City Of Promise Part 3

"I know what you meant. Don't fuss. I never take offense. Anyway, I promise I can stride along at a fairly fast clip if I've a mind to. But just now I suggested a walk to get us out from under the harridan's beady gaze. I want to talk, Mollie. I love talking to you. Why don't you want to talk to me?"

"But I do, Josh. Why would you think otherwise?"

"Stop it," he said. "Stop playacting. It's the very thing I liked about you from the first. That you're genuine, at least mostly. But ever since we went coaching you've treated me like something with a bad smell you don't want too close. Please tell me why that is, and what I have to do to get back to where we were. Where I thought we were," he amended.

A crossroads and Mollie recognized it as such. "What did you mean . . . mostly genuine?"

"Popandropolos," he said immediately, "is poppyc.o.c.k. A made-up name if ever I heard one. You're Irish, though I have no idea why you prefer not to say so. I know the Irish aren't held in high regard, but no one's likely to mistake you for a Five Points doxy, Mollie Whoever. So why the masquerade? And, more important, why have you decided not to like me?"

"I do like you. I think you are charming and fun to be with. And very, very courageous."

"Then why-Good Lord . . . Mollie, are you married after all? To some blighter who's gone off and left you to fend for yourself? Someone named Popandropolos, perhaps?"

"No, nothing like that. I am not married, Josh. I give you my solemn word I'm not."

"Fair enough. I accept it. But that still leaves the question of why you've been holding me at arm's length for a month."

Across from them a small girl with pink ribbons in her hair was rolling a hoop along the gra.s.s, and an even smaller boy was toddling into his father's open arms. "Because," Mollie said, "I am twenty-two and grown accustomed to being a spinster, and I don't wish my peace to be disturbed by dreams that can't come true."

The sheer brutal honesty of it left him without a response for several long seconds. Then, finally, recognizing that he was wading into waters much deeper than he'd first intended to brave, "Why can't your dreams come true, Mollie? How can you make that a.s.sumption without giving them a chance?"

She shook her head. "Some things have to be concluded on the body of evidence."

"Spoken like a lawyer," he said. "Was your father a lawyer, Mollie Whoever?"

"I don't believe so."

Josh c.o.c.ked his head and studied her. "But you don't know for sure. I think I begin to see some shape to this story. Are you a little b.a.s.t.a.r.d, sweet Mollie? Or should I say b.a.s.t.a.r.dess? Is that the big secret, the shame consigning you to spinsterhood?" And when she didn't answer, "If so, you should know I'm exactly that. A b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"You're not! Your father is the famous Dr. Nicholas Turner, and your mother was Carolina Devrey of the shipping Devreys."

"Ah! I see you like me well enough to have done some investigating. I'm delighted. And it's all true as far as it goes. But apparently you did not probe far enough into the dark and dreadful past. My mother and father weren't married when I was born. And I was a six-year-old page at their wedding, that's how brazen they were about it."

Mollie waved his words away. "It's an old story, Josh. No one cares about it anymore."

"True enough. No one does. And whatever your story may be, no one-or at least no one named Joshua Turner-cares about it, either."

The sun was beginning to disappear behind a row of stately linden trees and the air was quickly cooling. Above their heads a number of small birds flitted among the wooden houses erected for them when the park was established in 1847, each labeled in now-fading lettering as Custom House or Exchange. There was even one called Macy's-because some wit had commented, in New York even the birds had to be occupied with business.

A breeze ruffled Mollie's hair and Josh realized he hadn't given her an opportunity to take a wrap when he dragged her out of the house. He put his arm along the bench behind her shoulders. "Are you too cold to stay here a short time longer?"

"No."

"Good, because I want to tell you another story. One that's far more to my discredit than my parents' romantic disregard for social custom."

"Josh, there's no need-"

"Yes," he interrupted. "There is. If we're to even consider going forward together a bit, seeing where it takes us, there's every need in the world. I'm not the war hero you think me to be, Mollie. I did not lose my leg in some stirring battle. I was mustered into the First New York Mounted Rifles in August of '62 because since I was four I could sit a horse better than most. Apart from that I was sixteen and knew nothing about anything, except that I wanted to fight to preserve the Union and free the slaves. My mother, after all, was an active abolitionist and my father shared her views, though he was less vocal about them. But neither of them knew I meant to volunteer until after I'd done it."

"Is that why they let you go through with it? Because they were abolitionists?"

"I think it was that they knew they couldn't stop me unless they pretty much tied me to a bedpost. I'm accustomed to getting my way, Mollie. Be warned."

This last with a brush of her cheek with the head of his stick, gold and shaped like a horse's head. She had asked him about it earlier and he'd said it had been in his family for years. That was a big part of her conviction that this could never be more than an escapade, her cert.i.tude that Josh Turner would soon lose interest. And her reason for keeping Josh's attentions secret from Auntie Eileen, who would only be disappointed once again. For all the scandal concerning his parents, both the Turners and the Devreys were old New York families with deep New York roots. It was one thing to have thought she might marry the likes of Max Merkel; it was quite another to imagine herself acceptable to the Turners. "There's nothing dishonorable in being stubborn," she said.

"Ah, yes. The rest of the story. As I said, I was mustered in during August and saw my first action on a Virginia battlefield in September. Zuni, a small and largely inconsequential fracas over a railroad bridge. Except not so inconsequential for me. I was taken prisoner in the first ten minutes. Never got off a shot."

