The Lions of Fifth Avenue: A Novel

CHAPTER ONE

New York City, 1913

She had to tell Jack.

He wouldn’t be pleased.

As Laura Lyons returned from running errands, turning over in her head the various reactions her husband might have to her news, she spotted the beggar perched once again on the first tier of the granite steps that led to her home: seven rooms buried deep inside the palatial New York Public Library. This time, the beggar woman’s appearance elicited not pity but a primal fear. It was certainly some kind of ominous sign, one that made Laura’s heart beat faster. A woman on the verge of ruin, alone and without any resources. Unloved.

The beggar’s black mourning gown was more tattered than it had been last week, fraying at the sleeves and hem, and her face shone with summer sweat. Every few days for the past month, she’d taken up a spot off to one side of the grand entryway under one of the towering stone lions, one of which had been named Leo Astor and the other Leo Lenox, after two of the library’s founders, John Jacob Astor and James Lenox. Laura’s children had admired them right off, with Harry claiming Lenox as his pet and Pearl doing the same for Astor, neither caring that the sculptures had initially been mocked in the newspapers as a cross between a dachshund and a rabbit. Only last week, Laura had just barely prevented her son from carving his initials into the sinewy rump of Leo Lenox.

The beggar woman shifted, finding what shade she could. The miserable-looking child who typically filled her lap was missing. Laura wondered where he was.

“Money or food, please, miss. Either will do.”

Laura reached into her shopping basket and pulled out two apples. One of the library’s employees would shoo the beggar away soon enough, and she was glad to have caught her in time, even if the act of offering the poor woman assistance was inspired, at least in part, by a ridiculous, superstitious bargain that existed only in Laura’s mind. As if extending a kindness to someone in need would smooth the conversation ahead.

“Thank you, miss.” The woman tucked the fruit away in her pockets. “God bless.”

Laura hurried up the steps and into Astor Hall, past the dozens of visitors milling about, their voices echoing off the marble steps, the marble floors, the marble walls. Even the decorative bases for the bronze candelabras were made from Carrara stone sliced from the Apuan Alps. The choice kept the building cool on steamy September days like this one, even if in winter it was like walking into an icebox, particularly in the evenings, when the library was closed and the furnaces only lightly fed.

She turned left down the grand South-North Gallery, passing under a series of globed pendants of thick, curved glass that broke up the long lines of the coffered ceiling. About halfway down the hallway, she took a right, then another, before climbing up a narrow set of stairs that led to the mezzanine-level apartment where her family had lived for the past two years.

Their seven private rooms formed a right angle that hugged a corner of one of the library’s two inner courtyards, the bedrooms and Jack’s study along one side, and the kitchen, dining room, and sitting room along the other. The open area that formed the crux of the right angle, and where the stairway emerged, had become the kids’ playroom, where Harry laid out his train tracks in one corner and Pearl parked her doll’s pram under the door of the dumbwaiter. When they first moved in, Jack had had to give them a stern warning when they were caught poking their heads inside the dark shaft, but soon enough the family had settled in and adjusted to their new surroundings.

The director of the library—Jack’s boss—had pointed out during their orientation how the classical architecture of the building followed a progression from hard materials to soft, starting with the stone entrance hall before yielding to the wood paneling of the interior rooms. Laura had done her part to stay true to the continuum, softening the hard floors with a mishmash of Oriental rugs and hanging thick drapes over the giant windows. On the fireplace mantel, she’d framed the newspaper article about their unusual living arrangements, which had been written the year they moved in.

She called out the children’s names as she headed to the kitchen, and the sound of their heavy stomping behind her brought a smile to her face.

“Harry lost another tooth.” Pearl dashed in first, her eyes flashing with glee from scooping the news out from under her brother.

Laura would have thought living in a library would turn them into a couple of bookworms, but Pearl wanted nothing to do with stories unless they involved ghosts or animals. Harry was different, although he preferred not to read himself but rather to be read to, particularly from his worn copy of Maritime Heroes for Boys. Earlier that summer, when Jack quoted a line from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets into Laura’s ear in a silly falsetto while she washed the dishes, Harry had demanded to know what it meant. At his bedtime, Laura had taken down the volume from the bookcase and read some of the poems aloud to him. Harry interrupted to ask questions about the more ribald phrases, which Laura dodged as best she could. Later, when she and Jack were lying next to each other in bed, they laughed quietly about their son’s natural—and thoroughly innocent—ear for the smuttier bits.

