The American Lady(15)
Marie shook her head. “The border guards looked rather fierce. One of them even went through my handbag, but that was all. Then they let me on through.” She laughed briefly. “You should have seen how excited the immigrants were! We had hardly gotten past the Statue of Liberty when the whole lot of them started staring into one another’s eyes. Georgie told me that they were deathly afraid of having some sort of eye infection. ‘Trachoma,’ I think she said—anyone who’s sick with it gets sent straight back. Have you heard of such a thing?”
Ruth nodded. “I think it’s quite right that they check very carefully who they let into the country. We can’t cope with infectious disease. Just imagine, more than eleven thousand people arrive here every day! They have nothing but a bundle of old clothes under an arm, and every single one of them thinks the streets are paved with gold! But this whole business with immigration is simple, really. Four or five hours and then they’re through, and the New World awaits!”
“Did you have to come through Ellis Island back then?” Marie asked curiously. She suddenly realized that she knew next to nothing about how Ruth had left Germany.
“Good heavens, no!” Ruth waved a hand. “For one thing, there weren’t as many people arriving back then. And for another I had my papers in order . . .” She instinctively dropped her voice to a whisper, though it was most unlikely that the taxi driver understood German.
Marie giggled. “Baroness Ruthwicka von Lausche—you must have had the fright of your life, didn’t you, when you saw that Steven had gotten hold of forged papers that gave you a noble title?”
Ruth grinned. For a moment Marie thought her sister looked just like the daring young girl who had left Lauscha, and her husband, in the dead of night all those years ago.
To this day, Marie didn’t quite know why Ruth’s marriage to Thomas Heimer had failed. He was the son of one of the most prosperous glassblowers in the village, and at least at first, Ruth had been head over heels in love. But then one day she had turned up back home with all her worldly goods and her three-month-old daughter, Wanda. “I’m never going back to him,” was all she said—not a word of explanation otherwise. Johanna and Marie had had no choice but to accept it.
“Having a title certainly did me no harm,” Ruth said now. “You can hardly imagine the way people bent over backward to help. Of course that was also because I arrived with Steven. All the same . . .” She looked thoughtful. “I never felt comfortable about those forged papers. That first year was very hard. Whenever the doorbell rang, I thought, well that’s it, they’re coming to get me.” She sighed. “When Thomas finally agreed to the divorce and Steven and I could get married, a weight fell from my shoulders! I’ve felt like a new woman ever since I became Steven’s wife.”
“It’s odd—at the time I hardly noticed what was going on, somehow,” Marie replied, embarrassed.
Ruth just laughed. “And you think that’s odd? You had nothing but those baubles of yours on your mind, day and night!” Then she pointed out the window. “Look, we’re just crossing the Avenue of the Americas now. It won’t be long before we arrive.” She gave Marie a quick explanation of the city’s grid layout, with its streets and avenues that imposed some order on the chaos of Manhattan.
Marie was astonished when the taxi stopped among the soaring buildings. “You live here?”
“We have the top apartment,” Ruth replied proudly, pointing vaguely up to the top of the slim skyscraper before them. “Don’t tell me you never heard about our move a year ago!”
“Well, quite, but I thought someone as wealthy as Steven would live in his own house . . .”
“Not at all!” Ruth said triumphantly. “Anyone who can afford it is moving to Fifth Avenue these days. I can hardly imagine ever having lived anywhere else. Steven and I were among the first to recognize the advantages of living right in the middle of town: you need fewer staff to run an apartment, you’re much closer to the shops and the opera, you don’t have all the bother of a garden . . . Let me tell you, it won’t be long before they all leave their old houses! Fifth Avenue is already called Millionaire’s Row, I’ll have you know.” She snapped her fingers and the taxi driver followed her through the elegant front door with Marie’s luggage. Marie followed—and then stopped, thunderstruck.
“I don’t believe it!” She looked around, astonished.
Over a hundred square yards of red marble stretched out before her, with gilded benches of black granite lining the edges and vast palms growing in pots by the walls. The whole back wall of the lobby was one vast aquarium in which fish in every color of the rainbow swam among coral and strange-looking plants. Just as Marie was expecting a parrot to fly out and land on her shoulder, a uniformed page boy opened the elevator door. Marie followed her sister hesitantly into the elevator cage, a gleaming chamber of bronze and glass, which began to glide upward.