Death of a New American--A Novel Read online

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  For my friends and neighbors who have come from around the world and landed in Jackson Heights, Queens

  Acknowledgments

  I am deeply grateful for Catherine Richards’s editorial judgment, support, and sense of humor. And she is merciful, saving the life of one character in this book. (If you like this character, you have her to thank.) I also thank her terrific assistant, Nettie Finn.

  I am also grateful to …

  My agent, Victoria Skurnick, of whom I say roughly once a month, “Thank God she’s my agent.”

  Sarah Schoof and Allison Ziegler for achieving the impossible and making publicity fun. David Rotstein for the beautiful cover on this book. Also thanks to production manager Cathy Turiano and production editor Chrisinda Lynch. And because copyeditors and proofreaders rule—huge thanks to Rachelle Mandik and Laura Dragonette.

  As always, the ladies of the Queens Writers Group for their friendship and wisdom—especially at conference cocktail gatherings.

  Several people and organizations were invaluable when it came to research. Among them:

  The Italian American Museum on Mulberry Street, which was very helpful and gave me a chance to visit the pork stores I visited with my dad as a kid.

  Lieutenant Bernard Whalen for directing me to sources on the police force at the time, including his own excellent book, The NYPD’s First Fifty Years.

  Newspapers—especially The New York Times—thank you and God bless a free press.

  The excellent guides at Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, Long Island.

  Stephen Talty for his book The Black Hand and Steven Biel for his terrific cultural history of the Titanic, Down with the Old Canoe.

  This book has some lines in Italian, a language I do not speak. A sincere grazie to Anna Kushner and Anna Schivazappa.

  An enormous thank-you to Pearl Hanig for her early read and for asking questions like, “Would they really have a morgue in Oyster Bay in 1912?”

  Finally, I would like to thank everyone who read A Death of No Importance. Some of you wrote me, some came to bookstore or library events, some just weighed in on Goodreads. Writing the book is pleasure number one. Interacting with readers is the other great benefit of this job.

  And so, 20,000 women paraded down Fifth Avenue to the sound of the trumpet and in the glare of electric lights. Did their leaders really think that any sensible man likes to have his wife, or his mother, or his daughter thus parade in the streets? It seems to me that this parade is one of the strongest arguments against universal suffrage for women that has yet been presented.

  —A LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1912

  They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking, viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities.

  —H. P. LOVECRAFT ON ITALIAN AND JEWISH IMMIGRANTS

  A wedding took place on Long Island yesterday. This morning’s newspaper informs me that the bride, sixty-seven, is the star of a popular television drama. The groom, twenty-five, was recently employed as a waiter. The two became acquainted at a clinic known for its success in treating alcoholics. It is the groom’s first marriage, the bride’s seventh.

  The guests included many from the world of show business, as well as a presidential candidate who was also once an actor. A chimpanzee was the ring bearer. He performed his duties without incident. The actress’s adult daughter was not in attendance; she reportedly disapproved of the match, first on the grounds of the groom’s age, and second, that his résumé included employment at a place called FunKey Nuts, an establishment popular in the Florida Keys.

  The bride was walked down the aisle by her personal psychic. The couple was to honeymoon in the South of France; proceeds from the sale of the wedding photos would be donated to a cause dear to the bride’s heart: the safety and preservation of whales.

  I happened to notice the story not because I was familiar with the bride or the groom—or even the chimpanzee—but because I recognized the house where the wedding took place. It is now a resort where a great deal of golf is played, but it once was a private home. I was there in 1912. I remember the year clearly because it was shortly after the Titanic sank, taking more than fifteen hundred lives with her. It was a memorable year for other reasons as well. It was the time of the Bull Moose, when Teddy Roosevelt came roaring back to the political arena he had so recently quit. Eleven candidates fought for the favors of the small percentage of the American public able to vote—and women wondered if that fraction should not be enlarged. The arthritic Ottoman Empire was struggling to hold on to its European riches and three thousand cherry blossom trees arrived in Washington as a gift of the Japanese people.

  And there was a wedding.

  Then as now, there was a wealthy bride. Then as now, an eager groom, disgruntled relatives, and a suspicion that the match was more economic than romantic, although we were not so fussy about such distinctions back then. Then as now, the wedding was to be a glittering society occasion, an alliance that would result in prestige and wealth for all concerned.

  But death intervened.

  1

  “I don’t suppose we’ll be invited to the best funerals. Only the second-rate ones.”

  “Charlotte!” Mrs. Benchley and Louise stared in horror at the younger Benchley daughter, who was reclined on a chaise lounge, her face obscured by The New York Herald. Under a banner headline—“Titanic Sinks!”—was a picture of John Jacob Astor and the words “He gave his life so that women and children might live.”

  We were in Louise’s room, preparing for her visit to her fiancé’s family on Long Island. In the silence that followed, I thought how foolish we had been two days ago when we first heard the news, imagining that the Titanic had sunk with no great loss of life. The earliest bulletins had said as much, stating that everyone had proceeded in an orderly fashion to the lifeboats and were now patiently awaiting rescue. It was only when The New York Times reported the abrupt end of the ship’s distress signal that we began to feel uneasy. Then came the bewildering news that the Carpathia had only picked up seven hundred survivors. That was when we faced the reality: fifteen hundred people were dead, gone in a single night.