Where Pearl could be bossy, Harry was sweet, if sometimes dim when it came to the vagaries of human nature. When Laura dropped off the children at the school on Forty-Second and Second Avenue for the first time two years ago, Pearl had taken a moment to analyze the groups of schoolgirls arrayed around the playground, figuring out the best approach, while Harry had recklessly stumbled over to some boys playing marbles, accidentally kicking several with his foot in the process, which resulted in a hard shove and a quick rejection.

Harry, at eleven, was older by four years, but Pearl was wiser, faster. Laura and Jack had discarded the original name they’d picked for their daughter—Beatrice—after she showed up with a white frost of fine hair covering her head, more like a little old lady than a baby girl. Her eyes weren’t the vivid blue of Laura’s but more a gray, and her features and coloring gave her an ethereal appearance. “Pearl,” Laura had said, and Jack had agreed, tears in his eyes. “Pearl.”

The last school year had been tough for Harry, who, unlike his sister, never brought friends home to play or got invited to birthday parties. Laura hoped this year would be different and he’d gain some confidence, especially since, if everything went according to plan, she wouldn’t be around as much.

Pearl ushered her brother into the kitchen. “Show her the tooth, Harry.”

He opened his palm, where a baby tooth sat like a rare jewel. Laura took it and held it to the light. “It’s a beauty, let’s see your gap.”

He smiled wide, showing off the space where one of his canines had been. “It didn’t hurt at all, I was playing with it with my tongue, and suddenly, pop, it was gone.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t choke on it,” said Pearl. “I know a girl who did and she died.”

“Pearl, that’s not true.” Harry looked up at Laura for confirmation.

“You don’t have to worry about that.” Laura pocketed the tooth in her apron. “Now go get cleaned up before your father comes home.”

She cut up the roast beef and potatoes from the other night, glad to not have to turn on the stove in this heat, and was slicing apples for dessert just as Jack came in.

Jack yanked at his tie and looked wildly around the tiny room. “I don’t have time for dinner, the payroll still needs to be done.”

This wasn’t the right time for her news. She gave him a quick kiss, then turned and slid the letter that she’d left out on the worktable back into the pocket of her apron.

“Of course you have time for dinner, it’s still early.”

But she knew what he meant. He meant that if he skipped dinner, he would have time to do both the payroll and work on his manuscript. The book he’d started several years ago and was so close to finally completing.

“Can I take it into my study?” He shifted the payroll file to his left hand and grabbed a slice of apple. “I can do the numbers for payroll and eat at the same time.”

His beseeching eyes reminded her of their son’s. She made a plate and carried it into the extra bedroom, where he’d pushed one of the library desks up against the window. It was all out of proportion to the room, like a huge wooden barge squeezed into a tiny boathouse.

He was already working his way down the rows of the ledger, filling in each one with the name, position, and monthly salary of the eighty people under his employ at the New York Public Library. She looked over his shoulder at the list: attendants, porters, elevator runners, carpenters, steam fitters, electricians, stack runners, janitors, coal passers. And at the very top, Jack Lyons, superintendent.

When he’d been offered the job, back when they still lived at the Meadows, Laura had been reluctant to return to the city. Reluctant to give up the sunshine and fresh air that living sixty miles north of New York provided the children, as well as the kind community of fellow workers who lived within the perimeter of the ramshackle estate where Jack oversaw the grounds. The decision to move out to the country in the first place hadn’t been her idea, either, but the position had offered them an escape of sorts: a way for Laura to avoid the worst of her father’s wrath and disapproval at being an expecting bride. Together, she and Jack had decided to forgo the city lights for a quieter life, where Jack diligently oversaw the estate during the day and wrote at night. Every winter, Harry and Pearl marched out to sled down the big hill behind the owners’ mansion after the first snowfall, and every spring, they picked daffodils from their cottage garden and presented them to Laura as if they were made of spun gold.

But then the wealthy old couple who owned the estate died, and their grown children decided to sell off the land, sending the employees packing.

