KATHERINE J. CHEN
In her free moments, she remembered home, as it had been. About five miles from the squat, one-room cottage she was never, in her youth, ashamed of, a grassy path fitted with wildflowers led to a stunted hill, and from the hill, a view of the horizon and the sea. She used to lie on her stomach in this place, bony knuckles propped under a pointed chin, and look out from gray eyes to the foaming crest of blue-green waves, rising, falling, tossing with the abandon of children splashing in a large puddle the smooth film of water that rippled and never ceased to move. A trick of the light, she knew, was why the sea on a sunny day could become a mine of glittering treasure, of winking sapphires and drifting diamonds, which blinded as much as beckoned to whoever looked upon its face. And when she’d had her fill of the view, when she felt dizzy from both the height and the smell of clean, solid earth packed tight beneath her, she would roll onto her back and lie motionless in that spot for close to an hour, eyes shut, listening.
Her mother had said to her, as a child, to bend her ear to the sea when there was trouble. Here or here, and she would indicate first her head and then her heart, as the source of one’s difficulties. Later, in the years after her father’s passing, when three meals became two, then finally one or none, her mother would add to this demonstration, from head to heart to stomach. It does wonders, the sea, she would tell her and her younger sisters, and she hadn’t deceived them. The sound of this natural turbulence, a symphony of gurgling, roaring, and hissing chaos, as the spray flung itself and broke against a jutting point of rock, smoothed over whatever ache she happened to feel, occasionally for her father, sometimes, as was only natural, for a boy she thought herself in love with, but always for food, for bread and the taste, no, the memory of meat, of melted bacon fat in a coal-black pan held close over the fire.
The sea will save you, her mother told her, out of the hearing of her sisters one night as they slept. She remembered, too, her mother’s face, not as clear as it was in the brightness of day but half-hidden, half-alive in the twitching flame of a solitary candle. A pouch of coins fell into her lap, and she knew, without meeting the eyes carefully watching her, that many a breakfast and supper had been missed for the realization of this moment; that it was a hard thing, perhaps the hardest thing, for a proud woman to have to borrow and to beg from neighbors and relations who had long ceased to visit in order to send away her eldest child. She weighed the coins in her hand in silence, and neither of them spoke, for they were craning their ears, listening to the deep-throated rumblings coming outside from an angry water. The scream of a migrant seagull caught in the storm chilled them, and she had felt a tremor in the hand that held the money.
Where she lived now—not her home—there was no trace of the sea, except in imitation. Nimble fingers, aided by machinery, had stitched the froth of waves into a delicate netting of lace that decorated sleeves and collars, or ran in neat, parallel fringes down the fronts of dresses from Worth and Doucet. Like water slipping across sand, the silken train of a lady’s gown receded noiselessly over carpeted floors, leaving no sign it had ever disturbed the ground or even paid a visit. Birds abounded, though not in clouds. Their feathers reached skyward from the latest fashions pinned to a gathering of poised, exquisitely covered heads, and the stones—the emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds—these shone in their gilded settings and were none of them illusions dancing across the water.
In one of the many drawing rooms of Mrs. Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, at her Madison Avenue address, a meeting of this artificial sea had converged during the hour of luncheon. For the occasion, the chrysanthemum chairs with gold brocade had been uncovered, dusted, and arranged in four rows of five. A painting by Sargent, recently acquired, and which had hung in pride of place over the mantelpiece, was removed, out of consideration by the mistress of the house that the loveliness of the picture shouldn’t distract from either the speakers or, more significantly, her own person when she stood to address her audience. Food was to be served buffet-style on the most forgettable set of Wedgwood plates. “Nothing flashy,” Mrs. Belmont had instructed the chef, whom everyone, save the lady herself, addressed as “Monsieur.” “Let’s keep it low-key. Ordinary, even. They’re not here to gorge themselves.” The next morning, she approved the menu sent up to her on gilt-edged ivory cards emblazoned with her monogram. Thirteen dishes, none over the top, most discreet, and all admirably suited for consumption on small plates that would easily fit in a lady’s hand. There were the usual bluepoints and lynnhavens, Spanish olives, the chef’s signature lobster salad and his less-well-known crabmeat salad, as well as smoked tongue and smoked salmon, bite-size cucumber sandwiches garnished with dill and a peppery mayonnaise, followed by assorted desserts on trays, butter-suffused custard pastries, and fresh slices of melon. It was decided the offerings of dessert would be served along with three varieties of tea, and that the guests would arrive before the speakers in order to have plenty of time to avail themselves of this everyday fare.
She was called Marjory now, which had been the name of her predecessor, a perfectly suitable name, everyone agreed. It was easier this way, she was told, her real name being unconventional, even strange. No one could be expected to learn it, not even the scullery maid, who was Swedish. The thin line of the butler’s mouth had curled into a grimace at the very sound.
