City of Promise (9 page)

“I believe,” Rosie allowed herself a single delicious sigh of pleasure, “dear Mollie has a suitor.”

There followed a full report on Joshua Turner, during which both women admitted to remembering the old scandal attached to his birth, and decided it mattered not at all since it was so long ago. “He’s come to the store to see her at least four times,” Rosie said. “And I think they have walked out together a few times apart from that.”

“Are you sure?” Eileen demanded.

“I am rather sure,” Rosie said with a smile. And related the details of the time Mr. Turner had invited Mollie coaching
—I happened to be
there, my dear, and of course I silently encouraged her—
and another occasion when she overheard him say something about their taking tea together. “I take it Mollie hasn’t mentioned any of this?” The dressmaker had finished telling everything she knew about Joshua Turner and Eileen’s niece, and clearly taken pleasure in being the one who, on this occasion, knew things.

Eileen had trapped herself with her eagerness to find out what Rosie had clearly come to tell her. She had no choice but to admit she was not in Mollie’s confidence. “Not yet,” she said. “But I’m sure she shall.”

“Oh yes,” Rosie agreed. “She will. Undoubtedly. And of course I shan’t mention any of this to her.”

“Or another living soul,” Eileen said with a slight sharpness to her tone.

“Of course not, my dear. No one . . . I would never do that.”

She would not, Eileen knew. There was, for one thing, just that hint of employer and employee that remained as a minor undercurrent in their friendship. Eileen was always in a slightly superior role. For another, Rosie quite enjoyed being friends with someone who, whatever her reputation might be, could provide Sunday tea with excellent sherry and delicious Boston cream pie. Eileen’s onetime dressmaker would keep her mouth shut. Her niece’s reluctance to confide that Mr. Joshua Turner was wooing her was a bit more difficult to understand. He was, after all, the very sort of gentleman Mollie had been sent to Macy’s to find.

Five minutes after Rosie left, Eileen, thankful that it was Sunday and she did not have a houseful of men grunting and groaning and sighing with pleasure in every room of the place, unlaced her girdle and set it aside. She put on a silk wrapper and curled up on her bed, happily scratching every bit of reddened, welted flesh. And the explanation came to her. Mollie wasn’t sure of him. She had not mentioned Joshua Turner because she did not believe he would propose marriage.
She’s resigned herself to being a spinster,
Eileen whispered aloud.
“She’s Miss Popandropolos, the lady who sews, and she’s found a certain comfort in the role.” Mollie, Eileen realized, didn’t want to disappoint her aunt. More important, she didn’t want to disappoint herself. Well, something would have to be done about that.

Odd, Josh thought, his confiding his story to a girl he’d seen fewer than half a dozen times. The only other people who knew were his father and Zac. Though it was likely the outlines of the tale—the bit about his not having lost the leg in battle—would be apparent to the man he was on his way to meet.

His destination was the bar of the Grand Union Hotel, across from Vanderbilt’s newly completed Grand Central Depot. The hotel marked the finish of Lexington Avenue, that bastard child inserted in the 1830s between Third and Fourth Avenues from Gramercy Park to Forty-Second Street, and the end point of polite society’s northern reach. Beyond Grand Central hundreds of trains rattled and racketed along Fourth Avenue; so many of them these days that the professors of Columbia University at Forty-Ninth Street claimed they couldn’t hear their own lectures. The Common Council was trying to get Vanderbilt to sink a tunnel and bring his trains in and out of the town belowground. Possibly some property opportunities if he did it, Josh thought, particularly in the wasteland of the East Fifties and Sixties, but so far there was no deal.

He got to the hotel a few minutes before seven. The lobby was a swirling mass of men in evening dress and women in softly swishing satin and silk, their talk punctuated with laughter and the air around them a heady mix of scents. The smell of success, he thought. Replaced in the gentlemen’s saloon—the Coach and Four it was called at the Grand Union—by cigar smoke and scotch whiskey, the smell of money.

