City of Light

by Lauren Belfer

  “I knew that! But Miss Riley said Niagara Falls was more important. She said I was a ‘heroine.’ She said almost nobody in the world gets a chance to be a heroine, and now I was one.”

  I shivered at how close her words were to Tom’s when we stood together in the drawing room the morning after the bombing at the power station.

  “She said she wouldn’t keep tutoring me if I didn’t do what she wanted me to do, and I wanted her to keep tutoring me. She said Papa was bad. She said he was more than bad, she said he was evil.” She sighed in befuddlement and despair. “But now I’m not so sure, because they put her in the state hospital. Winifred Coatsworth told me that only crazy people get put in the state hospital. Is Miss Riley crazy? Is Papa evil?”

  “No, Grace, no. Of course not.” Which question was I answering? I couldn’t tell. My mind was overwhelmed and reassurance was all I could offer.

  “But he was trying to take all the water from Niagara Falls. That was evil. Even though Papa doesn’t seem evil to me. I mean, he never acts evil—not to me, I mean.” She stared at me in confusion.

  “I understand how hard it is to figure all this out.” And now I did understand: the frailty that Susannah Riley had recognized in Grace—like a thin pane of glass being pressured to the breaking point, she had described it—this frailty Susannah herself had created by forcing Grace into this terrible predicament. “Miss Riley never should have asked you to betray your family.”

  “Then if Miss Riley’s wrong, and she must be wrong because they put her in the state hospital, she’s the bad one. So she’s bad and Papa’s good, and I did the worst thing anyone could ever do. I’m the worst girl …”

  “But you’re a child. You didn’t know. You didn’t understand. Miss Riley made you do it.”

  “But at Sunday school they say even children can choose between right and wrong and good and bad. I chose bad.”

  I felt so tired. “Grace—you can’t look at things only as good or bad. Things aren’t that simple. You thought you were doing the right thing when you did it. You have to try to see the shades of gray, the way you do when you’re drawing, and forgive yourself and promise yourself to do better. That’s how God forgives. By seeing the shades of gray. By seeing into your heart, and what you truly feel and what you truly are, deep down. And how you learn from the things you do wrong and try to do right the next time.”

  Grace seemed to consider this. After a moment I asked, “What did your father say, when he saw the papers?”

  She shook her head sharply. “He got so upset that he took hold of my shoulders and started shaking me and shouting. He was scary but at the same time it was like he was crying too—like he couldn’t understand how I got to be such a bad girl who would let someone see his papers, especially Miss Riley. Then he stopped shouting and he just said, ‘I trusted you, I trusted you,’ like he would never trust me again. And he said didn’t I know that he was trying to help poor people get electricity to make their lives better, just like Mama would have wanted him to, and I made it harder for him to do that by showing the papers to Miss Riley. Now we were leaving and he wouldn’t be able to do it at all except maybe somewhere else. And then he got angry all over again and—and—the look on his face, Aunt Louisa, like he was going to kill me. And then he slapped my face—he never did that to me before—and then he looked as if he was going to do it again, but then he just turned away and said I had to stay in my room until it was time for us to go to the party.” She stopped.

  “And then?”

  “He left. He shut the door behind him. He didn’t lock it, though, so I guess he trusted me to do what he said and stay in my room. But I’m such a bad girl I didn’t even do that. After a while, I heard the downstairs door and I looked out the window and saw him drive away in the carriage. I knew he was going downtown to work, so I knew there’d be a few hours before he got home. I waited a while more and then went down the back stairs and snuck out without anyone seeing me and I came here.” Again she sighed. “Do you think he’ll forgive me?”

  “Yes, Grace.” I was quick to promise forgiveness, but what else could I say? “He loves you. I know he’ll forgive you. Shall I talk to him?”

  She brightened. “Will you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew I was right to come to see you.”

  “You must always come to me if you’re worried about something—or write to me,” I quickly corrected myself. “We’ll create the most wonderful collection of letters while you’re away.”

