FULLY DRESSED FROM HER neck to her stockinged feet, Isabelle took the center of the parlor room as if on a stage, with Mae and Junie splayed at her feet as her admiring audience. Isabelle was listening to the weather report on the radio, which she would repeat syllable for syllable, in the exact voice and dialect of the male newscaster.
“And Sunday promises to be a cold one! We have a front coming in from Canada—now what else have the Canadians ever given us besides icy weather, Norm? Oh, maple syrup, you say. So right. But we can get maple syrup from Vermont. Every bit as good. What else have the Canadians ever given us?” Norm said something, there was giggling, chortling, and Isabelle giggled and chortled, too. “Well, Norm, we’re not going to mention that on the air during family hour. It’s against the law, our Constitution now says so.”
And on and on.
Finn asked his children about it.
“She does it all the time, Daddy.” He regretted he wasn’t home early enough during the week to hear it more often.
“Only with the weather?”
“With everything. The best is when she repeats the jokes on the comedy hour.”
“Jokes, no kidding.”
“Daddy, Isabelle is so much more fun than Edith,” Junie said.
“Edith is a very nice lady,” Mae said, shushing her sister. “But she can’t run or play tag or hide-and-seek like Isabelle. Or make jokes.”
“Well, Edith teaches you more serious things.” But Finn bought two more radios for the house.
“She should be paying us for buying her radios,” said Vanessa. “Finn, I need you to talk to her. She keeps taking the children downstairs! Say something to her. Tell her to stop.”
“Why?”
“Why are our girls spending time with the servants?” Vanessa said.
“Edith is a servant.”
“You know what I mean. It’s inappropriate.”
“What are they doing down there?”
“Getting up to no good. The other night, they made cookies!”
“They what?”
“Don’t joke, Finn, it’s not funny.”
“The cookies they fed their father?”
“That’s not the point. They shouldn’t be in the cellar.”
“But the oven is in the cellar.”
“They shouldn’t be using the oven!”
“Are they having fun?”
“Not the point.”
“Are they learning something new?”
“They’re learning useless things.”
Finn shrugged. “I don’t know. Baking seems all right. Who doesn’t like cookies?”
Vanessa, apparently. “Finn, are you going to talk to her, or should I?”
Finn kissed Vanessa on the head. “I think you should do it, cupcake. I’d like to listen in from the other room, though. I want to hear how you carry it off. I told her to stop joking once. It didn’t go well.”
“How could she possibly joke in English, Finn?”
From downstairs came the sound of a loud piano. Finn had bought the piano because all fine homes in Beacon Hill had one. The girls had been taking lessons, but they were reluctant learners at best and still very much beginners. But this piano playing was discordant and joyous and had hints of a real though unfamiliar melody.
In the drawing room, the girls and Isabelle were pounding the keys in cacophony and unison.
“I teach them ‘Kolomeyka,’” Isabelle said. “Very good Ukrainian song. I play on akordeon. Not same, but almost . . .”
Vanessa was cross and exasperated. “Girls, stop that. You’ll ruin the action. Isabelle, please don’t do that anymore. One at a time, please. And don’t play anything that hurts our ears. The piano makes beautiful music, not—”
“Vanessa,” Finn said in a quiet, chiding voice.
Vanessa clicked her heels and her tongue. “You know, it really bothers me,” she said, “that the idiot savants are allowed to make a disharmony of our evenings, and I’m supposed to just say thank you.”
“Who are you calling idiot savants? Not our girls, I hope.”
Vanessa continued. “Yes, what a show-stopping party trick this so-called piano playing is going to be when Mother and Daddy come for tea. I’m sure Adder and Eleanor would like nothing more than to hear it. Why, it’s a veritable Beethoven.”
“Why, it’s a veritable Beethoven!” echoed Isabelle in the same irritable tone.
Finn laughed.
Vanessa didn’t.
It was hard to deny that for Finn—even without accidental nighttime run-ins with wet naked Ukrainians—the house had become more fun since the arrival of this mysterious creature, all woman, part naiad, part dryad, part siren, singing, swinging from trees, telling stories in other tongues, baking melt-in-your-mouth delights, and making music. Work was growing increasingly stressful, but at night, if he managed to get home in time to catch it, there was laughter. Sometimes there was dancing, too. With Isabelle’s help, the girls put on skits for them after dinner. Vanessa wasn’t impressed, but it was all Finn could do not to break up when his babies tried to imitate Isabelle imitating Will Rogers in her own version of his comedy routine. “Write to your congressman,” Isabelle would say, sounding more Will Rogers than the man himself. “Even if he can’t read, write to your congressman!”
Vanessa leaned close to Finn. “Do you think she knows what a congressman is?”
“Get some laughs and do the best you can,” said Will Rogers to Vanessa, standing with her hands akimbo on her slim hips in the middle of the parlor room. Isabelle switched gears into a high nasal twang and instantly became Jack Benny, shuffling the two-step. “Now remember, ladies—a smile is the second-best thing you can do with your lips.”
“Does she have any idea what she’s saying?” said Vanessa. “Any at all?”
