City of Promise (63 page)

Mollie ducked away from his grasp, meanwhile seeing that police and soldiers had arrived seemingly from nowhere and were converging on Chatham Street. One man had a hammer and a chisel and immediately started hacking at the bolts that held the iron stair rails in place. Others soon joined him, using whatever makeshift tools they could find, and in moments they had torn away first one section of the fence and then another.

The mortal snarl was relieved as suddenly as it had formed.

Done and over. Except for those for whom it was not.

Men piled the bodies of the dead on one side of the road to await hearses. Most showed by the blood that had oozed from their noses and ears that they had been pressed to death. Others had been torn apart and were missing body parts and apparently had bled away their lives. As for the wounded, they were laid out on the other side of the road to wait for ambulances.

There was a constant hum made up of groans of pain, and sobs,
and here and there the sound of praying. Mollie found a horse trough that had some water at the bottom and ripped off a piece of her petticoat and soaked it and went among the injured, wiping faces and hands and promising that help was on the way, unable to think of anything else she could do. She spied a child kneeling on the pavement next to another and hurried over. A little boy—five or perhaps six she guessed—dark-haired and with enormous brown eyes, looked up at her. “My little sister’s hurt her leg. She can’t walk.” He was holding the hand of a small girl lying on the ground. Her hair was as dark as his, though her eyes were an improbable blue.

Mollie reached down and stroked the girl’s hair back from her forehead and sponged her face. The child didn’t respond, though she was clearly alive. Just, Mollie realized, made silent by terror. “What’s her name?”

“Essie.”

Mollie turned back to the girl. “There are doctors coming, Essie. They’ll get you well soon. You must be brave, and I know you will be.” The girl’s brother meanwhile had not let go her hand. “My name is Mollie Turner,” she told him. “What’s yours?”

“I’m Michael,” the boy said. “And her real name is Esther. She was named for Grandfather Sol’s wife who went to heaven.”

Mollie caught her breath. It seemed so far-fetched, but she had after all been told that Sol Ganz had gone to Brooklyn over the new bridge and she had come here precisely because she hoped he’d come back the same way. “Esther and Michael,” she said. “Those are nice names. Do you know where your grandfather is now?”

“Over there.” Michael gestured to the people stretched out on the pavement waiting for the ambulances.

“Stay here,” Mollie said. “Don’t move. I promise I’ll come back for you. Do you understand, Michael? If anyone asks, remember my name. Mollie Turner. Say it now.”

“Mollie Turner,” the boy repeated dutifully.

“Yes, that’s very good. Mrs. Joshua Turner. If someone asks or tries to get you to go anywhere say I’m returning for you. I shall, Michael.
I promise. I’ll come back for you and Essie.” She waited until the boy nodded, then moved to the ranks of the wounded.

It took only a few minutes. Sol Ganz was lying some twenty feet beyond the spot where she’d found the two children, close to the railing that surrounded City Hall Park. Mollie got down on her knees beside him. “Hello, Mr. Ganz.”

His eyes were open and he smiled up at her. “So, Mrs. Mollie, I was thinking of you,” he said. “Now here you are.”

The words were spoken quietly. She had to bend close to hear. She could see no obvious wounds, but when she took his hand it was chilled and his pulse was so rapid it could be seen fluttering beneath the skin of his wrist. “There are ambulances on the way, Mr. Ganz. I’ll wait here with you until they come. Don’t try and speak. Save your strength.”

“The children . . . ,” he muttered.

“They are not far. I’m watching them. Michael told me where to find you. He said he’s your grandchild.”

“I have many grandchildren. All over. In the city and in Brooklyn. Now . . .”

“You mustn’t use your strength like this, Mr. Ganz. You can tell me later. I promise.”

“No. I don’t think so. Now I must tell you. I was considering you, Mrs. Mollie. For a long time I have considered. Some of the children have not even one parent . . . You and your husband, you have no . . .”

His voice trailed away and he closed his eyes and Mollie thought he was gone. But when she pressed her ear to his chest she could hear his heart. Faint, and very rapid. When she lifted her head he was again looking at her. “All day I thought, I can bring these two to Mrs. Mollie and Joshua. With the others, the ones who are Jewish, it would be a sin. But these two . . .”

“Mr. Ganz, you must save your strength.”

“No. Listen to me. Michael and Esther, their father was Jewish. Not their mother. So it’s not such an
averah,
a sin, to give them to
gerei toshav,
good people who do not worship idols. Not even money. So
Michael and Esther, since they have no one—” His words were interrupted by a fit of coughing.

Mollie looked back over her shoulder. She could see the children, still alone, still where they had been. “Mr. Ganz, are you telling me these children are orphans?”

“Yes. The parents, both dead. Only me they have. So you—” More coughing. Mollie tried to support his shoulders and raise him up. “No,” he muttered. “Listen, all my grandchildren. You must . . .” He stopped, and his next words were not, she realized, meant for her. He was saying a prayer she thought, but in a language she did not know.

After that there was a trickle of blood from the left side of his mouth and he stared sightless at the sky.

Mollie heard her name being called as she brushed closed Sol Ganz’s sightless eyes.

She looked up to see Josh coming toward her. He was leaning on Ollie and his clothes were in shreds, and he seemed to have neither his cane nor his peg. Mollie sprang up and rushed to him. “Dear God, Josh, what happened? Were you in that terrible crush? Are you injured?”

“Absolutely fine,” he said, and repeated it as if to convince himself. “I’m fine.” Then, “Ollie, can we get to the fence do you think, so I can lean on that. And perhaps you can find me a cane in all the abandoned things that are lying about. Anything will do.”

