The first snow is like volcanic ash, so feathery light that it floats in the air without settling. For a few brief days the colorful patchwork of fallen leaves shines through the branches, until, overnight, the brilliance dulls to browns and grays. Audrey Stone has already returned to Rochester, but with her husband and two sons she plans to make a special trip to the Manikin for a Thanksgiving feast, if the weather holds out. Hal Craxton should be home from Egypt by then. Lilian will have had two weeks to get used to her situation—if she chooses, she may accompany her family back to the city. But this will be her last chance to change her mind.
It is up to Ellen to keep the interior of the Manikin presentable for its inhabitants and guests. Twice a year, in autumn and spring, Ellen turns the mansion inside out and attempts to renew it. The process lasts five days. “Stay out of Mrs. Griswood’s way,” Sylva will warn her boys, giving them each a sharp slap ahead of time, since they’re sure to be a nuisance. But to stay out of the way you’d have to go to the next county—so the men reason, and they won’t even set foot in the kitchen during Ellen’s house-wrecking campaign. “Do you prefer pestilence?” Ellen will call out to Sid the gardener from an open window as she wipes the glass. “I prefer peace!” Sid will shout, waving his rake at her.
Housecleaning, of course, is women’s work. First thing Monday morning, Sylva attacks the stove—blacking it to keep it from rusting, sifting out ashes, scouring its greasy burners. She puts Nora in charge of the pantry—every jar and can must come off and the shelves be wiped down, and then everything must be returned to its proper place. Eva will wash the drapes and carpets and blankets, rejuvenate the pillow feathers, and clean the mattresses. Billie will polish the furniture and floors, banish the cobwebs from the ceilings, and clean the windows. And Ellen will start with the basement, then close up the conservatory for the winter, and finish off with the Cabinet of Curiosities, grooming and polishing the trophies with special attention.
During this week it is always the repetition of her responsibilities that threatens to overwhelm Ellen: still the wicks need trimming, stairs need to be swept, the clocks need to be wound, Sylva needs time to bake, and Mrs. Craxton needs attention, though not as much as she used to, thanks to Lilian. Who’d have thought Ellen would be grateful to have Lilian Stone around? It’s just for this one week—afterward, Ellen can resume her place as Mrs. Craxton’s main companion. The trick during these seasonal cleanings has always been to fool Mrs. Craxton into a state of complacency. Ellen would lay out a game of patience and crank up the gramophone and leave Mrs. Craxton alone, sometimes for as long as an hour. Now Lilian can help stretch that hour into two and Ellen can go on about her work.
Ellen’s the fool, as it turns out. Lilian Stone has better things to do than to sit around playing cards and breathing in an old woman’s sour exhalations. Early in the morning she wanders off no one knows where, leaving Mrs. Craxton so affronted that she ignores her breakfast and stares blankly at the dining-room mural, refusing to be consoled by Ellen or even to be moved from her place at the head of the immense cherry-wood table. So Ellen has to let the basement wait and instead busies herself with the minutiae of the dining room, dusting the porcelain tea set, removing the lambrequins from the windows, and finally settling to the tedious work at the étagère, taking out all the fossils and teeth and seashells on display so she can clean the glass shelves, all the while keeping her mistress within sight, in case the strain of disappointment becomes too much for her.
Noon comes and goes, and Mrs. Craxton speaks only to decline lunch. Ellen suggests sending Sylva’s boys to Millworth to fetch Dr. Spalding, but Mrs. Craxton scoffs at the idea—the trouble, she says, is not inside her body but outside the house, wandering through the forest. Girls these days think themselves invulnerable, and though Mrs. Craxton doesn’t really fear for Lily, she obviously fears this precedent of inconsiderate behavior. There will be trouble when Lilian returns, harsh words, a falling-out. Ellen must bolster the old woman. Perhaps she could tell her about Lilian’s bawdy performance at the window yesterday, and Mrs. Craxton could indulge herself with self-righteous disgust at young people these days, their lack of manners; every girl’s a tramp. But Ellen decides that telling tales wouldn’t do anyone any good, so she resigns herself to a wasted day. Tomorrow she will wake an hour earlier and set to work on the furnace. For now, she will see to it that Mrs. Craxton, pitiful old thing, gets whatever she wants.
