Chapter Sixteen
Nellie took the Sixth Avenue Elevated up toward the Lazarus home at Forty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. Down below her the foot traffic was thick, now that the snow from the Great Blizzard had finally melted away. From thirty feet above, on a stifling summer day, she was reminded of animals in a stockyard awaiting slaughter. But as the train rolled into the city’s more well-to-do neighborhoods, traffic in general thinned out considerably—due in no small part to Pinkerton guards stationed on each corner from Forty-Third Street up to Sixty-Third Street to discourage the unwashed.
She walked four blocks to the Lazarus home on upper Fifth Avenue, a large brownstone with a dozen chimneys and a two-story balcony edifice over the entrance, which fit nicely among the other large mansions in the most expensive neighborhood in the city.
Nellie had decided to visit Emma’s sisters unannounced, fearing that if she sent a telegram or sought permission some other way, they would simply decline to see her. Cockerill said the family had almost disowned Emma for the embarrassment she’d provoked by working with immigrants. Nellie suspected the sisters would want nothing at all to do with a newspaper reporter inquiring about Emma and a possible murder. But it would be harder to turn her away in person.
She walked up the dozen granite steps and rang the bell by the large cast-iron portal. A moment later, a gruff maidservant in her fifties opened the door.
“Yes?” asked the woman uninvitingly.
“I am here to see Miss Anne Lazarus and Miss Josephine Lazarus.”
“They are not expecting anyone.”
“The matter I wish to discuss came up suddenly.”
She handed the maidservant a calling card. The woman frowned when she saw it.
“Miss Anne and Miss Josephine do not speak with the press,” said the maidservant. “May I suggest you write and ask for an appointment?”
“I have important information about their sister, Emma.”
“Perhaps you might mention that in your request.”
“I have reason to believe she was murdered.”
That shook the woman out of her impassive demeanor. “I will wait here,” said Nellie.
The maidservant went back inside. Nellie looked around at the sidewalk below. The lamps were powered by electricity and had bulbs rather than gas lanterns. Nellie had read about such streetlamps in Paris and London, but this was the first time she had ever seen them for herself. Any New York neighborhood wishing to change over to electric lights had to pay for the lamps and generator itself, and so far only the wealthy area bounded by Fifth and Madison, from Forty-Eighth to Fifty-Second, had done so.
Two homely women in their early thirties, in conservative attire that left only the hands and face uncovered, appeared at the door, trailed by the maidservant.
“Miss Bly?” said the taller one. “I am Josephine Lazarus. And this is my sister, Anne.” Josephine was the harsher-looking and more commanding of the two. Anne struck Nellie as gentle but intimidated by her older sister.
“Thank you for seeing me,” said Nellie.
“What’s this about a murder?”
“May I come in?” The sisters hesitated. “It is not a matter to be discussed on a stoop in this neighborhood,” said Nellie.
“All right.” Josephine reluctantly turned to the maidservant. “Sarah, we will be in the library.”
The sisters retreated inside, leaving Nellie standing there. No invitation to have tea, no offer to take her coat. The maidservant held the door open, and Nellie stepped into a giant foyer with tapestries of French battle scenes. The fifteen-foot-high walls were papered seamlessly in a gray pattern, and silver candelabra gleaned on marble counters.
Nellie recalled her first memories of her family house in Apollo, then the newest and largest in town. There was such joy in that house. This one, by contrast, seemed to have been completely drained of joy. She followed the maidservant to a room off the main hall, a library with shelves two stories high and a balcony fifteen feet up. The room itself was littered with loose papers and open books.
Josephine motioned her in, pointed to a chair, and closed the door behind her. “Now, what is this assertion you have concerning Emma?” she asked, sitting across from her on a French Louis XV hand-carved walnut sofa with a lime-colored damask, resting on six exquisitely carved cabriole legs.
“I have reason to believe your sister was poisoned.”
“Miss Bly,” said Anne, “she saw the finest doctors in England. They were perfectly clear she was dying of cancer. I know that because I was with her at every visit. And the illness proceeded exactly as they described.”
