City of Promise (7 page)

“Why? Are you spoken for?” Joshua demanded.

“No, but—”

“I’ll be happy to ask permission of your father or guardian. I’m perfectly respectable, you know.”

Behind him Rosie O’Toole was nodding her head in vigorous agreement.

“I barely know you, Mr. Turner.”

“Not so,” he said, sounding very grave, “you’ve had your hand up my trouser leg for three years.”

Most females would have blushed. Or been outraged at his familiarity. Mollie giggled. She couldn’t help herself. And when he hoisted that trouser, displayed his peg, and said, “Nothing improper of course, since that leg’s made of wood,” she was undone.

“You take it so well,” she said, his courage suddenly making her insides feel as soft as warm butter. “It must be very difficult. Do you never want to complain?”

“Not much point in it. Now tell me where you live and I’ll collect you at two on Sunday afternoon.”

Mollie hesitated. Nothing would come of it. Auntie Eileen would be disappointed yet again. Rosie O’Toole took a step closer and loudly cleared her throat. Joshua Turner, Mollie noted, did not appear startled. Instead he gave the definite impression he was aware of being watched and was unfazed. It struck Mollie all at once that this was not a usual sort of man. “Miss Hamilton’s,” she said, “Eight East Twenty-Third Street.”

“Miss Hamilton’s,” Joshua repeated. “I’m honored, Miss Mollie Popandropolos. And I very much look forward to seeing you on Sunday.”

Good thing, Mollie thought, she wasn’t a regular churchgoer. The absence of devotions allowed her to spend three hours Sunday morning deciding what to wear. It was a bit warmer, fortunately. And the sun was shining. She settled on her blue-and-white-striped dress, because she particularly liked the way the flounced skirt bustled behind her—she wore a padded underbustle to emphasize the effect—and made her waist look really tiny, and she could wear over it a blue short cape trimmed with ruched red velvet. The dress had a matching parasol besides, and when she twirled in front of the mirror Mollie decided the effect to be quite charming.

The outfit wasn’t new, but since she’d never been coaching before,
or indeed anywhere with Mr. Turner, that hardly mattered. Anyway, her bonnet was new. It was white straw trimmed with blue feathers and she’d bought it at Macy’s two weeks earlier. It had been marked down to a dollar seventy-five from two, and with her employee’s discount—something only Macy’s offered—had cost a dollar and sixty-one cents. Good value, Mollie decided as she surveyed the full effect. And in the afternoon, based on the expression on Mr. Turner’s face when he saw her, Mollie was pleased with her choices.

He drove a small straw-bodied phaeton, open to the elements and pulled by a single bay. “Glad you brought a parasol,” he said when he handed her up with as much ease as might a man with both legs. “Perhaps someday I’ll be rich and proper and take you coaching in an elegant black brougham.”

“I shouldn’t like that half so well, Mr. Turner. After all, one wouldn’t be able to see as much from inside a brougham.”

“Or be seen,” he agreed, giving her another look Mollie thought to be approving. “Which after all is the point. And you must call me Joshua. Josh if you prefer.”

“I must, must I?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why is that?”

He took a moment to reply. “I can’t really say, except that it would please me enormously.”

“Then Josh it will be.”

“And may I call you Mollie? Miss Popandropolos is a bit of a mouthful.”

“Mollie is acceptable.”

Josh grinned and snapped the reins and clucked the horses into action.

Fifth Avenue’s procession of luxurious mansions had begun marching north from Ninth Street in the 1850s. These days, when he turned the phaeton onto Fifth at Twenty-Third and headed uptown, Josh
and Mollie were in the thick of that opulent parade. “That house over there,” he nodded to his left, “is said to have a picture gallery and a private theater, as well as a library and a ballroom. And solid gold banisters throughout.”

“Must be terribly difficult to keep them free of fingerprints.”

He laughed. “Fair enough. What about that one then?” with a nod to his right. “Has its own third-floor chapel with stained glass windows. Plus marble staircases, ebony paneling, and plaster cherubs in the bathing rooms. I’m told there are four of those.”

“Cherubs or bathing rooms?”

“You are impertinent. In a charming way. Bathing rooms I suppose. Men of the type who own such places buy their statuary by the dozen. Or at least their wives do. I take it you are not impressed.”

“Well I am, sort of. But . . .” But she had seen too much of what the men who built these castles got up to in the time they didn’t spend making money. And all the newspapers had reported the time Mrs. Singer ran into the street from the mansion her husband’s sewing machines built, screaming she’d been beaten enough for one day. “I don’t think grand houses necessarily make people happy.”

“A noble sentiment. Am I to take it that’s the sort of thing young ladies are taught in Greece? Popandropolos is a Greek name, is it not?”

“It is, but I’m afraid I know nothing about the country.” Paying close attention to the need to adjust the hem of her dress. “I was born here in New York.”

“Of Greek parents, I take it.”

“That’s right.” This time it was her parasol that required adjusting.

“Has anyone ever said you look particularly Irish?”

“No,” Mollie answered, turning to him at last and speaking in her firmest tone of voice, “never.”

He shot her a quick and piercing look she wasn’t quite sure how to interpret, but all he said was, “End of the handsome houses. At least for now.”

