THROUGHOUT THE LONG RIDE to Westhampton, it was as if Sandy Weinraub occupied the seat at Maddie’s side.
Her physical passion for Phil confused her. She wanted him, but knew in her heart that it was much more than that. The reawakening of desire was followed closely—as it had been last night—by misgivings about herself and her judgment.
She had loved Sandy, passionately and completely. It had seemed to her right and logical to surrender things she loved in order to be with him and to keep him happy. The first night they’d been together, she remembered very clearly, he had spent sipping vodka, never seeming really drunk. Not that it would have mattered, as long as they were together.
She had willed herself not to notice. Not to have it matter.
She let her breath out in a sigh, her body moving with the jostle of the train. In retrospect she couldn’t imagine how she could have been that stupid.
Stupid to love him, she thought. Stupid to marry him. Stupid to pound her head against the wall of thinking she could change him, by threats to leave, by pleas, by reasoning, by all her offers of help. She still didn’t know whether he’d actually loved her or not. Could addicts really love?
Had it all been lies?
She loved Phil. She knew that as surely as she knew her name, and the knowledge filled her with terror and despair.
If he was lying to her—about loving, about sanity—she didn’t think she could go through all that pain again. Every instinct she possessed told her that Phil Cooper was a man she could love, a man she could trust. He was strong and funny and listened to what other people said, to say nothing of the fact that just being in the same room with him made her want to rip his clothes off and drag him into bed….
But every instinct she possessed had once told her that Sandy loved her. And that their love was good and right.
Which left her where?
Bay Shore. Patchogue. Exhausted shoppers bundled in overcoats and rubber boots trying to juggle purses, magazines, brown Bloomie’s bags from the after-Christmas sales, umbrellas, crying children who should have been settled down for naps and cookies hours ago. Early darkness flashed by the windows of the train, hiding the long gray shape of cold beaches, colder sea.
In the river parishes along the Mississippi they’d be lighting bonfires, huge frames of logs whose orange glare was visible for miles through the dense winter fog. Everyone would be getting ready for Mardi Gras and holding King Cake parties—if you got the plastic baby in your slice of King Cake you’d have to throw the next party—and the whole world smelled of burning sugar from the refineries. Though it would be damply cold, it was seldom the wet, brutal, uncaring cold of New York.
“I came down here the minute I discovered there were places in the world where it didn’t snow,” Sandy had said to her, with his sly sidelong grin, as they’d walked up St. Peter Street to the Café du Monde from his apartment in the French Quarter, through that damp sugar-smelling fog and the glaring lights of Mardi Gras. Maddie had leaned into the shelter of his arm and laughed.
That first year of living in New Orleans—of her going to classes and pretending to all her friends that she wasn’t having an affair with the writing teacher—there had been a lot of laughter.
After he came to New York to work as an editor for Galactic magazine, it seemed to Maddie that he had never actually worked again. She’d worked, mostly waiting tables. During his year at Galactic she had, in fact, done a lot of unpaid editing while he was “not feeling well.” She’d gotten money once from her mother, but the emotional interest payments were simply too high: if she had to hear her mother one more time on the subject of the career as a professional dancer she’d just thrown away, she would have said something—as her aunts liked to put in—that did not do credit to her raising.
It had been easier to pretend that everything was all right.
Didn’t he see what it was doing to me? she wondered. Didn’t he care?
When Maddie had returned from Darkness Visible that afternoon to the apartment on Thirty-second Street to get ready for her gig, she’d found Sandy’s leather jacket laid neatly over the back of the couch. Just the sight of it hit her hard. Oh, my God, he’s turned up again….
Forgetting, for that first instant, that he was never going to turn up again.
The memory of her struggle against him was still burningly clear. When she’d asked him to leave she’d had the locks changed, but she knew Sandy was cunning. Her greatest fear, during the eleven months between his departure and his death, had been that he’d get evicted from whatever friend he was sponging off, or single flophouse room he was living in, and that she’d come home some afternoon and find his jacket on the back of the couch and his stuff piled in the living room: This is just for a couple of days or weeks….
And she’d have to go through the whole agony again of finding him a place, paying first-’n’-last, and getting him out of her apartment and out of her life. She’d have to steel herself against the panic attacks, the frantic declarations of love, the sobbed promises of reform.
She’d gone over and picked up the jacket, and found under it two CDs. Wind on the Water and Dust Storm, instrumental music by Phil Cooper. Produced by one of the myriad of tiny private music companies that had sprung up in the wake of inexpensive CD technology, complete with Photoshop covers and a not-quite-professional black-and-white picture of Phil on the back.
What her mother would say if Maddie informed her that she was in love with yet another penniless artist—and another Yankee at that—she didn’t like to think.
