The Museum of Extraordinary Things (18 page)

A
PRIL 1911

ONE FUNERAL
after another was held, at Mt. Zion and Baron Hirsch and Evergreens Cemeteries. Rain and drizzle dashed the hallowed ground at many of the private funerals, held one after the other. When Mayor Gaynor and Governor Dix both refused to take responsibility for the fire, neither one visiting the site of the disaster, it seemed no official was willing to stand up for those who had been so terribly wronged. The families of the dead were aided by the Red Cross and the Hebrew Burial Association to ensure that burial plots could be purchased for the girls whose families could not afford plots in the muddy cemeteries of Staten Island and Brooklyn and Queens and horse-drawn hearses hired. The girls themselves, having been paid only six or seven dollars for a workweek of sixty hours or more, had earned too little to pay for their own funerals. The corrupt politicians still ran the town, despite the work of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who as a New York legislator had done his best to bring the Democratic Party back to reason.

A sea of black umbrellas preceded waves of endless sorrow. Eddie positioned himself at the edges of such gatherings, his cap pulled down, his camera slung over one shoulder. He photographed the funerals from a distance, stationing himself behind a stone wall or under a wide-limbed copper beech, doing his best not to bring attention to himself while keeping his lens free from raindrops with a soft rag. The world carried the scent of lilacs and damp earth, and the
sky was a dove-colored, so laden with clouds it seemed that heaven touched the ground.

Eddie waited for the end of each service before showing the dime-store photograph of Hannah Weiss to mourners who filed by. Most of those he approached were mistrustful of his presence, so far inside their own grief he often had to repeat himself to be understood. He spoke in English and Yiddish, as well as the broken Russian he remembered from his boyhood.
Please excuse the interruption, but this girl is still missing. Perhaps you knew her? Did you see her on the day of the fire? Or the day before? Maybe recently?
One young woman who was lamenting her own losses had sputtered, “Who do you think you are asking questions here?” before stalking off. Another time Eddie had been chased off the premises when relatives of the deceased noticed his camera and charged after him, fiercely protective of their grieving family’s privacy. They had thrown rocks and called him a ghoul. Perhaps he was, but the photographs of the distraught, raging mourners were among the best he’d ever taken. He added the prints to his wall of sorrow, which now ran the length of his loft, ravaged souls scattered in black and white, the exalted and the earnest, the mourners and the mourned side by side.

On the fifth of the month, New York City held a mass funeral for the unidentified victims of the fire, a procession that would take six hours to complete. The morning’s drizzle would become a driving rain, but a sea of more than three hundred thousand mourners holding black umbrellas lined the street to pay their respects to those who had lost their lives. Guards had been stationed around the homes of the owners of the factory, for there was talk of retaliation. The survivors mur
mured to each other in remembrance of those they had lost, girls who had jumped holding hands, lovers who had kissed before the flames engulfed them, lives burning up like cinders as the owners and supervisors were skulking over the melting tar of the roof, making their way onto a neighboring rooftop. The deceased were put to rest in black coffins covered with shrouds—each had a silver plate upon it, stating that they were the unidentified departed.

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, begun in 1900 to protect working people from seventy-hour workweeks and wretched conditions, had met in long sessions, swelling the halls at Cooper Union, petitioning President Taft and the governor, John Dix, only in office since January of that year, for workers’ rights. The parade of mourners was more than just a funeral; it was a river of outrage. Carts transporting the dead were laden with flowers, pulled by huge draft horses draped with black netting. Thousands of mourners in black coats, the men in bowler hats, the women draped in black wool and velvet, followed the carts, including the members of the Ladies’ Waist and Dress Makers’ Union, Local 25, the union that had tried and failed to have sprinklers installed in the Triangle factory. The mourners carried black banners and garlands of roses. Signs carried by women’s union groups called out,
AN END TO GRIEF
.
The city still smelled of smoke, and a gray film hung above them. It was April, yet it seemed another month entirely, more somber November in mood.

As Eddie made his way through the crowd, he was looking for one person, a young woman with pale hair, the color of snow. Snow melted, Eddie knew that much. It disappeared if you tried to hold on to it. He had posted himself in the doorway of a pet shop. From this position he could see the swelling throngs. The gathering was not unruly, but the quiet was worse than any mayhem, a pulsing wave of sorrow. Soon enough, the owner of the shop came out with a broom. There was to be no loitering, he declared, for he feared his plate-glass windows would be shattered should tempers rise.

As Eddie moved on, he thought he spotted Weiss’s daughter. It was what he had come to do, yet at the sight of this girl, he grew light-headed. He shifted his camera stand over his shoulder, then folded himself into the crowd. He made his way through the mass of people on the street, trailing her, holding his breath, like a man about to jump from a bridge. She wore a camel-colored coat over blue skirts and high-buttoned boots, her pale hair falling down her back, proceeding so quickly Eddie wondered if she was a ghost, for ghosts are said to move in the corners of human sight. She disappeared in a mob on Fourteenth Street, but after a few moments Eddie spied her again. Her hair was indeed a beacon. If she chose to slip a shawl or scarf over her head, he would certainly lose her in the crowd. He pushed his way through the throngs with greater haste.

