City of Light (2 page)

I asked, “Did something happen on your walk home, Millicent?”

“Yes.”

I sat forward, gripping the armrests of my chair.

“Oh, nothing like that, Miss Barrett,” she said, laughing nervously. “I mean, no one
bothered
us. But Grace said something … strange. So strange, I thought you’d want to know about it. It bothered me.” Millicent’s voice was breaking; all at once she was about to cry.

“It’s all right, Millicent.” I rubbed the back of her hand as she struggled against her tears. “Tell me when you’re ready.”

Finally she began. “Well, we were walking down Chapin Parkway and looking at the lamps coming on—it wasn’t snowing yet—and I said how beautiful it was, to see the lamplight on the snow. Even the old and dirty snow looks beautiful with the light on it. I said how lucky we were, to be out at sunset, the most beautiful part of the day, and”—there was a sudden shrillness in Millicent’s voice, as she stumbled over her words—“and then Grace looked at me and said she wanted to kill herself.”

Millicent stared at me, expecting a response. But as shocked as I was, I had learned long ago to withhold my reactions to what students told me until I was certain I’d heard everything. I didn’t want to make snap judgments and perhaps miss the most important facts.

After a moment Millicent resumed. “She wasn’t excited. She said it like it was the most natural thing she could think of.”

She paused again, and I knew I must speak this time. But I mustn’t frighten her, even as I was alert to every nuance of her words. “And what did you say, Millicent?”

“I said, ‘You mustn’t say that, it’s a sin,’ and she said, ‘I can say it if I want, and I can do it too,’ and she was mad at me, and I said—”

At this point Katarzyna carried in a silver tray holding the cocoa in a silver pot, a plate of shortbread cookies, and the flowered china she knew I liked to use for company. In spite of my upset, I was pleased that Katarzyna was trying to make up for her behavior in the hall. She placed the tray on a small round table, which she moved between Millicent and me. While I poured the cocoa, Millicent ate the cookies with intense concentration.

After she’d finished several, I asked, “You were about to tell me what you said to Grace?”

Millicent brushed the cookie crumbs from her skirt. “I—well, I didn’t want to have a fight with her, so I tried to think of what you would say.”

“Thank you, Millicent, that’s very kind.” My tone was more dismissive than I intended. I hated flattery. But I reminded myself that Millicent was unfailingly sincere. “And what was that?” I asked more gently.

“I said everything was so beautiful in the world—she should just look around at the snow and the lights, and listen to the sleigh bells, and she would realize. Was that the right thing to say, Miss Barrett?”

Her earnestness made tears smart in my eyes. “Yes, Millicent, you said exactly the right thing.”

“Then Grace said everything
was
beautiful, she knew that, but she was a bad girl. ‘A bad evil girl,’ she said, and ‘I want to be dead, so I won’t be bad anymore.’ I never heard anyone talk like that, Miss Barrett. I don’t know Grace very well, but I remember helping to teach her to read, when I was younger. Remember how the girls in my class used to help the first graders with reading and math?”

Yes, I remembered.

“Remembering gave me an idea, and I said that if she killed herself, who would draw for the little children at the Crèche? Who would imitate elephants? The children would miss her. But Grace only said they would find someone else to draw for them. I didn’t like it, when she said that. Oh, Miss Barrett, it was scary—she was so quiet about it. Like she’d really thought it through and knew exactly what to do.”

I could see them clearly in my mind, making their way between a winter’s-worth of snow mounds: Grace with her blonde hair flowing in ringlets beneath her hat, the rabbit fur of her high-collared coat touching her jawline, her hands in a fur muff, her high-buttoned boots; Millicent beside her, wearing a coat expensive and well made, but plain-looking compared to Grace’s, so as not to draw attention to the girl who wore it. So as not to elicit jealousy in someone who was capable of acting on that jealousy, because he was white and his daughter did not have as fine a coat as the daughter of a colored man.

“Then I remembered that Grace’s mother died last year.”

Less than a year ago, it was. At the end of September. On a pristine early autumn day, yellow just beginning to touch the green on the trees outside her window. Margaret Sinclair had been my best friend, and I missed her terribly.

“I know about things like that”—Millicent’s reference to her own family was confident and matter-of-fact—“so I put my arm around her, and I said, ‘Your mother would be sad if she heard you talk like this.’ But Grace said, ‘That’s not true. Because when I’m dead, I’ll be with my mother, and I’ll be able to tell her that I’m sorry for everything bad I did, and she’ll forgive me and she’ll take care of me again, and that’s why I’m going to kill myself, so I can be with her in heaven.’”

Millicent stopped.

