Decorum

Since women prefer, as a rule, to conceal their womanly weaknesses and disabilities as far as is practicable, it is impossible for individual men to judge of the strength or weakness of individual women. Thus, when a man rises from his seat to give it to a woman, he silently says, in the spirit of true and noble manliness, “I offer you this, madam, in memory of my mother, who suffered that I might live, and of my present or future wife, who is, or is to be, the mother of my children.” Such devotion of the stronger sex to the weaker is beautiful and just. . . . It is the very poetry of life, and tends toward that further development of civilization when all traces of woman’s original degradation shall be lost.

—Decorum, page 17

Francesca had nothing of the Miss Havisham about her, but, untouched and shrouded in dustsheets, the very personal chambers of her parents and brother threatened to upset the balance she had struggled so hard to achieve. The house’s other sixteen rooms had given ample vent for her energies. Lighting had been modernized and the new telephone hung in the back hallway. The kitchen had been refurbished and bathrooms overhauled with porcelain fixtures and black-and-white tile. The servants’ rooms, too, had been given fresh paper and paint, curtains and quilts. Eventually she could avoid them no longer. The time had come to go through the last of her family’s belongings to make the house ready to receive her new husband.

John helped her. Jurgen Lund’s manservant and head of the servants’ hall, he had moved with the Lunds from Denver to New York when Francesca and Oskar were children. He had dispatched the rescuers to the lake and sent the footman Harry for the doctor and the police on that awful day and knew better than anyone the devastation that followed in the wake of the Lunds’ deaths. He had kept the devastated household together, moving mechanically. Now, if she lost her nerve, John would keep her to her task.

Her parents’ honey-and-primrose bedroom felt otherworldly—the carved oak bedstead, the tall oak bureaus, the shaving stand, all hovering specters beneath their dust sheets. The Labradors, Coal and Chalk, obediently followed from room to room, their nails tapping on the parquet between the carpets, their acute noses sniffing at the fading scents beneath the coverings. Determined to vanquish the ghosts, Francesca tore away the sheets and turned out closets, bureaus, and trunks, separating clothing for charity, for the servants, and the few things she would keep. John followed behind her, lifting, moving, cleaning.

“I’ll keep these,” Francesca said as she fingered the beads on her mother’s bodices of black velvet encrusted with jet beads, plain blue-gray velvet, and blue moiré.

“I remember that blue one, miss, for the mayor’s reception.” Then, as if reading her mind, “Any of them would look well on you, if I may say so, miss.”

Three of her father’s flannel suits would become jackets for her, his neckties crazy-quilt pillows. Small personal items she chose for Maggie and Jerry, and for John and Harry and the cook, Mrs. Howell, and for her own maid, May. Her favorite items of her father’s would go to Edmund—a stunning gold pocket watch on a stunning chain, and two heavy gold rings—a signet and a deeply carved crest her father had used as a seal.

“John, I don’t believe I’ve ever told you how much I appreciate everything you’ve done for the family these last four years. These can’t have been easy years for you. I’m very grateful.”

“You’ve said it many times,” he said with a slight smile.

“Have I? It seems to me I never say it enough.”

“It may seem so, miss.”

“It has been important to me that you’ve been here, to see to things. At nearly twenty-three—I was mature, yet immature in many ways. There are so many things I wish I could have done to shield you all, and make things eas . . .”

“You needn’t say, miss. I understand.”

Their progress was more rapid than she expected. Granted, a heap of questionables lay on the bed, but the worst was over. All had been excavated amid quiet reminiscences and even a little laughter.

In the week following, Francesca launched an assault on Oskar’s room. Fastidious in neither furnishings nor clothes, it was her brother’s exercise equipment that brought her low, so evident was vitality of a young life cut short. The rings and a punching bag still hung from the ceiling, the well-used tennis rackets displayed on the wall, the dumbbells, baseball bat, and golf clubs—somehow she would find a place for these. She felt where Oskar’s long fingers had molded the fabric lining of the boxing gloves and batted at the air, then turned her fury on the punching bag. When she stopped, her face was glowing and her arms were sore. I could have used that punching bag at the Jeromes’, she thought. The decision now was whether to leave it in this room or have it removed to her own.

Her father’s study was last. Might Edmund change this room with the cocoon-like oak paneling, its dark blue-papered ceiling strewn with gold-leaf stars and bordered with paper in patterns of gilt crenellation and Greek keys? So many men used their libraries as showplaces of masculine bravado for drinking, cigar smoking, card playing, and deal-making. Jurgen Lund’s library had been for work and study—a private haven for a gentle and private man. Francesca and Oskar had regarded it a privilege to share it, to read aloud to him or to study with him as he worked, times of quiet companionship. The trio would leave Sonia reading or sewing in her little butter-colored sitting room until the family assembled there for evening devotions.

