“Well,” said Hetty, “it’s certainly large.”
“It is,” said Mary.
“I hope,” said Hetty, as she gazed at the rows of tables, “that they can find that many people who want to read. I always fall asleep in libraries, don’t you?”
“I hardly use them,” Mary confessed.
“Plenty of room to sleep in here,” said Hetty. “Let’s go down.”
It was a bright day outside as they came slowly down the steps onto Fifth Avenue.
“I’m pleased I saw it,” said Hetty, “but I’ll be glad to go home. I feel a little tired.” She paused while Mary looked out for a cab. “Did I tell you,” she said, “that my husband proposed to me right here, when they’d just built the reservoir?”
“Yes,” said Mary, with a smile.
“That was a wonderful day,” said Hetty.
“It must have been,” said Mary.
Then Hetty suddenly said, “Oh.”
“What is it?” said Mary.
But Hetty didn’t say anything. She staggered, as if she’d suddenly been struck.
“Are you all right?” said Mary. But before she finished the question, Hetty started to fall. Mary tried to hold her, but she couldn’t, and Hetty crashed to the ground.
It was quite a piece of luck that a shoeshine boy should have been passing right beside them just then. He put down his things and helped them right away. He propped Hetty up, and while Mary held her, he hailed a taxi, and then, since Hetty seemed to be unconscious, he helped Mary get her into the taxi and asked if he should come with her to the house. “Oh,” said Mary, “that would be so kind.”
So the boy put his things on the floor of the taxi, and Mary told the taxi to go down Fifth, and in no time they were on their way. Hetty’s mouth had fallen open; she seemed to shudder. The boy leaned forward and propped her up, awkwardly, in the corner of the seat.
“Gramercy Park,” said the boy to the driver.
“How do you know that?” asked Mary.
“Been to the house,” said the boy.
Then Mary realized she had seen him before.
“Why, you’re the brother of the Italian girl who came to lunch a few months back,” she said. “Your sister works at the Triangle Factory.”
The boy said nothing. And Mary remembered the terrible tragedy that had happened there in March. That awful fire. It was a huge scandal—one hundred and forty people had died, mostly the Jewish girls who worked there.
“I hope your sister was all right,” she said anxiously.
For a moment, Salvatore Caruso did not reply. He was looking at the older woman. He realized, which Mary still did not, that Hetty Master had just died. That would be enough for this nice lady to worry about today.
“She’s fine,” he said.
Empire State
1917
FOR OVER A century, the United States of America had avoided the tragic quarrels and follies of the Old World. Three years ago, when the countries of Europe, trapped in their complex tangle of rivalries and alliances, had begun the Great War, William and Rose Master, like most thinking Americans, had hoped their country could stay out of the futile quarrel. And for a while it had seemed that this would be accomplished.
Was there a strategic necessity to become engaged? Not really. Was there an emotional reason? Although most Americans assumed that their country was predominantly English, there were in fact more Americans of German descent than either English or Irish. Nor, in the year 1917, were the British too popular. For Britain’s cruel crushing of the Easter Rising had enraged Irish Americans, at least; and the British naval blockade had harassed countless American vessels. President Woodrow Wilson, who still liked the British, sent them food. But that was about it. If the Europeans wanted to tear themselves apart again, most people said, that was their problem. Avoid foreign entanglements.
In the end, it was Germany that brought America into the war. Up until recently Wilson, trying to keep his country neutral, had managed to handle the Germans. When their submarines sank the Lusitania with Americans on board, he’d protested, and the German high command had stopped the submarine war. Now, however, everything had changed. The Germans had behaved abominably: seeing Russia collapsing into chaos, and the British nearly starving, they had concluded that they could win the war with a final push. Suddenly, German submarines had gone into action again. “Since your ships carry food to the British,” Germany told President Wilson, “we’ll torpedo any American vessel on the seas.” In an astounding insult to the United States, German representatives even told Mexico: “Attack America, and we’ll help you take back Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.”
It had to be war after that. The massive American mobilization now in progress would soon teach the Germans what it meant to tangle with the free nation across the Atlantic. Only last week, William and Rose had gone down Fifth to Washington Square Park to see the big bonfire where some enterprising young people were burning an effigy of the German Kaiser.
To date, the faraway European conflict had not affected the Master family very much. Indeed, William Master had been surprised to find that he had done quite well out of it. For a few months in 1914, the Stock Exchange had been closed, but a busy market in war bonds had developed, and soon there had been huge business to be done supplying the warring nations of Europe. American manufacturing was still forging ahead; Henry Ford was mass-producing cars on his new assembly lines.
In fact, the greatest immediate worry confronting Rose and William was their son Charlie.
He had not had to register for the draft, at least. That was something. The Draft Registration of May 1917 applied only to men aged twenty-one to thirty-one. But Charlie had given his parents plenty of other reasons to be apprehensive.
Rose had been concerned when Charlie had insisted on going to Columbia University instead of Harvard. “He likes being in New York,” her husband pointed out. “I know,” she’d answered. “That’s what worries me.” Quite apart from the fact that Harvard was Harvard, she’d also reckoned that Charlie would get into less trouble in Boston. “I’m just afraid that he’ll make undesirable friends.”