She wants a girl—one girl in particular, though as it turns out, Ellen’s Peg will have to do. There’s Peg in the kitchen gobbling a sandwich, nose pink and wet after a romp outside. She’s a lovely sight to her mother, bursting with life. Still a child in many ways. So what if she’s strong-willed? Today, Peg’s health seems the reward for Ellen’s leniency, the girl’s insolence only an annoying habit. See how the color in her cheeks matches her hair. Someday Peg will look back upon her childhood and realize that her freedom was her mother’s greatest gift, and she’ll be thankful. She knows how to be alone with herself, she isn’t weak or timid, and she won’t have to borrow a personality from her husband. Give her a few more years, and she’ll have a rare kind of composure that can’t be bought.
Peg leans against the kitchen table as she eats, lost in thought. Ellen stands on the threshold between the two rooms and scrubs fingerprints off the swinging door. She watches Peg take a long drink of milk, winces but manages to keep quiet when her daughter wipes her lip with the back of her hand. Now’s not the time to remind her about the use of napkins. Ellen has work to finish. Her daughter, educated but still half wild, must be civilized gradually, gently.
“What may I do to help you, Sylva?” Peg asks, as if she has overheard her mother’s thoughts.
“I expect your mama has an idea. ’Bout time you pitched in, kitten.” Of all the people at the Manikin, Sylva is the most honest, and Peg flinches visibly at this simple truth.
“Mother?”
“You may keep Mrs. Craxton company.” Ellen blurts it out before considering the consequences, and it’s too late to retract. She’s never put the old woman in anyone else’s charge before—why should she begin with Peg? But she knows that Mrs. Craxton has overheard the exchange. And even while she searches for a way out of the predicament, her daughter is already obliging, smiling courteously, approaching Mrs. Craxton with the sprightly step of someone who doesn’t much care how she’s received.
“I challenge you to blackjack,” Peg announces, opening the drawer in the sideboard where the cards are kept. Ellen feels weak about the knees, horrified by Peg’s impertinence. Blackjack, indeed! Why not strip poker while you’re at it, Peg? Hey, young lady, where’s your Havana?
“Don’t like that game,” Mrs. Craxton mumbles. But any response is better than none, so Ellen refrains from interfering, pretends to busy herself with cleaning and waits to see how Peg will manage.
“Old maid, then.”
Oh, Peg.
“I always win,” says Mrs. Craxton, cracking a smile as Peg settles into a chair.
“I won’t let you win.”
“We’ll see.”
Ellen has been tending the fire in the dining room all day, and she throws in another log, watches as the flames slip under the warped bark. While Peg deals out the hands, Mrs. Craxton asks her twice for the time—evidence that she’s reviving. Ellen waits until the flames have wrapped snugly around the log, then leaves the room without a word, comforted, as though she’d just listened to a lovely piece of music. So Peg’s at work, finally—occupying Mrs. Craxton, not an easy task by any means, especially with the difference of almost sixty years between them. And Ellen is lost somewhere in the middle.
Down in the basement she sweeps the floor, then sets to work on the furnace, stirring the white coals in the belly to force down the loose ashes to the lower shelf. A salty tear of perspiration drops into her eye, and she shuts the dry eye and looks out through the blur into the throbbing heat. She wonders about herself at seventy-five. Maybe she’ll be long dead, her body resting in her grave while her spirit dashes about with the north winds. That’s what she wants for herself, eventually: to be weightless. Not to fly—she wants the motion to be effortless, as in the delicious moment just after all her strength had gone into the squeeze of pleasure, and she lay limp in her husband’s arms. Remember? His body encasing hers. The heat spreading inside her. But that old memory, however tempting, is incompatible with the task at hand, and she sends it back to the depths of her mind. Shoveling yesterday’s ashes, hauling them in the wheelbarrow up through the bulkhead, dumping them in the bin until the furnace shelf is empty and she can brush and scrape away the sooty crust that remains—always the perfectionist, Ellen is, not satisfied until she can see the gleam of metal again.
