Tom did donate his home to Macaulay, and now girls play field hockey across his lawns. He asked that a small plaque be put on the gate: “The Margaret and Grace Sinclair Campus of the Macaulay School.” I would have preferred not to have the plaque, with its daily reminder of their loss, but of course I acquiesced. Recently the board has been encouraging me to move into the house, so that my home, beside the school, can be converted into classrooms for our growing student body. Over three hundred fifty girls will attend Macaulay this year, as we welcome more daughters of the professional class and the burgeoning middle class, who can now afford—and desire—the level of education Macaulay provides. But I’m not tempted by Sinclair House. I fear that I would wake in the night and imagine Grace or Margaret on the stairs.
There have been deaths too, of course. President Cleveland died last year, but his passing left me strangely unmoved; I felt as if I had long since left him behind. Touching me more personally, Mr. Rumsey died in 1906, at the age of seventy-nine. I found that I missed him, his steadiness, his quiet yet reassuring presence. Oddly, I no longer felt anger toward him. I had reached a plateau in my own life that allowed me to offer him forgiveness. After his death, no one was capable of stepping into his place as leader of the city, and a fluidity and diversity entered our midst, much as Mr. Rumsey himself had foreseen. The directorship of my board now rotates from member to member each year, and the power vacuum regarding Macaulay, at least, has been filled by me. The board looks to me for my opinion, and defers to it—for wasn’t I close to Mr. Rumsey, didn’t he trust me always? Thus part of his power has become mine.
Franklin Fiske has continued reporting for the World, roving from one story to the next. He passes through Buffalo frequently, and when he’s here he always comes to see me. He has never married, but of course he is never long enough in one place to marry. I sense him hovering still, waiting for any move, any approach I might make toward him, unwilling perhaps to risk that crucial third proposal until he is certain of success. Sometimes, every now and again, I find myself imagining a life with him, but I’ve never told him this.
Tom continues work on the Salt River Project in Arizona. Construction began on the massive Roosevelt Dam in 1903, under the Federal Reclamation Act, and continues. With its federal support, the project is intended to aid the common people of the area rather than industrialists. Tom and I exchanged letters frequently at first, and then less often but still regularly. He hasn’t remarried. The last time I heard from him, he reported that he’s made Peter Fronczyk (now an experienced engineer) his second in command. Somewhat wistfully, it seemed to me, Tom wrote that Peter still believes that through his work he creates on earth the light of God.
The light of God. Often I catch myself wondering, what would Grace be like now, if she’d grown up? Would she be tall for a woman, as I am? Slender, lithe, her still-blonde hair pulled back and up? Of course by now her hair might have darkened to pale brown, but I think not. Mine hasn’t darkened, after all. Or instead of being lithe, she might be strong and firm, a horsewoman, for she always loved horses. She might be a fine artist too, planning to continue her training at an art school in Europe—in Paris, perhaps, and next summer I would visit her there. Would she have beaux already? Of course she would (no one serious yet, I hoped), boys from the finest families, a Rumsey, or a Cary.
In recent years I’ve enjoyed such fantasies about her. Such fantasies bring me pleasure, not pain. They lighten my being. More than once Miss Atkins has caught me smiling for no apparent reason in the front hall at school, where we are surrounded by girls hurrying to class, and teasingly brought it to my attention. Except for the anniversary of her death, I almost never imagine Grace slipping on the rocks at Niagara. I don’t believe the Church’s teachings about heaven, and I don’t believe in angels—not as physical entities, the way Grace did—so I don’t know where she is now, and I don’t sense her presence with me. Nonetheless each year she has grown up for me along with her classmates, along with Winifred Coatsworth and Ruth Rumsey. When I see them, their hair pinned up, their long skirts rustling, I see her. I see what she would be. She is a young lady now.
September. Once again the faculty is gathering for the autumn term, and the students will arrive next week—those girls whose minds must be opened for the good of the city and the nation. Thus has God given me a second chance at motherhood, granting me the ability to forgive myself and offering me redemption.
In the calm waters of the park lake, there is a mirror of the sky, dense blue and touched by a dazzle of radiant, gray-bottomed clouds. My city’s sky, a gift from the shifting currents and ever-changing winds of the Great Lakes, those vast inland seas, the source of our prosperity here at the place where shipping lanes converge with rail lines and electricity flows unending. I am poised between water and sky, in the park that Olmsted made, in the city that grain made—grain and lumber, steel and iron, their inexhaustible abundance granting us a riot of skyscrapers and mansions.
One last time I breathe deep the sweet scents of fresh-cut grass and thickly laden trees. Then I turn toward home and school—an unassuming, unremarkable woman in a high-collared navy blue dress, a blank slate upon which anyone might write anything whatsoever.
HISTORICAL NOTE
The struggle to preserve Niagara Falls was the first major environmental battle in the United States. In 1906, the preservationists appeared to achieve victory when Congress passed the Burton Act, which strictly regulated the amount of water which could be diverted from the Niagara River for use in the generation of electricity.
But it was a pyrrhic victory. The Burton Act was superseded in the years that followed, particularly during wartime. Today, 50 percent of the water of the Niagara River is routinely diverted from the Falls to generate electricity during daylight hours in the summer, 75 percent at night and throughout the winter, with what is claimed to be no appreciable change in the scenic effect.
Although electricity is now taken for granted, electrical use among common citizens in the United States came relatively late, compared to some nations in Europe. In Europe, electricity was considered a public service and distribution was controlled by governments. But in America, electricity was a commodity. There was no profit in individual electrical use, so there was no incentive for privately held utilities to provide it. As Thomas P. Hughes observed in Networks of Power, “Power systems embody the physical, intellectual, and symbolic resources of the society that constructs them.”
