The musty stink of damp clothes lingered in the carriage, which reeked of soot, and the floor was littered with discarded tickets. I was glad I wasn’t wearing my good coat when we sat down on the grimy wooden bench. I peered out the grease-smeared windows, but the only view was straight into the apartments of the buildings that lined the track. After catching sight of too many men in their underwear and women cooking in tiny kitchens, I gave up and stared at my hands.
‘At least there are no men exposing themselves or women caught in amorous activities today,’ said Florence in an attempt at humour.
We alighted from the train and descended another set of slippery steps to the street. I grabbed the railing but it was so chilly I was afraid that I might stick to it and let it go. We walked past a butcher in a bloody apron skinning a goat, a pawnbroker and a baker with grime under his nails sorting bread.
‘He’s the only baker who doesn’t add sawdust to his flour,’ Florence told me. ‘Everyone else does, or waters down their milk. That’s why so many children starve no matter what their parents feed them.’
We stopped at a German delicatessen where Cecilia bought liverwurst sandwiches, pickled vegetables and cooked sausages. Surely she didn’t intend for us to eat those things? We turned down a side street and the stench of urine and faeces was so overpowering, I had to stop.
‘It’s worse in summer,’ said Cecilia letting out a loud breath that steamed in the air.
Something touched my leg and I glanced down to see a pile of rags moving. Then a craggy, sallow-skinned face popped up and the pile became a woman. ‘Penny to save someone starving?’ she asked, holding out a hand blackened with dirt.
Florence reached into her pocket and gave her some coins before we walked on.
The street was lined with ramshackle houses. One might have once been as handsome as Douglas Hardenbergh’s charming Georgian mansion, but now its front steps were worn and cracked, the ironwork was missing and the windows were caked in a brown crust. The dwellings on either side of it were rickety wooden houses; two of them nothing more than burned shells on the verge of collapse. Oversized rats scurried between the piles of rotting garbage that were stacked in the gutters with seemingly no expectation of collection.
‘These homes were built to house a single family,’ Florence explained, ‘but as the wealthy moved further uptown, they were divided into smaller and smaller apartments. Now there could be as many as twenty people living in each apartment, sometimes more.’ She nodded towards one of the burned-out buildings. ‘That caught fire last year. One hundred adults and eighty children were killed.’
We all stood in silence imagining what that terrible catastrophe must have been like. I remembered the grisly accounts of the Bazar de la Charité fire in Paris a few years previously, in which one hundred and twenty-six people had perished, including children. I couldn’t imagine a more terrifying way to die than to be trapped in a burning building.
‘Of course there are many poor areas in Paris,’ I said. ‘But since Haussmann remodelled it, there aren’t slums quite as bad as this in the city.’
Cecilia gave a grunt. ‘Two-thirds of New York’s population live in tenements. That’s nearly two and a half million people, Emma.’
‘Two-thirds? How could that be possible?’
Neither Cecilia nor Florence answered me. Instead, to my horror, they walked up the steps of the Georgian house and gestured for me to follow them. Surely we weren’t going inside?
I steeled myself. I had to go through with this for Isadora’s sake.
The hallway was dim with a tomb-like chill that sank into my bones. Every kind of human odour assaulted my nostrils — faeces, urine, vomit, blood, sweat — mixed with the stench of rotting food and mud. In the gloom I glimpsed sacks of rubbish everywhere, as if we had entered a rag-and-bone merchant’s. A rat scurried between us with a piece of bloody meat in its mouth and I stifled a scream.
At the end of the hall stood a staircase with some of the steps missing. ‘Be careful,’ Cecilia warned us as we climbed. ‘Last time I was here the railing gave way and hundreds of bugs scurried out of it.’
We stopped on the third-floor landing and Cecilia knocked on the first door we came to. ‘Mrs Dempsy, it’s Cecilia West and Florence Garrett. We’ve brought some food for you and the children.’
