Grace and Lithauer had the driver take them to New York Orthopaedic Dispensary, but they couldn’t find a specialist. Grace had seen too many clients who had relatives go into an emergency ward never to come out. She wanted a specialist. So they drove to Flower Hospital, where Grace was finally admitted. Two specialists from outside of the hospital were called in to consult. Grace was in great pain but still conscious.
Grace suffered a severe compound fracture of the left ankle. But the broken bones that had pierced her skin were the least of her worries. The doctors at Flower were trying their best to prevent blood poisoning, which they knew could cause amputation of the foot or death. They watched her carefully for four days and gave her injections of lockjaw serum with a long silver needle. Grace lay there, still on the white bed, her black hat on the table beside her.
When she was finally out of the woods, the doctors said it would be at least three weeks before she could leave the hospital. And months before she could walk. When Heck appeared before Magistrate Cobb, he said that he was “turning east onto Fifty-ninth Street when the accident happened.” Heck said he did “not see Mrs. Humiston in front of his truck, but stopped when he heard her cries.”
He was released on $500 bail. Heck also said that the policeman was able to easily see both the truck and Mrs. Humiston, with her sweeping black dress, stepping off the trolley. Heck said the policeman gave him the right of way.
During this time, as Grace recovered, the City of New York faced a new breed of murderer. This hunter didn’t lend itself to story or gossip. Its motive was utterly transparent: to sicken and kill anything that breathed. The influenza epidemic that had creeped into Gotham from a Norwegian boat in 1919 had so completely changed the city that, by 1920, the streets looked like an outdoor hospital. Schools were closed. People went to their jobs with cotton masks tied tight around their mouths. Movie theaters staggered their show times so as to spread out their crowds. As the great sickness, which would later be understood as the body’s unnecessary overreaction to virus, spread across the boroughs, victims transformed from printed names to empty, place-holding zeroes. Families grieved and cowered behind doors locked to quiet streets. By 1922, the fourth wave of the pandemic was finally ending. Since 1918, over forty thousand New Yorkers had died. The war had taken her sons; the flu had mopped up the rest.
After her accident, Grace stayed out of the public eye, for the most part. She still practiced mostly immigration cases (which were now fewer) and cases of patients with mental illness. She rarely left New York and lived in a series of apartments. When Amelia Earhart completed her solo flight across the Atlantic in 1932, Grace sent her a telegram. It read: “Congratulations.”
In her later years, Grace watched her city change even further. New York pushed its way even higher into the sky, turning into almost solid steel, impregnable and stainless. Murders came and went in the news. And yet another war—even greater, if that was even the word for it—began and ended, killing millions across the globe. The public forgot her, and Grace became yet another stylish old lady in a Park Avenue apartment with jars of cold cream and stories gone untold. She became someone whom people wondered about when she clicked her wooden door shut. Her family had always been her cases, and, like any family, they were no longer whole. She had made her work the immense adventure of her life.
On August 1, 1947, Alfredo Cocchi was considered rehabilitated and was released.
On July 16, 1948, Grace was admitted to the French Hospital. Thirty minutes later, she was dead. She had arteriosclerotic heart disease. She was seventy-eight. Her sister Jessie claimed her body, and Grace was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery on July 19, 1948.
Grace and Cocchi never met. But if Grace ever leafed through her old report on Sunny Side in her dark apartment, she would have found, on page 61, a list of people who had thankfully escaped the island.
Grace might have frozen at seeing the name on the upper-right. Her mind might have tried to go back to all those blurry faces. She might try to calculate the math in her head or on a scrap of paper. She might look and search for a birth certificate. There was no possible way it could be him. She would look again. She had written this name down, then typed it, all those years ago. Had she run across this man in one of those low cabins? Had she spoken to him? Had he answered? Or was it all in her head? Grace might have gone through the photographs she still had, looking at the black-and-white faces for someone in the back: pale, smiling, and intangible among the tall crops.
List of the families who escaped from Sunny Side leaving debts:
Names.
Albonetti Cesare
Pieroni Giovanni
Baratti
Pielli Eligio
Domenicucci Emilio
Contini
Ferrara
Mancini Carlo
Padroni Enrico
Augusto Fratesi
Frantini Luigi
Romanelli Cesare
Vincenzo Angeletti
Laggio Natale
Santucci Enrice
Rocchetti Antonic
Cocchi
Pirrini Fernando
Rosa Guardino
Angeletti Giovanni
Socci
Romanelli Enrico
Pacifico Fratesi.
Frantini Guiseppe
Pantozzi Luciano
Enrico Santucci
Mrs. Ersille
Maggio Carlo
Albonetti Santa.
In an interview late in life, Grace remembered the first time she met Henry Cruger. Mrs. Felix Adler had introduced them, hoping that Grace would take the case.
“I shall never forget the despair in the face of that man,” Grace said. “His eyes were sunken in his head and the last vestige of hope had left him. He sat in a chair in a corner of the office, his head bowed, his eyes unseeing.”
“Mr. Cruger thinks you can find his missing daughter,” Mrs. Adler said.
“Before I could protest,” said Grace, “she reviewed the case for me. She told of the aspersions police had cast upon the girl who was lost; how they had characterized her as ‘wayward’ when her conduct was unimpeachable. She told of the despair of the Crugers themselves, of the mother in a sickbed frantic with worry, of the sisters and the father himself not knowing which way to turn. Then, when she finished, Mr. Cruger looked up, straight into my eyes.”
“Won’t you help me find my girl?” asked Henry Cruger.
“Many times since then I have wished that Mrs. Adler had not come to me,” Grace admitted. “Many times have I tried to forget the horror of that case, the constant worry and fear, the sickening, disgusting things I saw and experienced.” She shook her head.
“I protested at first,” she continued. “I told Mrs. Adler and Mr. Cruger that they overestimated me considerably. I told them that there was slight possibility I could uncover more than the police had. Mrs. Adler argued with me. Mr. Cruger sat there with bowed head. And when he raised his eyes and looked at me and said again ‘Won’t you help me find my girl’ I knew that I had lost.
“I am not sorry that I did not turn Mr. Cruger down,” said Grace. “I would do it all over again, under the same circumstances.”
Epilogue