“What do you see in this room?” he had asked me.
The question had confused me at first. The answer seemed obvious, but I’d learned that nothing about Mr. Carnegie was ever obvious. I’d walked around the room, giving simple answers. “I see fine paintings hung one above another. Louis XV chairs upholstered in red silk fabric with long fringe and short, turned legs. A floor laid in parquet marble and covered with a red, flowered rug. Walls hung in crimson damask with a frieze of full-blooming roses painted above it. A Carrara marble fireplace topped by an onyx mantel clock and candelabra from France and porcelain vases from England. On the center table, a ewer and stand from Austria, a painted tile from Germany, and small ivory figurines from the Orient.”
He gawked at me. “That is a mightily impressive recitation, Miss Kelley. How on earth do you know such minute details about this room?”
I smiled, a slightly devilish grin. “I’ve heard your mother describe it often enough to her guests.”
“Of course you have. How silly of me to ask.” He laughed. “Would you like to know what other story this room tells?”
“Please.”
“This room is actually meant to be read like a book, with each object functioning like a word in a story.”
I stared around the parlor, trying the tease out the story in the room. Nothing came to me from the crowded, overstuffed, chaotic space. “I confess to ignorance. Will you read the room to me?”
“It would be my pleasure.” He walked over to my side, placing his hand against my elbow as he would to any lady visiting Fairfield. I felt like a guest instead of a servant.
Pointing with his free hand to the center table and the mantel, he said, “The specimens you’ve so perfectly described tell the ‘reader,’ or guest, that the family residing in this home is well and widely traveled.”
“I see.” I didn’t mention that the Carnegies had not traveled to the Orient as the figurines might suggest, but I understood how this “word” worked in the room’s narrative and how a family might manipulate those “words” to send particular messages to their guests.
Moving his hand from my elbow to my palm, he guided me to the wall most crammed with paintings. “This array of choice artwork demonstrates that the Fairfield inhabitants are steeped in culture.”
As he continued describing precisely what each painting would tell the observer about the family, I nodded, but I wasn’t truly listening. All I could think about was the warmth of his hand on mine. While I wanted him to clasp my hand more tightly, at the same time, I was more terrified that Hilda might enter the room and witness us in such a compromising position.
Delicately sliding my hand out of his, I asked, “What about the furnishings? And the silk walls? What part do they play in the story?”
“Ah, excellent question. They are sumptuous and expensive but not overdone. This tells Fairfield’s guests that its owners are well-to-do but not ostentatious. They are instead dignified and refined.” He described the varying fabrics on the walls and furniture of the room, and once again, I wasn’t listening. I had been struck by an insight about Mr. Carnegie.
The “book” about Fairfield was like the narrative of his life Mr. Carnegie was crafting. I sat back and watched him wield his “words” like a painter wields his brush, each a masterly stroke in the creation of a seamless whole. Except I was not witnessing the creation of an average painting, I realized. I was watching a masterpiece in progress.
Mrs. Carnegie had arranged a formal dinner for April 15 at Fairfield. The evening was meant as a joint celebration of the Civil War’s end, as General Lee had surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox, and the European trip Mr. Carnegie had planned in lieu of his Scottish consular position. The furor that raged over her elder son’s decision to leave Pittsburgh for a “grand European tour” with his friends Harry Phipps and John Vandevort at month’s end had abated. Once it became clear that he was determined to leave Pittsburgh, my mistress relinquished her resistance and began to enjoy the details of his journey, a “gentlemanly trip,” as she referred it to with the ladies of her social acquaintance. These ladies, as of late, did not include Miss Atkinson, to my great relief. Her recent engagement to a gentleman from the East End of Pittsburgh meant that she rarely frequented occasions where Mrs. Carnegie was in attendance. That worry, at least, had abated.