“And then?”

“All of a sudden she made a snowball and threw it against a tree, and asked about—well, some gossip about one of the teachers, and she was giggling about it. That made me mad because I didn’t know if she was just playing a game with me, about killing herself, or if she really meant it. When we got to her house she asked me to come in for cocoa and cake, but I was still mad so I said no, even though I wanted to, and then I came here.”

For a long time I stared into the fire. One image filled my mind: Grace Sinclair as a baby. Her chubby cheeks, her silken hair, the delicate white bonnet her mother had knitted for her. How had Grace come to this dreadful point in her life? How and when had we adults allowed her to go astray?

For Millicent’s sake, I roused myself. “You did well, my dear. Very well indeed. You’ve been splendid. Grace is lucky to have you as a friend.”

Millicent’s eyes lit up. “What will happen to Grace now, do you think?” Something occurred to her, eliciting a perverse, thrilling curiosity. She whispered, “Do you think they’ll send her to the state hospital?”

The hospital, more formally called the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, was several blocks from school. With its two brooding towers that could be seen from almost every part of town, it was a specter that haunted the edges of children’s minds.

“No, Millicent,” I said evenly. “She won’t be sent to the state hospital. She’s only nine. As you thought, she’s probably playing a game with those words about killing herself.” I didn’t believe it, but what else could I tell her? “She probably heard a grown-up talking, and she’s imitating what she heard without understanding it. That’s why a moment later she was throwing snowballs and giggling about her teachers. Well”—I clapped my hands lightly, my signal to students that meetings were coming to an end—“I think it best that you not discuss this with your friends. We don’t want anyone teasing Grace, do we? Of course you’ll want to tell your family. But at school, it will be our secret.” I squeezed her hand, knowing the hint of conspiracy would encourage her to keep quiet.

She looked toward the windows. “Miss Barrett,” she said carefully, “does anyone really do that? Kill themselves, I mean. Is that something people do?”

Society’s accepted answer would have been, “No, of course not.” That was the answer her family and her minister would have expected me to give. Suicide was an unmentionable, shameful sin that reflected upon an entire family. But I couldn’t lie to Millicent. Instead I said, “Grown-ups sometimes, but rarely. People have to be very misguided to do that; ill in their minds in some way.”

“Never children?”

I said nothing. I was at a loss. I’d never known a student to commit suicide or even threaten it. Nonetheless, I’d had suspicions more than once among the upper-school girls … a senior whom I knew to be terrified of boats was said to have died alone in a sailing accident; a junior once died between evening and morning from what was labeled an “overwhelming fever.” However, people did die in sailing accidents and did die of overwhelming fevers, so how could I know the truth?

“Never children. I’m proud of you, Millicent.”

She smiled broadly, and perhaps feeling that a smile was inappropriate under the circumstances, she raised her cup and finished her cocoa. When she had also finished the cookies, I telephoned her aunt to send a sleigh to pick her up.

And then I was alone, with nothing but Grace Sinclair’s face to fill my mind.

CHAPTER II

T
here is a nightmare I have: I fall asleep at the end of a productive day and suddenly find myself trapped within the frothing, seething waters beneath the cataract of Niagara. The struggle is long. No one can help me. Black cliffs loom around me. Waves of mist blind me. Rainbows flash. Trout leap. My legs lock within the wet vise that is my skirt. Emerald-green covers my face, blocks my throat, until finally, I let the vortex take me. This dream comes to me two or three times a year, without warning. That is, with no attachment to any specific event that might inspire it. Nevertheless I do know why I have the nightmare.

My mother died of diphtheria when I was two years old, and my paternal grandmother came to live with my father and me at our home in Williamstown, Massachusetts. My father was a professor of geology at Williams College. He had married late in life, after years of complacent success, and he idolized my mother. Her early death left him forever with an expression of puzzled surprise, as if he were taken aback by a treachery he dared not define.

When I was seven, my father took me with him on a trip to Niagara. He had been to the Falls many times, but this was my first visit. With the acute focus of a child, I listened to my father explain the landscape: First there was the Niagara River, which divided America from Canada. About a mile above the Falls, the river was transformed into the rapids. At the Falls, the sixty-three-acre Goat Island divided the rapids, creating the American Falls on one side and the vast, curving Horseshoe Falls, which belonged to Canada, on the other. At the bottom of the Falls was the steep-walled gorge, which the water itself had carved through the soft rock. The gorge was seven miles long, and the river continued some seven miles farther, into Lake Ontario.

