“Look what I bought myself today. A New York guidebook! In English!” Marie took the book proudly from her pants pocket and passed it to Steven.
Wanda was still amazed that Marie had managed to ignore Ruth’s attempts to dress her respectably. But she’d done it somehow, and at least here at home she wore pants and a selection of tight-waisted blouses that were cut like men’s shirts, with ruffles down the front and at the cuffs. Marie looked so daring in her getup that Wanda found herself thinking of the Three Musketeers. She would like to try it herself sometime . . . but Mother would never allow that.
“What a good idea! In fact you should have had a city guide all along,” her father said, looking fondly at his wife. “Ruth knows all there is to know about the best shoe stores and boutiques. But if you ask her what year a building dates from or who the architect was, my dear wife is usually stumped for an answer, aren’t you, my love?”
Ruth shrugged indifferently. Wanda knew her mother didn’t care about that sort of thing.
“Well, I think that the authors just copy off one another. Most of them have never set foot in the city,” Wanda said. But she felt a twinge of annoyance that she hadn’t thought to give her aunt a guidebook herself. Perhaps the two of them could have taken one of the walking tours described in its pages.
Marie looked at her curiously. “Do you think so? I find it very informative. Especially the section about New York’s bridges—that was the first thing I read, right through! Look, I’ll show you something.”
Everyone around the table smiled—Marie’s fascination with New York’s bridges was well-known by now.
“Look, this is how they built the Brooklyn Bridge,” Marie said, pointing to a photograph of a dozen workers grinning as they struck poses in a nest of steel cables. “It says here that they used fourteen thousand miles of steel cable. By the time it was done, it had cost three times as much as they expected.”
“Does the book say how many workers died building the bridge?” Wanda asked with a hint of concern in her voice as she bent over the page. “Or that thousands of poor immigrants worked on the site for decades, sweating their guts out for two dollars a day?”
“Wanda!” Ruth chided her.
“What do you mean, Wanda? Aren’t you the one who always says there are two sides to every question? Light and shade, remember. Where there’s wealth, there’s poverty too. And that’s especially true of New York. You only show Marie the side of the city you think she should see. How is she supposed to form her own impression?”
“Oh heavens, there you go again with your views on the social question. I hardly think Marie came all this way so that she could go visit the slums,” Ruth said icily.
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Wanda shot back. “Aunt Marie is an artist. That means she wants to see more than Broadway and the temples of commerce. Or the grand events at Madison Square Garden. That’s not where art really happens these days—true art moved on long ago. Pandora says—”
“Kindly spare us your dance teacher’s opinions in such matters. The woman’s mad,” Steven interrupted gruffly. Then he turned back to Marie.
“Wanda’s right about one thing, though,” he said, glancing over at his daughter with a frown. “New York is a work of art in its own right. There are no new worlds to discover in this day and age, but this world-class city is the work of human hands. A work in progress. And each and every one of us should feel grateful to be a part of it.”
“I never knew you could be such a poet,” Marie said, giving Steven a gentle dig in the ribs. “Go on, it’s fun hearing you talk like this.”
Why couldn’t her aunt talk to her, just once in a while? Wanda turned back to her food in a huff. The potatoes tasted very good, even if they looked like mush.
Steven pointed out the window. “Out there the buildings are so tall that some streets don’t get to see the moon and stars at all. It’s like living in a canyon, but each canyon offers thousands of opportunities every day. Win or lose—everyone holds their future in their own hands. That’s the real beauty of this city, for me.”
“Opportunities!” Wanda spat out, before Marie’s face could cloud over again with that dreamy look of hers. “You mustn’t believe everything that Father says. If you happen to be young, and a woman, there are next to no opportunities. All you ever hear is what you’re not allowed to do.”
Marie looked at her, baffled. “Whatever do you mean?”