She stops to rest for a moment and sifts through the ashes in the wheelbarrow. Even water would feel coarse in comparison. So soft are the ashes that when she closes her eyes and holds them in her cupped hand she can imagine she’s holding goosedown. Or cobwebs. She had better check on Billie later to make sure she’s reaching the cobwebs in the highest corners with her feather duster. And Eva—she joined the staff in August, and though she says she’s washed mattresses before, Ellen doesn’t entirely believe her. These girls don’t care about the quality of their work, since they consider themselves temporary help and are always chattering about better jobs to be had. The maids usually last no more than six months, a year at best, convinced that they’ll move on to a better position, and beyond that, to marriage, a Sears mail-order house, a picket fence, four children. Ellen understands the impulse—when you’re young, you want to believe that life’s a steady climb to a flat-topped summit. But too often disappointment cancels out the bliss of hope, so a woman’s ambitions should be modest. Ellen wants to spare her own daughter, to prepare her for the inevitable hardships. Peg had better know about the business of living before she sets out on her own, for there’s nothing respectable about a young woman on the move, and the usual direction is down. Work. Work so hard that you make yourself invaluable. Work saves a woman from vice, Ellen believes, from the abuse of men, from poverty. Work, Peg, work for the sake of security.
The older servants are appropriately grateful for their jobs. Lore Bennett has been at the Manikin for ten years and has made no noises about leaving. Sid is a restless sort, but he’s nearing fifty and has confessed to Ellen that he’s tired of the unexpected. He’ll never marry, though he has a tendency to cast an invitational wink in Ellen’s direction, and she doesn’t like to be alone with him. Peter and Sylva have their three children—and Nora, too—so they’re not going anywhere. Red Vic, at sixty-three the oldest member of the staff, knows he’s lucky to have a job at all.
The girls, including Peg—especially Peg!—could learn a lesson about appreciation. Ellen forgives them when they complain about the Manikin and its backward aspects, but she loses patience when they balk at hard work. They act as though some innate superiority puts them above Ellen, as though they each had a Lilian Stone inside waiting to come out. Soot under her fingernails, soot in her hair, soot covering her face and neck—this is what the world will give a woman who doesn’t have the wealth to support her ambition. Ellen has to admit it to herself, if to no one else, that she hates this necessary stage of cleaning, when she’s imprinted with the dirt she’s worked so hard to remove, when she’s unspeakably filthy from the contact. But she stops just short of feeling sorry for herself. It could be worse: she could be working twelve hours a day in a factory or in the fields or in a poorly ventilated office picking out letters on a typewriter. She’s grateful for her position, and though in good American fashion she’s tried to give her daughter opportunities she herself never had, she’s not ashamed of her work. Far from it. It suits her perfectly. She perceives herself to be a plain woman with skin stretched too tightly over her bones so the skeleton shows through with disturbing insistence. Ascetic and obedient, Ellen fits the role of housekeeper exactly, carries herself with the tired poise of an actress who has performed the same play every night for eight years. So rare are her lapses and hesitations that even those who know her best know only the housekeeper and not the self independent from her work, and she sees no need to remind them of the difference. She enjoys her power, or, as she prefers to think of it, her influence, and always exercises it judiciously.
But she’s never more proud than when she’s in Mrs. Craxton’s company and receives directions instead of giving them. No one is as completely dependent upon her as the old woman, and perhaps this alone explains Ellen’s pride—she believes herself to be superior to her employer. Or is it that Mrs. Craxton needs Ellen only as a witness, and almost anyone could replace her? Peg is an adequate substitute. More than adequate, apparently. Ellen pulls herself up from the basement ladder into the kitchen and finds Sylva and Nora peering around the door into the dining room, where the old woman laughs with the lusty heaves of a woman half her age and Peg giggles in return.
Sylva motions to Ellen, puts her finger to her lips, and whispers, “The Steffan boy brought a telegram. Mr. Craxton’s heading off to Italy instead of coming home for the holiday, turns out.”
Ellen looks over Nora’s shoulder. Mrs. Craxton is in her chair facing the fire and Peg stands beside her. What are they laughing at? Punch and Judy dancing in the fireplace? Mrs. Craxton points a finger at the flames and says, “There he is, there!”
