![]() “Stay together?” Alva’s sister Armide said. Limp laundry drooped on lines strung from one windowsill to the next along and across the entire block from Broome Street to Grand. ![]() Soiled, torn mattresses and broken furniture and rusting cans littered the alleys. The buildings were crowded and close here, the narrow street’s bricks caked with horse dung, pungent in the afternoon heat. Harmon called as eight young ladies, cautiously clad in plain day dresses and untrimmed hats, left the safety of two carriages and gathered like ducklings in front of the tenement. She was twenty-one years old, ripened unpicked fruit rotting on the branch. ![]() WHEN THEY ASKED her about the Vanderbilts and Belmonts, about their celebrations and depredations, the mansions and balls, the lawsuits, the betrayals, the rifts-when they asked why she did the extreme things she’d done, Alva said it all began quite simply: Once there was a desperate young woman whose mother was dead and whose father was dying almost as quickly as his money was running out. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |