1901

SALVATORE CARUSO WAS five years old when he came to Ellis Island. It was New Year’s Day, 1901. The day was icy cold but clear, and over the snowy landscape all around the wide waters of the harbor, the sky was crystal blue.

The Caruso family had been fortunate. From Naples they’d taken the Hohenzollern—the German ships were best, his father said—and they’d crossed the Atlantic in less than ten days. It had been crowded, down in steerage. The smell of the latrines almost made him throw up, and the throbbing of the engines, his mother said, was a punishment sent by God. But there had been no storms during the crossing, and they were allowed up on deck to get the fresh air for an hour every day. His mother had brought food—ham and salami, olives, dried fruit, even bread, tightly wrapped in napkins—that had lasted through the voyage. Each evening Uncle Luigi had led the singing of Neapolitan songs, like “Finiculi, Finicula,” in his soft tenor voice.

There were eight of them altogether: his parents, his mother’s brother, Uncle Luigi, and the five children. Giuseppe was the eldest, fifteen years old, strongly built like his father, a good worker. All the children looked up to Giuseppe, but being so much older, he was somewhat apart. Two other little boys had not been so strong, and died in infancy. So the next in line was Anna. She was nine. Then came Paolo, Salvatore, and little Maria, who was just three.

His mother was holding little Maria by the hand. Until Maria came along, Salvatore had been the baby of the family. But now he had someone to look up to him, and it was his job to protect her. He liked to play with his baby sister and to show her things.

His mother was wearing a black coat against the cold. Most of the women had their heads covered with a white shawl, but despite the winter weather, his mother had put on her best hat. It was black also, with a tattered little veil and a limp artificial flower on the brim. Salvatore had heard that once there had been two flowers, but this was before he was born. He understood that she was wearing her hat now so that the Americans should see that the family were people of some standing.

Concetta Caruso was short and dark and fiercely proud. She knew that the people of her village were superior to the people of the neighboring villages, and that the Italian south, the Mezzogiorno, was finer than all the other lands of the world, whatever they might be. She did not know what people of other nations ate, and did not care. For Italian food was best.

She knew also that, whichever of the saints she asked to help her, God saw all the sins of the world, and that He would decide whether any mercy was to be shown.

That was fate. It was inescapable, as certain as the blue dome of the sky over the Earth. Going to America wasn’t going to change that.

“Why are we going to America?” Salvatore had asked, as they sat in the cart, on their way from the family’s little farm into Naples.

“Because there is money in America, Toto,” his father had answered. “A heap of dollars to send to your grandmother and your aunts, so they can keep the farm.”

“We can’t get dollars in Naples?”

“In Naples? No.” His father had smiled. “You will like America. Your Uncle Francesco is there, and all your cousins that you have never met, and all waiting to greet you.”

“Is it true,” Salvatore had asked, “that everyone in America is happy, and you can do whatever you want?”

But before his father could reply, his mother had cut in.

“It is not for you to think of being happy, Salvatore,” she said firmly. “God will decide if you deserve to be happy. Be grateful that you are alive.”

“Only bandits do what they want, Salvatore. Camorristi. And God will punish them. Obey your parents, work hard, look after your family. It is enough.”

“There are still choices,” Uncle Luigi had said gently.

“No,” Concetta had flared up, “there is no choice.” She’d gazed down at her little son. “You are a good boy, Salvatore,” she said in a softer voice, “but you must not hope for too much, or God will punish you. Always remember that.”

“Yes, Mama,” he’d said.

Next to his mother, holding little Maria’s other hand, was Uncle Luigi.

Uncle Luigi was small. He had a round head, and the strands of hair he plastered across it could not conceal the fact that he was bald. He was not powerful like Salvatore’s father, who only tolerated him. He had worked in a store; he could also read and write, and liked to go to church with his sister, neither of which impressed the other men in the family. “Reading and writing is a waste of time,” Salvatore’s father would say. “And the priests are all rogues.” Uncle Luigi was a little strange. Sometimes he would hum to himself, and gaze out into space, as though in a dream. But the children all loved him, and Concetta protected him.

Salvatore had been put between Anna and Paolo. Anna was slim and serious. Though she was only nine, she was the eldest daughter, and she helped her mother in all things. She and Paolo didn’t always get along, but Salvatore liked Anna, because she used to take him out for walks into the woods when he was little, and give him chocolate.

As for Paolo, he wasn’t even two years older than Salvatore. Paolo was his best friend; they did everything together. During the voyage, Paolo had been sick, and he kept coughing, but he seemed better now, and Uncle Luigi said the fresh air would put him right.

Salvatore loved his family. He could not imagine life without them. And now they had all crossed the ocean safely, and Ellis Island lay just ahead of them. There, he knew, they would all be inspected before being allowed into America.

And that was the terrible secret he had heard his father tell his mother, not an hour before. One of the family wasn’t going to make it.

The life of Rose Master was privileged, and she knew it. She was a loyal wife and a loving mother, and she ran her houses to perfection. But she hadn’t come by all this good fortune without hard work and calculation. And having got so far, it was hardly surprising that she meant to go further. If her husband was working to increase the family fortune, then her task, as she saw it—and most women she knew would have agreed—was to raise their social position. Indeed, for a married woman of her class and time, blessed, or cursed, with ambition, there wasn’t much else one could do.

The question before her was by no means simple. There were many things to calculate, opportunities to seize, social pitfalls to avoid. And the further up the social scale one went, the more one’s freedom of choice was restricted.

Where was the family going to live?

Not in the summer, of course; that was settled long ago. They’d always be at the cottage.

Every family needed a cottage. By “cottage,” of course, one meant a summer house on the coast. It might be modest or it might be a mansion, but that’s where mothers and children spent the summer months, and one’s husband, assuming he had work to do in the city, came for weekends. And the truly fashionable had cottages in Newport, Rhode Island.

Newport had been chosen for good reason. As the British and French had discovered in centuries past, its harbor was deep, sheltered and magnificent. The New York Yacht Club, which now trounced Britain’s elite Royal Yacht Squadron in the America’s Cup every year, had its home there. Newport’s many miles of unspoiled shoreline provided space for all the cottages that society might need—indeed, more than enough, for Newport society was exclusive. Once one belonged in Newport society, one had reached the top.

Newport was perfect for the summer. The problem was New York.

The family was well represented in the city. William’s grandmother, old Hetty Master, was still in isolated splendor at Gramercy Park. His father Tom had recently bought the late Mr. Sean O’Donnell’s splendid house on Lower Fifth, after he died on a return voyage from England. And for the last few years, William and Rose had been renting a fine place, further up the avenue. But now the owner wanted it back, and it was time to buy a place of their own.

“You’d better decide where we go, Rose,” William had genially remarked. “Brooklyn or Queens, Manhattan or the Bronx. Staten Island if you like. So long as it’s in the city.”

Technically, of course, all the outlandish places he mentioned were part of the city now. Just before the new century began, these surrounding areas—Brooklyn and Queens County on Long Island, part of the old Dutch Bronx estate above Manhattan to the north, and rural Staten Island across the harbor to the south—had all been incorporated within the expanded City of New York. Brooklyn, proudly independent, had only just been persuaded to join. But the resulting Five Boroughs of New York made the metropolis, after London, the most populous city in the world.

And there were splendid houses, and pleasant parks, and delightful open country in any one of those five boroughs. But Rose Master wasn’t free to choose them. The family could only live in Manhattan, and not in many places there.

Then there was the question of noise. After the terrible blizzard of 1888 had brought the city to a standstill, everyone had agreed that the telegraph wires should be buried underground. This was easy to do, and it had improved the look of the place. Many people also argued for underground transport, which would be out of sight, and impervious to weather. But this was taking much longer. So for the time being, the El trains, with their noise and smoke, and tracks running past everyone’s windows, were still puffing and clattering up the avenues on the East Side of the island, and up parts of the West Side too.

As fashionable New York advanced northward, therefore, it avoided the smoke and noise, and hugged the quieter center. Fifth and Madison avenues, and the streets close to them, were the best residential quarters.

“What about Park Avenue?” William had suggested.

“Park?” she had cried, before she’d realized he was teasing her. “Nobody lives on Park.”

The trouble with Park Avenue went back thirty years, to when old Commodore Vanderbilt had erected a big railroad shed on Fourth Avenue at Forty-second Street, to act as a kind of terminal. Fourth had changed its name to Park Avenue these days, which sounded well enough. But the terminal was a mess, and the railroad yards spread in a hideous swathe for a dozen blocks to the north of it. Even above Fifty-sixth Street, where the tracks narrowed and were covered over, the noise and smoke rising from the center of the avenue indicated that the infernal regions were only just below.

“What about the West Side then?” he’d said. “It’s better value there.”

She knew he was gently teasing her. Not that the West Side was to be despised; gone already were the days when the Dakota was in the wilderness. The West Side was quieter and land prices were lower; the big family houses in the side streets were often larger than their equivalents on the East Side, and some real mansions were arising there too.

But who lived there? That was the point. What was the tone of the place? Would a West Side address sound as perfect as the cottage in Newport?

No, it had to be somewhere close to Fifth and Madison. The question was, how far up?

The Masters couldn’t afford a palace like that. They could live near one, though. But should they?

J. P. Morgan didn’t live up there. Pierpont Morgan’s mansion was on the east side of Madison, down at Thirty-sixth Street. Mr. Morgan had openly stated his opinion that some of the mansions going up on Fifth were vulgar monstrosities. And one couldn’t deny that he had a point. Most of those mansions were being built by new money. Very new money indeed. Morgan’s great fortune might only derive from his father Junius, but it had come from banking in London, in the grandest manner. The Morgans, besides, had been well-to-do in Connecticut since the seventeenth century. Compared to all but the oldest Dutch families, they were old money.

And that was the point.

Rose was always grateful to her father-in-law for the names he had chosen for his son. The fact that it had come about by chance, that for some reason Tom’s wife had taken a fancy to the name of Vernon and that Tom had disliked it and suggested the old family name of Vandyck instead, didn’t matter. What mattered was that Rose could, quite properly, call herself Mrs. William Vandyck Master—and in doing so, proclaim that her husband came not only from Anglo-Saxon Protestant money, but from Dutch ancestors who went all the way back to the days of Stuyvesant and before.

The Masters were only modestly rich, but their money was old. As long as a family could afford to stay in society, that counted for something.

William had given her the pearl choker for their third wedding anniversary. It was just like the one that Alexandra, the Princess of Wales, always wore in the society photographs from London, and it meant more to Rose than any other piece of jewelry she possessed. She let her fingers play over it now, as in her mind she went up and down Fifth and Madison, street by street, thinking about who lived on each block and whether, should she find the perfect social territory, there might be a house, or a building lot for sale there.

“There it is, Toto.” Anna was pointing. The bridge of the ship had obscured the great monument from view, but now the passengers were all pressing toward the port side to get a better look as it approached. “The Statue of Liberty.”

There was hardly any need to move to the rail. The mighty statue towered over them. Its upraised arm, torch in hand, seemed to scrape the sky. Salvatore gazed up in silence. So this was America.

Salvatore didn’t know much about America. He knew it was big, and that the people there spoke English, of which Uncle Luigi spoke a few words, and that when you worked, they gave you dollars to send home. He had never heard of the Anglo-Saxon Puritans or the Dutch settlers, or the God-fearing farmers of New England. His family had never spoken of the Boston Tea Party, or Ben Franklin, or even George Washington. Nor, gazing at the Statue of Liberty, could he have derived any clue as to the existence of such a Christian or democratic tradition.

Yet instinctively, as the Mediterranean boy looked up, he understood what he saw.

Power. The colossal, pale green, pagan god rose alone on its huge pedestal above the waters. Hundreds of feet up, under its mighty diadem, the blank, heroic face stared with Olympian indifference across the clear blue sky, while its upraised arm signaled: Victory. If the statue bade him any welcome at all, the little boy sensed, it was to an empire like that of his ancestors. Only one thing puzzled him.

“Is it a man,” he whispered to Anna, “or a woman?”

“She is a woman,” said Uncle Luigi. “The French gave her to the Americans.”

Had Uncle Luigi known it, he could have added that the sculptor came from Alsace, on the Franco-German border, had studied in Egypt as well, and that therefore it was not so surprising if this monument to Liberty, timeless as the pyramids, should also echo that modern version of the classical spirit, the French Second Empire—with a hint, perhaps, of German power as well.

They sailed straight past Ellis Island. The first- and second-class passengers, the people with cabins, did not have to pass though that ordeal. They had already been given a brief and courteous inspection on board before the ship entered the harbor, and were free to disembark at their leisure.

On the starboard side, the ship passed Governor’s Island, then the tip of Manhattan with its little fort and park. Beyond, in the East River, both the funnels of steamships and the huge masts of sailing ships graced the waters. On the port side, Salvatore saw the high cliffs of the Palisades up the Hudson. Then, moments later, the ship began to make its slow turn toward the Hoboken piers on the New Jersey side, where the German liners docked.

Across the river, New York stretched for miles. Street after street of brick and brownstone houses; here and there, clumps of office buildings, several stories higher. Nearby, the dark spire of Trinity, Wall Street, and further off, the Gothic towers of the Brooklyn Bridge rose into the sky. Even more dramatically, nearly a dozen tall skyscrapers, each over three hundred feet high, soared into the heavens above them all. But while everyone gazed eagerly at the city, Salvatore started thinking of something else.

It had been at the turn of the metal stairs going up to the deck. That’s where he’d heard his father say it. The other children didn’t hear, because they’d already turned the corner above.

“Do not say such a thing, Giovanni.” His mother had sounded shocked.

“But it’s true—I know what happens, I spoke with a man who has been there. It’s not only your chest and eyes they inspect—they have special doctors there to spot the ones who are crazy. They chalk a cross on their chest and they make them sit on a bench, and then they talk to them. And in a minute …” he made a gesture—“it’s over. They can always tell. They are specialists, from the finest lunatic asylums in America. So they will understand at once that your brother is crazy, and they will send him back to Italy. Ecco. You will see.”

“Do not say it, Giovanni. I will not listen,” his mother had cried.

But Salvatore had listened. And when they got up on deck, he had tugged at his father’s sleeve and whispered: “Is it true, Papa, that they will send Uncle Luigi home because he is crazy?”

His father had looked down, with a serious expression.

“Shh,” his father had said, “it’s a secret. You mustn’t tell anybody. Promise me.”

“I promise, Papa,” Salvatore had said. But it was a terrible secret to keep.

It took an hour before they were let off the ship. His father, Giuseppe and Uncle Luigi each carried a heavy suitcase. Uncle Luigi’s case was made of rattan, and it looked as if it might burst open at any moment. There was also a wooden trunk which was taken across on a trolley. The steerage passengers were led straight along the wharf to where a barge was waiting. His father made them hurry, to be near the front. He had talked to men who’d come back to Italy from America, so he knew exactly how things were done.

“They sometimes keep you waiting for a whole day on the barge, before they let you off at Ellis Island,” he’d been told. “So in this weather, it’s better to be inside than on deck.”

Once they were all on board the barge, it only took a few minutes to get to the island. And though they had to wait a while, within another hour they had joined the slow line making its way toward the big doorway.

Then the men were told to go one way, and the women and children another. So his father and Giuseppe and Uncle Luigi had to leave them. That made Salvatore sad, because he knew his uncle wasn’t coming back, and he called out, “Good-bye, Uncle Luigi,” but his uncle didn’t seem to hear him.

In front of him, a young doctor was checking everyone’s eyes. Salvatore saw him mark one child with the letter T. When he finally came to the Caruso family, he started with little Maria, probing her eye gently with his forefinger. Then he did the same to Salvatore. And Salvatore was relieved, because his father had told him that they might lift his eyelid with a little buttonhook and that it would hurt and that he must be brave. The doctor carefully inspected Paolo, Anna and his mother, and waved them on.