The desk and bookcases had remained locked except for one bank of open shelves that held the well-loved and well-worn books—Shakespeare and Dickens, the great poets, classical mythology, Tolstoy and Caesar’s Gallic Wars, modern machinery, sports, religion, and science in English, Latin, German, French, and Norwegian. The massive desk had been specially designed so that Oskar and Francesca could study there, with specially made chairs and footstools. The desk and all the books would stay. She couldn’t imagine any man objecting to a fine collection of books.

Jurgen’s presence was everywhere as if he wanted to speak to her. She drew up her special chair and remembered how it was. Three gleaming white-blond heads bent over their work on a winter evening. Their father holding some small mechanical curiosity under the lamplight, explaining its intricacies and pointing to tiny parts with his pen, three pairs of gray-blue eyes straining to see. “Move, Oskar, I can’t see; your head’s in the way” and “Move yourself, silly, you’re just a girl,” she could hear them say and Jurgen’s gentle rebuke, “Let Francesca see, too, Oskar. Girls can know things.”

As Francesca unlocked drawer upon drawer she found to her amusement that this reserved, fastidious man was a pack rat. The drawers were crammed with small glass jars, old cigar boxes and pipe tobacco tins, tea tins, and matchboxes, all neatly labeled in Norwegian—broken jewelry pieces, lengths of watch chain, mismatched clasps, thousands of objects from a jeweler’s lens to a glass jar filled with nails, screws, nuts, bolts, and washers.

In the back of the center drawer, she found several packets of well-thumbed letters in Norwegian tied with blue ribbons. Francesca pulled two or three from their envelopes to look at her mother’s writing and the signatures, glimpsing phrases, spilling flower petals and carefully replacing them before tying the letters up again. She found another envelope in this drawer, and in it a folded paper containing two locks of baby-fine hair the color of tow, each tied with a white ribbon, and a longer, coarser, thicker white-blond curl. Across the paper in Jurgen’s neat, precise hand was written, “Sonia, Oskar, and little Frankie.”

The discovery took her breath away and tears, to which she had not yet given way in all this project, suddenly sprang into her eyes. She sat in her father’s chair, holding the locks of hair—her mother’s, her brother’s, and her own—the last physical remnant. Grief exploded inside her in wave after painful wave, purging and cleansing her psyche, until her sides and shoulders ached.

Exhausted and hungry, she rang for tea. She needed sustenance to complete her task—the largest and deepest desk drawer. Francesca turned on the desk lamp in the fading afternoon light, and over tea and sandwiches pulled several folders from the drawer and stacked them at one side of the desk. Page by page, she quickly grasped each account and determined that most of the business contained there had already been dispatched. Notes on subjects of interest, jokes and funny stories, and articles on current affairs, literary criticism, and psychology she threw away without regret and set aside the business files for more careful scrutiny.

As she came to the end of the drawer, a folder bearing the uninformative label “T.—E. F.” emerged. She laid it flat upon the desk and, the second half of her sandwich in hand, began to leaf through it as she had all the others. The first sheet was a page torn from a ledger, titled “J. K. Shillingford, Expenses” and whose first entry was listed as “$20—advance on expenses” and dated March 10, 1886. There followed several other entries, some for fees at a rate of eight dollars and fifty cents a day, others for reimbursements of direct expenses for transport and lodging and indicated a business journey to Baton Rouge and a place called the Felicianas in Louisiana.

Louisiana. A distant alarm bell began to ring in her mind at the mention of the destination of this Shillingford. Few Southerners were among their family acquaintances and none who had called Louisiana home. The engagement of Shillingford may, of course, have had something to do with business at the bank where Jurgen and Jerry were colleagues. Yet she had a sinking feeling. She dawdled over a dish of rice pudding, decided the tea in the pot had gone cold, and rang for more.

She was roused from her reverie by John’s appearance with the tea. As he quietly withdrew, she moved the ledger sheet to the left-hand side of the file. Next were invoices and an envelope filled with receipts, mainly railway ticket stubs and inn receipts and handwritten chits for meals that documented the ledger entries. Buried among the receipts was a business card presenting “J. K. Shillingford, Detectives” and an address on Bleecker Street. Loath to go on, she put down the envelope and began to pace, stalling over paintings and books.

When she could avoid it no longer, she came back to the desk and looked again at the folder. Four items of correspondence followed, each in its envelope, as was her father’s habit, to keep all pertinent dates together—the envelope’s postmark, the date upon the letter itself, and the date received, which he noted on all business letters. These she passed by and took up a short but more formal-looking document, typewritten, headed by the same name and address as on the card, with the addition of the title, “Contract,” and signed by her father and Shillingford. With increasing dread, she picked it up and read it.

Date: March 10, 1886

Client: Mr. J. Lund

East Sixty-third Street
New York, New York

Agreement: Mr. J. K. Shillingford, Detectives, to undertake investigation of Mr. E. F. Tracey at the rate of $8.50 per day, additional expenses to be reimbursed upon presentation of receipt. Client to be invoiced.