But the celebratory tone of the dinner changed to one of mourning with the assassination of the beloved President Lincoln on April 14. The Carnegies decided not to cancel the event. Instead, they sent servants around to their guests’ homes with letters stating that the dinner would observe the rules of mourning and serve as a memorial meal in President Lincoln’s honor. The menu was tamped down from its prior extravagance of melons, consommé, salmon, sweetbreads with peas, filet chateaubriand, roast duck, and dessert. All the servants wore black mourning bands around our upper arms, and black curtains were draped around the home. The Carnegies donned funereal clothes, although the change was not terribly noticeable on my mistress, as she always wore black.
The guests were dressed accordingly, and a somber mood prevailed at the beginning of the evening. From my vantage point in the servants’ hallway, where I waited with my chatelaine as always, I heard eulogies for President Lincoln. Two gentlemen made various proclamations about the wonders of the late president and how he led the nation to victory.
Then the elder Mr. Carnegie began to speak. “During my time as the head of the telegraph department under then Assistant Secretary of War Scott, I had the great fortune of meeting President Lincoln on several occasions when he awaited information. His eyes and speech bore a plainspoken intelligence I’ve never since had the honor to encounter. Yet the most striking and admirable quality of the esteemed man was not his intellect or even the bravery of his convictions, but the perfect democracy of his everyday actions. He treated every man and woman he encountered with the same deference and respect, no matter their station. We should all aspire to his great example.”
“Here, here,” the dinner guests called out, clinking their glasses.
After every remaining gentleman made their tribute, well wishes to Messrs. Carnegie, Phipps, and Vandevort were offered. The clinking of crystal lasted close to an hour, and the mood of the dinner guests lightened with each sound. It seemed strange that they would be celebrating and mourning in the same breath.
A chair’s legs scraped across the floorboards, and suddenly Mr. Carnegie was standing before me. His eyes had a glaze I’d never seen in them before, although I recognized it well enough from my occasional visits to Galway pubs with my family. Mr. Carnegie was inebriated, an oddity, since he usually abstained from alcohol.
We were alone in the back hallway. Drawing so near to my face that I could smell the whisky on his breath, he took my free hand in his. He said, “Forgive me, Miss Kelley, for taking liberties. But given the impending date of my departure, I’m left with little time to speak my mind. And it’s been torturous having you near but not being able to talk with you.”
Did I dare to speak authentically? I was sick of lies and pretending and burying my feelings, and I wanted to admit the truth. Just once. “For me as well, Mr. Carnegie.”
“You do understand that is the reason I’m leaving, don’t you? That you have decided we should not share each other’s company? And that we should not speak of any mutual affection?”
“I do,” I confessed, looking at the floor.
“One word from you, and I will not go.” He tilted my chin up so I would meet his gaze. His eyes searched mine, as if he might find the word stay there if he couldn’t find it on my lips.
I had missed him terribly, and I was sorely tempted to do as he asked. “I wish I could ask you to stay, Mr. Carnegie. I truly do. But I cannot. My duty to my family comes before all else, which means I must earn my wage and send it to them.”
“I could help with your family. I ce
rtainly have the means.”
I heard a note of pleading in his voice.
I paused, trying to understand what he was really offering. Was he proposing that we simply continue our covert meetings and that he would help my family financially? I did not hear him offering something more formal. What would happen if he tired of me or his mother finally discovered us and objected? Given his intense loyalty to his own family, I’d likely lose my job along with the hope of securing any other comparable one—Mrs. Carnegie would surely carry a vendetta—and my family would be lost. No, I could not afford to indulge my feelings. I must stay the course, but respectfully, so as not to alienate him.
I could not risk meeting his gaze. I might soften. Keeping my eyes averted from his, I shook my head.
He removed his hand from my chin but kept the other wrapped around my hand. “I understand, and I admire your selfless duty to your family. Will you do me one favor before I leave?”
A knot formed in my stomach. What was he going to ask of me? I had always perceived Mr. Carnegie as above the sorts of antics I’d heard about other masters. Perhaps I had been wrong.
“Please call me Andrew, not Mr. Carnegie. I need to hear you say my name out loud before I go. Grant me that wish at least.”