There was a broad, square staircase next. His father had warned them all about this. “It is a trap,” he told them. “And you have to be very careful, because they are watching you. Whatever you do, don’t look tired or out of breath.”

And sure enough, Salvatore saw that there were the men in uniform quietly watching them from the hallway below and from the stairway above. One of the men in uniform was standing at one corner of the stairs, saying a word to people as they passed.

The family in front of them was large, and the doctors seemed to be taking a long time with them. While this was done, the line was held up, and Salvatore started to get quite bored. But at last the line began to move again. When Salvatore reached the man in uniform, he was asked his name, in Neapolitan so that he should understand, and Salvatore said it loudly, so that the man smiled. But when he asked Paolo his name, Paolo coughed before he gave it. The man didn’t say anything, but he made a mark in blue chalk on Paolo’s chest. And a few moments later one of the men took Paolo away. His mother became very agitated.

“To the doctor’s pen,” they told her, “but don’t worry.”

Then one of the men told Salvatore to take a deep breath, and he puffed his chest out, and after a moment the man nodded and smiled. After that, another man inspected his scalp and his legs. It took a while until they had all been checked, but at last his mother was told they could all proceed.

“I will wait here until you return my son,” she said. But they told her: “You have to wait for him in the Registry Room.” And there was nothing else she could do.

They entered the Registry Room through a big double door. To Salvatore, it looked like a church—and indeed, the huge space, with its red-tiled floor, its side aisles, its soaring walls and high, barrel-vaulted ceiling, exactly copied the Roman basilica churches to be found all over Italy. About twenty feet above their heads, an iron balcony ran round the walls, and there were officials observing them from up there too. At the far end there was a row of fourteen desks, in front of which there were long lines of people snaking back and forth between dividing rails, but there was also quite a crowd of people waiting to join the lines.

They looked around, but there was no sign of Paolo. Nobody said anything.

Nearby they saw a man they had spoken to on the ship. He was a schoolmaster, a man of education. Seeing them, he smiled and came over, and Concetta told him what had happened to Paolo.

“It’s just a cough that he has,” she said. “It’s nothing. Why have they taken him?”

“Do not worry, Signora Caruso,” replied the schoolmaster. “They have a hospital here.”

“A hospital?” His mother looked horrified. Like most of the women in their village, she believed that once you went into hospital, you never came out.

“It’s different in America,” said the schoolmaster. “They cure people. They let you out after a week or two.”

Concetta was still doubtful. She shook her head. “If Paolo is sent back,” she began, “he cannot go alone …”

Salvatore was thinking that it wouldn’t be much fun in America without Paolo. “If Paolo has to go home, can I go with him?” he said.

“No, no, signora.” The schoolmaster was soothing. “He is a little boy.”

But his mother had turned her face away from Salvatore.

“Look!” cried Anna.

It was Paolo, with Giuseppe and their father.

“We waited for him,” Giovanni Caruso explained to his wife.

Paolo was looking pleased with himself. “I had three doctors,” he said proudly. “They made me breathe in, and cough, and they looked down my throat. And two of them listened to my chest and another to my back.”

“You are safe, then?” cried his mother. “They have not taken you away?” She clasped him to her bosom, held him close, then released him and crossed herself. “Where is Luigi?” she asked.

Giovanni Caruso shrugged. “I don’t know. He got separated from us.”

Salvatore knew what had happened. The doctors from the madhouse were questioning Uncle Luigi. But he didn’t say anything.

The family joined the line in front of the desks. It took a long time before they reached the head of the line, and there was still no sign of Uncle Luigi, but finally they were approaching the big desks where the officials were waiting, some seated, others standing close behind.

“The men behind are the interpreters,” his father whispered. “They can speak all the languages of the world.”

When they reached the desk, the man addressed Giovanni Caruso in Neapolitan, which anyone from the Mezzogiorno could understand.

Checking their names against the manifest, he smiled. “Caruso. At least the ship’s purser could get your name right. Sometimes they mangle them terribly.” He grinned. “We have to follow what’s on the ship’s manifest, you know. Are you all here?”

“Except my brother-in-law. I don’t know where he is.”

“He’s not named Caruso?”

“No.”

“I’m only interested in Caruso.” The man asked a few questions, and seemed satisfied with the answers. Had they paid for their own passage? Yes. “And have you a job in America?”

“No,” Salvatore heard his father answer firmly.

Satisfied with his inquiries, the man at the desk was waving them through.

“Welcome to America, Signor Caruso.” He smiled. “Good luck.”

They passed through a turnstile, down a flight of stairs, and then into the baggage room. Here they were given a box lunch and a bag of fresh fruit. They found their suitcases and the big wooden trunk. Nothing had been stolen. Salvatore watched as his father and Giuseppe started to put the trunk and cases on a trolley. They were told that they could have them delivered free to any address in the city, but Concetta was so relieved that they hadn’t already been stolen that she wouldn’t let them out of her sight again.

She was still looking about anxiously for Uncle Luigi, but since Salvatore knew he wouldn’t be coming, he didn’t bother.

Then, suddenly, his mother started crying out.

“Luigi! Luigi! We’re here. Over here.” She was waving excitedly. And sure enough, at the far end of the room, Salvatore saw his uncle coming toward them. He was smiling.

“Uncle Luigi!” Salvatore started running toward him. His uncle was carrying his suitcase. He scooped Salvatore up in his free arm and carried him back to his sister.

“Where were you?” she asked. “We couldn’t see you.”

Uncle Luigi put Salvatore down. “I came through before you. I’ve been waiting here ten minutes.”

“Thanks be to God,” she cried.

But Salvatore was even more excited. “They let you into America, Uncle Luigi. They let you in after all.”

“Certainly they let me in. Why shouldn’t they let me in?”

“Because you’re crazy. They send all the lunatics back.”

“Salvatore!” cried his mother. “What are you saying?”

Hot tears came to Salvatore’s eyes. “It’s true. They put a cross on the lunatics, and the doctors from the madhouse question them, and send them home,” he protested.

Uncle Luigi raised his hand again.

“Enough,” said his mother, while Salvatore buried his face in her skirt. “Luigi, help Giovanni with the suitcases. As if we hadn’t enough troubles in the world. Poverino, he doesn’t know what he is saying.”

Minutes later, when Salvatore was beside his father, he whimpered, “Uncle Luigi hit me.”

But his father gave him no comfort.

“It’s your own fault,” he said. “That will teach you to keep a secret.”

1907

It was just before noon on October 17 when the telephone rang. The butler answered. Then he came to inform Rose that her husband needed to speak to her.

“Tell him I’ll be down in a minute,” she said. She was fastening her pearl choker. It looked elegant with her gray silk dress.

Much as she loved William, she’d rather that he hadn’t called just then. He ought to have remembered she’d be busy. For this was the day of the month when she took his grandmother out for a drive.

Taking old Hetty Master out once a month might be a duty, but Rose also found it a pleasure. Hetty was almost ninety now, but her mind was still sharp as a razor. She sometimes went out in her own carriage, but she liked to be taken out too, and there was never any shortage of things to talk about. She read the newspapers every day, and once Rose had brought her up to date with the latest doings of the children, Hetty would be sure to ask her sharp questions about the relative views of the Pulitzer newspapers or those of Mr. Hearst, which Rose often had some trouble in answering.

It was also very agreeable for the family—and her ambitions for them—to have such a splendid figure in the background.

“And didn’t your husband leave the Union Club?” Rose would prompt.

“I always liked the Union Club,” Hetty would say. “I don’t know why people left it.”

“They said it was letting in too many of the wrong sort,” Rose would remind her. “That’s when they set up the Knickerbocker Club,” she’d explain to her guests, “where my father-in-law’s a member now.”

“There was nothing wrong,” old Mrs. Master would repeat, “with the Union.”

Anyway, it was time to put on her coat and go out. Rose hoped her husband wasn’t going to delay her. Downstairs, the butler handed her the telephone.

“What is it, dear?” she said.

“Just thought I’d call. Things are a little rough down here, Rose.”

“In what way, dear?”

“I don’t exactly know yet. I don’t like the look of the market.”

“I’m sure it will be all right, William. Remember what happened in March.”

There had been some anxious days that spring. After a period of easy credit, it had suddenly emerged that several significant companies were in trouble. Then an earthquake had hit California, there had been panic selling in the market, and credit had become tight. The trouble had subsided, but all through the summer while she and the children were at Newport, rumbles had come up from the city as the market went up and down uncertainly.

“We’ll talk about it tonight,” she said. “I have to take your grandmother out now.”

She was wearing a hat with an ostrich feather round the brim, and a coat trimmed with fox fur as she stepped out of the house on Fifty-fourth Street. She had done very well in finding that house. It stood between Fifth and Madison, a little closer to the latter, just a few blocks below Central Park therefore, and close to the great mansions of the Vanderbilts on Fifth. But as it happened, the side streets here were even better than the avenue.

She’d sensed it at the time she was looking. The character of Fifth was about to change—not further up along the park, but here, at the great fashionable intersection of thoroughfares. And sure enough, within a few brief years of their purchase, the change had come.

Hotels. The St. Regis and the Gotham. Splendid hotels, to be sure, but hotels all the same, on Fifth at Fifty-fifth. Now a commercial building was going up on the block above. Rumor said that Cartier, the Paris jewelry firm, intended to be there. Nothing could be more elegant, but it was not a private house. The side streets were another matter, though; they would remain as residences.

A few doors down lived the Moore family. He was a rich lawyer, and they had a fine, five-story limestone townhouse, three classical windows wide, with a central entrance between railings and lamps, and a carved stone balcony at the piano nobile floor. The Master house was one of several big brownstones in the same block, with steps coming down over the stoop. Not so handsome, certainly, but impressive enough.

Rose kept a careful eye on the Moore household, using it as a yardstick. The Moores had nine servants in the house. William and Rose had six—a Scottish butler, an English nanny, the rest of the domestic staff being Irish. Twice a week, the children went across Central Park to Durland’s Riding Academy on West Sixty-sixth. It was with a sense of general satisfaction, therefore, that she started down the steps to the street.

If she had only known what old Mrs. Hetty Master had in store for her that day, she would have gone straight back into her house.

“This is nothing to do with me,” she would exclaim with a laugh. “It’s my husband’s little madness.” His insane extravagance, certainly.

To say that William Master was a fanatic for the motor car would have been an understatement. The last twenty years had seen huge changes in the city: the quieter cable-car lines up Third and Broadway, the recent electrification of the El trains. Why, even the horse-drawn cabs were being replaced with motorized cabs with taxi meters now. Private motor cars, however, were for the rich.

Even so, there were quite a few makers to choose between, from the Oldsmobile curved dash, the first mass-produced car, to the more expensive Cadillac, named after the aristocratic French founder of Detroit, and the many models of Ford. William Master knew them all. He could discourse on the benefits of Ford’s top-of-the-line Model K, which would set you back an astonishing $2,800, over eight times the price of an Oldsmobile, to the European rivalry of Mercedes and Benz on the racing circuits. That spring, he had become highly excited about the news coming from Britain.

“The new Rolls-Royce is out—Claude Johnson’s been testing it up in Scotland, and the results are astonishing. Autocar says it’s the best car in the world. And it’s so silent, Johnson’s called his own car the Silver Ghost. There’s only a handful been produced so far, but everyone’s going to want one. Well,” he’d smiled, “those that can afford it.”

“What does it cost?”

“Well, Rolls-Royce sells you the chassis and engine. I guess that’s around a thousand British pounds. Then you order your own custom bodywork from the coachbuilder—that’s another hundred or so. There are other things besides. Maybe twelve hundred pounds.”

“How many dollars to the pound, William?”

“A pound is four dollars and eighty-six cents.”

“That’s six thousand dollars! Nobody’s going to pay that,” she cried.

William had said nothing. Last week it had arrived at the docks.

“I had mine done like Johnson’s: silver paint, silver-plated fittings. Johnson had green leather seats, but I went for red. I’m calling mine the Silver Ghost, too. Isn’t she handsome?”

When she got to the house, Hetty Master was waiting. She inspected the car with interest, asked what it cost, and said, “I don’t approve.” But she got in happily enough. Sometimes she liked to include her friend Mary O’Donnell on these outings, but today she was alone.

Few people could enjoy getting old, but insofar as it was possible, Hetty Master did so.

She was a rich old woman in the full possession of her faculties. Her family loved her and lived nearby. She said and did what she liked. She could indulge a few mannerisms which, when she was younger, it had been wiser to keep in check. She could even, to amuse herself, cultivate some new ones.

Though Hetty had never been so interested in the social world herself, and she was certainly less conservative than Rose, she understood the younger woman’s ambition and respected her. She was also not above teasing Rose, once in a while.

“Where shall we drive to?” Rose inquired.

“I’ll tell you as we go,” the intrepid old lady answered. “First we’ll pick up Lily.”

Rose knew better than to ask too many questions, and as they went back up Fifth, it was Hetty who led the conversation. From Twentieth to Thirtieth, she wanted to know all about the children. At Thirtieth, she remarked that the car was certainly very comfortable, but much too expensive, and that she’d have to tell young William that he was too extravagant. Only when they reached Thirty-fourth did Rose interrupt her. And when she did, it was to groan.

“Even after ten years,” she now declared, waving her gloved hand toward a sumptuous building, “when I think of the scandal, and my poor, dear Mrs. Astor, I can’t bear to look at it. Can you?”

For they were passing the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

She was very rich indeed. That went without saying. She and her husband had occupied one of two huge Astor mansions on the site. But if the Astor family had become rich and established enough to assume New York’s social leadership, Caroline, through her Dutch Schermerhorn ancestors who went back to the founding of the city, could claim it as a birthright. And with all this power at her disposal, Mrs. Astor had undertaken a labor worthy of Hercules. She was going to polish New York’s upper class.

By chance she had a helper, who encouraged her to do it. Mr. Ward McAllister, a Southern gentleman who’d married money and toured Europe to observe its aristocratic manners, devoted his life to these things. He declared Mrs. Astor, who was short, swarthy and somewhat plump, to be his inspiration, and together they set about giving New York a higher social tone.

Not that America was a stranger to class. Boston, Philadelphia and other fine cities, including New York, were trying to establish a more permanent order by compiling Social Registers. In New York, the ancient Dutch landowners and old English merchants with their boxes at the Academy of Music had known how to be snobbish. When Mr. A. T. Stewart, the store owner, had made his fortune and built a mansion on Fifth, they didn’t think he was a gentleman, and ignored him so cruelly that he left in despair.

But New York had a particular problem: it had become the big attraction.

With its banks, and its transatlantic connections, it was so much the money center of the continent that every big interest needed to have an office there. Copper and silver magnates, railroad owners, oilmen like Rockefeller from Pittsburgh, steel magnates like Carnegie, and coal barons like Frick, from the Midwest and the South and even California, they were all flocking to New York. Their fortunes were staggering, and they could do anything they wanted.

Exceptions could be made. The Vanderbilts were new, and the old Commodore, who had a fouler mouth than a bargee, never gave a damn about society. But the next generation was very rich, and very determined, and even before they’d got a duke in the family, they’d been let in. One had to be practical.

Yet who was to select this inner circle? Ward McAllister already led a committee of the region’s greatest gentlemen that decided who was eligible to attend the yearly Patriarchs’ Ball. Once he had Mrs. Astor beside him, she became the queen of the event and gave the list her regal stamp. And how many guests should there be? It varied, but not more than four hundred. That, McAllister declared, was the total number of people in the great metropolis who would not feel or look awkward in a ballroom. If one considered the thousands of people in New York who were well accustomed to dances, and who had probably been to as many grand resorts as McAllister, this last claim might have seemed a little specialized. But it pleased Mr. McAllister, and so four hundred it was.

