The Attempt

by Magdaléna Platzová

  The penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island was a constant threat for the New York anarchists. Andrei B. served his time elsewhere, but Louise G. ended up there with a two-year sentence. Half of it was dismissed for good behavior, at the intercession of her influential New York friends.

  During her incarceration, Louise trained to be a nurse and read every book she could get her hands on. She also developed a respect for religion, thanks to a Catholic priest of French origin, who supplied her with literature and met with her in the evenings to discuss what she had read.

  “I realized that you don’t need to fully share the views of another in order to feel close to him,” wrote Louise. “Father Jerome had an enormous capacity for love and compassion. He was humane. I got along better with him than with many of my puritanical anarchist comrades.”

  Father Jerome also advocated poverty at a time when Protestant preachers were roaming the country, spreading word that it was a man’s duty to accumulate wealth. Wealth was a sign of God’s blessing, and poverty God’s punishment for sins and laziness, they claimed.

  “How did money come to be held as the greatest value in the New World?” Louise questioned. “Where does this greed come from, this urge to accumulate more and more? Why are people like bottomless pits that can never be filled?”

  Hair, feces, and blood on the operating room tiles. The woman who just gave birth asleep, exhausted, in her bed, a child lying openmouthed on the bed beside her. A purple knot of flesh that isn’t going to survive, and even if by some miracle it did, nothing good lies in store for it. Certainly not the love of this worn-out, prematurely aged mother. Who knows how many she squeezed out before this one, how many were born dead, how many she killed or left to die, how many of them are alive without ever knowing anything but hunger.

  I heard that in the dustbins of London they find more murdered newborns than dead cats.

  The woman sleeps fitfully, her cheeks burning with fever. She’s one of the quiet prisoners. Food and pain are the only things she reacts to. If anyone ever gave her a gentle caress, it was so long ago that she has forgotten.

  What they call the operating room here is a small room with a sink, a table, and a lamp, separated from the rest of the infirmary by a door. Apart from that, there’s just a big walk-through room with sixteen metal beds covered with gray wool blankets, lined up side by side along the plank wood floor. Most of them are occupied. Tied to each bed is a tag stating the patient’s name, age, and reason for conviction: Anne Blythe, 23, prostitution. Anne Sullivan, 20, prostitution. Kathy McCormick, 40, theft.

  They beg me for alcohol and cigarettes. They pull on my sleeve and whisper, “Get rid of this thing for me! Louise, honey, do it for me. I know you know how. Do it for the little one’s sake. Kill him.” And they pound on their bulging bellies.

  At home, they jump off tables and sit in tubs of boiling water. Knitting needles are even more dangerous. They don’t care if they die having an abortion. At least then they’ll have peace, and the city will look after any children they leave behind.

  LOUISE’S CONVICTION—INCITING UNREST—set her apart from the prostitutes and thieves. As a result, Dr. White noticed her and offered her a job as an auxiliary nurse. That meant she was allowed to sleep in the infirmary instead of in a cramped cell where the water on the walls condensed into tiny droplets that inched their way down to the floor and she couldn’t read even when she pressed herself up against the bars, which let in a little daylight.

  When he had to operate, Dr. White called in the trained nurses from Charity Hospital, but for minor procedures—injections, measuring blood pressure and drawing blood, emptying chamber pots and wiping sweat, sitting vigil with the dying and closing their eyelids once they died, changing bandages and cleaning festering wounds—there was Louise.

  After a visit from her highly placed New York friends, the warden and the prison director began to treat her more kindly, even allowing her to go on walks sometimes.

  I watched the trees slowly wrapping themselves in green, the currents and eddies within the river’s mighty flow, the steamboats’ comings and goings. The sheer curtain of trees on the east bank thickened with new leaves, partially blocking the view of the imposing mansions of Ravenswood. I heard the roar of the wind, the distant train whistle, the clatter of hooves and the rattle of wheels on pavement. When the wind blew from the west, the hustle and bustle of the city dominated my hearing, while the easterly wind carried to me the crow of a rooster or the bleating of sheep. Explosions of dynamite boomed from the quarry on the island’s southwest side, where the convicts labored breaking rocks.

