That's a name we hadn't heard yet. "Who's Grenier?" Mike asked.
"King's College. Head of the biology department there. Out of UCLA, if I remember correctly. Haven't seen him around in weeks, but I think it's because he's been on sabbatical this semester. Might not even be in town." Mike was writing the name in his notepad.
"Why biology?" I asked.
"The scientific piece is as important as all the digging we're doing. Maybe more so. By the 1870s there were almost a dozen medical facilities here. Every 'incurable' patient from the city was sent to a hospital or clinic on Blackwells. One was for scarlet fever, another for epilepsy, a separate place for cripples, for cholera and typhus sufferers. There were tuberculosis facilities, and a special building for lepers. It even had the first pathology laboratory in the country.
"Then there came your ruin, Alex. Eighteen fifty-six, to be exact. Smallpox continued to be a societal scourge throughout the nineteenth century."
"What about Jenner? I thought there was already a smallpox vaccine by that time."
"Yes, the vaccine was being used in America by then, but the constant influx of poor immigrants who had been infected in their own countries brought the disease here from all over the world. Because it was so wildly contagious, patients in New York City had always been quarantined away from the population. They were generally sent to live in wooden shacks on the banks of the two rivers, until it became even safer to ship them off to the island of undesirables."
"Blackwells?"
She nodded. "Renwick designed a stunning home for those latest outcasts. The Smallpox Hospital. You see it lighted up so dramatically at night from Manhattan, with its pointed, arched windows and crenellated roofline. A great gray monument to disease. Small wonder the biologists want to study the place."
Nan moved to the giant map and ran her finger up the narrow piece of waterway that separated Manhattan from the grim institutions of the old Blackwells Island. "How are you on Greek mythology?" she asked. "The River Styx, Lola used to say this was. Souls crossing over from the realm of the living on their way to hell. To what she called the deadhouse."
13
"What was the deadhouse?"
"Just Lola's name for Blackwells Island, I guess. It was a nineteenth-century expression that meant a place for dead bodies."
"Did she refer to it that way?"
"I know you had met her, Alex. She had this tremendous flair for the dramatic. Used it to great advantage in the classroom whenever things got dull. We were all brainstorming about the dig one night-I think we were downstairs in my own dining room- going through a pretty good case of red wine-and that's when I heard Lola use the expression for the first time."
"Was it an actual place on the island?"
"Not on any map that I've ever come across. Imagine the scene, as Lola used to say. There you were, raging with fever and blistering with pustulant sores, as epidemics swept through communities in the crowded city dwellings. Smallpox was spread both by direct contact and by airborne virus, as you probably know. Public-health workers separated out the ill and infected-rich and poor alike-to isolate them from the able-bodied."
The image of a plague-ridden city was chilling.
"Then, Lola would describe the bedlam on the piers in the East River as the afflicted were loaded onto boats to bring them over to the hospital. Most of them knew that for the diseased, it was a sentence of death. Some tried to escape from the officials at the docks. From time to time, one or two dared to jump in the water and brave the fierce currents of the East River rather than be ferried to hell. The once tranquil farmland had become a zone for the dead and dying. Boats went out loaded with contagious patients. As these untouchables neared the shore, their first sight was the stacks of wooden coffins piled by the edge to be loaded on for the ride home. Chances were good that if your destination was Blackwells Island, as Lola said, you were going to the deadhouse."
We were silent until Mike spoke.
"So she had the fourth piece of the project? Government, political science."
"Exactly."
"Any particular interests, like some of you others?"
"Lola had a special preoccupation, I'd say, with the prison and the madhouse. Disease and the hospital conditions revolted her, she said. But a lot of famous people passed in and out of both the asylum and the penitentiary, and she loved to learn their stories. I've never seen anyone do research about these places the way she did. Lola read all the books, she devoured letters and diaries of the time that were original source material, she even found some old survivors who had lived or worked on the island in the 1920s and thirties."
"Do you know who they were?"
"No, but surely someone in the department must have catalogued names. I'm too busy belowground to talk to people. We left that to Lola. As long as this place was mentioned, she didn't care whether it was the notebook of a nurse or the autobiography of Mae West-"
"I saw her do that bit in her classroom once. I thought that West was locked up in Manhattan, in the Tombs."
"One night there. Then a ten-day sentence to the workhouse on the island. Mae had it pretty cushy, for a prisoner. The warden agreed that the inmate underwear was too rough for her delicate skin and let her wear her own silk teddies and white stockings. He even took her out for horse rides in the evening.
"Lola knew all their stories. Boss Tweed, Dutch Schultz, lots of corrupt New Yorkers wound up there."
"Damn, I'd love to hear some of those tales," Mike said.
"Talk to Professor Lockhart in the history department. Or even to Paolo Recantati. The historians were tracking that kind of thing. I've got my own tales of woe from the asylum."
"What kind of guy is Recantati?" I asked.
"He was new to King's this semester. Quiet, very aloof. He was a history scholar, too, so Lola tried to engage him in our cabal, get his support for continued funding. Our goal was not only to complete the dig, but to try to get the money needed to restore these unique buildings. She brought Recantati in on a few of our meetings to hear what we were up to. I've talked with him about it several times, and he seemed quite interested."
"Were you and Lola the only two women running the show?"
Nan paused for a moment. "Yes, we were."
"Any sense of Lola's personal life? Was she involved with any of these other professors?"
"I'd probably be the last one to know. The students always seemed to be more interested in that kind of information than I was."
I showed Nan a photograph of Charlotte Voight, a copy of the one on Lola's board, which Sylvia Foote had given to me earlier in the day. "Did you know this girl, one of Lola's students? Ever see her on the island?"
Nan studied the picture and handed it back. "No help to you there. I supervised the Barnard and Columbia kids. If she went to King's College, then any one of the group we've talked about would have been working with her."
"It's puzzling why Dakota would have cared about the kid enough to hang her picture in the office. Along with Franklin Roosevelt-"
"The Roosevelt piece I can answer," Nan interjected. "FDR was one of Lola's heroes, for whom Blackwells was renamed in 1973."
"Charles Dickens?"
"No idea."
"Nellie Bly?"
"She's one of my inmates. Your office helped, Alex."
"We did?"
"Assistant District Attorney Henry D. Macdona, 1887. Nellie Bly was a young reporter, working for The World, Joseph Pulitzer's scandal-loving newspaper. Some editor had a brainstorm to expose the hideous condition of the patients in Blackwells insane asylum, and Nellie Bly volunteered for the job. Undercover, you'd call it. She actually went to the district attorney for advice, and for the promise that they would begin a grand jury investigation if she found abuses.