It had to be said that Mrs. Astor’s lists were quite remarkable for their consistency. There were the newer families of massive wealth, of course, from the Astors themselves to the most recent Vanderbilts. There were the solid old-money families of Otis, Havemeyer and Morgan, and eighteenth-century gentry like Rutherfurd and Jay. But sprinkled all over the list were great names, still rich, and going back to the region’s seventeenth-century beginnings: Van Rensselaer, Stuyvesant, Winthrop, Livingston, Beekman, Roosevelt. If Mrs. Astor wanted to keep the quiet wealth of old New York as the example of how things should be done, then you’d have to acknowledge she’d pulled it off.

When Rose met her future husband William, the first thing she had discovered, even before his heaven-sent second name, was that the old-money Masters were on Mrs. Astor’s list. And when after her marriage, old Mrs. Astor had taken her up, Rose became a willing acolyte. Many an afternoon she had sat at her feet, to learn the finer points of social etiquette.

Only one of these rules had caused her any difficulty.

It was an interesting idea, imported from Old Europe, where the best people went to the opera to be seen. Presumably, if the artists ever had the good fortune to perform for an audience composed entirely of aristocrats, there would be a mass exodus just before the end, leaving them to conclude their opera to a silent and empty house—and thus, most conveniently, obviate the tiresome need for curtain calls and flowers.

“I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss the overture and the finale when I’ve paid good money for it,” her husband had quite reasonably replied. He might have added that it was an insult to the music, the artists and the rest of the audience. But he had wit enough to know that this was part of the point. Aristocrats were supposed to be above the music, and care not a bean for the feelings of the artists or the audience. “You can go,” he’d told her, “but I’m staying.”

And indeed, Rose might have hesitated to observe this convention herself if she hadn’t felt a loyalty to Mrs. Astor.

She and William found a compromise, however. Rose would leave just before the end of the opera and wait in the carriage a few yards down the street so that, as soon as William came to join her, they could get away quickly from the vehicles of the less instructed.

“When I think,” she now remarked to Hetty Master, “of the way Mrs. Astor was treated, by her own family, it just makes my blood boil.”

It was Mrs. Astor’s young nephew who was the culprit. He’d lived in the house next door. And because his father had died, and he could claim, technically, that he was the head of the family, he had demanded that it was his wife who should now be called Mrs. Astor, and that Caroline must revert to the less senior appellation of Mrs. William Astor.

“Of course,” Rose said, “he was never a gentleman. He even wrote historical novels.”

Anyway, Mrs. Astor had quite rightly refused. Age and reputation should be given their due. So in a huff, young Astor had left for England, and not returned. He’d even become a British citizen, like the turncoat he was. For a man to let his daughter marry an English aristocrat was one thing, in Rose’s opinion, but to become an Englishman himself was quite another.

But he’d taken his revenge on his aunt all the same. He’d turned his former New York house into a hotel, thirteen stories high. It towered over hers, destroying all her privacy. He called it the Waldorf.

Four years later she’d admitted defeat and moved uptown. The Astor family rebuilt her house as a second hotel, the Astoria, and soon the two had been joined, by the gorgeous Peacock Alley, into a single establishment. Rose still refused to set foot in it.

“Mrs. Astor deserves a statue in her honor,” Rose stated with finality.

There was a pause.

“They say,” said Hetty, “that she’s entirely demented nowadays.”

“She’s not well,” Rose conceded.

“Well, I hear she’s demented,” said Hetty, inexorably.

The Rolls-Royce passed into the Forties. The old reservoir was no longer in use now, and they were building a magnificent new public library on the site. Everyone in the family knew that this was where Frank had proposed to Hetty, and Rose maintained a reverent silence while Hetty gazed at it as they passed. Soon St. Patrick’s loomed ahead on their right. As they reached the Fifties, and the new hotels rose into the sky by the Vanderbilt mansions, Hetty observed that everything in the city seemed to be getting very tall. “I’m surprised you like living up here with all these hotels,” she said.

“We’re in a side street,” said Rose.

“I know,” said Hetty. “All the same …” At her request, they went west across Fifty-seventh Street. This took them past the fine concert hall that Mr. Carnegie, the steel magnate, had financed. The new millionaires might not always be elegant, but they certainly knew how to support the arts. “I was at the opening gala,” Hetty reminded her. “Tchaikovsky himself conducted.”

Soon after that, they were bowling up Central Park West. It was looking increasingly handsome these days. The Dakota had company: its sleeker sister, the Langham, was now on the next block up. Other splendid buildings also stared across the park.

“We’ll go to Riverside Drive first,” said Hetty.

The Upper West Side might not be so fashionable, but it had many fine streets. On West End Avenue, there were houses with wide reception halls, splendid curving staircases, and music rooms or libraries. Some of the apartment buildings were truly magnificent—in one place, an exquisite facade that might have come from gothic Flanders, only stacked twice as high; in another, a huge, rusticated, red-brick block, big as a castle, and crowned with the bulbous mansards of France’s belle époque. The people who lived there—doctors, professors, owners of middle-sized businesses—paid a lot less than the people across the park, and lived very well indeed. But it was as they came to the high and magnificent sweep of Riverside Drive above the Hudson, that Hetty exclaimed: “There. That’s what I wanted to see.”

The sight before them, it had to be said, was quite extraordinary. The house had only just been completed. Its magnificent grounds occupied an entire block, and overlooked the Hudson far below.

It was a French Renaissance chateau, built in limestone, with turrets, and it contained seventy-five rooms. Even the biggest mansions of Fifth, because of their cramped sites, looked bourgeois by comparison. Its owner, Mr. Charles Schwab, having the boldness and intelligence to realize that the city’s greatest asset was the magnificent view over the Hudson River, and ignoring timid fashion entirely, had, like a true prince, built his mansion where he liked. They might not know it, but he had left them—Astors, Vanderbilts, everyone, save maybe Pierpont Morgan—far behind. His former boss and partner, Andrew Carnegie, said it all. “Have you seen Charlie’s place? Makes mine look like a shack.”

They stopped the Rolls for several minutes in front of the gateway to admire the place. Rose had to confess that, West Side or not, it was something to talk about.

“Now,” Hetty announced, “we’ll go up to Columbia University.” She smiled. “We’re going to pay a call on young Mr. Keller.”

“Mr. Keller?” Rose’s face fell.

“Why yes, dear. My friend Theodore Keller’s son. He’s expecting us.”

“Oh,” said Rose. And she looked thoughtful. She did not want to see Mr. Keller, of Columbia. She did not want to see him at all.

“I wish I could do that,” Hetty remarked.

Before getting that far, they turned east, passed by the site where the mighty Anglican cathedral of St. John the Divine was arising, and came to the campus.

Columbia University was already a college of some antiquity. Having begun its life downtown in the mid-eighteenth century, as the mainly Anglican King’s College, it had later changed its name, relocated to mid-town, and only a decade ago moved once more, to the splendid site at 115th and Broadway. The campus was already handsome; indeed, the broad dome of the Low Library that presided over it could have graced Harvard or Yale.

It was now, as they pulled up, that Rose tried the only ploy she could think of.

“I’ll wait for you in the car,” she declared, and indicated to the chauffeur that he should escort the two old ladies in. But it was no use.

“Oh you can’t do that, dear,” said Hetty. “He knows you’re bringing us. That would seem awfully rude.”

So a few minutes later, she found herself in the pleasant office of an athletic man in his late twenties, with dark brown hair and bright blue eyes, who had placed three armchairs before his desk, and was clearly delighted to see them.

“Welcome to my lair,” said Mr. Edmund Keller with a pleasant smile. There were bookshelves round the walls, a print of the Mona Lisa, and a photograph of Niagara Falls, taken by his father. A glance at the books revealed that he was a classical scholar and historian. Rose allowed herself to be introduced, then tactfully kept silent.

“Lily and I saw your father only the other day,” Hetty declared. “He stopped round at my house for tea.”

Nicholas Murray Butler was a very impressive man. He was a distinguished academic, internationalist and political figure. President Theodore Roosevelt called him a friend, and his views were as sound as they were conservative. Everybody said he was doing great things with Columbia. So if he had suspicions about young Mr. Keller, you could be sure it was for a very good reason.

She’d met Mr. Butler at a gala, and they’d chatted quite a while. She always took care to keep informed about everything that was going on in the city, so she’d listened carefully as he told her about the improvements he was making up at the university. They’d got along rather well. When she asked him if he was satisfied with the students applying, he’d answered yes, before adding in a low voice: “Perhaps too many Jews, though.”

Rose hadn’t anything against Jews herself. Some of the most notable men in New York—people like the great banker Schiff, whom even Morgan held in high regard—were Jewish and one met them socially. The old German Jewish families that lived on the Upper West Side, or in the pleasant suburb of Harlem now, were often highly respectable.

Of course, the masses of poor Jews who had flooded into the Lower East Side during the last quarter-century were quite another matter. One felt sorry for them, naturally—they’d been fleeing those terrible pogroms in Russia and places like that. But such people. She’d seen them, of course, in that noisy, bustling quarter, and she couldn’t imagine that they would provide the genteel young men that Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler would want.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” he’d continued. “I have distinguished Jewish professors, and we take in plenty of Jewish boys. But I have to limit the numbers, or they’ll swamp the place.”

It was then, trying to think of something else to say, and remembering she’d heard that Theodore Keller’s son was teaching at Columbia, that she’d mentioned his name. And she’d been quite surprised when Butler’s brow had darkened.

“You know him?” he’d asked.

“Not personally.”

“Hmm.” He’d hesitated. “He is entitled to his opinions, of course, but I may have some political differences with him.”

Again he’d paused. “Well, I go only by things he has said in public, but I have the impression—no, I must say that I believe—that Edmund Keller’s views are socialistic.”

Rose Master did not know a great deal about socialists. One heard about them, of course, in places like Russia, and even in more familiar European countries, too. Socialists, communists, anarchists, revolutionaries. People who had no respect for private property. People without roots, or morals. She remembered something a British politician had told her at a dinner party, when she and William had made their visit to London. “These people would take away every individual freedom we have. They call us capitalists, whatever that may mean, and say our capitalism is evil. That is their excuse for destroying everything we cherish. If they had their way we’d become servants of an all-embracing state, like the oriental empire of Genghis Khan. Moreover, because they believe they are right, they will do anything—they will create strikes, they will kill, and they will lie, they will always lie—to achieve their ends.”

“A socialist. That’s terrible,” she’d said to Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler.

“I hope I’m mistaken,” he’d said, “but I believe his opinions tend that way.”

“What will you do?”

“Columbia is a university, Mrs. Master. I’m not a policeman. But I keep an eye on him.”

So now, as Hetty and Lily chatted to the seemingly pleasant young man, Rose watched him also, as carefully as one might watch an alligator or a snake.

By and by, Hetty remarked that Rose had brought them in a Rolls-Royce. Rose observed Keller intently now; the thought of such a capitalist luxury would surely bring a glint of rage to his eye.

“Rolls-Royce?” He was looking straight at her. His eyes were very blue, intense. “Which model?”

“My husband calls it a Silver Ghost,” she answered reluctantly, watching him more closely than ever.

But his face lit up with joy.

“The Silver Ghost? That’s just been tested? Side valve? Six cylinders, three and three? A trembler coil with a magneto as well?” He had almost jumped up from his desk. “A masterpiece. However did you get it so soon? Oh, I should love to see that. May I see it?”

“Well,” added Lily, “it seems we’ve made your day.”

“You have,” he answered, with charming frankness.

But Rose wasn’t fooled. She remembered what she’d been told. They lie. They always lie.

Ten minutes later, they were down in the street. To the great amusement of the two old ladies, Mr. Keller even had the chauffeur open the hood so he could inspect the engine. Once he had finished, he beamed at them all, before saying farewell.

“Now, the next time you come to see your father, you must promise to look in to see me, too,” Hetty told him. “It’s only up the street.”

“Certainly I will,” he replied.

“Now, dear,” the old lady turned to Rose, “you’d better give Mr. Keller your card so that he can call upon you too. I’m sure William would be delighted to take him out in the car. They can talk about the engine.”

“That’s very kind,” said Keller. “I’d enjoy that.”

Rose’s face turned to stone. No doubt you would, she thought. But if Edmund Keller with his socialist ideas supposed he was going to insinuate himself into her house, he was mistaken.

“I haven’t a card with me,” she heroically lied. “But I will send one,” she added, without enthusiasm.

“Don’t worry,” said Hetty. From her small handbag, she took one of her own cards, together with a little silver pencil, and wrote Rose’s address on the back. “It’s easy to find. Just around the corner from the Gotham Hotel.”

“Thank you. I’ll call,” said Keller, as they drove off.

“Well,” said Hetty, “wasn’t that nice?”

Early that evening, when William got home, Rose told him all about it. He listened and nodded, but seemed preoccupied. Then he told the butler to bring him a large whiskey.

“It’s been a pretty bad day on the markets,” he said.

“I’m sorry, dear.” She smiled understandingly. “I’m sure it’ll get better …”

So she could only sigh. She’d have to try and deal with Keller herself.

On Friday afternoon, William Vandyck Master entered Trinity Church, Wall Street. He sat down in one of the pews near the back. Then he started to pray.

Trinity was a fine church. Thanks to its land endowments back in the seventeenth century, the church still owned much of the area. It was rich, and it had used its money wisely and well. It had founded numerous other churches in the growing city, while the Trinity vestry had been the first to provide education for the city’s Negro population at a time when many other congregations disapproved. And for all its wealth, the interior of the church retained a pleasant simplicity. There was a single stained-glass window at the east end; all the other windows were plain, and bathed the interior in a soft light. The walls were wood-paneled. It almost reminded William of a library, or a club—but if so, a club of which the kindly Deity was certainly a member.

William wasn’t very religious. He went to church; he supported the vicar. It was what you did. He didn’t pray much—just in church on Sundays, really. But although it was only Friday, he was trying to pray today. For he was very much afraid.

He was about to lose everything he had.

When you thought about it, William considered, there were only two ways to make a lot of money on Wall Street. The first was the more conservative. You persuaded people to pay you to manage their money, or even just to move it, from one place to another. That was the banker’s way. If the sums were large enough—if you could persuade a government, for instance, to put its funds in your hands—then the fee, or the tiny percentage on the transaction you took, could amount to a fortune.

The second way was to gamble.

In the process, naturally, you might lose their money from time to time. And so long as they didn’t know you’d lost their money, you should be able to string them along, and borrow some more, and recoup it. But at some point—perhaps far off, or if there was a panic, horribly soon—you would have to pay them back.

William Vandyck Master couldn’t pay. He’d done the numbers. His obligations exceeded his assets. And now that a panic had started, everyone wanted their money. He was wiped out.

He hadn’t told Rose. There wasn’t much point. Anyway, he couldn’t. So there was just himself and God, now, to discuss the position. And he was wondering whether, by any chance, God would care to bail him out.

If only he’d done what his father wanted. William knew he’d disappointed him. Tom Master’s dream had always been that his son would be a banker. A real banker. And when Tom Master said a real banker, William knew that his father had only one man in mind.

J. P. Morgan. The mighty Pierpont. His father’s hero. Since the days when he’d started reorganizing the railroads, the great banker had moved into shipping, mining, all kinds of industrial production. When he put together the great combination that was U.S. Steel, it became the mightiest industrial corporation ever known to man. The power of the House of Morgan was huge, and through its board directorships, it controlled industries worth far over a billion dollars.

Morgan’s reach was global. He ruled, and lived, like a king. And was feared like a king as well. Perhaps more than a king. Perhaps a god. Jupiter, the men on Wall Street called him.