They had reached the crest of Murray Hill at Thirty-Seventh Street.
From there on the brownstone palaces gave way to mostly open fields. Because the paved avenues and cross streets of the grid had been built a bit above grade level to make construction easier, the undeveloped countryside fell off to either side. Driving along Fifth above the Thirties it seemed they looked down into a different world. There was a good deal of rubble left over from laying out the roads, interrupted by an occasional tumbledown shack or a sprawling dwelling that housed hundreds. Rookeries everyone called them, huge barracks-like structures where landlords crammed in as many of the working poor as could pay a few dollars’ rent. And everywhere half-dressed urchins who frequently stopped playing long enough to stare after the phaeton until it was out of sight. Then, at Fifty-First Street, the desolation gave way to a half-built pseudo gothic pile that since 1858 had been promising to become the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Patrick.

“Do you think,” Mollie asked, “the city will ever come up this far? Perhaps when the Catholic Church is finished. Will all the grand mansions march up to meet it?”

“I suppose they will, but that’s not what interests me. I’m in real estate as it happens, and I can assure you, what this town needs is not more grand mansions. What’s required is a way to shelter the middle classes who make New York run. There has to be something between a shack, or a rookery for the poorest of the poor, and a castle on Fifth Avenue.”

“But there is,” Mollie said. “Block after block of ordinary brownstones without any nonsense like gold banisters. And more being built everyday.”

“True enough, but one house per family is not going to solve the problem for the future. We’re an island, don’t forget, and there’s only so much filling along our shores we can do. Land is the one thing New York City can’t manufacture.”

“And do you have a solution to this problem?”

“I have ideas, Mollie. Or I should say, one idea with numerous variations.”

She started to ask what exactly the idea was, but they had reached Fifty-Ninth Street and were entering Central Park. Joshua immediately became occupied with making his way into a close-packed string of vehicles, while for her part Mollie was lost in wonder.

Stately broughams and elegant coaches and racy landaus were making their way along a winding thoroughfare lined with trees just beginning to green. There were few coachmen. Almost everyone drove themselves, that being part of the afternoon’s pleasure. A number of the gentlemen took great trouble to show off their skill at handling teams of two or even four, and bettering their rivals as they did so. This involved a lot of side-by-side maneuvering on a roadway planned for single-file traffic in each direction, and you could hear the drivers taunting one another as they managed to bob and weave their way to the front of one carriage, only to be confronted by half a dozen more.

Josh was soon in the heart of that competition, obviously enjoying the challenge of taking on grander carriages and frequently beating them. He’d gotten to his feet—he was remarkably steady despite the peg—and though he held a whip as did the other drivers, he seemed only to crack it in the air, and to control his horse with nothing but the reins. His hat fell off as he worked the phaeton around a particularly challenging curve, and the sunlight shone on his red hair. He looked, Mollie thought, like someone from the books she’d read as a young girl: a hero from the days of old, his head circled with laurel.

Strollers, meanwhile, were thick on the ground either side, and all the women, riding or walking, wore brightly colored dresses, while the men sported cutaway coats and top hats. “Quite a sight, isn’t it?” Josh asked with another of his broad grins. “Welcome to coaching, Mollie. Now tilt your parasol so everyone can see your gorgeous feathered bonnet. And don’t forget to smile at the gawkers. You’re exactly what they’ve come out to see.”

There were countless boardinghouses in New York City. Rooming houses they were called, and the great majority accepted only single men. A few were willing to accommodate entire families in one or perhaps two bedrooms, though they were obliged to take their meals with other residents in the communal dining room. Most of these establishments occupied brownstones that had been deserted by the fashionable in the rush uptown. Never mind that every house built in the city after 1840 was equipped with running water, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, and central heating; if it was below Tenth Street it was no longer a place where a family with even modest social pretensions chose to live, and it was promptly sold and turned into a dwelling for the masses who could afford better than a rookery or a slightly less-crowded tenement, but not a whole house.

Edith Hamilton’s rooming house on Twenty-Third Street was an exception only in that it was reserved for those relatively few single ladies who did not live with their families. Mollie sometimes amused herself by thinking of the ways in which her present situation was like living at her aunt’s. Here as at Brannigan’s, six single women lived under another woman’s care and constant observation, but nothing on God’s green earth was more proper than Miss Hamilton’s Residence for Ladies.

Room and board cost fifteen dollars a week (not an inconsiderable amount considering that the poor souls in the rookeries paid a few pennies a night and those in the tenements fifteen dollars a month). Meals at Miss Hamilton’s were served at precise hours: breakfast at half past six and a light supper at seven-thirty. On Sundays there was as well a midday meal at one. Among the house’s amenities was a single bathing room with a large porcelain tub and big brass taps. Each lady was assigned a weekly half hour in which to use the facility. Apart from that she had a washstand with a large bowl in her room, and permission to fill a pitcher with hot water twice daily. The bedrooms were austere in their appointments, the greatest luxury apart from the washstand being that every room was provided with a Bible.
And while it went without saying that no males were permitted above stairs, the women were also forbidden to visit each other’s bedrooms. Visiting, according to Edith Hamilton, was a thing meant to be done when one was fully and appropriately clothed.