Laura, Jack, and the children had moved into the library just before it opened to the public. Laura’s view of the giant oak tree outside the caretaker’s cottage window had been replaced with the harsh whiteness of twelve-inch-thick blocks of marble. Not a speck of green to be seen. The walnut paneling in the salon and the modern kitchen had appealed to her at first, as did the idea of living within the walls of the most beautiful building in Manhattan, but the isolation had eventually worn her down. While the library had lived up to its founders’ expectations as the largest marble building in the world, an inspired example of classical design that took sixteen years to complete, Laura hadn’t realized how remote their lives inside the white fortress would be. There were no neighbors to wave hello to each morning, as there had been at the brownstone where she grew up, nor picnics down by the river with the other families, as at the Meadows. Instead, just an endless parade of anonymous visitors who came in to see if the building lived up to its reputation for grandeur and beauty (the answer was always a resounding yes), or those who simply wanted to pull up a chair in the Main Reading Room.

Jack swaggered about the building as if it were his own castle, which, in some ways, it was. He knew all the secrets, every nook and cranny. He bragged about the place to the children so often that they easily parroted back his statistics: thousands of visitors a day, eighty-eight miles of stacks holding one million books.

And in the very middle of it all, their small family, tucked behind a hidden stairway.

She couldn’t wait any longer. Once he started in on his manuscript, her interruption would be even less welcome. She thought of the beggar woman squinting in the harsh sunlight, one bare hand lifted. That would never be her.

Slowly, she withdrew the envelope from her pocket and slid the letter out, the only noise the scratch of Jack’s fountain pen.

“I heard back,” she finally said.

He placed his pen down on the desk without looking up. “Is that right?”

She waited.

“And?”

“I’ve been accepted.”

The Main Reading Room on the third floor was the best place for a good late-night cry. Laura had discovered this soon after they’d moved in. She’d always been easily moved to tears, and the vastness of the space, with its fifty-foot ceilings adorned with puffy clouds, was as close as she could get to the fields behind the upstate cottage where she’d retreat when her emotions overcame her. During the day, the room’s gleaming tables, punctuated with desk lamps, were flanked by the curved backs of patrons, reading or making notes with the quiet scratch of a pen. Laura often imagined what it would look like if all their thoughts became visible, the enormous cavern above their heads suddenly crammed with words and phrases, floating in the expanse like bubbles.

Tonight, though, the room was the repository for only her own wretched musings.

She cried not for herself but for how upset Jack had been to not be able to grant her that one wish: to go to Columbia Journalism School. They simply couldn’t afford it. He had such a pleasant face—open and quick to smile—that to see him distraught made her twice as disappointed in herself for bringing him pain.

When she’d first brought up the idea with Jack earlier that year, he’d approached it with his usual meticulousness. Together, they’d made a list of advantages and disadvantages, and decided that it would be feasible only if she received a full scholarship. Which she had not. As a matter of fact, she hadn’t even been accepted, only wait-listed. Until today.

She hadn’t considered the idea of going back to school until several months ago, when the assistant director of the library, Dr. Anderson, had heard her joke about her life raising children within the library’s walls and suggested she write a piece on the subject for the employees’ monthly newsletter. She’d dashed off a silly article about the difficulty of keeping Pearl and Harry quiet during the day, especially in the summer, when they weren’t in school, and how she’d come up with the idea of a ten-minute “stomp” every evening, after the patrons had drained into the streets and the administrative offices had emptied. At her signal, the three of them would leap about the hallways, dancing and singing, Harry running laps and Pearl practicing her yodel, bringing the night watchman sprinting to the second floor to find out what on earth was going on. He’d stood there, panting, hands on his knees, and Laura had worried he might collapse from the fright. After that first time, though, he’d gotten used to the idea, sometimes even joining in, offering up a yowl that echoed down the stairwells and probably frightened the rats rooting around in the basement.

Once Dr. Anderson took over as director, he’d insisted Laura write a monthly column called “Life Between the Stacks,” which she dutifully tapped out on Jack’s typewriter while he was at work. Soon after, she’d seen an announcement in the newspaper about a school of journalism being started at Columbia University, open to both men and women. Upon inquiring, she discovered that students who already held a bachelor’s degree could take just one year of courses. One year. Eighty-five dollars a term. A grand sum, considering Jack’s salary. But still, just two terms. It would be over before they knew it, and then she could get a job at a newspaper and bring in her own salary. After her discussion with Jack, she’d asked Dr. Anderson for a recommendation and been delighted when he’d agreed to provide one.