“I have no doubt she suffered a cancer, Miss Lazarus. But her death was accelerated and ultimately caused by poison. Specifically, arsenic.”
“Arsenic? That’s impossible,” said Josephine.
“Is it? Why?”
“Anne or I were with Emma at virtually every moment for eight months.”
“No friends or acquaintances kept watch while you left the room? One of you was with her at all times? Are you absolutely sure?”
“There may have been a few moments here or there. But who would have wanted to kill Emma? And why? The doctors all agreed she would be dead within months.”
“Both of those questions I hesitate to answer until I have actual proof she was murdered.”
“And how would you obtain such proof? She has been dead for nearly a year.” Josephine’s skepticism made clear she considered the conversation a waste of time.
“I have a scientist who believes he can determine the true cause of her death if presented with a piece of your sister’s clothing.”
“Her clothing? How would that help him?”
“He believes that traces of the poison would remain on the clothing. He is highly respected, Miss Lazarus. And I am convinced he is right.”
Josephine shook her head. “We mourned our sister’s death for nearly a year, Miss Bly, and now occupy ourselves with her legacy, an anthology of her poems.” She indicated all the loose papers in the room. “We plan to have two volumes to the printer by the anniversary of her death. There is no point in spending time examining her demise.”
Nellie had not expected this.
“But what if she was, in fact, murdered?”
“Emma presented us with enough of the sensational in her own lifetime,” said Josephine. “I see no reason to continue that into ours.”
“Surely you want to know if your sister’s death came at the hands of another—”
Josephine stood up abruptly. “Thank you for visiting, Miss Bly. We won’t detain you any longer.”
Nellie stared at her, completely at a loss. It made no sense that someone would have no interest in learning how her sister was killed.
“May I at least borrow a nightgown she wore in her final weeks? Or a blanket she used?”
“No. As I said, the matter of Emma’s death will stay at rest.”
Josephine strode toward the door. But Anne’s curiosity got the best of her. “Miss Bly. Whom do you suspect of arranging this poisoning?”
“Mr. Henry Hilton. He despised your sister.”
“Yes, he did.” Josephine glared at Anne for prolonging the discussion. “But their problems occurred more than ten years ago.”
“Mr. Hilton’s fortune has shrunk every year. He holds your sister, and Jews in general, responsible.”
“Mr. Hilton went to great lengths not to include our family in his criticism of Jews. He wrote a letter to our father, personally inviting him to stay as his guest at the Grand Hotel. He would never have committed violence against one of our family.”
The naïveté and ignorance of these women was stunning.
“Please excuse us, Miss Bly,” said Josephine. “We have work to do.”
“Yes. The anthology,” said Nellie, looking at the papers strewn about the room.
Nellie was not prepared to leave empty-handed. It was imperative to come away with an item for Ingram to examine. She wracked her brain for some other way to get through to the sisters, but Josephine interrupted, as if she could see the gears turning.
“Let me explain, Miss Bly. The circumstances of Emma’s death are of little interest to us. Anything about her in the newspapers at this point should be related to her poetry, not the manner of how she left this world.”
Something didn’t make sense about the anthology. Nellie finally realized what it was.
“Your sister wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems. Why only two volumes?”
“We omitted poems, if you want to call them that, when Emma meandered on to one of her political tangents. We are putting forth only more traditional poetry.”
“Those will have the most enduring legacy,” added Anne.
“May I see the table of contents?”
“Certainly.”
Anne proudly handed her a piece of paper, hoping for a compliment. Nellie perused the list and noted the most glaring omission.
“What about ‘The New Colossus’?”
“That will not be included in the two volumes,” said Josephine tartly.
“But it is a masterpiece. I have never read anything so stirring.”
“I am glad it moved you, Miss Bly. Perhaps someday we will include it in a collection of her more zealous poems,” Josephine said with a chill.
Nellie, astounded by the bowdlerization of Emma’s canon, observed that “1492,” an epic poem comparing Columbus’s discovering America with the Spanish Inquisition, was not there. Nor were Emma’s passionate reviews of Daniel Daronda, George Eliot’s masterpiece of an Englishman discovering his Jewish roots, which Emma wrote had changed her life.
