Shadows of the White City

by Jocelyn Green

  Ivan set his jaw, then used all his brawn to part the sea, Kristof ushering Sylvie in his wake. “There’s no way we can get there on foot,” he told her, half shouting to be heard.

  “I’ll swim if I have to,” she replied, doubting there were any vessels left.

  By the time they reached the wide steps that led down to the Grand Basin, her hat was gone, and her hair was tumbling down her back. Just as Sylvie feared, no vessel waited at the landing. Every one of them already carried people and colored lanterns over water that reflected the Fair’s white lights.

  “Wait here.” Kristof waded into the water and grabbed the first gondola he came to. Then another vessel blocked her view.

  “He’s paying them,” Ivan told her. “He’s paying the passengers and the gondoliers.”

  Moments later, two gondolas glided up to the landing. As four people debarked, Ivan climbed into one of them while Kristof helped Sylvie into the other. It swayed as he stepped in after her and guided her onto a velvet-covered bench.

  “Race you to the Woman’s Building,” Kristof called to Ivan.

  With a terse nod, he accepted the challenge.

  Kristof wedged himself beside Sylvie. Water from his dripping trousers seeped through her wool skirt. She didn’t feel it.

  “We’re in a hurry,” she called to the gondolier. “Can you get us to the Woman’s Building?”

  Kristof added something in Italian.

  The dark-haired gondoliers on bow and stern answered with their long oars, sending the gondola forward.

  Haltingly, they swung around the forty-foot-tall pedestal that held the Statue of the Republic and several daring spectators, then continued toward the opposite end of the Basin. At a snail’s pace, it seemed to Sylvie, they angled beneath a bridge connecting the Electricity and Manufactures Buildings.

  Sylvie followed the sound of cheers until she spotted a giant parade float depicting the Great Fire that had taken place twenty-two years ago today. She had run from that fire and survived it. Even so, the reminder pressed a bruised spot in her memory, and she quickly looked away.

  Kristof called out in Italian again, spurring the gondoliers on as they steered around electric launches, dugout canoes, and other watercraft.

  She grasped his hands to warm them. “I don’t understand why Jozefa came back. Rose has been writing to her. She planned to join her in New York, I’m sure.” On land, people roared for a float of Columbus at the Court of Isabella.

  “Jozefa is a proven manipulator. That’s hard to do from a distance.” He put his arm around her rigid shoulders. “We’ll get there.”

  At this rate, it wouldn’t be soon. Sylvie could only pray it would be soon enough.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Twin lines of crimson light ripped through the sky just as Sylvie and Kristof gained the rooftop of the Woman’s Building. The parade was over, the fireworks begun. Across the lagoon, fifteen thousand fairy lamps lit all at once in the trees.

  “Ivan? Rose?” Sylvie called into the darkness. Trails of smoke striped the sky.

  “Mimi.” The searchlight swept over the roof, illuminating the empty chairs and tables of a deserted café, and Rose, who stood near the waist-high railing. Ivan, thank goodness, was with her. Jozefa presided, as still and pale as a sculpture. Beyond them, past the lagoon and Fisheries Building, showers of red and green burst over the lake.

  “I’m here,” Sylvie said. “Kristof and I are both here. But Jozefa, why are you?”

  “I just got here myself,” Rose said. “Ivan says he arrived a couple minutes before me.”

  His gondoliers had been more aggressive than Kristof and Sylvie’s.

  “What’s going on?” Rose asked.

  “This would have been easier if you’d come alone.” Jozefa pushed back her shoulders, dignifying her silhouette. “But you didn’t. As I was just explaining to Ivan, I missed you. I supposed you might want my company on the long journey to New York.”

  “Didn’t she already tell you she would meet you there?” Kristof asked. “Why couldn’t you trust her?”

  “I—I wrote I would probably come,” Rose stammered. “It was all but certain. But it’s no small thing, leaving this way. How can I say good-bye to Mimi forever?” She faced Sylvie. “I wish I could take back every cruel and wicked thing I ever said to you. I shudder when I think of all the times I glibly pointed out that you were not my mother. You’ve been more of a mother to me for all these years than I had any right to. You shaped your entire life around me, though I was an orphan and you could have handed me to an institution.”

