The Museum of Extraordinary Things

  I discovered which factories Block’s family owned and made a list that I carried with me. I stood outside each one, including the loft where my father and Isaac Rosenfeld’s father had worked years ago. For several years Block disappeared. I found out later he had gone to Harvard College, then to law school. When he moved back into his family’s house after his residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was still around. Sometimes I stationed myself across from his family’s home. In the half-light I gazed through the tall arched windows. It was a brownstone mansion on Sixty-second Street, built by the architects Hunt and Hunt with beautiful cornice pieces and elaborate stone carvings. Surely, it could not compare to Mrs. Vanderbilt’s block-long monstrosity of red bricks and limestone, built in 1882 across from the Plaza Hotel, inspired by a chateau in the Loire Valley. All the same, the Block mansion was grand enough. I felt even more like a criminal when I lurked there. I felt trouble course through me. I had photographed some gang members in the Tombs prison before their hangings, moments before they crossed from the courthouse to their incarceration and death over a connecting bridge that prisoners called the Bridge of Sighs. I’d wondered if these men had always known they would murder and rob and that their fates would lead them to ruin. As for me, I had no idea what I was capable of. Was the future set, or could a man change his destiny and make his own decisions as to what came next? Perhaps it was as Hochman had once said to me, that a man had many lives. Each day we chose the path we would take by our own actions.

  And yet I did not feel that way whenever I turned onto Sixty-second Street. I felt pulled there by something far beyond my control.

  I was jumpy and unpredictable as I stationed myself outside the mansion, like the arrested men I photographed. They often hung their heads and would not look full face into the camera. It was difficult to get a decent portrait of a criminal. Surely the same could have been said of me had my photograph ever been taken, not that it ever had been. I did not wish to be anyone’s subject, or to expose what the lens might reveal.

  I took to the shadows when I was positioned outside the Blocks’ mansion, and in doing so became a shadow of myself. I became acquainted with the people who lived in the house by merely observing them. The scullery maids and the liveryman I knew by name. There was a maid called Agnes, and another called Sarah. Several workingmen who were in charge of the upkeep of the mansion cleared the grounds, among them a fellow they called Stick, who seemed to be their boss and who occasionally threw me a look. I slinked down the street at such times, but soon enough I was back, reckless in my need to stalk the family. I knew the schedules of the well-dressed women, Block’s grandmother and mother, and an attractive younger woman with a serious expression who went in and out with her friends, all wearing large, extravagant feathered hats and silk cloaks. She was the girl I’d frightened long ago, the one with the rabbit coat. My timing was always off, and I never caught a glimpse of Block himself. Then at last I saw him headed for the doorway, Harry Block, the boy who’d handed over his watch without a fight, now a gentleman of means and responsibilities. He exited a carriage, wearing a fur-collared coat and a silk bowler. He thanked the liveryman, whom I knew to be named Marcus, clapping him on the back good-naturedly before he took the steps two at a time. Block was handsome and well mannered, at ease in the world, as rich men often were. My rage was white-hot. I felt it in my blood. It was as if the day when my father stepped off the dock had happened only hours before. Hochman had been right, the past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go. Fate was both what we were given and what we made for ourselves.

  I hadn’t given up the hatred I carried.

  I took to following Block, and soon enough knew his routine. Once I leapt unnoticed and caught onto the rear of his carriage. I hung on as it made its way down Broadway, only inches away from him. My heart pounded as the wooden wheels hit ruts in the street, but my hands clenched the brass railings. I stepped off before the carriage stopped, leaving to ensure I didn’t assault him. He oversaw the factories that belonged to his father, and also had a legal practice in which he served as the attorney for many other factory owners. He was on the boards of several charities, well known for his fund-raising abilities.

  I positioned myself outside his family’s mansion on the night an event was held to celebrate the new library that was being built in the Beaux Arts style between Fortieth and Forty-second Street. The building would stand in the place where there had been a man-made four-acre lake with water from the Croton Reservoir, surrounded by a twenty-five-foot Egyptian-style wall. Now a new, larger reservoir had been built in Westchester County, and the library would be considered a true wonder of the city, elegant, enormous, a free education for the people of New York. The party was to raise funds, but it was a gathering outside the usual social hierarchy, for it was unlikely that these donors would ever be invited into the parlor of the Astors, who had given the bulk of the funds. These were Jews, after all, wealthy, but still separate.

