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Willow Locke, a teenage immigrant living in turn-of-the century Manhattan, must find the strength within her to protect her family from an insidious corporate plot to destroy the un...
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View of the tenements in 1910
Talia Lostch looked out the tenement window across the vertiginous canyons of the Bowery. A petulant cumulous cloud towered above the tenements, the thunderhead slowly rising in the burnished copper sky. Sunlight diffused through the city labyrinth in gold and sepia veils. The buildings were connected by an intricate network of laundry lines on pulley systems. They trembled gently in the evening breeze, as though transmitting some secret telegraphy.
She felt an inexplicable thrill in watching hundreds of lines being pulled in at the same time, anticipating the rain. A hesitant updraft lifted a spiral of autumn leaves and brittle newspaper to flash suddenly brilliant against the oblique light. Some strange symmetry there, between the threadbare gray laundry and the funnel of newspaper ascending on the updraft.
She saw families on the street below, children shepherded along through the dusk. A carpenter shuffled back to his building after a long workday. He set his wooden crate of tools down and waited on the doorstep to finish a cigarette. He stared vacantly along the street, gesturing meaninglessly with the ember in the gathering dark. An old woman sat on the curb beneath a street light playing the hurdy-gurdy; panhandling coins from passers-by. The wind caught fragments of the sad melody as it unwound from her crank. Talia closed her eyes for a moment to grasp the delicate thread of the song. The tune pulled on the roots of her memory. It tugged on her, drew her back to some obliviated image on the palimpsest of her memory. Something from long ago. Unconsciously, she extended her index finger, as though plucking a string. But the song escaped her.
She opened her eyes and resumed her searching of the street below. A happy crowd emerged from the subway and walked down the avenue together, laughing and talking. Even from the sixth floor Talia could hear the distant rumble as the train started off again. She could sense the electric current arcing and slithering through the tunnel. She could feel the empathy between the train and the gathering metallic anvil cloud overhead. As the train departed, some internal structure of the cloud arced, and the whole column incandesced. The rain would come soon.
She pressed her palm flat against the window to feel the barely tangible pull of static electricity on the glass. The smell of fresh water and dust ameliorated the stench from the courtyard outhouses six floors below. She looked at her reflection in the dark glass. Her features were angular, her blue eyes looked cold and distant. Like ice, Mrs. Seinkewczik would say.
She could see their intense color in the reflection—the same color as her father's eyes. Her limp hair was a dun color, like a mouse's fur. She knew she would never be beautiful. Not like her sister, Ayala. Ayala was an astonishing raven-haired beauty, statuesque and graceful. She towered over Talia when they walked together. Next to her sister she felt gangly and self-conscious, as though she had wandered in from the street onto the stage of a ballet performance. Ayala's beauty was an intense radiance, burning away the stale air and drek of the tenements. Talia had many times felt herself vanishing in the presence of her sister. Their neighbor, Mrs. Seinkewczik, often made a point of comparing them. Just yesterday she had accosted her on the stairwell.
