Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  She walked over to a large window and peered outside at the Hudson River. It looked cold and fierce, and loneliness trickled down inside her. After a few minutes, she went upstairs to her room and closed the door.

  Outside, evening deepened into night and Cornelia’s room darkened. She sat in her armchair, thumbing through a book and enjoying the relative quiet of her space. Like the music room downstairs, Cornelia’s bedroom had tall bookshelves in it, most of which were crammed with books. Toys and stuffed animals that she had outgrown lined the hard-to-reach top shelves.

  Cornelia’s favorite shelf contained her precious dictionaries. Some of them were leather-bound; others were clad in tattered, faded canvas covers. She even had a thesaurus that had been owned by a famous writer who’d lived in Cuba and Spain and France, and had written about wars and bullfighting. It had been a present from Lucy, who was amused by her daughter’s precocious interest in words.

  While Cornelia loved reading books, her interest in dictionaries and complicated words had more to do with warding off people who tried to strike up lengthy conversations with her. Her life was simply too full of grown-ups who always looked over her shoulder or pestered her or peppered her with annoying questions about her family. Long, confusing words were often her only defense against the artillery of adults who plagued her.

  The primary offender was Madame Desjardins, who, as it has been noted, still stuck to the simpler expressions of English as though she were clinging to the wall of an ice-skating rink. Whenever Madame Desjardins became too pesky or intrusive, Cornelia simply filled her sentences with longer and longer and increasingly inscrutable words. Finally, Madame Desjardins would bluster her speech to a halt and stare at Cornelia in a frustrated sort of way with her hands on her hips. “Mon Dieu! You are too much,” she would say, and stomp down the hallway.

  This afternoon, Cornelia’s book of choice was The Superior Person’s Book of Words. The inside flap of the book advertised the following: “Put an end to fopdoodly speech; amaze your friends, baffle your enemies, write interoffice memos to end all discussion!” Cornelia had neither friends nor enemies, and she did not even know what an interoffice memo was, but the idea of ending all discussion sounded good to her.

  She soon had a chance to see if the book worked. She heard the telltale thump, thump, thump of Madame Desjardins’s footsteps as she heaved up the stairs and knocked on Cornelia’s door.

  “Cornelia Street! May I please enter?” wheezed Madame Desjardins. She was quite portly, and the trip up the stairs always drained her. Without waiting for Cornelia’s answer, she pushed the door open.

  “Why are you reading with no light on?” she exclaimed as she clumped into the room. She descended upon an unsuspecting desk lamp and clicked it on. “You will ruin your eyes. And then you will have to wear big glasses and then none of the boys will want to kiss you when you grow up!” she practically shouted.

  Cornelia just sat there, dumbfounded by this grander-than-usual entrance. “Madame Desjardins, I’m trying to read,” she said.

  “What is that little book?” Madame Desjardins swooped in and nudged the book backward so she could see the title. “Eeeee! Another book of words,” she cried in despair, knowing a foe when she saw one. “Why do you not read books like the other girls want to read? Like, let me think—like Harriet ze Spy or any of those Harry Potter books?”

  Cornelia glanced down at Chapter 4 of the book and found help right away. “Madame Desjardins, could you end this nugatory line of questioning and tell me what you want?” she asked, just warming up. “Nugatory” reportedly meant “pointless” or “trifling.”

  Her arrow met its target. “Comment?” squawked Madame Desjardins. “I want only to know what you would like to eat this evening. And what did you just say to me, young lady?” she added suspiciously.

  Cornelia casually flipped to Chapter 4 and found a treasure trove of relevant words. “Please don’t be a quidnunc, Madame Desjardins,” she replied. “Must this conversation be quotidian? I find that quisquous.”

  She said this last word without even knowing if she pronounced it correctly. The word “quidnunc” meant “one who is forever anxious to know about everything that is going on.” “Quotidian” meant “occurring every day,” while “quisquous” meant “puzzling.”

  “Whatever you provide for sustenance will suffice,” she finished. This meant that Madame Desjardins could cook anything she wanted. Cornelia sat back to watch the reaction to her speech unfold.

