You are making good progress on this bowl. Halfway done! Campbell’s makes a very good soup, don’t you think? Though I wrote to the Campbell twins once and they didn’t write back. Well, I guess they’re just kids and can’t be held accountable.
Anyhow, as I was saying, I was used to Edward leaving me, back when we were tots. Oh, we might have spent all day playing hide-and-seek in the Lambs’ garden, or throwing sticks in the Lambs’ goldfish pond, or showing each other our tummies in the stables, but evening always put an end to it. Off Edward would go, to change into his velvet short pants and floppy bow, and then to his dinner in the mahogany-paneled dining room, served by my parents. Off I went, up to the attic, where I would eat my bread and butter alone and then put myself to bed. There, in my cot, as my parents worked downstairs, I would gaze up at the stars out my little round window and imagine what Edward was doing. Was he building a ship in a bottle in the library with his father? Being bathed by his mother in his claw-foot tub? Sleeping on a satin pillow in his four-poster bed?
Still, it cut me deep when he was sent off to boarding school, then to college in the East, and then on long tours of England and Europe. When he came home on holidays during those years, he’d be friendly to me, inquiring about my activities, though I had a feeling that he wasn’t really listening for my answer. His father had always treated me in the same vaguely pleasant way when I crossed his path, asking jovial questions and then not waiting for a reply. I had little experience with his mother. Mother warned me to stay out of her sight.
Dad would make a joke of it when she did. “Watch out for Mrs. Lamb!” He’d gnash his teeth. “She’ll eat you up!”
Mother’s face would go sour. “Shut up, Bill.”
How old was I when Edward returned from the last European tour? Twenty-seven? I had given up on marrying by then. I had been working full-time for the Lambs since I left eighth grade, doing their laundry, and you don’t meet husbands while running sheets through a mangle in the basement.
It was on a warm sunny day in late June, a Sunday afternoon, the only day of the week that my parents, as the butler and housekeeper, had a half day off. I was alone in the Lambs’ garden, enjoying the scent of the blooming roses as I pushed a needle with chapped fingers through stretched gauze, when a gentleman wearing a straw boater stepped inside the gate.
I could only give him a quick glance, being in the middle of a stitch. I applied the same care to my needlework that I gave to the laundry and later to my photo tinting. “The Lambs are at the seashore.”
“How have you been, Dode?”
I pricked myself. “Dorothy” had been too much for Edward to pronounce as a little child, when he would come to stand at the base of the service stairs. His shout of “Dode!” would send me flying down three flights.
How had I not recognized at first sight his golden skin, the color of the inside of a plum? As children, we would hold our arms next to the other’s and compare their color: they were a surprisingly similar ivory-gold in winter but his got an enviable richer gold in the summer. How I loved his clear green eyes shaped just like a cat’s—“leonine” is the actual word for them. And that golden hair that grew backward from its platinum roots in the whorl on his hairline, his mane magnificent on his large head. I often wondered how anyone could be so beautiful.
“Looks like life has treated you well,” he said.
My heart felt too big for my chest. “Not particularly.”
He laughed. “Just as blunt as ever. How refreshing you are.”
I didn’t know what to say about that.
“How is it that you aren’t married,” he asked, “as pretty as you are?”
“I’m not that pretty.”
“And there you are mistaken.” He took my hand and kissed the back of it. I could still feel the pressure of his lips as he strolled away.
The next day, he stopped me on the back stairs and asked me to accompany him to the art museum.
How would it look for the heir to a Cincinnati beer fortune to be strolling the galleries of a museum with his housekeeper’s daughter? “We can’t do that.”
“Whyever not?”
I noticed that he had an English accent since coming home from his tour.
“I’m—”
“—beautiful,” he said. When I frowned at his flattery, he added, “Just a little beautiful, if that makes you feel better.” He winked. “And only in your heart.”
Oh, I loved the art museum. I have always admired the smart use of color. I could have strolled through those echoing rooms forever, grit crunching on the marble floor under my Sunday-best shoes. But it is hard to focus on the Old Masters when a young man has his hand on the small of your back.