  “Like I did, you mean.” Jozefa’s veneer of control began to peel away. “Is that what you’re trying to say? Have I not told you I’m sorry enough times? How many more apologies do you require, darling?” But the endearment rang hollow and cold.

  “This isn’t about you,” Rose said. “This is my apology to make. I love you, Mimi. And during the past few weeks, whenever I’ve imagined myself far away from you—” She pressed a fist to her mouth. The edge of her shawl riffled in the wind. “It isn’t guilt I feel, for you’ve given me your blessing. But how can I cut ties with you and not grieve? Since Nikolai died, you are the only family I’ve had. You and Papa Stephen, Aunt Meg, Uncle Nate, Hazel, Walter, Olive. Mr. Bartok, too. The Hoffmans. I’ve belonged with you. I’m sorry I ever lost sight of that.”

  A burden Sylvie hadn’t realized she still carried suddenly lifted, the relief of it like a hundred birds taking flight from her body. “Yes,” she managed around the hard wedge in her throat. “You belong.”

  More explosions spangled the sky.

  “My dear, you begin to scare me. If I leave here without you, I don’t know what I’ll do. We stand atop a monument to what Woman has done, what Woman can do. But for all my accomplishments and fame, my life has failed to satisfy me. I need my daughter for that. I need you to prove that you’ve forgiven me.”

  Rose turned back to Jozefa, and Sylvie imagined she could see her mind sway as she leaned toward her. “I do forgive you. And I love you, too. I want you to be happy, you must believe that.”

  Even in the hazy glow cast from the bulbs lining the rooftop, the cords of Ivan’s neck were visibly taut. “Be wary, Rose. She wants to use you for her own happiness. I should know. I’ve been guilty of the same. Beware of people like us.” It was the truest thing he could have said, and it sent a shudder of surprise through Sylvie.

  “She’s my mother,” Rose insisted. As if this alone might outweigh everything else in the balance.

  She still didn’t know it was a lie.

  Sylvie slowly walked toward her, then hesitated, searching for the words that would right her world again—and bring Rose’s world crashing down. Her lungs grew thick with dread. Sylvie didn’t want it to be this way. She didn’t want to have to crush Rose in order to save her.

  “The truth,” Kristof said above the distant but raucous crowd. “Just tell her the truth.”

  Wind whipped Sylvie’s hair about her face and neck. “Rozalia, we met with Dr. Janik this evening. I wish you’d been there.”

  “I’m sorry, Mimi. I didn’t mean to keep another secret from you.”

  “Wiktor Janik wasn’t just the Dabrowskis’ friend and neighbor. He was the doctor who delivered you.” Sylvie’s voice was steadier than her stomach. Kristof pressed reassurance into the small of her back with his hand. “He delivered you from Magdalena. She was your mother, and Nikolai your father. Jozefa lied to you.”

  Anger flashed over Jozefa, there and then gone. Mastered.

  “What?” Rose frowned.

  A strange laugh escaped Jozefa, scraped from some dark and hidden place. “Don’t listen to her, dear. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  “You did.” Ivan’s defiance resounded over the continual blast of fireworks. There was no break, no respite between explosions now, but one piled on another, layering the sky with color and foul-smelling smoke. The searchlight swung back to them, lighting him from
behind. “You lied to Rose over and over. You admitted it yourself.”

  “Miss Townsend is desperate.” Jozefa raked a hand over the pearl strands draping her bodice. “What lie would she not utter, if it meant keeping you to herself? Of course she wants to deceive you. She’ll say anything. Anything at all.”

  “No.” Sylvie’s middle roiled, her pulse thrummed in her ears. “That’s your tactic, not mine. Listen to me, Rose. Your shawl was crocheted by Dr. Janik’s wife as a gift to Magdalena soon after you were born.” Rockets exploded in the night from a dozen different places about the Fair.

  “You can’t prove any of this.” Jozefa’s tone turned as dark as her face.

  “I can.” Kristof reached into his pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a rag. Metal chair legs scraped the pebbly rooftop as he pushed them out of his path. “Look,” he said. “It’s the same yarn.”

  Then Sylvie understood. Somewhere on the fairgrounds, an elderly Polish doctor was walking around without one of his socks so that Rose could see the evidence.

