Adventures in Housekeeping
During the six years Joel and I lived at Fallingbrook, we shared our home and routines with a colourful assortment of house staff, as neither of us had a proclivity for house management. Although our gastronomic needs were simple, we required a multitalented housekeeper who could tackle vegetarian cooking, housecleaning, laundry, chauffeuring, the idiosyncrasies of the intercom system, infrared alarms, double-coded garage doors, and secret panic buttons. Ours was not an easy house to run.
On the morning that Anje, my diminutive Polish houseman, started his year at Fallingbrook, a threatening man came pounding on the door demanding money. “Is no problem,” asserted my little Pole, brandishing a bread knife. “I vill kill bad man if please you, madam!” I assured him that the knife would not be necessary, and that this was not an everyday occurrence. Anje proved to be an excellent driver, housekeeper, and cook. Tea and fruit salads were delivered on bedside trays at seven-thirty each morning; delicious recipes were presented with smiles of accomplishment. When my Olympic song, “Hands of Man,” required a group of accompanying singers on a national telethon, Anje eagerly volunteered his fine tenor voice. I watched as he slowly swallowed a raw egg before our performance. “Good Polish recipe for throat, Miss Boyd. You like to try for nice voice?” I would have done a lot of things for “nice voice,” but swallowing raw eggs was not one of them.
Lenny was our next attempt at a housekeeper, after Anje left to work together with his wife. He was a soft-spoken young Canadian from a domestic agency that had checked his references — or so they said. Joel was frequently away in Paris, which left me alone in the house with Lenny. He seemed well suited to the job and excelled at making delectable desserts; Joel and I congratulated ourselves on having made a good choice. At my request, Lenny installed a hidden safe in the kitchen, and a “Beware of Dog” sign on our gate to the beach. “If Fallingbrook is ever targeted for a robbery, this sign might act as a deterrent,” I confided.
The first thing to disappear was my mink coat. This was in the days before my animal-rights consciousness had been raised, leading me to realize how wrong it is to use the skins of animals for our sartorial satisfaction. Although I had always opposed the trapping of animals, even lobbying Trudeau against seal hunting, I had naively believed that ranch-raised minks did not suffer. I have since learned otherwise and will never buy fur again, as man-made fabrics are a more ethically acceptable alternative. After hours of searching for my coat, I concluded that a delivery man must have “lifted” it from the front closet. The next items to vanish were my headsets and some cash. It just did not seem possible that Lenny could be behind these unexplained disappearances, but when Joel flew out of town on business I was left with a slightly uneasy feeling. “Would you run a check on my new houseman?” I asked an acquaintance in the police force. The report that came back was enough to put me into cardiac arrest. Lenny had just been released from the Denver penitentiary after serving several years behind bars for armed robbery, drug pushing, forgery, and car theft. An inspection of his room turned up the ownership papers of Joel’s car, practised forgeries of both our names, correspondence from his jail buddies, stolen merchandise, and a large butcher’s knife. “Oh, don’t worry, Liona. He’s not really dangerous,” the police assured me as I anxiously eyed the sharp edges of the knife. “He studied butchery and pastry-making in the Colorado penitentiary.” Suddenly, I understood his talents for creating desserts, but visions of Sweeney Todd and his meat pies swam before my eyes.
In a panic, I emptied the safe he had installed and begged my parents to come over in a hurry. When Lenny showed up, confrontation seemed the only solution. Under scrutiny, he confessed to the thefts, handing back the stolen cash and even disclosing the furrier to whom he had hocked the mink. Shaking like a nervous needle on a Richter scale, he ran out of the house, and for days did not resurface, leaving the police frustrated in their attempts to arrest him for a previous car theft. I felt as though I had been dragged into an episode of Miami Vice when the officers started camping out in my basement.
After many false leads, our escapee finally showed up. As I handed over his suitcase in the dark driveway, three policemen with handcuffs sprang from behind my cedar bushes. Our security key was discovered tucked into his socks, and the car he had been driving was stolen. Lenny was sentenced to one year in jail, from where he repeatedly called collect, begging me to sponsor his rehabilitation. Several neighbours had experienced petty thefts while our houseman worked at number seven. Joel and I thought we might know the reason.
Determined to find someone more trustworthy, we interviewed two dozen hopeful housekeepers, eventually hiring a respectable-looking man in his late fifties with impeccable references and perfect manners. Humphrey set about tidying with a vengeance, neatly folding my pantyhose and classifying Joel’s unruly socks. Regular cups of tea were served with deference and downcast eyes; it was obvious that he was not a very happy soul — smiles never brightened his face — but he worked diligently, putting in long hours without complaint.
The lies started innocently enough with nutmeg. “Oh, Humphrey, what a delicious carrot cake,” I exclaimed. “What spices did you use?” “Nutmeg, ma’am,” he replied. I knew we had no nutmeg in the cupboards, and for that matter, no carrots. “Did you use a cake mix?” “Oh, ma’am, how could you even think such a dreadful thing! I only ever bake cakes using fresh ingredients.” It seemed such a minor issue that I let it pass, believing that somewhere hidden away in the dark recesses of my cabinets, Humphrey had stumbled on a jar of nutmeg and a couple of long-forgotten carrots. That evening, rummaging in a kitchen drawer, I was startled to come across five flattened cake-mix boxes. There was the shortbread he had made “from scratch” the previous week, and the raisin scones I had served with tea to my guests. The same sickening feeling of betrayal I had experienced with Lenny came flooding back. I returned the incriminating evidence to its drawer, pondering my next move.
When Humphrey returned, I sat in the kitchen and cut myself a slice of nutmeg carrot cake. “Humphrey, I really have to know if this was made from a mix. I won’t hold it against you, as I am hopeless at making cakes,” I laughed, casually nibbling the dubious cake. Humphrey indignantly swore that he would never resort to mixes and showed no signs of contrition during my interrogation. Perhaps it would be best to await Joel’s return so he could advise me on whether I was making too much of a trivial matter; in the meantime, why not take a peek in Humphrey’s room? Normally, I would never have dreamed of going into my houseman’s private quarters. But the revelations of his room made me glad I had become a snoop. On the night table was a bundle of hateful letters filled with obscenities, and behind it a collection of leather whips and child pornography. We had presumed Humphrey was gay and held no prejudice, but his writings, which focused on child abuse and self-degradation, made me realize that behind the perfect manners lived a very distrustful and disturbed individual. How could we once again have misjudged character so badly? In this case, nutmeg was the least of my worries.
After the distasteful task of dismissing Humphrey, I took off for a month’s tour, leaving Joel to fend for himself. When I returned, the interview routine resumed, until finally we hired Sav, a young Kenyan wildlife artist who ran our household for more than a year. I slyly negotiated back massages at seven in the evening when his favourite show, Wild, Wild World of Animals, was on television and delighted him with my purchase of a little biscuit-coloured rabbit. Joel, adamantly opposed at first, soon also became quite entranced. He had never been close to an animal; the experience brought out some gentle qualities not revealed before in him. Unfortunately, after several months, we both developed allergies to our adorable pet and were obliged to give him away. One far-fetched headline in the local newspapers said, “Liona Boyd Gives Away Her Baby!”
A Portuguese couple took over the housekeeping duties when Sav departed to work at the zoo. Apart from the plump wife’s daily mantra — “I want kill this man. I hate ’usband!” — and nightly sobbing sessions on the telephone to her family in Lisbon, life at Fallingbrook was relatively peaceful.