When William was still at Harvard, Tom Master had managed to get him an interview with the great man. Morgan’s reputation was fearsome and William had been pretty terrified, but Morgan had sent word that he should come to his house on Thirty-sixth Street in the evening, and when he’d been ushered into the great man’s presence, he’d found the banker in a gentle mood.

What did Morgan look like, William wondered: an ogre in his den? A pirate surrounded by his treasure? A Renaissance prince, a Medici? Or something more Celtic, rich and strange: Merlin the magician, perhaps?

“Look at this,” he invited young William.

William looked down at the illuminated page. The colors were rich. The gold leaf shone mystically.

“It’s beautiful, sir.” He’d heard that Morgan spent a good part of the bank’s huge profits buying such things.

“It is,” Morgan murmured, then turned his attention away from the treasure to his guest. “We’ll sit down.” He motioned William toward a pair of leather armchairs by the fire. As soon as they were seated he began. “Your father tells me you like machines.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Study engineering?”

“It’s a hobby.”

“Mathematics?” The eyes, like shuttered coal furnaces now, were resting on him.

“I like machines more than numbers.”

“What else do you like?”

William hesitated. He wasn’t sure. Morgan was watching him, not unkindly.

“If you’ve something specific, you can come to see me again,” he said. And then he got up. The interview was over.

“Thank you, sir,” said William, as he left the room.

“How did it go?” his father asked eagerly, on his return.

“He said I could come to see him again.”

“He did? That’s splendid, William. Splendid.”

And in truth, William realized, the great man had been perfectly fair to him. It had taken Morgan rather less than half of one minute to see, with absolute clarity, that this young man had no idea what he wanted, no burning ambition, no particular talent, no achievement—in short, nothing whatsoever that could be useful to the Morgan bank. So he hadn’t wasted any time. Come back, he had said, when you’ve something to offer. And he was right.

Several of his friends had been going into brokerage houses, others into trusts. “If Morgan takes you, he’ll work you to death,” they warned him. And in any case, he’d known in his heart that Morgan wouldn’t take him. There was no reason why he should.

Months had passed, and he’d quietly let the matter slide. His father had been disappointed, but had said nothing.

And in the years that followed, he hadn’t done so badly. He was a partner in a brokerage, nowadays. He speculated a little, but the biggest money he’d made came from his partnership in a trust.

Trusts were a way to make a lot of money. Originally, they were set up to take care of the funds for old-money families like the Masters. When grandfather made a will, with a nice big trust, the money would be managed for the family until it was all paid out. Depending on the terms of the trust, that could be many years. So trust companies were sound, conservative—trustworthy, in other words. At least, that was the idea.

But then some bright young fellows discovered that there was a legal loophole in these arrangements. The trust companies could also take in money, and invest it as they liked. Behaving like a bank, but without any of the rules that restrained a proper bank, they would pay high interest rates to attract the extra funds, and then undertake the wildest speculations. In short, despite their respectable-sounding names, most of them were pirates. Proper bankers, men like his father, were suspicious of the trusts.

“What sort of cash balances do you fellows keep?” Tom Master had once asked him.

“Oh, quite enough,” he’d said, which of course meant next to none.

“I met Pierpont Morgan at a reception the other day,” his father had continued. “I asked him what advice he’d give to a young man in a trust. You know what he said? ‘Get out.’”

Well, Pierpont Morgan was semiretired now. He spent a good deal of time supporting the Episcopal Church and its liturgy. He’d built a magnificent library next to his house to keep his fabulous collection of books and gems. Every year he went on his travels to Europe and returned with priceless treasures—old masters, Greek and Egyptian antiquities, medieval gold. Often as not, he just gave it straight to the Metropolitan Museum. His son Jack Morgan, a first-rate banker, but not so terrifying, was running the bank day to day.

He’d still been riding high when he read about the new Rolls-Royce. But even then, the cracks in the system had begun to appear. That spring, when the market had been shaken and credit had been tight, a number of the biggest men in American industry had come together to discuss the situation. Coal was represented by Frick, railroads by Harriman, oil by Rockefeller, banking by Schiff and the Morgans. They’d wanted to form a consortium to support the market. Jack Morgan had agreed, but old Pierpont had not, and the proposal had come to nothing.

All through the summer, William had watched as the market dithered, hoping it would strengthen, or at least send him a sign. Wasn’t the market supposed to be wise? So people said, but William wasn’t so sure. Sometimes, it seemed to him, the market was nothing more than an aggregate of individuals, like a great school of fish, feeding upon small hopes until some fright causes them all to swerve together. Amid all this doubt, the thought of the Rolls-Royce on its way to him had kept his spirits up. And when it was delivered, the solid magnificence of the thing seemed to say: No man who owns a Rolls-Royce can be in trouble.

How ironic then that the rotten timber that was about to bring the whole market crashing down should be the one with the most splendid name.

The Knickerbocker Trust. By the sound of its name, you’d have thought it was as solid as a rock. Knickerbocker meant tradition, his father’s club, old money, old values. Well, by noon today, the word on the street was that the Knickerbocker was in trouble.

At three o’clock, the partners of William’s trust had reached a terrible conclusion.

“If the Knickerbocker goes, it’ll start a panic. Everyone’ll want their money. The trusts will start going down like ninepins. Ours included.” And that would only be the start of things.

Pray.

That weekend, on Saturday, William Master took his wife and children out in the Rolls. They drove up into Westchester County. It was quite warm, and with the fall leaves turning to red and gold, it was a beautiful drive. They went up to Bedford, and had a picnic there. A perfect day.

On Sunday, of course, they all went to church. The service was all right. A bit insipid. The vicar was away, down at a liturgical conference in Virginia with the great men of the Episcopal Church, including J. P. Morgan. The curate gave a sermon on Hope.

That evening, he read to his children. For no particular reason, he chose the tale of Rip Van Winkle. As they came to the place where the ghostly Dutchmen play ninepins in the mountains over the Hudson, he could not help thinking of the terrible crash of financial ninepins that was probably coming on Wall Street, but his face gave nothing away. Let his family remember one last, happy weekend.

And that night, when Rose remarked that two of the wives she’d met at church had whispered that there was likely to be big trouble ahead in the market that week, he smiled and said: “I dare say it’ll get sorted out.”

Not much point in saying anything else.

Sometimes William wondered if all things in the world were connected. But he hadn’t thought about Alaska. He was in the brokerage house the next morning when he saw the message on the wires. It looked innocent enough. The Guggenheims, the mighty German Jewish mining family, were going to develop huge copper reserves in Alaska. A good thing, one might think. But when William saw it, he cried out: “It’s all over.”

It was some time since a small group of speculators had decided to corner the copper market. He knew the men. The copper supply was limited, and the price was soaring. There hadn’t been a word about these damned Alaska mines. To buy the copper, they’d borrowed a fortune from the Knickerbocker Trust; but with huge new supplies from the Guggenheims in prospect, copper prices would fall through the floor. The corner, and the speculators, were surely bust.

The market groaned. The market swooned. All afternoon stocks fell. William felt sure that the Knickerbocker Trust must fail now. And after that …

It was mid-afternoon when one of his partners came in with unexpected news.

“Morgan’s going to try to save the trusts.”

“Jack Morgan’s away in London,” William pointed out. “Hard to see what he can do from there.”

“Not Jack. Old Pierpont. He took a private train up from Virginia. He’s been here since last night.”

“But he hates the trusts. Despises us all.”

“Yes, but there’s so much money tied up in them, he reckons there’s no choice. If they fail, everything goes.”

Was it a ray of hope? William doubted it. Even Jupiter with his thunderbolts could hardly remove this massive mountain of bad debt.

But it was the only hope on the horizon. That evening, when Rose asked him anxiously what was happening, he smiled bravely and told her: “Morgan’s going to sort it out.” No point in starting a panic in his own home. Anyway, he couldn’t face it.

On Tuesday morning, a crowd formed outside the offices of the Knickerbocker Trust. Soon they had to be formed into an orderly line by a policeman. They wanted news. They wanted reassurance. They wanted their money. Inside, Morgan’s men were going through the books.

At lunchtime, William went for a walk down Broadway. As he came to Bowling Green, he passed the offices of the two great shipping lines, Cunard and the White Star. Continuing down to the waterside he stared across the harbor at Ellis Island.

How long would it be before he was as penniless as the poor devils who came in there every day? he wondered.

He wondered how Rose would take it. She loved him, in her way. But she’d married into a certain kind of life. That was the deal. Old money, with money. Take away the money and what sort of marriage would they have? He honestly didn’t know. At least the Jewish refugees and the Italian peasants arriving at Ellis Island had been poor when they married each other. They had nowhere to go but up. In a way, they were free.

It was almost funny really, when you thought about it. All his life, he’d been rich. But he’d been living in a prison cell—in the great jail, called Expectation. And he couldn’t get out of it.

Well, there was one way out. Maybe, when he’d tidied up his affairs as best he could, he’d go to the White Star Line and buy a passage to London. Say he was going on business. It needn’t even be a first-class ticket. No one would know. Then, somewhere out in the Atlantic, when it was dark, he’d quietly jump off the ship. Not such a bad way to go. Wouldn’t give anyone any trouble.

What sort of a life would he be leaving? Had he been happy? Not really. Did he like his house? Not so much. He loved his new Rolls-Royce—he was sure of that. But what did he love about it? The fact that it was expensive, the silver body, the red leather seats, the admiration and envy it evoked? No. It was the engine. That’s what excited him. The way it worked, the beauty of it. He’d have been just as happy if he was a poor mechanic.

The man who built that Rolls-Royce was the lucky fellow, William considered. A fellow doing something he loved, and doing it supremely well.

Do I love what I do? he asked himself. Not much. Do I do it well? He was mediocre, at best. And right now, he had failed, completely and utterly. How did he feel? Ashamed, humiliated, probably unloved. And very, very afraid.

By the time he got back to Wall Street, the news was out. Morgan’s men had concluded that the trust was past praying for. The Knickerbocker Trust had failed. Lines were already forming outside the other trusts, including his own. People were withdrawing their money.

That evening at home, he smiled cheerfully through dinner with his family. Yes, there had been a little panic on Wall Street, he confessed to the children. They’d see it in the papers, and hear about it, but it would soon pass.

“The fundamentals of the market are good,” he assured them all. “Indeed, this is probably an excellent time to buy.”

The next day, people were camping outside the trust offices by dawn, hoping to get their money out before the rest. Meanwhile, the trust partners were looking for cash. The moment they opened for business, they went to the brokers, calling in all their loans. When he walked into his brokerage house, his partners there told him: “We’ll be lucky to get through the day. By tomorrow we’ll be gone.”

William went outside. There was nothing more to be done. He gazed sadly up at the sky. It was hard, and terrible. He turned, to walk to Bowling Green again, wanting to be alone.

But he had only gone a short way when one of the clerks from the trust caught up with him. The man was looking excited.

“Come quickly,” he cried. “Oh, sir, rescue is at hand.”

President Theodore Roosevelt had reason to be suspicious of New York City. A decade ago, he’d labored to reform its corrupt police. He’d also witnessed the mighty industrial combinations that J. P. Morgan was building up—and he didn’t like what he saw. Too much economic power was in too few hands, he believed. Elected governor of New York State, then chosen as vice president, the assassination of President McKinley had unexpectedly brought him, at the age of only forty-two, to the White House, where he had continued to speak against the might of Wall Street. For Pierpont Morgan himself, however, Roosevelt had a high regard.

“Do whatever you think best. But save us.”

And now Jupiter, greatest of all the gods, began to fling his thunderbolts.

When William Master looked back on those days, it was like remembering a great battle: periods of waiting; moments of sudden excitement and confusion; and a few haunting images that would never leave his mind again. Using the government money, and raising even greater private sums by the sheer force of his personality, old Pierpont Morgan went to work. On that Wednesday, he began saving trusts. The next day he saved the brokerage houses on the New York Stock Exchange. On Friday, when Europe started withdrawing funds, and credit became so tight that Wall Street came to a halt, Morgan strode in person up to the Clearing House and had it issue its own scrip currency, so that money could flow. Yet perhaps the truest measure of his authority was seen that evening, when he summoned the clergy of New York to his house and told them: “You’ll be preaching on Sunday. Here’s what you have to say.”

It took two weeks for Morgan to rescue the financial system. Along the way, when New York City declared it was also going broke, he rescued that too. In his final act, he called all the biggest bankers and trust men of Wall Street to meet him in his princely library, locked the doors, and refused to let them out until they did what was needed.

But the abiding image that remained in the mind of William Master came from Wall Street itself. It was on that first Friday. He was walking westward as he came to the street’s main intersection. On his left, on the corner, number 23, the House of Morgan. Across from it, the splendid facade of the New York Stock Exchange. On his right, Federal Hall and, a short way up Nassau Street, the Clearing House. Ahead, only a hundred yards or so, was Broadway and Trinity Church. Here was the very center of American finance. This week, at least, it was the cockpit of the world.

Jupiter looked neither right nor left. His eyes glowered as though lit by volcanic fires. His swollen, bulbous nose bulged from his face like a mountain from which his mustaches spread down like silver lava flows. Did Vulcan fashion his thunderbolts in there? Quite likely.

As he strode rapidly down the street, the crowds parted in front of him, as mortals before a deity. And so they should, thought William. Morgan might support his church, and like to sit with bishops, but when he descended into Wall Street from banking’s Mount Olympus, he was above mortal men. Then, truly, Morgan was Jupiter, king of all the gods.

But alas, he was still a man. In the months that followed, one question was often asked: “Morgan will not always be with us. What’ll we do then?”

Some argued that more regulation was needed, to stop the abuses that had led to the crisis. But William Master was sure this was a bad idea.

“Things got a little out of hand,” he agreed. “But we don’t need socialism. The banks can regulate themselves, as they do in London.”

It would take six years before a Federal Reserve system with limited powers was instituted.

For William, however, life soon returned to normal. When his wife asked him, “Did we nearly lose everything?” he reassured her.

“I suppose if all the trusts had failed, Rose, then we should have failed too. But we were never really in trouble.” It seemed to comfort her so much that, after a while, he almost believed it himself.

The first weekend in November, he took the Rolls-Royce out alone, for a fifty-mile drive. He thought of taking young Keller, too, but decided not to. If Rose had found out, it would only have annoyed her.

If the panic of 1907 was to change the life of young Salvatore Caruso, it was a small event the month before that he always remembered.

It had been his mother’s idea to send him to the priest’s house. Not their own parish priest, but the silver-haired old man who’d come to say Mass in their church the week before. And where did he live? In the Jewish quarter, of all places.

It wasn’t far. You only had to cross the Bowery and you were in it—the Lower East Side’s tenth and thirteenth wards, which ran across to the river just below the old German quarter. Its poor streets—around Division and Hester streets, through Delancey, and all the way up to Houston—housed small factories, varnish shops, ironworks and tenements which, for a generation now, had been filled to overflowing with the Jews of Eastern Europe. On Rivington Street, however, near the river, was a Catholic church.

Salvatore hadn’t enjoyed the old man’s sermon. It had been about Christ’s temptation in the desert, when Christ had gone up to a mountain and the devil had told him to jump off, so that God could save him. But rightly, the priest reminded them, Jesus had refused.

“Why didn’t he jump?” Salvatore had whispered to Anna. After all, if Jesus could walk on water, why not fly? It seemed a grand idea. But not to the old priest.

“Tempt not the Lord thy God!” he had cried, looking straight at Salvatore. God is all-powerful, he had explained, but He does not have to prove Himself. It is sacrilege—again he looked at Salvatore sternly—to challenge God to do anything. He does only what is necessary for His plan, which we do not understand. If He gives us poverty, if He gives us sickness, if He takes a loved one from us, that is part of His plan. We may ask for His help, but we must accept our fate. “Do not ask Him for more than you deserve. If God wanted man to fly, he would have given him wings. So do not try,” he told them firmly. “For that is the temptation of the devil.”