  In June, things slowed down in the infirmary. It was hot and humid, and I opened the windows wide. The nurses at the other hospitals on the island wheeled their patients out to the shaded terraces in their beds and left them there all day. There was always a little breeze blowing above the river’s surface, which made the heat just bearable. The penitentiary administration wouldn’t allow anything of the sort, however, so the prisoners, even those who were ill, had to remain behind bars.

  11

  WINTER IN PRAGUE. Fourteen hectic days making the rounds of the pubs. I even got together, briefly, with my ex-wife. She was expecting a baby.

  “How come we never had children?” I asked.

  She shrugged meaningfully.

  She didn’t want to talk about us, only about herself and her new husband and her new house outside of Prague, which she would be driving out to in her new car when we were done. She was renting out the flat we used to share, she informed me, dangling the car keys from one of her fingers with the painstakingly polished nails. She didn’t drink. No plans of getting a job. She would stay at home with the baby, and then they would have another. They had bought a cottage in the country. Her new man made good money.

  “So what about you?” she asked.

  “Me? Nothing much.”

  “How’s New York treating you?”

  “I’ve always liked it there.”

  “Are you seeing anyone?”

  I shrugged.

  In the morning, before I left, I walked up the hill to the castle to say good-bye. The sun had just struggled its way above the horizon, shaking off the cobwebs of smog, and was rapidly climbing, white and flat. Thin ribbons of smoke wound their way up from the Baroque rooftops of Malá Strana.

  Looking down on my hometown, I realized there were some paths I had never figured out, blindly feeling my way to my destination every time. Others I had taken often, but I wasn’t sure I could find them again. Trickery and illusions. Stone statues, hundreds of them, lounged and loitered inside niches and next to palace gates. Naked bodies in fresh-fallen snow. I had grown up here among them, but they suddenly seemed excessive. I was looking forward to Manhattan.

  SISTER MICHAELA WROTE ME AN E-MAIL, thanking me for my New Year’s wishes and asking if I would send her my New York mailing address.

  She said she had thought everything through and decided she had nothing to hide.

  She was in a completely different place now; she was safe.

  “Enclosed space allows the miracle of transformation from a limited earthly life to a life of spirituality, which is the gateway to paradise,” Michaela wrote. “Neither the desert nor the celestial sphere, traversed, day by day, by the glowing orb of the sun, will swallow us up. On the contrary, this is the only place where we can stand firm, however lonely it may be. There is only us and God. He hears us and we him.”

  She wrote that there was a time when she had studied her family’s history in detail. In college, she had even begun to write a book about her ancestors, believing that if she retold the past, she would be free of it. Maybe she was right, but her life went in a different direction. She had abandoned the idea of writing a novel and never wrote more than the few pages she was planning to send me.

  She said she still didn’t understand quite what I was after, but nevertheless she would send me her notes. They didn’t concern her anymore.

/>   “There’s still one piece of information I owe you,” Michaela wrote. “In New York, you asked if there was ever any talk in our family about the assassination attempt. I said no, but that isn’t true. My aunt once told me when the gun was pointed at my great-grandfather Kolman’s heart, he suddenly had a vision of Martha. She was standing beneath the window in a pool of sunlight. She was wearing a white dress and was looking straight at my great-grandfather, smiling.”

  On January 5, when I got home (taking the liberty of calling New York my home), I found an envelope from Sister Michaela waiting in my mailbox. A stack of neatly typed pages from the precomputer age. They gave off a strangely sweet aroma. This must be how the desert smells, I thought.

  Alice

  Alice, the nanny, and the maid are getting the children dressed. Four-year-old Tom has on pants, socks, and shoes, as well as a shirt and a vest, but he’s racing around the cabin, slipping away from the nanny as she chases after him with his coat and scarf. He wants to go outside as is. Three-year-old Martha, whom the women have finally managed to get dressed, starts taking off her clothes again, whining that she’s going to be too hot in her coat.