She came to a stop on a corner, and Eddie could see her well enough to tell she was no ghost, only flesh and blood. He readied his camera. Just as he took her photograph, she lifted her eyes, and stared directly into the lens. Later he would see that her eyes were dark, ember-colored, and he would recall that the eyes of the girl in Weiss’s dime-store photograph were pale, clearly blue. But at that moment all he could focus on was that she had begun to approach him. He had no idea what to expect, certainly he never imagined she would strike him on the chest with open palms. He reeled backward, even though he was so tall, astonished by her fury.

“You think you can come here like a jackal and take photographs while we drown in our grief ?”

“You didn’t have to hit me.” He was thankful she hadn’t damaged the camera.

“We have some rights, you know,” she remarked coldly.

When she started away, Eddie took her arm. “You’re Miss Weiss?” Several young women on the corner were watching, clearly disturbed, but Eddie wasn’t concerned. It was unlikely they would signal one of the many policemen stationed nearby. None of them wanted the authorities involved in their affairs.

Eddie showed off the dime-store photograph. “Is this you?”

The young woman flushed. “What are you doing with this? Are you a thief ? Did you rob my father?”

“Your father came to me. He thought you were lost and asked for my help. But clearly you don’t want him to know where you are.”

“My father knows exactly where I am.
”
The girl raised her chin and nodded to the photograph. “This is my sister,” she said of the image.

They stood together as the crowds pushed past, an odd intimacy between them. “You’re twins?”

“A year apart. Not that it’s your business.”

“I just want to speak to you about her.”

“For all I know you could work for the insurance company, or for the police. If you follow me, I’ll hit you harder. And next time I’ll scream.” Hannah’s sister backed away, slipping into the crowd.

Eddie might have followed her, but he had learned early on that it wasn’t possible to force out information; evidence gathered in that manner would be unreliable at best, threaded with half truths and assumptions. The Wizard of the Lower East Side always instructed the boys he employed that, when one was searching for a person’s whereabouts, the individual’s entire history must be considered. With every case, the investigator must look backward in time. Who was the woman who had set off on March 25 wearing a blue coat, a treasured gold locket at her throat? It was the path of that soul he must set out to discover. To find someone, it was necessary to follow in the way that the angels who follow men’s lives on earth are said to do, charting each trespass without judgment, for judgment is never ours to give.

THE RAIN
was a familiar, bleak curtain when Eddie decided to return to the territory of his youth. After weeks of searching, he knew little more about Hannah Weiss than he had on the night when her father had first come to his studio. She seemed to have vanished completely, as though she’d fallen through the sidewalk and continued her fiery descent into the deepest recesses of the earth. He couldn’t help but wonder if he’d lost the knack for finding people, if his talent hadn’t come so easily to him that he hadn’t appreciated his own abilities.

Eddie sought out Sheriff Street. The weather was so raw he found himself shivering, and he kept his collar up, hands in his pockets. For a while he felt disoriented when confronted by the turmoil of the crowded markets, the steamy scent of vegetables and meat from the vendors, the men in wide black hats who gazed at him with contempt. The gutters in the old neighborhood ran with filth, for many tenement buildings were still without toilets, and the outhouses in the bare dirt yards drained sewage directly into the streets. The buildings were so close any bit of light would have been hard-pressed to break through even if the day hadn’t been so dreary. After a while, the streets seemed familiar once more. When he let his instincts take over, he still knew the route by heart. The Hall of Love looked the same. The large wooden doors, the carved balustrades, the tiled mosaic floor in the entranceway. He entered, clapping the rain from his jacket. Several women were gathered in the unheated corridor, anxiously waiting, hoping to be granted a meeting with the renowned man whose reputation had only continued to grow in the past few years. In Russia they called him an angel, a messenger from God who tended to the forsaken and the betrayed. A few of the women in the hallway held handkerchiefs, on the verge of tears. One young mother tried to hush her baby with a lullaby, but the infant continued to wail sharp, mournful cries. The air was thick with the odor of wet wool and human despair.

Two insolent boys of ten or eleven slouched around in a corner nook, caps pulled down, joking with each other as they amused themselves with a pair of dice. They were little ruffians hired to attend to Hochman’s legwork, as Eddie had once been, spending too much time in brothels and taverns. The boys lounging in the Hall of Love were most assuredly practiced in the art of eavesdropping and had learned to peer through keyholes. Those who were literate were instructed to jot down notes to bring back to their employer. Most became caught up in the tawdry life of debauchery they were only meant to report upon. The corruption was like quicksand; one step and it pulled you down.

Eddie approached the boys straightaway.
Start at the beginning
,
and here is mine
.

“Is the old man in?”

Eddie could feel the world he’d once known coming back to him. He may have lost his faith in taverns and whorehouses, but he’d been granted an odd variety of strength from being pitiless. His detachment had helped him survive.

The boys glared rudely and leaned closer to one another. Both had dark, rabbity faces. They’d probably been starving when Hochman offered them work.