Mollie glanced again at the children. Michael was watching her intently, following her every movement with his eyes. “This way, Ollie,” she said, maneuvering them to a portion of the fence nearest the youngsters.

Josh’s arm around her waist was for more than support, she realized. He was hugging her close. “What happened, dearest? How did you lose your peg?”

He shook his head. “I’ll tell you that part later. The worst of all this horror was apparently here at the stairs. I was some further back. It
wasn’t bad once we got the crowd to stop trying to move, just stand and wait.”

He’d seen some soldiers trying to quell the panic by swinging from the rafters above the heads of the crowd, carrying the message that the bridge wasn’t falling, that there was a crush at the stairs, nothing more. That was something he could do as well, Josh had realized. After that he’d spent many minutes swinging from the upper beams of the bridge, carrying the message that the only thing needed was patience and everyone would get off without harm. When it was over a couple of the troops propped him up on either side and helped him return to the Manhattan exit on Chatham Street. He might not have found Ollie given the chaos, but the chestnut apparently spotted him and neighed loudly in greeting.

Now it was growing dark. The horizon was a streak of orange and the arc lights that had been installed at intervals along the bridge went on one after the other, a string of jewels connecting the two cities above the silver stream of the water. Here and there electrified buildings around City Hall came alight as well. Ollie was illumined by their glow when he returned with a sturdy shillelagh. Josh grasped it, grateful that it kept him from feeling so helpless, but exhaustion was returning as the adrenaline ebbed. “I don’t have the strength,” he said, “to ask what you’re doing here, my love. But do you think we might go home now?”

Mollie shook her head. “Yes, of course. But just one moment more, please.”

She ran over to where the two children waited. “That’s my husband over there, Michael. He is very tired because he has been helping the people trapped on the bridge. He would like to go home now and so would I. Would you and Essie like to come with us? Your grandfather seemed to think it would be a good idea.”

The child hesitated, “I guess so. Seems like it would be all right if Grandfather Sol said so.”

“Yes”—the voice came from the child still lying on the pavement—
“I’m sure it’s a good idea.” They were the first words the little girl had spoken and Mollie instinctively reached down and kissed her cheek.

“Indeed it is. May I pick you up, Essie?”

The girl said she could, and Mollie did, and took Michael’s hand and brought both children to where Josh stood watching her.

“These two were being brought to us by Mr. Ganz,” she said. “I’m afraid he has passed on.” She nodded her head in the direction of the ranks of dead and injured. “Their names are Michael and Esther, and they’re orphans now, but I believe he was supporting the family before the parents died. There are, I suspect, many others. That’s what he meant about having grandchildren, Josh. They’re here in the city and in Brooklyn as well. He said so before he died. I’m sure you will find some sort of record at his shop. If you look.”

He reached over and touched her cheek. “Of course I will look. And I’ll see to it that what needs to be done is done. You have my word.” If in some grand scheme payment was required for the life he’d taken, perhaps this would qualify.

“Thank you,” she said. “And Essie and Michael?”

He smiled. At her first, then at the children. “I’m thinking,” he said, “that it’s a good thing I still haven’t rented the penthouse at 1160. A family of four can use the space.” Then, to the stableman, “See if you can get the carriage any closer, Ollie.”

Moments later the brougham was a few feet away. Mollie carried Essie toward it. Josh took a tentative step using the unfamiliar shillelagh to provide balance.

The little boy, Michael by name, Josh remembered, stepped close to his side. “Here, sir, I can help if you’ll just put your hand on my shoulder.”

Author’s Afterword

T
HE
N
EW
Y
ORK
subway system, so often discussed—indeed longed for—in this novel, ultimately evolved as extensions of the elevated railways. The first underground tunnel was opened in October of 1904. It belonged to the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the IRT, which owned the Ninth Avenue El, and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, later the Brooklyn and Manhattan Transit Company, which became known as the BMT. The independent Eighth Avenue line, the only one originally owned and operated by the city, was the IND. These separate subway systems were for nearly a century the form in which New Yorkers knew, loved, and sometimes hated their subway system. Today’s unified, color-coded routes are a considerably later development.

The construction method adopted for much of the early underground portions of the subway system (some forty percent of it is, to this day, run above ground on elevated railways), was “cut and cover.” The street was first torn up, the tunnel built, then covered over and regraded, newly surfaced, etc. Such was the origin of what many generations
of New Yorkers would call the Lexington Avenue Line. Bringing me to a small puzzle.

Lexington Avenue was not on the original grid as laid down in 1811. It came into being in the early 1840s at the behest of Samuel Ruggles, when he created Gramercy Square Park and surrounded it with new and expensive (and taxable) luxury houses. Most sources agree that in this original incarnation the thoroughfare went only as far as Forty-Second Street. Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century everything above Forty-Second was pretty much no-man’s-land. As happens in the story, things began to change with the opening of the Grand Central Depot in 1871. In this novel, however, as in some reference sources, Lexington is among the avenues that in the early 1880s still had not pushed north. Evidence to the contrary can be found on the Galt & Hoy map, but Josh deals with that in
chapter 18
, and it seems to me other evidence supports him. Beyond question, however, the avenue became a major north-south artery in the late 1880s. That’s when the old dirt road was torn up and built anew to accommodate the building of the IRT’s Lexington Avenue subway.

As a result, readers looking for any trace of the Carolina or St. Nicholas apartment buildings in today’s ultra-fashionable East Sixties will not find them. In the parallel universe of this novel’s truth, they were torn down to make way for the subway. Trenton Clifford’s ghost no doubt looked on from hell and laughed.

And as additional evidence for this version of history, in this neighborhood the beautiful single family townhouses date from after 1900. Park Avenue, not Third, smiled on the East Sixties and carried the day.