The First of July(8)

For him, beauty in New York was a matter of achievement and ambition. The great red stone blocks, the sheer confidence of those buildings and the carved family names of so many from the Old World who must have arrived in a state of poverty and could now proclaim success: Mannheim, Carlotti, Trüdl, Steinbacker.

Marina was herself a Steinbacker on her mother’s side and a Van Guyen on her father’s. Her blue eyes and silver-gilt hair would have looked at home in Delft or Bavaria, he thought. In England, much that was thought beautiful was simply a matter of its having endured through time. A building that had survived since the Wars of the Roses, a parkland full of medieval oaks, thatched manor houses whose beds had supposedly been slept in by the great Elizabeth. The older and more fragile the substance, the more the English admired it. The more ancient the family, the more profound the inertia that kept it fixed in the very spot it had occupied for five hundred years, the more that family was revered. He liked the whole, unfinished rawness of the New World. He would go out early to draw sketches of the city growing: the girders and electric lighting and the cranes dipping to welcome ships arriving from the Atlantic. The garment factories and the soapy vapor from basement laundries, the motorbuses and the subway from City Hall to Broadway, the trains setting out to cross a continent, and the steam and sparks at Grand Central Station.

If he were honest, he liked noise. Even in the rooms of his apartment, four floors up, looking out over the treetops, with echoes muffled by wooden paneling and Turkish carpets, he reveled in the hum of this city, which had taken him to its heart. On hot nights, with the sashes open, when it was too hot to sleep, he would lie and listen to distant sounds and rejoice at his own anonymity in the great grinding machine. Yet there had been much that had shocked him when he had first arrived: squalor, violence, destitution, things he might never have seen if it hadn’t been for his nocturnal walks, or which he might indeed have seen if he had ever bothered to explore the industrial cities of his mother country. He even allowed himself to think back to the woman many thousands of miles away, whom he had once thought he loved, and to feel ashamed that his view of her, so romanticized and physically charged, had completely ignored the fact that she was driven by a need to escape the poverty he now saw around him every day.

He had initially bought into a textile factory. It should have been folly—he knew next to nothing about industry, although his late mother’s family had made a fortune in brewery; but he wanted to invest in a business he could work in himself, not just profit from. He was fortunate that although his business partner had had little capital, he was honest, knowledgeable, and experienced. What they shared was a wish to use modern methods, to expand but also to provide the usual hostel for the workers, mostly women, mostly immigrants—not so they could live in a virtual prison but so their conditions could be improved. Behind their backs and, indeed, to their faces, heads were shaken. A penniless idealist and a rich and ignorant Englishman, each exploiting the other. The machines would fail, the business would fold, the workers would take advantage: they would, indeed, steal; their competitors would flourish. But instead it was the workers who flourished with basic medical care, adequate food. Some stole, undoubtedly, some may have taken advantage. Some substituted less healthy sisters or friends when it came to medical care. Some smoked cigarettes or got pregnant by strangers. But many thrived. Classes were introduced to teach English to women who spoke only Italian or Yiddish. In time, the best employees became overseers, less brutal than their predecessors. The workers stayed and gained new skills as more sophisticated machinery was introduced. Harry bought better-quality cotton, sent out work to skilled finishers. A few, a very few, other businessmen came to look at their methods.

Then, in early 1911, his partner, who was only in his thirties and had no family, had drowned while ice-skating, and to Harry’s astonishment had left him his half of the now-successful business.

A month or so later, in March, came the calamity that had been waiting to happen, falling on one of his competitors whose factory was an old-fashioned sweatshop. One hundred and forty-six women and children, locked into their workplace at the Triangle shirtwaist factory, had burned to death or jumped to meet it on the pavements of Manhattan. The papers were full of pictures of charred and broken bodies: small bundles of rags on the hard New York sidewalk. Suddenly philanthropists and politicians found a useful model of enlightened industrialism in Harry Sydenham. It was a pity that he was British, but at least he had declared no intention of returning to his native land. In spirit, the papers reported, he was an American: a man of innovation and energy, a man of ideals.