Chapter Thirty-One

She lay in bed for a week, barely moving. Her mother brought her meals, but Nellie couldn’t touch them. She knew she had to eat, that it was harmful to starve herself, but she was too depressed to ingest food. And guilty. It was bad enough to lose the love of her life, but he had died defending her, and she felt totally responsible.

Ingram’s family took his body back to their home in Albany for burial. Nellie did not go along. She had said her good-byes in the ambulance and was too shattered to contemplate leaving the house, let alone the city.

Mary Jane stepped in as caretaker and quietly stayed nearby without bothering her. Nellie appreciated it. Her mother had always been fiercely loyal and was proving so again. But mother and daughter needed money. Pulitzer had sent flowers and words of condolence and told her to take as long as she needed before returning to work, but no mention was made of money, and Nellie and Mary Jane had no savings. They had used up what little they had when they moved to New York. It was well and good to know a job would be waiting for her, but she had nothing to live on in the meantime. Adding to her financial woes, Ingram’s family would soon be selling the house.

And so, after five days of little sleep, no food, and terrible heartache, Nellie dragged herself out of bed and took the streetcar to Newspaper Row. She had sent Mary Jane out every day for a copy of the paper, to try and occupy her mind and to see the reaction to the Emma Lazarus story, but it hadn’t yet appeared in the paper. Nellie assumed Pulitzer or Cockerill had some questions for her—it was, after all, accusing one of New York City’s leading literary editors of murder—and were waiting until she returned, out of a sense of decency. Still, she had to admit to a certain surprise, even annoyance, that the story had not run, and wished her first dealings with the newspaper after her return did not arouse her impatience.

She walked past hulking security guard Flaherty, who had heard what happened with Ingram. Seeing that the stuffing had been taken out of her, he merely nodded. She entered the building and walked to the newsroom but without the thrill she felt every other time she’d smelled the newsprint and heard the clatter of reporters and machinery. She headed toward her desk and lifted her skirts above the tobacco juice on the newsroom floor without her usual resentment or disgust. Those reactions seemed so minor now, so beside the point.

Cockerill was sitting at his desk, editing a story, as she approached him. “Hello, Mr. Cockerill.”

He looked up with surprise. “Miss Bly.” Cockerill was a hard man, but there was pain on his face when he saw what Ingram’s death had done to her. “I am so sorry.”

“Thank you.” Mixed in with his sympathy, she could see, was also a puzzlement. Why exactly was she here?

“I’m here for my next assignment.” Her request unsettled him.

“You need to see Mr. Pulitzer.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No. But he wanted to see you when you returned.”

“Well, I have returned. Shall we go see him?”

“He said it was to be alone.”

“Then I suppose I should go to his office.”

“Yes.”

She took the elevator to the eighth floor. She wondered what Pulitzer wanted with her. Maybe he just wanted to thank her for her work on the Emma story. Or perhaps it was to tie up some loose ends. She was eager to get the story out. Gilder had murdered Emma and arranged for the thugs to search for the coffee cup, which had led directly to Ingram’s death. The world needed to see Richard Gilder for what he was.

Outside Pulitzer’s office the same two male secretaries who had treated her so coldly now sat up stiffly when she approached.

“Please tell Mr. Pulitzer I’m here,” she said.

It was a directive—not quite an order, but also not a request. The two men did not like taking directives from a woman but sensed that now was not the time to assert their authority. One got up without a word, tapped on Pulitzer’s door, and walked inside.

Nellie stood there quietly, making no attempt at conversation with the other secretary. “Mr. Pulitzer will see you,” said the secretary as he emerged from the office. He held the door open for Nellie as she walked inside.

The room was darkened, as before. It took her a moment to adjust to the light. Pulitzer walked around from behind his large desk to greet her.

“Miss Bly,” he said, grabbing her hand with both of his and looking at her earnestly. “We are so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you, Mr. Pulitzer. And thank you for the flowers.” He dismissed it with the wave of his hand.

“Please. It was nothing. You are back to work now?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then. Let us talk about your next story.” He indicated for her to sit down.

“I want to talk about my current story first. Is there a problem?”

“Problem? No, not at all. You did exactly as I asked. Excellent, beyond what I expected.” He sat down at his desk, immensely pleased.

“Do you have any questions about it?” said Nellie.

“Questions? No. None.”

“Then when will it appear in the paper?”

“It is not going to appear in the paper,” he said with finality.

She sat there dumbfounded, at a complete loss. This was a sensational story. Why would he not publish it?

“I don’t understand.”

“Your assignment was to find out who killed Miss Lazarus. And you did.”

“You asked me to write a story about it.”

“Yes. But I had no intention of publishing it. You see, Miss Lazarus wrote a marvelous poem that everyone who comes to this country, everyone who lives in this country, should know about. That poem belongs on Lady Liberty, on the base where thousands of people can read it every day. But her sisters were determined to keep it to themselves.”

Nellie nodded. She wasn’t sure where he was going with this. “They plan to withhold it. They were very emphatic about that.”

