beyond it, the English garden, lush and wild, a carefully overgrown maze in the middle; the raspberry patch; the butterfly garden, a gift to Grace on her first birthday from her godfather, John J. Albright.
My imagination opened. Yes, I was the chatelaine here. The house and garden were mine, by right of marriage. I was Grace’s mother in the eyes of the community, I was Thomas Sinclair’s wife; we were a family. Margaret would feel pleased, not betrayed. I would fulfill the promise of her lost life. I would be with Grace every day, as she had been.
There would be other rewards. My mind leapt: I held court here, my Monday night “saloon” transformed into a true salon that filled the house.
Musicians played Schubert in the garden, acting troupes performed Shakespeare beside the fountain. No longer bound to dress the role of a staid schoolmarm, I wore the fine clothes I loved and could now afford. Not only did I continue my work at Macaulay (Tom was not the type of man to object), but I funded as many scholarships as I pleased, the board be damned. Every problem dissipated in the ease of wealth. Patty Milburn tried to meet my eyes, but now I could afford to look past hers. Anyone who’d ever called me a bluestocking or an old maid or a spinster learned to be jealous of me finally.
Somehow in the gondola, Grace had given my mind permission to travel in this direction, and now I embraced the safe harbor Tom could offer. Tentatively I began to ponder our possible intimacy … but what could I imagine? What experience did I have, with which to formulate my yearnings? Only my evening with former president Cleveland, only this: the rubbery mass of his stomach buoying me; the anguish as his body prodded into me; the too-warm liquid that he left, slipping down my thighs.
Stop! I told myself. I rose from the chaise, banishing self-pity as well as the fantasies to which Grace had led me. I straightened my high-collared gray dress. Looking like the proper headmistress I was, I went inside and down the hall to the library to find something to read.
At first I was sun-blind, startled by black forms rising before me. Waiting for my eyes to adjust, I breathed deep a combination of dusty books and lilac-laden air. The silence was as dense as the shadows. The windows were thrown wide, the gauze curtains lifted by the breeze. One by one the pieces of the room came clear, in tones of sepia: Susannah Riley’s watercolors of the power station; the plaster Nike of Samothrace glowing soft white on its pedestal in the corner; the small framed photograph of Margaret on Tom’s well-ordered desk.
I went to look at the photograph, picking it up from the stand. Margaret with her dark hair and eyes, gazing at me. Would she want me to take her place? In all the years I’d known her, I’d never told her about my evening with Grover Cleveland, and she’d never asked me about Francesca, although she must have heard the rumors. I suppose she was too well brought up to inquire directly, and I never confessed: The thought of discussing a Boston marriage (real or feigned) with beautiful, confident Margaret embarrassed me deeply. And after Grace was born, I wanted Margaret to believe in my supposed liaison with Francesca, so that she would never suspect that I was the woman who had given birth to the child she cradled in her arms.
A shiver passed through me, at the closeness of death. The room was no longer a haven of warmth and peace, but a place haunted—by Margaret. The barrier between us—the line between life and death—became permeable and frail. I could feel her everywhere around me.
I put the photograph back, fighting an urge to flee.
And then on the desk I saw it: a dark red folder, labeled “Water.” A small granite paperweight—an eagle in flight—held the folder closed. My sense of Margaret flowed away.
“Water.” Such a strange title. Not water power or water leases, not water charters or rentals or options. Simply “Water.”
Who would not have opened it?
We all take refuge in our moral certainties, our smug sense of “I would never do that!” Blithely we condemn anyone who would. Yet faced with the choice, we do open the folder. Just this once, we think. Just this once won’t overturn a lifetime of rectitude. God will understand. And so the deed is done, the smug certainties still safely in place.
The files were extensive. I recognized Tom’s overly precise handwriting, the writing of someone for whom the mere act of putting words together was an unexpected gift. Now these sacred symbols of the alphabet covered page after page, letters and numbers arranged in a code I couldn’t break. The column titles, however, I could understand: “Westinghouse-Speyer,” “Usage,” “Kilowatt hours,” and the initials “cfs.” Cubic feet per second, I realized after a moment’s confusion. “Full capacity,” with a future date, repeated again and again at the bottom of the pages. There was a copy of a bill from the state legislature defining the limits on the amount of water that could be taken from the Niagara River above the Falls. There were guarded communications from Francis Lynde Stetson, J. P. Morgan’s attorney.
I heard muted coughs from upstairs as Grace woke.
An urgency crept into me: I mustn’t let Grace discover me reading her father’s papers. There were only a few pages left. The key to Albright’s warning, to Rumsey’s warning, was here—if only I could break the code. My hands were shaking. Initials—that’s what the last pages revealed. Initials with ever-increasing amounts of money beside them. Initials with dates—dates of inspection.