  And the wealth and fame of those who had died! Astor, Straus, Guggenheim. People so blessed with the world’s riches—how could they be lost, anonymous forms swallowed by the Atlantic? The unsinkable ship, wrecked upon an iceberg, pulled headfirst into the icy water. And there had been no orderly evacuation, just panic, desperation, screams, and death. Over the past two days, I had found myself dazed and short of breath, lost in contemplation of children who, separated from their parents, had gotten lost in the madness and were left to face their end in the rising waters alo
ne.

  “It’s so awful,” said Louise, who was also gazing at Mr. Astor’s picture.

  “You mustn’t think about it, Louise,” said her mother. “It’s not a time to distress yourself. Think of the wedding.”

  “Yes, think of it,” said Charlotte. “Don’t the Tylers have a duchess coming over from England? Imagine—‘I survived Titanic and the Tyler-Benchley wedding. Two disasters in a single month.’”

  Louise went pale. Sinking onto her bed, she whispered, “I think maybe Charlotte’s right.”

  Mrs. Benchley, who had been asking for the third time if I had packed Miss Louise’s navy day dress, said, “Right about what, Louise?”

  “Maybe we should postpone.”

  Mrs. Benchley’s mouth dropped. “Postpone?”

  “Just by a few weeks, or even months.”

  “Decades?” offered Charlotte, turning the page. Inwardly, I sighed. Kindness had never been one of Charlotte’s more salient qualities, but her spite was growing worse as the wedding day grew near. Two years ago, the sisters’ prospects had looked very different. Charlotte had made a dramatic debut in New York society by becoming engaged to one of its most eligible bachelors. But on the night their engagement was to be announced, he was found bludgeoned to death. Charlotte had fallen under suspicion, but another was found guilty and executed. (Still another person was guilty, but that’s a story for another time.)

  There had been hope that people would forget Charlotte’s connection to the celebrated murder. Alas, society was not so willing to forgive. Charlotte found herself stranded among people who remembered her as the interloper who had destroyed the Newsome family. Oh, she was still received, but she was relegated to the far distant edges of conviviality, forced to survive on conversational scraps such as old Pierpont Jackson’s discourse on the breeding of foxhounds or Melanie Derwent’s chatter about the paranormal. The iron had entered into Charlotte’s soul. The sweet dimpled smile made appearances when necessary. But I had the feeling that behind the smile, the teeth had grown sharper.

  Louise gestured helplessly at the headlines. “I don’t see how we can have an enormous wedding right after such a tragedy.”

  Mrs. Benchley’s face was blank with incomprehension. “But dearest, just the other day, Mrs. Borcherling said how much she was looking forward to it.”

  Wringing her hands, Louise said, “Well, maybe we could, just this once, disappoint Mrs. Borcherling?”

  “We certainly could not,” said her mother with unusual vigor. “She’s asked me to serve on a committee for a memorial to the men of the Titanic.”

  Frustration agitated Louise’s body; her lip began to tremble and tears welled in her eyes. Shutting the trunk, I said perhaps Miss Louise should lie down; we would be leaving early and it was important she be rested. Mrs. Benchley hastily left the room, taking Charlotte with her.

  Hand to her chest and gulping air, Louise said, “It’s all going to go wrong, I know it. Completely, horribly wrong—”

  “It will be fine, Miss Louise,” I said soothingly.

  “No, it won’t. I can’t do it. I can’t.”

  A society wedding is a daunting prospect for even the most beautiful young woman. Louise Benchley was not a beauty, being somewhat deficient in chin and protuberant of eye. When I first met her, she had been a girl uncommonly affected by gravity; everything inclined downward. Her shoulders slumped, her arms dangled, her hair hung lank. I sometimes wondered if the midwife hadn’t pulled too hard on the infant Louise and her newborn form, pliable as taffy, had been stretched several inches beyond a desirable length.

  We had worked hard, Louise and I, to bring out her charms. Careful coiling had given her hair height and volume, improved posture an air of vitality. Stylishly adorned hats had lent their support, and she could now utter as many as three sentences in succession in the company of mere acquaintances. But nothing had improved her looks more than the glow that came the day she became engaged to William Tyler.

  But the Titanic was only the latest obstacle to be placed in the way of Louise’s happiness. William had returned from law school to propose to Louise in the summer of 1911, during a heat wave that drove people to sleep in Central Park, caused rail accidents due to melted tracks, and killed nearly four hundred people. When William told his mother of the engagement, Mrs. Tyler asked him if his wits had been turned by the heat. Had her son forgotten that she no longer spoke to the Benchleys, after Charlotte’s snatching of his sister’s fiancé? William’s sisters Beatrice and Emily simply blocked out the information. Oh, was William getting married? To whom? Louise Benchley? No, not possible, you must be mistaken.

