The Attempt

by Magdaléna Platzová

  Louise had accompanied him to the station. As she hugged him good-bye, she thought to herself, For the last time!

  It was hard for her to imagine.

  Of the journey itself, Andrei wrote, “Every detail of that day clearly etched in my mind.”

  In his wallet he had just one dollar, enough for a night in a cheap hotel. First thing the next day, he would look up his comrades in Pittsburgh, so he could stay with them. How much time would he need to get everything ready? Two days?

  He thought about his mother and his eyes welled up with tears. He wanted to remember her alive.

  The last time they had argued, it had been about the girl serving their meal. Andrei couldn’t stand it when his mother beat the servants.

  “She’s no worse than you are.”

  His mother blanched with rage. “Don’t you ever talk to me that way.”

  She reached out and rapped him on the back of the hand with a fork. He grabbed a glass and hurled it at the mirror—one of the elegant Venetian mirrors that decorated the dining room of their country house.

  His mother’s rapid exit. Then silence. From that day forward until her death, which came all too soon. She turned to the wall and exhaled. He didn’t even get a chance to tell her he loved her. He covered her dead hands with kisses.

  He fled to America soon after that. Stayed with relatives but didn’t linger long. He and his opinions were just a nuisance to them. At sixteen he was kicked out of school for an essay arguing that God didn’t exist. What do you do with a boy like that?

  He was seventeen when he came to New York. He spent his first few nights on the street, then found friends, comrades. So much had changed in two years! He had moved in with Louise. And now he had a mission. He had been waiting for it. He knew it would come. This act would be his trophy. His guiding star. Something big and real, which couldn’t be undone.

  “Outside the train windows,” Andrei wrote, “the sun is setting. Cows graze in lush meadows. Families with children stand along the tracks, waving at the passing train. The world could be a good place, too. Good for everyone!”

  I’M GOING TO PITTSBURGH BY BUS, not by train. We left Friday afternoon from Chinatown in New York. There were no ripening fields outside the window, just the roadside shoulder and the line of cars passing us. Soon it was dark. I booked a night in a hostel, and the next day I would set out in Andrei’s footsteps.

  IN 1892, A BROWNISH YELLOW CLOUD of smoke, soot, and ash hung over the city from the factory smokestacks belching flames day and night. The workers lived in single-story dwellings slapped on top of one another, each big enough for two rooms, one family per room. Some homes sat off by themselves, tilting sideways in the midst of a block of demolished or burned-out buildings.

  Only the main street was paved in Homestead, a steelworking suburb of Pittsburgh set in the bend of the Monongahela River. All the other roads were dirt. In the fall, until the snows and freezing weather came, and then again in the spring, they turned into a sea of mud. The houses, shops, and taverns belonged to the steel mill owners. When the men drank up their wages, they would shop and live on credit, then spend the rest of their lives working to repay their debts. Until their children took their place.

  Today a shopping center stands on the site of the former steelworks, of which nothing remains except a row of tall brick smokestacks. On the other side of the river, slowly decaying under the onslaught of rust, are the blast furnace, walkways, and chimneys of the so-called New Mill, which thirty years ago was still in operation. The tracks lead off to nowhere.

  From Homestead I head, as Andrei once did, for the millionaires’ district in Pittsburgh’s East End.

  In those days, coaches issued from the gates of expansive villas surrounded by gardens, bearing ladies dressed in white and their children, squeaky-clean and well fed. As Andrei walked down the street, any doubts he might have had disappeared.

  From a distance, I contemplate the home where Eleanor can’t die. Nearby, she had another center built to hold the art that wouldn’t fit into the museum in New York. She turned the surrounding woodlands into a park and donated it to the city. All in her father’s name. The house with the round turrets is also slated to become a museum. They’re just waiting for her, its last inhabitant, to die. Then the villa and all its inventory will be taken care of by the foundation that Eleanor has granted a large sum of money in her will. Every single object is to be kept: every book, petticoat, toy, and hairpin that fell behind the headboard.

  This museum of happy family life will be the last thing she does for her father.

  On a bright Sunday morning, the park around the villa is filled with people jogging, parents strolling with children. Yellow leaves settle onto the baby carriage tops; some of the trees are already bare. Acorns drum against the wooden picnic tables. The air smells of nuts, mushrooms, and damp earth.

  Following the signs, I easily find the little walled-off cemetery in the woods. The gate is locked, but I can see in through the decorative wrought-iron bars. Beneath a tidy row of thuja sit four tombstones, two large, two small, one topped by a white angel with drooping wings. That must be Martha’s. The little one with no decorations probably holds the baby’s bones. And the biggest one is Kolman’s. Beneath the hulking tombstone is the concrete crypt in which Eleanor had her father laid to rest. Even after his death, she felt a need to protect him from the hatred that he aroused in people. Beside him, covered by a somewhat smaller piece of stone, lies Alice. They had to bury Thomas Kolman elsewhere. After their father’s death, when he found out the will provided for most of the estate to go to Eleanor, he parted with the family on bad terms.