  “Eeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee!!!” Madame Desjardins shrieked. “Every day you do this! I will be like a crazy woman when I leave this house someday. Mon Dieu!”

  “You are being a virago, Madame Desjardins!” Cornelia pressed on, growing a little excited that things were going so well. “Virago” meant “a fierce, bad-tempered woman,” according to Chapter 6.

  “Fine! I will make spaghetti with meat, and you will just have to be happy with it.” She flounced out of the room and closed the door.

  A little later, once the storm clouds had cleared and the smell of tomato sauce wafted up the stairs, Madame Desjardins shouted from the kitchen, “Mademoiselle Dictionnaire! Come down the stairs. We will open the box.” Cornelia threw her new favorite book on her bed and ran down the stairs.

  Ingrid grouchily lugged the box into the living room. It looked like it might have suffered a few petulant kicks in the elevator on the way up. She dropped the box with an “Ouff!” and turned to Madame Desjardins, who stood there with a pair of scissors, waiting to cut the package open.

  “Maid,” Ingrid grunted, pointing to her own chest.

  “I’m a maid, not a manual laborer. That might mean the same thing in France, Madame Overseer, but in America, that’s two different categories.” She gathered her coat and bag. “See you on Saturday. If my back isn’t broken,” she muttered, looking darkly at the box.

  Madame Desjardins dismissed her with a wave of her hand and zealously cut the tape and strings off the box. “This time, there will be a present for you, I can feel it,” she said to Cornelia, sawing and snipping away.

  A surge of hope swelled up in Cornelia, followed immediately by a thump of doubt. Did Lucy really think about her daughter while she was away? Did she even think about Cornelia while she was here, for that matter? Cornelia looked at the package with a new urgency, as if its opening might answer these questions. Her stomach tightened.

  The box finally groaned and gave in, and Madame Desjardins tore open the top. She started pulling things out of it. “Let me see—some clothes…and, umm…programs from her concert! You can see where your mother is playing. And…umm…music books—I think she has played Chopin this time.”

  Madame Desjardins’s stacks of clothes, books, and paper next to the box grew higher and higher.

  “Aha!” she exclaimed, fishing a shoe box out of the bottom of the parcel. “I bet this is a little present for Mademoiselle Dictionnaire,” she said, nodding at Cornelia.

  “You open it,” Cornelia said dubiously.

  Madame Desjardins cut off some Scotch tape on the sides of the shoe box and took the top off.

  “Oh,” she said quietly, and her face changed. She looked up at Cornelia. “Not this time after all. Quel dommage. What a pity. Maybe she is bringing the present when she comes home this weekend.”

  She reached into the shoe box and pulled out a pair of glamorous satin evening shoes with very tall heels. The strap on one of them was broken. Lucy had scrawled some words on the lid of the shoe box: “Please have fixed ASAP!”

  Cornelia tried to swallow back her misery, determined not to cry in front of the housekeeper, but Madame Desjardins cooed and petted her sympathetically anyway. That evening, she made Cornelia a chocolate tart to eat while she did her homework.

  The dejection still sat on Cornelia’s chest like a rock when she was tucked into bed that night. She lay in the dark of her room, listening to the faint sounds of Madame Desjardins laughing at something on the telev
ision in her room down the hall, and then she began to cry. It had been a bad day and tomorrow would be more of the same. She’d wake up, go to school, sit alone at lunch, and now she would have to avoid even looking in Lauren Brannigan’s direction on top of everything else. And then, after school, Cornelia would walk home slowly and spend the afternoon and evening enduring the excessive fussing of Madame Desjardins. Even when her mother came home again this weekend, it would only be a matter of days or weeks before Lucy would leave yet again for another concert in another city or country.

  The cold January wind squeezed in around the edges of the bedroom window, slightly blowing the shades. Cornelia made a bet with herself that no other girl in her class felt as lonely as she did.

