If I wanted to feel close to Papa, I rode his subway. The underground line paralleled Huntington Avenue overhead, which, in itself, was a nice stroll down memory lane, always bustling with people and carriages and tourists and students. But when I needed to really remember the sound of Papa’s voice, rich and confident, or the fire, full of plans and possibilities, ideas and inventions, in his eyes, I rode below. The trains snaked through concrete tunnels into pitch blackness the way memories routed through narrow channels of thought, peeping out once in a while to make sure the world was still turning, and then rushing onward, inward, and down, down, down to the bowels of the past.
When I was seven years old, Papa said the subway was the answer to all of Boston’s problems. He liked to say it flippantly, as we marched along the sidewalk, anticipating my saucy reply. I never let him down.
“Poppycock. Can it serve up a hot dog?” I asked. “Can the subway sew my new party dress?” Papa always encouraged my questions. He said questions were like knocking on the door of knowledge.
He tended to bang them down and it was entertaining to watch.
Papa swung my hand and we dodged a woman pushing a pram. “Maybe not today, Loveda,” he’d return with a wink, “but soon. Very soon.”
That was 1897, when he presented at the subway’s Grand Opening. His triumph. One of so many. I placed a gloved hand over my stomach as the subway lurched, remembering the ceremony, the celebration afterward, and the congratulations of half the city that remained inside of me as a ball of excitement.
I turned fourteen the summer Papa, Mama, and I attended the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Papa won both the Grand Prize and the Elliott Cresson Medal. By then, he’d already built and sold companies founded on his inventions and advancements with electric motors. Subways. Streetcars. Elevators. His speech at the event mirrored the bedtime story I’d learned by heart.
“It was 1888,” Papa would say in a far-away voice. “I was just out of the navy and looking at Boston with fresh eyes.”
“You’d seen the Crystal Palace,” I’d interrupt. We sat in the lobby of the Missouri hotel, hiding in the shadows of deep leather chairs, waiting for Mama to appear and send me to bed. “Paris. London.” I said the words with what I considered a dramatic, romantic voice. I’d only read about such places, but the World’s Fair had charged my imagination.
“Yes. Where the coal-powered steam locomotives run underground.” His eyes would grow wide. “Filthy, smoky, deafening. Fast.” He’d squint for effect. “Miserable.”
“But Boston didn’t even have streetcars yet,” I’d prompt. “In 1888.”
“No, not electric ones, but they were in construction.”
“You won the Gold Medal in Paris for them.” I shifted in my seat.
“Who’s telling the story?” He puffed on his pipe and raised an eyebrow.
“You are, Mr. Brown. Please continue.”
“That March, we had the worst snowstorm in American history. Some drifts of snow in the city were fifty feet tall, if you can imagine it.”
I could, when he told the story.
“People died. Boston froze. Streetcars, cabs, trolleys, horses, automobiles, buses, wagons. Nothing moved beneath the crushing remains of the blizzard. Bridges collapsed.”
“But you had a notebook full of inventions.” I smoothed at the ruffles on my dress and noticed a mustard smudge. “And an idea that could save the city.”
Papa was a born engineer. A scientist. A progressive thinking man whose friends accused him of having gears in his head for brains. By the time the mechanized turn of the century arrived, he’d settled down in Boston, married Mama, and had me to contend with. But the gears in his head had not been idle.
“An underground system,” Papa said with a wave of his pipe, “where weather is irrelevant. Where people can get quickly across the city without fighting traffic, requiring a horse, or being robbed in the alleys. They won’t smell drifts of horse manure, get covered in dust and grime, or go deaf from the echoing noise bouncing between buildings.”
It had all been in his speech that day. “But Papa,” I said, wishing I could climb into his lap the way I’d done before Mama had started pinning up my hair, “I happen to like the smell of horse manure.”
“Horses slip and break a leg. They founder or grow old. Entire herds die of disease,” he said with a mock scowl.
“If Bonnie or Mag could hear you, they’d rebel on the spot.” Only the wealthy kept horses and buggies in the city, and I missed ours when we traveled.
I’d crossed my patent leather shoes demurely under my chair, sitting erect in the fashionable corseted ruffles Mama had chosen for the presentation, feeling utterly foolish. Even then, I was a tiny thing, not destined to grow much over five feet tall, and Mama compensated with layers in every direction. I had no use for them.
“Electric motors,” I recited. We’d memorized his speech together. “Clean, convenient, and safe.”
The subway car lurched to a stop, jolting me from my reverie at the Adams Square Station to exchange passengers. I was familiar with them all. Boylston Street. Park Street. Scollay Square. Haymarket. My journey through the middle of the earth was coming to an end. The car was musty inside, but the electric bulbs glowed with a cheerful, if impersonal, light. I put a steadying hand to my hat brim as we lurched forward toward the next stop.
The porter kept his eyes dead ahead, as though he could see where we were going. As if he could choose.
I pulled Papa’s gold watch from my skirt pocket and checked the time. Nearly eleven. It wouldn’t be long now. Bea was meeting me at the Public Garden at Arlington with a picnic lunch. I smoothed the seams over my lap where the stitching betrayed an alteration to make room for my hips. You could only turn a dress so many times before the fabric grew tired. But the layers, at least, were gone.
So was Mama.
The last conversation I’d had with my parents was as close to a family row as we’d ever come. They left for England with Mama’s ultimatum that I marry the highly eligible bachelor who was courting me at the time. Papa countered with insistence that I enroll in Cornell or Cambridge. All I’d wanted was to go with them. Our passionate exchanges had been in vain. None of us had had our way in the end.
Papa and Mama went down with the RMS Republic in 1909. It was two years later and I was tired. Tired of reconstructing myself out of the last scraps of the fabric of what had been my life. In the subway, alone with my thoughts, no one noticed.
In the unforgiving light of day, everyone did.
The subway came to its last stop at the Gardens. Peering through the glass window, I took a deep breath and summoned a smile. Sunday was my day off and I intended to make the most of it.
I stepped from the train and made my way up the stairs. August sunshine beckoned and then embraced me in hot, sticky arms. It was a blunt reminder that we were surrounded by water. The Atlantic, certainly, as the multitude of ports attested, but also the Charles River and Fort Point Channel carved Boston into a peninsula of harbors, throwing bridges and boats and birds into view whichever way you turned.
I smoothed at my hair in vain. At five foot four inches I was not a curvy girl, although the S-shaped corsets pushed what there was of me into uncomfortable positions. God bless the Queen. After the Independence Day celebrations last month, it was ironic that we all remained enslaved to English fashion whims. My frizzy brunette curls rebelled in the humidity and my tipped up nose and firm chin plastered an air of defiance on my face that I could do nothing about.
Once I’d been impoverished, no one else had anything to do with it, either.