Free Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland

mouth in the horsecab on the way to Grand Central Depot. There was much hoopla on the platform because this was a special Columbian Exposition train. A four-piece band played beneath a banner, and boys wore sandwich boards advertising various exhibits, guesthouses, and restaurants. Hank stood quietly, jotting them down, while George trotted up and down the platform like a terrier on a leash until the conductor opened the doors.
    “I hope you have many adventures,” I said quietly to Hank.
    “A person has adventures only when he’s traveling alone. Traveling with another, he has comfort.”
    George performed a few dance steps—loose body, arms akimbo, head waggling—just before he stepped on board.
    Edwin looked on indulgently. “My brother, the antic.”
    “Has he always been like that?”
    “Always. Our mother used to call him Georgie the Jester. That only made him sillier.”
    “And what did she call you?”
    With an expression of embarrassment, he murmured, “Edwin the Educator.”
    Once inside the passenger car, George opened the window to shout and wave his hat as the train pulled out.
    “See everything. Learn all you can,” Edwin shouted back.
    “Aha. The Educator indeed,” I said, and his tawny cheeks reddened.
    I watched George’s head and flailing arm shrink and blur in the distance. The gleaming rails coming together behind the train pointed toward beauties and advancements beyond my imagination, including our finished windows, shipped a month late. The only word that could describe how I felt was bereft.
    Yet there beside me, stately as a statue, was Edwin. Around our awkward silence moved a fluid, noisy crowd. I would have preferred to nurse my sullen mood alone, but Edwin’s gesture invited me to walk back into the terminal with him.
    “And what art do you do?” I asked, facing forward, making an assumption, intending brusqueness.
    “The art of making people happy, or at least happier.”
    “That’s what all artists do, or aim to do.”
    “I work for the University Settlement in the Lower East Side, helping immigrants get their bearings.”
    “Oh.” It came out feebly, flat, and final.
    He invited me to an English tearoom nearby, and since I had promised George, I said yes. There wasn’t much conversation on the way, only that George had told him all about me. At the tearoom, he insisted that I have a scone.
    Feeling obligated to be friendly, I asked, “So what do you actually do at this settlement place?”
    “I help new immigrants learn English and find jobs, enroll their children in school, find doctors and dentists who will take impoverished patients for fifty cents a visit, intervene in cases of tenement disputes, instruct them on the importance of labor unions.”
    Labor unions. Just what caused me to work like a fiend while the men paraded up and down Fourth Avenue for a month.
    “Sometimes I give speeches to society clubs to persuade them to donate,and to political organizations to support changes in labor laws. Other times, I ladle soup.”
    “Soup?”
    “That’s right. Soup. The Fourth Ward of the Lower East Side beneath the Brooklyn Bridge is flooded with immigrants living in poverty, sometimes ten to a room. New arrivals live in hall rooms.”
    “What, pray tell, is a hall room?”
    He adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles. “Imagine a large old house turned into a boardinghouse with a hundred people living in the bedrooms and only one indoor bathroom and an outdoor privy. The poorest immigrants rent space in the corridors, priced per foot, barely wide enough for a cot, one family’s space partitioned off from another’s by a shredded curtain if they’re lucky.”
    “No privacy?”
    “None. Other families have to walk through the hall to get to their space.” A musing grunt came from deep in his throat. “Shared experience makes the Fourth Ward a tightly knit community.”
    My girls—my Tiffany Girls, as they liked to call themselves—had any of them lived in a