  Several inspections over tea had persuaded Mrs. Tyler that Louise was pleasant and bullyable, and these were qualities Mrs. Tyler looked for in her relations. And there was the fact that the Tyler fortune was depleted, the Benchley fortune considerable, and Mrs. Tyler still had two unmarried daughters. So, Mrs. Tyler sighed and resigned herself to a wealthy daughter-in-law.

  The couple had wanted a quiet wedding, preferably at the Benchley home. But here Mrs. Tyler would not give way. Her only son’s wedding must be an occasion; there would be no comparison made to the embarrassment of the wedding of the Roosevelt boy to his cousin Eleanor several years back. (Town Topics criticized that affair for the “pathetic economy of the food,” which was “supplied by an Italian caterer not of the first class.” The flowers were arranged by a “Madison Avenue florist of no particular fame; and the narrow staircase of the house permitted only one person to ascend or descend at a time.”) With complicit dithering from Mrs. Benchley, William and Louise had been overruled.

  Months of searching, evaluating, arguing, and—in Louise’s case, weeping—had followed. Everything grand enough for the mothers was terrifying to the bride. Finally, William’s uncle, the celebrated Charles Tyler, had stepped in. The wedding would be held in a home, but at his home, the beautiful estate of Pleasant Meadows on Long Island. The space could match Mrs. Tyler’s most fevered dreams of splendor, yet it was a place beloved by William, which in turn made it acceptable to Louise.

  Of course, the involvement of Charles Tyler drove the newspapers into further frenzy and they pounced on the preparations. Everything about Louise—the size of her foot, the span of her waist, the enormity of her father’s bank account—was detailed. To date, there had been twenty-seven articles on the wedding dress alone: was it to be Worth or Paquin? The veil cathedral length or floral crown? The state of her bridal underwear was speculated upon from stockings to corset. The identities of the bridesmaids, the shade of white of the shoes, the provenance of the caviar—everything made its way into papers. And all with a degree of malicious anticipation; one could expect nothing but fusty good taste from the Tylers, but of the newly rich Benchley clan, expenditures of splendid vulgarity might be hoped for.

  None of this helped Louise’s already fragile nerves. And she was not alone in her distress. I took some pride in this match; for all intents and purposes, I had made it. As a ladies’ maid, it was a central part of my calling to see my employers securely established in society. As the plain, older sister of a woman suspected of murder, Louise’s marital prospects had been grim. Her money would have ensured a suitor eventually, but not the sort of man capable of caring for a shy, desperately insecure young woman.

  Handsome, well-bred, and poor, William Tyler had also been overlooked on the marriage market. Everyone knew he would marry in the end, but no one was fighting for the privilege. Here, I saw an opportunity. She was rich, he was socially connected. He was kind, she needed kindness. I was the one who suggested William call on Louise, but it hadn’t been easy to put them together. Louise had a terror of being seen in public or speaking out loud, both of which are useful in courtship. William had the predictable affinity of the good-looking for the good-looking. And he was a romantic; his early calls on Louise had had the stale whiff of duty to them.

  But that had changed as they discovered over walks in the park
and pastries at the Hotel Astor that they had much in common, chiefly, being the deferential members of overbearing families. Furthermore, they were both enamored of an elderly basset hound named Wallace, who was walked frequently and unwillingly in the park by his owner, a Mrs. Abernathy.

  So, I could now tell Louise with sincerity, “Everything will seem brighter once you and Mr. William are married.”

  She whispered, “I don’t think so. I want to think so. But I can’t quite believe it.”

  The only answer I had to this vague foreboding was: “Tea.”

  Going to the kitchen, I winced at a thump and thud from upstairs; the housemaid Bernadette was wrestling with the vacuum cleaner and presumably ruining the Benchleys’ molding in the process. In the kitchen, Mrs. Mueller, the cook, was vigorously kneading a ball of dough; she was a mediocre cook but had a real enthusiasm for pounding things. Elsie, a hired girl, newly arrived from Idaho, sat, elbows on the table, reading the newspaper. After the last girl had quit—a Greek—Mrs. Benchley decided the fault lay not with her own communication skills, but in the candidates’ lack of English, and instructed the agency to send her nothing but “good, plain American girls.” Hence, Elsie. Tall and dark haired, she looked as if the plains winds had blown every bit of fat from her body, leaving her spindly and sharp jawed. But she had energy and willingness and so far, Mrs. Benchley’s experiment in domestic nationalism seemed a success.

  Like the rest of New York—indeed, the rest of the world—the Benchley staff was obsessed with the Titanic. Everyone had her particular part of the story. Bernadette was suspicious about the lack of lifeboats, the cook distressed over the fate of Baby Trevor, while Elsie anxiously awaited word of tennis champion Karl Behr.

  Now she read, “‘International Tragedy Rouses Sympathy of the French People. Kaiser William Sends Message of Condolence. Sir Ernest Shackleton Says, Abnormal Year for Icebergs.’” What was normal for icebergs, I wondered.