The Attempt (6 page)

Under U.S. law, he wasn't yet of legal age at the time he
committed his crime, and his attempted murder had failed. The twenty-two years he was sentenced to, later reduced to fourteen, was an unusually severe punishment, even by the standards of the day.

A good lawyer might have helped, but he chose to defend himself. He hoped to use the trial as the stage for a grandiloquent performance, so he could finally get his message across to those for whom he had sacrificed himself, since the steel-workers didn't seem to understand his actions. Some even blamed him for their defeat. A lot of his anarchist comrades were angry at him as well, and wrote articles denouncing him. They claimed that by acting alone he had harmed the entire movement.

But the trial took place sooner than Andrei had expected, and the public was barred from the proceedings. Andrei didn't have time to prepare properly, and none of his intended listeners heard his famous speech. He barely managed to stammer through a few sentences of it. The whole thing didn't even last an hour.

Andrei felt humiliated and robbed. Nothing went as he had planned.

As John C. Kolman erected his buildings around the Pittsburgh prison, he must have had occasion to think of the young man with the revolver. He certainly didn't feel sorry for him. He didn't even feel sorry for his own children, so why should he feel bad for the Russian Jew who had tried to take his life?

Even his beloved daughter Eleanor didn't escape his scorn. He told her she would never get married and would end up a spinster, shuffling around his buildings with a paper bag, collecting rent.

I walk back downtown over Pittsburgh's oldest bridge. It's the oldest steel bridge in the United States, the only one in the city that might still have some trace of Andrei B. stuck to it. In his day, there were railroad tracks leading over it; now they've been replaced by a road and a pedestrian bridge.

I've seen everything I wanted to: the courthouse and the prison, which is still in use, so I wasn't allowed inside. Kolman's opulent architecture.

The house the anarchists used as a base to dig their underground tunnel is no longer standing. Nor is the headquarters of Carnegie Steel, where Andrei B. fired on Kolman.

7

T
HE WHEELCHAIR SITS AT ONE
in a row of tall windows, back facing the door. The white muslin curtain trembles gently. Eleanor, her finger slipped between the two thin strips of fabric, looks out over the sloping green lawn toward the garden shed, which her father had built for her and her brother. Nothing in it has changed: display cases filled with tiny porcelain figures, a table and chairs, her girlhood dolls. The cages Tom used to catch rats and mice are stored away in the attic.

From behind, I can see a white tuft of Eleanor C. Kolman's hair and the folds of a beige blanket wrapped around her. The dining room smells of coffee, dust, old wood, and an amply medicated body.

A nurse in a blue uniform escorts me into the room. Judging from her abruptness, I assume she's the one I spoke with yesterday at the gate. Small and wiry, with short dirty-blond hair and a face I'd forget even if I saw it every day. She gets her name from the virgin goddess Diana.

“Miss Kolman!” Eleanor doesn't stir. “The gentleman is here.”

Diana walks to the wheelchair and turns it to face the room. But the old lady is caught on the curtain, the muslin fabric twisting around her like a spiderweb. She yanks at it impatiently, until the nurse succeeds in working her loose, then pushes Diana aside with the back of her hand.

“My glasses!”

Diana obediently pulls a pair of glasses from the pocket of her uniform, places them on the old lady's nose, and retreats into a corner.

The daughter of John C. Kolman looks like a caricature of her father. One of her eyelids droops, probably due to a stroke. The other eye, pale blue, stares straight at me.

I stammer something about how grateful I am to be invited into her home.

Eleanor gestures with her hand toward the fireplace.

There it is, the Bouveret, in the same spot where its original owner hung it a hundred years ago. I have to admit, seeing it in person like this, it has a certain charm. It reminds me of the old color prints of Jesus in a white shirt, radiant head gracefully bowed to his chest, heart bloodied and wrapped in thorns. The figures of the apostles are lost in shadow, the only source of light coming from Jesus and the white loaf of bread he holds broken in his hands. A young girl stands among the men, holding a bowl in her hands. She stands to the left of the Lord, fixing him with a rapturous gaze.

Perched on the mantelpiece beneath the painting are two framed photographs, two children in coffins. Martha, the little rosebud, looks as though she's sleeping, curly hair tied in a bow, her little hands clasped on the blanket, gripping a white rose. The baby boy has sunken cheeks and a mouth like an old man, his eyeballs bulging beneath his waxy eyelids.

“Coffee?”

I'm startled back to my senses. “That would be very nice. Thank you!”

“Diana!”

A column clock, a marble bust of Martha, velvet-bound
photo albums, statuettes, writing implements, an old-fashioned lorgnette. It's as if someone had just set them down for a moment and walked away.

Diana returns with a tray bearing a single cup of thin porcelain tinkling in its saucer.

She pushes Eleanor up to the table. My host doesn't drink coffee, but apparently she'll keep me company.

“Jan van Os.” She points to the opposite wall, hung with a rich still life of fruit, flowers, insects, and a mouse feasting on grains of corn.

“Beautiful, really. When did Mr. Kolman acquire it?”

“Eighteen ninety,” she says without a moment's hesitation. “Do you see the bee?”

“No.”

“Go closer, look more closely.” She pronounces each word with great effort, her voice creaking and scraping inside her withered throat. “Not there. On the left! You see?”

Sitting on the exposed red innards of a slightly spoiled fig, sliced open in two, there actually is a little bee.

“Yes, there, I see it now.”

“Hooray.” Eleanor wheezes.

