It was only looking back on them that made the next three weeks pass quickly. Nurse Lipman, having accepted my presence, conceded one drawer in the wardrobe and part of the bed—so long as I kept my feet clean and off her side, courtesies she did not feel compelled to reciprocate. We woke before dawn to wash, change, and feed Old Man. Lessons with Mrs. French and Violet began at eight in the library. I had an hour of idle time after lunch, then three hours in the sickroom reading to Old Man in the yellow, kerosene lamplight, then back to the library, then dinner, then bed, then do it again. And haunting me all the time weren’t spirits so much as Mama.
Live people can haunt, you see, as well or better than the dead, and in those f irst weeks, I measured everything I saw or did against what Mama might say or think about it—silly, given that Mama was never one to share what she thought or felt. To keep her out of my thoughts, I occupied myself, even at idle times. Which is not to say I was useful. Servants accomplished all labors I used to. Mrs. French, who was never idle, encouraged me to wander the gardens and write about plants that most attracted or disturbed me, to improve my descriptive skills (because heaven forbid if even idle time did not pass in service to self-improvement).
Mostly I read in a crook in the sculpture-gallery wall nearest the conservatory. A lighter fare than Plato—Collins, Cummins, Dickens, Radcliffe—populated the library shelves, and Mrs. French censored nothing. Or I’d sit back and, listening to the strange and constant movements of that house, imagine those marble statues breaking from their pedestals, to resume those scenes of love and terror in which they were frozen.
One statue in particular, nearest the conservatory, enthralled me.
It was of a young woman, a garland in her hair. She was running, but looking back, her mouth open, a cry on her lips. One of her hands, reaching up, became f ive branches with leaves. One foot, planted hard against the earth, became a root; her belly was bark. To be honest, I nearly jumped out of my skin when f irst I saw her. She appeared so lifelike, so fearful, so soft to the touch, it was an honest relief when I summoned the nerve to tap her thigh and found it stone.
One day midweek, as I sat reading beside her, Miss Rose burst through the great double doors of the manor and into the foyer, shedding wrap, hat, and gloves in furious haste. Robert, the butler, trailed after.
“The good women of the Ladies’ Auxiliary,” she said, “have no need for the vote! No need, they say. And that Mrs. Morrison. The women of Reliance do not wish to have the vote thrust upon them. Thrust upon them? Had you any idea just how boorishly arrogant that woman was?” The butler had not. “The presumption! And she would not be allowed past the lobby of the New York Hotel wearing that dress. Except to clean it. Violet!”
She looked about. It was quiet, the servants occupied elsewhere. She spotted me and I felt my guts sink.
“You. Where is Violet?” I rather made a point of avoiding Violet.
I’d also been quite happy to avoid Miss Rose. Since the bath, I’d been a brainless, forgetful, stuttering fool around her. The unaccustomed impulse to please did this to me. I had no practice in flattery or self-aggrandizement, and in a frenzy to say something, anything of value, I blurted half-formed thoughts I then felt foolish about and later drove myself silly wondering what she thought about me, when it was obvious Miss Rose thought little about me.
Hardly an afternoon passed when Miss Rose was not visiting some relief foundation or orphans’ home or entertaining this or that charitable concern. She woke late each day, at nine, and labored for an hour over her toilette with Mrs. Hardrow. Breakfast at ten, Mrs. Nettle told me, was a pastry or a sweet bun and a poached egg in a silver cup. At eleven she called Violet from the library to play piano and practice vocal scales and elocution exercises such as “nine hundred ninety-nine nuns interned in an Indiana nunnery.” While she liked to complain that she was ab-so-lute-ly exiled from society in that river town, she still managed to secure dinner plans three days a week, and visitors, mostly men, always seemed to be coming and going. And of course, there were the soirees, every third Wednesday of the month (the next one in a week) to which Mr. Stockwell so objected.
Every third Wednesday, society arrived in the shape of local musicians, artists, and singers—Reliance had its own small bohemian set, William primary among them. With them came a host of uninvited guests—shopgirls and clerks in their Sunday best—who all became, by the end of such evenings, Rose’s “brilliant, brilliant darlings” and she their “Heavenly Rose,” the name that emblazoned broadsheets when she graced the New York stage. Now and again this core was enlivened by a troupe of acrobats, a famous actor, or a writer en route to or from the West. All came to eat and drink, to perform and luxuriate in Miss Rose’s lavish praise, and to repay praise with the flattery Miss Rose demanded. Sometimes the young men stayed for days, wandering the gardens with note and sketchbooks and pensive expressions, entertaining what could only be divine revelations. Most often they stumbled away the next morning, bound for fame or obscurity or worse. I didn’t know. There was to be some sort of benefit gala that night in town. But since I arrived at the manor, there had only been one soiree, which I’d watched from the second-floor balcony, hoping for glimpses of William (who hadn’t come to visit me, as I’d expected).
Now I could feel Miss Rose’s gaze upon me. “I’m speaking to you,” she said. “What are you doing there?”
