The latecomers, p.1
The Latecomers, page 1
Copyright © 2018 by Helen Klein Ross
Cover design by Lauren Harms
Cover 3-D illustration by David Wu
Author photograph by John Gruen
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“This Moment.” Copyright © 1994 by Eavan Boland, from New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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ISBN 978-0-316-47687-4
E3-20180824-DA-NF
Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Family Tree
Prologue
Part One 1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
Part Two 31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
: Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Historical Notes
Selected Bibliography
Sites of Research
About the Author
Also by Helen Klein Ross
Newsletter
This novel is dedicated to my Irish-American
mother, Margaret Whelan Klein.
For Katherine and Margaret, too.
And, of course, for Donald.
One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.
A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.
Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark.
—Eavan Boland, “This Moment”
Author’s Note
Although many of the events that take place in this story are historical occurrences, this novel is a work of imagination. (As Muriel Spark observed, it is a blow to a novelist’s pride of invention if readers think otherwise.) But as I live in a small town in Connecticut in a house similar to the one described, perhaps it is necessary to say that the characters and the town they occupy are works of fiction, not disguised biography. While the story isn’t fact, I hope it rings true for readers who believe, as I do, that fiction is the conduit of our deepest truths.
Prologue
Emma
Upper East Side, Manhattan
September 2001
Emma pushed through the door of the ladies’ room by reception and turned on a tap and held her palms upward, letting cool water run over the veins in her wrists, the trick Arlette had taught her when she was in pre-K, to calm herself.
When Emma came out—there was her mother. Her mother was usually careful about looking her best when she came uptown to Thatcher, but now her mascara was running, her lipstick was gone, her face was wet with sweat and tears. Her mother hugged her and, for once, Emma hugged back, taking refuge in her arms as if she were a little kid instead of a freshman in high school. Her mother said she was there to take her home.
Suddenly, girls around them were talking, saying that Emma and her mother could come home with one of them, they all lived so close, only blocks away.
But Emma wanted, for once, the same thing her mother wanted, which was to go home. She hoped her father would be there. She knew her mother was hoping this too.
When they got to the street, they saw that many stores had already closed; hastily lettered signs were taped to accordion gates: CLOSED DUE TO TODAY’S CIRCUMSTANCES.
“We’ll need money,” her mother said, but the ATMs they passed were DOWN UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Long lines snaked from banks, and from pay phones.
Later, Emma found it ironic that the parents who had resisted giving their kids cell phones were finally persuaded to change their minds by the events of a day on which cell phones proved useless.
A huge crowd had gathered in front of the electronics store. What was on sale that so many people would take this moment to line up for? Then she saw—they were watching the TVs in the window. Emma and her mother stopped to watch too. News was coming so fast, it had to be reported in what looked like ticker tape running across the bottoms of screens. South Tower Collapsed.
They watched the tower come down again and again. Each time it fell, Emma was flooded with gratitude that her father worked in the other one. But then they showed footage of the North Tower and she felt a stinging at the back of her eyes. Windows in the towers were designed not to open, yet it looked like people were leaning out of them. Dark spots drifted down the sides of the building. Emma guessed it was debris from the fire, but then the cameras zoomed in and she saw—the dark spots were people. People were jumping. Some fell upright; some arched as they descended, doing backward Cs, like victory jumps, and Emma closed her eyes and did what she hadn’t done since she was a child: she reached for her mother’s hand. Her mother squeezed it and brought the back of Emma’s hand to her lips.
Emma felt certain that her father wasn’t one of the jumpers. He’d never have jumped, since it would have meant jumping away from them.
When they got to the subway at Eighty-Sixth, a sign at the entrance read NO MORE SERVICE TODAY.
They headed to Third, where going against traffic they saw—an army tank! Had a war started?
Her mother raised her arm to hail a cab. There were no cabs in sight. But after many changes of lights, a slightly battered car stopped in front of them. Car service. Emma’s mother opened the back door and Emma slid across several rips in the vinyl, making room for her mother. But she didn’t slide in.
“Take this to a Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street,” she said to Emma, fishing a twenty out of her wallet. “Take the train to your grandfather’s. Wait at Hollingwood until I come up with Daddy.”
At the sound of “Daddy,” Emma’s eyes filled.
“No!” Emma said, pushing the money away, sliding back across the seat toward her mother. “I’m staying with you. I want to go home!”
