New York - The Novel

room and board besides, and most sent money back to their families. In the fourteen years she’d been with the Masters, without any family to support, Mary had saved a tidy sum.
    Of course, if ever she’d needed money, Sean would have helped her. Her brother was becoming quite a wealthy man. Eight years ago, he’d taken over Nolan’s saloon down on Beekman Street. When she’d asked him what had happened to Nolan, he’d been evasive.
    “He wasn’t getting along with some of the boys,” he’d said vaguely. “He may have gone to California, I believe.”
    To tell the truth, she didn’t care what had happened to Nolan. But one thing was certain: Sean was making a fortune out of the saloon. He’d married and had a family now, and was quite the respectable man.
    “You don’t have to work as a servant, you know,” he told her. “I’ve a place for you any time you want.”
    But she preferred to keep her independence. And by now, in any case,the Masters’ house had become her home. If little Sally Master was in any kind of trouble, it wouldn’t be long before she was knocking on Mary’s door. When young Tom Master returned from Harvard for the summer, Mary felt the same thrill of pleasure as if he’d been her own.
    Did she still think of getting married? Perhaps. It wasn’t too late, if the right man came along. But somehow he never seemed to. If Hans had asked her, she supposed she would have said yes. But Hans had been happily married for many years. Time had passed, and she never thought of him nowadays. Well, hardly ever.
    “Down Fifth, James,” Gretchen called to the coachman, and a minute later they passed out of the bottom corner of the park and onto the carriage thoroughfare.
    “Where are we going?” said Mary. But her friend didn’t answer.
    If Broadway had dominated the social scene for generations, the upstart Fifth Avenue was bidding for prominence now. And though fashionable Central Park was still waiting for the city to reach it, isolated mansions on Fifth were already getting close.
    The first house of note, seven streets down from the park, was a palatial mansion nearing completion on an empty site. “That’s Madame Restell’s,” Gretchen remarked. “Doesn’t she live fine?” Having made a fortune with her husband procuring abortions for the good people of the city, Madame Restell had recently decided to build herself a house on Fifth where she could enjoy her retirement in state. And if Mary looked at that house with some horror, it was only another block before she reverently crossed herself.
    Fifth at Fiftieth. St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A decade had passed since Cardinal Hughes had laid the cornerstone of the great church which the city’s huge new population of Irish Catholics so obviously deserved. And there was no doubt about its message. If Trinity’s claims on the Gothic style had seemed impressive for a while, the vast new Catholic cathedral rising on Fifth would put the Protestant Episcopalians in their place—and provide a mighty reminder that honor was due to the Irish Catholics too.
    Mary was proud of St. Patrick’s. Increasingly, as time went by, the Church had been a comfort to her. The religion of her childhood, and of her people. At least you knew that it would always be there. She went to Mass every Sunday, confessing her few, small sins to a priest who gave her kindly dispensation and renewal of life. She prayed in the chapel, where the shadows comprehended all human tears, the candles promised love,and the silence, she knew, was the stillness of the eternal Church. With this spiritual nourishment her life was, almost, complete.
    They swept on down Fifth, past the orphanage for poor Negro children at Forty-third, past the fortress-like splendor of the reservoir, all the way down to Union Square, where they picked up the Bowery.
    “Have you guessed where we’re going?” asked Gretchen.

    Theodore Keller’s photographic studio was well equipped, and divided into two sections. In the smaller section, there was a camera set in position opposite a single chair placed in front of a curtain. For like the other photographers on the Bowery, his bread-and-butter business in recent years had been taking quick portraits of young men standing proudly, or sheepishly, in their unaccustomed uniforms, before they went off to fight against the South. Quicker than the old daguerreotype to take, easy to reproduce on paper, he’d get thirty a day sometimes. It paid