  I slipped inside by assuring the doorman—whom I recognized as an elderly fellow called Barker—that I’d been sent by the Tribune to take photographs of the event. I had my camera with me, and I showed my press pass, which didn’t mean much but seemed to satisfy the servant. I felt a thief simply walking over the plush carpeting. It was blue and red, a grand Chinese tapestry, and the floors of the entranceway were polished slabs of black and white marble. Another servant of some sort, one who must have been hired for the evening, for I failed to recognize him, led me past a telephone room fashioned of golden oak into the great hall, where there was a hanging Tiffany lamp of enormous proportions that cast a warm glow. The woodwork gleamed, and there were angels carved into the wooden cornices. The family was gathered here, including the father, my own father’s old employer. The senior Mr. Block seemed to have some illness, as he was unable to leave his chair. I took my time in setting up my camera. I was not the only photographer. The family had hired a society fellow I knew, Jack Hailey, who had access to Manhattan’s elite, and acted as if he wasn’t a lowly newsman. He was annoyed by my presence and told me in no uncertain terms he planned to sell photographs to the papers so I shouldn’t bother trying to sell mine.

  “Fuck you, Hailey,” I said. “Kiss their asses if you want. I’ll do as I please.”

  The young woman who was Harry’s sister happened to overhear. She was tall and refined with a solemn demeanor. She gazed at me, concerned, then turned to whisper something in her brother’s ear. He patted her arm in a comforting but somewhat condescending manner. Harry’s sister had turned out to be attractive though she hadn’t been a pretty girl. When she wasn’t surrounded by her silly friends, her expression was thoughtful, her eyes bright with intelligence. I’d seen her turn down glasses of champagne, and I noticed she kept to herself. Her personality seemed rather serious, and I imagined that she would have chosen to walk away from the festivities and have a moment to herself, preferring to sit on a park bench under an elm tree, for instance, watching the dark filter through the branches like any common woman. But she wore so many diamonds she would have been robbed in an instant.

  I took two “official” photographs, then managed to take another when the family wasn’t posed and were moving apart from one another. Juliet seemed in a hurry to be gone from that setting. In that photograph, Harry Block is the only one staring directly into the camera. When I look at that image now, I think he understood that he had been seen in some deep way, and that everything he was at his core had been caught on film. I did have a moment where I wondered if I’d stolen not only his watch but his soul.

  I quickly packed up and made my way through the crowd. My hatred of those in attendance was simmering, and I suppose I was a thug if thugs are those who come uninvited to a party with murderous intentions in their hearts, acted upon or not. How was it that a terrible son such as I was able to feel such vengeance for what this class of people had done to my father? I detested how
they’d caused his fingers to bleed and how they’d stripped him of his pride.

  Harry Block stopped me in the hallway. The room was shaped like a teardrop, the plaster walls painted a glossy peacock blue. We stood on the enormous Oriental rug, stitched by laborers for pennies, causing some of the workmen to go blind from the smallness of their stitches and the closeness of their work. It was a beautiful creation, one I despised.

  “You! Wait a moment.”

  The camera stand was over my shoulder. If I hoisted it, it could be used as a weapon. Moses Levy would have despaired had he known of my willingness to consider a piece of equipment meant to illuminate beauty to be equally useful in an act of brutality.

  “Did you hear me?” Block called.

  I turned and gazed at him directly, my enemy.

  “Did I get your name?” he asked. “I was told you work for the papers.”

  “I’ve got your name,” I answered. I barely recognized my own voice, for it carried a flat, dangerous tone. “Harry.”

  My companion was accustomed to being called Mr. Block, particularly by servants, which he clearly considered me to be. He narrowed his eyes and gazed fully into my face to see if he could conjure up some remembrance of who I might be. I could tell he saw an utter stranger. I was nothing to him after all.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the watch. I quickly flipped it open to check the hour. “Time for me to go,” I informed him.

  He hadn’t recognized me, but he knew the timepiece well enough. He looked at me again, even more puzzled. All the same, he didn’t try to stop me as I made my way out of the mansion. I went through the darkened streets, my anger burning through me. But after twenty blocks, it was gone. It vanished and left me hollow. I thought of the grave expression on my father’s face when I’d tossed the stolen watch on the table. He hadn’t known me any more than Harry Block did now. From that time on I was a stranger to my father and to myself. I wished I’d never taken the thing in the first place. I wished I could have returned it. But like it or not, the watch belonged to me now, and every day I carried it, it served to remind me of who I had become.

  APRIL 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 murmured 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?”