“They’re not letting anyone south of Fourteenth now. Do this for me, Emma. I can’t worry about you too.” She shoved the bill into Emma’s blazer pocket.
The car pulled away and Emma heard from speakers in the dashboard, “The National Guard on alert…fear of biological hazards.”
Alone in the backseat, she started to cry. She imagined her parents breathing in poisoned air, catching some terrible fatal disease. And what about her cat?
She had an appointment with the orthodontist later, but how straight your teeth were didn’t matter anymore.
Traffic was terrible. It took a long time for the car to get forty blocks north to the station. The driver and she didn’t talk. They just listened to the news.
When Emma pulled the bill from her pocket and handed it across the front seat, the driver didn’t take it.
“Keep it, peaches,” he said. “I’m not car service. I just stopped at the light. But you take care, you do what your mama says.”
“Thanks.” She nodded, thinking his kindness would have seemed extraordinary on any day but this.
Were trains still running? Were her grandfather and Arlette safe?
Hollingwood had stood in Wellington, Connecticut, since her great-great-great-grandfather built it in 1853.
Would it still be there?
Part One
1.
Hollingwood
October 1927
That morning, hours after the cock crowed but before the town-hall bell chimed eight, Bridey mounted narrow steps leading up from the kitchen, holding tight to the fluted handles of a silver oval on which Mr. Hollingworth’s breakfast quivered. Serving gloves weren’t insisted upon at Hollingwood as they were in the big houses on Fifth Avenue, where a friend from home worked, but Bridey sometimes wore them anyway—it spared prints on the silver, which saved time in the long run; the trays and pouring pots needn’t be polished so often.
Mr. Hollingworth’s breakfast was meager fare compared to the morning feasts she and Nettie used to cook up: blood sausages and custards, fruited popovers and muffins, eggs poached and scrambled and over easy or hard, depending on how he and his four children preferred them that day. But that was years ago, when the children were children, and breakfasts were rollicking starts of days in the dining room instead of quiet meals for an invalid who spent most of the time in bed.
A poached egg on toast is what she was carrying now to Mr. Hollingworth, along with a pot of coffee and a pitcher of cream she’d skimmed from the top of a bottle left this morning by the Byfield boys who’d taken over their father’s milk route. The bread was rack-toasted, despite the newly acquired electric toaster, which she hid in the pantry so it didn’t rebuke her. Sarah, the eldest, had brought it back from a traveling exhibition of housewares in Hartford, but Bridey didn’t trust the contraption, convinced that its complicated workings couldn’t be depended upon to produce the shade of toast she was after and, even more important, couldn’t be depended upon not to electrocute her. She’d racked toast on a fire for almost all of her thirty-four years. What would be the advantage of doing a task differently when it was one she had mastered and could do by hand without thinking? The electric cream separator, from the same exhibition, sat next to the toaster, both shrouded by covers that shielded them not only from dust but from Sarah’s notice should she wander into the pantry, an unlikely occurrence.
Bridey appreciated electrification in moderation. The house had been electrified ten years ago, soon after she’d stepped off the boat from the west country of Ireland, where electric lights were unheard of and they got along fine without them, thanks very much. Now, she appreciated being able to sew or read at night, which was hard to do by the flickering light of a candle. She sang the praises of the electric icebox. But Americans believed that if a thing was good, much more of a good thing was even better. Electric irons, electric sewing machines, even electric lighters for men’s cigars—Bridey couldn’t see the need for any of these, though Mr. Tupper, the electrician, assured her that such laborsaving devices were already proving indispensable to housekeepers.
A bell sounded in the stair corridor. The rear kitchen door. Bother. Bridey stepped backward and, careful to keep the tray in balance, turned and descended the steps. She set the tray on the counter, covered it with the silver dome, removed her gloves, and crossed the kitchen to open the door.
There, on the gray-painted porch, stood Mr. Tupper. It was as if he’d heard her maligning his work in her head.
“Come in, come in.” She swung the door wide to welcome him warmly, feeling a need to make up for the offense.
Mr. Tupper took off his cap as he stepped inside and set down his toolbox on the wide pine-board floor. “The Canfields were top of my list today, but they have guests stopping, so I’m here to replace your duals if it suits.”