  Alice is uneasy, and Tom is trying her patience, almost as if he can sense it. He doesn’t listen to her until she starts shouting at him and threatening him with a switch. Finally, both he and Martha allow themselves to be buttoned into their navy blue sailor’s coats so they can go out for a short walk before breakfast. Tom runs ahead, followed by Alice, holding Martha’s hand. The nanny goes with them, while the maid stays behind in the cabin to tidy up after the children and supervise the maids from the shipping company when they come to do the morning cleaning.

  The Atlantic is calm today. Morning sun floods the upper deck. The shoreline has long since disappeared, just a rolling mass of water stretching as far as the horizon, swallowing up the summer sky. Gulls hover in a sparkling tail at the rear of the ship.

  Alice had traveled to Europe before she was married, with her parents and sister, but ever since the wedding she had been too busy to make it over the ocean. First, furnishing their home, then Tom was born, then Martha. In the winter, she didn’t feel like going anywhere with the children, and they spent their summer months at a private club on Lake Conemaugh, where the Pittsburgh businessmen and their families got together to fish, hunt deer, race sailboats, make business deals, and clear their lungs of the city’s filthy air.

  It’s the children’s first time on an ocean liner. Tom pleads to be taken to the captain’s bridge and engine room, and Martha’s eyes bulge on seeing the endless stretch of water.

  On deck, they run into some friends they were socializing with after dinner the night before, and Tom and Martha beg to play with their children for a while. Alice leaves them with the nanny and goes off in search of her husband. She looks in the café, the day lounge, and the smoking room before finally checking the library, an oval room with tables and cushioned chairs, bathed in the morning light that filters in through a cupola of frosted glass. John C., hidden behind a wooden replica of a Doric column, sits lost in thought at one of the tables. Actually, he is halfway reclined in a low upholstered armchair, legs crossed, chin jutting out belligerently. A stack of newspapers sits piled before him, but he isn’t reading. His blue eyes are fixed on the ornately carved ceiling. He must have gotten hold of the papers yesterday evening before their departure. Alice glances at the front page of the newspaper on top: MURDER BY NEGLIGENCE; CLUB GUILTY, NOT GOD.

  She is a bit nearsighted, so she has to bend down. The caricature, printed in color, shows a group of powerful men from Pittsburgh, including her husband. He is on the grass, half-sitting, half-reclining, as he is now, giving an impish look at Carnegie, who squats on a cliff overlooking a lake, holding a fishing rod, with a canvas fishing hat on his head. His young business associate Knox stands fawningly at his side. Alice recognizes most of the faces in the cartoon. They are friends of her husband; she and their wives play bridge together, organize charity events and musical soirées. She has danced with these men at lamplit parties on Lake Conemaugh. In the picture, holding fishing rods and glasses of champagne, they drink a jubilant toast as a dam crumbles beneath their feet, streams of water spurting out.

  “Who do they think they are?” Alice exclaims. “You should sue them.”

  “They don’t name anyone.”

  “But it’s obvious it’s you.”

  John C. shrugs. “They can’t prove a thing on us.”

  “What is there to prove? It’s nobody’s fault it rained.”

  “Let’s go have breakfast,” her husband says abruptly.

  He folds the newspaper into his dark leather briefcase, which normally he entrusts to his secretary, George. But just to be safe, this time George remained in Pittsburgh. John C. has friends, but they all belong to the club, and he has no doubt that when push comes to shove, it will be every man for himself. He would do no differently. The only person he can count on to be loyal is George, whose salary he pays. He goes to ring for a steward to carry his briefcase back to the cabin, but Alice insists on taking it herself. She accompanies her husband up to the deck, then leaves him and heads to the first-class section. Inside the cabin, she sits down at the desk and pulls out the newspaper.