“No, no,” Mr. Riggs, the butler, tutted, which was his way of restoring order without raising his voice. “No, you’ll be Marjory. If we’re lucky, Mrs. Belmont won’t notice the difference.” And Mrs. Trevor, the housekeeper, had stifled a smile.
“Marjory,” she repeated, as if it were a foreign word she was learning. “Marjory.”
The luncheon being held that day was a private event with a social cause. Mr. Riggs called these social causes of his mistress “her parlor entertainments.” Suffrage, he would count off on his fingers, being first and foremost, women’s rights, then labor. And the last would send all of them, if they were collected together in the servants’ dining room, into a fit of polite but amused laughter.
“She’s invited a veritable carnival this time,” Mr. Riggs said, stressing every syllable of the word veritable. “Monkeys, you know, from the factories, to tell their tragic tales to the ladies. That kind of thing.”
“It’s more parlor entertainments, Mr. Riggs,” Mrs. Trevor said, using the language of her compatriot. “Just think of it that way.”
“We’re never going to be serving them?” the head footman, named Richard, asked from the doorway, while chewing a biscuit.
“What? The monkeys?” Mr. Riggs said in his most professionally stupefied tones, the same that could utter “Ma’am” while removing a bowl of cocktail sauce with a water bug in it, if the situation ever called for such an intervention. “You needn’t worry yourself. Monsieur only cooks for the ladies, and I do mean ladies. He would be offended if word got back to him, and you know how the Morgans have been trying to poach him for the last year and a half.” Shaking his head, he tutted.
There’d been more than one occasion when Marjory couldn’t keep up with the discussion. She was still inclined to take references literally, and when Mr. Riggs mentioned the “monkeys from the factories,” she had instantly pictured a chimpanzee wearing gloves and a cloth cap operating the bottling machine of a molasses refinery.
She had checked her disappointment at the back door when the “monkeys” turned out to be no more than an Irish shopgirl, a Polish seamstress, and an elderly Italian matron accompanied by her two granddaughters. She had been told to take their things and place them quite apart on separate wooden chairs, and while doing so, to hold whatever items she received, a coat perhaps, or a hat, at arm’s length, in no way touching or brushing against the wallpaper, any other furniture, cushions, dishes, much less cookware and appliances, along the way.
By the time the speakers were led into the drawing room, the sea nymphs had already settled in the chrysanthemum chairs with their plates. Introductory remarks came after, and an encouraging round of applause succeeded only in making the faces of the honored guests, who stood at the front of the room, blaze redder than a basket of ripe cherries.
It was considered a step up that Mrs. Trevor had asked her to serve during the talks. Marjory held the tray, while another maid, named Janey, poured.
The Polish seamstress went first, talking in high-pitched, plaintive tones. She was fair-haired and tall, with well-built shoulders and long arms that stretched outward when she grew excited. It was somehow evident, without anyone remarking on the fact, that she had worn her best dress for the occasion and that in all likelihood she had labored in the morning over the immaculate polishing of her shoes. Her boots shone brighter than the small gold cross that glinted from her chest.
“I wish I could say more has changed since Triangle…” she began, alluding to the fire at a well-known shirtwaist factory that had taken place over four years ago. “I wish…” she repeated, as the light-blue pupils of her eyes moved dramatically over her audience.
At that moment, Marjory’s own eyes settled on an image of genteel loveliness. A single finger had made itself known to them at the other end of a row, and they had hurried to oblige the call for more tea.
Slowly, as she approached, the speech of the seamstress slipped away from her. Slowly, and with relish, Marjory witnessed the last tuft of crabmeat disappear between two pink lips, exposing a bottom line of endearingly crooked but pearly teeth and the moist surface of a tongue. This, surely this, was what we all aspired to, she thought to herself, and she marveled at the subtle working of the jaw, which betrayed no hunger, no eagerness to consume. It was a languid, subtle chewing, accustomed and therefore unimpressed by the supply of tender, fresh meat from the sea. It was a beringed hand of very white fingers that balanced, at its tips, the least impressive of Wedgwood plates and the remains of what had been consumed: three shrimp tails, two pieces of lettuce, the shells of oysters. She counted two bluepoints and one lynnhaven, gracefully, even artfully, set aside, like the border of a garden.
When tea was poured, she marveled at the ease of the hands that lifted the steaming cup to the mouth. A large stone of vibrant cerulean glinted from the right forefinger.
“The needle of the machine,” the Polish seamstress said, “sliced through my finger. It simply slipped. Blood everywhere.”
And the eyes that had transfixed Marjory to the spot, which made her breathless with an inexplicable wonder, raised themselves and seemed to say, questioningly, Oh, really? Did it? before the neck bent to sip again from the delicately flowered tea.
She knew of the suffrage and labor movements only what had been told her by Mr. Riggs and Mrs. Trevor at the dining table.
