City of Light

by Lauren Belfer

  The dates the babies had been brought in and their presumed dates of birth were posted from signs hung on the cribs. We stopped beside a crib that held four infants. The youngest babies were the fattest, the oldest were the thinnest. Here was a three-month-old, wizened and gazing at the ceiling unblinkingly. At three months Grace had smiled and brought her little hands together—or so Margaret had told me in a letter while I was in Europe. Here was a six-month-old, hollow-eyed and still, with sores around its eyes, skin so white as to be transparent, the red and blue of arteries and veins throbbing across its skull—approaching death at the age when Grace was rolling and sitting and squealing on her blanket in the garden.

  How easily Grace could have been condemned to this, to this holding pen of human beings awaiting death. The fact that she had avoided this was nothing but chance—a lucky chance that Margaret and Tom had wanted a baby; if they hadn’t, who knew whether I would have been able to support her on my own, despite my best attempts? I felt a stabbing pain in my stomach and tried not to bend over, not to let Francesca notice my anguish, not to let her wonder why I couldn’t view all this clinically, like a problem to be solved.

  I closed my eyes partway, to see only in fragments. Enough to walk at Francesca’s side. Fragments: Francesca’s high-buttoned boot. A fringe of cashmere shawl. A skirt of rustling silk. My friend had statistics to keep her steady. She had a purpose, a goal. Despite her initial hesitancy and misgivings, she had now turned into an avenging angel.

  “I put together some reports the doctor in New York sent me and figured out that from 1896 to 1897, three hundred sixty-six infants were brought to his hospital and twelve survived the year. Twelve. So their survival rate is about the same as ours. I don’t know whether to feel proud or angry that we can meet the New York City record.” She swished her skirt around a cart. “It’s called Wasting Disease, but it’s nothing but neglect. I went to see Miss Love at 184 and asked her if she really knew the conditions here. She sat there offering a plate of cake crumbs to a canary and told me that most of these children are bastards anyway and we mustn’t let ourselves get sentimental over them. God will do his work, she said. And she felt compelled to add that she never would have entrusted me with this mission if she’d known I’d turn sentimental. Do you think she really wants them to die?”

  I managed to whisper, “I don’t know.”

  “I thought better adoption procedures might help, but when I asked Miss Love about that idea she was very negative. For the entire asylum, all ages. Seems there once was a time—a pre-Lovian time—when ‘ladies of the night’ came here looking for recruits. When farmers came looking for laborers they could raise up like workhorses. They especially wanted these younger ones, who wouldn’t already know how to talk back the way the older ones did. Miss Love informed me proudly that she put a stop to both the adoption and the talking back.” Francesca strode ahead, as if hard work alone could constitute a slap at Miss Love. She stopped at a crib in the corner.

  “Now, here we’ve actually got one who’s made it to fourteen months.” She turned to look for me. “Come on, Louisa,” she said impatiently, tapping the crib railing. I forced myself forward. “Maybe this proves Mr. Darwin’s point, for only the truly fit can survive this charity home. This boy’s ready to be transferred to a regular orphans’ ward. Of course the statistics are better there, because most of the children are brought in when they’re older—when their parents die of consumption or the father deserts them and the mother can’t manage to feed them on her own. But a lot of them have rickets or get it here, so they’re not that much better off.”

  The child who proved Mr. Darwin’s theories sat alone in a metal cage; his crib had caging across the top, so he couldn’t climb out. His name, George, was written on a tag attached to the crib. He didn’t move or call for attention. He simply stared at us. At fourteen months Grace had been a terror, talking gibberish with conviction, racing through the house on ever-stronger, pudgy legs, crawling under tables to play hide-and-seek with Margaret and me. But not George. His legs were spindly. His expression was blank. I felt suddenly as if I were looking at an animal in a zoo. There was a huge, horrible abyss between us. We might have been from different species, incapable of communicating, even with our eyes.