Buffalo never regained the sense of glory it had experienced before the assassination of President McKinley. The city’s economic prosperity continued for many decades, however, until the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway system in 1959 made its harbor obsolete, and the steel plant at Stony Point—by then called Bethlehem Steel—stopped production in 1983. The Pan-American Exposition was a financial disaster for its investors, and John Milburn’s portrait at the Buffalo Club was indeed defaced. Mary Talbert protested the exclusion of African Americans from the exposition planning committee, but Milburn never took action against her for this. In 1902, Milburn moved with his family to New York City, where he once again rose to prominence as an attorney.
City of Light is a blend of fact and fiction, of characters and events real and imagined. Louisa Barrett, Tom and Grace Sinclair, Franklin Fiske, Abigail Rushman and her parents, Francesca Coatsworth, Susannah Riley, Frederick Krakauer, Karl Speyer, and Millicent Talbert—all are fictional creations. The Macaulay School is based on the Buffalo Seminary, a girls’ school which still exists. The power station at Niagara is modeled on the Niagara Falls Power Company’s landmark Edward Dean Adams Station, which pioneered the use of alternating current in the United States. The Adams Station ceased operations in 1961, and its beautiful powerhouses were bulldozed into their wheel pits. The site is now the Niagara Falls wastewater treatment plant. The character of Daniel Henry Bates is loosely based on J. Horace McFarland, president of the American Civic Association, who fought relentlessly, albei
t nonviolently, for the preservation of Niagara.
Of those characters who actually existed, Dexter Rumsey’s daughter Ruth grew up to marry (over her family’s objections) Irish-Catholic Buffalonian William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who later became the director of the OSS, precursor of the CIA. Elbert Hubbard, who by then had married his paramour Alice Moore, died in the sinking of the Lusitania, in 1915. After John J. Albright died in 1931, his goods were sold at auction, his home torn down, and his estate subdivided; he had suffered business setbacks, but more important, he had given virtually all his money away to worthy causes and castigated his colleagues for not doing the same. Although he did indeed marry his daughter’s governess, there is no evidence that he fathered an illegitimate child. Mary Talbert became a vice president of the NAACP and worked as a Red Cross nurse in France during World War I. In 1922, she received the Spingarn Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the NAACP, for her human rights work. She died in 1923. Maria Love lived on at 184 Delaware Avenue until 1931, when she died at the age of 91. The Fitch Crèche, the first day-care center in the United States, closed two years later, a victim of the Depression. And Frances Folsom Cleveland lived until 1947. Before her death she made the acquaintance of future president General Dwight D. Eisenhower. To him, she must have seemed an emissary from a different world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am beholden to David E. Nye for his two remarkable books on technological development in the United States, Electrifying America and American Technological Sublime. Daniel M. Dumych’s Niagara Falls, Patrick McGreevy’s Imagining Niagara, and Paul Gromosiak’s Soaring Gulls and Bowing Trees expanded my understanding of the Falls. I am also particularly grateful to Karen Berner Little for her book on Maria M. Love; Lillian S. Williams for her work on Mary Talbert; Ann K. Finkbeiner for After the Death of a Child; Margaret Leech for In the Days of McKinley; Walter Lord for The Good Years; and Michael N. Vogel, Edward J. Patton, and Paul F. Redding for America’s Crossroads. My research has been made possible by the dedicated librarians of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society; the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library; the Niagara Falls (New York) Public Library; the New-York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; and the New York Society Library. Doris Hampton and the staff of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, Niagara Frontier Region, generously provided information. Many Buffalo residents graciously assisted me, among them: Cornelia Lewis Dopkins, Mary Rech Rockwell, Ginny Lohr, Nancy A. Fredrickson at LucasVarity, and Gary Sutton and Kristen Pfaff at the Buffalo Seminary. I enjoyed many walking tours with the Preservation Coalition. In addition to their books on the Pan-American Exposition and on the waterfront, Elizabeth Sholes and Thomas Leary offered their insights and hours of companionship in our mutual excitement for Buffalo’s history. And I am proud to be indebted to the late Austin M. Fox, educator, scholar, and gentleman, who shared not only his encyclopedic knowledge but also his literary acumen.
I have been blessed by an extraordinary editor, Susan Kamil, whose wisdom, commitment, and precision have enriched this book beyond measure. Her steadfast pursuit of every nuance has transformed the way I approach my work, and I will be forever grateful. I must also express my lasting gratitude to my agent, Lisa Bankoff, for her faith in City of Light, for her humor, and for her unending encouragement. In addition, I offer my deep appreciation to Irwyn Applebaum for his support. The entire Bantam Dell team generously contributed their multifaceted talents, and a special thanks goes to Jim Plumeri for his vision and artistry. Nita Taublib smoothed every path, and Zoë Rice always knew the perfect word and brightened every day. Many friends sustained me during the six years I worked on City of Light, especially Alexandra Isles, Carol L. Shapiro, Elisa Shokoff, Ruth Shokoff, and of course Richard M. Osterweil; their careful readings helped me at every stage. Finally, I thank my husband, whose profound generosity of spirit gave me the time, nurturance, and stability in which to write, and I thank my son, for being himself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LAUREN BELFER grew up in Buffalo, New York. She received her M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University in New York City, where she now lives with her husband and son. She is currently at work on her next novel.
CITY OF LIGHT
A Dial Press Trade Paperback Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Dial Press hardcover edition / May 1999
Island Books mass market edition / October 2000
Delta Trade Paperback edition / September 2003
Dial Press Trade Paperback edition / July 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This book is a work of fiction. Although certain historical figures, events, and locales are portrayed, they are used fictitiously to give the story a proper historical context.
All other characters and events, however, are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1999 by Lauren Belfer
Maps by James Sinclair
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-52917
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
The Dial Press and Dial Press Trade Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76402-7
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