“It doesn’t involve us,” Mr. Riggs, who had worked in the early part of his career for the Goulds, explained with his usual authority. “Even in labor, we’re servants, you understand. It isn’t considered labor to them, not to the unions or even the women. We’re domestic and therefore off-limits, you see. But I don’t mind that. Do you, Mrs. Trevor?”
“No, I can’t say I do, Mr. Riggs,” Mrs. Trevor replied. “We handle things our own way—privately. You won’t ever find me in a ballot box.”
“Oh, the thought of it, Mrs. Trevor!” Mr. Riggs said, turning red with laughter, before Mrs. Trevor herself joined in on the gaiety.
And Marjory, though she didn’t laugh, had smiled, too, because it seemed right that she should. In the eight months she’d lived in New York, the household staff of Mrs. Alva Vanderbilt Belmont comprised her limited circle of acquaintances, and, to the extent permitted, persons she trusted. She recalled, even now, the first time she had set foot in Monsieur Arnault’s kitchen, all the servants crowded around at the center table, and Mr. Riggs, flaunting his showmanship, theatrically offering her an orange.
“How would you eat this?” he’d asked, and then inclined his head to the table where dazzling lines of silverware awaited her.
She thought she would cry, but Mr. Riggs said gently, as her face showed the first signs of puckering, “You wouldn’t begrudge us a bit of fun, would you, Marjory? Not on your first day?”
So, she took a knife, what later she realized had been a steak knife, and sliced the orange in half, then in quarters. With all eyes blinking at her, she took one of the quarters, put it in her mouth, and sucked. Noisily.
“Ha-ha-ha!” everyone had cried, clapping.
And what began, in that moment, as a vague feeling of inadequacy had, in the months since, evolved into certainty of her own ignorance. Her mind, at first resisting, in the end turned on her. Now she knew that she knew nothing, except what had been, at the address of 477 Madison Avenue, explicitly taught her. She realized, initially with a kind of horror, and afterward with resignation, that nothing could be more terrible than to confuse the coffee and demitasse spoons, to misname the patterns most common to flatware—that is, names like Olympian and Winthrop—and, most deeply ingrained in her soul, more than lines of memorized Scripture and prayer, remained the memory of the orange. To correctly digest an orange, she now understood, one must use a citrus spoon and apply its serrated tip to the pulp.
It was the Irish shopgirl’s turn to speak. Glancing toward the front of the room, Marjory caught dark, girlish curls framing a flat and sincere-looking face. She imagined that such a face would do well behind the store counter, and her own cheeks colored with the embarrassment that some, perhaps Janey or Mrs. Trevor, might assume she was being indirectly represented by an individual who was, after all, only a stranger to her. She hoped, if the stray eye of one of Mrs. Belmont’s guests caught sight of her that they would guess she was native-born, perhaps a migrant from the South or from a city called Philadelphia located in a state similarly named.
When she returned to the buffet table where Mrs. Trevor stood, her flushed complexion attracted immediate attention from the housekeeper.
“Ah, you did just fine, Marjory,” she whispered, more gently than was her custom. “I didn’t have cause to notice you at all.”
She was told to leave quietly and to go clean the servants’ staircase.
“Richard trails in all kinds of dirt,” Mrs. Trevor sniffed, referring to the head footman. But Marjory felt that Mrs. Trevor knew the truth of the matter, and this was, in fact, a small mercy deliberately bestowed upon a grateful supplicant.
“I just want to be treated like a real person,” the Irish shopgirl implored, as Marjory was leaving. “I want to be seen. I’m not a tool or a part of a machine to be used and thrown away.”
These were the last words she caught as she hurried down the stairs to the familiar comforts of obscurity.
In bed, she reflected, as Janey snored across from her, that she hadn’t behaved at all well on the steps of the servants’ staircase earlier that afternoon.
The Italians were leaving. From above, the heavy tread of the grandmother descended, followed by the light, dancing step of her two wards. Their language, as they whispered, resembled the faint, muffled chatter of birds, who out of necessity must speak to one another but have no wish to draw attention to themselves in the trees.
As they passed the step where Marjory worked, the older woman coughed, and Marjory thought, with some distaste, that in addition to the usual scuff marks and dust to be found on the stairs, she must wash away an Italian’s spit as well.
The younger child, who was no more than eleven or twelve, repeated in English, over her grandmother’s coughing, “Ask her. Ask her.”
“Ask her, why not?” she said again.
She had learned what to do on such occasions. In her first week, it was Janey who had enlightened her as to the steps that should be taken.
“If you’re polishing something,” she said in her easygoing way, “you must stop without making a fuss about it and simply leave the room, moving straight to the nearest door. You must look ahead of you, and pretend like you didn’t know who had come in, and take away whatever things you brought with you to clean. I’m warning you now, don’t forget. A girl lost her job here once because she was stupid enough to leave a dust cloth on Mrs. Belmont’s marble table. The one shipped from Par-ee.”
“What if I’m spoken to?” Marjory asked, thinking it an intelligent question.