“Burnin’ that telegram,” Sylva explains. “Had Peg read it out loud, then she tossed it in the fire.” She wipes her hands on her apron and turns back to the stove. “Shame on that man,” she mutters.
“Don’t look like she cares a stick, Aunty,” Nora says.
“She don’t ever look like what she feels,” Sylva replies, casting such an implicating glance Ellen’s way that Ellen says defensively, “She’s given up on him. Any mother would, by now,” convincing no one. They all hear the agony in that laugh, and if Mrs. Craxton had dived headfirst from her chair into the fire, they wouldn’t have been surprised.
* * *
For weeks the skin of the snowy owl has remained inside a square, airtight metal box in Boggio’s studio, sprinkled with naphthalene crystals and a few teaspoons of old carbon bisulfide. No lice, fleas, or maggots are going to infest Boggio’s rare specimen before he has properly mounted it. But here’s the riddle: What is proper? He might as well be trying to mount the skin of a fallen angel. He has never seen an angel, though he hopes to one day. And he has never seen a snowy owl in the field. He must model his snowy angel after its former self and capture some motion of life in the pose. His little Kodak can’t help him here. Every morning upon waking he stares at the ball of fine excelsior on his table and wonders how to go about it. How to continue with the work he’s begun. How to do justice. How to represent life in precise detail.
A job has never stumped him so thoroughly. For lack of anything better, he spends the afternoons in an old hut that he has claimed as his bird blind, overlooking Craxton’s marsh. He doesn’t hope to find another snowy owl, but he might snap a picture of a different species—a red-tailed hawk or, if he’s lucky, a great horned owl, a common enough marauder, every farmer’s most detested pest. But even this is an unsatisfying prospect—making do with such a peasant bird. There must be other possibilities.
He reminds himself as he walks quietly along the path of the simple rules that apply to the mounting of any large bird: Be sure that the artificial manikin is smaller than the natural one; bind the roll of excelsior with linen thread to give it strength; fill the space between the artificial body and skin with straw; and use a heavy, galvanized wire to support the head. Guidelines make any operation sound easy. But the combination of surgery and art demands a unique sort of talent, as rare as it is useless in any other line of work. Forty years ago Boggio tried his hand at accounting and failed miserably. He is sure he would have failed at everything else, including women. Especially women. All the palaver and deceit involved. He has been alone for his entire life—this in itself is an accomplishment. By his age most other men are struggling to resign themselves to their cowardly marriages. Solitude is a challenge that Boggio has met as fearlessly as the snowy owl herself, who left behind her arctic home in search of a more temperate solitude. Lovely bird. She’ll never see the blossoms of the dogwood or the speckled carpet of lily of the valley underfoot. She’ll never crush a wild strawberry upon her tongue. Think of all she’ll miss because of Junket’s expert aim. Boggio would like to represent this as well: the unlived future. To show what has been lost. It is a melancholy tale, the tale of the hunted.
The snow has begun to fall again, and with every step Boggio pushes through an ice curtain that melts upon his face. A quarter mile away lies his hut, built a century earlier, according to local history, by a farmer to house his mad wife. Boggio replaced the door years ago, and he alone carries the key, so when he finally reaches the hut he is surprised to find the door ajar. You old idiot, he chides himself, can’t even remember to latch a padlock. Then he sees that the bolted lock has been busted right out of the wall. He steps into the dank room and while his eyes adjust he inhales the familiar smells of the moldy wooden floorboards, of damp brick, of cold. But there is something else, too. Boggio smells the wool blanket before he sees it crumpled like a child curled upon itself to keep warm. Or a small man. Some mudlark taking advantage of Boggio’s forgetfulness? Some weary Willie with nothing to do but to set up home in Boggio’s private blind? He grabs the blanket and rips it off the infernal good-for-nothing … nobody. There is nobody, only the same dirt and cobwebs that give the room its character. Filth, Mrs. Griswood would say. But it’s one hundred years of filth. Familiar filth. Everything’s familiar here, except the blanket—and the white silk undergarment that flutters out from the folds of the blanket and wafts as gently as a feather, as a butterfly, as a tiny angel, to the floor.
