Is Jacqueline di Fidelio home?” asked the man, who wore a nondescript dark suit. His brown hair was close-clipped and a small scab had formed on his chin where he’d cut himself shaving. A wall-eyed distortion of my face reflected back at me in his dark glasses, which I assumed he’d left on to avoid eye contact and intimidate me in case I made any trouble, which I could have assured him right there on the spot, I would in no way do. Not me.
He and the woman held up wallets displaying official identifications, which I scrutinized. Agent Romano with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Agent Collier with the Internal Revenue Service.
“Please come in. I’ll inquire if Madam is available.”
My paycheck has bounced and now if Madam is about to be arrested and incarcerated, I thought as I ascended the stairs, one heavy, deliberate step at a time—which, for someone as diminutive and happy as I, was a skill achieved only with years and years of assiduous daily practice—what will I do?
In butler school, my lack of “deliberateness,” my inability to proceed with purposeful dignity, was what kept me back a year. I had too much joie de vivre, I was too much a terrier to trudge naturally. It had to be browbeaten out of me. I had to be cowed into submission, thudded on the head with a club like a lumbering, dumb beast. Finally, the overtly stated fact that if I did not get with the program, I would not receive my certificate from Lady Atchley’s School—my absolute last chance if I were to avoid going to work for my parole officer’s uncle at his trash collecting business—terrified me to such an extent I immediately wiped the smile off my face and settled properly into the traces. The thought of spending the rest of my life bouncing through Birmingham’s potholed streets as I clutched the slimy handrails of one of those reeking, smoke-belching garbage trucks wearing filthy coveralls and a wide, thick leather belt cinched tight enough to keep my kidneys from rupturing straight out of my body when I picked up heavy barrels of week-old festering chicken parts and dirty diapers, was so indescribably execrable, it scared the wits right out of me. For the rest of my term at Lady Atchley’s, I became as dull and invisible as the rest of my butler mates, to whom being unnoticeable came naturally.
So if these government people were looking for trouble, they were barking up the wrong tree. Life’s underbelly has never been my cup of tea.
Under their cold, imperturbable eyes, my heart and my feet turned to lead. It was all I could do to drag them up the stairs. It was a natural trudge. Lady Atchley would have been proud.
“I’d sure love to have a butler,” the IRS woman said to her colleague. She was a strawberry-blonde and her voice reminded me of one of Madam’s clients, an especially tiresome woman who lived in Ft. Myers, Florida, and spoke in a flat Minnesota monotone. I suspected she had to have even the most basic jokes explained to her in excruciating detail and then she would still not get them.
It may seem to you I am too judgmental, maybe you even find me bitchy, but the fact of the matter is, I’m a pretty good judge of character and I like to make snap evaluations and then see if I’m right, which I generally am. Besides, in the evenings, when it’s just Madam and me in the library for cocktails, she asks what I think, and my observations usually are good for a laugh or two, if nothing more. Sometimes it’s enough to get us all the way through dinner.
The government people were what I call the new kind of humans. They had the hard, bony, scary look of forty-year-olds who work out everyday and have no body fat. Who take their children from all-day day-care to evening-care at the health club while they work out and count it as quality family-time because they’re in the next room and not wearing their business clothes. These were the kinds of people who frightened me most, because they were jealous, they had attitudes, they hated rich people, and worst of all, they had power. They could destroy our lives without even the smallest backward glance and feel totally justified in whatever actions they took, because they truly believed that somewhere, somehow, we deserved it.
They’d settled in the sunroom on white wicker armchairs with bright yellow chintz cushions. Large windows opened out onto the field, which had turned sharp and clear with no remnants of the early morning’s gentle mist. I poured cups of coffee and set a plate of bite-sized sticky orange rolls on the square glass coffee table among the stacks of thick, glossy art books.
“Thank you, Nigel,” Madam said. Her face had gone pale and in spite of the fact that she was over six feet tall, six-one-and-a-half to be exact, she looked diminutive and defenseless. She could be shockingly meek, a real turn-tail artist—and she had that look about her now. But then again, it could all change like lightning and she could detonate like a hydrogen bomb. Madam was as unstable as Uranium-238, and you never really knew what you were going to get until it was too late. Right now, I could see she was stalled, casting back and forth between attacker and victim, aggressor and defender. I was afraid that if she didn’t pull herself together and just act like a normal, intelligent human being, we’d sink without bubbles into the swampy oblivion of the broke and broken, which I’ve spent my entire life trying to swim clear of.
The Internal Revenue Service was nothing to mess around with—especially when you were in Madam’s perpetually precarious position with them—and everyone in the room knew it.
I pulled the French doors closed with great showy ceremony, just as Madam likes it done when there are visitors we’re not too sure of, or who we know will be impressed by such Hollywood-style folderol—we’re very into the theatrical around this household—and prayed we were on the right track.
Then I tiptoed around the living room sofa and sat quietly in a small chair next to the matching pair of doors I’d left open at the far end. I was quiet as a mouse. What would she do without me?