Concetta Caruso had liked the sermon very much, and she had thanked the old priest afterward. They had talked. She had discovered that his mother came from the same village as her own. And that he had a liking for sugar-coated almonds.

But why had she chosen that day of all days to send Salvatore to his house with a bag of sugared almonds? Who knew? It must have been fate.

That was another strange thing about the Jews. They didn’t seem to have parish churches like the Christians. Even the larger synagogues were squat little buildings, squashed between tenements, without a churchyard or a priest’s house. Some were just announced by narrow doorways leading to single rooms; you might see three or four in a block. His mother did not approve of the Jews. She said they were heretics, and that God would punish them. But his father only shrugged.

“Haven’t they been punished enough before they came here? There are no pogroms in America, Concetta, thank God. Basta. It is enough. Leave them be.”

The priest seemed delighted with his mother’s gift, and told Salvatore to thank her.

Salvatore was so anxious not to be late that he ran all the way back. Crossing the Bowery into the Italian quarter, he went three blocks before turning left into Mulberry Street, where his family lived. They were waiting in the street already, dressed up for the great occasion. His parents and Giuseppe, his brother Paolo, his face scrubbed. His older sister Anna was still doing little Maria’s hair.

“At last,” said his father, as Salvatore arrived, “we can go.”

“But where is Angelo?” cried his mother, while his father made a sign of impatience. “Anna, where is Angelo?” As the eldest daughter, expected to help her mother, Anna was in charge of Angelo most of the time.

“Mama, I’m doing Maria’s hair,” said Anna plaintively.

“Salvatore will find him,” said his mother. “Quickly, Toto, get your brother Angelo.”

Salvatore ran into the house. It was a typical tenement house of the Lower East Side. Originally it had been a five-story row house with steps up to the door. But long ago, the owner had realized that he could double the small rents he received by a simple expedient. Building out as cheaply as possible into the small yard behind, he had been able, for no great outlay, to double his rentable space. And since both the owners of the house next door and of the house in the next street that backed onto his had done the same thing, the only ventilation for the back part of the house now came from two sources: a narrow air shaft between this house and the one beside it, and the tiny yard remaining at the very back, where a pair of latrines served the needs of all the tenant families.

When their cousins had first shown them the place, the day after they’d come through Ellis Island, Giovanni and Concetta Caruso had been disgusted. Soon they discovered they were lucky. They had three rooms on the top floor, at the front. True, you had to climb up the stinking stairwell to get there, but there was fresh air from the street, and you could go onto the roof above, where the washing was hung out to dry.

Angelo was standing in the back room when Salvatore burst in. He had his shirt on, but he had not tucked it in. And he was looking down at his feet miserably.

“You’re six years old and you still can’t tie up your bootlaces?” Salvatore cried impatiently.

“I was trying.”

“Keep still.” He’d have dragged his little brother down the stairs as he was, but Angelo would have been sure to trip. Hurriedly, he started to tie them for him. “You know who we’re going to see?” he asked.

“No, I’ve forgotten.”

“Idiot! We’re going to see the greatest Italian in the world.”

He did not say the greatest Italian who ever lived. That was Columbus. After him, for northern Italians, came Garibaldi, the Patriot, the unifier of Italy, who’d only died a quarter-century ago. But for the southern Italians of New York, there was only one great hero, a living hero too, who had come to dwell among them.

“Caruso,” Salvatore cried. “The great Caruso, who shares our own name. We are going to see Caruso! How can you forget?”

“He has sung all over the world,” their father would say. “Naples, Milan, London, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, San Francisco … He has sung with Melba. Now he sings with Geraldine Farrar. Toscanini conducts him. And what did the great Puccini himself say, when he first heard Caruso sing? ‘Who sent you to me? God Himself?’” Not just Italian, but born in Naples, and he even shared their name. “We are related,” his father declared, though when Salvatore asked him to explain the relationship, his father had only shrugged, as if the question were foolish, and answered: “Who could know such a thing?”

And they were going to meet him today.

It was thanks to Uncle Luigi. He had found work in a restaurant nearby. Not a grand one—this, after all, was the poor Italian quarter. The richer, northern Italians, the doctors, the businessmen, the men of education who looked down upon their fellow countrymen from the south—regarded them as animals almost—they lived in other parts of town—Greenwich Village was favored—and they had fine restaurants over there.

But Caruso never forgot the poor home in Naples he came from. He liked to eat down in Little Italy, and recently, he’d come to dine in the restaurant where Uncle Luigi worked, and Uncle Luigi had asked him if he might present his family the next time Caruso came, and the great man had said certainly, because that was his noble character. He was having his midday meal there today.

Salvatore had just got Angelo downstairs when his brother said he had to go pee-pee. With a cry of frustration, Salvatore took him to the door of the backyard, so that he could go out to the latrines. “Hurry,” he told him, while he waited irritably by the door. After a few moments, Angelo came out. “Hurry,” he cried again.

Then he’d cried out once more. Too late.

Despite the fact that the communal latrines were there, the people above the yard continually threw their refuse out of the window to be cleaned up later. The journey to and from the latrines was always perilous, therefore. Everybody knew to look up when they moved through the yard. Everybody except Angelo.

“Stupido! Idiot!” screamed Salvatore. “Look at your shirt. You disgrace us.” He seized his little brother by the hair and dragged him weeping along the corridor and out into the street, where the family greeted him with cries of vexation.

His father threw up his hands, and started to blame Salvatore. But Salvatore started shouting that it wasn’t fair. Was it his fault his brother couldn’t tie up his shoes or look out for himself when he went to the latrines? His father made an impatient gesture, but he didn’t disagree. Meanwhile, his mother had taken Angelo inside.

“Let him stay at home,” Salvatore complained, “instead of disgracing us.” But in a few minutes, looking contrite, his little brother was back again, his head scrubbed and wearing a shirt that was clean, though much older than the first. Then they all set off up Mulberry Street.

The Italian streets were almost as crowded as the nearby Jewish quarter, but there were differences. Small trees gave shade along some of them. Here and there, a handsome Catholic church, sometimes with a walled churchyard, would break up the line of houses. Each street, moreover, had its particular character. People from the Neapolitan region mostly lived on Mulberry, the Calabrians on Mott, the Sicilians on Elizabeth, with each major town taking a particular section. They re-created their homeland as best they could.

Not that Concetta ever felt at home. How could she, when all the life she’d known before had been in the warm Italian south? They might have been poor, but they had their land, their village, the ancient beauty of the Mediterranean shore and the mountains. All she had here was the roar and clatter of narrow streets, set on the edge of an endless, untamed wilderness. This place called itself a city, yet where were the piazzas, the places to sit and talk, and be seen? Where was its center?

True, at the bottom of Mulberry Street, where the city authorities had finally pulled down a group of tenements so foul that they rivaled the neighboring Five Points, there was now a small park, overlooked by the Church of the Transfiguration. People went there, yes, but it didn’t feel like a proper Italian space.

“Everything here is ugliness,” she would sigh.

But if America was terrible, it gave you money. A generation ago, strong Irish newcomers had labored on the building sites, dug the canals, built railways and cleaned the streets. But many of those Irish families had moved on. They were policemen, firemen, even professional men now. It was the turn of the new Italian arrivals to take on the heavy work now. It was not well paid—only black people were paid less—but Giovanni Caruso and his son Giuseppe were strong and worked hard. And with Anna taking in piecework too, the family was still able, like most Italian families, to save something. Every month, Giovanni Caruso went to the Stabile Bank on the corner of Mulberry and Grand streets and sent dollars back to his sisters in Italy. He was also able to put away a little for himself. In a few years, he hoped to have enough saved to open a small business, or buy a house, maybe. That was a dream that would make the long years of hardship worthwhile. Meanwhile, to please his wife, he had even kept Paolo and Salvatore in school—although thirteen-year-old Paolo was quite old enough, he reminded her, to be earning his living.

Another few years. Especially with the help of Signor Rossi.

Like everyone else in Little Italy, Signor Rossi had come there because he had to. But he was a prominente, a man of distinction. “My father was a lawyer,” he would say with a shrug, “and but for his untimely death before my education was completed, I’d be living in a fine house in Naples.” Nonetheless, Signor Rossi was a kindly man with knowledge. Above all, he spoke good English.

“Money in the bank is good, my friend,” he would explain, “but money that grows is better. The Americans make their money grow, so why shouldn’t we share in their good fortune?” Over the years, Signor Rossi had become quite a successful banchista. He knew how to invest, and dozens of families had been grateful to put their savings in his hands. Each month, Giovanni Caruso would add a little more to the savings he had placed with Signor Rossi, and each month Rossi would give him a brief account of how his little fortune was growing. “Be patient,” he would counsel. “If you invest wisely in this country, you will prosper.”

The family walked proudly up the street. Giovanni with his grown-up son, then Concetta with little Angelo, Anna with Maria, while Salvatore and Paolo brought up the rear, talking and laughing as usual.

The little restaurant was not yet crowded. In the middle, Uncle Luigi, with a napkin over his arm, was serving beside a large table at which a single man was sitting. He was a thickset, Neapolitan fellow, not unlike their father, but in his eyes there was a special gleam. As they entered, and Uncle Luigi gestured for them to approach, the man at the table beamed at them and, opening his arms expansively, invited them to sit at table with him.

“Welcome,” he cried, “the family of Caruso.”

Salvatore would never forget that meal. He had never seen so much food in his life.

Not that the food in the Italian quarter was bad. Even his mother would grudgingly admit that, in America, you ate more meat than you did in the Mezzogiorno, and pasta too. No thick peasant bread, either. In America, you ate light white bread, like the rich.

From the great Caruso, also, there exuded an aura of warmth and generosity that seemed to fill the whole room. “Italy in America,” he remarked to Giovanni Caruso with a grin, “it’s even better than Italy in Italy.” He patted his growing stomach. “This is where we Italians come to grow fat.” For indeed, even in the stinking tenements of the Lower East Side, the thin immigrants from the Mezzogiorno would nearly always put on weight after a year or two.

To Concetta Caruso, he was charming. He knew her village, even one of her relations. Soon, she was beaming. As for Giovanni Caruso, who knew very well the tenor’s legendary generosity, he was anxious to make sure that Caruso should not think they had come there looking for charity.

“We do well,” he told him. “Already I have savings. A few years more and I shall buy my own house.”

“Bravo,” said Caruso. “Let us drink to the land of opportunity.”

“But you, Signor Caruso,” his father added respectfully, “have brought honor to our name. You have raised us all.”

Like a tribal chief, Caruso acknowledged this tribute. “Let us raise our glasses, my friends, to the name of Caruso.”

During the meal, he spoke to each of the family in turn. He congratulated Giuseppe on helping his father, and Concetta on raising such a fine family. Anna, he saw at once, was the family’s second mother. Paolo admitted that he wanted to be a fireman, and when it came to Salvatore’s turn, he asked him about his school.

The Church of the Transfiguration stood between Mott and Mulberry streets, on the small rise overlooking the little park. When the Carusos had first arrived there, an Irish priest ministered to an Irish congregation in the main church, while an Italian priest conducted a service for the Italian congregation, in their own language, down in the crypt below. But since then, the Italians and their priest had moved upstairs, a signal that it was they who had taken charge of the area now. Beside the church was the school which the Caruso children attended.

“You must learn all you can,” the great man told Salvatore. “Too many of our southern Italians despise education. They say, ‘Why should a son know more than his father?’ But they are wrong. Work hard at school and you will get ahead in America. You understand?”

“And this young man,” Caruso turned to little Angelo, “do you learn things at school?”

Angelo might be dreamy, but he did well at school. In fact, he could already read better than his elder brothers. He also had a talent for drawing. He was too shy to say anything, so his mother informed the great man of these facts, while Salvatore, who couldn’t see that Angelo’s talents did him any good, made a conspiratorial face at Paolo. So he was a bit taken aback by the next question.

“And your brother Salvatore, is he kind to you?”

There was a pregnant silence. Then Angelo burst into life.

“No,” he cried loudly, “my brother is not kind to me.”

Paolo thought this was funny, but Caruso did not, and he rounded upon Salvatore.

“Shame on you.”

“Anna looks after Angelo,” his mother interceded, not wanting the great man to think that her youngest child was neglected. But though he nodded, Caruso’s attention remained on Salvatore.

“Your brother is a dreamer, Salvatore. He is not so strong as you. But who knows, he may be a thinker, a priest, a great artist. You are his big brother. You should protect him. Promise me you will be kind to your brother.”

At that moment, Salvatore was ready to give Angelo a beating, but all the same he felt himself go very red, and promise, “Yes, Signor Caruso.”

“Good.” From nowhere, the great man produced a chocolate and gave it to Salvatore. “This is for you only, Salvatore, so that you remember you have promised me to be kind to your brother.” He held out his hand, so that Salvatore had to shake it. “Ecco. He has promised.” He looked at them all, just as seriously as if he had signed a legal contract.

And Salvatore looked at little Angelo, whose eyes were now very round, and at the tenor, and at his family, and secretly cursed his fate. Now what was he going to do?

As for Salvatore, he felt obliged to be kind to little Angelo. To Paolo, of course, this was an opportunity for harmless fun. Hardly a day went by that he didn’t persecute Angelo by taking an apple away from him, or stealing one of his boots, and gleefully telling the little boy: “Don’t worry, your brother Salvatore will get it back for you.” Angelo had to fight him several times.

He was scarcely aware of the financial panic on Wall Street the following month. Such things had nothing to do with the poor folk on the Lower East Side. Then Uncle Luigi came by and said that one of the banchiste who dined frequently at the restaurant had lost a lot of money, his own and his clients’. “I hope your Signor Rossi is all right,” he had said. “Signor Rossi is far too clever to make any mistakes,” Giovanni Caruso had answered. But later that day Salvatore had seen his father looking worried.

Two days later, his father went out to see the banchista. When he returned, his face was ashen. He went up on the roof to talk alone to Concetta, and Salvatore heard his mother scream. When the family was all together in the little apartment that evening, Giovanni broke it to them.

“Signor Rossi has lost everything. All his clients’ money. It is very complicated, and many others are in the same situation, but our savings are gone. We must start again.”

“It’s a lie,” cried their mother. “Money can’t disappear like that. He has stolen it.”

“No, Concetta, I assure you. Rossi has lost most of his own money as well. He told me, he hardly knows how he will eat.”

“You believe him? Don’t you see, Giovanni, what he is doing? He will wait a while, then he will disappear with all the money. He is laughing at you, Giovanni, behind your back.”

“You do not understand these things, Concetta. Signor Rossi is a man of honor.”

Salvatore had never heard his mother speak to his father with such disrespect. He wondered what would happen. But his father chose to ignore it, the business was too terrible already to worry about anything else.

“Paolo and Salvatore must go to work now,” their father said quietly. “It is time for them to help us, as Anna does. There is plenty of work. Maria and Angelo will stay in school for the present. In a few years, we shall recover, and there will be better times.”

For Salvatore, the change of circumstances was a distinct improvement. He didn’t have to go to school, and he was exempt, therefore, from the great Caruso’s instruction that he should study. And he and Paolo were so busy out in the streets that it was easy enough to be nice to little Angelo when he saw him. They found plenty of ways to earn money in the streets, but mostly he and Paolo plied their trade as bootblacks. They would go across to Greenwich Village and shine the shoes of Italian men who were lunching there. They found an Italian enterprise where they were allowed to enter the office and shine the boots of the men who worked there. Working together, they would take turns to put on polish and shine, although even Paolo had to admit that Salvatore could get a better shine on any shoe than he could. “It must be something in your spit that I didn’t inherit,” he would say regretfully.