“Well, then you have to answer,” Janey said, and Marjory could tell from her expression that she had nearly rolled her eyes at her. “If they ask for something, you do it straight away. Or if you can’t do it yourself, you find me or Mrs. Trevor.”
“Now, it’s more difficult to leave quietly,” Janey continued, “when you’re stooping or washing the floor. If that happens, all you have to remember is to stop and turn away. Stop and turn away.”
“Stop and turn away,” Marjory repeated, and Janey nodded.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it, though,” Janey said cheerfully, as a conclusion to the day’s lesson. “Mrs. Trevor is a wonder at timing all the errands. She’s so good at arrangement and things like that. And it’s like Mr. Riggs said. If we’re lucky, Mrs. Belmont won’t even realize the old Marjory’s married and gone.”
So, though she knew that they were all three of them staring at her on the steps, waiting, Marjory set aside her dustpan and looked in the opposite direction toward the servants’ quarters. Her posture, as she folded her hands across her lap, suggested, she hoped, the discretion of the good servant who is patient but eager to resume her duties.
“Ask her,” the girl repeated. “It is only water.”
“No, no,” her sister said, talking loudly. “You think it is only water to them? No.” Her voice betrayed the frustration she felt. Embarrassment had moved her finally to anger. She broke into Italian, and a steady stream of foreign vitriol filled the hall.
By the time they reached the last stair, the grandmother’s thick voice had taken turns admonishing first the one, then the other at her arm. The younger girl was sobbing. Their steps quickened, and with the alacrity of thieves, all three drew toward the door that led out onto the street, as if they couldn’t bear a moment longer to stay inside the house.
She looked up too late. The door had shut, and seemingly on cue, Janey emerged from the kitchen.
“Oh, I would have given them a cup of tea before they left,” she said, “if I saw them.”
“I didn’t know if that would have been the right thing to do,” Marjory said, reddening. “I wanted to. I just didn’t know.”
Stop and turn away, she thought. That’s what you told me.
Janey shrugged, leaning against the spindles of the staircase. “No harm done,” she said. “And it saves us a cup, well, smashing three perfectly good cups, anyway. No knowing what diseases they might have in the factories. Not everything kills you instantly, I’ve heard, and it’s better to be careful.”
“Did you see?” Janey asked, before she moved off. “No, I think you’d left by then, so you wouldn’t have. The old woman lost both her thumbs bookbinding. She showed all the ladies in the drawing room.” Giggling maliciously, she looked over her shoulder at the door. “They think they’re better than us anyway, those factory girls.”
“Us?”
Janey gave her a look. “Servants. We’re what’s holding back the modern age, aren’t we?”
The next morning, Marjory unfolded a letter. The paper was a cheap, yellowing, and waxy type, as if it had been stored and archived for years before being mailed as an afterthought.
“Is that where you’re from?” Janey asked, peering over her head. “How on earth do you pronounce that word?”
“There are all kinds of words like that where I’m from,” Marjory said, trying hard to keep the edge out of her voice.
The letter, from a Father McKinnon, was only a few lines long. Her mother was feeling poorly. Please send, if feasible, more funds in order to settle some outstanding debts and for a doctor to visit her at home.
“Is that how your name is spelled?” Janey inquired. “Your real name?”
Holding the letter in both hands, Marjory placed her right thumb over the word in question. Then she turned her thumb downward so the sweat of it would smear the ink and she wouldn’t have to look at the word again. She collapsed the paper as it had been, into thirds, and slipped it under her pillow.
“So?” Janey hissed. “What are you going to do?”
She watched as her friend’s eyes traveled to the end of her mattress. With a pocket knife, borrowed from the head footman one evening three weeks ago, they had cut out a small compartment after everyone had gone to bed. And inside that compartment, a bottle of dark glass still remained sealed.
“Did you or didn’t you?” Janey asked, and Marjory, a numbness taking over, shook her head.
“Jesus,” Janey cursed, a vein in her neck throbbing to the surface. She looked like she might be sick. “Jesus! What are you going to do?”
She had begged before. At the crossroads of the village, she could always count on a passing cart to take her to town, and then she would stand on the busiest thoroughfare, before the more upscale shops, and wait and watch. The trick was to discriminate, to fix on a kindly face or a drinker emerging from one of the better pubs who might have change to spare in his stout-induced good humor.
But that wouldn’t work, not here. She couldn’t stand in front of Tiffany’s with her hand outstretched, blocking the view of a pair of gold vases or a peridot necklace set in diamonds. In New York, everyone moved with a purpose. It was impossible to stay still.
