New York

  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.

  As for Anna, at eighteen she had filled out into a young woman, but she was still almost as slim as she had been when she was a young girl. Men turned to look after her in the street; she had no young man though, and said she wasn’t interested. Salvatore was sure of one thing. “If any young man comes calling for you, he won’t just have to get past Father,” he told her, “he’ll have to be inspected by me.” Only the best would do for his sister.

  “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?”

  Of the thirty thousand policemen in the city, many of them Irish fellow Catholics, hardly any could speak Italian. True, the NYPD had started an Italian squad. But its chief had been killed on a visit to Sicily by a gangster named Don Vito, and the squad had become insignificant after that. So long as Italian crime remained within the Italian quarter, the New York police didn’t interfere too much.

  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.

  On Saturday, March 25, 1911, Anna went to work as usual. It was a fine day. Saturday was the shortest working day at the Triangle Factory. Work began at nine in the morning and finished at 4:45 p.m., with a forty-five-minute break for lunch. By the time she arrived, there was a crowd outside waiting to go in.

  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 sh
e 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.

  Saturday afternoons were always a little hectic. At the end of the week’s work, the shipping clerks would be running around trying to get all the final orders completed. As finishing time approached, the pay packets were given out. You couldn’t go before the final bell, of course, but some of the girls who had young men waiting for them were getting ready to make a speedy exit. As the bell went, and the power to the machines was cut off, everybody rose. But Anna wasn’t in a hurry. She took a little mirror out of her bag. Might as well make herself look nice before meeting the mystery man. She attended to this while the girls started moving toward the door. She was still sitting there when she heard something strange. Someone was shouting.

  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.”

  When he reached the building, he checked first the front doorway, then the one around the corner on Greene Street. There was no sign of Anna. Moments later, a group of girls came out of the front entrance. He spoke to one of them and learned that they’d come down from the eighth floor in the elevator. “The fire’s caught the boxes of cotton,” she told him. “They went up like they were kerosene.”

  “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.

  Anna was standing by one of the ninth-floor windows. Girls were appearing at the other windows on that floor too. They seemed indistinct, and then he realized that there must be smoke in the room behind them. One of the girls opened a window, and some smoke came out. There was a faint flickering of light in the cavernous space behind them. The flames must have reached that floor.

  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.

  The young man who jumped had gone straight through the net. Anna and the other girls who’d followed her had hardly been slowed at all before they hit the sidewalk. Amazingly, Anna’s face was quite preserved, though the back of her head was entirely crushed. He didn’t need the fireman to tell him she was dead.

  “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.”

  The last year had seen rather a decline in Hetty, which was only to be expected at her age. As they moved through the great marble entrance hall, however, she insisted on walking up the stairs.

  “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.