City of Promise by Beverly Swerling Read Free Book Online Page B

effect to be quite charming.
    The outfit wasn’t new, but since she’d never been coaching before,or indeed anywhere with Mr. Turner, that hardly mattered. Anyway, her bonnet was new. It was white straw trimmed with blue feathers and she’d bought it at Macy’s two weeks earlier. It had been marked down to a dollar seventy-five from two, and with her employee’s discount—something only Macy’s offered—had cost a dollar and sixty-one cents. Good value, Mollie decided as she surveyed the full effect. And in the afternoon, based on the expression on Mr. Turner’s face when he saw her, Mollie was pleased with her choices.
    He drove a small straw-bodied phaeton, open to the elements and pulled by a single bay. “Glad you brought a parasol,” he said when he handed her up with as much ease as might a man with both legs. “Perhaps someday I’ll be rich and proper and take you coaching in an elegant black brougham.”
    “I shouldn’t like that half so well, Mr. Turner. After all, one wouldn’t be able to see as much from inside a brougham.”
    “Or be seen,” he agreed, giving her another look Mollie thought to be approving. “Which after all is the point. And you must call me Joshua. Josh if you prefer.”
    “I must, must I?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Why is that?”
    He took a moment to reply. “I can’t really say, except that it would please me enormously.”
    “Then Josh it will be.”
    “And may I call you Mollie? Miss Popandropolos is a bit of a mouthful.”
    “Mollie is acceptable.”
    Josh grinned and snapped the reins and clucked the horses into action.

    Fifth Avenue’s procession of luxurious mansions had begun marching north from Ninth Street in the 1850s. These days, when he turned the phaeton onto Fifth at Twenty-Third and headed uptown, Joshand Mollie were in the thick of that opulent parade. “That house over there,” he nodded to his left, “is said to have a picture gallery and a private theater, as well as a library and a ballroom. And solid gold banisters throughout.”
    “Must be terribly difficult to keep them free of fingerprints.”
    He laughed. “Fair enough. What about that one then?” with a nod to his right. “Has its own third-floor chapel with stained glass windows. Plus marble staircases, ebony paneling, and plaster cherubs in the bathing rooms. I’m told there are four of those.”
    “Cherubs or bathing rooms?”
    “You are impertinent. In a charming way. Bathing rooms I suppose. Men of the type who own such places buy their statuary by the dozen. Or at least their wives do. I take it you are not impressed.”
    “Well I am, sort of. But . . .” But she had seen too much of what the men who built these castles got up to in the time they didn’t spend making money. And all the newspapers had reported the time Mrs. Singer ran into the street from the mansion her husband’s sewing machines built, screaming she’d been beaten enough for one day. “I don’t think grand houses necessarily make people happy.”
    “A noble sentiment. Am I to take it that’s the sort of thing young ladies are taught in Greece? Popandropolos is a Greek name, is it not?”
    “It is, but I’m afraid I know nothing about the country.” Paying close attention to the need to adjust the hem of her dress. “I was born here in New York.”
    “Of Greek parents, I take it.”
    “That’s right.” This time it was her parasol that required adjusting.
    “Has anyone ever said you look particularly Irish?”
    “No,” Mollie answered, turning to him at last and speaking in her firmest tone of voice, “never.”
    He shot her a quick and piercing look she wasn’t quite sure how to interpret, but all he said was, “End of the handsome houses. At least for now.”
    They had reached the crest of Murray Hill at Thirty-Seventh Street.From there on the brownstone palaces gave way to mostly open fields. Because the paved avenues and cross streets of the grid had been built a bit above grade