  I see the sky dully reflected in the windows of the villa. Leading toward the main entrance is a sand-strewn path, carved into the vivid green of a lawn that slopes gently down toward a greenhouse and garden shed. A hundred years ago, Eleanor must have played there, eagerly watching for her father to come home from work. The turn onto the driveway is made from a quiet street lined with villas, each one a copy of a different historical style, from Norman half-timbered houses to Rococo chateaux. The Kolman house is the ugliest one. You can’t even tell which style it’s trying to mimic. It’s been expanded and remodeled so many times, its original appearance has been completely watered down.

  I HIT ON THE PLAN OF HOW to get to Kolman’s daughter while I was in the reading room of the New York Public Library, looking through a book about the Kolman house that Eleanor herself put together thirty years ago.

  I was amazed at how much Kolman’s taste changed in the space of just a few years, how perfect his New York collection seemed in comparison with what was on display in the rooms of the first family residence. It encapsulated the difference between a metropolis and a provincial city, between the mentality of cultured art dealers like the Duveen brothers and the outlook of an unsophisticated businessman, who accumulated works of art solely for his own pleasure.

  One of the paintings he bought in his first years of collecting still hangs over the fireplace in the Kolman dining room: Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret’s Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus. I verified it from sources more up-to-date than Eleanor’s catalog, including an article on the Web site of the Art Renewal Society, a bizarre organization based in New York that advocates for the rehabilitation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century academic painting.

  As an emissary of an organization like that, I might find an open door with Eleanor Kolman. I could pretend I was writing a book about the forgotten victims of modern art and trying to track down every existing work by Dagnan-Bouveret.

  The furthest John C. Kolman got in his collecting was the Impressionists, and Eleanor was even more conservative, settling in between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. She didn’t allow any modern art in the collection, even when it meant clashes with the museum’s board of trustees. That made two discriminatory rules: no Germans and no modern art.

  I RING THE BELL AT THE GRAY STONE GATE. As I wait, the wor
ds of Sister Michaela run through my head: “There’s one point on which my great-aunt and I fundamentally disagree: I don’t believe in art as a way to salvation. The obscene accumulation of wealth can’t be redeemed by collecting pretty pictures, not even if you show them for free! In every other respect I’m like her. Are you surprised? My family would be. They think I’m different and that’s why I ran away. But in fact it’s just the opposite.”

  “Do you have an appointment?” asks the woman over the phone at the gate when I explain what I want.

  “I sent a letter, but I’m not sure if Miss Kolman received it.”

  There is a pause, then the woman’s voice comes back on: “Miss Kolman got your letter.”

  “That’s great. May I trouble her for a moment of her time, then?”

  “She was expecting you yesterday.”

  “That can’t be. I definitely wrote Sunday the twenty-second. That’s today.”

  “She can’t see you now. She’s resting.”

  “Please, if you don’t mind, could you at least ask her?”

  Again a moment of silence, then the woman returns.

  “Come back tomorrow morning. In the afternoons she’s too tired.”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to go back to New York tonight.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “No, I mean yes, I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “Be here at nine A.M. You can view the painting, but no photographs. You’ll have to make do with the ones Miss Kolman had taken for the catalog.”

  “Yes, of course. Thank you. Please give my regards to Miss Kolman and tell her I’m looking forward to it.”

  Silence. The staff Eleanor employs aren’t too polite. Apparently, she keeps them on a short leash and a little bit hungry all the time, like guard dogs.

  BELOW ME GLITTERS THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, which then continue on together under the name of the Ohio. The lights from the bridges and skyscrapers, yellow, white, and blue, push back against the cold autumn dark. Supposedly, this is one of the most beautiful views in the United States. The air is fresh and crisp. It’s hard to imagine there was once so much smoke and dust that even on a bright day the sun didn’t peek through. To get up to the vantage point, I took one of the two old-time funiculars that still climb Mount Washington. There used to be seventeen of them. In those days it was the only way to transport people, supplies, construction materials, even horses up the incline. The roads were too narrow. In 1870, when they built the Monongahela Incline, the young John C. Kolman was just getting into the coal business, manufacturing coke and quickly getting rich.

  There’s no way to miss the mark he left on downtown Pittsburgh. After his split with Carnegie, he proceeded to build at a furious pace, perhaps trying to prove he couldn’t be gotten rid of that easily, he couldn’t be erased from the city.

  He erected a steel-framed skyscraper, higher than the Carnegie Building, as well as a one-thousand-room, twenty-two-story hotel and a huge arcade of shops and galleries in the ornate neo-Gothic style.

  All of the buildings are in close proximity to the prison where Andrei B. spent fourteen hellish years, most of it in solitary confinement. For talking back, refusing to go to chapel. For thirteen of his fourteen years, he wasn’t allowed any visitors. Once, he tried to escape.

  Three anarchists rented a ground-floor apartment in a building just outside the prison walls. While two of them dug a tunnel, the third spent several hours a day playing piano to cover up the noise. After a few months, they actually managed to dig their way inside, but the map they had, drawn for them by a former prisoner, was wrong. Instead of emerging into a tool shed, as they had planned, the tunnel came out smack-dab in the middle of the prison yard. They were found out, and Andrei went back into solitary.

  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

  THE 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, radia
nt 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.”