  A faintness grew within me. I couldn’t breathe. My vision was going black, while Francesca talked on and on. Like an echo I heard her words, then suddenly felt her hands grip me as I began to fall. “Louisa, are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m—” Pulling her along even as I used her for support, I hurried to the end of the ward, where the stairwell had wide windows that I pushed open. The wind blew rain around me, the cool, clean rain of early summer. Outside, the landscape was enveloped by the month of June, but inside, seasons were irrelevant, defined only by heat or the lack of it. Rain splattered on my face and neck, and slowly my breathing eased.

  “Louisa. I know it’s horrible, but why in the world …” Francesca was chastising me. By my own choice, she could never understand me. How I yearned for a hand upon my shoulder; for words of comfort. But I could get them only by confessing the truth, and although part of me yearned to share the truth, such words gagged in my throat. “I—I must have eaten something that didn’t agree with me.”

  “Yes. You must have.” She seemed to believe me. Such a good liar I had become. “When you’re better we’ll go down to the office. I have some ideas I want to discuss with you. I want to hire someone who knows about infant development. I want to—”

  “I’m sorry, Francesca, but I can’t help you here.” I stared out the window at the tree limbs tossed by rain, too humiliated to meet her eyes.

  “Why ever not? Don’t tell me you’re too ‘sentimental’ for it? Maria Love be damned, I’m going to set up adoption procedures, I’m going to hire doctors, I’m going to design a separate building for the babies and see that it gets built—there’s a real chance to make a difference here.”

  “Yes, Francesca, but not for me. I can’t make a difference here.”

  “Why ever not?” she said again, her anger mixing with petulance. “It doesn’t make sense. You’re just being squeamish. You’ll get used to it. I did. You’re the perfect one to work with me. We’ll never have children of our own. We owe this to society. To the city.”

  “No, Francesca,” I insisted. “No.”

  “I think you’re being selfish.”

  I didn’t answer. Better she think me selfish than know the truth. How could I tell her that here, but for fortune, was Grace? How could I tell her that I saw Grace in every crib?

  On Sunday morning, the day after I’d toured the Infants’ Ward, I sat in Trinity Church near the Tiffany stained-glass window of the archangel Gabriel. Gabriel’s robes were stark white against a swirling opalescent background of blues and purples, like the end of the world as imagined by the poet William Blake. But Gabriel himself was serene, suffused with light. He seemed neither male nor female. His face was beckoning and forgiving, all-knowing yet reverential. His eyes gazed not upon the surface of things, but to the spirit. Gabriel … the angel of the Annunciation. In Islam, the angel of truth. Whenever I came to Trinity, I sat near him. He was a solace in my loneliness; he offered me a path to transcendence. Today he eased the anguish that I’d felt among the dying children, even though he had no answer as to why God allowed such a place as the Infants’ Ward to exist.

  “Louisa? Is anything wrong?” Startled, I looked around to find Tom standing beside me. He touched my shoulder. Embarrassed, I stood too quickly, fumbling with the hymnal on my lap. Tom took my elbow to steady me. The service was over, and the church smelled of incense and lilies. The transoms were open, and the winds of Lake Erie purified us. The sepia-toned air glowed with a mist of dust motes. The custodian, a graying Negro employed for the sake of charity, muttered as he rearranged the prayer books for Evensong. Otherwise Tom and I were alone. Grace must have gone off with the other children to play on the parish house lawn.


  “Louisa?” He sounded worried.

  Not looking at him, I rearranged my shawl. “I’m fine. Thank you for asking.”

  “What were you staring at?”

  “The window.” I glanced at it. The shadow of a bird fluttered across the colored glass. Tears welled in my eyes, from the beauty of it. “It’s a comfort to me.” I stopped, feeling I’d revealed too much. “I don’t know why,” I added hurriedly.

  “A comfort for what?”