Listen. Boggio hears it before he conjures an image—an echo, like a mermaid’s song that can be heard under water from hundreds of miles away. The song of lovers. And now he imagines what he hears: a man’s pale, spongy buttocks rose and heaved, a woman’s thighs jerked with each thrust. The room filled with their howling and groaning. A rutting song, that’s all—he has no illusions. Just a cheap burlesque in the woods. And here’s Boggio’s souvenir.
Wretches, whoever they were. Boggio doesn’t want to know. The progeny will be given to a foundling hospital, he wagers. They will abandon it, just as Boggio was abandoned when he was two weeks old. No pity wasted, though. The world is a haven for bastards and orphans. Boggio, by virtue of his long-suffering independence, has little to lose.
He holds the frilly panties to his nose. There’s a smell of buttered bread in the middle, and the panties are damp at the puckered edges where they’ve been resting against the wall. Boggio’s wall, violated. The insult of it hits him—a rogue and a slut had their fun, at Boggio’s expense.
But insult can inspire the open-minded man. Boggio clutches the panties in his hand, squeezing from them a wonderful new idea. He did hear the song, didn’t he? He heard it with remarkable clarity. Now listen carefully: an owl is singing. He will make the bird sing. He’s been wrong to try to start with an image of action. To simulate life, he must construct his animal in such a way that anyone can hear the voice. He imagines the effect: a man enters the gallery, strides across the room to examine Boggio’s famous owl, and as soon as he’s within arm’s reach he hears the voice, a violent whoosh of sound and then the scream of a predator, the cry too lifelike to have come from a recording device. The man knows the owl is dead, stuffed, inanimate, but just as certainly he knows what he heard—the voice of the dead owl. Impossible, he tells himself. But this is the beauty of Boggio’s idea: miracles are never forgotten.
He’s indifferent to the snow on his walk home. He’s thinking about the challenge in front of him. He will spread the owl’s wings and stabilize them with wire mesh. He will fill the head and neck with cork dust mixed with shellac—he’ll need about two cupfuls, he figures—and then he’ll shake and tamp the head until it is completely filled. He’ll have to stuff the beak with a wad of chopped tow, since he plans to leave it open and pull the mounting wire through the mouth rather than through the skull as he usually does. He will wire the mouth open and bend the papier-mâché tongue to evoke, exactly and irresistibly, the sound of a scream. And he will paint the beak with a coat of umber, then seal it with beeswax. The finished bird will be his fiercest animal. She will recall her wild self more convincingly than any other of his creations.
Now that he has his idea, the execution will follow easily, naturally. He picks up his pace as he nears the Manikin, but instead of returning directly to his own quarters he circles the house, searching the windows for some sign of activity. On his third trip around he finally sees the housekeeper washing the glass door in the conservatory.
“Mrs. Griswood,” he calls, tapping on a pane of glass and grinning. He holds up the panties. “You want filth, here’s filth for you!”
* * *
Snow, at last. True snow. Not the furtive or dishonest snow that has started and stopped and started again for weeks. Not the mean-spirited, sleety snow or the snow that coats the trees with ice. This is snow that gains in bulk and weight with astonishing speed, snow that transforms the forest within minutes into a whitewashed maze of compartments and aisles, snow that lands in tempting dollops on the tiny red berries of the bitter nightshade, snow that sticks to the hairpin edges of rhododendron leaves, snow that skews perspective, making even the trees close by wave like seagrass. It is not yet the harsh snow with blizzard winds that sweeps south from Canada. This is snow that seems indigenous, falling vertically with a soft hiss, gathering in mounds shaped by the contours of the earth. It is a snow that marks the beginning of winter. A snow that buries.
No other season in the region is as immutable. Once winter sets in, people forget the context of the year. It is winter. It will always be winter. Memories of summer days are blurred by the insistent snow. The forest without snow would look denuded; with snow, it is utterly confident. The weather takes on the logic of natural selection, casts itself as the culmination of seasonal change, having evolved from the weaker seasons into a white-bearded, indomitable Thor, whose main fraud is constancy. Winter will never end—this lie drives unsuspecting homesteaders to despair. Settlers who choose to live outside the towns and cities give up their farms to winter, and only the most trusting believe that someday their land will be returned.