Trenton Clifford was waiting for him, seated by himself at a small table off to the side of the long mirrored bar. Far enough from any of
the gaslights so he was in the shadows. Josh spotted him quickly nonetheless. Clifford’s walrus mustache and his full head of pale blond hair caught what light there was around him, for one thing. For another, few men had planted themselves so indelibly in his memory.

He made his way to the table and stood silently beside it. Clifford looked up, but didn’t rise. Just watched him. “Captain,” Josh said finally. He could not bring himself to wish the other man a good evening, and he did not extend his hand.

Clifford made a gesture as if to offer his, then thought better of it and nodded toward the chair across from his. “Sit down, Josh. And it’s Mr. Clifford these days. Or Trent if you prefer. War’s over, son. Let it go.”

“It’s not the war I remember so vividly.”

Dwindled corpses the poet Walt Whitman called the men he saw released from Belle Isle when peace came. Tobacco-colored and stooped like gnomes, in Whitman’s words. Some days—the hottest of them usually, so the prisoners couldn’t resist—they were encouraged to swim in the river. Inevitably some got too close to the rapids. That’s what the rebel guards were waiting for. “There’s another trying to escape!” one of them would yell. And they picked them off like clay pigeons, one after the other. Target practice. Captain Clifford was camp commandant. Josh remembered him standing on the bank one afternoon with a brand-new Colt revolver. Shooting one after another and calling the tally aloud. “Six hits,” Clifford said as he walked away. “Didn’t jam once. I declare this to be a fine sidearm, gentlemen. Best the North has to offer.”

“Your note said imperative.” Josh still wasn’t sure why he’d come. Maybe because if he had not he’d have thought himself still cowering.

“Imperative to you. Interesting for me.” Clifford signaled toward the bar. “What are you drinking?”

“Scotch,” Josh said, and put his own silver-dollar coin in the waiter’s hand when it arrived.

Clifford smiled at the gesture, then sat back, looking not at Josh
but at the cigar whose end he was trimming with a gold cutter. “You always were what my old mammy would have called a long pisser, Joshua Turner. Prepared to aim your stream whether or not you’ve got anything to back it up. But big ideas. Always.”

Josh tossed back the whiskey, then stood up to go.

“Sit down,” Clifford said, some of the old authority creeping into his voice. “You’ve come this far through curiosity. Probably as much about yourself as about me. Might as well hear me out, don’t you think?”

Josh sat down.

“How’d you lose the leg? You had a matched pair at Belle Isle. And the way I hear it, you didn’t spend any time on the battlefield after that sister of yours cleaned you up and turned you loose.”

“Lost the leg in a bear trap. And who told you all that?”

Clifford shrugged. “I hear things. That’s what I do, Josh. I listen. Made my fortune.”

“Here in New York? A ways out of your element, aren’t you? For a Southern gentleman.”

“I take it that’s meant to disparage all Southern gentlemen by association. Don’t bother trying to insult me, Joshua Turner. Rolls right off my back.” Clifford paused to light the cigar, holding the match an inch or so away from the end and inhaling the flame toward it, puffing greedily when the tobacco caught. “Excellent cigars,” he said when a wide plume of gray smoke rose above his head. “Excellent everything is available in this city. Sex, food, shelter, whatever a man desires can be had. Only thing at issue is the cost. That’s what’s left, Joshua. The things money will buy. The North destroyed my way of life to protect its own. Only game left to play is the Northerner’s game. And a man like me, I’m bound to play something.”

“Is that what you brought me here to say?”

Clifford held up two fingers in the direction of the bar. “You were a clever young ’un, Josh Turner, and you’re a clever man. Doesn’t surprise me. And you are also well enough established in this town to
make those brains count for—Take your hand out of your pocket, damn you.” The refills had arrived and Clifford interrupted himself long enough to insist on paying for them. “Drinking whiskey I buy doesn’t make us friends. And friendship’s not what I have in mind.”

