by Avi
That Emma was working at the Waldorf Hotel cleaning room number nine twelve when a man, a hotel guest, a Mr. Brunswick, went into that room pretending it was his own. Then he stole a fine watch and chain, having probably observed the owner with it. He then proceeded to ask Emma Geless her name—under pretense of commending her to her superior—so Emma gave it. The man then slipped into the girls’ dormitory, found Emma’s bed, which he easily located, because of her name tag on it, and placed the watch chain under her pillow, knowing she would be blamed for the theft.
Packwood holds up the chain and watch. In the gloomy court the golden watch shines like a string of stars. The watch is its own sun.
“And did you detect all this yourself, Mr. Packwood?” asks the judge.
“Your Honor, it was my friend Bartleby Donck.”
“And where is our Mr. Donck?”
“Gravely ill, Your Honor.”
The judge sighs, says to Packwood, “Then you withdraw the charge against the defendant Emma Geless?”
“We do, Your Honor.”
“And the real thief?” asks the judge.
“No longer alive.”
“Good!” The judge bangs his desk with a hammer and says, “Case dismissed. Let the prisoner go free. Next!”
Quick as that, Emma is nothing but smiles and more smiles. There are hugs and kisses and more hugs and kisses, ’cause she’s innocent—which she always was—the way Maks always said. But hey, being innocent and being free—two different things.
Maks gives her a huge hug. Then he turns and faces Willa. She’s trying to smile. But she can’t, not really. In fact, tears come again. Maks hugs her anyway. He whispers, “You’re part of our family now.”
And that reminds him of what Mama always says: “People are freer in America. But there are more tears.”
88
Back in the tenement it’s like a party. Everybody’s happy. Willa’s doll is on her lap, and Maks could swear the doll is smiling too.
Willa herself still tries to smile, still can’t. But Mama sits next to her, holding her hand, ’cept sometimes it’s Papa who holds her hand, or Ryker, or Agnes, or even Maks.
Then Emma announces that Mr. Packwood told her she could have her old job back. “And,” she says, laughing at Maks, “he said to tell you if you wanted to keep on being a bellboy at the hotel, he will arrange it.”
“There,” says a beaming Papa, “when the whole family works together, we can manage anything.”
Maks looks at Willa. She finds a little smile from somewhere and offers it to everyone.
Then, in the middle of this celebration, Agnes starts coughing. All of a sudden, nobody is happy.
That’s when Willa says, “Papa, you must get Agnes to a doctor.”
“My dear girl . . . ,” Papa starts to say.
That’s when Willa stands up and goes to Maks’s cigar box, pulls out her blue tin box. Everyone watches as she opens it. What she takes out is her mother’s golden ring. She puts it into Papa’s large hand.
“It was my mother’s,” says Willa. “Sell it. She said I should use it for my new family. For Agnes.”
Maks notices that Willa’s family picture ain’t in the box anymore. He don’t know where it went, and he never sees it again.
89
I suppose you need to know that over on Delancey Street, in Donck’s rooms, the old detective is stretched out in his filthy bed, his eyes closed.
There’s a woman sitting by his side.
90
Before Willa and Maks sell the Saturday papers that afternoon—Maks wants to do it one last time—he and Willa decide to go see Donck to thank him for all he did.
When they get there—Delancey Street—they knock on the door.
“Come in,” says a voice.
When they enter, they don’t see Donck. ’Stead, there’s a lady in his room. She’s standing near his desk, looking sad. Around her neck is a glittering diamond necklace. The minute Maks sees her, he knows who she is.
“May I help you?” she says.
“Looking for Mr. Donck.”
“He died this morning,” says the sad lady.
“You his friend?” asks Maks.
“I was. And you were too, I believe,” she says to Maks, recognizing him from the Waldorf.
“Yes, ma’am. Guess we all was.”
Maks and Willa don’t know what else to say. They just stand there. Then Maks glances over to Donck’s desk and sees some writing. Across the top page it says:
The Bradys and the Missing Diamonds
Or
The Boy Detective
Written by a New York Detective
Out on the street Maks tells Willa, “I know that lady.”
“Who is she?” says Willa.
“Packwood’s sister. Remember that lady in the story, the one the boy detective helps? That was her. And guess what? Donck was writing it.”
“Was that a diamond necklace around her neck?”
“Think so.”