Diana interjects: “This is a game Miss Kolman used to play as a child. Every morning she would try to find something new about the painting, and if she did, that meant she was going to have a good day. It's been a long time since she's found anything, hasn't it, Ellie? Until this morning. Congratulations on finding the bee! You're going to have good luck today.”

“Never mind about that,” the old woman says, shooing the nurse back to the corner. She turns again to me. “So you're interested in Bouveret? You're writing a book about him?”

“Yes, that's right.”

“He isn't worth it.”

“But he's one of the great masters,” I stammer. “A successor to Rembrandt, unjustly overlooked.”

“It's sheer kitsch. Can't you tell?” Eleanor snaps.

My face flushes red. “But then why . . . I mean . . .”

“Why is it here? For my father's sake, of course. He brought it back from Paris after Martha died. Because of the little girl. He bought a lot of paintings with little girls back then. I wasn't born until much later. Just an add-on.” Her chest rattles with laughter, which turns into a cough. Diana steps in with a glass of water and whispers something in her ear.

“Oh, never mind,” the old woman says, dismissing her again. “Why shouldn't I talk? It's not like it's going to kill me.” She bursts out laughing again, followed by a long bout of coughing. Finally she gasps, “He won't leave me alone. Even now he won't let me be.”

“Miss Eleanor,” Diana says, raising her voice in an admonishing tone.

“T
OM
,”
THE OLD WOMAN SAYS TO ME.
“That whole time you left me waiting in the anteroom, and I still wasn't upset. Remember how I assisted you in surgery? What you did to those animals was disgusting, but I didn't mind, just as long as you played with me. Shall we go upstairs?”

She turns to Diana. “We want to go upstairs.”

The nurse shakes her head disapprovingly, but she dutifully pushes her out the door. As they pass me, she whispers, “You have to come, too. She thinks you're her brother.”

“It's been so long since you've been here. I'm going to show you everything,” Eleanor promises as we ride up in the wooden elevator. “I left it all just the way you remember. What took you so long to come back, Tom? Are you still angry? Do you think I stole from you? I would never do that to you, Tom.”

Diana pushes the wheelchair down the hall and opens one of the doors. “Our classroom,” Eleanor announces with pride. “Remember?”

Bookshelves, blackboard, chalk, glass-doored cabinets stacked with notebooks, maps on the walls, the familiar schoolroom smell.

“Just look at that.”

I pick up one of the notebooks. The margins of the carefully ruled pages covered with regular girlish letters are filled with notes scrawled in pencil. I recognize the handwriting of John C. Kolman: “Why isn't the assignment complete? Improve grammar. Excellent!”

She leads me on into Alice's bedroom. There, among the silver hairbrushes and stale bottles of perfume, among the cloudy mirrors, carved deer, and roses, she bursts into tears. A bubbling and gurgling comes from inside her, like water passing through a clogged pipe.

Finally, Diana has a chance to intervene. She pulls a case with a syringe prepared in it out of her pocket. All she has to do is to unwrap it and remove the protective cap. The old woman calms down as the needle plunges into her dried-out skin. She settles back in her chair and closes her eyes.

Diana removes Eleanor's glasses and straightens her covers with an almost loving touch. She beckons me to follow her. Out in the hallway, she presses a button and a bell sounds
in another part of the house. A few moments later, a woman appears. I think I spoke to her yesterday, too. A big black woman with a kind round face, she serves under Diana, the shadow of a shadow.

“Put her to bed.”

The black woman wheels Eleanor away down a long corridor and turns the corner.

Diana escorts me out.

“I don't know why she agreed to your visit,” she says, shaking her head. “I suppose she wanted to talk to someone from the profession. She really does know her art. Years ago, she was working on a book, too, back when I first started here. She would write and write, for hours at a stretch. But she never finished it.”

“How long have you been working here?”

“Twenty years.”

“That's a long time.”

“Yes, very long.”

“Do you remember what the book was about?”

“The Italian Renaissance. She asked me to read it. Some of the passages were quite nice. I remember a description of a monastery in Italy. Every cell had a small window looking out on the landscape and a drawing on the wall to go with the view. I can't remember the painter's name.”

“Fra Angelico,” I say. “I've seen the monastery. It's beautiful.”

“There, you see, you've even been there.”

“Does Miss Kolman have these episodes often?”

“Not too often.” Diana is surprisingly talkative. “But it comes every once in a while. Especially at night. She complains that she wants to die. She cries.”

“That's terrible.”

“Yes, it's challenging. A few years ago, at one point, she refused to eat. We had to put her on IV. Then somehow she just snapped out of it. Sometimes she gets confused, like she did today with you, and sometimes she talks to ghosts. Usually her father. She complains that he won't let her die, and other things. Some nights it's enough to drive you crazy. She wakes up crying and moaning that she was never good enough for him and he ruined her life.”

She suddenly stops. “Why, I shouldn't be telling you this! These are . . . confidential matters. I hope you'll keep it to yourself. I don't even know why I started.”

Our brief moment of intimacy has passed and she hastily tells me good-bye.

Outside, I stagger a little, the sandy path crunching beneath my feet.

On the bus ride back to New York, I read through the informational materials I collected on my tour around the Iron City. One of them is a brochure from the Kolman Museum, with a section featuring Eleanor's memories of her father.

“My daddy,” she writes, “would have done anything to make me happy. He proved it to me every day in the most loving, intelligent, unusual way. Ever since I was a child, I've felt the strength and gentle protection he provided. He was my fortress.”