  Light suddenly blasted away the dark all over the White City as five hundred-pound magnesium bombs detonated on the Wooded Island, in the Court of Honor, and at the lakefront all at once. In this gift of illumination, Rose gasped at the sock Kristof held, pairing it with the shawl that was tied over her shoulders.

  “It’s a match,” she choked out from the brink of a dangerous height.

  Sympathy throbbed through Sylvie. Dizziness shook her.

  This moment—the wind, the rooftop, the dark, the smell of smoke—whisked her back to the weeks following the Great Fire. In the rush to reconstruct the city, the mortar between bricks had frozen before it had time to dry. Strong gusts toppled many-storied structures. Sylvie and Meg had stood on the top floor of one of those buildings, coaxing Stephen to come down from his soldier’s-heart-induced patrol. Terrified, she had felt the floor shift and creak beneath her feet, had heard bricks slipping loose and tumbling to the ground. Just after they’d all left the building and crossed the street, it had collapsed.

  Sylvie stood on such scaffolding again right now with Rose, who had hastily constructed her dreams and plans upon every word Jozefa had told her. It would not hold. And now, instead of coaxing Rose to climb down from the dizzying height, Sylvie was knocking away the bricks herself, until nothing remained but the joyless conclusion that Jozefa was an imposter and Rose’s real mother was still dead in her watery grave.

  Her heart kicked at its cage. “Dr. Janik is telling the truth, Rozalia,” Sylvie said. “Jozefa isn’t.”

  Rose twisted toward the woman she’d been calling Mother. “I don’t understand. Explain it to me. The truth.” She sagged against the railing, her skirt snapping at the rungs.

  “I had a baby.” Regret oozed from Jozefa’s words. “I named her Rozalia and gave her up for adoption, regretting it for the rest of my life. I told you all of this, and it’s absolutely true!” Strands of hair spun in the gusting wind, defying her tidy coiffure.

  “Perhaps you did,” Kristof said. “But your baby was not this Rozalia. Was it?”

  Sylvie searched herself for some pang of sympathy but found none.

  “I have been searching for so long, and so has she,” Jozefa argued. “Fate brought us together, and I won’t lose her now. Not after everything I’ve done.”

  It was Ivan’s turn to laugh. “You mean not after trapping her, lying to her, and feeding her stories you thought she’d want to hear?”

  “The lullaby?” Rose’s voice was small and cracked. Parched, Sylvie thought, for nourishment Jozefa could not give.

  “I sang that to you,” Jozefa insisted.

  “What lullaby?” asked Ivan.

  Rose hummed the first line.

  Ivan picked up the tune and sang it in Polish. “Rose, that song has been around for ages. Every Polish mother, mine included, has sung it to her children for generations. Go to any tenement in my neighborhood and you’ll hear the same thing. This means nothing.”

  Rose slid along the railing away from Jozefa, her expression that of one plummeting.

  “She isn’t your mother.” Sylvie hooked her arm through Rose’s elbow. She would break her fall, be a soft landing if she could. But she could feel the cracking of Rose’s heart in her own chest.

  “Don’t listen to her!” Jozefa bleated. “She’s just being selfish. See how she pulls you away from me.”

  Rose stiffened, and Sylvie felt a bolt go through her. “Selfish? Mimi has done nothing but support me. She let me correspond with you, even after you destroyed the letters you said you’d mail her on my behalf. It was her idea to give me Polish lessons, and Mr. Bartok has given hours out of every day to make sure I learn the language. She told me I was free. Free to choose you. And I’m just as free not to.”

  “But don’t you see?” Jozefa’s eyes went round and wild. “It’s perfect. You wanted your mother. I was trying to find my daughter. You even have the same name she did. Surely that’s a sign. Come back with me. I don’t want to keep living alone. I’m weary of bearing the guilt for a single mistake I made twenty years ago.”

  “Twenty?” Rose rasped. Another flare overhead cast her face in blue and green.

  “What difference does it make that you’re a few years younger than my daughter? What does it matter that we don’t share the same blood? I can’t find my own Rozalia. But I found you. It’s good enough.”

  Sylvie’s blood went cold, icing her veins. Only when Kristof’s hand settled in the hollow of her waist did she realize she was shaking. “So you confess the entire deception. You knew she wasn’t yours the entire time?”