* * *
The Manikin had been renovated not with comfort in mind, at least not the comfort of its inhabitants. It was designed to be dressed up and admired—Henry Craxton Senior named it with perceptive irony. But how cruel the irony seems once winter sets in and the admiring spectators have fled back to their electric lights and oil furnaces. The immediate meaning of the season’s first heavy snowfall is so obvious that no one bothers to say it: There will be no Thanksgiving party. The Stone family wouldn’t dare leave civilization to gather in no-man’s-land for the holiday. Whether or not the highway has been cleared, a person risks his life to travel in a sleigh from Millworth over Firethorn Mountain to the Craxton estate.
For Thanksgiving dinner, Sylva boils a corned beef, on Mrs. Craxton’s order. Usually the old woman has a more refined, if limited, palate, alternating between poached fish and pink roast beef, with turkey and all the trimmings on the holidays. She’s always liked to put on a show for guests and expects the staff to share the feast in the kitchen. But plain boiled beef is hardly something to relish. They grumble their way through this Thanksgiving meal while in the dining room Mrs. Craxton punishes Lilian with silence.
At formal dinners Ellen pours the cider and Billie serves the food. Today, Billie has been replaced by Peg, who lately has been working with such tireless effort that she doesn’t leave the two maids enough to do. But Peg is more eager than skilled. She hasn’t been trained to ease out of the kitchen by slowly pushing the door open with her hip, and the creak and whistle of the swinging door breaks into the quiet. Yet here she is in a black rayon uniform and white apron trying her best to help her mother. What’s come over the girl? Ellen wants to believe, but doesn’t quite, that Peg has taken stock of her situation and understands what she must do to survive. By nature, Ellen is cautious—she needs to know the reason for Peg’s conversion. Even the word “conversion” makes her suspicious. Peg is too used to her freedom to give it up lightly. They should have a talk later, in private. But Ellen has lost the ability to talk intimately with her daughter and prefers to take refuge in the briefest, most insignificant exchanges.
Careful, she thinks, watching Peg set a pewter gravy boat on the sideboard. But it’s a warning to herself, as well. Careful, because banality leads here, to this funereal silence. And when the silence signifies a contest of wills, as it does today, there will be bloodshed. There will be a victim.
In this contest between Mrs. Craxton and Lilian, Ellen can see that the mistress of the house will win. She has gained the upper hand with her unexpected powers of restraint. Never before has she seemed so stolid, so coldly dignified. Ellen has lost count of the number of times her rakish son has laughed at his mother because she can’t control her rages. Hal Craxton always wins their battles with laughter and has maintained for himself the right to come and go from the Manikin as he pleases.
Surely the antagonism between generations is not a problem peculiar to the century, though modern trends of education have only made the rift more pronounced, Ellen believes. Perhaps it is an American problem. America breeds insolence. To come to this country you have to leave behind all comforts and pretend to be naturally brazen. In no time the mask grows onto the face. Americans fancy themselves a tough lot, when in fact they are the first to take refuge in fashion and quack religions. The wealthy are even more vulnerable. Ellen believes that families like the Craxtons suffer greatly for their privileges, and she’s quick to insist that she wouldn’t want to change places.
Who would want to sit where Mrs. Craxton is sitting, in a hand-carved, leather-upholstered wheelchair, with her imperious face looming over the table? Though there’s nothing but a weak hip wrong with her, she won’t last forever, Ellen reminds herself, wondering in a distracted way how she’ll manage after Mrs. Craxton’s death. Her employer would drag her into oblivion, if she could. And Lilian—even now Mrs. Craxton wants to break the girl’s spirit. Nothing would delight the vengeful old woman more than to watch Lilian Stone languish.
“I have eyes in my head, Ellen,” Mrs. Craxton had said the previous night, meaning, I know what that girl is up to. They all know—the staff, the children, Mrs. Craxton herself. Unexplained absences are easily interpreted. Last week, the postal clerk mentioned to Red Vic that a young man, a painter by profession, was lodging at the Mill-worth hotel for the winter, which made it simple for the servants to match Lilian’s daily absences with her purpose. They all have eyes in their heads. Ellen threw away the undergarment that Boggio had found, but who needs evidence when the motive is so obvious? Lilian Stone came to the Manikin to escape her parents’ supervision. Out here, she can meet her lover daily, clandestinely. But for visitors there is no dependable privacy on the Craxton estate, and the servants watch the girl’s secret maneuvers with scornful interest, while Lilian remains oblivious of her audience.