  Chapter Two

  Lucy

  A week passed, and as Cornelia had predicted, nothing really changed and nothing extraordinary happened. She learned some mildly interesting things at school. In history class, she read about an explorer named Magellan who seemed to travel around the world almost as much as Lucy did. In science class, she learned about the solar system and how all of the planets revolved around the sun. Again, this reminded Cornelia of her mother.

  After school each day, she walked home alone, and once at home, she fended off Madame Desjardins with her arsenal of words. Her favorite new word for the housekeeper was “hamadryad,” which meant “Abyssinian baboon.” From her Superior Person’s Book of Words, she also learned some new words she could direct at Walter if he went overboard with the teasing, such as “fopdoodle” (“a fool”), “galoot” (“a clumsy oaf”), or “pilgarlic” (“a poor bald-headed man who presents a sorry spectacle”).

  Lucy returned home from her trip, and with her came a caravan of luggage. She kissed Cornelia distractedly, and then swept into the study and talked on the phone for hours. Apparently her concert had not gone well, and she was in a sour mood for days. She spent hours smoking sullenly in the music room, missing meals and tinkering with new music pieces. Everyone—even Ingrid—tiptoed around the apartment so Lucy would not be disturbed.

  Late Monday afternoon, Lucy called Cornelia into the music room. Cornelia apprehensively walked into her mother’s sanctuary.

  Lucy sat at the keyboard of the piano, smoking. The light from outside shone on her harshly beautiful features. She kept her shoulder-length jet-black hair cut in a line so straight that it could have been used as a ruler. Long, muscular arms connected her famously wide hands and shoulders. Even though she was a petite woman, she always tilted her strong chin upward, giving her the appearance of an empress gazing down on her subject. People from magazines and newspapers always wanted to shoot pictures of Lucy like that, sitting regally at her Bête Noire.

  “Come in, darling. Sit next to me for a minute,” Lucy said, patting the seat of the bench in front of the piano. It was the only place to sit in the room besides the floor. Cornelia moved some music sheets to the floor and dutifully sat down next to her mother.

  “Did you miss me while I was in Russia?” Lucy asked, smoothing down Cornelia’s hair somewhat awkwardly.

  “Yes,” said Cornelia uneasily, feeling as dull and sedentary as a turnip compared to her mother.

  “Well, I had a dreadful time,” Lucy replied, smoothing her own hair down now. “My concert was ghastly, and I had the longest trip home ever. They lost my luggage not once, but twice. I need a rest. I might go to the beach house for a few days and relax.”

  Cornelia nodded silently and thumbed one of the keys on the keyboard in front of her. She already knew what her mother was going to say next. As if on cue, Lucy got up and closed the doors to the music room.

  “Cornelia,” she began in a low voice. “I know that Madame Desjardins can be bothersome sometimes, and that you like your privacy. But she’s been very upset about her relationship with you lately.” She suppressed a little sideways smile. “You’re not casting spells on her with your long words, are you?”

  “She never leaves me alone,” Cornelia mumbled, not daring to look at Lucy. “It’s the only way to make her go away.”

  “Well, I’m sure that she just wants to help,” Lucy said, sitting down next to Cornelia again. “We worry about you getting lonely, that’s all. Why don’t you make friends with some of the other girls at school?”

  Cornelia didn’t even bother to address Lucy’s boring question. “Can I come to the beach house with you?” she asked instead, already knowing the answer.

  “No, darling. You have to go to school,” Lucy said. There was a moment of silence. “Cornelia, I’ve been thinking. Would you like to take piano lessons?”

  “No,” Cornelia answered, her voice quavering a bit. It was not the first time they’d had this discussion.

  “Why not?” Lucy said with genuine interest. “You know that I would never pressure you, but I’m always curious why you’re not interested. I’m sure you’d be superb. You certainly have the genes for it.”

  Cornelia frowned. This conversation was not going well. She knew why she didn’t want to take lessons: it would just trap her in her mother’s long shadow even more. She much preferred books to music, because words made up her private world, and hers alone. Her mastery of words was the only thing that made her Cornelia S. Englehart, and not just Lucy Englehart’s Daughter. But of course, she couldn’t say this to her mother.