  I studied him then, carefully, the way he sometimes studied me: the blue eyes, the clean-shaven cheeks, the pale-brown hair swept back from his forehead, his features muted by the sanctuary’s hazy light. He looked diffident, without the edge of domination he’d shown that evening on the terrace. I felt the loneliness of us both. And at that moment I loved him—regardless of what he had or hadn’t done—perhaps simply as a friend, perhaps only selfishly, because he had come to me, thinking me distressed; of all the congregation, he was the only one who noticed.

  “My mother used to go to Mass every day—really believing it all, not just dragging us over on Sundays because it was her duty. I come here mostly for Grace’s sake, not my own, I’m sorry to say.” He held the corner of the pew, massaging the polished wood. “Louisa, I—” He stopped. “I thought—” He looked aside, seeming at a loss. Then his mood shifted, or at least appeared to, as he resolutely took on a tone which allowed him to feel more at ease: “Grace seems to have gotten a notion in her head that we should get married. Just about assaulted me with it not too long ago. Did you know?”

  So, her confessions in the gondola had originated even more in her imagination than I’d assumed. “She passed on something to that effect.”

  “Well, it’s an idea with certain attractions, don’t you think?” The Irish lilt in his voice allowed him to get away with such indiscretions. “You were Margaret’s closest friend; I feel I know you well. You’re everything I could ever want in a mother for Grace.” He spoke without a trace of irony, as if he’d forgotten our conversation in the sleigh—although my own apprehensions made me feel certain that he had not forgotten.

  “That’s hardly a recommendation for wifehood,” I replied, matching his tone.

  “Now, now, wait a minute … I’m sure people have married for lesser reasons. And of course you’re very beautiful. I noticed that even when Margaret was alive, if you’ll forgive me for saying so.” His beguiling look forced me to smile. “I wouldn’t mind having a woman around the house, I must admit. You know how Albright keeps telling me to advertise for one—it seems so much easier just to ask someone I already know.”

  “Tom, if you don’t stop teasing I won’t know what you mean.”

  “Ah. Sorry,” he said, not looking sorry at all. “The fact is I mean every word I say.” I couldn’t respond to this; I felt flustered and unsettled by how quickly he was moving us along. “But the teasing is part of my nature. You’ll have to learn to live with it. Margaret learned to live with it.” Then his smile faded. “None of this is as easy as Grace would like, is it? Sometimes Margaret is so alive in my mind.”

  “In mine too.”

  “It’s only been ten months.”

  “I know.”

  “Of course you know.” He touched my shoulder, consoling me. “This morning Mrs. Sheehan came upstairs to bring me a cup of coffee in the library and for an instant I swore I was hearing Margaret’s step on the stairs. I felt everything else just … disappear, and she was the only thing left.” He studied the archangel Gabriel for a long moment, then turned to me abruptly. “But I do care for you, you know.” He slid one finger across my cheek, and I felt like cringing away from him even as I yearned to embrace him. Instead I couldn’t move. “Maybe we should agree that in a year or so we may possibly have an understanding with one another.”

  “Yes,” I said, the tension easing out of me. Because of Margaret, everything would proceed slowly; because of Margaret, bit by bit I could overcome my fear, step by step imagination could evolve into reality, and I could become Grace’s true mother at last. In that time too, I would surely learn the truth about Speyer and Fitzhugh—if in fact there was any other truth to be learned. I felt as if my best friend had returned to offer me a gift. “Yes, I would agree to that.”

  “Do you think possibly having an understanding in a year or so will appease our little girl?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Neither do I,” he agreed. “Well, that’s part of growing up, isn’t it? Learning to wait for what you want. A new experience for Grace. And, perhaps, for me.”

  CHAPTER XXI

  Usually after the Macaulay graduation in mid-June, my Monday evening salon went on hiatus. I hated entertaining in the hot weather, and in any event the good families left Buffalo for their summer homes along the shores of Lake Erie, in the Genesee River Valley, or in Newport, Rhode Island. But not this summer. My salon ceased as usual, but because of events surrounding the Pan-American Exposition the good families stayed in town and the world came to them.