He had. Before he’d even gone to Columbia, Charlie had shown a precocious interest in the nightlife of the great city. He’d disappear into the theater district or Greenwich Village, and nobody would know where he was. More than once he’d come home drunk.
“And yet, underneath,” his mother quite correctly pointed out, “he’s still a child.”
As for his opinions, now that he was at university, one never knew what he was going to say next. He’d already told her that the Bolsheviks in Russia had a good cause; the other day he’d said he was thinking of joining an anti-war protest. His ideas and enthusiasms seemed to alter every week.
Her husband William might find it all amusing, but she was well aware that Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia was determined that his university should be seen as patriotic and politically sound at this critical time. He’d warned the faculty and undergraduates that if they started any public protest against the war, they’d be dismissed, and recently Charlie had confessed that two of his friends had been expelled. She lived in terror that any day he might come home and tell her that the same thing had happened to him.
“I’m sure,” William said cheerfully, “that if Charlie gets in trouble, you’ll be able to smooth things over with Butler. Just ask him to one of your parties.”
It was true that Rose Master was quite a force to be reckoned with, these days. After the death of old Hetty Master, a good deal of money had flowed down to William’s parents. And when, a couple of years ago, William’s mother had died, and Tom Master had followed her not a year later, the trust funds had left William and Rose in possession of a considerable fortune, to do with as they pleased.
Recently they’d moved up to a considerably larger townhouse just off Fifth Avenue in the Sixties, only a couple of blocks from the magnificent new palace of Henry Frick. The house had a fine
classical facade and a further, special feature, copied from Mr. Scribner the publisher’s house, which stood nearby. Most people with motor cars kept them in converted stables nearby, but in the Masters’ new house, the entrance was through a double gateway, leading into a little courtyard, where the car descended into a basement garage by a private elevator. William had also bought a new Rolls-Royce, the Sedanca de Ville model, which resided there.
If Rose, over the last decade, had built up a reputation as a hostess who entertained delightfully, but with a well-judged, old-money restraint, she was now able to do the same thing on a considerably grander scale. And through her entertaining, it was perfectly true, she could wield surprising influence.
But she was well aware of her limitations.
“If Charlie annoys Nicholas Murray Butler,” she said, “I don’t think I could save him.”
And now, she very much feared, Charlie was about to commit a dangerous error.
So it was in no uncertain terms that she told Charlie, one November evening: “No, Charles, I will not have that man in my house.”
“But, Mother,” he protested, “I already invited him.”
Why, of all the people lecturing at Columbia University, Charlie had singled out Edmund Keller as a hero she had no idea. As far as Rose was concerned, the relationship between their two families had died with old Hetty. But earlier that fall, when Charlie had met the popular lecturer and Keller had expressed his warm remembrance of the Master family’s role in his own father’s career, Charlie had been delighted.
“I realized we still have some of his father’s photographs,” he told his mother. “He even asked me if I meant to be a patron of the arts.”
“He’s trying to flatter you.”
“It’s not like that,” Charlie said, with a frown. “You don’t understand. Keller’s a pretty important person at Columbia; he doesn’t need us.”
It was true that, with commendable restraint in her opinion, Butler had allowed Mr. Keller to continue his career as a university teacher, and that Keller had done quite well. But in her mind, two facts remained. Firstly, Edmund Keller had been, and no doubt still was, a socialist. Secondly, her son was far too impressionable.
And now Charlie, in an act of childish idiocy, had asked the man to one of her select parties. But looking at Charlie’s fair-haired, blue-eyed face, it now occurred to her that it might be wiser if she used a little subtlety. Keller must be dealt with, but in a way that wouldn’t antagonize her son.
“He really wouldn’t like the party, Charlie,” she said. “But let’s do something even better. Ask him to come to dinner with us, just a family dinner, where we can get to know him better, and talk.”
A week later, Edmund Keller, suitably attired in a dinner jacket and black tie, came to call at the house. When Charlie had first suggested he come to a party at his parents’ house, he’d been a little uncertain. He remembered that Rose had once referred to his views as socialistic at a luncheon—though it had been said during an argument, and was years ago anyway—so he’d assumed that she didn’t much care for him. But the pressing invitation he now received to a family dinner seemed to indicate that there were no bad feelings at all.
He wasn’t a fool, but the world in which Edmund lived operated in a slightly different manner from Rose’s. It had not occurred to him that if Rose Master invited him to a family dinner, it was not a compliment at all, or an expression of friendship, but a signal that she didn’t wish him to meet her friends. He walked quite contentedly, therefore, unaware that he was an undesirable.