In the way stray thoughts do, it had occurred to her without prompting one night that some exchange must have transpired in this city, which only the best families, perhaps that esteemed body of American gentility she heard tell of so frequently—the late Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred—secretly knew about and were in on together. It was a silly idea, to be sure, and she felt at once ashamed for letting her imagination run away with her. But she had wondered, even considered, for the few distracted minutes that she lingered beside a window after supper, whether a pact might have been made, signed, and sealed with blood early in the city’s relatively short history. Before her eyes rose the interior of a Neoclassical ballroom, walls brushed with gold, a five-tiered chandelier removed from its protective bag for the occasion and painstakingly cleaned. The curly heads of putti decorated the cornices like victims of religious sacrifice, while a tangled mural of angels, trumpets, and lilies of the valley soared omnipotent overhead. Everywhere, installed above the Palladian windows and hidden alcoves where lovers stole kisses on divans, loomed carvings in solid gold. Here, an eagle about to take flight. There, a sylphlike Diana with two hounds baying at her feet. She saw all of this and the procession of couples who entered one by one into the room with a kind of photographic clarity. And, at the opposite end, beneath a window illuminated by a high and full moon, stood a desk with a long scroll of thick legal paper, a heavy black pen placed at its head, and a silver needle mounted on a crude wooden stand. A caped figure wearing a top hat sat behind the desk, beckoning, and the couples, forming a line, went up to sign their names and prick their thumbs, which they pressed next to each of their signatures. At the end of the party, when everyone had had a turn, the figure rose from his seat. He thanked his guests for coming and removed first his cape, his white gloves, then his shiny top hat, and everyone saw, without any semblance of amazement, that it was not a man at all who had entertained them that night but a creature with horns and a pointed tail.
“You will receive your wealth very soon,” the Devil said, rolling up the scroll, and by the following morning, certain families had been made rich and their rivals bankrupted or steeped in scandal. From the depths of the earth, the Met Life building had sprung overnight like a newborn, and New York was transformed from a stick-and-mud settlement of dilapidated farmhouses into a metropolis of steel and skyscrapers, suspension bridges and automobiles. The windows of the mansions on Fifth Avenue gleamed, and the Devil waited, patiently grinning, for the collection of the souls promised to him.
How else, Marjory thought, could one account for all this finery? For Cartier clocks? For ivory-handled silk fans from Tiffany? Or vaults of Gorham silver, which made, every summer, a trip in chamois bags to mansions in Newport and then returned to sit in rooms finer than any Bayard Street tenement?
She had walked the Ladies’ Mile and found the shops overwhelming. Everywhere, in the vicinity of where she lived, there was something pleasant to be spotted and taken note of: a woman’s easy laugh, the click-click step of patent leather Oxfords on the pavement, a new window display to herald the changing of the seasons at B. Altman’s. She felt sometimes, her heart stirred by a strange longing, that there could be no place more refined, more ahead in the world than New York. She had only to look upon the red awnings signaling the opening of a steakhouse on Fifth Avenue or the triumph of the sprawling Waldorf Astoria Hotel to feel that, in gaining these innovations, this supremacy over the known universe, something unspeakable had also been lost to the city’s inhabitants forever. Beneath the veneer of agreeableness, as barely perceptible as a rising fog, there lay a stratum of unease and disquiet. The racing pulse of a criminal conscience rendered everything loud and fast. There was always the sound of construction, of engines screeching and steel rising or stone being blasted. Fresh finery was made, then purchased, and the cycle continued. Everyone talked a lot and spent a lot, and there existed no unhappiness or temporary spell of petulance that couldn’t be eased and finally resolved by the purchase of an ermine muffler from Bergdorf Goodman or the digestion of a dish of roasted squab drowned in sauce at Sherry’s.
You could not stand on a street corner and beg, like a clown.
She was aware, with a great sense of irony, that it was she in the end who had made a pact with the Devil. It was she who crept, concealed behind a sheet of rain, to the scratched red door of a four-story brownstone on her evening off. Her hand, slippery and cold, gripped a door knocker shaped in the curling horns of a ram’s head. She pounded twice, then three more times before the door finally opened. From the threshold, a small woman, dark-haired, with an angular jaw, blinked at her.
“It is only natural that you should be nervous,” the woman said, as they moved from the hall to a dimly lighted parlor. “Poor Francis,” she added, and a finger casually indicated the direction of the entrance. “All my visitors abuse him terribly.”
Money was counted, then counted again, before the woman asked, as if it were a question to be disputed, “This is just the first installment?”
Marjory nodded.
“I can be trusted. I’m employed,” she began, but the woman shook her head.
“I don’t need to know specifics,” she said, secreting the first of what would be four payments into a pocket of her dress. From the same pocket, she produced a bottle of dark glass. “Here.”
Afterward, Janey had said, sitting on her bed, “My friend told me she’s a tiny woman. She thought she was the parlor maid when she answered the door. Is she small?”
“She’s short,” Marjory replied. “Frail-looking. Bony,” she added, trying to think of how to describe her. “You couldn’t really remember her face. She looked away from you most of the time.”
“Probably being discreet,” Janey said.
“Yes, that’s likely.”
It went quiet between them. Then Janey, smoothing a crease in the pillow, spoke. “Who was it that night? Was it the dark-haired one with the thick brows?”
