Having been in domestic service since I was fifteen—over half my lifetime—I could tell tales that would raise an eyebrow or cause a gasp, but I don’t have the urge to prattle about people I have worked for and come to know as well as I do my own family. Most of them, including my current mistress, Mrs. Jefferson Davis, have been kind and considerate. So I say at the outset, in the event this rumination is ever read by anyone else, that I am writing in this diary for one purpose only—so that I might revisit these observations when and if I have acquired the wisdom of advanced age, should I be so lucky.
Mrs. Davis and her daughter Winnie had only been in New York City for about three years when I started to work for them, but their crisp way of speaking sounded as if they’d never lived anywhere else. When I felt at ease enough with Winnie to mention that fact, she explained that her mother had grown up in Mississippi, attended a school in Pennsylvania, and also had lived in Washington, D.C. And she herself had spent a good part of her life outside the South. She said, “Neither of us is of a regional mind-set, although there are those who expect us to be.” I didn’t catch the drift then of what she meant, but the words have stayed with me. One of the things I admire most about Winnie Davis is that she doesn’t talk down to me. I call her Miss, but in my thoughts, I call her Winnie, the name she goes by.
Having just said Winnie’s mother is kind and considerate, I will add that Mrs. Davis is a mixture of haughty and down-to-earth. Some of the time, it’s as if she’s reminding herself and me that we have to observe the difference in our stations. When Winnie is away on a trip or in one of her moods where she won’t talk to her mother, or as she has been these past weeks, really low-sick, Mrs. Davis gets all friendly with me.
I was not supposed to be here. She had explained that she couldn’t afford to bring me on vacation with them and had lined up summer employment for me in the city. Then as I was about to end that service and go to Boston to see my family, Mrs. Davis called for me to come to Narragansett Pier to help with her ailing daughter. She could have engaged hotel maids who would like to pick up extra wages during their off time, but she wanted me because I am used to the “routine.” I expected Winnie to be in one of her moods where she takes to her room and doesn’t leave it for days. At such times, she’s not that much of a care; mainly, she wants to be left alone. This time, though, I could see right off it was more than one of her dark spells. Soon after I arrived, I overheard Mrs. Davis tell Mrs. Pulitzer that Winnie was sicker than anybody she’d ever seen not to be dying.
Mrs. Pulitzer got a city doctor involved that same day, but even he has not been able to turn things around. Mrs. Davis sent me to the village pharmacy yesterday for Dulcet’s Tonic, which was the only thing she could think of that hadn’t been tried on Winnie. It’s hard on her to watch her daughter fade in and out, as though reality is a room with doors, so Mrs. Davis has had me doing most of the watching. At first, I was uneasy sitting by the bedside with Winnie lying there like she’d already passed on or staring toward the ceiling as though she saw things there that weren’t. Winnie usually has a notebook handy, which she writes in when she feels like propping up. Not when her mother’s around, though. When she hears a tap on the door, she stashes the binder under the bedcovers. She has instructed me to place it beneath her bed, should she doze off with it in her hands.
After I had coaxed some coddled whites-of-egg and soggy toast down her this morning, she rallied a bit and stared at me like she’d never seen me before. Then with a smile of surprise, she said, “You’re his first wife, aren’t you?”
That gave me a turn. “Oh, Miss, you know I’m not any kind of wife.” I could have added, “Like you, I did not marry when I had the chance.” Also like her, I’m upwards of my thirtieth birthday, and while I don’t expect my status to change, if she could just stay healthy for awhile, hers might. In the city, men come to call for Miss Winnie Davis, to take her to dinner and the theatre, or to the opera, or a reception. When she puts her mind to it, she can get herself up quite splendidly and even hold her own with Mrs. Pulitzer. Right now, though, she looks pitiful, like she’s in a trance. Her eyelids are half-closed—in the white space that’s visible, the pupils dart around like bugs—and her breathing is shallow. That crinkly hair going every which way around her face and shoulders makes her look as bewitched as she sounds. (After writing that sentence, I have crossed myself and said a silent prayer.)
A few days ago, she rallied considerably. Winnie is more reserved than her mother, but she’s not shy. She told me once she and I were both listeners by nature. “Margaret, I believe you like to form your own opinions,” she said. “And so do I. Do you sometimes think you can see both sides of an argument?”
“Both, or neither. I tend not to take a side in a controversy. I guess I’m what you would call a fence-sitter.”
“That can be the same as seeing both sides,” she said. “It’s easier to observe life than to participate in it.”
Yet she had told me of times when she spoke out so forcefully on subjects she didn’t know about firsthand—such as the War that was mostly fought in the South—that she even surprised herself. After such a moment, she added, “I am not comfortable in a group where everyone thinks alike.”
