'Wasn't everyone a foreigner?' Mike asked.
'I think it's always the case, Detective, that some are more alien than others. Did you know that whenever an immigrant was found alone in the streets, unable to communicate because of the language barrier, our benign forefathers just placed him in the asylum until someone could make out what he was saying?
'The other discouraging thing about this place was that there was a very small medical staff. The patients were actually cared for by prisoners from the penitentiaries. I can only imagine the abuses.'
'Is the asylum still there?' I asked, studying the photo images of the primitive outbuildings.
'All those wings are gone. What remains today are the ruins of the Octagon Tower. It's a stunning rotunda, built in the Greek Revival style, with an elegant winding staircase, all columned and pedestaled.' She showed me the interior photographs, which looked like a shot up five spiraling flights of cast-iron steps. 'It was once considered the most elegant staircase in New York. Now that broken frame climbs up to the open sky. Completely deteriorated and neglected.'
'I guess the theory of the day was to treat the inmates like animals, but do it with charm.'
'Exactly. There were vegetable gardens and willow trees and an ice-skating pond so that the external appearance seemed like an oasis of calm and care. But within the walls, it was truly a madhouse.'
'What interests you about it? Why the dig?'
'It's everything an urban anthropologist craves. There aren't many places to burrow into in Manhattan these days, much as I'd like to. This offers a very confined site with a fair amount of known history. We've got records of an early Indian settlement there, before the Colonials came to America. We're already finding those artifacts-tools, pottery, weapons. Then you have the agricultural community which existed there for another century.
'And, of course, the asylum years, for most of the nineteenth century. Remember, many of these patients who were not indigent went there with all their possessions. They were served on china plates, not the tin cups of their almshouse neighbors. When these buildings were all abandoned, much of this stuff got left behind, buried in place. Scores of dignitaries visited the island to see this innovative social welfare setup, and some of them, including de Tocqueville, wrote about it extensively.
'You really must-both of you-come out to see how we work and what we've found. The dig is at a bit of a standstill with this frigid weather we're having, but I can have one of the students tour you around the Octagon. The whole island, if you like.'
'We'll take you up on that offer. But we'd also like to talk to you about Lola Dakota, Nan.'
'I'll tell you the little that I know,' she said, sitting down at her desk and motioning us to take seats opposite her. 'Of course, I first met Lola when she was on the Columbia faculty. Bit of a wild card, personally, but a talented scholar.'
'Did you socialize with her?' 'Not much. Without even knowing about their marital problems, Howard never trusted Ivan very much. He always seemed to be hustling people. Looking for the quick score. We were occasionally invited to the same dinner party, but the four of us never spent any time together.'
There was something different about the tone of Nan's responses when she talked about Lola. She did not seem quite as open as she had when discussing the history of New York. 'Were you here for the funeral?'
'No. No, I left for London on Friday evening. That was the day she was killed, wasn't it? I didn't learn of her death until one of Howard's phone calls.' She fumbled with paper clips in the top drawer of her desk.
'We've only spoken to one of her sisters and a couple of students. What was she like as a colleague or peer?'
'Well, her style was a lot flashier than my own. I wouldn't say that we had much in common.' Nan was a brilliant scholar, nationally renowned in her field, and as modest as she was good. 'But one-on-one, she was perfectly pleasant to work with. She never confided in me, if that's what you mean. I don't think I had seen her in more than a year after she moved to King's College. It was the Blackwells Island project that brought me into contact with her again.'
'How did that get started?' Mike asked. Nan looked at the ceiling and laughed. 'Several years of wishful thinking on my part. Hard to remember which of us pushed the idea forward first. Let's see. Winston Shreve helped to organize the plan. He's the head of the anthropology department at King's.'
'Have you known him long?'
'Fifteen years. Very impressive credentials, which is why they recruited him for the school. Undergrad and graduate degrees are both Ivy League, if I remember correctly. Spent some time at the Sorbonne. Helped with the excavations at Petra. He's wanted to do something on the island for as long as I have. Like me, one of those New Yorkers in our profession who's always wanted to get his hands in some local dirt, but just keeps watching apartments and office towers get planted on top of every square inch of historical soil that we covet.
'Yes, Winston and I have been talking about digging on the island for as long as I've known him.'
'And the others?'
'It was a four-department program. Multidisciplinary, as they like to call it these days. Something for everybody. We each seem to have a special place on the island that attracts us for a different reason. Winston and I run the anthropological courses. My favorite site is the northern tip, from the lighthouse to what remains of the Octagon Tower. Skip Lockhart chairs the American history segment. His heart seems to be attached to the people who passed through here, their stories and what became of them. Thomas Grenier is in charge of the biology students.'
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
'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