But Lilian isn’t the only one excluded from the circuit of gossip. It dawns on Ellen that her own Peg reveres the Manikin’s guest, that Peg’s attention even now is focused entirely on Lilian Stone. So assiduous is she that after removing Lilian’s dinner plate, she leans over and brushes away the bread crumbs still clinging to the linen tablecloth.
Ellen sees it’s time to move her daughter on, so she sends her into the kitchen for the next course. Dessert is an applesauce cake with a molasses sauce, which Sylva always bakes at holidays. To refuse it would be too obviously rude a gesture, so Mrs. Craxton allows the cake to be served. Lilian eats her piece with steady appreciation, and when she asks for a second helping, Ellen almost softens to the girl. But the affection disappears when Lilian seizes Peg’s wrist, pulls her close, and whispers something in her ear. Peg holds her laughter inside with a cupped hand.
“Peg Griswood!” Mrs. Craxton barks, and they all freeze.
“Yes?”
“Clear my place.”
Just what the girl needs, Ellen thinks—a firm order to remind her that, above all, Mrs. Craxton expects absolute submission from her domestic help. Humiliation brings a flush to Peg’s cheek. This is her first hard lesson—painful but as necessary as the many tumbles a child takes when it is learning to walk.
Peg doesn’t move. Didn’t you hear! Ellen wants to scream. Mrs. Craxton glares. Lilian grins. For a horrifying moment Ellen thinks her daughter means to turn her back on Mrs. Craxton and leave the room. But finally, with averted eyes, she does what she’s been told, thank God, and stacks the dishes on her tray. Ellen moves aside as Peg brushes past. She wants to slap Peg for almost costing her mother her job; but she also wants to kiss her and apologize, because right then she remembers her own humiliation when she was forced to undress Mrs. Craxton’s guest.
What will she say to Peg later, when they are alone in their bedroom? Nothing. Nothing at all. She doesn’t even want to know what Lilian whispered. They will not speak of it, she tells herself, accepting her decision with guilty relief.
* * *
“Will you come to my room tonight? Come late, after they’re all asleep.” A whispered invitation, full of intrigue and promise. Peg can’t believe it—this is more than she had hoped for. Yet she does believe it. Will you come to my room tonight? The intrigue is what separates Lilian and Peg from “them”—the rest of society. The promise is that Lilian Stone will make Peg modern.
Maybe they’ll paint their lips. Maybe they’ll smoke opium and tell dirty stories. They will have to bury their faces in the feather pillows to muffle their hilarity. They’ll drink absinthe and prick their fingers and smear their blood together. They’ll sneak downstairs in the middle of the night and raid the pantry. They’ll eat up Mrs. Craxton’s marshmallows, every last one. Lilian will teach Peg French obscenities, and Peg will teach Lilian to whistle. They’ll go hunting with umbrellas. Peg will take down the stuffed cougar with a single bullet between its bright eyes. Lilian will ride on the back of the giant green turtle. They will smash the glass of the étagère. They will burn holes in the satin drapes with their cigarettes. They will lock Mrs. Craxton’s bedroom door and hide the key. They will run away together to New York City, where they will open a nightclub. They will dance for men and grow rich from the tips, and in a year or two they’ll have saved enough to buy a mansion. They’ll have twenty-seven rooms and as many servants. But they will be kind to their help—their servants will join them at the table, and every dinner will turn into a wild party.
In the hours before Peg creeps down the dark hallway to Lilian’s bedroom, she imagines a thousand different scenes. But the promise is always the same: Lilian will make her modern. And later—after she has sat up with Lilian until dawn, after Peg has returned to the room again the next night and the next, week after week, after she has lost so much sleep that during the day she can hardly speak a full sentence without reversing words, after they’ve learned everything there is to know about each other, Peg will feel very modern indeed.