Part 25 (1/2)

”Ain't no more hay,” the boy said. ”Not if I'm going to have feed for the horses tonight.”

”No more? But Mr. Turner said . . . You must go downtown, Ollie. Order a load of hay to be delivered at once. Tell them we must have it today or-” She stopped speaking and looked up. The sky was dark gray and covered in dense cloud. A few flakes were beginning to drift through the air. A few more appeared and then more, swirling around her until she and Ollie were standing in a shower of snowflakes.

Since that terrifying day three years before, she had shuddered with horror every time it began to snow. This time she wanted to laugh with delight. ”Shall it last do you think, Ollie? Are the G.o.ds of winter playing with us, or are they serious?”

”Not sure about G.o.d, Mrs. Turner. Never heard nothin' about him being different in the winter than in the summer. But this looks to be a fair enough snow.”

Mollie opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue and tasted an icy p.r.i.c.kle. ”Go right now, Ollie,” she said, but with less urgency than before. ”Get as much hay as we need for a month and ride home with the carter.”

”Much as we need for the garden, or just for the horses?”

The needles of a small blue-green fir-Abies balsamea-a narrow but clotted evergreen about as tall as she that would someday have sufficient size and substance to mark the turn of a brick path, were already frosted, and there was a coating of white on the hay spread on the perennial border. ”Enough feed for the horses only. I do not believe the plantings will require more.”

The boy hurried off on his errand. Mollie stayed where she was, watching the garden fill up with snow. Dreaming different dreams from those that had once filled her mind and soothed her heart. But dreams at least. Something. She stretched out both arms and held them open, as if she were welcoming someone. A child.

No, never.

But her embrace was not quite as empty as it had been before.

Book Two.

18801883.

18.

THE TELEPHONE WAS attached to the wall beside Josh's desk, a wooden box about a foot square. When he wanted to use it he lifted the earpiece and turned the crank and somehow, in what seemed miraculous even after a year, a man's voice said, ”Exchange.”

”Please connect me with Mr. Devrey.”

There was a long and mostly silent pause, followed by a loud buzzing. Josh took out his watch and observed the movement of the minute hand. When after sixty seconds nothing had happened he jiggled the metal cradle of the earpiece. On the third try a different voice said, ”Exchange.”

”I was connected previously. I asked for Mr. Devrey but did not reach him.”

”You weren't connected to me, mister.” The rudeness of the phone men was already legend. ”What's the number?”

”I can't remember the number. But I believe you have the list.” There were, he knew, some two hundred fifty subscribers. At sixty dollars a month he suspected there might not be many more. ”Mr. Zachary Devrey in the Devrey Building on Ca.n.a.l Street.”

The phone man grunted. Another pause. Then Zac shouted h.e.l.lo in his ear.

”It's Josh, Zac. Can you hear me?”

”Loud and clear.” With that hint of glee that still accompanied every one of these extraordinary communications.

”Are we set for this afternoon?”

”Can't hear you now. Speak up.”

”This afternoon,” Josh shouted into the funnel-shaped mouthpiece fixed above the crank. ”At Suns.h.i.+ne Hill.”

”Yes, what about it?”

”Is the auctioneer coming? Are we still on?”

Zac shouted still louder, as if to emphasize the affirmative. ”I'm a.s.sured he'll be there at three.”

”Good. I'll see you then.”

Followed by the satisfying click when the connection was broken.

Thirty-two miles in all directions from City Hall; connected by cables buried underground which somehow carried spoken words, not merely Morse code. A marvelous leap of progress that came after Western Union funded Mr. Edison's improvements to Mr. Bell's invention.

Josh hung up the telephone and turned to the window. His office of the moment was on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Third Street, on the fourth floor of a building that climbed five additional stories above his head and housed fifty-four flats. He'd occupy this one until he rented it, then he'd move on.

Steel-framed buildings remained his unique achievement. His detractors found their straight-up facades entirely too austere to be worth copying. Western Union's ”tallest office building in the world” was ten floors, finished four years earlier downtown on Broadway and Dey Streets, but built entirely of masonry. It rose in tiers like a wedding cake, with similar furbelows and flourishes.

Josh cared nothing for his critics. Let them carp about Spartan exteriors unworthy of a great city. He housed people who without him would not have a private home. And he made a comfortable profit doing it. He no longer, however, made his own steel. The girders came from Pittsburgh by rail and coastal steamer. Caused a lot of dissension within his crew. ”We're iron men, not janitors, Mr. Turner,” Ebenezer Tickle fumed. ”And you gave me your word we'd have our old jobs back at our old pay rate.” Josh pointed out that he'd promised they would make his steel if he made it. Not the same thing.