For his mother, the loss of their savings meant a change of regime. A sewing machine was installed in the best lit of their three small rooms, close to the window. There, she and Anna would take turns to do piecework by the hour. It paid poorly, but they could remain in the house, look after the smallest children and feed the family while they also worked. After her original outburst over Signor Rossi, Concetta had never said anything more about it, but Salvatore knew she could not be happy. One evening he heard his parents talking quietly up on the roof. His father’s voice was gentle, persuasive, though Salvatore could not hear exactly what he was saying. But he heard his mother’s words.

“No more children, Giovanni. Not like this. I beg you.”

He understood what his mother meant.

It was toward the end of the year, and he was walking down Mulberry Street with his father, when Uncle Luigi suddenly came running out of his restaurant after them. They must come at once, he told them. The great Caruso was eating inside and wanted to speak to them.

“Assolutamente,” Giovanni assured him. “Everything goes well.”

“Bene. Bene,” said Caruso. “And are you being kind to your brother?” he demanded, turning to Salvatore.

“Yes,” Salvatore promised, he was.

“And you are studying hard at school?”

“He studies as never before,” his father cut in, before Salvatore could reply. Salvatore saw his Uncle Luigi stare in surprise, but Caruso was not looking that way, so he did not observe it. Instead, he drew an envelope from his pocket and handed it to Giovanni.

“Two tickets to the opera, for you and your wife.” He beamed. “You will come?”

“Of course.” Giovanni Caruso stumbled to convey his thanks.

They had walked a little way down the street after this interview when his father turned to Salvatore.

“I could not tell him about our misfortune, Toto,” he said awkwardly. “I could not let him know you were no longer in school.”

“I know, Papa,” said Salvatore.

“I am a Caruso too. I could not make a brutta figura.” A loss of face. Italian pride. Salvatore understood. He even dared to squeeze his father’s hand.

“You were right, Papa,” he said.

On the day that she was to go to the opera, however, his mother said she did not feel well.

“Take one of the children with you,” she told her husband. “Anna can go.” But his father, after thinking for a minute, said that since Salvatore was with him when Caruso gave the tickets, it was he who should go.

How proudly Salvatore walked beside his father as they approached the opera house on Broadway that evening. The big square-faced building that took up the whole block between Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets looked to Salvatore like a department store. But there was no doubt about the elegance of the people in evening dress who were entering it. He even noticed a silver Rolls-Royce gliding to rest near its entrance.

As they went inside, Salvatore gasped. The vast auditorium with its mighty chandelier was like a celestial palace. A massive curtain of gold damask hung across the stage, and on the huge curved proscenium, he saw the names of great composers. Beethoven he’d heard of, Wagner he hadn’t. But there, for all to see, was the name to make every Italian swell with pride: Verdi. And it was Verdi’s Aida that was being performed tonight.

He soon realized that Caruso, sensibly, had not given them expensive seats, where everyone would be in evening dress. They were both in suits and clean shirts, of course—his father had even put on a tie—but as they made their way through the throng, Salvatore couldn’t help noticing that the patrons of the opera were looking at them strangely. When he blacked the boots of the rich businessmen by day, they were friendly enough. But now that he was invading their home territory, several of the men gave him and his father cold glances. A woman quickly pulled her gown away, lest it be contaminated by their touch, while her husband muttered, “Damn Italian wops.”

“They like our opera, Toto, just not us,” his father remarked sadly.

When they found their seats, they could see that their neighbors were simple Italians like themselves, perhaps also the recipients of Caruso’s generosity. His father began to chat to them, but Salvatore was thinking about the way the rich people had looked at them. And he continued to brood about it until the curtain went up.

The plot of Aida was easy to follow, especially, he thought to himself wryly, if you were Italian and could understand the words. The Princess Aida, a captured slave in Egypt; her lover, the hero Radames. The love triangle completed by the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh. But with what grandeur Verdi handled the simple theme! What majestic marches, what haunting scenes. With his magnificent voice, thrilling as any tenor, rich as any baritone, Caruso the hero had the audience enthralled. As for the production, the Metropolitan Opera had provided a new staging that season, of unrivaled magnificence. As Salvatore responded to the music and drank in the scene, he sensed that all the splendor of his native Mediterranean, from Italy to Africa, was here. He felt profoundly stirred.

Giovanni Caruso’s face was tilted up. It was quite an ordinary face—broad and dark, the face of a working man from the Mezzogiorno. Yet seen in profile, it seemed to the boy that it was as fine as that of any Roman noble. And in the faint light, Salvatore could see that his father’s face, though perfectly still, was wet with tears.

He would have been most astonished to know that, in her box, a fashionable lady named Rose Vandyck Master had already risen to retire, before the opera’s end.

It was the following spring that Salvatore had his only quarrel with his brother Paolo. It happened when they were on their usual rounds in a crowded office, shining shoes.

It was amazing how fast people seemed to forget the financial panic of the previous fall. Business had been good. The men in the office were obviously making money, and if they were in a good mood, they might even give the boys a dollar tip before they left. On this occasion, after they’d finished half a dozen shoes and been paid, one of the men, who was busy on the telephone, stretched out his hand and gave Salvatore a dollar just as they were going out of the door. They had just reached the elevator when Salvatore looked at it and realized that it wasn’t a dollar. It was five. He showed it to Paolo.

It was surely a mistake, and quite an easy one to make. The dollar bill had a bald eagle and portraits of Lincoln and Grant on its face; the five-dollar bill had a running deer. But they were the same size, and the man had been busy on the telephone.

“I guess we’d better tell him,” said Salvatore.

“Are you crazy?” Paolo stared down at him contemptuously.

Salvatore didn’t think it was so crazy. Five dollars was a huge sum of money. The man had surely made a mistake. Taking his money seemed dishonest.

“He made a mistake. It feels like stealing.”

“That’s his problem. How were we to know he didn’t mean to give us five?”

“He’ll be mad when he realizes,” Salvatore countered, “and then he’ll hate us. Anyway, he’s always been good to us. If we show him the five dollars, maybe he’ll be pleased, and let us keep it.”

“You don’t understand anything, do you?” Paolo hissed. He was starting to look really angry. At that moment the elevator arrived, and he pushed Salvatore inside and made a sign to him to keep silent. Only when they had left the building and were on the sidewalk outside did he turn on him.

“Do you know what he’ll think if we show him the five dollars? He’ll despise us. This is New York, Toto, not a convent. You take everything you can get.” Seeing that Salvatore wasn’t convinced, he took him by the shoulder and shook him. “What do you think those men do in that office all day? They trade. They buy and sell. If you make a mistake, you pay. If you win, you get rich. Those are the rules. You won’t take the money? You look like a loser.”

“Papa says it’s important that people trust you,” Salvatore said obstinately.

“Papa? What does he know? Papa trusted Signor Rossi, who took all our money. Our father’s an idiot. A loser. Don’t you know that?”

Salvatore stared at his brother in amazement. He had never heard anyone speak about their father in such a way. Paolo’s face had contorted into a scowl. It made him look ugly.

“Don’t say such a thing,” he cried.

When they got back that evening, they placed all their money on the table for their mother, as usual. Paolo had changed the five-dollar bill into singles, but she was still surprised at the amount. “You earned this? You did not steal?” she asked suspiciously.

But in the months that followed, though some of Paolo’s good humor returned, it seemed to Salvatore that a secret rift had opened between himself and his brother. They never spoke of it.

It was his sister Anna to whom he drew closer. If she’d seemed bossy to him before, now that he was older and working, the age difference between them seemed less. He could see how much she did with their mother in the house, too, and he tried to help her. During part of the day, the two youngest children were at school, but when they came home it was Anna who usually looked after them and prepared the evening meal while her mother worked. In particular, she would try to keep Angelo away from his father, who couldn’t help being irritated by his youngest son’s dreamy ways. Little Maria was easier to deal with. Round faced and bright-eyed, she had become the family pet.

Most of the day, his mother sat at a small table by the window in the front bedroom, on which there stood a Singer sewing machine, bought on the installment plan. There she would do piecework for the garment trade by the hour. Sitting in a little armchair nearby, Anna would do the hand-stitching. It was not so bad in summer, but on long winter evenings, it was another story. The tenement only had gaslight to work by. Even with a kerosene lamp to help them, Salvatore would see the two women peering anxiously at their work, and sometimes his mother would shake her head and say to Anna: “Your eyes are younger. Tell me if this is straight.”

He knew that all over the Lower East Side, Jewish and Italian women were huddled in small rooms, in the same way. Some families set up little sweatshops in their lodgings, hiring girls even poorer than they were to work in shifts round the clock. That was the way the garment industry worked. Anna would arrive from a garment-maker carrying a great pile of unfinished items piled on her head. When the pieces were finished, Salvatore would sometimes offer to take them back for her.

He was on this errand one evening in June when he happened to pass a building from which a crowd of young women were emerging. Most of the girls were Jewish, but they didn’t seem to mind when the curious Italian boy asked them what sort of work they did. They answered his questions cheerfully before going on their way. All the way home, Salvatore thought about what he had learned. At the evening meal, he told his family.

Any such decision would have to be made by his father. And Giovanni Caruso shook his head at the idea of Anna being out of the house; his wife, though, was prepared to consider it.

“Anna is ruining her eyes at home,” she said. “She’ll be blind before she finds a husband. Let me look at this place, Giovanni, just to see what it is like.”

She and Anna went there the next day. A week later, Anna Caruso began work at the Triangle Factory.

Salvatore’s day now took on a new routine. He would shine boots with Paolo until early evening, when he would take Angelo to meet Anna.

The Triangle Factory was in a cobbled street just east of Washington Square Park, at the foot of Fifth Avenue. In the park, standing on a granite plinth, there was a fine statue of Garibaldi. A north Italian, admittedly, but at least an Italian. The great hero had even lived on Staten Island briefly during his years of exile, and it made Salvatore proud that Garibaldi should be so honored in the middle of the city now. Every evening, he and Angelo would wait beside the statue for Anna to appear. Sometimes she’d be told she had to work late; and if she didn’t appear, he’d take Angelo back. But usually she arrived, and then they would all walk home together, once in a while stopping for an ice or a cookie on the way.

Anna was happy. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company, as it was called, occupied the top three of the ten floors of the big square building. The factory mostly made the ankle-length skirts and the white, narrow-waisted, Gibson Girl blouses, called “shirtwaists,” that were fashionable for working girls and women. Most of the work was arranged at long tables where rows of sewing machines were driven by a single electric engine. It was a lot more efficient than the pedal machine their mother used at home. Many of the employees were men, some of them employed in teams under a subcontractor, though there were plenty of girls too. Most of the workers were Jews, maybe a third related in some way or other to the owners, Mr. Blanck and Mr. Harris, but there were some Italian girls too. Everyone complained about the pay and the hours.

Another effect of the new regime was to bring Salvatore closer to his little brother.

Angelo was still a dreamer. At school, he learned his lessons erratically, but the one thing he loved was to draw. He would carry a little pencil in his pocket, and use any piece of paper he could get his hands on. When he and Salvatore were on their way to meet Anna, they would often pick different routes. Nearly every time he’d find something that interested him, and he’d start to sketch it, until Salvatore had to drag him away. Often he would notice some fine bit of carved stonework over a doorway, or high up on the entablatures and cornices of the tall office buildings. No one in the family thought much of his efforts, except Uncle Luigi.

“Of course he likes the carvings,” he declared. “Who do you think did those carvings? Italian stonemasons. All over the city. Look at the Americans’ houses—copied from ancient Rome. Now they make tall office buildings—great cages of steel—but they clothe the cages with brick and stone, and add Roman cornices round the top so that they look like so many Italian palazzi. New York is turning into an Italian city,” he cried enthusiastically. “Our young Angelo will be a great architect, a man of honor. That is why he draws.”

This ambitious design was so obviously impossible that nobody paid any attention. But his father did say grudgingly: “Perhaps he could be a stonemason.”

As for Angelo himself, he went upon his dreamy way. Once Anna confided to Salvatore, “You and I will have to watch out for Angelo all his life.”

For over a year, Anna worked at the Triangle Factory without incident.

The year 1910 began on a Saturday. In New York, there was a light dusting of snow. But on Sunday morning, when Rose Master got into the Rolls-Royce and set off downtown, the sky was clear and blue.

“None at all,” she said. “Drive on.”

The last thing Rose wanted to do—the last thing she’d ever thought she’d have to do—was get in a fight with old Hetty Master. She’d talked to William about it. “Am I wrong?” she’d asked. “No,” he’d said, “but you can’t stop her.” She’d reasoned with his grandmother, gently pointing out why this luncheon might be a bad idea. But Hetty had been obdurate. And the trouble was, people were already talking about it. Hetty’s name was being mentioned everywhere, and Rose feared, with good reason, that there could be some reference to the old lady in the newspapers. Something had to be done.

So Rose had made her plans. They were subtle, and devious. She had even employed a journalist she knew, a sound man she could rely upon, to draft a story which would have the desired result. With luck, it might be possible to turn the whole business to some good account without personally offending Hetty too much. But whatever the outcome, she was determined about one thing: the Master family name must not be sullied.

Edmund Keller walked briskly down Fifth Avenue. He liked to walk, and the cold air on his face felt good. He’d spent the first part of the morning with his Aunt Gretchen’s family, up on Eighty-sixth Street. Like so many of the inhabitants of the old Kleindeutschland, they’d long ago moved to the Yorkville area on the Upper East Side, where Eighty-sixth Street was called the German Broadway now. Gretchen had died a couple of years ago, but he was still close to her children and their families.

It was only sixty-five blocks or so down to Gramercy Park. He could walk that comfortably on a bright cold day like this. A dozen blocks every ten minutes, going north to south. Walking across town, the blocks were longer, but he only had to get from Fifth across to Lexington.

Fifth Avenue was sedate on Sundays. He passed the red-brick facade of the Metropolitan Museum, and continued down the long strand where the palaces of the millionaires gazed at Central Park. In the Fifties, he crossed to the west side of the street to avoid a crowd of people coming out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. At Forty-second, he noted that the new library with its magnificent classical facade was almost complete. But it was not until he got all the way down to Twenty-third, where Broadway made its great diagonal cut across Fifth, that Edmund Keller smiled with pleasure.

There it was: the Flatiron Building.

There were some tall buildings uptown these days, but it was only when you got to the Flatiron Building that you entered the realm of the real skyscrapers. The Flatiron Building, however, was one of a kind. Over twenty floors high, on a triangular groundplan at the intersection of the two great boulevards, and looking at Madison Square, it was one of the most elegant landmarks in the city. The narrow corner offices were especially prized.

Edmund Keller liked skyscrapers. He supposed it was natural that commercial and financial men in the crowded world of Wall Street should try to get the maximum use out of the sites their offices occupied, which meant building up. In the last twenty years, the development of iron girder construction had meant that the weight of buildings no longer had to be carried by their walls, but could be cheaply and effectively carried by huge networks of steel. Back in the Middle Ages, medieval builders had been able to raise soaring buildings using pillars of stone and complex frameworks of wood, but these structures were massively expensive. Steel construction, by contrast, was simple and cheap.

Yet it was also in the spirit of the age, he thought, that the mighty business titans of America should send their buildings soaring into the sky, so that they could look out, like eagles, upon the vast new continent. And if the summits of the buildings were like mountain tops, he foresaw that the avenues between them would soon be great canyons, down which the daylight would come striding, bold as a giant.