I love him. Does he love me?
She didn’t know whether she hoped he did, or not.
It would be easier to simply have a bone-shaking, teeth-rattling, back-clawing affair and call it quits. See, I am too worth something.
Easier all around to go on living with Tessa and Baby, to dance and teach and read the cards for those throngs of black-clothed Midwestern Goths and Gothettes who wandered through the West Village in search of sex, drugs and body-piercings. To seek her own strength, as Diana had advised, rather than spend her life guessing about someone else’s weakness.
Like the Nine of Pentacles, the lady in her own garden, with the hawk on her fist. Alone.
The lights of Mastic Beach whipped by in the dark.
But the Nine of Pentacles, Maddie knew, like all the nines in the tarot deck, had the meaning of being one less than the ten. Nine was the place where you could stop the train and get off, if you didn’t have the courage or the faith or the blind willfulness to continue to the ultimate outcome of the meaning of the suit. In the suit of the Swords, nine could mean—one of its several meanings—a wake-up call, the horror of realizing where violence and strife will lead. In the Wands it was a warning: Is this what you really want? before you reached the ambiguous burden of what your will has brought you. In the suits of the Cups and the Pentacles, it carried implications of settling for what seems best—worldly riches or solitary content—rather than pressing on to the joys of greater love that lay beyond.
Diana had seen danger around her. Not from Phil, she had said, and had smiled.
Why am I so ready to believe the spread that tells me he is the whisperer in the dark of the Glendower Building, while my mind balks at the spread that tells me he isn’t?
Maddie touched the insulated lunch box in which she carried her CDs—the party’s hostess, Mrs. Buz, had promised her a live band but Maddie knew far better than to trust a client’s assurances about anything. She fished out Wind on the Water, though it was too noisy in the train to play it, or anything, on her Discman. Gazed for a time at that grainy shot of the craggy, thoughtful face, the kitten he’d chosen to have photographed with him.
If the building isn’t haunted, Phil may be a lunatic. If it is, Tessa is probably in danger. Or am I just ready to believe the worst of him because I’m looking for a reason to run back into my garden and slam the gate? Keep your distance, pal, or I’ll sic my hawk on you.
FOUR SONS AND A GRANDSON of Mrs. Buz were waiting at the Westhampton station in an enormous SUV to drive Maddie to their mother’s house. Maddie put the CD—and the subject of its composer—aside, and the rest of the evening passed in a kaleidoscope of music, chatter and enough lamb and couscous to feed the Turkish army. Resplendent in green and gold, she danced for a wildly appreciative audience, the men springing up to dance with her—or flipping showers of dollar bills onto her head in the far-more-polite Middle Eastern fashion of tipping the dancer—and the women howling and ululating behind their hands.
As every dancer of Maddie’s acquaintance could attest, private parties were always very much of a tossup. She’d performed at birthday and retirement gigs where she’d come away with liquor and worse things in her hair, swearing she’d quit dancing for good. There were always people who treated dancers as if they’d just jumped out of a cake or stepped off the walkway at some Jersey strip joint. Like all her dancer friends, she’d had her share of occasions where she’d showed up and found twenty-five drunks and only a boom box for the promised “sound system,” and had ended up having to change into her costume in the pantry.
But this, for once, was the other kind of party. Completely apart from a five-hundred-dollar check and nearly half that much again in tips, Maddie enjoyed herself thoroughly. There was always something infinitely delightful about dancing with a live band—oud, mizmar, doumbek and accordion—and about dancing for an audience that knew the kind of dancing they were looking at, rather than Omaha tourists out to see belly rolls. As always, the dancing freed her mind, washing away any concerns about Phil, or Sandy, or whether or not she’d ever be able to love and trust again or if she wanted to try.
The energies that rule the cosmos aren’t going anywhere, Diana had said. There is no way that you can miss what you’re intended to have.
At times like this, it made great sense to Maddie that there were sects of Hinduism that saw the guiding god of the universe as a dancer.
Afterward, Mrs. Buz and her sisters packed up several pounds of leftover couscous, kebabs, lokum and sarigi burma and begged her to take it away with her “for your little roommate and your friends”—during the course of the evening the hostesses had gotten out of her all about Tessa and Phil. “You are too skinny—you need flesh to dance!”
Then they all hugged her, jammed more tips into her hands and put her in the family SUV to take her to the station for the last train to the city.
It was now midnight, freezing cold and snowing. It was the twelfth of January, the small hours of the year, when light and spring seem furthest away. A cold moon winked through bitter scuds of cloud. Almost no one was on the late train back to the city, leaving Maddie time and quiet to slip Wind on the Water into her Discman, and put the earphones over her ears.