  “I just don’t want to,” she said stubbornly. She tried to change the subject. “Can I come with you on one of your concert trips soon?”

  “When you’re older,” her mother replied, and lit another cigarette. She looked at Cornelia for a minute and deliberated. “All right. Now, run out so I can work on this Rachmaninoff piece. It’s driving me insane. My hands need to be about an inch wider than they already are to really do it right.”

  Cornelia walked solemnly to the door when her mother said, “And I’ll see you this weekend when I get back. Be good, darling.” She was already studying the sheet music on the piano.

  And that was that.

  All of that waiting, thought Cornelia indignantly, and the only time she talks to me, it’s about Madame Desjardins and piano lessons.

  She grew cross and vowed to use even more confusing and complex words as revenge. Her mother left the next morning.

  When Cornelia came home after school later that week, a big moving truck was parked outside the building. Boxes littered the sidewalk, waiting to be moved in.

  “Top of the day t’ you, Miss Cornelia,” yelled Walter across the lobby. “Blimey—look at this mess! You ’ave a new next-door neighbor. Them movers must be barmy to leave boxes laying about outside on the pavement. All the dogs living in this building might take ’em for new square fire hydrants.”

  Cornelia smiled. A few minutes later, Madame Desjardins let her into the apartment, and she ran up to her bedroom immediately. Strangely, she found that she had no interest in reading. Nothing in her bedroom interested her, not even the contentious word book. She felt anxious for some reason, like something was about to happen, but she didn’t know what.

  She shocked Madame Desjardins by coming downstairs before dinner and ambling around the apartment. She fiddled with the stereo in the living room until Madame Desjardins discovered her, let out a shriek, and sent Cornelia scuttling away. After that, Cornelia set up a game of checkers in the apartment’s main hallway, playing both sides. But then Madame Desjardins came swishing out of the kitchen, didn’t see the operation taking place on the floor, and stepped on the board. She even slid a few feet, scattering the black and red plastic disks everywhere.

  By five o’clock, Madame Desjardins’s nerves were shot.

  “Mon Dieu! One day, you hide in your room like a secret, and the next day, you are everywhere! I step on you wherever I put my foot,” she wailed.

  But it was Cornelia’s description of Madame Desjardins’s coq au vin cooking in the kitchen as “mephitical” (which meant “stinking, noxious”) that sent the housekeeper over the edge.

  “Out! Outside with you!�
�� she exclaimed. She vehemently shook Cornelia’s coat and beckoned for her to put it on. She put some money into one of Cornelia’s pockets to get “some little cakes from that place” for her dessert that night. “Not that you deserve little cakes today,” Madame Desjardins muttered, glaring at Cornelia as she shoved her into the hallway.

  The door thudded shut behind Cornelia. Boxes lined the walls of the corridor, ready to be hauled into the new neighbor’s home next door. As Cornelia passed the front door of the apartment, she noticed a small blue sign hammered onto it, just above the doorknob. She leaned in to examine it. The sign proclaimed in white letters:

  ATTENTION! CHIEN BIZARRE.

  Cornelia blinked. What did it mean? She got into the elevator and mulled it over on her way down to the lobby.

  She went on her errand to the Magnolia Bakery, dragging along because the trip had been a punishment. She took an extra-long time coming home just to make Madame Desjardins worry about her.

  It was dark when Cornelia strolled back to her building. Walter wasn’t at the front desk, and the quietness of the lobby unnerved her even more. When she got out of the elevator on her floor, she glanced again at the mysterious blue sign on her neighbor’s front door.

  Suddenly the door opened and something shot out of the apartment. It ran full speed over her feet, and she staggered backward in surprise.

  “Gah!!” a man shouted from inside the apartment.

  “Mister Kinyatta!! You little beast! Come back here immediately!”

  And into the hallway ran a short, bearded, dark man wearing a turban and a knee-length shirt over trousers.

  “Hello, young miss,” he huffed in Cornelia’s direction, and scrambled down the hallway in pursuit of the creature. “Mister Kinyatta, come here or I’ll put you in a stew!” the man hollered as he ran and disappeared around the corner.