“But isn’t that the way it is down South?” I asked.
“Only on certain subjects.” She frowned, then sighed. “Such as, the way things used to be, before the War.”
Since she’s not especially talkative by nature, I was surprised when she started to ramble that morning. It might have been the fever that got her going. First thing she said was, “I didn’t know until I was almost grown that my father had been married to someone before my mother.” She stared at me. “You bear a strong resemblance to the portrait of the first wife. Did you know her?”
“No, I don’t believe I ever met her. Where is this portrait, Miss?”
“I assume it’s still at our house near Biloxi, in Mississippi.”
Mrs. Davis once told me that was the most aggravating place she could think of—hot as Hades, with mosquitoes almost the size of hummingbirds—and she didn’t miss it one bit.
Winnie added, as if I had asked the identity of that first wife, “Her name was Sarah Knox Taylor. Knox, as he called her, died of malaria three months after they were married. Jeff had fallen ill too, but he survived. Knox was buried in a graveyard on his sister’s plantation in Louisiana, where he had taken her to meet some of his family.” She paused to cough and sip from the glass of water I handed her. “When my mother visited those same relatives on her honeymoon, she took flowers to the first wife’s grave. My sister said that years after Knox died, our father ran across a pair of her slippers in a trunk and went berserk with grief.”
“That’s a drawback of marriage,” I said. “Most always one of the pair dies before the other.”
“Well put. Now, please remind me who you are?”
“Margaret Connelly.”
“Of course. I must have mislaid your name.” She wasn’t teasing me; she appeared too dazed to be making a joke. She shook her head as if to clear it. “Days and nights and weeks have run together. Do you know when I returned from Atlanta?”
“I wasn’t here then, but I believe it’s been about six weeks.”
“That long! Have I been out?”
I was trying to frame an answer that wouldn’t alarm her. “Well, I wouldn’t say you were really out of your head …”
She laughed for the first time since I’ve been here. “I meant outside this hotel.”
“No, Miss; I don’t believe you’ve left these rooms.”
“Then let’s take a stroll.” She sat up and swung her long legs over the side of the bed and stood up.
“Your mother—”
“She’s not here, is she?”
“No, ma’am.”
She pushed her hair back with an angry gesture. “Good. It’s not up to her anyway.”
She walked fairly steadily to the armoire, flung the doors open, took a shirtwaist dress off the rack with one hand and started to pull her chemise over her head with the other. She can be fit to faint one minute and have a burst of energy the next.
Winnie Davis was standing there naked as the day she was born, unfastening the buttons on the dress.
“I’ll do that for you, Miss. But first, let’s get you some undergarments,” I said.
“No petticoats or stockings. In the summertime, the less clothes the better.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her summer is gone and we’re well into September. After I got her into the clothes, she let me brush her hair and coil it into a loose bun. She did not look at her reflection in the glass. I held out a hand mirror to her, and she shook her head. “No, thank you. It would be like seeing my own corpse,” she said.
“Miss, if I may say so, you look amazingly well.” That was not flattery. She still has a fine shape, curves in the right places, even though she regurgitates most of what little nourishment she takes in. At that moment, her complexion had a becoming glow and her large eyes that remind me of silver coins were so luminous I wondered if the fever had stoked some fire inside her. Winnie was eager to be off, but I took time to write a note, informing Mrs. Davis that we were taking a bit of air, and left it on the console in the foyer.
We had just got off the lift in the lobby when I spotted that lady holding forth in a group near the front entrance. “Shouldn’t we speak to your mother?”
“No. We’ll slip through a side door.”
Outside, she took several deep breaths and stared longingly toward the water. Then her gaze lit on the bicycle stand. “Margaret, can you ride a wheel?”
“Yes, Miss.”
“Excellent.” She took a small snap purse from a pocket, extracted some coins, and handed them to me. “That should get us a pair of bicycles.” I was glad she didn’t specify a two-seater, as I’d had no experience with that kind of contraption.
We rode at a sedate speed, side by side on the boardwalk beside the seawall, not briskly, as I suspect she would have preferred had she been feeling up to par. The breeze was tender on my face, and I thought the tingling, salt-misted air must be good for her.
Although her mother gives me my orders, Winnie is the one I am a wee bit leery of, even when she’s well. At times, she seems distracted and acts as if she’s unaware of my presence, but not in a snobbish way. At the apartment in the city, she spends hours at a time writing at her desk, and two or three times a week she goes to the newspaper office. She and her mother are not like other ladies of the leisure society. These two work for wages. The older likes for the younger to dress well, but her own clothes are much-mended. When I first spoke with her, I figured the famous Mrs. Jefferson Davis would haggle about salary, but I also got the impression, during that interview, that she was a fair-minded person. Some from the South who’ve come North to live will have only colored servants, but Mrs. Davis explained, when I came to apply for the position, that she likes to hire a good Irish Catholic girl. Even though she herself is a lifelong Episcopalian, she’s a great admirer of the mother-church religion and doesn’t mind if some of it rubs off on her. I wanted to suggest she start coming to Catholic services and get it firsthand, but of course, I said no such thing.