Maddie had heard it said many times that you can’t hide on the dance floor. She didn’t know enough about music to know if it revealed the inner soul to the same degree—Richard Wagner at least seemed to be proof that one could compose exquisite melodies and still be a class-A prick—but if evil lurked in Phil Cooper’s inner soul, it certainly didn’t come out in his art.
Mostly piano, though he also played both mandolin and guitar, sometimes—according to the liner notes—multiple-tracking all three. He also played harpsichord, the light, jangly notes flowing into a style like jeweled ragtime. The music itself was beautiful, melodic, sometimes simple and sometimes complex, and absolutely nothing like anything either commercial or modern that Maddie had ever heard.
It delighted her, and she knew instinctively that it was too odd to be marketed as pop, too melodic to be what currently passed for classical style, and too unpretentiously old-fashioned for any of the New Wave stations she’d heard.
It was a beautiful anomaly, and it no longer surprised her that Phil was scratching to make ends meet.
Nor was it strange that he was getting a ration of grief over it from an elderly contractor in Tulsa.
She turned the jewel case over, regarded the harsh features and the gently smiling dark eyes. You can’t learn about him through the cards, Diana had said. It’s about where he fits into your life, not where you fit yourself into his.
The last song on the disk was called “Step Off the Edge and Fly.” Something in the soaring cascades of notes told her that he understood.
You can’t learn about him through the cards. The only way was the real way, the hard way everybody did it: putting in the time, putting out your heart, and seeing how you felt about it at the end of every day.
PENN STATION WAS NEARLY deserted—hard, flat surfaces echoing coldly the voices of those few unfortunate travelers still en route to someplace or other at one-thirty on a Sunday morning in January. Though it was only a few blocks, Maddie got a cab to the apartment on Thirty-second Street. “And another thing,” the driver ranted at her the moment she shut the door, “there were videotapes of Kennedy’s assassination, and Bobby Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King’s. How come there wasn’t a videotape of John Lennon’s assassination? You tell me that!”
It was fortunately a short ride. Maddie paid him and he zoomed away without pausing for breath.
When she slipped through the door of the apartment as silently as she could, the first thing she did was look at the couch. Her stomach sank with dread.
No Tessa. The bedding hadn’t even been made up.
Maddie dumped her bag on the floor, looked at the clock.
Ten to two.
Shit.
She scooped up the telephone, tapped through to the message service. The first was from Diana. “Maddie, I’ve sent you an e-mail about what I could learn of the Glendower Building. Even if it’s late when you get in, I think you’d better read it right away.”
The second was from Phil. “I hope you pick up your messages the minute you get in. There’s something weird going on here and I think you’d better come down. I’ll be in the lobby waiting to let you in. If I’m not there, please wait for me, I won’t be more than a few minutes. Love you.”
The next three were hang-ups. Phil, probably—there was one per hour, nearly on the hour, as if he was walking across to the Owl—which closed at midnight—or down to the all-night liquor store on the corner to make them. Part of her mind tagged the information, and the fact that whatever “weird” was, it obviously was something that couldn’t be explained to a 911 operator.
Part of her mind jarred breathlessly on his first message’s closing.
What did you say to me?
Love you.
Quick and casual, like a kiss in passing or a pat on the shoulder.
Love you.
She was already on her way through the curtain to her alcove, where the laptop was set up on the tiny dresser under the soft glow of the bronze lamp. She clicked onto the Net and an obnoxiously perky droid voice informed her, You have mail.
To: BeautifulDancer909
From: ValedGoddess@DarknessVisible.com
Maddie,
Here’s what I’ve been able to find out about the Glendower Building and the man who built it, and what happened there in January 1908.
The Glendower Building was constructed in 1884 by Lucius Glendower, who owned a number of construction companies, tenement buildings, clothing factories and match factories on the Lower East Side. It was eight stories tall, the upper three floors of which were occupied by the Pinnacle Ready-Made Shirt Company, which Glendower owned.
As you probably know, in the days before trade unions there was not only no regulation of how little an employer could pay—or how many hours’ work he could demand of employees, firing at will those who refused to do as they were told—but there were no safety regulations, either. Glendower had a bad reputation even among the garment workers of the Lower East Side.
Maddie thought, Yikes! Her grandfather had been a reporter covering labor strikes early in the century, so she knew a little about the people who were running the garment business then. It was saying something for one man to have a “bad reputation” among that gang of robber barons.