“We really should get back to the compilation. Sarah!” The maidservant appeared at the door.
“Please show Miss Bly out.”
Nellie brusquely walked past the sisters and the maidservant without a thank you or good-bye. Without an item of Emma’s clothing, she had no idea where next to turn.
She reached to open the front door.
“Miss Bly!”
It was the maidservant, Sarah.
“The door can be peculiar sometimes. Please.”
Sarah opened the front door for her. As Nellie walked past, Sarah deftly slipped a folded-up piece of cloth from under her apron and handed it to her.
“This was the covering for Miss Emma’s pillow,” she whispered. “It has not been washed since her death. In fact, her entire room has stayed the same since the day she died.”
Nellie looked at her with surprise. The woman could lose her job for something like this.
“Miss Emma was a lovely girl,” she said in a low voice filled with emotion. “I knew her since she was a child. If she was murdered, the world should know of it.”
Nellie slipped the pillow covering inside her coat. Mixed in with determination was a look of fear on Sarah’s face.
“I will not say where I got this. I promise,” Nellie whispered and walked out.
Sarah closed the door behind her. Nellie proceeded down the steps, the pillowcase hidden in her jacket, her left arm pressing against it. She dared not move it until she was safely away from the house, lest the sisters were watching from the window.
She had gotten what she wanted.
“I’m not surprised,” said Alan Dale.
The sisters’ attitude had confounded Nellie. How could anyone not care if their own sister was murdered? She hoped that Alan Dale, as a Jew and a friend of Emma’s, might enlighten her, so she stopped to see him before taking the pillowcase to Ingram.
“To you and to me, Miss Bly, Emma Lazarus was a person to be revered. To her family, she was nothing short of an embarrassment.”
“That was the very word they used this afternoon. I don’t understand. Her poems were admired around the world. She had audiences with royalty. She devoted herself to the poor. How could such a woman possibly be an embarrassment?”
“You need to understand that the Lazarus family has already suffered several major scandals and wants to avoid all mention in the press. One uncle was brutally murdered and no arrest was ever made. His brother, who was suspected of the murder, was shot by a prostitute and barely survived. A third uncle was a justice on the New York Supreme Court and forced to resign after being implicated in a Tammany Hall scandal. The sisters grew up in this public ignominy. The last thing they want is more of it.”
“But Emma was practically a saint. They seemed almost ashamed of her.”
“Miss Lazarus’s family were Sephardim,” said Dale with a shrug.
“Sephardim?” Nellie had never heard the term.
“Jews who lived in Spain before the Inquisition and then fled to Portugal and the Portuguese colonies. Several thousand of them came to America in the 1600s, when those colonies were no longer safe. At first they encountered persecution here—”
“Mr. Cockerill mentioned that. But in a short time, the Lazaruses made a fortune.”
“Indeed. But what Cockerill no doubt failed to tell you was that like most Sephardim, the Lazarus family kept their Jewish identity to themselves, unveiling it only at their homes or in their synagogues. They had a public life and a private life, an arrangement that worked well for Jews in Colonial America. But eventually a new wave of Jewish immigrants arrived in this country, from Germany and Central Europe, who looked and sounded very different from the Sephardim of Iberia. They were poor and had Germanic names and accents and practiced a much different brand of Judaism, and the Sephardim looked down on them. Sephardic daughters were forbidden to marry or even converse with German Jews. Sephardic men avoided doing business with German men. Joseph Seligman, the man Hilton turned away from the hotel in Saratoga, was a German Jew, and truth be known, many Sephardim had no problem with what Hilton did to him. They would have done exactly the same, given the chance.”
“But he was still a Jew.”
“He was a German Jew, which to many Sephardim meant he was no Jew at all. Emma’s family was outraged when she organized a boycott on behalf of Seligman, but they put up with it, in part because President Lincoln and President Grant had treated him as a war hero. But her work at Castle Garden … that was simply unacceptable.”
“She was helping the poor.”
“Yes, but it was the nature of these particular poor that so upset the family. These new immigrants were below even German Jews. They were Russian Jews.”