  “No.” The actress twisted a ring on her finger. Perhaps she was still performing. “At first, I really thought she might be mine. Then we bonded. Didn’t we, Rozalia? The dates not working out mattered less and less.” Ever graceful, even in her madness, she fluttered toward Rose, reaching.

  “Miss Zielinski.” Kristof stepped between them. Ivan went to his side, a bulwark. “Do not touch her. She is not your property.” He looked over his shoulder at Sylvie and Rose. “Do either of you ladies have anything you wish to say, or are you ready to leave?”

  Rose inhaled, then controlled her breath’s release. “My parents died while trying to give me a life in America. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  An eerie smile crept over Jozefa’s face, like a mask changing shape. “I see. And what about the baby?”

  Rose peered around Ivan to see Jozefa. “What baby?” The wind all but snatched her question.

  “Yours.”

  Shock spilled down Sylvie’s collar. Her thoughts jumped so far, she reined them back, forcing herself to focus on much smaller things. The pebbles beneath her soles. The sour odor of fireworks, the ghosts of smoke they left behind. The cold Kristof endured in the dropping temperature, his clothing still wet and clinging to his skin.

  Rose’s hand went to her flat middle. “I am not with child.”

  “You don’t expect me to believe that. I left you alone in a hotel room with a young man who adored you. Stalked you, even, which is how I knew he’d be perfect. I fed you lines from Romeo and Juliet. Who can resist forbidden love?”

  “I tell you, I couldn’t possibly be with child.” She looked to Sylvie. “Believe me!”

  Sylvie’s knees felt loose as she stepped sideways, the better to see Jozefa around the barricade formed by the men. The barrage of heavenly explosions dimmed as she called up the last five weeks that Rose had been home.

  She hadn’t complained of her monthly cramps. She hadn’t taken to bed with a hot water bottle and a bar of chocolate, as she had every month since she was fourteen. Sylvie’s mind conjured Rose with a baby, shunned, her place in good society gone. She saw herself helping Rose with the infant, the toddler, the growing child, as Sylvie’s hair turned the color of stone.

  An explosion shattered the visions. Rose had given her word that nothing had happened beyond a kiss.

  Jozefa crooked a f
inger at Ivan. “Remember what we talked about.”

  His face latched shut against her. Fireworks burst into shapes of dolphins, fountains, and flying fish, but proved no more astounding or impossible than these rooftop revelations.

  “Ivan, tell her. Tell them!” Rose cried. She stepped out from behind him to stand at his side. The broad beam of the searchlight veered over the four of them, and then over Jozefa, apart and alone.

  In Ivan’s hesitation, Jozefa clucked her tongue. “What do you think of your precious Rose now, Miss Townsend? Just when you finished raising her, she brings a baby into the world, unwed. You wouldn’t force her into an unfit marriage. But are you ready to give another eighteen years toward helping her raise this child? I think not.”

  Sweat filmed Sylvie’s skin. They were all too close to the edge. “I believe Rose,” she said. “But even if she were with child, I would not send her or the babe away.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve already given half your life to her.” Jozefa leaned toward Rose. “Come with me to Poland. I’ll atone for my sin of abandoning my daughter by helping you raise yours. Just because you don’t have a husband doesn’t mean you can’t keep your baby and your reputation, too. We’ll tell everyone you’re a widow. I’ll make sure both of you are cared for. I’ll redeem my past mistakes.”

  This was madness.

  Kristof angled toward Ivan. “You have something to say. There’s still time to be the real hero.”

  Ivan clenched fists at his sides. “There’s no baby. There’s no way she could be pregnant. I would never do that to her. And I would never lie about it. Not even if someone offered enough money to keep my family well fed and healthy for a year.” He directed a scalding gaze at Jozefa.

  Rose gasped. “How could you?” Her voice shook with disbelief and sorrow. “You wanted to ruin me! You orchestrated the entire thing, so that even if I was tempted to reject you, you hoped Mimi would reject me!”

  “I love you, Rozalia,” Jozefa crooned. But she was backing up, away from all of them, bumping and scraping chairs and tables. “I would do anything to have you with me until the end of my days. It doesn’t matter to Miss Townsend that you’re not her blood relation. Neither does it matter to me.” She gripped the railing at the edge of the roof.