The first thing that happened was that he met Charlie and his father in the courtyard. They were dressed for dinner, but William was about to put the car away. They spent a most agreeable few minutes discussing the Rolls-Royce, and then William asked him if he’d like to come out for a quick spin. Keller politely wondered if they’d be keeping his hostess waiting. Knowing that, for all his wife cared, Keller could have driven to Maine, William assured him it was all right. So they drove all the way down Fifth to Washington Square, then circled round, came up Sixth, back along Central Park South, past the Plaza Hotel, to Fifth. William clearly enjoyed driving his car, and he gave Keller a lively explanation of its technical merits. They got back, descended in the elevator to the garage, and then, cheeks flushed from the night air, joined Rose in the drawing room. Moments later, dinner was announced.
They ate in the dining room. All the leaves of the dining table had been removed, so although the dinner was formally served, they were quite intimate. He sat between William and Rose, with young Charlie opposite him.
The conversation was easy. He told Rose how much he admired the car, then Charlie introduced the subject of Theodore Keller and his photography, and the splendid photograph of Niagara Falls that William’s grandfather had commissioned. Theodore Keller was in his late seventies now, and when the old man finally departed, Edmund explained, he would be the custodian of all his father’s work. “It’s quite an archive,” he remarked. This led to a discourse on the Civil War, and then the conversation turned to the present war with Germany.
William and Edmund discussed whether the convoys would be able to get past the enemy submarines in the Atlantic, and they all wondered how long the war would last. Then Keller remarked that, as well as its terrible cost in human lives, the war was also a cultural tragedy.
For no sooner had the United States entered the war against Germany than an ugly anti-German hysteria had begun. Anything that sounded German was now suspect. German-language journals were being closed, while in Britain, Keller pointed out, even the Lord Chancellor had been forced out of office because, in an unguarded moment, he’d remarked that he still loved German music and philosophy.
“What about me?” he said. “My family were German, and I’m certainly not going to stop listening to Beethoven or reading Goethe and Schiller because of the war. That would be absurd. Why, I even speak German.”
“Really?” said William.
“Yes. My father could hardly speak a word, but a few years ago I got interested in German literature and wanted to read it in the original, so I started taking lessons. I speak it almost fluently now.”
From there the conversation turned to the temperance movement, which had been becoming increasingly strident recently.
“I hate those people,” Charlie declared with passion. His father smiled and remarked that this was hardly surprising. Keller then politely inquired what Rose thought about it.
“We belong to the Episcopal Church,” she answered, quietly. Surely Keller must know that people like herself had nothing to do with these growing calls—which had even reached Congress now—for Prohibition. The whole thing was driven by Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists and other churches that mostly catered to a different class of person.
“The irony,” William said, “is that if Prohibition does get passed, we shall probably have the war to thank for it. The Episcopal and Catholic Churches may not support the idea, but the most effective lobbying against it has always come from the brewing interests, which are mostly owned by families with German names. And as you rightly say, Keller, everything German’s so unpopular now that nobody wants to listen to them. It’s really absurd.”
And what did his hostess think of votes for women? Keller asked.
“Votes for women?” Rose paused. Alva Belmont’s cause had been making some headway, though the suffragists were quieter now, with the war claiming everyone’s attention. Rose hated to be on the same side as Alva Belmont, but she admitted grudgingly: “I think it will come. It should.”
Rose could see that, although William understood her reservations about Keller, her husband still found the historian interesting. What was Keller’s opinion of the situation in Russia? he wanted to know. Rather to her surprise, Edmund Keller seemed pessimistic.
“It’s impossible to predict,” he said, “but if history is anything to go by, then I am fearful. The French Revolution might have been splendid
, but it still introduced a reign of terror.”
“The tragedy to my mind,” William Master remarked, “is that despite all Russia’s problems, the economy was growing rapidly until this war began. Russia might have developed into a prosperous and contented nation.”
Here, however, Keller could not agree. “I just don’t think that the tsar’s autocracy could be sustained,” he said. “As a historian, I may foresee bloodshed, but it’s hard to blame the Russians for wanting a change of government.”
“Even by socialists?” Rose asked.
Keller considered. He wanted to be fair. “I dare say if I were a Russian I’d think so.”
Rose said nothing more. It was a clever answer, but it did nothing to change her view of Edmund Keller’s politics. Charlie, however, was eager to explore this dangerous territory further.
“Don’t you think capitalism oppresses the workers?” he wanted to know. “I think it does.”
Keller hesitated. “I suppose,” he said pleasantly, “that any system that gives power to a particular class will tempt that class to exploit the powerless. It seems to be human nature.”
“The capitalist system is a tyranny,” Charlie announced, “based on greed.”
His mother turned her eyes to the sky. His father smiled and murmured: “Remind me to stop your allowance.” But Keller, as teacher, could not help giving every proposition its due consideration.
“You could argue,” he said, “that any strong belief can blind people to other realities. Belief in profit at the expense of other things can be a cruel master. Look at that wretched business at the Triangle Factory, for instance.”
Rose stared at him. Did he really mean to bring up the Triangle strike now? To remind her how he’d tried to embarrass her, at Hetty’s luncheon, seven years ago? To start that argument over the factory girls again, when he was a guest in her own house? Was he being supremely tactless, or outrightly aggressive?
“Those striking girls,” she said very firmly, “were being used by socialists and revolutionaries. And the meeting at Carnegie Hall proved it very clearly.”
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