  That look of expectation and eagerness which I cherished so much came into her face. “I promise to write every detail of what I’m seeing, so it’ll be like we’re seeing everything together. Even the Mississippi River!” she added, trying to please me.

  “Yes.” I rubbed my forehead in exhaustion. “I hope so.”

  She glanced out the window again. “Look how the leaves are turning yellow.” It was true. Autumn was sneaking up on us. Grace took her spyglass from her pocket and pressed it against the glass. “I’ve never spied on my house from here—have you ever done it?”

  I managed a laugh. “I have looked over at your house and wondered how you are, Grace. But I’ve never taken a telescope and tried to look in the window.”

  “But you can! You can borrow my spyglass! I’ll leave it here for you. You can keep it as long as you want. Until we leave, I mean. You can look into our house anytime. I’ll tape messages on the windows for you—secret messages, no one will be able to read them but us!” Unexpectedly she became solemn. “I wish Mama was with us. Don’t you?”

  I placed my hand upon her shoulder. “Yes, Grace, I do. I think of her often.”

  “I do too. Do you remember how when fall came Mama used to take me out to rake leaves because there were always so many everywhere, more than Mr. Duffy could manage—like an ocean of leaves, Mama used to say, and we’d rake them up until we had huge piles and then we’d fall back into them and lie there and watch the sky?”

  “Yes, Grace, I remember.” And when Margaret stood up from a leaf pile, there were leaves stuck in her hair and clinging to the back of her cloak. Grace too had leaves in her hair, shocks of red and brown against the yellow of her hair, and they used to brush them off one another, first Margaret brushing Grace, then Grace brushing Margaret.

  “Sometimes I hear Mama’s voice telling me what to do. She always gives the best advice.” Grace smiled even as tears filled her eyes once more. “I don’t mean I really hear her voice; I imagine her.”

  “I understand.”

  “Sometimes I think if I imagine her enough, then she’ll really be there. Not like a ghost, I mean like an angel.” Her expression turned ineffably sad. “Sometimes I wonder if she’ll be able to find me after we move. I’ll be going to new places where I won’t ever have been with her, and she won’t ever have been there, either. She might not be able to find me.”

  “She’ll always find you, and you’ll always find her, because she’s in your heart.”

  She regarded me quizzically.

  “You have her inside you, in your soul.”

  “Then she’s not an angel?”

  “An angel is …” But I couldn’t fight my way out of this quagmire, so I surrendered to her simple Sunday school faith. “Angels never get lost, Grace. They follow you wherever you go.”

  “Oh, good,” she said, apparently happy again. I exhaled in relief. So much of my energy was devoted to the process of ensuring that she was happy, as if the mere fact of her happiness could redeem the sorrow of her conception.

  “Sometimes I think I’m so bad that I wish I wasn’t even alive anymore. I wish I could just be dead. Then I’d be with Mama forever and I wouldn’t have to worry about what was right and what was wrong.”

  Suddenly I felt light-headed, as if I would faint, every fear I’d ever had for her fused into this moment. I groped for what to say—what could I say, to stop her from having such thoughts? To make her want to live instead of die? “Oh, Grace,
please don’t talk that way, about not wanting to be alive anymore,” I implored. “I couldn’t live if you weren’t alive.” This was my one chance—perhaps my only chance—to help her, but in my shock and anxiety, I didn’t know what to say … I didn’t know where to begin. “Grace, it’s a terrible sin, a terrible, terrible sin, for someone to take their own life. God never forgives it. Never. People go to hell for it. You can’t be buried in hallowed ground.” What was I doing, invoking hellfire, citing the teachings of the Church, doctrines I didn’t even believe in? Whatever was I thinking of? But I was desperate to reach her, and I didn’t know what else to say. “Your father and I, we couldn’t …”

  “It’s all right, Aunt Louisa,” she said, patting my arm solicitously. I could see by her concerned expression that she was more affected by the drama of my emotions than by her own worries. She giggled nervously. “I meant only that sometimes I wish I was dead, not that I …”

  My clock chimed twelve noon.