“I’m still waiting to know what is.”

“I hear you’ve an idea to make gentlemen live stacked on shelves under a common roof. Like bags of flour. You think they’ll go for it?”

“Where in hell’s name did you hear such a thing?”

“Are we back to that? You’re never going to know my sources, son. Not if we sit here for twenty years. Now, tell me why you think gentlemen this side of the ocean will agree to live in French flats.”

The way Josh saw it, either he answered the question or he got up and walked out. And if he intended the latter, he’d not have come in the first place. “Middling sorts of gentlemen,” he said. “And they’ll agree because pretty soon they’re not going to have any choice. There’s not enough room on this island for the numbers of people who want to live here. It’s that simple.”

“Keep ’em out then. Make the place more exclusive. What’s wrong with that?”

“They’re needed, these engineers and accountants and senior clerks. Business can’t run without them. New York’s all about business.”

Clifford nodded, but raised another objection. “Brooklyn,” he said. “Queens. The Bronx even. What about them?”

“Nothing about them. Some will move there. Many already have. But it’s inconvenient. Brooklyn in particular’s a devilish journey. The ferry’s unreliable in any kind of harsh weather.”

“There’s the bridge,” Clifford said. “Going to change everything. Don’t you agree?”

“Might do if it ever gets built.” The granite tower on the Brooklyn side was complete, rising an improbable two hundred seventy-two feet above the high water mark, but the one on the Manhattan side—at Dover Street and the river—was a much slower effort. John Roebling,
the engineer who designed the bridge, was dead of tetanus after crushing his toes against a piling. His son had taken over, then succumbed to some mysterious on-the-job illness he was chasing round the globe trying to cure. “Just now,” Josh said, “that’s looking less than likely. Queens is no easier to get to and it’s a wasteland beside. As for the Bronx . . .” Josh shrugged, “all those places have one major drawback. They’re not New York City.”

“Very well. But that fellow Hunt, the architect as put up those flats over on Eighteenth Street, he’s beat you to it, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would not. Richard Hunt’s used a hundred feet of frontage to make twenty apartments on four floors. Not much advantage there.”

“I went over and had a look this afternoon,” Clifford said. “It’s five stories.”

“Top floor’s only accessible after four flight of stairs. Too many for most people. The fifth-floor units have skylights. They’re let to artists for studios. The whole venture’s interesting, but not economically sound. Not here in the city.”

“The way I hear it, Hunt’s going up eight stories over on Twenty-Seventh Street.”

Josh nodded. “Better location. And this time his client’s Paran Stevens, who owns a fair parcel of city land to start out with. Hunt’s been assigned the entire block between Fifth and Broadway, and he’s going to install at least four of Otis’s steam elevators. But it’s a far cry from what I have in mind. Stevens’s building is to have eighteen suites, each almost as big as a house, with ballrooms and butler’s pantries and dressing rooms. Communal servants quarters as well. Upstairs in the attic. Under, of course, a properly fashionable mansard roof.”

“You don’t approve?”

“I don’t think it answers the problem. If business is to thrive we need to shelter more people of the ordinary sort. As I said, we don’t have much land on Manhattan Island. We have unlimited air. The solution’s to go higher.”

Clifford’s blond head was wreathed in cigar smoke. Josh could
barely make out his nod. “Problem becomes that the higher you go, the more of those damned cast-iron pillars you need to hold everything up, and the closer together they have to be. Thicker walls as well. Pretty soon your construction materials are eating up your living space. That’s so, isn’t it, young Mr. Turner?”

Josh had given away as much of his thought on the subject as he intended. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

Another nod. This time Clifford reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a card and pushed it across the table. “Talk to this man. When you and he figure something out, let me know. I’ll back you.”

A cold day in Hell, Josh thought. But he pocketed the card.