As Rose caught sight of Edmund Keller, she nodded to herself. She’d managed to keep him at a distance quite effectively so far. Once, he’d come round to call at the house during the afternoon, and she’d told the butler to say she was “Not at home.” It was standard social procedure, and he’d gone on his way. A while later he had written a brief letter to say that he hoped to call, and she had sent an equally polite reply to say that as one of the children had measles, this would be a bad idea. He hadn’t troubled her after that. Seeing him entering Hetty’s house now, she thought: Well, if socialist Mr. Keller was coming, that just proved how right she was to intervene. And if he wanted war, he was going to get it.

“This is where we get out,” she said to the two young people who accompanied her. And a few moments later she was sweeping them past the astonished butler.

She was smiling brightly, though as she saw the other guests gathered in the house, she couldn’t help feeling glad that dear Mrs. Astor had died eighteen months ago. Thank God, she thought, that the poor lady wasn’t alive to see this.

The whole, wretched business had begun in the fall. Some of the garment workers in the downtown factories had started to complain about their working conditions. Perhaps they had a case. Rose didn’t know. But in no time, agitators—socialists and revolutionaries from Russia mostly, she’d heard—were whipping them up. The garment workers were threatening to strike, and the factory owners were outraged.

But not Mr. Blanck and Mr. Harris, the owners of the Triangle Factory. They had provided an in-house union for their employees, but they told them firmly that anyone who joined the militant outside union would be dismissed.

Rose didn’t condone the bad treatment or the violence, but these things had to be kept in proportion, they mustn’t get out of hand. And things wouldn’t have got out of hand, if it hadn’t been for a certain group of women. The women in this room.

You had to give it to old Hetty, Rose thought grimly, she’d assembled quite a crowd. There were half a dozen Vassar girls—they should have known better, for a start. Rose was never sure what she felt about women going to college. Vassar and Barnard in the state of New York, Bryn Mawr down in Philadelphia, and the four colleges up in Massachusetts—the Seven Sisters as they were called, like a sort of female Ivy League. All respectable enough, no doubt; but did one really want girls from the old families getting a lot of foolish ideas put in their heads? Rose didn’t think so.

Just look at the results. Vassar girls had been parading round the city with billboards supporting the strike. They’d been living down on the Lower East Side with the poor. All for what? To show they were enlightened? Well, at least they had the excuse of being young. And that certainly could not be said for the next figure to greet her eye.

Alva Vanderbilt—at least that was her name in the days when she’d forced her daughter Consuelo to marry the Duke of Marlborough. Alva always got her way. After she’d divorced Vanderbilt for a pile of money, married August Belmont’s son and built a huge mansion up in Newport, Rose suspected Alva had got bored. So next she’d decided to make herself look important by demanding votes for women. One might argue about the rights and wrongs of female suffrage, but not about Alva’s unquenchable thirst for publicity. And it was wholly typical of Alva, seeing the strike in the garment district, to decide to hitch these unfortunate women to her own bandwagon and proclaim that their dispute was about women’s rights.

“Hello, Rose. Didn’t expect to see you here.” Elizabeth Marbury was wearing a dark coat and skirt, with a small black hat on her head. She always filled any room she was in. It wasn’t just that she was broad in the beam; it was her presence. Literary agent to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and many others, she went where she pleased. Having taken up the cause of the women strikers, she’d brought support from the acting profession, and money from the wealthy Shubert family. She’d even hosted a lunch for a group of the strikers within the sacred portals of the ladies’ Colony Club.

At least she hadn’t brought her friend. She and Elsie de Wolfe, the designer, had been living together for years. Women lovers. The fashionable worlds of New York, Paris and London accepted them, but Rose didn’t approve. Elizabeth Marbury eyed Rose calmly.

“Who are your young friends?” she asked.

Rose smiled, but shepherded them past her without explaining. The other people in the room were mostly society ladies, and a few old friends of Hetty’s. Lily de Chantal was in bed with the flu, but Mary O’Donnell was there, faithful as ever, and Rose went to greet her.

“Are you going to Carnegie Hall tonight?” Mary asked. “I feel I ought to go with Hetty—she’s quite determined to be there. But if you or William took her,” she added hopefully, “I could stay at home.”

For this was what the luncheon was all about. A gathering, a social rally, before the huge event.

Tonight’s meeting at Carnegie Hall was going to be the climax of the last two months. It could even be the start of a general strike. It was actually a union meeting, but if anyone thought that was going to keep people like Alva out, then they didn’t know the rich and powerful women of New York. On behalf of her Votes for Women League, she had a private box.

“I’m sorry, Mary,” Rose said, and Mary looked disappointed.

“We’re only waiting for one more person now,” Mary said. Then, glancing toward the door, she added: “And here she is.”

Even as Rose turned to look, she had an instinct who it would be. Alva Belmont and Marbury were bad enough, but if there was one woman in New York whom she truly hated, one woman she couldn’t forgive … well, she was walking into the room now.

Who would ever have believed that the great Pierpont, J. P. Morgan himself, could have such a daughter? She was only carrying on like this because he gave her twenty thousand dollars a year. Rose couldn’t understand it. Why didn’t he just stop her allowance?

For this was Rose’s complaint. If she believed for one moment that these women really cared about the working conditions of people like the two young persons she’d brought with her, she mightn’t have minded; but for their own purposes, their own sense of power—their own vanity, in her opinion—these rich women, from old families, the very people who were supposed to take the lead in society and set a good example, were funding strikers and whipping up public support for a cause behind which, she was quite sure, were socialists, anarchists, people whose mission was to destroy the very society which gave them their wealth. These women were traitors, fools perhaps, but destroyers. She hated them.

And she could just see the articles in the newspapers. “Mrs. Master Hosts Luncheon for Mrs. Belmont and Miss Morgan before Carnegie Hall Meeting.” Or even worse: “Master Family Backs the Strike.”

Well, it just confirmed how right she’d been to bring these two young people here today.

As they all sat down to luncheon in the big dining room, old Hetty Master couldn’t help feeling pretty pleased with herself. She’d worked hard for this, and the timing had been perfect.

For a ninety-year-old woman to host an event like this was quite a social coup. It wasn’t too often these days that she had a chance to be in the thick of things, and who knew if such a chance would occur again?

She might be ninety, but Hetty believed in moving with the times. She’d seen so much change. She’d seen canals come, then railroads, gaslights, then electricity, steamboats and now the motor car. She’d seen the old crowd at the Academy of Music yield to the rich crowd at the Metropolitan Opera, and families you’d never heard of, like the Vanderbilts, get into Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred. If Rose wanted life to be a bit more decorous, Hetty in the last years of her life wished she had a bit more excitement. In fact, just for once, she thought she’d like to be in the forefront of fashion.

And the garment strike was the fashion just now. She had every sympathy with those poor girls in the factories, though she wasn’t going to pretend that she knew all the issues. But today’s lunch would be remembered. However small, Hetty Master was going to see if she couldn’t get herself in as a footnote in New York’s history.

So she surveyed the guests at her table with great satisfaction.

Inviting Edmund Keller had been an afterthought. She’d seen him at his father’s the week before, and asked him to come along, as it was always nice to have a man around. As for Rose, she really hadn’t meant to invite her at all. Indeed, she’d been surprised when her grandson’s wife had got wind of the event and said she wanted to come. “There’s no need, dear,” she’d told her. But Rose had been so insistent, it would have been awkward to refuse. And now she’d turned up with two young people from the Lower East Side, and insisted they sit with her. Had she suddenly been converted to the cause?

Anna Caruso glanced down at Salvatore. She’d only agreed to come if her brother was there to protect her. “Just tell your story simply, the way you told it to me,” Rose had said. But faced with all these people, in this big house, and the fact that she knew her English still wasn’t so good, she couldn’t help being nervous.

She’d been surprised when Mr. Harris at the factory had called her over last week. “This lady,” he’d explained, “wants to talk to one of our loyal workers, and I’ve told her you’re a sensible girl.” It was pretty clear that she’d better do what he said. So she’d told the lady what she wanted to know. Then the lady had said she’d like to come back to her house and see her family. So at the end of the day, she’d collected Salvatore and Angelo from the park, and the lady had driven them all back to Mulberry Street in her car. The sight of the Rolls-Royce stopping outside their house had caused quite a stir. When the lady had said she wanted to take her next Sunday to tell her friends about the factory, her father had been dubious, but when Mrs. Master had given him her visiting card and address, and offered twenty dollars for the inconvenience, it was agreed that she should go, as long as she was accompanied.

“My name is Anna,” she began, “and my family lives in Mulberry Street.” She told them how they had arrived in America from Italy when she was a little girl, how her father had lost their years of savings in the panic of 1907, how her brothers had had to leave school, and how they were all working to get back on their feet again. She could tell that they liked her story. There had been murmurs of sympathy about the loss in the panic, and of approval for the way they were all working so hard. She explained how difficult it was for her mother, working at home, and how she had gone to the Triangle Factory, where the conditions were better.

And now the lady started asking her questions.

“Is there a union at the factory?” Rose asked.

“There is a friendly union inside the factory.”

“It was the outside union, the Women’s Trade Union, that the owners did not like. Did you want to join it?”

“No.”

“So when the owners locked out the workers, what happened to you?”

“And he gave you back your job?”

“Yes.”

“Did he employ new girls to work at the factory?”

“Yes.”

“Are they mostly Italian, Catholic, respectable girls, like you?”

“Yes.”

“The girls who lost their jobs, who have joined the WTU, are they mostly Jews?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, dear. You can sit down.” Rose turned to the assembled ladies. “I think everyone here can see that this is an honest young woman,” she declared. “And I’m sure there are grievances at some of the factories which need to be addressed. But I think we need to be careful. What is it the Jewish girls want that Anna here does not? Are they really striking for better conditions, or is their object political? How many of these Russians are socialists?” She gazed round in triumph. “I believe it’s a question we need to ask.”

Rose enjoyed the silence that followed. In the first place, she’d brought a little common sense to the place. The people in the room would have been even more surprised had they seen the little press story that gave an account of how, at a luncheon at old Mrs. Master’s house, members of the Master family who were well acquainted with the true conditions of the workers, not all of whom were on strike, had questioned the motives of some of the socialist agitators behind it. Old Hetty could still have her moment of glory—her luncheon would be remembered—just not in quite the way she had planned. And the family’s reputation would be saved. The story would be printed in several papers that evening.

In the silence that followed, Hetty stared. She couldn’t believe it. Her own grandson’s wife had come here to ruin her party, in this act of public disloyalty. Her reaction was instant and natural. No doubt Rose knew the trust funds would flow down to William anyway, but if she thought that anything from this house was coming to her, she could forget it.

Hetty looked round for someone to save the day. Her eye alighted on Edmund Keller. It was worth a chance.

“Well, Mr. Keller,” she asked, “will you be our knight in shining armor?”

He understood the city well enough to know that the Russian immigrants, having suffered political and religious persecution, were determined to fight anything that looked like oppression in their new home. The Italians, on the other hand, were only fleeing poverty. They sent money back to Italy; many of them didn’t even plan to stay in America—sometimes at the docks there were more Italians returning home than arriving. They had less reason to cause trouble, or to enter the political process, therefore. And they might put up with bad treatment when they shouldn’t. But even having said that, the situation wasn’t straightforward. And if there was one thing, as an academic, that Edmund Keller hated, it was people who simplified evidence until it was misleading.

“Are there picket lines outside the Triangle Factory?” he asked Anna.

“Yes, sir.”

“Are there Jewish girls in the picket lines?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are there also Italian girls in the picket lines?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are, I don’t know, maybe a quarter of the picketing girls Italian?”

“I think so.”

“Why do you not stand in the picket line?”

Anna hesitated. She remembered the day the woman from the WTU had accosted her as she went into work, demanding to know why she was betraying all the other girls. She had felt so guilty. But when she had talked to her parents about it that night, her father had ordered her never to raise the subject again.

“My family does not wish it, sir.”

There was a murmur round the room. Keller turned to Rose Master.

“I think we need to be careful here,” he said. “The factory owners would no doubt like us to think that this is entirely a Jewish strike, a socialist strike perhaps. But they may be misleading us.” He didn’t mean to be rude. He just wanted to be accurate.

Old Hetty was beaming. Rose’s face was a mask.

But it was then that Edmund Keller made a great mistake.

“Of course,” he continued casually, “one can see why this girl’s family wouldn’t want her to join the WTU. But in fairness, European history shows that factory workers were nearly always exploited until a powerful union or a government intervened.”

If the ladies had been holding a historical seminar, a balancing argument like this might have been a point to raise. But they weren’t. And he had just given Rose her opening to strike back.

“European history? You’d know all about that, Mr. Keller, I’m sure. And isn’t it true Europe is full of socialists? And don’t you know that when innocent Italian girls are bullied or deceived into supporting the unions, they’re being used by Russian socialists? But you know all about socialists, Mr. Keller, from what I hear. Since you, Mr. Keller, I have it upon good authority, are a socialist.”

Keller hadn’t particularly studied the socialist question. Nor had he the least idea that the president of Columbia, disliking his somewhat liberal views, had told Rose that he was a socialist. He stared at her in great surprise, therefore, which she, naturally, took to be guilt.

“Aha,” she said, triumphantly.

“Well,” said Hetty, seeing that things weren’t going at all as they should, “this is all very interesting, I must say.” Which even Edmund Keller realized was a signal, in these circles, that the discussion should end at once.

Anna was very nervous. “I hope she’ll take us away now,” she whispered to Salvatore when the meal ended. But Rose Master was busy talking, and so they were left standing alone.

Had she said the wrong thing about the Italian girls on the picket line? Would the lady tell Mr. Harris at the factory, and get her into trouble?

They had been standing together for a minute or two when the old lady who owned the house came across. She was with another lady, not quite so old.

You could see the other old lady was very rich, but she seemed kindly, and asked where they lived.

“I used to live not far from you, just the other side of the Bowery,” she said. Anna looked at her in disbelief. She couldn’t imagine the rich lady had ever lived anywhere near the Lower East Side in her life, but she didn’t like to say so. The old lady saw the look on her face and smiled. “I used to have to walk past Five Points every day.”

“You mean you lived in a tenement like us?” Anna finally ventured.

“I did.” Mary O’Donnell paused, as if remembering. Then she glanced at Hetty Master and smiled. “Actually, my father was drunk most of the time, and didn’t even work. As for our lodgings …” She shook her head at the memory. “I had to walk out in the end.” She turned back to Anna and Salvatore. “Your father sounds a good man. Whatever you do, keep your family together. That’s the most important thing in the world.”

Just then, Rose appeared. Fortunately, she seemed quite pleased about everything, and she took them away. So Anna never found out how the rich lady got out of the Lower East Side.

At Hetty’s request, Mary O’Donnell remained after everyone else had gone. Mary knew it was nice to have someone to discuss a party with, when it was over.

“It went well,” she told Hetty. “Everyone will remember it. And the conversations certainly made everybody think.”

“I am not pleased with Rose,” said Hetty.

“Mr. Keller did quite well.”

“He meant well. Rose,” Hetty continued, “was very disloyal.”

“I suppose we must forgive,” said Mary.

“I may forgive,” Hetty replied, “but I’ll be damned if I forget.”

“The Italian girl was sweet,” said Mary.

“That reminds me,” said Hetty. “Why did you tell her that your father was a drunk who didn’t work? Your father was a perfectly respectable man. He was a friend of the Kellers. I remember very well the day that Gretchen told me all about you.”

Mary paused, and looked at Hetty a bit sheepishly.

Hetty eyed her. “Are you telling me, Mary O’Donnell, after all these years, that you came to work here under false pretenses? That you weren’t from a respectable family at all?”

“I don’t think I could have done it. But Gretchen could. She was my friend.” Mary smiled, affectionately. “I’m afraid she told you the most dreadful lies.”

Hetty considered. “Well,” she said finally, “I’m very glad that she did.”

Edmund Keller spent a pleasant evening with his father. It wasn’t until the next morning that he heard what had happened at the meeting at Carnegie Hall.