“No, he had light hair. Yellowish. Green eyes.” She almost smiled. “You had the dark one, remember?”
“Yes, but we only kissed a few times on the mouth. At least, that’s how far I let it go.”
The rebuke hit her like a slap.
“Was he the first?” Janey asked kindly, perhaps feeling she had been cruel.
She stuttered a little, shaking her head. “No,” she finally said. “There were two others. Back home, that is.”
Janey’s eyes bulged. “Well!” she cried. “You can never tell!”
“I thought I would marry the second one,” Marjory explained.
“Well!” Janey repeated. “Still, I shouldn’t have taken you with me.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I didn’t think you had it in you, though,” Janey said, as if to discharge herself of any blame. “You were dancing so much. Spinning like a child’s top all the time with your hair loose over your shoulders. What were you thinking?”
Marjory shook her head. “I don’t know. Perhaps I wasn’t thinking. Perhaps all I wanted was to be seen.”
It was a few nights after the “monkeys from the factories” had given their talk that she had a dream.
In the one-room cottage back home, her sisters discovered a mouse in a pail. The youngest screamed, pulling in fright at the ends of her own hair.
“Ah, kill it!” they both shouted. “Kill it! Kill it quickly!”
All four of them—she, her mother, and her two sisters—stared down at the intruder. It was a brown, furry creature with patches of hair missing from its back and a thin, flesh-colored tail that twitched every now and then like a worm. Bits of blood stuck to the claws where they had been rubbed raw against the wood.
“How will we kill it?” her mother asked evenly.
“Wring its neck,” one of her sisters said, without offering to do anything.
“No, don’t touch it,” her mother said. “It might bite you, and then we’ll have more trouble on our hands.”
“Beat it to death,” her other sibling suggested.
“With?” their mother asked.
They looked to her for advice.
“It’s such a small thing,” she heard herself say in a shy voice. “Such a small, stupid thing. Look at it trying to get out.” And they turned their eyes again to the creature, which was standing on its hind legs, scratching at the impenetrable sides.
“It’s vermin,” her mother said. “It needs to be killed.”
“We could let it go,” she said. “We could take the pail and just tip it over in a field. It would run away, and we wouldn’t have to touch it, not once.”
“And come back,” they all said together. “It would come back.”
“Mice always come back where there’s food,” her mother explained, and when she had said this, everyone looked down and away at the floor because they knew it wasn’t true. They had each of them only a slice of black bread that morning.
It was her mother who decided, after considering, that a kettle of water should be heated, and when the water reached boiling, that she would pour the water into the pail. Her sisters thought this a good idea.
“I’ll throw it out afterward,” her mother said. “The water and the mouse together.”
And as they waited for the kettle to warm, she felt sicker and sicker at heart. Her sisters sat across from each other at the table, the youngest one drumming her fingers or scratching her nose until it turned pink. Her mother bent over the stove, rubbing the end of her lower back where she felt pain.
As the first wisps of steam began to rise, she glanced again at the animal, and the sound of the scratching that they had all been forced to listen to, like the ticking of a clock, filled her with horror.
The kettle emitted its high-pitched whistling, and from her throat, a scream came out, like a shot. A chair was knocked over, and in both hands, she scooped up the pail. When she ran, it was as if the wind was at her back, pushing her in the direction of the fields.
She woke up, sweating, the sheets beneath her soaked through.
In the early hours of dawn, she sat on her bed, moving the bottle between her hands. With the nail of her left thumb, she unsealed the cap and peered inside the glass.
The letter from the priest lay unfolded next to her.
Dear––––––––,
I am sorry to write with bad news, especially while you must still be adjusting to life far away. But I think you’ll agree that some things one can’t escape knowing even from foreign shores. Your mother is ill, and your sisters, though they try, have had a hard time coping on their own. I have given them what I can, but it isn’t enough.
Your mother and sisters say the money from you stopped a while ago, four weeks, to be precise. They don’t understand why this is and hope you haven’t caught any sickness from the air in New York.
Please write when you can and send what you can feasibly spare to the address enclosed. The doctor thinks your mother has a growth and that it is located somewhere in her spine. But he won’t visit her again until she pays for the first consultation, and there are other debts to be resolved at the grocer’s and chemist’s shops, to name just a few.
Yours Sincerely,
Father McKinnon
It was many hours later, upstairs, that she felt a small tug at her stomach. From a crate, she had lifted the latest of a series of ancient bronzes ordered expressly from a dealer in Rome. She had clutched to her chest the bust of a bearded deity, metal curls brushing the bottom of her chin, as the first wetness touched the inside of her leg and slid down her ankle.