“Nothing,” I said, but nonetheless felt guilty. “Only looking.”
Miss Rose considered the statue. I considered Miss Rose. She wore a f itted bodice, a high monkish collar, a white bustled skirt splayed like the tail of a swan. I was aware I was staring. Aware, too, that she expected this of me.
“You like this?”
At f irst I thought she meant her dress, but she was speaking of the statue.
“Yes,” I said. “No. I mean, it’s beautiful. And terrible.”
Violet rushed through the conservatory entrance. Miss Rose ignored her. I was sure I had said something foolish.
“You are right. Quite beautiful. Quite terrible.” She turned as if to make a formal introduction. “This is Daphne. She was a beautiful nymph, desired by Apollo. She ran away and when she appealed to the Gods to save her, the Gods, in their great wisdom, transformed her from a girl into a laurel tree. And left Apollo untouched.”
She raised one arm in much the same pose as the marble orator to her left.
“A beautiful woman’s face is not her own. It is”—with a sweep of her hand she acknowledged her stone and marble audience—“like a statue or a portrait on the wall, destined for public consumption. Women gaze with envy upon another woman’s beauty and f ind the tiniest imperfection the greatest of comforts. And men? Men admire, in a woman’s face, the reflection of their own hopes and fantasies. They f ind themselves under a spell of their own making and call it love. They write poetry and make war, not for the woman, but for her face. And then blame the woman when her face feels nothing in return.”
Miss Rose’s arm remained aloft. Violet began to clap, and Miss Rose, dropping her arm, looked hard at me.
“Well?” She placed a cautious hand to her curls. “I thought it quite good. Mrs. French is not the only wordsmith in this house. Yes, I shall recite it for tonight’s gala. Enough, Violet!”
Violet stopped clapping.
“Mrs. French has been rather impressed by your progress.”
This was news to me.
“But you.” With one f inger, she tapped the side of her nose, then with the same f inger, pointed at me. “You are often underestimated, I think. You will come see me, tomorrow, after your lessons.”
I glanced at Violet, knowing the comment was too close to a compliment for her taste, and after Miss Rose, gathering her skirts, left us there, I braced for wrath.
“It will be lovely, divine, exquisite,” Violet said sweetly.
“Violet!” Miss Rose called.
“Christine Willison is going to sing Faust. I may recite Lear or Macbeth. I have not decided. William will be there. Too bad,” she said—“too bad you are not invited”—and rushed after Miss Rose.
I glared after her. I had mentioned William only a few times in Violet’s presence, but like all royal witches, she was monstrously perceptive.
She also had, to my untrained ear at any rate, a full and lovely singing voice she was not bashful about showing off, and a good eye for drawing. Her trim waist and pale complexion were points of pride, as were her nails, blunt and perfectly clean, and she walked very prettily, like a dancer, on the balls of her feet. While she was not nearly so advanced in her studies as she f irst led me to believe, her memory was remarkable—she needed only to read a poem to know it. What I hated most about her, I think, was that I would have liked to like her, and whether I admitted it or not, I wanted her to like me; I think she knew this, too, because for weeks she’d dangled the possibility before me with the odd kind word, only to yank it away with subtle and calculated meanness. I was used to being feared, sometimes pitied out of hand, but these were cursory reactions to my appearance. No one had ever taken the time and effort to abuse me so artfully.
After three weeks in the manor, I could guess, from the tone of her voice alone, with whom she might be speaking. Her “Miss Rose tone”—deferential, soft, quick to agree, withholding all contrary opinion—must have been a great effort to maintain, because the moment she was beyond Miss Rose’s hearing, she sought some servant to abuse. Really she must have been quite lonely, but I had no pity. Her “Madelyn voice” promised to be a work of expertly understated nastiness.
I could only imagine the voice she might use on William.
The thought worked on me all afternoon and was still festering when I escaped Old Man for the rose garden before dinner. It was late October, a metal taste of snow in the air and the gray sky loud with geese heading south. Upriver, the Missouri spilling into the Mississippi looked like a coffee stain on a piece of brown worsted. Mist hushed from warm eddies near the riverbank, and the oaks and maples were brilliantly dressed.
They reminded me of fancy ladies. Of Violet. Of William.
Of William in a vest and top hat. William with his freshly shaved face and new manners, shiny as a pocket watch. Would Mama be there at the gala as well? Feeling the solid weight of the charm beneath my blouse, I took it off to admire—my habit when alone and thinking—when Alby, pipe in hand, emerged from the topiary. I closed my f ist quick around the charm.
“Dear Lord, if I peel another potato, gonna turn into one! How am I meant to learn a kitchen if all she ever got me doing is peeling this and scrubbing that?” She slumped beside me. “Huh. What’s the matter with you, then? Look like someone shot your dog. Smoke?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“No? And you got nothing in your hand either, huh? What is it?”
“Nothing.”
Alby searched her pocket for a match, found only a broken half. “You take something, huh? I always say Miss Rose got so many treasures, not likely to miss a little, but Cyrus says don’t go pissing on the hand that feeds you.”
