Every bag contained a small sewing kit of two needles, thread, pins, and a thimble a bar of soap a short book of simple, uplifting poems a lollipop and four pennies. Harmon directed the coachmen to unload their baskets, each of which held twenty muslin bags tied with twine. Already they were rationing food, restricting their entertainments, managing with two servants when they’d once had nine-and disguising these truths as best they could. If their circumstances didn’t improve dramatically and soon, they and their two younger sisters might be the ones living in a single room with no running water, doing their business in a dim alley or open courtyard where everyone could see. “Certainly circumstances play a role.”Īlva glanced at her. “That they’re inferior?” She pointed to a little boy with greasy hair and scabbed knees who picked his teeth while he watched them. “I don’t believe what?” Miss Berg asked, adjusting her hat to keep her face in shadow. “You don’t really believe that,” Alva said. Miss Roosevelt’s act-alike friend Miss Hadley Berg said, “To be fair, what else can you expect? These people are born inferior.”
Alva wouldn’t ask.Īmong the “everyone” here were numerous haggard, bundle-laden girls and women moving to and from doorways a few old men propped on stoops or reclined against walls and the dirtiest assortment of children Alva had ever seen-barefooted, most of them-playing in the street. She would tell every Roosevelt ancestral detail if asked. The speaker was Miss Lydia Roosevelt of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, a cousin or niece (Alva couldn’t remember which) of one of the charity group’s founders.
“To the devil, surely,” one of the other girls replied. “Stay together?” Alva’s sister Armide said. Limp laundry drooped on lines strung from one windowsill to the next along and across the entire block from Broome Street to Grand. Soiled, torn mattresses and broken furniture and rusting cans littered the alleys.
The buildings were crowded and close here, the narrow street’s bricks caked with horse dung, pungent in the afternoon heat. Harmon called as eight young ladies, cautiously clad in plain day dresses and untrimmed hats, left the safety of two carriages and gathered like ducklings in front of the tenement.
She was twenty-one years old, ripened unpicked fruit rotting on the branch. WHEN THEY ASKED her about the Vanderbilts and Belmonts, about their celebrations and depredations, the mansions and balls, the lawsuits, the betrayals, the rifts-when they asked why she did the extreme things she’d done, Alva said it all began quite simply: Once there was a desperate young woman whose mother was dead and whose father was dying almost as quickly as his money was running out.
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