The tray that Marjory carried into the drawing room was unusually heavy. Monsieur has outdone himself, everyone said, and Mrs. Trevor, sighing in awe, looked longingly toward the pyramid of cream puffs obscured in powdered sugar, which were her particular favorite. To the usual plate of almond and sesame seed biscuits was added that afternoon a dish of caramel éclairs, a silver cup of cherry compote with clotted cream, and a formidable centerpiece, a whole Neapolitan cake perched atop a crystal stand. A chocolate pot of porcelain, hand painted with green vine and periwinkle, towered in the upper left corner, while to the right, a damask napkin folded in the shape of a swan embodied the most modest of the tray’s offerings.
In the drawing room, where the picture by Sargent had since been restored, Mrs. Vanderbilt Belmont waited.
“What day is it?” Marjory had asked Janey that morning.
“Saturday,” Janey said.
“Is it Saturday?” Her voice was hushed like a whisper. How had three whole days passed without her realizing?
“Arnault certainly knows how to please,” Mrs. Belmont muttered, as Marjory poured the chocolate. A set of chubby fingers wiggled toward the cream puffs.
She was about to leave when her mistress waved a hand at her.
“Stay. I might have something for you to do. An errand to run maybe.”
Marjory waited. She watched as the first bite of cake was ingested. Then a biscuit was consumed and several spoonfuls of the cherry compote topped with cream. As the compote was still being swallowed, a second cream puff disappeared into the mouth, and Marjory thought how her employer’s jaws resembled a powerful machine that one might see in a factory, mashing to a fine paste whatever entered it.
She thought, as she refilled cups of chocolate, how grotesque her mistress looked. Mrs. Belmont was a woman of mature years—old with a mean face, like an embittered bulldog. You could tell, just by casting your eye over such a face, that she was a woman hard to get along with and who was used to having the rest of the world see things her way. It didn’t matter that she was dressed, at the moment, in the latest creation tailored by Madame Paquin herself from Paris. Or that she wore, pinned in the center of a wide and ample bosom, a brooch of rare purple stones. There were still cake crumbs lodged in the corner of her mouth, still a dab of clotted cream stuck, like a white mole, to the front of her chin. And the lips, when they caught the light, were oily with the stickiness of the compote. The syrup from the cherries had colored her mouth a dark shade of crimson, and if one looked quickly enough, it was easy to mistake the reddish outline for fresh blood.
She had heard at breakfast that Mrs. Belmont was in a foul mood. The tray of sweets was offered as a palliative, meant to cool the breath of her fiery temper.
“Of course she’s against it,” Mr. Riggs had said. “You can’t really see her supporting such a demonstration, can you? It’s against all her sensibilities.” And he enunciated the syllables of sensibilities as though they were separate words strung together.
“It’s just a parade,” Janey put in. “What’s the harm in it? A lot of women marching up a few blocks?” She shrugged.
“I hear there’ll be men as well,” Mrs. Trevor said.
“You know she’s only upset,” Richard said, “because she isn’t in charge of the whole damn thing.”
They had laughed at this, and Richard, thinking himself extremely clever, added, “If they could only put her on top of a float with a crown on her head and a scepter in her hand, you know she would just love the idea.”
“So long as it’s her idea,” Mrs. Trevor said, since the mood at the table called for a little impropriety.
“Mrs. Belmont won’t be there, then?” Janey asked, cutting up the rest of the egg on her plate. “She won’t walk with the other ladies today?”
“She’ll be there,” Mr. Riggs said. “Don’t be fooled by her blowing all hot and cold now. She couldn’t let something happen without her in this city. It’s not her way.”
“Parlor entertainments,” Mrs. Trevor said.
When Mrs. Belmont rose from her chair and left the room to go out, Marjory did not take the depleted tray and its contents through the corridors and down the stairs to be washed. Instead she lingered. She looked around her, as if seeing the walls, the furniture, and the Sargent painting for the first time. She touched the Louis XVI table by Roentgen and sat, for a few minutes, in the soft velvet side chair, to rest her feet, which were sore from standing. The soles of her boots brushed against the hardwood floor, and she tapped her heels in a cheerful rhythm, listening to the music she made, of which she was the only audience.
She didn’t take the tray with her, even as she traveled through the rest of the house. It was still early in the afternoon, in the lazy hours between luncheon and dinner, and she knew that everyone would be downstairs, chatting about the demonstration and Mrs. Belmont’s bad mood.
The double doors of the library creaked when she opened them. The sight of books, of so much learning and accumulated knowledge contained within rows of neatly bound volumes, moved her in a way she couldn’t explain, as her fingers slid over the spines, pulling out ones of interest. She caught bits of phrases she thought lovely, like a line from Catullus, and the wing span of the butterfly Aporia crataegi. She opened a volume of The Mayor of Casterbridge to a random page and lifted the book to her nose so that she could inhale the smell of leather, ink, and fine paper. With Middlemarch she did the same, and she walked all around the perimeter of the room, a copy of Robinson Crusoe tucked in the crook of her elbow, while she stroked the backs of the armchairs and touched the head of a marble bust of Horace.