Cyrus was the driver and the gardener, a Creole. Alby, whose mama had been Creole, was about the only one who could understand what he said. She flicked the broken match away, nudged closer. “Lemme see.”
“I didn’t take anything from Miss Rose.” But there was no way around showing her. Even in the waning light, the little eight-sided charm sparkled richer than anything I had a right to own. Her shrewd eyes pinched.
“Found it,” I said.
Alby said nothing.
“Someone gave it to me.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“William.”
The name, out of my mouth before I knew it, gave a sharp little thrill.
“William Stark gave it to me,” I said. “But he told me . . . he told me not to tell anyone.” The developing f ib raised my spirits considerably. After all, who’s to say William wouldn’t have given me such a charm, if he’d had one to give? Soon the statement felt more like an embellishment than a lie. And if a lie, then a harmless one, surely.
A different picture had formed in Alby’s head. “Well, I’ll be!”
“What?”
“Well, I just wouldn’t-a guessed a girl—town girl, what I mean—like you would be giving for favors. Lizzette maybe.” We’d caught Lizzette, the cow of a chambermaid who’d slapped me, and the houseboy, Tom, rutting behind the garden shed the day before. “I’m not judging, mind, but you got to be careful.”
“Not like that. It’s not! I’m not giving anything for anything.” And here, I gathered myself. “I. I love him. And”—I was standing now—“he loves me. We’re in love!”
The laughing call of geese pierced the sky above. Alby, wisely, said nothing; she didn’t need to, for those last words rang hollow even to me, and made me tense all night, and defensive when Violet, with more than her usual sweetness, greeted me the next day. She spent all morning giving me self-satisf ied smirks across the table without saying anything about William or the gala, and damned if I’d ask. So I was in no good mood when, at the appointed time, I knocked on Miss Rose’s off ice door.
From the sound of her voice within, Miss Rose was in no good mood either.
I followed Mrs. Hardrow into the room, staring at my feet, and still those mirrors caught pieces of me like blackberry thorns. Miss Rose hunched over the desk, muttering to herself, her gloved hand stained black from the frustrated scratch of her pen. Dozens of discarded pages lay scattered about the carpet. Dozens of pages, and not even foolscap! Miss Rose lifted her head carefully, as if it carried a great weight. Then she balled the page she’d been writing and tossed it in disgust on the floor at my feet.
“Pick it up,” she said. I did. “Read.” I did. “Aloud,” she said.
When I was conceived, the Mississippi flowed backward.
I handed the crumpled page back, and she threw it again into the air and watched it plummet lifeless to the carpet among its fellows.
“There it is, Madelyn. My life. The blank pages of my life!” Her eyes rested upon me as I stood one awkward moment, two, feeling as I often would with Miss Rose, that I was little more than another mirror before which to practice phrases and faces for some anticipated performance. She sat back as much as her dress would allow, then recast her gaze upon me.
“You know Mrs. Smith the dressmaker, do you not? Your sister works for her, I believe? Stand up straight. Look at me.” I did both. Her smile, replicated in so many angles, pinned me in place. “What does Mr. Dryfus think of such”—she thought for a minute—“such industry? A great many men believe themselves more progressive in principle than they are comfortable being in practice.”
I didn’t know what Mr. Dryfus thought.
“And you. You have not been back to visit your sister since arriving, is that right? Mrs. Hardrow tells me you haven’t even asked. I hope there is no rift between you?” I said nothing. “It is often said that family bonds are the hardest to break. This may be true. Maybe.” Her eyes darted to the ceiling, to Old Man. “But once broken, they are very, very hard to mend.
“I want you to do something for me, yes? Look at me. Yes?” Digging into her desk drawer she produced a paper-wrapped box—roughly the size and shape of the cigar box of naked ladies I’d found the year before in William’s desk—and a note. “I want you to take these to Mrs. Smith. Will you do that? Straight to Mrs. Smith. Wait to see that she reads the note, and don’t leave without a reply.” She stared down her long, beautiful nose at me. “Then, my dear, go home to your sister. My father can do without story time this afternoon.”
It’s hard to explain the effect Miss Rose had on me. She was not particularly tall, and her girth was an illusion of cloth, but she wore height and girth to the greatest possible effect, her posture and gestures so grand as to seem part of a script only she had read. It can’t be said that I was afraid of her exactly (though I was afraid of displeasing her) or that I admired or trusted her. Not then. Not yet. I merely succumbed to her dazzling presence as you might to a sudden fever, helplessly, without forethought or will.
Nevertheless, by the time I reached the town green, I had all but recovered myself.
“Go home,” she had said. “To your sister.”
A church bell, then another, chimed two o’clock, and boys and girls spilling from Main Street School scattered like birds in all directions. Fine. Fine, I would deliver Miss Rose’s box and note. But beyond that I wasn’t sure. Because. Because technically I had no sister, did I? No home, either. The thought a dry scouring rush on the back of my throat. Technically, I wouldn’t be disobeying if I didn’t visit.
After all, Mama had not seen f it to visit me.