A woman in a threadbare dress and torn apron opened the door. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five but her face was drawn like an old woman’s and her hands were red and raw. She showed us into a dingy apartment, no bigger than the ironing room in Caroline’s mansion, where two small children were lying on a pile of dirty straw. There was only one window, and the ceiling above the coal stove was black with grime. The stink of cabbage and fried onion seemed to have sunk into the peeling wallpaper.
‘This is our friend Miss Emma Lacasse,’ Cecilia said, holding out the food package to Mrs Dempsy. ‘I’m showing her the ropes today. She’s a cadet.’
‘Thank you,’ Mrs Dempsy said, taking the package. ‘I was wondering how I was going to stretch things. Mrs O’Brien has measles at her place and I couldn’t leave the little ones with her to go to work. The rent’s due tomorrow, and the collector says it’ll go up to nine dollars next month. When I told him that was too much and the window seals and stove pipe still hadn’t been fixed, he said there are ten other people waiting to take the place if I don’t want it.’
Mrs Dempsy’s tone was that of a woman resigned to bad luck and frustrations. Cecilia took out a pencil and notebook and wrote down what she’d said.
One of the children had a wheeze to his breathing that didn’t sound healthy. Florence bent down and touched his forehead.
‘He has a temperature,’ she said. ‘Make sure you send for Doctor Johnson, and let him know I’ll fix up the bill.’
‘Thank you, Miss Garrett,’ Mrs Dempsy replied. She glanced at me with a look of apology. ‘I’m sorry I don’t have anything to offer you. Things have been much harder since Angus was killed. It must be exciting being a cadet and all. You must be smart.’
I wasn’t sure what to say to this woman who was being kind to me while she was trapped in a nightmare.
‘Not as smart as I’d like to be, Mrs Dempsy,’ I replied eventually. ‘But I’m always learning.’
We visited some of the other apartments in the building. In one of them, an old man was crouched by a stove trying to keep warm. He was drinking hot water from an empty can and my eyes fell to his hands, painfully swollen with rheumatism.
‘Tell us how many people live here, Mr Sauer,’ Cecilia asked him.
‘In the evening, when everybody comes home from the factory, there are fourteen of us. My son and his wife and her two sisters, six children, and three boarders.’
‘Where do they sleep?’ asked Florence.
I had been wondering the same thing. The room was barely twelve feet across.
The old man pointed to a pile of dirty rags. ‘We spread them out so everybody has something.’
‘How old are the children?’ I asked. ‘Do they go to school?’
He shook his head. ‘There’s no time to worry about school when everyone’s hungry. The children only bring in a few cents making artificial flowers but it’s something.’
On our way out, Cecilia gave some money to a new mother who only had newspaper to wrap her newborn child in.
‘Thank you, miss,’ she said, with tears in her eyes. ‘But I don’t think he’s long for this world. I saw that look in the eyes of my last two. They took one glance around them and decided not to stay.’
Back on the street, the open air I had thought so foul was much fresher than inside the house. I couldn’t wait to scrub the stench of dirty rags and foul straw off my skin, but I didn’t believe anything would wash away those images of poverty from my mind.
‘You’re shocked, aren’t you, Emma?’ said Florence. ‘You’ve never seen anything like that before?’
I shook my head, ashamed of what I and the r
est of my family would look like to a woman in Mrs Dempsy’s situation, or to Mr Sauer, or the new mother whose baby would probably die. One of those hundred dollar bills Oliver had handed out at the ball for the men to roll into cigarettes would have kept these families housed for a year. What Caroline had spent on my costume and jewellery would have provided amply for a lifetime. If Lucy had handed out the party favours to the people in these slums, it could have changed the course of a whole neighbourhood’s history.
‘How do these people end up living like this?’ I asked. ‘I don’t understand.’
Cecilia studied me for a moment, then pointed to the brownstone across the street. ‘The tenants in that building pay their rent to a collector, but do you know who owns the building? The landlord who refuses to spend any money on repairs; who orders the collector to extract the maximum rent possible?’
‘A criminal perhaps?’ I said.