Laura had learned that she’d been placed on the waiting list a few weeks after she’d mailed in her application. Then, today, she’d learned the good news. A place had opened up and was hers, if she wanted it. But Jack didn’t seem to see it the same way.

“I wish we could afford it so you could go, but maybe this is for the best,” he’d said back in the apartment. “Even if we could, what about the children?”

She’d been expecting the question. “They’re old enough to take care of themselves. If there’s ever a problem, you’re right here in the building.”

“Why not keep doing what you’re doing, Laura?” asked Jack. “Dr. Anderson said just the other day that you’ve got a lovely way with a phrase in the newsletters.”

“Because it doesn’t pay. I want to help so you don’t feel the full burden of our life on you.”

“We always land on our feet. What burden are you talking about?”

She couldn’t mention the beggar; he wouldn’t understand. That she feared if something happened to Jack, she’d also end up on the steps, ragged and dirty, begging for money. She’d seen her parents’ lavish lifestyle curtailed after several financial struggles, although they refused to speak of them, as if by ignoring the problem, it would disappear. Which it had, in a way. Every few months, Laura noticed another empty space in their Madison Avenue town house where an antique bureau had been sold off, or a too-bright square in the wallpaper where a severe portrait had once hung.

The latest issue of McCall’s had included an editorial about the restlessness growing among modern women, of the need to have some power over their lives. She experienced that restlessness in her bones every day. To live in a building that spilled over with books and knowledge, with its shelves of maps and newspapers from around the world, yet to feel so utterly stifled, was torture.

“I want a passion, like you have for your manuscript.” Maybe he’d understand it if she put it that way.

“Look, Laura, I’ll be done with the manuscript by next year. If we wait until then, we can use the advance for your tuition. It’s the least I could do, after everything you’ve done for me.”

She slumped into his lap and put her head on his shoulder. “We can’t do that, silly,” she whispered. “The advance is for you to quit this work and write full-time. But you see, if I’ve graduated by then and have a position, you’d be able to quit no matter what.”

She could see she’d said the wrong thing by the way he blinked twice. That was how well they knew each other, after eleven years as man and wife. They’d met when she’d been in New York City in between terms at Vassar, at a party where she’d worried she’d talked too loudly and brashly about the meaning of a Poe poem. She was still getting used to being the youngest in the room and no longer the smartest. Laura had whizzed through high school in three years and been accepted to college at sixteen, urged on by her mother to take hold of every opportunity. But Laura’s time spent back in the city, among greater minds than her own, had brought her quickly down to earth. Embarrassed after her Poe soliloquy at the party, she’d retreated to the kitchen to help wash up. Jack had joined her, drying the champagne coupes, both of them stifling a laugh after the hostess breezed by and warned them to be careful to not break the stems.

“Do be careful,” Jack had said with an affected accent after she left. “They’re quite delicate, you know.” He held one up to the light to check for spots, his enormous hand like a bear’s paw. At which point the glass had fumbled away from him, landing in the sink in a pile of icelike shards.

They’d stared at each other in shock before doubling over with laughter. Later that evening he’d called her beautiful, and he didn’t seem to mind that her thick, dark eyebrows made her look sanctimonious (or so said her father) or that her hair was an unruly mess (her father again).

She caught Jack glancing at his typewriter. He was eager to get back to work, to use up every possible minute before he fell into bed at midnight, exhausted.

“We can ask my parents, maybe.” She knew it wasn’t really an option but wanted to encourage him to consider it from all angles.

He stiffened. Mentioning her parents had been another mistake. He’d spent the past decade trying to prove himself as a good husband and father. “No. We don’t go to them.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Jack opened the letter and read it. “It’s eighty-five dollars a term, plus twenty dollars for books.” He placed it back down on the desk and lightly wrapped his arms around her. “It’s out of our reach. Besides, you’ll be older than the other students. By ages.”

She swatted at him, although the words stung more than she let on. “I’m only twenty-nine. Don’t look a day over twenty, they tell me.”

“Twenty-one at the most.”

“It’s only for a year. Quicker than any other type of degree. What if we scrimp?”

But she knew their finances as well as he did. How strange to be barely managing month to month while living in such architectural splendor. The kids were growing so fast, they needed new clothes every other day, it seemed. Pearl had come down with a terrible influenza in January, and the doctors’ bills had almost done them in. She was fine now, thank goodness, but they were still catching up. The timing couldn’t be worse.