  To all of us. Parties and receptions filled my days. I saw Franklin Fiske at many of these parties, and he was unfailingly kind. I never saw Tom, however. He’d sent me a note the week after our meeting at Trinity Church to tell me that he was consumed with business. I had to admit that this was a relief. In retrospect, I’d startled myself by how quickly I’d agreed to the notion of an understanding with him. As the days passed without the pressure of his presence, however, I gradually developed more confidence in the idea of marriage sometime in the future.

  Meanwhile the newspapers were filled with stories of what had been dubbed the “race to the finish”: the number of days left until September 6, when President McKinley was scheduled to visit the power station and push the lever that would put Powerhouse 3 online—if it was ready. Work was being conducted in twelve-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day. The papers were documenting every aspect of construction, every test, every difficulty no matter how minor (in the articles Tom referred to these as “challenges,” not difficulties); profiling everyone from engineer to janitor, searching for heroes. And in the eyes of the newspapers (albeit not the establishment-bound Express) Tom had become the greatest hero of all. While he was working, Grace spent the long summer days visiting friends and taking tennis, swimming, and riding lessons at the country club. I had breakfast with her every other morning. Most days, Tom had already left for the power station by the time I came to call or had simply spent the night out there, leaving Grace in the capable care of Mrs. Sheehan.

  Each week brought new dignitaries to the Pan-Am, lured by special events in their honor: University Day bringing academic officials; Opera Day renowned musicians; national days bringing troops of ambassadors and princelings, the local families vying to provide their entertainment and accommodation—such privileges generously bestowed by John Milburn, never a man to overlook a detail that might someday result in a reward to himself.

  We became a city transfixed by expectation.

  On July 9, the National Association of Colored Women convened its three-day biennial convention at Lyric Hall. Miss Love invited me to attend the first day. Ordered me, would be a better description of the note she sent. But no matter, entering Lyric Hall I felt an assuaging of my guilt about not joining Mary Talbert in her protest at the exposition. The hall was decked out in banners of purple and white, the NACW’s colors, symbolizing royalty and purity. “Lifting As We Climb” proclaimed the central banner across the stage. Miss Love had staked out a row toward the back, not far from the portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette. Every Caucasian woman who came in the door was peremptorily called to join her. We made for a small group: myself and several reform-minded ladies, seated primly in our row while around us several hundred Negro women beautifully attired in white or purple greeted one another with excitement. They ignored us.

  In a white lace dress, Mrs. Talbert stood at the front of the hall answering questions, making notes, passing out leaflets, dire
cting people to their seats. Her protest at the Pan-Am had garnered no attention whatsoever—at least not in our newspapers, although undoubtedly the Negro papers had covered it. Nonetheless she was still organizing, her demeanor forthright and proud; she buried any despair she might feel under a veneer of steadfast commitment.

  I sat between Miss Love and Miss Mary Remington, a short, stout, and formidable lady originally from Massachusetts. She’d established her own settlement house in Buffalo—the Remington Mission—in the worst part of town. Unlike Miss Love, she actually lived at her mission among the destitute, with her loyal friend Miss Alice Hyde. Miss Remington was rumored to be both gracious and affectionate toward the many who came to her for assistance. Miss Love viewed Miss Remington as her chief female competitor in the charity circuit.

  After everyone who could be expected to join us was in attendance, Miss Love announced to no one in particular, “When I was a girl my mother hid runaway slaves in our stable. Our stable was a station on the Underground Railroad!”

  I’d heard this before. More than once. No doubt Mary Remington had too.

  “How well I remember the day I saw a slave auction in the South,” Miss Love continued, nostalgically reminiscing. “I’ve always been lucky enough to travel. Nearly fifty years ago, that auction was, but I recall it as if it were yesterday. An entire family separated—each to a different owner. I can hardly bear the memory. It’s an inspiration.”