‘That house is the property of Augusta Van der Heyden, along with the two beside it. Those further down the street have been in the Schorer family for years. The two that burned down were owned by the Warburgs.’
I was stunned and couldn’t do anything but stare at her. I thought back to Augusta’s elegant formal dinner, to the night at the opera, to the showy parades in Central Park. Those people acted so civilised, so cultured, so superior, but this was where their money came from. My mind blurred.
‘Two streets down, the entire area is owned by Douglas Hardenbergh,’ Cecilia added.
A buzzing started in my head. I had the sensation of staring down a dark tunnel.
‘I admit he is one of the better landlords,’ Cecilia went on. ‘He has at least complied with regulations to provide adequate ventilation, plumbing and fire escapes, but the tenements are still how he makes his money. The other supposedly elite families have point blank refused to make improvements of any kind that would cost them money.’
‘Every day more and more immigrants flood into New York — from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Russia, China, and even from the south,’ Florence said. ‘They’re all hoping for a better life, but instead they find this.’ She grimaced, looking around her. ‘And their sheer number means the landlords can afford to exploit them.’
‘My family don’t own any tenements, do they?’ I asked. ‘I’ve only heard that Oliver invests in some commercial property.’
Florence shook her head. ‘But he does own railroads and factories and in that way he contributes greatly to the terrible position these people are in. The low wages he pays means these families can never escape the cycle of poverty. You heard what Mr Sauer said: the adults’ wages are so low, the children have to work too. They’ll never learn to read.’
Cecilia’s eyes narrowed. ‘It’s Oliver Hopper’s sheer arrogance that most angers me,’ she said. ‘Would you like to know how Mrs Dempsy’s husband was killed?’
I shivered, knowing that she was going to tell me something terrible. For a moment none of us said anything, then Cecilia spoke slowly and deliberately.
‘Oliver Hopper loves his European automobile so much he makes a game of it when he speeds down Fifth Avenue, forcing pedestrians to jump out of the way. Vendors throw fruit at him in an attempt to make him slow down. Late one afternoon, he struck Angus Dempsy as he was getting off a streetcar. Angus’s head was crushed like a cantaloupe. The police arrived, but Oliver was never charged because of who he is. Afterwards, he didn’t even offer any compensation to Mrs Dempsy. Angus’s funeral was paid for by what the other tenants of the building could scrape together. He’s buried in the potter’s field on Hart Island.’
Her words ran through me like a bolt of lightning. I stumbled as the image of Teddy cleaning gore from the tyre of Oliver’s automobile rose in my memory. My brother-in-law had killed a man? I wanted to argue with Cecilia and tell her that she must be wrong, but I couldn’t get any air into my lungs. My vision turned white and my legs gave way beneath me.
Florence grabbed my arm. ‘All right, Emma, let’s get you somewhere warm.’
Aunt Theda ladled pea soup from the tureen and placed the bowl in front of me. The fire in her dining room was blazing but nothing could take away the chill in my bones. Tears burned in my eyes when I recalled destitute Mrs Dempsy in her rat-infested apartment, trying to support her starving children.
‘That can’t be what happened,’ I said again. ‘Oliver is selfish and ambitious but he’s not completely without morals. He gives money to charities anonymously —’
‘He is completely without morals,’ snapped Cecilia. ‘All of them are.’
My mind swam with anger and confusion. I’d thought that Oliver’s distant and sometimes harsh manner was due to his unhappy marriage. But I should have seen him for the callous brute he was when I came across his trophy room with its slaughtered animals. Then another idea scratched at my brain: did Caroline know about it? I recalled the evening of the accident and remembered that she and Oliver had fought fiercely. Out of all the awful discoveries I had made that day, at least I could take comfort that my sister hadn’t condoned Oliver’s atrocious behaviour.
‘How does it feel to be a member of the Hopper family now?’ asked Cecilia.
I could not bring myself to look at the women, ashamed of how they must view me. But Oliver’s behaviour did not change my love for Isadora. She was faultless in my eyes. Being born into the Hopper family was not something she had chosen for herself.
