Known as the mother of New York churches, it could seat a thousand parishioners. When it was full, it looked like a neighborhood version of the afterlife. There was a sliding oak wall at the back of the altar that could be pulled back to reveal a shimmering wall of blue stained glass. People came from far away just to see its mechanical baptismal font, which would slowly rise from the flat floor from a secret underground chamber.
The first-floor Sunday schoolroom was one of Ruth’s favorite places in the world. The Christian Endeavor Room was where Ruth could sit with the children. The double set of sliding doors concealed the infant room. Ruth would play with the littler girls, reading Bible stories, and standing and smiling when their parents came to claim them, lifting their small bodies high into the air. Ruth would smile among all the bright, white children. She would teach them about the poor widow from Luke 21: 1–4 who put only two tiny coins into the offering cup yet gave more than all the rich combined.
But on this Sunday, those same girls in dresses and ribbons came in with their heads bowed in the disbelief of early despair. They slowly gathered in the rectory and got on their knees in silence. Some were crying. Many were crying. The Reverend Pattison, a tall, handsome man, entered the room and sat among them. The reverend often commended Ruth and was sometimes seen encouraging her. He had personally baptized her a year ago last Easter. As he sat with his flock, they all prayed for Ruth’s safe return.
In another part of the church, behind closed doors, the Mothers’ Committee drafted an official resolution that served as their own kind of prayer. They condemned the “appalling condition of city streets where it is not safe for our girls and boys to go unprotected.” The resolution was adopted with the hope that all of the “mothers of New York unite to get better protection for their children.” Later, under the direction of the same committee, the girls in the church sat in long rows, preparing ten thousand circulars with a photo of Ruth to send to police commissioners and hotel managers. The committee got movie-screen projectionists all across the country to flash her grainy picture on the screen before Charlie Chaplin’s Easy Street. The mothers of the committee wanted to cover the country with Ruth’s smile. They ordered her photo sent to conductors, brakemen, and drivers. These women who met behind closed doors represented a powerful community. Their actions were the measurement of how much they loved Ruth Cruger. And the idea of her.
*
Later that night, when Henry was out, the phone rang in the apartment. His wife Christina paused, then picked up the receiver. She heard only a faint buzz on the other end.
“I saw your daughter,” the voice on the line said. It was a woman.
Mrs. Cruger listened, waiting for the woman to speak again.
“At Manhattan and 128th Street at about 4 o’clock Tuesday afternoon,” the woman said. Mrs. Cruger wrote it down in the pad by the phone that was already covered with numbers.
“She was a slender girl,” the woman on the line said. “Wearing a long brown coat such as the newspapers say your daughter wears. The collar was turned up about her face, but I could see she seemed dazed. She was crying.” For Mrs. Cruger, who listened with doubt, this last word still cut sharply. The woman went on: “A man about forty years old, not at all foreign looking, had her by the arm and was urging her along and arguing with her almost angrily. They passed out of my sight north on Broadway. I did not think anything of the incident until I read of the disappearance of Miss Cruger in the newspapers.”
Mrs. Cruger asked for her name, but the line was already dead.
When Henry came home, his wife was shaking when she told him about the call. Henry went to his notebook and checked the numbers. In the absence of his daughter, numbers were the only things he could trust. He respected their complete lack of disguise. And he was sure they could help find his daughter. The time given by the caller was a full half hour after Ruth had supposedly left in a cab with a mysterious stranger at 125th and Lenox, which was the story the detectives had told him. The caller didn’t mention a cab, but her description of the man was eerily similar. Was it the same man?
Henry knew that finding a forty-year-old man in a coat in New York City was probably an impossible task. Henry tried to rethink his approach. If there was a connection between the two stories—if the man seen pushing Ruth along was indeed leading her toward a cab—then Henry needed to find the cab driver from the story the detectives had told him. That driver, Henry hoped, might be the only person who could determine who the mysterious man was and where he and Ruth had come from. Henry was settled. He had to find this cab driver. He had to find this chauffeur.
The next morning, Henry took a series of cab rides all across Harlem, following the route his daughter had supposedly taken. Henry sat in the back, his eyes on the street as the city passed him by, all legs and coats and hats. The jingling horses of the old days were all but gone. He saw the black girders of the elevated train frame the sky. They held up great signs for Howard Clothes (“The Gentleman of Good Taste”) and Maxwell House (“Good to the Last Drop”). He passed a middle-aged woman with a chalkboard held around her neck with burlap twine. It read BEGGAR’S PERMIT BADGE 2622. BLIND. There were two horizons in the city now—the burnished steel above and the uneven brick and wood below. When Henry saw police on the sidewalk, he slumped his face down into his collars. But he watched them all, though their smiles hurt him. He was searching for form and repetition and anomaly. Henry Cruger, the accountant and father, had, of necessity, become a detective.
Ruth had not been seen in four days. Later that day, the New York Times reported that Police Commissioner Woods had taken a “personal interest in the case.” Woods promised that “all detectives of the Fourth Branch who could be spared be sent in search of her.” But every day was counting down to a worse and worse conclusion. The papers—and there were nearly twenty daily papers now—reported that Henry Cruger had hired his own private detectives from the Martin Donnelly agency. They hit the hospitals and came up empty. Henry still kept riding in cabs. He knew that if she had reached the subway, she could be long gone. But he couldn’t think about that. All he could grasp right now was Harlem.