It was a small enough request. “Andrew,” I whispered to him, and I felt my resolve soften.
He pulled me closer to him, and as I looked into his eyes, a jarring call sounded out from the dining room. “Andra.”
“Andra!” The voice grew louder. “What are you doing near the kitchen?”
It was his mother. My mistress. And whatever chance remained at that moment was lost.
Chapter Twenty-Five
November 4, 1865
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
I had believed nothing could be bleaker than an Irish winter. Gray skies without a hint of sunlight. Barren tree branches reaching toward the sunless sky. Relentless cold and damp that no amount of fireside warmth could thaw. But I was wrong. Nothing was worse than the onset of the Pittsburgh winter after Mr. Carnegie’s departure.
Not that the weather was harsher than the winter I’d previously served at Fairfield. The frigid temperatures and the bitter winds and the snow made dark by the unyielding black smuts drifting from the city to the countryside were all the same. No, the sole difference was Mr. Carnegie. Not until he departed for his trip to Europe did I understand how much hope and lightness he brought me, even when our park afternoons had ended.
Without him, my life became an unending routine of service to an ever-demanding taskmistress, made increasingly difficult with the harsh change of seasons.
Without her beloved Andra to soften her, Mrs. Carnegie oversaw Fairfield and the Carnegie business investments with a domineering fist. Although the elder Mr. Carnegie left behind strict instructions to his younger brother on managing the family affairs, Mrs. Carnegie insisted on ruling alongside him like a co-regent.
Instead of accompanying her to morning calls throughout Homewood and afternoons of whist at neighbors, I began traveling with her to the Carnegies’ downtown offices. I stood by her side while she attended meetings with the younger Mr. Carnegie to review the affairs of Cyclops Iron, Iron Forge, Union Telegraph, Lochiel Iron, Keystone Bridge, Central Transportation, Columbia Oil, Pioneer Coal, Adams Express, and a number of other brick, coal, locomotive, and iron ventures. Always quiet during the meetings—she was ever cognizant of reinforcing the impression of the younger Mr. Carnegie’s leadership—my mistress’s strength and intellect were unleashed behind closed doors with her younger son at home at Fairfield. She came alive in this new role, and I realized how brilliant she was. And I learned about the industrial forces in play in post–Civil War America.
The absence of the elder Mr. Carnegie not only fueled my mistress’s tongue, but also freed her younger son from his subservient role to some extent. I watched as he stood up to his mother’s edicts in those private business conversations. And while his mother had instigated the younger Mr. Carnegie’s pursuit of Miss Lucy Coleman for the family’s sake, he now sought out the courtship for his own reasons. The twosome shared a comfortable banter and attraction evident to any bystander, and it pleased me to watch him pursue the young woman for her own sake during the increasingly frequent family dinners between the remaining Carnegies and Colemans.
In truth, Mr. Carnegie was never really absent. Multiple times a week, lengthy letters with exotic stamp marks arrived at Fairfield. My mistress and her son acquired the habit of reading the letters aloud to each other in the hours after dinner. She reveled in his descriptions of the Atlantic crossing on board the newest and quickest ship called the Scotia; laughed over his trip home to Dunfermline, Scotland, where he stayed up all night singing Scottish songs with relatives in a town that seemed “miniature” to him after America; and soaked up his accounts of theater, restaurants, concerts, museums, operas, and architecture on the continent. Her son was becoming a gentleman, and while she missed him terribly, she delighted in the status of his well-earned trip, even bragged about it with her friends.
But the letters did not bring me comfort. In fact, they only worsened my mood. To hear of his adventures, accompanied by his friends, with words full of wonder and merriment, made my situation bleaker by comparison because it threw my lingering feelings about him into bold relief.
“Are you listening, Tom?” my mistress barked at her son.