None of this was making sense to Nellie.
“You see,” Dale continued, “in Russia and Poland, Jews were poor farmers, with little education. In Germany at least they could function as merchants. After Tsar Alexander, who had provided protection for Jews, was murdered in 1881, hundreds of thousands of Jews in Russia and Poland were slaughtered and their villages burned to the ground. Those who survived fled to Germany and France and England, but those countries were overwhelmed by the numbers—one hundred thousand immigrated to Britain alone. The Hebrews in Europe wrote their brethren in the States, asking them to take in some of the poor souls, but the Jews in America turned them down cold.” Dale recounted the history with total disdain.
“For what possible reason?”
“They claimed there was no place to put them. They said the new arrivals could not make it as farmers—the crops here were too different from those in Russia and Poland—and the Lower East Side was already as crowded as a rat’s nest. They were too big a burden for the community, and the Jewish leaders here refused to take them.”
“How could they refuse?” Nellie asked incredulously.
“You’re Irish, aren’t you, Miss Bly?”
“Yes. But I don’t see—”
“How would your well-to-do Protestant friends feel about taking in a bunch of Catholic beggars from Dublin?”
“The Catholics would not bother to ask because they would know the answer. But the Jews have such a history of persecution. To turn their backs on their own—”
“They didn’t forbid them from coming; they simply said they would not look after them. The immigrants would have to survive with absolutely no support—and with no knowledge of English, no way of earning a living, no way to feed their families. It was disgraceful, and Emma Lazarus refused to accept it. She went to her friends in the press—including Mr. Pulitzer, I’m proud to say—and publicly shamed the more prominent Jews here, many of them members of the same synagogue as her family. She raised money to provide for the immigrants and found them work and shelter and gave them an appropriate welcome. But the family was horrified and wanted to disown her. In fact, if the father had not had a prolonged illness, the sisters would have disowned her. He was the only one in the family defending her.”
That explained why so few poems were part of the compilation, Nellie realized. The sisters wanted the history of Emma’s life to stop before the incident at the Union Hotel in 1877. As far as they were concerned, the Emma after that time could be buried forever.
“So you see, Miss Bly, Emma has brought the Lazarus family quite enough attention from the press for a while.”
Mrs. Fairley, the receptionist in Ingram’s office, was as sullen as ever.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Fairley,” Nellie greeted her with insincere good cheer.
“Good afternoon, Miss Bly,” returned Mrs. Fairley with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
“Is Dr. Ingram available?”
“He is with patients.”
Nellie knew that was the case, of course, and in fact timed her visit so she would not see Ingram. His plans continued to wound her deeply and constantly, and she was not at all sure how she would react if she saw him. She decided she would meet with him after he had done the chemical analysis. There was no need before then.
“I have something for him.” Nellie set the pillowcase, wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine, on the desk. “He is expecting it.”
Mrs. Fairley took out her scissors.
“Do not unwrap it, please. It is of scientific import.”
“He prefers me to open packages—”
“He prefers nothing of the sort. I have told him that the paper seams are marked in ink, and he will become very upset if the package has been opened.”
Mrs. Fairley’s cheeks flushed with color.
“You listen to me, young lady. I am his assistant—”
“Not in his laboratory, Mrs. Fairley. Only in his reception area. In Dr. Ingram’s scientific work you have no place. And should that ever change, I will take my inquiries elsewhere.”
Mrs. Fairley had never been spoken to like that, certainly not by a woman twenty years her junior. But Nellie was fed up, and with Ingram about to leave her life, she saw no reason to suffer Mrs. Fairley’s ill-mannered judgments any longer.
“That should be no problem,” snapped Mrs. Fairley. “I’m sure you have many doctors who see you in the late afternoon.”
Now it was Nellie’s turn to go flush. This woman observed more than Nellie thought and lacked the good taste to be quiet about it.
“Please have him inform me when he has the results,” she said and left.