“That would be grand,” said Bridey, pulling the door closed behind him. The sparrows were cheeping like chickens today. Yesterday, the door had been left ajar and one of them had flown in and it had taken her a mortal hour to shoo it out of the house.
When Mr. Tupper electrified Hollingwood, Mr. Hollingworth, like most home owners in Wellington, had prevailed upon him to convert existing gas fixtures to duals. Duals were lit by both electric lines and gas so that if electricity had turned out to be a passing fad, the lamps could be reverted to gas without the expense of calling Mr. Tupper again. Now it was clear that the invention had caught on and people were going all electric for safety reasons. Duals were proving to be temperamental. Last month, a leak of gas from a dual had caused a house just off Main Street to burst into flames. Mr. Tupper was so busy, it took months to get an appointment with him.
Today was far preferable to the December date marked on the wall calendar. It was still October. The holidays were a good ways away and whatever mess was about to be created would be certain not to interfere with holiday houseguests and entertaining. What’s more, Sarah and Edmund were abroad now, which meant they’d be spared seeing the mess that inevitably resulted from a visit by Mr. Tupper. Sarah became nervous when things in the house had to be changed.
Hollingwood had been built by Sarah’s grandfather, a governor of Connecticut who had drawn the plans for the house himself, which accounted for why the house wasn’t like any Bridey had seen. It was the biggest house in town, built with stones mined from local quarries that weren’t around anymore. The house looked to Bridey like a house in a fairy tale. It rambled this way and that, with long hallways and bow windows and several porches and sunrooms and a four-story octagonal turret. The windows at the top of the turret were arched and color-stained like church windows and whenever Bridey went up there to sweep up dead flies or dust the old telescope that nobody used, she stopped a moment to gaze through the colored panes, taking in the holy beauty of the field and the lake and the evergreens bordering everything, like a backdrop.
Bridey offered Mr. Tupper tea and a scone still warm from the oven and he ate efficiently, standing up at the worktable, careful to keep crumbs from falling onto his beard. As he dunked the scone into the teacup, he apologized for having to cut a hole in the wall. His work would damage the wallpaper, he said, which would have to be replaced. The thought of that made Bridey wonder if she ought to put him off after all. Perhaps she ought to consult Sarah, but Sarah was in Italy with Edmund on an extended lecture tour of the lake towns to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Their sixteenth. They’d married the summer after Bridey came to Hollingwood, and had her coming here really been so many years ago?
Sarah was the only one of the children who lived at home now. She’d returned to Hollingwood with Edmund soon after they married, having discovered that two Mrs. Porters in a house was one too many. Sarah was educated in many things (politics, painting, gardening) but left on her own, Bridey guessed, Sarah wouldn’t be able to boil an egg. Sarah was always seeking happiness afar, in every place but home, though that was where she was certain of finding it.
To Bridey’s mind, Vincent had suffered mightily because of this. Bridey, always alert to the boy, had spent years trying to relieve his suffering due to his mother’s inattention to him and it saddened her to know that she could not relieve it altogether. But now—Vincent wasn’t a boy anymore. He would be eighteen next birthday and how lucky for him, for all of them, that the Great War was over so the prospect of his being sacrificed for it needn’t be contemplated.
If Bridey turned Mr. Tupper away, it would be weeks before he came back, then it would be Christmas, a season of parties and celebrations, and it wouldn’t do for the front hall to be in a state. As Mr. Tupper finished his scone, Bridey went down to the basement and came back with old sheets from the rag bin. She’d learned the hard way about covering the furniture.
She led Mr. Tupper through the butler’s pantry and, with an elbow (her arms were full of the sheets), pushed the glass plate on the door panel, swung through the door, and took him left past the linen closet so as not to lead his work boots across the good dining-room rug.
As she turned into the hallway, she saw the scrolled brass arms of the dual to be replaced. Bridey hated to think of harm to the wallpaper beneath it. But there was a good wallpaper man in town now, and the decorator from France who’d hung the paper originally had had the foresight to leave an extra roll in the attic.
Mr. Tupper helped Bridey draw sheets over chairs and tables in the hall, then Bridey returned to the kitchen, touched the silver pot to make sure it was still warm (Mr. Hollingworth didn’t take hot coffee, due to sensitive teeth), slipped on the gloves, lifted the tray, and again mounted the stairs.