I insisted on these details because we weren’t visiting Niagara as tourists. We had work to do. My father had come to study evidence of glaciation, and I was eager to help him. On Goat Island, we climbed down the long twisting stairway that led to the base of the American Falls. Following narrow wooden walkways, and soaked in spite of our rain gear, we made our way to the Cave of the Winds, behind the surging sheet of water. In the cave we took samples of limestone and shale. Then we climbed up the stairs, nearly a hundred steps. My legs ached by the time we reached the top. After I rested, we crossed the stone bridges leading from Goat Island to the small Three Sisters Islands—Asenath, Angeline, and Celinda Eliza, far into the Canadian rapids. These islands were called the Three Sisters, my father explained, in honor of the daughters of General Parkhurst Whitney, a hero of the War of 1812. In their day, the bridges hadn’t yet been built, and early one spring, when the rapids were mostly ice-bound, the girls had bravely walked to these small islands and become the first females to visit them.

I could be brave too. I imagined myself, like Asenath, Angeline, and Celinda Eliza, tiptoeing through the shallows. The waters around the islands were calm and lovely, with gentle inlets and small cascades. My father and I visited in June, when the islands were a wilderness of rocks, flowers, bushes, and trees. Branches arched down to touch the water. Mallard ducks swam contentedly from cove to cove. Red-winged blackbirds flitted among the foliage, their yellow and red shoulder patches dense as velvet in the sunlight. A butterfly—a Painted Lady, my father said—lit upon my hair. Apart from the roar of wind and water, there was no sense—no hint, even—of the cataract nearby.

We picnicked along the tree-lined shore of the third Sister, Celinda Eliza. The stony ledge where we sat was magically smooth, for the rocks had once been underwater, my father explained: The unrelenting flow had polished them slippery as glass. Out beyond the sparkling shallows the rapids were like a green blanket, solid, thick, and strong. Yet here on Celinda Eliza, all was peaceful. The undersides of the leaves were lit with the rippling reflections of sunlight on water.

After lunch, my father became absorbed in searching for glacial erratics, boulders carried here by glaciers, sometimes from hundreds of miles away, while I became absorbed in the pebbles washed up along the shore, vibrating in the glimmer of the water’s edge. One pebble in particular captured my attention. It was bright and shimmered like crystal or like a diamond. Yes, it
was
a diamond and I had to have it, for my father. I was a geologist, like him. A
diamond
—the finest gift I could ever give him.

A ripple of water carried the stone a bit farther down the shoreline. Another took it a bit nearer the rapids, but I had to have it. I took a step toward it, the water touching the tips of my boots. I bent down, and reached….

“Louisa! Freeze!”

My father was grabbing my arm, pulling me back, making me stumble on the slick rocks, kneeling before me screaming, “Don’t you ever do that again! That was a stupid, stupid thing to do! Don’t you know how strong the current is? You could have been swept over the Falls in an instant!” And then, as I stood stunned within the circle of his arms, he began to cry, hiding his face against my shoulder, his rough gray beard scratching my cheek.

There had been no danger. I know that, now. Five or six steps would have been needed, at least, to reach the pull of the rapids. I have learned that many people—rational people—wade along the shores of the Three Sisters, cooling their feet in the bright shallows. I have come to understand that my father cried more because I was his only living link to my mother than because of any real danger. But when I was seven, his terror swept through me and became my own. Over and over I replayed the scene in my mind, but no longer was I standing in the reality of a half an inch of water. I was wading—ankles, knees, waist, farther and farther into the rushing mass—until the soft blanket enveloped me.

After our visit to Niagara, my father came to believe that he could protect me only if he kept me near him, so when I completed the local elementary school, he decided against sending me to boarding school, which would have been customary for a girl in my position. Instead I was tutored for three hours each day by a succession of Williams College students. Under my grandmother’s watchful eye, these young men taught me their areas of concentration—Roman history one day, Chaucer the next, in a disorganized jumble nonetheless imbued with intellectual passion and rigor. In the summers, instead of spending peaceful days in Williamstown with my grandmother, I went with my father on expeditions to Colorado and Wyoming. When I was ten, we were stranded for two days by a frightening summer blizzard in the Togwatee Pass, in Wyoming, but because I was with him, my father thought me safe.

All this had an unforeseen effect: I learned to talk on terms of absolute equality with mountain men, Indian guides, and (most significantly) the eminently marriageable students of Williams College. I felt none of the awe that other girls—more properly raised girls—might have felt or feigned. I never learned to flirt or to simper. Perhaps the fact that I treated men as friends made it impossible for them to consider me as a wife.