That afternoon, when Willa and Maks go out to sell the Saturday papers, he calls the headline as usual: “Extra! Extra! Read all ’bout it! ‘Murder at the Waldorf. Terrible Struggle with a Crazy Man! Two Men Killed!’ Read it in The World! The world’s greatest newspaper. Just two cents! Only two cents! Here ’tis!”
For once, he is the news. And that night he makes his whole eight cents. As I said when I first started to tell you this story, for them days, eight cents ain’t bad.
And, oh yeah, that night, it being Saturday, everybody gets their weekly bath. Mama likes a clean family.
91
So there’s the story. Too many coincidences? Or just miracles? You decide. Thing is, it’s all true.
But you probably want to know what else happened, right?
Papa pawned Willa’s ring and got enough money for Agnes to go see that doctor over on Mott Street and get some medicine. She got mostly better. She went on to become a typist at a bank earning ten dollars a week! Three years later she married Monsieur Zulot.
The shoe factory closed and never reopened. But Emma and Maks kept working at the Waldorf.
While Jacob started selling The Times, Willa became a newsie and sold The World. But she also went to night school and learned to read.
The three boys? Too many stories to tell!
Mama kept doing laundry.
The truth is, for a long time it was mostly the kids who took care of the family.
Fact, it was thirteen months before Papa got a job at the Fulton Fish Market, repairing barrels.
What I’m saying is, the family survived.
But these days, hey, that whole world is gone. Nothing left but those tenement buildings, which you can go see for yourself down on the city’s Lower East Side. Call ’em tombs with windows, if you’d like, but millions of people were alive in ’em.
And when I do look at ’em, I’m reminded of that song Papa liked to sing:
We’re traveling from our home
to an unknown land.
What will be there,
sadness or peace,
we don’t know.
Only God knows.
Author’s Note
From its earliest days as a Dutch settlement, New Amsterdam, which became New York City, has been home to all kinds of people, languages, and cultures, more than any other American city. Its history lives in the past and the present. “Wall Street”—the name we use to refer to the core of our twenty-first-century economy—takes its name from a wall built by the Dutch in the seventeenth century.
The United States experienced enormous changes at the end of the nineteenth century, nowhere more than in our large cities. It was a time of great wealth, great poverty, widespread crime, great charity, and major political reform. Many good things happened, particularly in the realm of science and technology. Nevertheless, many awful things happened too, such as the spread of urban diseases and cruel social discrimination.
This, too, was the time of a g
igantic influx of immigrants who poured into the country through Ellis Island. The place where newcomers came and stayed in the greatest numbers was New York. The histories and personal accounts of the time all mention how many children there were in city tenements, on the streets, at work, at play, and in jails.
City of Orphans is my attempt to catch a small bit of how New York City kids lived at the end of the nineteenth century. When thinking about the past, we often bring to it fanciful notions from books, movies, TV shows, and, not least, family stories. But as a wise man once said, “You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.” Doing research for a historical novel is the process of discovering facts, then working to make real what has become lost, forgotten, invisible, and sometimes denied. The discovery of what was can be exciting, puzzling, funny, and sometimes even frightening.
My lead characters, Maks and Willa, are, I hope, unique individuals, but they’re not so unlike thousands of other city kids of their day. Over the passage of time, we often forget kids in history, how they struggled to live and make livings—in short, how they survived. My hope is that in City of Orphans you will see them for what they were: amazing heroes.
Two final notes: The Plug Ugly Gang is not my invention. There really were gangs by that name. And “wasting disease” is what people used to call tuberculosis. That, alas, is still with us.
For Further Reading and Viewing
Alexander, June Granatir. Daily Life in Immigrant America, 1870–1920. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009.
Bial, Raymond. Tenement: Immigrant Life on the Lower East Side. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Byron, Joseph. New York Life at the Turn of the Century in Photographs. New York: Dover Publications, 1985.
Freedman, Russell. Immigrant Kids. New York: Dutton, 1980.
Granfield, Linda, and Arlene Alda. 97 Orchard Street, New York: Stories of Immigrant Life. New York: Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 2001.
Hopkinson, Deborah. Shutting Out the Sky: Life in the Tenements of New York, 1880–1924. New York: Orchard Books, 2003.
Nasaw, David. Children of the City. New York: Anchor, 1985.
New York, episode 3, “Sunshine and Shadow.” PBS Home Video, 1999.
Wheeler, Thomas C., ed. The Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming American. New York: Dial Press, 1971.