‘Will my brother-in-law be arrested?’ I asked. ‘I can’t understand how he got away with killing someone, intentionally or not.’
Aunt Theda sighed. ‘Unfortunately New York is corrupt from the police to the politicians. Those with money can get away with practically anything, including killing an innocent man and leaving his wife and children with no support.’
I shook my head. ‘If I could help, I would — but I’m not rich. I’m in New York to assist with my niece’s debut in return for my sister paying off debts I owe in Paris. Perhaps I can persuade my brother-in-law to pay Mrs Dempsy some compensation . . . Well, she can never be truly compensated, but it will help with her children.’
‘He won’t agree to that,’ said Cecilia. ‘It would be as good as admitting guilt.’
Florence touched my arm. ‘We’re not expecting you to make amends. We only wanted to let you know what the Hoppers and the people you associate with in New York are really like.’
‘My niece isn’t like that,’ I said, turning to Cecilia with a plea in my voice. ‘I realise you need to write the truth, but please leave Isadora out of it. If she had a choice she would be your most enthusiastic member of the Confirmed Bachelor Girls’ Club, and I believe she does try to contribute positively to the world through her art.’
Cecilia let out a breath. ‘I’ll only mention it was her debutante’s ball. But in return you must do something for us.’
‘What?’ I asked.
The three women exchanged glances.
‘Meet me at my apartment this time next week and I’ll show you,’ Cecilia said.
Cecilia’s article describing the tenements of the Lower East Side and how the ‘robber barons’ were exploiting poor immigrant workers appeared in McClure’s Magazine’s next issue. She mentioned Oliver handing out one-hundred dollar bills to his fellow businessmen at the ball:
These men are well-known subscribers to the theory of ‘social Darwinism’, which allows only the fittest and best-adapted individuals to survive. They, and others like them, have opposed welfare systems, compulsory sanitation and free schools, arguing that society can only progress and prosperity and personal liberty flourish when competition is given free rein. Supply and demand must determine prices and wages — no other factor. But doesn’t their ‘dog-eat-dog’ philosophy put them only a little above common criminals?
The daily papers were quick to take up Cecilia’s points, and soon the publications that had praised Isadora’s debutante ball only a short while ago were now condemning the Hoppers.
Three thousand bottles
of French champagne! Such a wanton display of wealth when so many in the city are suffering is simply outrageous, said the New York Times.
The New York World followed suit: Like the royalty of Versailles, these people have sunk to the level of debauched parasites and ought to be condemned to death. Heads must roll!
Even politicians and preachers denounced us. Caroline received death threats, and Oliver hired private detectives to guard the house. Both of them stopped driving their motor cars, and whenever Caroline went out in the carriage she always had a bodyguard to accompany her.
Since I’d seen the horrors of the Lower East Side, I’d been unable to look Oliver in the eye. I made an effort to control myself but it took all my willpower not to visibly cringe whenever he approached me. He had killed Angus Dempsy and the knowledge played on my mind every day. If I wasn’t so concerned about Isadora, I would have left the house and returned to Paris, even if it meant my debts went unpaid.
Isadora was shocked by what was written about her ball. ‘Perhaps we really are nothing more than parasites,’ she told me. ‘Mother spent half a million dollars on that farce! The guests combined would have spent thousands on their costumes. Imagine how that money could have changed the lives of the people in the tenements.’
Caroline came to speak to us one afternoon when we were in the music room.
‘I know these articles in the papers have upset the both of you,’ she said, sitting down on the piano stool and brushing her hand absently over the keyboard. ‘But you’re overreacting. Oliver and I went through something similar during the Pullman Strike a few years ago. People condemn us, then they forget and life goes on.’
‘But so many people live in terrible conditions,’ I said. I hadn’t told anyone that I’d seen the tenement houses and their pitiful inhabitants, but the images were firmly imprinted in my mind. ‘I hadn’t imagined that such slums could exist in New York. Maybe somewhere like Calcutta . . .’
The Invitation Page 26