Grace called dreamily from upstairs, “Aunt Louisa?”
I flipped through the file again. Where was the link I had missed? It was here; it had to be. But I was lost.
“Aunt Louisa, where are you?” Grace was awake now.
Fingers trembling, I stacked the pages as neatly as I could and closed the folder. I returned it to its spot on the desk, slightly to the right of the photo of Margaret. I put the eagle paperweight on top and hurried outside to the terrace. Once more I was sun-blind, this time from light instead of darkness. Before my eyes I saw lines of black numbers and letters, repeated over and over with precision. I heard Grace’s voice coming from the third-floor window; she asked if I was all right. I said that I was. Gradually my vision cleared, yet still I was blind. I saw, but I could not understand.
Mrs. Sheehan brought us an early dinner in the playroom; she would be leaving soon to attend the exposition with the rest of the staff. As we were served that meal, I recalled Signora Gambuto’s family a few miles from here, living in less space than Grace’s staircase landing. Nonetheless I enjoyed our dinner, nursery food that it was (ending with the compulsory graham crackers and cinnamon-flavored applesauce).
By the time we finished dinner, we were completely alone in the house. The sense of emptiness was eery. Anyone could come in, and we would never know, never hear—the doors were too far away. I had a childlike unease about glancing at the windows or at the staircase for fear someone would be there, watching. With this tinge of apprehension, I changed into a silkier version of my usual schoolmarm garb, making me look just like myself only more so. Grace put on a whimsical, dropped-waist white dress that made her look quite elegant.
In the hour remaining before the fireworks, Grace and I sat side by side in her art studio, and she took me through her stacks of sketches. They were neatly divided into still lifes, landscapes, and “figures from life,” as she called them. Gradually, after ten, then fifteen, then twenty of them, I felt tedium sweep over me. I was a teacher, accustomed to seeing children for a few hours at most. As much as I loved Grace, this extended visit was more time than I’d ever spent alone with a child, particularly one who viewed me as on call. I suppose if I’d been more experienced as a mother, I would have made her play by herself for an hour or practice the piano. But I had no such experience, no knowledge of how to put her off without hurting her feelings; and she, thrilled to have a willing audience, had no reason to stop the incessant chatter. I went into a daze, responding to her with the surface of my mind, while my real thoughts strayed in a jumble of questions and desires. So dazed was I that I didn’t focus on the group of life drawings that Grace began to display. I managed to register the housekeeper. The cook. “Look, here’s Papa sitting in the chair you’re sitting in, with his shoes off.” “Here’s one on a hot day when he unbuttoned his vest.” “Look, here he is wearing his paisley dressing gown.”
The everyday life of a family—although I actually knew very little about the everyday life of a family. The pictures portrayed what I imagined the everyday life of a family to be. I offered Grace an appropriate “lovely,” or “how careful you are with the flow of the fabric,” and she smiled and went on to the next drawing.
And then suddenly the next drawing turned out to be something different. At first I couldn’t comprehend what it was. Grace was already hurrying to hide it when
I roused myself to take it from her. It was a document. A document like the ones I’d seen in the folder on Tom’s desk.
“Where did you get this?”
Grace blushed. She pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “Oh, I was working with Papa at his desk,” she explained. “That’s when I made this picture, see, of him at his desk.” Nervously she flipped through the pictures, finally holding one out to me: Tom at his desk, wearing a suit, pen in hand. “This piece of paper must have gotten mixed in by mistake. I’ll return it later. He’ll be angry if he finds out it’s missing.”
“Yes, I’m sure he will. You’ll return it before we leave for the fireworks.”
“Yes, Aunt Louisa.” Taking the document from me, she put it aside on a shelf and gave me a sudden, beguiling grin. “Now, this is a special picture because it’s of Papa holding Fluffer!” She took it from the bottom of the stack and unveiled it like a magician producing a treat from a hat. Fluffer was a long-haired, broad-tailed cat. “Papa didn’t want to hold her, because she sheds all over, and that’s why I named her Fluffer. Mrs. Sheehan doesn’t even like her to come in the house. But I always bring her in. I told Papa he had to hold her—for my education. He always does whatever I want him to do, if I tell him it’s for my education.” She winked at me. “A cat and a person in the same picture. Miss Riley will be happy.”
And so we drifted on.
How many lives we lead, each of us. How many lies we perpetrate as we balance one facet of ourselves against the next. At that moment in May, my daughter, Grace, young and lovely, already nurtured a nest of secrets while I, oblivious, was consumed with her protection. I never realized that everything I needed to know about her had been laid before me, if only I’d been paying attention.
CHAPTER XIX
City of Light Page 32