There were no people about when Winnie and I ventured outside the hotel; most of the summer residents had departed by the end of August. After a few minutes of riding and listening to the rattles and squeaks of chains and pedals, I pretended I was winded and needed a rest. When we had plopped the bicycles down on the ground and ourselves on an iron bench beneath a tree, she asked me if I had a serious beau.
“Not at present, ma’am. The only man who ever proposed to me has gone his own way, and although it has been five years since we left off keeping company, I still think about him sometimes.”
“I know that feeling.” She hugged herself then, not as if she was cold, but as though she was pretending her arms were someone else’s.
“Are you sorry, Miss, that you didn’t marry the man you were engaged to?” I would not have been more surprised if worms had come out of my mouth. I could scarcely believe my nerve.
Neither the impertinence nor the question seemed to faze her. Looking out at the sea as though she saw something there, she said, “I don’t argue with fate. Marriage between us was not in the stars.” Then she turned toward me and added brightly, “Dear Margaret, if you had been meant to marry that fellow, you would have; so don’t make yourself miserable about it.”
I’ve never had a minute of misery over ending things with Will Jackson, who had more love for drink than for me. My motive in telling Winnie about him was to get her talking about her own broken engagement, which I was curious about because a few days before, when we got together in the village on our afternoon off, Mrs. Pulitzer’s maid had told me what she claimed was the real story: The ghost of Winnie’s father, the Rebel president Jefferson Davis, had appeared to Mrs. Davis and ordered her to cancel the wedding plans, as he could not bear the thought of his daughter marrying a Yankee. Mrs. Davis did not dare disobey her husband, especially since he was speaking from the other side, so she did as he instructed. If I was going to find out anything more on the subject, this was the time, so I took a deep breath and asked boldly, “Has the man you were engaged to wed someone else?”
The question seemed to surprise Winnie, as if she’d not even considered that possibility. After a moment, she said, “If he had married, or become engaged, or was seeing someone seriously, I would know.”
“Yes, there are some people who will always see to it that we hear things we don’t necessarily want to,” I said.
She said, “I meant, I would know in my heart if he had fallen in love with someone else.”
I wanted to say, “Then you must still be in love with him,” but the closest I got to it was, “It seems a shame you didn’t get together then.”
“Yes, it does, doesn’t it? Yet at the time it seemed impossible.” She sighed and frowned. “He had financial problems that could not be resolved in the foreseeable future.” She sounded as if she was quoting something she’d read, or memorized. After a few seconds, she continued. “I hoped to earn money through my writing, but I wasn’t sure I could, and I didn’t want him and his family to regard me as a liability. Also, I won’t deny it, I was not happy at the prospect of living with his widowed mother and three sisters.”
I didn’t know it happened in the upper registers of society— that a new wife would have to move in with other members of the man’s family. “Well, Miss, maybe we are both better off,” I said.
She was staring at the water again, as if she might wade into it and keep going until she disappeared beneath that ink-colored surface. The stone building with the life-saving station was not far away, but I was relieved when she accepted my suggestion that we start back, and that we push the bicycles, instead of pedaling.
When we reached the suite, Mrs. Davis had not returned. I retrieved the note I’d left for her and put it in my pocket. Winnie said, “Thank you for accompanying me, Margaret. Please don’t mention the outing to my mother.”
“I won’t, ma’am.” After I helped her change back into the chemise, she lay on the bed with her hands by her sides and closed her eyes. Within seconds, she looked so out of this world I implored her silently to hold on and not give up.
One of the doctors was here most of the morning, pacing by the windows and tapping a wooden tongue depressor against his palm. With each thud of that little paddle, he would wince as though it hurt. Mrs. Davis rolled her eyes toward me, as if to say, “That fool.” After he left, she went to her own room to rest, so there were just the two of us in this one, the sick girl and me. All of a sudden, the thick fog outside the windows lifted, and sunlight streamed in like good tidings. In these recent sad days, I had learned to be with Winnie in the silence, and I had the feeling she appreciated my company, even when she appeared not to be conscious. Mrs. Davis’s older daughter, who lives in Colorado, has been wanting to come, but Mrs. Davis has put her off, telling her to wait until Winnie feels more herself and they can have sisterly companionship.