He might not have prevailed had he not been able to put them back to work on construction and raise them a dime an hour. ”That's forty-five cents an hour for your men, Mr. Tickle. Time and a half for anything over forty hours as before. And your salary up five dollars a week to thirty. Do we have an agreement?”

”It's six cents an hour less for the others and five dollars a week less for me. Since before the panic.”

”It is,” Josh admitted. ”But economic upheavals of that magnitude have consequences.”

The dwarf considered for a moment. ”An extra two years rent-free on my lease,” he said finally. ”And I have to talk to the others 'fore I can say.”

”An extra year,” Josh said. ”Not two. And I'll wait as long as a week for your decision. No longer.”

It took three days, then their customary ritual of contract. Done, Mr. Tickle. Done Mr. Turner. Accompanied by a handshake.

Now he was considering putting up a new building on Fourth Avenue in the Nineties, something that seemed possible because civilization was marching toward 1060, and had in a few instances even moved beyond it. Why not? He could call the building the Park Avenue Flats. There was no reason not to appropriate the name the street bore in Murray Hill. These days there were plantings down the middle of the avenue uptown as well as down. For the same reason, disguising the venting of an underground train tunnel. Better still, he could call his new project the Park Avenue Apartments, the fas.h.i.+onable word of the moment.

But putting up a building of fifty or more flats in a place where probably no one but he imagined any gentleman would want to live . . . Yes, it was risky, but the thought got his blood going in a way that nothing else did. Particularly on a cold gray day that didn't feel at all like the middle of June. Josh opened the window and leaned out over the street. Below him Seventh Avenue seemed busier, more alive than he remembered it being in some time.

An economic uptick? He thought so, thought he could smell it in the stink of coal dust and hear it in the clattering rumble of the elevated railways.

Boss Tweed had coughed out his lungs and his life in Ludlow Street jail the year before, but his legacy was celebrated in every speck of ash that landed on the heads of pedestrians walking below an el. Building and running what the romantics called trains in the sky-a bit of a stretch for something only forty feet up-not only provided desperate New Yorkers with jobs, the els had at last made it easier for other workers to get to the jobs they already had.

Josh could see the tops of two of the lines from where he stood. The Ninth Avenue went as far as Eighty-First Street, and they were talking about extending it to Harlem in a few years. It was a grubby, workaday conveyance used by laborers employed along the great mercantile corridor that clung to the Hudson River, the mostly Irish dock workers and haulers of freight who manhandled the necessities of life on and off Manhattan Island. If he turned his head to the right, he saw the cheerful green stations and graceful wrought-iron roofs of the Sixth Avenue line. It offered comfortable cars not unlike a Pullman train, and heated, gaslit waiting rooms meant for ladies on their way to the Mile. As well as the very sorts of middling gentlemen who rented his flats.

The el further east on Third Avenue was neither as grimy as the Ninth nor as elegant as the Sixth. It pa.s.sed through largely residential parts of the city along an avenue lined with four- and five-story tenements, which were barely livable, but a huge improvement on the barracks-like squalor of the rookeries. Josh couldn't see the Third Avenue el from his window, but if he turned to the wall behind him it was carefully drawn on the map for which he'd paid a printing company called Galt & Hoy the outrageous sum of twelve dollars and fifty cents.

Exorbitant, but worth it. Three feet wide by seven feet long, the map showed every street and almost every building in the city. Josh had stuck pins with brightly colored heads in his own property. They formed a satisfying and very private rainbow. Yellow was for the five rooming houses he still owned, green signified his house at 1060 Fourth, and the five red pins indicated his apartment buildings in the East Fifties and Sixties. The one in which he was standing also had a red pin. It was an anomaly both because it was on the West Side-he'd picked up three contiguous lots for a song when the original owner went bankrupt-and because it was not actually pictured on the Galt & Hoy map. He'd built it after their cartographer did his survey. Another curiosity was that both the St. Nicholas and the Carolina were obscured by the draftsman's quixotic notion of showing Lexington Avenue continuing above Forty-Second Street and obliterating them. Josh stuck his red pins in nonetheless. He trusted reality more than the mapmaker's imagination. h.e.l.l, the man had chosen to show the Second Avenue el as completed when it had been started only a few months before, and he'd made a major feature of the Brooklyn Bridge. ”And G.o.d knows if that will ever be finished.”

”What's that, sir?” Hamish Fraser sat at a desk on the opposite side of the office, head bent over the accounts, and so quiet Josh had forgotten he was there.