Isabelle flashed a beguiling grin.
Finn rocked back, trying to conceal his own beguiled smile from both women. “I don’t know, Vee,” he said. “Ask her what the first thing is.”
Many nights, along with the entertainment, there were little cakes, and one time even lemon bars, which for some reason upset Vanessa so much, even Finn couldn’t joke her out of her mood.
Isabelle seemed to adjust to her new situation better than Vanessa to the same old situation with the addition of a helping hand. Finn found it inexplicable that the woman who had escaped her homeland, presumably under some duress, who had been shipwrecked and was now alone, was adjusting better to her circumstances than the woman who had lived her life wrapped in cotton, slept on a bed of silk, had servants for every job in the house, and whose single nervous malady seemed to be an overzealous need for organization and a slight antipathy to keeping time.
However you weighed it, one woman played with the children and mimicked jokes, and the other woman grumbled. There was nothing so small that Vanessa could not blow it out of proportion.
“Oh, you want to know why I’m slightly churlish tonight, my darling?” Vanessa exclaimed to Finn when he inquired about the cause of Vanessa’s sour disposition. “Come with me. I want you to hear with your own ears what the girls told me earlier.” She led Finn to the nursery. “Girls,” she said, “will you please tell your father what you asked me this morning. About milk.”
“Oh yeah, Daddy,” said Mae, “we want to know why we only drink milk once a week.”
“Milk is for babies, darlings,” said Finn. “Not for big girls.”
“But Daddy,” said Junie, “we want to drink milk every day.”
“Twice a day,” Mae said. “Morning and night.”
“Isabelle says we can have our milk delivered to our door. Can we?”
“We could.” Finn was unsure where this was going, but judging by Vanessa’s expression he knew it couldn’t be anywhere good. “Nothing wrong with a little more milk, I guess. But why such a keen interest?”
“We asked Isabelle why her boobies were so big, and she told us it was because the Ukrainian girls drank milk every day since childhood,” said Mae.
“And she said many boobies in Ukraine were bigger than hers,” said Junie. “Me and Mae want to have big boobies like Isabelle.”
“Mae and I, Junie,” Vanessa corrected.
“Mae and I want to have big boobies like Isabelle,” said Junie.
“Very good darling,” said a deadpan Vanessa.
“We need milk twice a day, Daddy,” said Mae. “Please can we have it, starting tomorrow?”
To keep a straight face with Vanessa giving him a side-eye glare took all the powers in Finn’s possession. Even her crossed arms glared at him.
Finn crossed his own arms. “Oh yeah, Vanessa, that reminds me,” he said. “If you’re going to launder all the towels in the house, please make sure you leave a few clean dry ones in every washroom. The other night, there was not a single towel to be found in either of the bathrooms upstairs.”
Vanessa became flustered and unsettled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, darling,” she said, stammering slightly. “But I will most certainly speak to the servants about it. It’s inexcusable.” She paused a moment. “Our conversation about milk reminded you of the towels?”
“What can I tell you, the human man works in mysterious ways,” said Finn. “I meant mind.”
There was something about her. On the surface she was capable, quiet, eventempered. She wasn’t flashy or showy. She acquitted herself well with his parents and in-laws. She was patient and polite to Vanessa, even though his otherwise courteous wife sometimes forgot her manners when she spoke to or about Isabelle. She tended to his children with such an aching tenderness that it made Finn’s own heart ache, for his children and for Isabelle.
Finn didn’t want to observe the woman too closely; he didn’t want to study her as if she were a painting or a subject desirous of being painted, but he had to confess to a certain magnetizing unfamiliarity about her that made him sometimes want to stare.
She had strong, developed hands with pronounced knuckles and trimmed, unpolished nails, uncommon for Boston women. Many things about her were singular: the high exposed forehead, the crescent-moon unplucked brows, the penetrating eyes of indeterminate color, half-sea, half-concrete, the defined bones of her oval face, her artist’s mouth. She wore no makeup, as if by design, and always had a scarf covering her head as if she was embarrassed by her choppy tufts of hair. Her face was a good face, and her gaze didn’t waver. When you spoke to her, she looked right at you; she wasn’t shy. There was an exotic confidence about her, merited or misplaced? He didn’t know and couldn’t tell.
There were other things too.
Late one night Finn came downstairs to get himself a drink and a bite to eat. Everything was quiet, but just as he was about to rummage in the ice box, he heard a noise in the pantry just off the kitchen. When he moved to investigate, he saw Isabelle, down on her knees, prostrate, her head flattened into the cold floor. She was motionless except for her heaving shoulders, and the racked weeping coming from her was the sound of a living beast tearing apart the heart of a human being.
Finn staggered back. He felt he had walked in on something he wasn’t meant to see, something she was giving only to God. Quietly he left the kitchen and after that night stopped wandering around his own house, lest he be confronted again with unfathomable things he didn’t understand and was afraid to.
Isabelle may have shown the world a defiant, self-assured hardness, but now Finn knew. Just below her surface was the floodline of a shallow grave.