“I tried everything to obtain their permission to use it. I offered them money. I offered to show them the design and the placement of the poem. I offered to publish Emma’s poetry myself. I offered to publish their own poetry myself, even though it is wretched. But they denied me at every turn. They said that Emma had caused the family enough embarrassment. They did not want their family remembered that way.”

Nellie recalled her encounter with the two sisters, when they were putting together the anthology of Emma’s poems. Some of Emma’s finest work was lying discarded on the parlor room floor, never to be published again.

“I had to find a way to pry ‘The New Colossus’ from their hands,” Pulitzer went on. “If what they feared most was the family embroiled in scandal, then I would give them scandal, one they would do anything to avoid. I went to the sisters and showed them what you had written. The thought of their sister depicted publicly in a lengthy intimacy with a woman, a married woman, especially one as contemptuous of them as Mrs. Gilder, was wholly unacceptable. And so, I am pleased to say, they agreed to let me use the poem.”

“In exchange for not publishing the story.”

“Yes.”

“But Gilder murdered her. When she was already dying and only had three months to live. That man needs to be brought to justice and punished.”

“I agree, Miss Bly. But how would you go about doing that? Let us say that we publish the story and Mr. Gilder is tried for murder. A jury might convict him, but I doubt it. You have seen the law at work. With Hilton’s money at his disposal I would not wager on a conviction.”

“But the world will know he is guilty.”

“Perhaps. But Miss Lazarus’s poems would not be published and might even be lost to us forever, while a guilty man walks free with a bad reputation. Such an outcome would be tragic.”

“The man is a murderer, Mr. Pulitzer. He is also responsible for the death of the man I loved.”

“I know that. And I can only imagine the anguish that causes you. But ten years from now no one will remember Dr. Ingram or Mr. Gilder—”

“I will remember!”

“Yes. And a handful of others. But the entire world will know the poetry of Emma Lazarus.”

She could say nothing. With great reluctance she saw his point. “He is getting away with murder,” she declared.

“Yes. He is. And someday he will have to account for that with his maker, if such a being exists. But millions and millions of people will derive inspiration from Miss Lazarus’s poems. Her voice will not be silenced. That is the choice, Miss Bly. Bringing a murderer to justice—perhaps—and losing an inspiring voice forever, or leaving things as they are and capturing that inspiring voice for the ages.”

Nellie thought about all the time she had put in on this story, all the danger, the worry.

“You tricked me.”

“I was not totally forthcoming, that is true. But would you have worked as hard if you had known it would not be published?”

The answer, of course, was no. But she still did not like being manipulated. “What is to prevent me from taking the story elsewhere?”

Pulitzer frowned. “I understand your desire to bring Mr. Gilder to justice, Miss Bly, and to see your story in print, but that would be foolish. No one except this paper would ever publish such a story. Mr. Gilder and Judge Hilton would see to that. I would also be disappointed in you and have to cancel our plans to see if Mr. Jules Verne is correct in his assertion that someone can travel around the world in eighty days. ”

She knew it was a bribe, delivered at the most opportune moment. And yet, to her embarrassment, it tempted her.

“Cockerill and I will help plan your journey,” he went on, “and you can wire us your stories. But you must decide soon. Another reporter is planning to undertake the same story tomorrow for a magazine.”

He had thought of everything, it seemed, even the notion of a competitor to spur her on. Nevertheless he sensed her misgivings about the Lazarus story.

“It is not easy to live with a grave injustice, Miss Bly. I understand that. But I ask you: is the world not better off this way?”

He was not simply asking her to make a choice; he was asking her to change her entire way of thinking, her view of the world. All her life, the choices had been between black and white, good versus evil. For a young girl thrown out of her home, and for a young woman going out on her own, that was how the world worked. Pulitzer was not simply asking her to see the world as gray; he was asking her to live with the existence of evil, something she had sworn to fight forever. He was asking her to look the other way for a greater good—for not only Emma Lazarus and her poems but for the chance to work in a man’s world, to pave the way for others, to do things as no one had ever done them before. Remaining a soldier in the war against evil might be more truthful, but it meant seeing all of those other things melt away, perhaps forever.

“Here is your ticket.”

He placed a steamship ticket for Southampton on the desk. Southampton was the first stop she had planned herself. She stared at the ticket. The decision was not sitting well.

“What will happen to Gilder?”

“For now, nothing. I will look for an opportunity to ruin him, I promise you that. But it will have to be with something other than the matter of Emma Lazarus.”

He leaned back in his chair and waited for her answer. They both knew what she would do. She had come too far, struggled too hard, to turn her back on an opportunity like this.

“I need to make arrangements for my mother.”

“I will hire someone to be her companion until you return. It is the least I can do.” The course was clear, but she felt sullied. She had lost her moral chastity, something she had clung to all her life. She had always prided herself on her integrity, but now she was crossing a threshold from which there was no return.

“You say someone else is leaving tomorrow?”

“Yes. In the afternoon.”

She reached for the ticket.

“Well, then, we don’t have much time.”