Paralyzed by the horses snorting and whinnying and frequently squealing with terrible pain, and the booming artillery firing from the hill behind, and the blood. All of it so much more terrifying than anything he could have conceived. And no way he could explain that to a woman. Not sitting here in a city park with sunset approaching and the sound of children's laughter barely faded. "I don't know why the reb who captured me didn't kill me." Sweet Jesus Christ, you're barely off the t.i.t, lad. With his bayonet an inch from finality. "But he did not. He grabbed the reins of my horse instead and pulled me out of it, and next thing I was in a particular outpost of h.e.l.l called Belle Isle Prison camp. An island in the middle of the James, with fierce rapids either side so any attempt to escape was suicidal. No barracks. Just a few shacks and some tattered tents. No food to speak of. Little medical care."

Mollie reached out her hand and lay it on his thigh. The one that had only air below the knee. Dusk now and they were mostly alone. No one to notice the remarkable forwardness of the gesture, or to see Josh cover her hand with his.

"I thank you for your commiserations, sweet Mollie. But I fared a good deal better than most. I started out young and healthy, and I survived off my own fat at Belle Isle for two years and four weeks. Then a high-ranking someone or other happened by who chanced to work out I was Ceci Devrey Lee's half brother, and hauled me off to my sister's plantation. Birchfield it was called, in the heart of the southern Virginia lakes. Well away from the fighting, or so we thought. I spent six months being nursed by my sister and her slaves and when, after being cosseted in this particularly luxurious enemy lap, I was once again well, I did not go looking for my regiment. I headed for north and home."

"Small wonder," Mollie said.

"Patently illegal," Josh replied. "I'd signed up for three years and there were four months left to run. And I'd never so much as wagged my finger at a Confederate soldier."

"It wasn't your fault," she insisted. "No one could say it was." And when he didn't reply, "What about your leg?"

"Oh yes, my leg. I lost it during the trek homeward. To a bear trap on a Maryland farm. The farmer's wife saved my life by hacking the gangrenous part off with a kitchen knife. She'd never heard of the sulfuric ether my father is so famous for using during his painless surgery, nor what he calls germs, but at least I convinced her to wash the knife in carbolic before she started."

Mollie let a few seconds go by. "What about your sister?" she said finally. "How have she and her plantation managed after the war. Without slaves, I mean."

Josh's face stiffened. Rather, Mollie thought, the way Auntie Eileen's did when she was crying without shedding any tears. "Birchfield was burned to the ground by Union renegades around the time General Sherman was torching pretty much everything between Atlanta and Savannah. That barbarism freed the Union conscience, it seems. Some men found they quite liked the old raping and looting and pillaging sort of warfare. They fed off that d.a.m.nable march and went rogue. Apparently my darling sister and her three children, none of whom had ever done any harm to anyone, were bayoneted where they stood. After that my brother-in-law came north to avenge their killing by burning New York to the ground. He wound up hanging from a tree in City Hall Park."

"That," Mollie spoke very slowly, "is a truly dreadful story."

"Yes, it is. But it can't be changed, Mollie, and I'm alive and grateful for it. Now, since in this world there's no telling how long that's to be . . . Will you see me again, Mollie? Without our needing to be watched every second by that Hamilton creature?"

"Yes, Josh. I will. But I can't say what's to happen beyond that."

"Fair enough, neither can I. But I'm a gambling man, Mollie. And I'm prepared to let my winnings lie, and wait for the next card to be turned."

4.

"MORE TEA, ROSIE?"

"No, thank you, Eileen. But perhaps a bit more sherry wine . . ."

"An excellent idea." Eileen lifted the decanter and topped up first Rosie O'Toole's gla.s.s and then her own. "Your good health, my dear."

"And yours, Eileen."

She wasn't using her Waterford, not for the woman who had once earned her living by dressing Eileen's ladies, and they drank her second-best Amontillado. But Eileen had told Hatty to bake the chocolate-topped cake known as a Boston cream pie, which she knew to be Rosie's favorite. Indeed, they had devoured fully half the cake between them. Replete now they sipped their sherry silently for some seconds, then Eileen said, "I take it things are going well at the store."

"Things generally go quite well at Macy's. Mrs. Getch.e.l.l will have them no other way."

"I take it my niece still meets with her approval."

"My dear Eileen, how could Mollie not meet with anyone's approval? Such a charming and polite lady is bound to be liked."

Eileen noted the use of the word "lady" rather than "girl." Twenty-two and unmarried, it was to be expected. "I remain enormously grateful to you for recommending her for the job, Rosie."

"Mollie's talents are much appreciated. By the customers as much as the staff," Rosie added, not quite looking at Eileen as she spoke. Choosing instead to pick up a stray crumb of Boston cream pie on the end of a delicately moistened finger.

Eileen's every sense was instantly alert. "Perhaps another slice of cake, Rosie. It's your day off after all. You should indulge just a wee bit."

"Well, perhaps only the tiniest sliver. Hatty is such a fine cook."

"Indeed, she is." Eileen cut a substantial wedge of the remaining cake and put it on the other woman's plate. "We're all gifted in something, don't you think? Just like Mollie. Gifted with a needle." Having brought the subject back to her niece, Eileen waited.

Rosie lifted a forkful of cake to her mouth, chewed, swallowed, then washed the delicacy down with a sip of sherry and sat back. "I shouldn't perhaps tell tales out of school as it were . . ."

"Of course you should," Eileen said. "As long as you tell them only to me. I am Mollie's only living relative, after all."

"Yes, you are. And I know you have her best interests at heart, always." Rosie leaned forward.

"Always," Eileen said, leaning forward in turn, so their heads almost met across the table.

"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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 ma.s.s 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.g with a gold cutter. "You always were what my old mammy would have called a long p.i.s.ser, 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 a.s.sociation. 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. s.e.x, 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, d.a.m.n 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 h.e.l.l'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."