A misty rain slicked the streets as I walked the short blocks from the subway stop. I was vaguely familiar with Brooklyn, having visited my paternal great-grandmother there infrequently as a child. She’d spoken with a heavy German accent and had seemed to barely tolerate my mother. I remembered her mostly by the scent of baking bread that clung to her like a perfume. She must have died before I was ten years old, because I didn’t remember the obligatory visits much past then.
The neighborhood I found myself in now wasn’t too dissimilar from the one of my memory, with the familiar stench of garbage and the sight of laundry floating like ghosts from lines stretched between buildings. I remembered with a certain fondness the predominant odors of sauerkraut and schnitzel that had always made me feel a part of my mother’s life, the part before she met my father and the brackets of disappointment that marked each side of her mouth had become permanent.
I stood across from a three-story brownstone with baby carriages parked out front on the sidewalk, a tired-looking mother jostling a screaming baby on her shoulder, taking turns patting the child’s back and flicking ash from a cigarette dangling from her lips, seemingly impervious to the drizzle that dusted everything with a fine mist.
I looked down at the crumpled piece of paper clutched in my gloved hands, double-checking that I was in the right place. Prunella Pratt Schuyler had responded to my request for a meeting with a short note scrawled out in bold script. It had been more of a summons than a response, telling me to be at this address at four o’clock Tuesday next. The expensive stationery was at jarring odds with the street on which I stood, the linen paper more appropriate to an Upper East Side debutante than to this Brooklyn neighborhood of immigrant families and the pungent scents of foreign foods. Remembering what Margie had discovered about Prunella in the society pages, I wondered if that false impression might have been intentional.
I was quite certain this wasn’t the same place I’d visited with my parents all those years ago. I had to assume that Prunella’s fortunes since my father’s death had deteriorated drastically, at least to the point where she’d been forced to move to Brooklyn from the Upper East Side. Which, some might argue, would be a fate worse than death.
I waited for a sputtering milk truck to pass and then crossed the street. The haggard mother barely noticed me as I passed her on the steps and entered through tall double doors into what might have once been an attractive foyer in a single residence. But now the black-and-white marble tiles of the floor were cracked and stained, the plaster ceiling moldings mostly missing or water spotted, the fireplace surround absent, presumably salvaged to grace a more deserving residence.
I almost left the building again to check the address one more time, but stopped myself. I recalled the rest of the information Margie had discovered in the newspaper archives about the demise of the Pratt family fortunes related to bad railroad investments, and then the blow the Schuyler family fortune had sustained during the crash of ’29. For a woman like Prunella, who since birth had been brought up and schooled to be nothing more than a society hostess, to end up in a place like this, far away from the familiar world of her youth—it must have been humbling indeed.
The sound of a couple arguing tumbled down the narrow stairs in front of me, the dark green runner of which was threadbare and filthy. A baby cried somewhere in the building, while an out-of-tune piano plunked out a scale behind the door to my right. I looked again at the note in my hand. Apartment 1B. The door opposite the piano, with peeling white paint and only a shadow of where a number one must have once been attached.
I hesitated only a moment before raising my hand and knocking, the sound slightly muted by my glove. I heard a movement inside, like the barest brush of satin against wood, and then nothing. I took off my glove and knocked again with all four knuckles.
This time I heard light but quick footsteps, followed by the sound of several locks being unlatched before the door slowly opened. Two large green eyes beneath a mop of white curly hair peered out at me through the space between the door and frame.
“Mrs. Schuyler? Aunt Prunella? It’s Kate. Kate Schuyler. Philip’s daughter.”
The door widened and the woman stepped back, revealing an old-fashioned and ill-fitting black maid’s uniform complete with starched white apron and cap. Her wide smile alone would have been enough to tell me it wasn’t my aunt Prunella, but when she opened her mouth and words that danced with an Irish brogue fell from her tongue, I knew for certain.