My father was pleased to relent in his steadfast supervision when I was ready for college, a goal we’d both cherished, but he died while I was in my third year at Wellesley, so he never saw me graduate. My grandmother had died the year before. Now I was completely alone, with no family and an inheritance not even sufficient to cover my tuition. My father had had no income beyond his salary. What with paying for my tutors and financing his scientific expeditions (so that he might conduct them exactly as he wished), there was almost nothing left. I sold part of my father’s rock collection in order to complete my degree at Wellesley. I had always hoped to follow my father’s path: to work toward an advanced degree in geology, to teach at a women’s college, and to continue our tradition of summer expeditions. The only graduate programs open to me, as a woman, were in Europe; therefore I would need to earn a good deal of money before I could continue my studies.

At Wellesley I had a close friend, Francesca Coatsworth, who was from Buffalo. After graduation, Francesca was returning home to begin an apprenticeship as an architect with the firm of Louise Blanchard Bethune. Francesca encouraged me to apply for a position at Macaulay, her old school. On her recommendation, I was offered an appointment teaching geography and history, a combination that seemed natural and pleasing. I took up my duties with excitement, knowing I had no choice, yet eager to make the most of the opportunity. In my heart, I believed Macaulay would be only a way station.

I surprised myself by choosing a city merely twenty miles from my nightmare of Niagara, but Buffalo was considered a place of promise and hope. Already it was called the Queen City of the Lakes, the greatest inland port in the history of America. And it was a city of glamour. Buffalo had sent two presidents to the White House, Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland. When I came to the city in 1886, Cleveland was in his first term in the White House. He had recently married young, beautiful Frances Folsom, who had grown up in Buffalo. She was wildly popular, with fan clubs dedicated to her around the country. There were sixty millionaires in Buffalo and scores who were almost millionaires. Their fortunes came from Great Lakes shipping, from railroads, flour milling, lumber, leather tanning, meatpacking, soap, iron, wallpaper, banking—and, quite simply, land: from the fervent rush of commercial interests to establish a foothold in Buffalo. The city’s daughters were being sent abroad to marry into the English aristocracy.

Outwardly, I prospered as the city prospered. In 1892, I became headmistress after only six years at the school. I brought Macaulay to prominence and doubled the enrollment, to close to two hundred fifty girls in grades 1 through 12. I instituted a college preparatory curriculum and, most important, made it fashionable. Girls from good families who had once completed their educations at finishing schools out of town now stayed home and graduated from Macaulay. Granted, not more than a handful were permitted to go to college, but all Macaulay girls attained a breadth of knowledge which made me proud. In addition to the standard subjects (including Latin), the girls studied chemistry, physics, and trigonometry. Many undertook the study of classical Greek. The curriculum was difficult, and new for women, but my girls rose to the challenge. I began a scholarship program, and although I had only limited funds (enough for one or two students per year), nevertheless Macaulay was recognized for educating the most talented among the working class. As an added benefit, my girls, probably for the first time in their lives, were forced to interact on an equal basis with the daughters of the men employed by their fathers’ factories. I also formalized a program of volunteer work, to give my scions of power and wealth an awareness of the bleaker realities of their city. I wanted them to take this awareness into their marriages, each a gentle but persistent infiltrator.

Through all of this I never gave up my own goal, to undertake studies in Europe for an advanced degree in geology. My daily life in Buffalo felt transient, like a youthful, albeit fulfilling, lark. Yet as the years passed, almost in spite of myself I became settled. When the day came that I finally possessed the financial means to leave the city to pursue my own dreams, I no longer felt I could. I had invested too much, in emotion and labor, to leave the city behind. My moment of choice had passed.

Grace Sinclair lived in a Palladian house set back from the corner of Lincoln Parkway and Forest Avenue, less than a half-mile from Macaulay. A low brick wall surrounded the estate, with trees and shrubbery further shielding the house from the street.

The evening after Millicent Talbert’s visit, I stood at the gate, my gloved hands upon the frigid grillwork, and I studied the house. A light, feathery snow was falling. Months had passed since I last stood here, and the house looked indefinably different. It glowed behind the barren trees with a brightness which wasn’t entirely welcoming.

Grace Sinclair was my goddaughter. When her mother, Margaret, had died seven months ago, she’d left her husband, Tom, devastated. Margaret had been born into one of Buffalo’s oldest and most prominent families, whereas Tom, although he was now the director of the hydroelectric power project at Niagara Falls, had endured poverty as a child in Ireland. Perhaps in part because of the difference in their backgrounds, Tom had adored Margaret, indeed worshipped her. After her death, he had retreated into himself. While still managing his business, he’d clearly wanted no visitors to his home during the time of mourning, and so I’d stayed away.