Mrs. Pulitzer and her retinue have left Narragansett Pier, but she has stayed in close touch. Mrs. Davis stood by Winnie’s bed this morning and read aloud the latest wire from that lady: “I am coming back, angel; arrive tomorrow. All my love, Kate.” Then she said brightly, “And won’t we be delighted to see her. If anyone can pull you out of the doldrums, it would be Kate.”
Winnie gave no sign that she took in a word of that.
The quiet around here is almost scary. All the other boarders and most of the staff have gone. The owners of the hotel have allowed us to stay on after the summer season ended because Winnie is too sick to be moved. A priest from the Episcopal church in the village has been stopping by each afternoon to read to her from a prayer book. Yesterday, when he tried to give her Holy Communion, he could not get her to open her mouth enough for the wafer, and the wine dribbled down her chin.
It was also yesterday that something very peculiar happened, either to me or to her, or to both of us. I was sitting right there, on the chair a few feet from the corner of the bed, watching Winnie intently, as I was supposed to, when a silver cloud rose from her body and moved to the ceiling. At the same time, I heard her breathing stop with a wispy sigh, as if she knew what was happening and didn’t mind. “Oh, good-bye, dear Miss,” I whispered. “You must be in heaven now, or on your way there.”
She opened her eyes and said, her voice clear as a bell, “No, I’m not. I’m thirsty. May I have some water?” She seemed to be pretty alert that afternoon. Her mother had come in to sit with Winnie; I was in the kitchen when a basket of fruit was delivered to the apartment. I took the basket in to them, and Mrs. Davis read the foreign-sounding name on the card to Winnie, with the greeting: “My dearest Winnie, please send for me the moment you feel like having company.” Mrs. Davis said, “I told you he really liked you. You should write to him, and show some interest.”
Winnie pulled the sheet over her head.
This morning, Winnie’s eyes seemed brighter, and she seemed less listless. The local doctor came by and was pleased to find her temperature was down to almost normal. “We’re making progress,” he said jovially to Mrs. Davis as he left to have coffee with Mr. and Mrs. Burns. Mrs. Davis had hardly slept the night before, and needed to be alone, so she retreated to her room. “I declare, Margaret,” she said, just before she went through the doorway, “I don’t believe I’ve ever known anyone as quiet as you. I think you must emanate a peacefulness that Winnie admires, and that’s why she likes having you in here with her.”
As Winnie began to stir around, I went to get her a small dish of cut-up fruit I’d prepared from the basket sent by the man Mrs. Davis wanted her to show some interest in. I had begun to think the way that lady talked: “Soon, we’ll be able to take our girl back to New York. Then she’ll perk up, because she’ll be anxious to get back to her writing. She’ll also want to check with the publisher about her novel, go to the newspaper office, and see some friends again. …” As I set the dish on the dresser, the mirror’s reflection was eerie. The person on the bed, who seemed to be asleep, was more than asleep. There was not the slightest evidence of movement—no flutter of an eyelid, no breath parting her lips, no twitch of a finger. She was as still as a wax figure. She looked like pictures I’d seen of enshrined saints in European cathedrals. It was straight-up twelve o’clock noon. The clock on the bedside table marked that fact with a weak chime, like a little bird singing its last notes. And this time, I knew my mind was not playing a trick. I told myself: This has nothing to do with me.
And yet it did. I reacted as if someone were giving me instructions: touched her lips with my rosary, made the sign of the cross on her forehead, adjusted her gown so her breasts were not exposed, straightened and folded the counterpane below her crossed hands. Then I sat beside her on that bed, cradled her beautiful head in my arms, and silently, wordlessly, made my farewells to Winnie Davis. As soon as I was able to control the flow of my tears—I had not let myself sob audibly—I felt beneath the bed ruffle until my hand grasped the notebook I’d seen her put there the week before. I took it to the alcove where I slept and put it with my things in a cupboard. Then I did what I had dreaded the most, and had known ever since I came to Narragansett Pier that it would fall to me to do; I went to Mrs. Davis’s room to give her this dreaded news.
I rapped softly on the door. As soon as she opened it—I had not yet said a word—the woman let out a scream that would do credit to a banshee, then put her back against the wall and slid slowly down it. The bulk of her made a loud thump, like a sack of meal hitting the floor. I hurried to the foyer and pulled the bell cord. A man on the hotel staff responded promptly, but seeing the situation, decided to wait outside the door for Mr. Burns to arrive and take charge.
Mrs. Davis was still sitting on the floor with a stunned look on her face as I slipped away to the alcove, to kneel by my daybed and say a proper prayer for the soul of Varina Anne Davis, whom the world knows as Winnie, the Daughter of the Confederacy.