He took her chin in his hand and gave her a kiss. “I’m sorry I can’t give you the world.”

“Not yet, but soon.” She put as much cheer into her voice as she could muster and left him to his work.

After washing and drying the dinner dishes, she’d checked on the children—Harry was fast asleep and Pearl was in her room playing dress-up with her doll—before stealing out of the apartment and up a flight of stairs to the Main Reading Room to nurse her injury in private. Her father had warned her that if she went against his wishes and married Jack, her life would drastically change. He’d been right about that, but not in the way he’d envisioned. She loved watching as the children grew taller, faster, and funnier every day, and she was lucky to be sharing her life with the man who knew her best.

But still. Time was going by so quickly, and she wanted to do more, be more. The daily chores, the sameness, weighed her down like stones in her pockets. Every day, there was yet another dinner to cook, yet another sock to mend.

She took a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her eyes, enjoying the stillness of the space, the dark quiet.

A sound up on the walkway that ran the length of the room above the shelves made her jump. A door opened, and there stood Dr. Anderson, squinting over the railing.

“Mrs. Lyons, is that you?”

She prayed her red eyes wouldn’t be noticeable in the darkened room. Rays of moonlight streamed through the giant casement windows, but not enough to see well by.

“Certainly is, Dr. Anderson.” She had no reason to be here at this hour, and she struggled to come up with an excuse before settling on the truth. “I like the quiet, sometimes.”

“Me, too. I was just finishing up and wanted to enjoy a smoke. Have you been up here yet?”

“No, sir.”

He motioned for her to take the door beneath him, sandwiched in between the shelves. It led to a spiral staircase that spilled onto the bronze-railed walkway, where she joined him. “Come this way.” She followed him through yet another door, this one implanted in the marble slabs between the second and third windows. Inside, a couple of steps led into a tiny, narrow passageway, hardly big enough to fit three people. Before them stood a door with a small, barred window. As he opened it wide, she gasped and stepped forward.

They stood in the night air on a balcony high above Bryant Park, looking west across the city. The full moon had brightened the neighboring buildings, while directly below, the trees cast moon shadows along the walkways, as if it were midday.

“I always wondered about these balconies,” she said. “They seem so far away when viewed from the park below.”

“Rumor has it they were meant to eventually be walkways, for an extension of the building that was never realized, but I have a feeling the architects simply liked the way they looked.” He took a drag on his cigarette. When she first met him, she’d been cowed by his high forehead and puffy lower lip—he reminded her of the portraits of French aristocrats from the seventeenth century—but his encouragement with the newsletter columns had softened her initial impression, and his recommendation letter had been nothing less than glowing.

“Any news from Columbia?”

She’d hoped he’d forgotten about it, as she’d first mentioned it way back in the spring when she applied. No such luck. “Yes.”

“Do tell.”

“I was wait-listed at first, but I recently learned that I was accepted.”

“Well, congratulations on that achievement. Jack must be very proud.”

“He is. But I think I’ll wait to go anyway. Now’s not the time.”

“Is it the expense?”

If she said yes, it would seem like she thought Jack’s salary was unfair, which was far from the truth. In her confusion to find the right response, her face became hot. She blushed furiously under Dr. Anderson’s close scrutiny. “No, not at all,” she stammered. “The children need me. I’ll try again next year, when they’re a little older.”

“So you had me write that letter for naught?”

His tone cut to the quick. He was not pleased.

“No, that’s not it at all,” she quickly assured him. “Circumstances changed, you see.”

He put out his cigarette and held the door open for her to retreat back inside. As they walked through the Main Reading Room and into the adjoining Catalog Room, they spoke of the heat wave gripping the city and other mundane matters before she retreated to the apartment to put Pearl to bed.

Three days later, Jack dashed into the apartment to fetch her as she was in the middle of drying the children’s clothes, her arm worn out from cranking wet undershirts through the wringer.

“Dr. Anderson wants to see both of us,” Jack said, his face pale. “Right now, his secretary said.”

Her stomach lurched as she followed him down the hall. Had she shared too much with Dr. Anderson the other night? He’d seemed curt, perhaps angry that she’d asked for a recommendation but not followed through. What had she done?