Nellie’s impatience with Mrs. Fairley stemmed from more than Ingram’s impending departure. Almost immediately after obtaining the pillowcase from Sarah, Nellie had realized it would be of limited value. The fabric would confirm whether or not Emma was murdered, and in that sense it was helpful, but without someone to attest that it had actually belonged to Emma—in other words, unless Sarah was prepared to lose her job—Nellie could not use it to make a convincing case to the public. She would be asserting that the most famous poet in America had been murdered and asking the readers to take her word for it. The pressure to disclose the source for the story would be enormous. But asking Sarah to identify herself publicly was out of the question.
Employment for women of any age, particularly Sarah’s, was hard to come by, and as much as Nellie wanted to see that story in the paper, she could not bring herself to consider making such a request.
Ingram had said the item need not be an article of clothing. It could be anything she held or sat on or leaned against. Nellie asked herself who visited Emma frequently those last three months. Her family, of course, but they would be of no help. Charles DeKay, but he too had to be eliminated, for obvious reasons. Surely, thought Nellie, Emma must have had friends concerned for her health whom she would have insisted on seeing. But how could Nellie find them?
Her only hope was the World’s archives. She asked to see copies of all New York newspapers within two weeks of either side of Emma’s death. At first, the archivist balked, uncomfortable with assisting a woman and especially being alone with one in the isolated stacks of old newspapers. He quickly relented, however, when Nellie threatened to summon Pulitzer himself, who would no doubt take great exception at the waste of his time and probably relieve the archivist of his duties on the spot. The archivist then dutifully brought her copies of all the New York newspapers during the period requested.
The World, befitting Pulitzer, had a laudatory obituary quoting Emma’s poetry extensively and detailing her charity work, but it contained nothing like the traditional “those in the company of at time of death.” The Times piece, which was most likely written by DeKay himself as the current arts editor, was a strange mix of rhapsodic admiration for her poetry and petty criticisms of her character: “Devoted to study and by nature extremely fastidious and critical, Emma Lazarus had comparatively few intimates, but they were constant and warm.” It, too, made no mention of those at the bedside at time of death. Nor did the Herald and Sun, though they discoursed at length about Emma’s literary and charitable accomplishments. Interestingly, it was the Tribune, the greatest exponent of anti-Semitism in the New York press, that provided the information she wanted.
“… she was surrounded by her sisters, Anne and Josephine, her editors at the Atlantic, Helena and Richard Gilder, and friends, most notably the poet and philanthropist Julia Ward Howe.”
Julia Ward Howe?! Nellie had to read the item several times to make sure she wasn’t seeing things. The composer of the most famous song in America, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Every schoolchild and every adult knew that song by heart. It was sung in churches and theater halls, at picnics and family gatherings, and even popped into Nellie’s mind at the sight of the composer’s name.
Julia Ward Howe was the great moral force of the United States. It was impossible to overstate the esteem held for her in most of the country, especially by women. She was active in causes throughout the nineteenth century, from abolishing slavery to promoting women’s suffrage to helping Russian émigrés to founding the nation’s first school for the blind. She was as close to royalty as existed in the country, and people from all over the world went to her Portsmouth, Rhode Island home to pay tribute. Now that she had reached seventy, she left Portsmouth only for a summer home in Newport and rarely left her beloved New England at all. Yet she had visited Emma’s sickbed and attended her funeral.
Nellie hurried to Cockerill’s desk.
“I need to send a telegram to Portsmouth, Rhode Island.”
Nellie had proved her mettle by covering for him with Pulitzer. Cockerill now viewed her as one of his reporters, and he would do anything to help her.
“We have a reporter in Providence,” he said. “He can arrange it. Portsmouth is twenty miles away.”
“I need it delivered immediately. It involves Emma Lazarus.”
“I’ll send it to him myself. Do you have the address?”
“No. But the person is well-known in Portsmouth. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe.”
Cockerill looked at her in surprise.
“What is her connection with Miss Lazarus?”
“Mrs. Ward Howe is known for never leaving New England. Yet she was by Emma’s side when she died.”
Cockerill took out a piece of paper and a pen.
“Bring a suitcase tomorrow morning and an extra coat. Long Island Sound can be chilly this time of year.”