  “Oh, Aunt Louisa!” In an instant her face was flushed with excitement. I was stunned by the shift in her mood. “I have to go. We’re leaving at one, and I don’t want Papa to figure out that I didn’t do exactly what he told me and stay in my room the whole entire time! You won’t tell him I came to see you, will you, Aunt Louisa?” she asked. I felt as if my mind couldn’t keep up with her, as if she’d leapt far ahead of me.

  “No, Grace, of course not,” I promised helplessly. “I won’t tell him.”

  “And you’re sure he’ll forgive me? About the papers, I mean?”

  “Yes, Grace. I’m sure.”

  “Thank you!” She gave me a quick hug, then bounded out, eager and happy.

  I let her go.

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  I never knew precisely what happened that afternoon at Goat Island. How could I? I wasn’t there. God at least granted me that mercy. I heard only interpretations. Hearsay, which I painstakingly wove together like skeins of yarn for a tapestry. Even if I had been there to see it, would I have had a clearer comprehension of it than anyone else? Of course not. I would have seen only my own sliver of truth, as everyone else saw theirs.

  Many people realized that something was wrong and ran to help. There were many witnesses, as the newspapers put it, but the waters are treacherous, and there was nothing anyone could do. Every witness said—every single one—that she slipped. She was playing a game. All the children were playing. On the rocks. By the cascades.

  The center of the party was on Goat Island itself. That’s where the food was laid out, sliced turkey and ham, bread and cheese, cold chicken, and cake for dessert. The type of food that’s easy to eat at a picnic. The drinks were laid out on Goat Island too. There was nothing stronger than beer, which was for the men. The women and children had unfermented apple cider. The children bobbed for apples, and someone had brought a cider press for them to use. Grace used it, or so I read in the newspaper. She pressed three apples and then enjoyed the fresh juice.

  As at most picnics, groups wandered off, congregating here and there, forming and re-forming from one place to the next. With a group of mothers and children of about her age, with some younger ones in tow too, Grace sat on the banks of Goat Island near the bridge to Asenath, the first of the Three Sisters. The waters are quiet there, at the Hermit’s Cascade. I remembered that I’d pulled Franklin back from wading there—out of irrational fear, not reason. The afternoon turned hot. Of course it was all right for Grace to take off her shoes and socks, to sit on a rock and wet her feet. The mothers allowed it. All the children did it.

  Tom wasn’t watching Grace, but he didn’t need to. She was old enough to place limits on herself and even self-control didn’t necessarily matter because so many mothers were there. Tom made certain, before he went off with the men—congratulating them for the years of work they had shared in creating the greatest hydropower project in the country, if not the world—he made certain the mothers knew they were to watch Grace. Besides, it wasn’t a man’s job to watch a child. No one blamed him for what happened, though he blamed himself—through all these years he’s blamed himself. The children were watched, Grace was watched. Even at the moment when she took the greatest risk, she was being watched.

  She’d been explaining to the younger children how the Three Sisters Islands got their name. She decided to show them how—to do what the daughters of General Parkhurst Whitney had done in 1816. Excitedly, she stepped into the water before anyone realized what she was doing. The water there is calm, the cascade is lovely, but the current is treacherous. Nonetheless she walked across to Asenath, thus proving that what the three sisters had done could still be done today.

  The mothers didn’t like her walking across to Asenath. They consulted together in Polish or Russian or Italian or whatever language they had spoken in the countries of their birth, each group unto itself. But the mothers were reluctant to say anything to her in English because she was Mr. Sinclair’s daughter. They couldn’t bring themselves to criticize or correct Mr. Sinclair’s daughter. They didn’t want to overstep their position or give Mr. Sinclair cause to be angry with their husbands, even if he was leaving soon. And Grace was so self-possessed and confident, they convinced themselves that she was safe. Yes, the mothers convinced themselves that she knew what she was doing. Born and bred as she was in this part of the country, she must have more knowledge than they did. Or so they told themselves.

