City of Light (59 page)

Elbert arrived, and after giving me a quick hug devoted himself to business matters with the other guests, making notes on his little pocket pad. Watching him, I smiled inwardly. Wherever he went, he was always, and unapologetically, himself. I’d invited the Talberts and they came, which flattered me considerably. The only notable absence was Mr. Milburn. The week before, his portrait at the Buffalo Club had been defaced (every past president of the club had his portrait displayed in those hallowed halls). This act of revenge for the exposition’s losses was not Mr. Rumsey’s style, but was most likely committed by younger men whose fortunes were less secure to begin with and were gone now. In early 1902, Milburn, rendered an outcast, would move to New York City.

The autumn passed. School brought its usual rewards and frustrations. The holidays were soon upon me. Mr. Rumsey invited me to Christmas dinner with his extended family at Rumsey Park, which was kind of him, and I did appreciate the company on that always difficult day for spinsters. In the past I would have spent the day with Margaret, Grace, and Tom, or with Francesca.

I used the school break between Christmas and New Year’s to sort through Grace’s things. The house was lonely with dust covers on the furniture. While I went through the closets and shelves brimming with her possessions, I felt a pang of guilt that I hadn’t done this before Christmas so the children at the Crèche could have these things as presents. But I consoled myself that they would enjoy them just as much at New Year’s. Some things I left at the house: her drawings of course; the infant clothes which Margaret had put aside in a special box to save; and her hats, which reminded me of the tilt and turn of her head. I took nothing home with me, for I couldn’t bear to be reminded of her any more than I already was.

In January, Miss Love requested my presence for lunch at 184, just the two of us, as her way of thanking me for the donation to the Crèche. We talked about the after-school vocational program she was instituting for older children at the Crèche—“Get them started on the proper path while they’re still controllable!” she explained. We talked about the memorial to President McKinley that was being proposed for Niagara Square. We talked about a replacement for Francesca at the Infant Asylum (mercifully Miss Love did not ask me to fill the position, showing more sensitivity than I’d given her credit for). We talked about anything but Grace. To distract myself from my memories, I offered my slice of lemon cake to a yellow canary who was as fat as a powder puff. As I watched him eat, I thought how much Grace would have enjoyed the sight. I could almost feel her squeezing my hand in the pleasure of it, knowing we must not reveal any giggles or even smiles to Miss Love, who regarded the feeding of her canaries as nothing but their due.

I kept myself close to home during the early winter, but ironically, as the February cold gripped the city and snow encased the ground, I felt ready to get out a bit. In that spirit, I accepted an invitation from Mary Talbert to visit the conservatory in Olmsted’s South Park, not far from the steel mill at Stony Point. At first I queried her about the destination of our excursion: a botanical garden in February? Yes, she insisted. We would go only on a sunny day, and I would be surprised. So on a sunny Saturday we took the train, hiring a carriage when we arrived at the Lackawanna station.

Surrounded by snow, the conservatory seemed like an overgrown dollhouse, its arches and cupolas lending it an Anglo-Indian look, like a play-palace built for the daughter of a rajah. Inside, the conservatory was warm and humid. Walking through the central, domed pavilion with its palm trees, and on into the orchid collection, Mrs. Talbert asked me a simple question, as simple as something like “How are you?” or “You haven’t seemed yourself lately.” Without taking time to think or reason, I began to unburden myself to her. I told her everything: the night at the Iroquois Hotel, the birth of Grace in New York, my decision to give Grace to Tom and Margaret, the blame I placed upon myself for Grace’s death. I was prepared for her judgment, for her condemnation that I’d been so naive as to go with Gilder that night. But she offered only sympathy, revealed by a kind of density in her eyes which welcomed me toward her soul. “How strong you’ve always had to be,” she said. “Much stronger than me.” And I felt for her a kind of surge that I can only describe as love.

Near the end of our visit, as we left the fern and hydrophyte house with its two-story waterfall, she turned to hold the door for me. A gaudily dressed young couple nearby nodded sagely to one another. I realized that Mary’s holding the door had answered a question for them. They had been taken aback to see a well-dressed Negro woman walking with a well-dressed Caucasian. Now they understood that Mary was my maid, and all was well with the world.

Mary raised her eyebrows in good humor. “There you are, ma’am,” she said in an ersatz southern accent before letting the heavy door close directly in the couple’s faces. How we laughed afterward. Sitting beside her on the train ride home, I studied her profile, the golden skin, the rounded cheeks, the straight nose, the warm half-smile, and I felt—here is my friend, the friend I have yearned for since Margaret died—but even closer, because I have trusted her with everything important to me. I have confided all and found acceptance. A friend now, finally, to call my own.

EPILOGUE

Early September, 1909

T
his year, Grace would be graduating from Macaulay. She would be seventeen, applying to college; Margaret would be making arrangements for her coming-out party. If only Margaret had lived, if only Grace had lived. I stand now by the lake in Delaware Park where Karl Speyer drowned. Looking across the water, I see the cemetery hillside where Margaret and Grace are buried. Although I cannot actually see their graves, I do see them in my mind: the angel that marks Margaret, the child holding a water pitcher that marks Grace. So many hopes, brought to naught, commemorated only by stone.

And yet, I reassure myself that I’ve been blessed in these past years by those who have lived, one after another fulfilling dreams I’d nurtured for them. Maddie Fronczyk is a physician who works with Dr. Alice Hamilton in Chicago in the new area of industrial medicine. I used Tom’s endowment to fund her medical education. Millicent Talbert is in training to be a pediatrician. During this past summer, she worked at a Negro settlement house in Richmond, Virginia. I feared for her safety in the South, but Mary tells me that Millicent doesn’t recognize personal risk; she seems to have overcome the fear of risk on that summer’s night eight years ago. Abigail Rushman has stayed on at East Aurora with the Roycrofters and is one of their most skilled book designers. I see her at the club now and again when she visits the city, though she never refers to the necessity that took her to East Aurora and greets me with no special acknowledgment of gratitude or memory. Which is how it should be. She is a professional now, confident in her path. She has not married.

After several years in the Orient, Francesca returned to the city alone. Susannah, she told me, had confessed to her the murders of Speyer and Fitzhugh and then disappeared in Singapore. Francesca explained to those who asked that Susannah had died of an Asian fever—“so dreadful, those Asian fevers,” she said forthrightly at my salon. Despite Francesca’s homecoming, Mary Talbert has remained my closest friend, even as she travels widely for her work against discrimination and lynching.

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

T
he 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, albeit 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.