In the bedroom of Mrs. Belmont, she opened bottles of fragrance from Poiret and dabbed a little of one that she liked on her wrists. Before the mirror, she straightened her cap and apron. Her hands drifted to the panels of the immense rosewood wardrobe and, flinging them open, embraced the line of furs that hung there as if they were old friends. Sleeves of mink and fox caressed her cheeks. She felt giddy, weightless. She thought if anyone, Mrs. Trevor, Janey, or Mrs. Belmont herself, stepped into the room at that very moment, they wouldn’t be able to see she was there. She would be like a ghost to them, and they would feel only a slight chill in the room where she had passed over the carpet.
Her head was full of useless things. As she moved through the halls, she considered that Mrs. Belmont had had three children by her first, loveless marriage, and that the children were named, in sequence of birth, Consuelo, William, and Harold. Mr. Harold Vanderbilt sailed a yacht named the Vagrant, and Consuelo had cried the night before her wedding to a duke from a place called Marlborough. When she visited, she liked a blue Ming vase of Provence roses to be placed on her dressing table. Everyone who met her said she was beautiful. Her portrait had been painted in Europe sixteen times, Helleu and Sargent among the artists.
She had learned that furniture must have names like George or Louis or Charles to be considered of value, that it didn’t matter if a string of pearls Mrs. Belmont wore had been previously owned, because the owner happened to be the late empress of Russia (Catherine the Great). There existed a particular fork for the eating of terrapin soup, just as there existed a spoon with a serrated tip for piercing the pulp of an orange. As she wandered through another corridor, in a part of the house she didn’t know, she heard again, like a whisper, the ghoulish cackling of the servants who had laughed at her in the kitchen.
In all this, there was no room for her own thoughts. For grief. No room for the recollection of how her left boot had inadvertently stepped in a palm-sized pool of blood or the bottle of dark glass, still full, because she couldn’t bring herself to drink.
The irony of what had happened three days ago didn’t strike her until she nearly collided with her employer in the entrance of the house.
“Here,” Mrs. Belmont said, shoving into her arms a heavy coat.
“Ma’am, you’re back already?” Marjory asked, taking the garment from her.
“I am. Where is everyone? Where’s Mr. Riggs?”
She heard herself answer and Mrs. Belmont huff away, up the main staircase to her room. If the earth swallowed her now, she wouldn’t resist. She would let herself be buried and the thousands of pounds of stone and dirt crush her from above. There was no afterlife, she thought. She needed none.
I think you’ll agree, Father McKinnon had written, that some things one can’t escape knowing even from foreign shores … Your mother and sisters say the money from you stopped a while ago, four weeks, to be precise. They don’t understand why this is …
The door to the street was still open. As she turned away, a sound came to her from outside. It was familiar—deep and resonant, an echoing, cyclical rumble.
The sea! she thought. The sea!
She was in the road, no longer a road but a grassy path scattered with wildflowers in a green land. Her mother had told her, in times of trouble, that she must listen for the sea. The sea will save you, she’d said. And it was here—finally, it was here. It had arrived when she most needed it. A cold wind touched her back, and the coolness felt pleasant to her, even as she shivered. The sound of the current, of chanting and singing and laughing just ahead, sent her heart turning with joy.
She saw waves of white, of rows and rows of angels riding the waters, arm in arm. A garlanded float, like a massive ship, followed close behind, and she saw there were more angels to come behind the ship, that banners decorated with purple and green streamers fluttered over all their heads.
In the distance, the blast of a trumpet thundered like cannon fire. The sound would signal her crossing into heaven, she thought. She shut her eyes and waited.
“Come on!” a voice shouted, and she felt a hand smooth as marble grip her arm, leading her forward. “Come on now! Don’t be afraid.”
A sob choked her throat as she left the pavement behind. There was no going back, no time even for good-byes.
“You can open your eyes,” the angel said into her ear. “You’ll crash into a lamppost going this way.”
The face that greeted her, wide and framed with curls, came slowly into view. A week ago, she had thought that such a face would do well behind the counter of a store. And for a moment, they blinked at each other, divinity and human, before the current of bodies forced them on ahead.
“What’s your name?” the Irish shopgirl asked.
“Marjory,” she answered quickly.
“Your real name, I mean.”
She hesitated. “What, don’t you know your own name? Forget it?” the girl teased.
All around her, as she looked, there was beauty. Those who passed her noticed her and smiled, and she did not feel that they were laughing at her or smiling because she still wore a maid’s cap on her head and an apron around her waist. From behind, a woman she didn’t know placed a gloved hand lightly on her shoulder.
“A wonderful turnout, isn’t it?” the stranger whispered, before moving on.
When she looked back, her friend was still waiting for her reply.
“Siobhán,” she said. “My name is Siobhán.”
Inside, there was so much that was raw, that hurt and was painful to think about. Yet as the sound of the sea filled her ears, as waves of angels continued to stream past them and the purple flags on the top of the grand ships rippled in the wind, she felt that this, all of this, would be enough.
Yes, she thought, it was enough.