And what a night it had been. The radicals had produced a splendid speaker, Morris Hillquit the socialist. With soaring oratory, he told the packed hall that the factory owners and the magistrates who had fined them were nothing more than the mailed fists of oppression. “Sisters,” he cried, “your cause is just, and you will be victorious.” Not only that, he assured them, the garment women’s strike was the beginning of something altogether more wonderful. Through the union, they could lead the great socialist cause of a class struggle that would soon transform not only the factories of the Lower East Side, but the entire city, and even the whole of America. It was a thrilling speech, and they cheered him to the rafters.

True, he was followed by a moderate lawyer who counseled restraint and a legal battle instead. But his speech was so boring that the crowd grew restless. And when Leonora O’Reilly of the WTU spoke next, and chided the lawyer, and told the women that their strike had done more for the union movement than all the preaching of the last ten years, they cheered her too. No wonder they were in high spirits.

But not everyone was happy. Tammany Hall liked political power, not revolution. The conservative leaders of America’s big unions, men like Sam Gompers, didn’t think that preaching revolution was a good strategy either. From that evening, support in the smoke-filled rooms of the labor movement began to fade. And something else began to ebb away rapidly. Money.

It wasn’t until early February that the strike wound down. The women got a shorter working week, down to only fifty-two hours; they were even allowed to join a union. But the Triangle and the other factories could employ whomever they liked, union member or not.

Edmund Keller supposed that Rose must be pleased about that. He’d been puzzled that she thought he was a socialist, but since he wasn’t, he’d shrugged the accusation off as made in the excitement of the moment.

He did not quite understand that because she believed him to be a socialist, and because she thought he’d tried to make a fool of her in public, Rose Master was now, in fact, his enemy.

The year 1910 was a happy one for Salvatore. He was fourteen years old now, and starting to feel himself a young man. It was also the year that he and Anna decided they were going to make little Angelo stronger. Anna’s method was to give him more food. Each day when they went home together from the Triangle Factory, they would stop at the restaurant where Uncle Luigi worked, and the owner would give them a little bag of leftovers. “For the sickly one,” he’d say.

Salvatore’s method was more robust. He made some little weights, and forced his nine-year-old brother to work with them in front of him each day. “I’m building up his muscles,” he told everybody. In the summer, he started taking him to the East River where, although it was illegal, the boys of the area used to swim. When Anna found out, she had a fit. “The water’s filthy. You’ll make him sick,” she cried. As the months passed, however, Angelo did seem to become sturdier. He stayed just as dreamy, though.

“And if you don’t approve of him?” she teased.

“I’ll throw him in the East River,” he said. He meant it.

At the start of December it was Anna’s birthday, and on the fifth, Uncle Luigi took the whole family out to the theater. They went to the American Music Hall on Forty-second Street, to see a show called The Wow Wows given by a British troupe on tour from London. The star was a talented young English actor named Charles Chaplin. They had a wonderful time. The next week, Anna told them that she’d got a raise at work. She was already making $12 a week; now she’d get an extra dollar. So the year ended well.

Except for one thing.

It was one bright morning in October when Paolo suddenly told Salvatore that he should go on alone because he had some other business to attend to. “I’ll meet you on Broadway and Fulton at four o’clock,” he said, and before Salvatore could ask him anything, he was gone.

That afternoon, he told Salvatore that he mustn’t speak of his absence. “There’s a man I’m doing some work for,” he said. “That’s all.” He produced some money, about what he’d have made shining shoes, but Salvatore had a feeling that his brother had more in his pocket.

One day the next week, the same thing happened. Soon it became a regular occurrence. At Christmas, he gave presents to all the members of the family. He said he’d secretly been saving up to do so. Everyone was pleased. Salvatore got a pocket watch; Anna a lovely shawl. But Concetta looked worried. Just before the new year she questioned Salvatore about his brother’s movements. Salvatore lied as Paolo had told him to, but he could see that his mother didn’t believe him.

“He is working for some camorrista,” she said. By that she meant any sort of bad person. “Or maybe worse. Maybe the Mano Nero.” The Black Hand. It wasn’t really an organization. Any gang wanting to extort money—usually from the richer Italians in their own community—would seek to increase their victim’s fear by using the dreaded symbol of the Black Hand.

“No,” said Salvatore.

“It’s the fault of the police,” said his mother. “Why do they do nothing?”

That evening, she accosted Paolo and accused him of being a criminal. But he denied it all, and became very angry; and in the end their father said the matter was not to be spoken of again.

The young man appeared in March 1911. Salvatore, Angelo and Anna had called in at the restaurant where Uncle Luigi worked one evening. They’d been made to wait a few moments, during which time Salvatore had noticed a good-looking young man watching them with interest. But he’d soon forgotten about it. The next day, however, as he was walking up the street, he’d met Uncle Luigi, who was eager to speak.

It seemed that the young man had already noticed Anna several times. His name was Pasquale, and he was very respectable, with a good job as a clerk. He wanted to meet her, but he was a little shy.

“If you already knew him,” Uncle Luigi suggested with a wink, “then it would be natural for him to meet Anna one day.”

“And if I don’t like him, then Anna doesn’t get to meet him?” Salvatore asked, pointedly.

“Si, si, of course.”

Salvatore agreed, and the next day he came by the restaurant where Pasquale was having coffee and a dolce. To Uncle Luigi’s great pleasure, Salvatore liked the young man. He was serious, clearly a good worker. His family were not rich, but they had more money than the Carusos. By the end of the conversation it was agreed that he would come by the restaurant as usual, after Anna finished work the following Saturday. If he saw Pasquale there, he would introduce him to Anna, and Uncle Luigi would give them all a dolce.

Salvatore was rather pleased with his new role. He looked forward to Saturday with some anticipation. He wondered how much to tell Anna.

Although it was the Jewish Sabbath, and both the owners and most of the workers were Jewish, only a handful of the people at the Triangle Factory observed the Shabbat, and there would be nearly five hundred people working there today.

There were two entrances to the building, one on Washington Place, the other round the corner on Greene Street. She went in at the Washington Place entrance and took the stairs. The elevator was for the management and visitors.

The Triangle Factory occupied the three top floors of the building, the eighth, ninth and tenth. On the stairs, she met Yetta, a Jewish girl who worked on the eighth floor, and she went onto that floor to finish their conversation. As well as the lines of work tables and sewing machines, the eighth floor contained the cutting tables, under which there were big boxes that would soon fill with discarded scraps of cotton as the cutters toiled. Beside one of the tables, Yetta showed Anna the steps of a new dance called the turkey trot. They both liked to dance, but a stern look from one of the foremen soon put a stop to that, and Anna made her way up to the ninth floor, where she worked.

The morning passed uneventfully. Not long ago the ninth floor had been refurbished with better washrooms and a nice wooden floor that caught the sunlight. At lunchtime, she went outside and walked about in Washington Square Park. She thought of the dance steps her friend had shown her. She wondered if Pasquale liked to dance.

It hadn’t taken her long to find out about Pasquale. As soon as Salvatore casually mentioned that they might be meeting a friend of his at the restaurant, she’d guessed he was up to something. As for Salvatore’s pathetic attempts to deny it, she’d soon dealt with that. When he confessed, she pretended to be angry. What she didn’t tell her brother was that she’d already noticed the young man looking at her, and she didn’t mind meeting him at all. But she told Salvatore that she didn’t know if she’d come with him or not, just to give him grief. She was smiling to herself as she went back into the building at the start of the afternoon.

From the statue of Garibaldi, there was a good view across to Washington Place. In summer, the leaves on the trees obscured it. But as Salvatore looked now, he could see the higher floors of the building clearly, and the sign—a triangle in a circle—that hung from the corner. He glanced at the watch Paolo had given him for Christmas.

“It’s time,” he remarked to Angelo.

“Will Uncle Luigi give me a hot chocolate?”

“Sure.” Salvatore looked across at the building. Any moment now, the first girls would start coming out of the door. A young man strolled by, paused for a moment, to look in the same direction.

And just then, a curious thing happened. There was a little popping sound. Nothing much, just a pop, from one of the windows up on the eighth floor. An instant later, a little puff of smoke came out of the window, and a tiny tinkle of glass could be heard from the street below. A horse standing there suddenly bolted with its cart. From above, smoke began to drift out of the broken window. A man ran across the street.

The fellow who’d paused beside the statue set off quickly toward the scene, leaving Salvatore and Angelo standing there. Moments later, whistles sounded from a fire station. Then a cop on horseback clattered down the street and ran into the building. People were spilling out onto the sidewalks, and from the far side of the park, a fire wagon came clanging into view.

“Stay here,” Salvatore told Angelo. “If Anna comes, wait for me.”

“What about the girls on the other floors?” he asked. But she didn’t know.

More and more fire wagons were arriving. You had to say, the speed of their response was impressive. Firemen—they seemed to be mostly Irish—were running hoses from the fire hydrants in the street, and taking them into the building.

They weren’t letting anyone go in. All Salvatore could do was rush from one entrance to another, trying to get whatever information he could from the girls coming out, or chance words he heard from the firemen.

The building’s own water hoses weren’t working, he’d heard, but the pressure in the hydrants was good. The fire had started on the eighth floor, which was now engulfed in flames, and the firemen couldn’t get past it. Somebody said there was a fire escape that went down the well in the center of the block. But it had collapsed. Some girls had managed to reach lower floors that way, but others were on it when it fell. Smoke and flames were pouring out of the upper windows now, on the Greene Street side.

Salvatore saw people pointing up at the roof, and he ran back a little way so that he could see. A crowd of workers were standing on the roof, and people from the adjoining New York University building, which was a little higher, had let down ladders so they could escape. Had the girls from the ninth floor got up there? It was impossible to know.

He went back to the statue of Garibaldi.

“Where’s Anna?” Angelo was wide-eyed.

“She’ll come.”

“Where is she?”

“Maybe she’s coming down in the elevator, though some of the girls are going by the roof. She’ll find us if we wait here.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“No.” Salvatore tried to smile. “Look at all the fire wagons and the firemen, and all the people coming out.”

Angelo nodded. But he looked frightened all the same.

Then Salvatore saw her.

Why were the girls by the windows? Couldn’t they get out? It must be getting hot in there. Very hot.

The girl stepped out onto the window ledge. Above the ninth floor, a heavy cornice ran round the building, jutting out a foot or two. The girl looked up at it. Perhaps she was wondering if she could get up there and work her way round to safety. Perhaps she didn’t know that the fire was already on the tenth floor above. But the floors of the building were twelve feet high; there was no way she could get up there anyway.

Other windows were opening now, and other girls edging out onto the ledges. A young man stepped out, too. They were looking down; the street was a hundred feet below. You could see the flames behind them now. Obviously they couldn’t stand the heat inside any more.

The firemen saw them and trained one of the hoses up there. The arc of water shot skyward, but by the time it got to a hundred feet high, it broke into a sprinkle. They started to run a fire wagon ladder up the side of the building, but that was no good—it couldn’t reach within thirty feet. The ladder rested there, tempting but useless. They were opening nets now, above the sidewalk. The people on the ledges were looking down at them. Would the nets hold if they jumped? It was an awfully long way down. The firemen didn’t seem to be telling them to jump. They hesitated.

Then Salvatore saw that Anna was looking toward them. She could see the statue of Garibaldi from up there, for sure, and she must be trying to find him and Angelo. With the water from the hoses and the smoke from the floor below, though, it mightn’t be so easy to make them out. He waved. Beside him, little Angelo waved too. But Anna didn’t wave back.

“Are we waving at Anna?” Angelo asked. “Can you see her?”

Salvatore didn’t answer. One of the girls had jumped. The young man jumped after her. Then Anna jumped.

Angelo didn’t see.

“Wait here,” Salvatore cried, and ran toward the building.

The nets were useless, of course. The firemen had only put them there as a last resort. By the time Salvatore got there, the fire chief was already telling his men to take them down again.

“That’s my sister,” he told the fireman, and gave him his name. “I have to take my little brother home, then I’ll be back.” He was amazed how composed he was.

He got back to the statue.

“Did Anna jump?” Angelo asked.

“Yes. She’s all right, but she’s hurt her leg, so they may take her to the hospital. She told me to take you home, and tell Mama. Then we’ll all go to see her later.”

“I want to see her now.”

“No, she told us to go straight home.”

“Are you sure she’s all right?”

“She’s fine.”

On May 23, 1911, no less a person than the President of the United States was in the City of New York for an important ceremony. On the site of the old fortress-like reservoir, the big library on Fifth Avenue was finally opening for business.

The collection, based on the amalgamation of the Astor and Lenox libraries, was huge. Backed with bequests from Watts and Tilden, the splendid new beaux arts building, designed by Carrère & Hastings, stretched across the two blocks from Fortieth Street to Forty-second. It might have taken an inordinate time to build, but it was worth it. The marbled facade and broad steps, flanked by two lions, could hardly be more magnificent, yet the place was also welcoming. Thanks to a huge donation from Andrew Carnegie, the New York Public Library system was among the most generous free institutions in the world.

Though the building would not be open to the general public until the following day, there was quite a crowd of the city’s richest and most important folk looking round after President Taft had done the honors.

Old Hetty Master moved rather slowly.

“I’m so glad,” she said to Mary O’Donnell, “that I’ve got you to go round with me.”

“It’s two floors up,” Mary warned her. And the floors were terribly high.

“I can walk,” the old lady insisted. “And I want to see this Reading Room they keep talking about.” The Reading Room on the third floor spanned the entire length of the building, almost a hundred yards. “I remember coming here when they had the Crystal Palace just behind it,” she remarked.

“I know,” said Mary.

It took time, but they got to the Reading Room, and when they did, they were impressed. It stretched away like one of the vast corridors in the Vatican.

“Well,” said Hetty, “it’s certainly large.”

“It is,” said Mary.

“I hope,” said Hetty, as she gazed at the rows of tables, “that they can find that many people who want to read. I always fall asleep in libraries, don’t you?”

“I hardly use them,” Mary confessed.

“Plenty of room to sleep in here,” said Hetty. “Let’s go down.”

It was a bright day outside as they came slowly down the steps onto Fifth Avenue.

“I’m pleased I saw it,” said Hetty, “but I’ll be glad to go home. I feel a little tired.” She paused while Mary looked out for a cab. “Did I tell you,” she said, “that my husband proposed to me right here, when they’d just built the reservoir?”

“Yes,” said Mary, with a smile.

“That was a wonderful day,” said Hetty.

“It must have been,” said Mary.

Then Hetty suddenly said, “Oh.”

“What is it?” said Mary.

But Hetty didn’t say anything. She staggered, as if she’d suddenly been struck.

“Are you all right?” said Mary. But before she finished the question, Hetty started to fall. Mary tried to hold her, but she couldn’t, and Hetty crashed to the ground.

So the boy put his things on the floor of the taxi, and Mary told the taxi to go down Fifth, and in no time they were on their way. Hetty’s mouth had fallen open; she seemed to shudder. The boy leaned forward and propped her up, awkwardly, in the corner of the seat.

“Gramercy Park,” said the boy to the driver.

“How do you know that?” asked Mary.

“Been to the house,” said the boy.

Then Mary realized she had seen him before.

“Why, you’re the brother of the Italian girl who came to lunch a few months back,” she said. “Your sister works at the Triangle Factory.”

The boy said nothing. And Mary remembered the terrible tragedy that had happened there in March. That awful fire. It was a huge scandal—one hundred and forty people had died, mostly the Jewish girls who worked there.

“I hope your sister was all right,” she said anxiously.

For a moment, Salvatore Caruso did not reply. He was looking at the older woman. He realized, which Mary still did not, that Hetty Master had just died. That would be enough for this nice lady to worry about today.

“She’s fine,” he said.