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Death of an Amiable Child

Irene Marcuse's first novel is a delicately delineated triumph, a quiet mystery that revolves around character and setting rather than hotly pursued clues and frantic detection. Anita Servi, a Manhattan social worker, has made a career of tending to the city's elderly. Crippled by arthritis, plagued by shrinking Social Security checks, relegated to dilapidated residence hotels that, with their fading paint and chipped brickwork, "look like the eccentric aunt who didn't get invited to the wedding over on Broadway," her clients still amaze her with their resilience. All the more shocking, then, for Anita and her daughter Clea to stumble over the body of Lillian Raines on their apartment landing. A former client, now homeless, the frail but dignified "Lady of the Landing" had become a fixture in their daily lives. Though the police term Lillian's death an accident, Anita is unconvinced. As she digs deeper into the old woman's shadowy past, ancient grievances come to light, weaving the fixtures of Anita's life--friends, neighbors, clients, coworkers--into an uneasy web of deception and murder. When more elderly women are threatened, it's up to Anita to unravel the tangled threads.

The sights, sounds, and smells of New York's Upper West Side permeate the book. The city bustles and hums, stretching out before Anita and the reader in an intoxicating, vibrant landscape: "Broadway, the street, puts on as good a show as any theater on the Great White Way. One time, Catherine and I saw a tall black man gamboling around in nothing but a pair of red wool socks. Two cops chased after him, lumbering hippos to his graceful gazelle. It made both our days. Who needs TV talk shows?" For all of its pollution and poverty, New York, through Anita's eyes, softens into an appealingly ungainly, overgrown village. It's the kind of place where all one's creature comforts and quotidian rituals may be satisfied in just a few square blocks, where anonymity gives way to recognition.

Marcuse's affectionately drawn characters, canny dialogue, and adept sense of pace set The Death of an Amiable Child far above the usual cadre of earnest but awkward first novels.

Amiable Child Monument

123rd Street & Riverside Drive

One hundred yards north of Grant’s Tomb, the “Amiable Child Monument” consists of a small, simple urn on a pedestal surrounded by iron fence. On the west side of the pedestal facing the river where the boy died, is a Biblical quotation from the Book of Job: “Man that is born of woman is of a few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.” The east side of the pedestal, which faces the site of his family’s former home reads, “Erected to the Memory of an Amiable Child, St. Claire Pollock, Died 15 July 1797 in the Fifth Year of His Age.”

The Amiable Child Monument was erected by George Pollock, a wealthy linen merchant from Dublin, who is said to be either the boy’s uncle, or his father. Pollock built his home on Strawberry Hill, which was later renamed Claremont, although not after little St. Claire. The setting of the Revolutionary War Battle of Harlem Heights, fought on September 16, 1776, Strawberry Hill was located on what was then the highest physical point in Manhattan. The estate, in today’s geography, stretched east to west from Broadway to the Hudson River, and north to south from 125th Street to 96th Street. On July 15, 1797, St. Claire Pollock fell to his death from the edge of the cliffs overlooking the Hudson River. Servants found his body washed up on the rocks that evening. Preferring not to bury the child in a church graveyard, George Pollock decided instead to bury the child at the site of his death. Soon after the death of St. Claire, Pollock sold his estate. He asked the new owners to care for the grave, writing to them: “There is a small enclosure . . . within which lie the remains of a favorite child, covered by a marble monument. You will confer a peculiar and interesting favor upon me by allowing me to convey the enclosure to you so that you will consider it a part of your own estate, keeping it, however, always enclosed and sacred.” This request made St. Clair’s grave

The area became part of Riverside Park in the 1870s and in that time, the monument has been replaced twice due to deterioration; once in 1897 and again in 1967. The original memorial once stood on the cliffs overlooking the Hudson River, but because of changes in Manhattan’s geography, the current monument, built of Barre granite, is now located in a thickly wooded area at the eastern edge of the Bird Sanctuary at 123rd Street.

The Amiable Child Monument is unique because it may be the only single-person private grave on city-owned land in New York City. People are still drawn to the monument more than 200 years after the death of the “amiable child.” Both a book of poetry and a contemporary mystery novel were inspired by this historical site. Also, neighbors continue to decorate the grave of St. Claire Pollack with flowers and wreaths, especially near the date of his death.