I went so far as to offer to pay for the doctor myself, but that only enraged Danzinger more. He shouted at me to mind my own business and forcibly pushed me out of their apartment. He shoved me so hard I lost my balance and tumbled down the stairs.
I was unconscious for hours. When I awoke in the vestibule at the bottom of the steps, I found it almost impossible to move because I was in so much pain. Something was wrong with my back. At dawn, our landlady finally opened her door to put out her milk bottles and noticed me.
I told her where to find some coins upstairs in my apartment. “Enough,” I said, “to take a carriage to a doctor I know who will come and help.”
When our family physician, Dr. Bernstein, arrived, he didn’t recognize me at first. I whispered to him who I was and took off my glasses. Hurriedly, I explained about Charlotte, who I feared needed him more. I knew he was trustworthy, and besides, there was no time to waste. Even though he was shocked to see me in such a place and in such a state, he did as I asked and went up to see Charlotte before attending to me.
He returned after only ten minutes. Charlotte had not made it through the night, he told me, as he examined my bruised and battered body in the hallway. The little girl had died sometime before midnight. My physical pain was nothing compared to the emotional pain I felt hearing that. I was devastated to think that if not for her father’s callous indifference, she could have been saved.
I’d broken two vertebrae in my back, so my editor assigned another reporter to write up the incident, and the article received a lot of attention. But I couldn’t be reached for comment. I wrote to Mr. Nevins and said I was recuperating with my family and was taking a leave of absence from both my reporting and my column.
I moved back into my parents’ house in Riverdale and stayed there for eight weeks. But even as my bones healed, my heart didn’t. When I was finally well enough, I cloaked myself in the garments of Vee Swann and ventured downtown to the tenement house to see Charlotte’s mother and siblings. I waited until I saw Mr. Danzinger leave for the night and then made my way upstairs, wincing with pain on each step. I had forgotten the stench of stale body odor, cabbage, and piss, and it made me gag.
Charlotte’s mother opened the door at the sound of the knock, looked at me, and told me to leave.
“Please, let me come in, for just a few minutes. I want to help.”
“You can’t help. You didn’t help before. You made everything worse.”
Searching past her, I saw her other daughter, Alice, and her two sons, Bill and Henry, looking at me expectantly, hoping I had brought gifts. And I had, but Mrs. Danzinger wouldn’t take them.
“I’m so sorry about what happened to Charlotte,” I said. “I miss her so much. You must, too. All of you must.”
Mrs. Danzinger’s eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t acknowledge my sympathy. “If my husband sees you here, I don’t know what he’ll do. Get out, and don’t come back,” she said, and shut the door in my face.
I left the bags of books and candy on the doorstep and made my way down the steps for the last time, thinking about the brown-eyed little girl who had dreamed of growing up and writing stories about fairies.
I wanted to help them but knew better than to openly interfere again. Instead, I had my father’s charity reach out to Mrs. Danzinger, offering to help her if she wanted to have her husband brought up on charges or to take her three remaining children and leave him. She refused to do either.
When I heard that, I arranged to have the charity put her on its weekly delivery list, ensuring that the packages were given only to her and not her husband. We regularly helped hundreds of families with extra clothes, toys, books, and canned foodstuffs. I also made sure that once a month, Mrs. Danzinger received an envelope containing ten dollars, which she never refused.
Despite the fact that I had helped Charlotte’s family, my spirit remained broken. Once I was able, I moved back to my rather unfashionable Chelsea apartment. I’d had the apartment for seven years. My mother had vehemently disapproved when I first moved in. She thought my disguise would be enough and didn’t understand why I wanted to live among commoners—not that she called them that; she was too polite—but I knew that was what she thought. I’d wanted Vee Swann to have her own apartment, one she could afford. I’d decorated it with thrift-shop bargains. The kinds of cast-offs that fit Vee’s salary. Despite the secondhand pieces, the apartment was cozy and welcoming, painted a warm peach, with lots of ferns and books and braided rugs. I’d found a couch upholstered in a leaf pattern and a green glass lamp in the exact same shade as the couch.
Once I recovered, I extended my leave at the World. Instead of writing serious stories for the newspaper, the column was all I was willing to tackle. Martha Sanderson and Fanny Ustead, two of my closest friends, both reporters, visited often. I made an effort to be cheery, but they knew I still wasn’t myself. They took it upon themselves to urge me back to work, but I resisted. Faced with Charlotte’s death and her mother’s refusal of help to move her and her other children out of harm’s way, I felt that all my efforts at shining light on injustice were a waste. I couldn’t change anything. Not fundamentally.
Then the second tragedy occurred. Just two months later, in October, a fire gutted my apartment building. I wasn’t hurt—I’d smelled the smoke and got out in time. But all the copies of all the articles I had ever written were lost forever. Charlotte’s book of fairy stories and her bouquet of felt flowers, birthday cards from fellow journalists, photographs, souvenirs, trinkets… all the tiny, inconsequential things that go to make up a life’s worth of memories—Vee Swann’s memories—vanished in one night.
Without a place of my own to live, my father insisted I move into his apartment above Garland’s, which boasted three bedrooms. Since he stayed there only when he worked too late to go home to the family manse in Riverdale, it was empty most of the time.
My father’s penthouse had been designed by my uncle Percy, an architect who had also designed my father’s store. Garland’s was the first to move uptown to Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street—which in 1902 was shocking, since it wasn’t yet fashionable to be up that far, and Uncle Percy had been bold and ultramodern in his designs both inside and out.
The apartment was even more splendid than the four-floor emporium beneath it. Perched high on the roof of the building, it had more windows than I’d ever seen in a New York City dwelling. It was like a mansion in the sky. Designed by Uncle Percy’s friend, Louis Comfort Tiffany, each window was like a painting, framed by beribboned garlands of silver, blue, and lavender flowers with green trails of ivy. That winter, all the windows were laced with ice and glittered in the cold sun, splashing reflections of color onto the walls and carpets. Tiffany lampshades and tiles on the floor and in the bathrooms and kitchen echoed the silver, blue, and green color scheme, and the handsome furniture was all covered in dark sapphire and deep emerald velvets and silks. The drapes were heavy damask sapphire threaded with silver garlands—the store’s logo.
A terrace wrapped its way around the whole apartment and on three sides was left open to the elements. Each spring, Father would call for a variety of bushes and flowers to be delivered. They would flourish and bloom in a riot of colors through the late summer.