Reluctantly, Tom lowered the newspaper he had been enjoying by the roaring fire and feigned attention. I surmised that his interest in these travel letters was minimal, as he received his own regular missives from his older brother with demands that he send written reports on the state of the family’s business interests and that he undertake specific tasks at the different ventures. The younger Mr. Carnegie believed himself to be capable of making decisions on his own and often disagreed with his brother’s determination to continually reinvest the capital they made. If the young Mr. Carnegie were in charge, I had heard him complain to his mother, he would operate far more conservatively, putting the money safely away or paying off accumulated debts. But he never disobeyed his elder brother, who insisted this post–Civil War period was the time for aggressive investment as the demand for iron and railroads was sure to rise. For all his blunderbuss, the younger Mr. Carnegie wouldn’t dare challenge the elder.
“You have my rapt attention, Mother,” Tom answered.
She glanced over at her younger boy, eyes squinting suspiciously as she asked, “Is that sarcasm I hear in your voice, Tom?”
Tom dropped the paper to the floor, folded his hands upon his lap, and said, “Of course not, Mother. I am waiting.”
“Excellent,” she said with a victorious smile. “Listen up.”
Dearest Mother and Tom,
It is a Sunday and therefore, a day of literary labor, as we boys have dubbed it. As you know, my task is to make a record of our travels in the form of long letters to you, and I hope you will indulge me in the finer details of our journeys.
We continue to take the continent by storm. We get along famously here in Dresden, Germany, each of us keeping to our established roles. Vandy is our resident German speaker and jack-of-all-trades; Harry serves as our postmaster by mailing all letters and ensuring the safe travel of our luggage; and I am the consummate planner and chief enthusiast, by which I mean I map out the excursions and spur the boys along. The boys cannot keep up with me, tiring far too easily, but then, no one has ever kept my pace but you, Mother. As usual, Harry and Vandy try to restrain my determination to visit every museum, sight, theater, and restaurant of note, without success.
We arrived in Dresden but two nights ago, greeted by a most exquisite jewel box of a city. Impressive church spires stared out at us out over the winding Elbe River, where all manner of boats sailed. Despite evidence of industry, the skies, the river, and buildings bear none of the dark marks of progress s
o prevalent in Pittsburgh. Quick study that I am, I am learning the language of Dresden’s breathtaking, often fanciful, buildings, especially the baroque and rococo structures that inhabit the center of the city like the Coselpalais. These churches, palaces, and government offices are unlike any of the structures in the New World or Old that I’ve encountered so far, with artwork to match. I am torn as to whether to name as my favorite the Sophienkirche, the city’s sole Gothic church built in early 1200s if legend can be believed, with its massive twin steeples, or the marvelously rococo, eighteenth-century palace the locals simply call the Zwinger. If pressed, I would likely pick the Sophienkirche, because it houses an enormous Silbermann organ where, rumor has it, Bach himself once performed.
Shall I regale you with details of the opera we heard at the famed Semperoper? No, since we have been speaking the language of architecture, I will first describe to you the opera house itself, worthy of visiting even without the exquisite singing that resounds within its hallowed walls. Considered one of the most beautiful opera houses, it boasts of three different architectural styles—renaissance, baroque, and Greek classical revival—a boon for a student like myself who finds the styles much easier to distinguish when studied side by side. Have I impressed you yet, Mother, with my new art terminology?
Vandy’s German has been indispensable in this regard. It assists us not only in our study of art and culture, but in our conversations with actual locals, not the guides we usually hire to educate us about the cities we visit. Last evening, after a hearty meal, we sat down to drink bottles of beer like every local German man in the establishment, and after we had quaffed down a few, we engaged in a lively discussion with a local tradesman, with Vandy as translator.
While I enjoy the expansive education I am receiving here, I miss the connection I felt with the local history in Dunfermline. There, aunts, uncles, and cousins were quick to tell tales about our very own ancestors, with descriptions so lively, it seemed as though the ancestors had walked the town streets that very afternoon. Here, we learn impressive histories about peoples with whom we have no connection, and while interesting, I do not feel the same bond I felt in Scotland, with its incomparable history, tradition, and poetry. How fortunate we are in our birthplace.
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