The Fifth Avenue Artists Society by Joy Callaway

Author:Joy Callaway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

AUGUST 1892

The Hopper House

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

I couldn’t understand why they’d decided to go ahead with the Society meeting other than the fact that they thought Mr. Carter would want it that way. I was only here myself because Lydia had begged me to attend. John wasn’t even in town, but had graciously allowed Tom to open the house for a meeting anyway. John had taken a train to Georgia with his father late last week saying something about needing to help him with his research, though I doubted John, who had no interest in medicine, could be of any assistance in whatever experiment Doctor Hopper was doing. Frank casually mentioned John had really gone away to distance himself from the tragedy, to take time to mourn his once friend in his own way. I couldn’t blame him, but I missed him terribly. I didn’t want to be here either.

I was sitting in the corner where we’d spotted Maude Adams on the first night, still trying to think up an idea for a new novel. I glanced at the first idea I’d written down. The immigration of my grandparents. Their story was a heroic, heartbreaking tale, and though their lives had greatly improved a few years after their arrival in the city, I didn’t know if I had the strength to live the calamity of their passage and early years as Americans. They’d fled to escape the Irish famine, leaving their parents and siblings behind. Losing two sons to disease on the ship over, they hadn’t been able to find work when they got here, forcing my father, his three siblings, and my grandparents to live with three other families in an apartment in the slums until Grandfather found a post with D.F. Tiemann Color Works, a position that eventually made them quite comfortable.

I closed my eyes in an attempt to recall anything striking I’d read as of late in the newspaper or magazines, trying to mute the roaring white noise of hundreds talking and laughing at once, and the eerie undercurrent of suspicion. Familiar faces I’d never met but had seen here often kept walking past me, circulating around to each artist’s display, their eyes bright with a strange optimism I didn’t understand given the melancholy of the day.

Marcus’s funeral had been that morning at Trinity Church. I hadn’t attended, but Franklin had said it was horrible. Mrs. Carter had apparently turned around after she was through receiving everyone, climbed up on the casket, reached in, and pulled Mr. Carter’s corpse from the pillow, hugging and shaking him while crying hysterically as though she could wake him up. Lydia had vomited and passed out next to Franklin and he’d had to carry her out of the church. Her behavior was concerning and foreign, entirely unlike the bubbly, poised woman I thought I knew.

I glanced over at Lydia now, stunned at the difference in her demeanor. John and I had promised we’d keep quiet about her episode in the

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