  Nonetheless, as a subtle way to curb her, one mother asked Grace if she’d ever been to the Hermit’s Cascade before. Grace said yes, her mother used to bring her here. Then the women, one after another, asked about her mother. They had heard tell of Margaret: the good she’d done, the compassion she’d shown. Grace said her mother was an angel now, and sometimes, if she spun around quickly and then stopped suddenly, she could see her mother like a glow at the edge of her vision. Then Grace did spin around—around and around as she had that day at the cemetery after the spring blizzard. Standing on the riverbank, she spun and spun, determined to make herself dizzy. When she tried to stop herself—to stop suddenly, to see Margaret at the periphery of her vision—she slipped on the slick black rocks of the shoreline. She was barefoot … she was spinning … she tried to stop … she slipped—it all happened in one graceful movement, like a ballet. Graceful Grace. She fell backward into the water.

  Later the coroner surmised that her head hit the rocks on the bottom. When she surfaced, witnesses said she was initially dazed, and the current pulled at her. Only seconds later—when they realized she wasn’t faking—the mothers began screaming. Inexorably, the current began to draw her under the water again and downstream. She struggled to right herself, but she was in the middle of the stream now, and the more she struggled the more the current imprisoned her, pulling her into deeper waters, pulling her under. Even men were screaming now at the bank. One of them found a broken tree branch and laid it upon the water for her to grasp, but she was panicked by then and couldn’t reach it. She came to rest some twenty-five yards away, on the Goat Island side, in a serene, gentle cove, facedown amid the reeds. Her hair floated in a perfect circle around her head.

  This was the story Tom told me when he came to me late that night. I was in my study reading the first essays the seniors had written for our philosophy class, and I was marking up the papers in frustration at their simplicity and brevity. Then I heard the knock. Perplexed at a visitor arriving so late, I hurried to the door. As soon as I saw him—his ashen, contorted face—I knew something horrifying had happened. He told me the story there at the doorway, struggling to stop himself from weeping. At first what he said made no sense. Then, once I understood the meaning of the words, I didn’t believe him. And then finally when I comprehended the actuality, the truth of what he was saying, I felt a kind of paralysis come upon me, imprisoning me from the outside, as if the air were too heavy for me to push my body through. I could only watch, not move. I have little memory of what I did during the rest of that evening. Little memory at all.


  CHAPTER XXXVIII

  I passed the weeks after Grace’s death in a daze. I recollect people coming up to me at school, on the street even, offering condolences, their faces familiar although often I could not recall who they were. There was a funeral of course, at Trinity Church. A burial on a hillside at Forest Lawn, beside Margaret. At both services I was only a godmother, allowed to stand near the front of the crowd next to her godfather, Mr. Albright, but not at the very front where Tom and the Winspears stood. I tried not to let anyone see how much I cried.

  After the burial Mr. Rumsey—kind, generous, as supportive as a father—took my elbow, led me to his carriage, and drove with me to the Albright estate because Mr. Albright as her godfather was giving a luncheon in her honor. No children attended this luncheon. Amid the board members and their wives, Miss Love, the Winspears and their friends, and various businessmen who’d worked with Tom, I heard no commemoration of Grace. For these people she had become merely an excuse for a party, an opportunity to lunch with Mr. Rumsey. My friends weren’t here, not Francesca, not Elbert, for what right did I have, as godmother, to invite my friends to this luncheon? Even though none of Grace’s schoolmates was there to remember her, the Albright house seemed to burst with children, “three under four,” Susan Albright described them at the club. Their nannies shooed them away from the guests, and their tears or laughter were heard from corridors, or from outside as they played chasing games across the lawns—reminding Tom and me, as we stood silently side by side at the windows to stare at them, of what we’d lost.

  Turning to Tom, I studied him, the strong features, the pale-brown hair, and a memory pushed through of the night he’d come with the news about Grace. We’d gone into my study, and he had begun to cry. As a sense of disassociation seeped through me, bewilderment was all I’d felt. Who was this large person, weeping in my arms, telling me that he’d done this dreadful deed, telling me that through neglect he’d murdered our daughter? As that night wore on, I’d felt myself separating from him, not because I blamed him, but because there was no room inside me for any feeling but the loss of Grace.