Glendower paid four dollars a week and hired mostly Russian, Jewish, Italian, Irish and Cuban girls whose families desperately needed any income they could get. The girls worked a twelve-hour day in the winter, sixteen hours in the summer, and Glendower’s floor managers routinely locked the doors of the factory loft except for a brief break at lunchtime. They said this was to check pilfering (the only toilets were in the yard behind the building and fabric could be sneaked over the fence) and also to make sure the girls didn’t go down to the yard simply to loaf. This was common practice then.
The windows were locked for the same reason, also usual business practice in the garment industry. If nothing else it led to several faintings a day in the summertime and at least one girl’s death from heat stroke and dehydration. Glendower paid off the city inspectors rather than go to the expense of putting fire escapes on the building, though they were added later.
What gave Glendower a smelly reputation was his sexual abuse of the girls who worked for him. His office was on the sixth floor and he would routinely take girls there and molest them, with the threat of being fired—and blacklisted from work in any of the other garment factories on the East Side—if they refused. This wasn’t that uncommon, either, by the way. Back then it was thought that a girl who worked—especially an immigrant girl—was fair game. Judging by complaints to the fledgling ILGWU, it sounds like Glendower—a massive dark-haired man whose father made a fortune selling guns to both sides in the Civil War—was a sex addict and, if not clinically a sadist, at least got a kick out of roughing up girls.
Phil had said, I hear them crying…. And I heard him laugh. Maddie heard again in her mind the whispering voice from the darkness: little sluts are all alike…good for one thing…
She thought of the endless stream of bright-faced children trotting up and down those stairs in their pink beginner’s leotards, their wispy little practice skirts. The floors that had been trodden by girls not much older, on their way to earn enough money to keep their parents and siblings from being thrown out of their tenement rooms, were buried these days under God knew how many layers of subsequent linoleum and paint.
But it was as if the walls remembered, and wept with shame in the dark.
Like most loft garment factories at that time, Pinnacle Ready-Made was a disaster waiting to happen. Rags soaked with sewing-machine oil weren’t taken out nearly often enough—it would be a nuisance to maneuver anything down the stairways, which were about two feet wide to get maximum advantage of space in the building for office and warehouse rental—and were allowed to pile up under the worktables. This was long before any kind of flame retardant was used on cloth, and the factory floors were piled with rags, scrap, lint from the machines and cotton dust, and cotton dust, which is highly flammable, permeated the air.
On the morning of January 13, 1908, the inevitable happened and fire broke out in the seventh-floor factory.
Maddie closed her eyes, hearing in her mind the sound Phil had described, the frantic clattering of fists pounding on a locked metal door.
Ninety girls were killed. The seventh and eighth floors were destroyed completely and the sixth floor gutted. Lucius Glendower’s body was found in one of the stairwells, where he’d apparently become disoriented in the smoke and confusion and burned to death. The consensus of local opinion was that this was only a preliminary to a similar but more lasting destiny.
His estate was divided between his second wife and his nephew, Grayson, who married one another in order to consolidate the stock holdings. They repaired the building, which they sold in 1925.
Maddie tried to imagine someone that coldheartedly calculating and greedy, and felt a little glow of gladness that Lucius Glendower had spent a portion of his life with not one, but two of them. Served them all right.
She scrolled down, expecting only an account of subsequent remodeling and sales.
The first time a girl disappeared in the building after the fire was in 1919. I couldn’t find much about her except that she was one of Grayson Glendower’s factory girls, but there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that she never left the building, and that her body was never found.
Maddie thought, her heart curling in on itself with shock, The first time…?
She scrolled down fast through the succeeding paragraphs of Diana’s e-mail. Counting names and dates. Too appalled, at first, to believe what she read.
In all, since 1919, at least ten girls had gone into the Glendower Building and had not come out.
New York’s finest had come up with a number of logical explanations to account for as many of them as possible. Some of them may even have been correct. One of the girls, a sewing machine operator who vanished in 1943, was called a “troublemaker” by her family and was apparently dating a Protestant boy they didn’t like, a boy who’d gone into the army. There was speculation she’d run off to join him before he was shipped off to fight in Italy, where he was killed a few months later; there was little surprise that no one had ever heard from her again. And the one who’d disappeared while working late one night in December 1967 had been a sixteen-year-old runaway from Portland, whose true name her fellow hippies in her East Village crash-pad didn’t even know.
But even discounting those—and the few witnesses involved swore that neither girl had left the building—that still left eight girls whose families, boyfriends and roommates were positive they had no reason to drop out of sight. Eight girls who had simply disappeared in the mazes of the Glendower Building’s dark upper floors.
Eight girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty. All of them except Eileen Kirkpatrick dark-haired, like most of the girls who’d been fodder for the East Side garment shops at the nineteenth century’s turn. All of them between mid-December and the thirteenth of January, the dark midnight of the year.
Little sluts are all alike…good for one thing…