  The number of deaths had already been estimated at over two thousand people. Many of them were still missing, probably carried dozens of miles away by the water. Nothing was left of the town that lay fifteen miles downstream except the Methodist church, the firehouse, and a few homes that were miraculously spared. The old stone bridge was also still standing. Shortly after the flood, a fire broke out amid the avalanche of debris, mud, and human and animal corpses that piled up at the bridge as the most devastating wave swept through the town. The fire burned for three days. People said they could hear the cries of survivors trapped beneath the wreckage.

  The Chicago Herald carried stories of the people who survived:

  Anna Fenn, Acacia Street: Before the flood hit, Anna’s husband, John Fenn, went to help the neighbors carry their furniture up to the second floor. The wave swept their home away moments before it flooded the Fenns’ house, where Anna remained with their seven children: John Fulton (12), Daisy (10), Genevieve (9), George Washington (8), Virginia (5), Bismarck S. (3), Esther (1½). Mrs. Fenn held the youngest child in her arms while the others huddled close to her. She described the scene as follows: “The water kept rising and lifting us up, till we hit our heads on the ceiling. It was dark and the house was shaking; you couldn’t breathe. I don’t know for sure when my children gave up the fight for life and drowned, one after the other. I can’t put into words the suffering I felt with the bodies of my seven children floating around me in the dark.” Mrs. Fenn’s husband, stove maker John Fenn, also failed to survive the flood. Mrs. Fenn is soon expecting the birth of her eighth child.”

  Alice thought there might be a way for her to help Mrs. Fenn and her eighth child. But John C. strictly forbade her from getting involved in anything related to the flood. “We’ve got to be careful,” he said. “Any overly personal assistance on our part could end up being turned against us.” The Fishing and Hunting Club formed a relief committee. About half the members contributed several thousand dollars each, and they also sent a thousand woolen blankets to the town. But they played innocent, refusing any direct responsibility for the disaster and not responding to the attacks on them in the papers. The method proved to be effective.

  Alice reads that, shortly after the flood, a group of town residents attacked one of the club’s cottages in revenge, but there was nobody there, since the few members who decided to spend that May weekend at the lake had left to return to the city before the misfortune struck. The only ones there were the caretaker of the property and a fisheries agent, who with a team of twenty Italian workmen were digging spillways up until the last moment to try to relieve the pressure, and piling mud and rock on the dam to strengthen it. When they saw that it was futile, they sent a telegram warning
the town that it was in danger, and fled. The body of the telegraph operator Bertha Altman, who received the alert, has not yet been found. All that remained of her in the ruins of the station were the metal frames of her glasses.

  The attackers, seized with impotent rage, broke into the clubhouse dining room, smashed a few plates, and moved on.

  Alice reads that the flood was caused by the spring thaw in the Appalachian Mountains, three days of heavy rain, a lack of maintenance on the dam, and, above all, incompetent modifications to the dam, lowering it for the construction of a carriageway across it. “The responsibility lies with the owners of the lake, the members of the Fishing and Hunting Club. But these men rank among the powerful of this country, who apparently cannot be held to answer for anything, not even the death of thousands of people.”

  Mornings on the lake had always been the most beautiful. The surrounding woods were filled with birds singing, and it was so lovely having coffee served on the veranda. The children were able to run around in the fresh air, far away from the blast furnaces of the steel mills, the chimneys spewing smoke and ash over the city day and night. Now all that was left of the lake was a muddy crater with the original bed of the Conemaugh River winding along its bottom.

  The ocean was calm throughout the voyage. They made it to Liverpool in seven days. John C. wanted to stay in London, but Alice was eager to see Paris, so she decided to go ahead and take the children with her. They stayed at the Hotel Belle Europe.

  While he was in London, John C. met with art dealers, exchanged telegrams with George about the situation in Pittsburgh, and studied the Wallace Collection of paintings in detail. He also bought a new set of undergarments and a tuxedo. Meanwhile, in Paris, Alice had two dresses sewn at the internationally renowned House of Worth: an ivory-colored ball gown of silk, decorated with lace and silver threads, and an afternoon gown in a warm red-brown shade. Princess Metternich was said to have ordered a similar dress the same year for her autumn strolls through Vienna.