Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  “Did you hear what Henri LeCroix did the other day?” she drawled. “It was the day before his big show at the Guggenheim. He ripped up every single one of his photographs that were supposed to hang in the exhibit! The museum was furious.” She smeared some blood-red lipstick on her lips and patted them with a napkin.

  “I’m telling you, all artists are crazy.”

  “I heard a story about a crazy artist,” Cornelia piped up, eager to divert her mother’s attention.

  Lucy looked as though she might die of shock. Cornelia never uttered an unnecessary word around Nina, unless it contained at least eight syllables and was designed to silence the singer instantly.

  “Really? What story is that?” she asked.

  Cornelia related the Picasso story that Virginia had told her several weeks before. She was careful to leave out all of the names, of course, but she was secretly pleased to see Lucy watching her, fascinated.

  “I know that story,” Nina butted in bossily. “It’s a famous story about the Somerset sisters and Pablo Picasso. You know who those sisters are, Lucy, don’t you? One of them was a well-known writer, and two of them were painters. I think there was another one also. The fat one—what was her name? Gertrude or Gilda or something.”

  Cornelia’s stomach shrank in horror when she heard this. How was she going to get out of this one now? She had never, in a million years, imagined that someone else would know about Virginia, much less about Alexandra, Beatrice, and Gladys. And anyway, the Picasso incident had taken place so long ago—how could Nina know about it? And then things got worse.

  “Yes, they were from a very important family here in New York,” Nina continued. “Their father was an extremely wealthy banker and philanthropist. I heard, incidentally, that one of those sisters—the writer—just moved into your building, Lucy. I think I read that in the Times or something. I meant to ask you if you’d seen her yet.”

  “Realllllly,” said Lucy, looking intrigued. “We just had new tenants move in next door. I wonder if it’s her. I’ll ask Walter. Those women were so fascinating.”

  And then she peered down at Cornelia, who had slumped practically under the table with misery by that point. “Cornelia Street! Sit up straight,” Lucy snapped. “Where did you hear about Picasso and the Somerset sisters?”

  Tears threatened to spill down Cornelia’s cheeks. Lucy would soon learn that Virginia lived next door and would go over to see her, and that would be the end of the secret friendship. And to make things worse, Cornelia had brought this on herself. Why hadn’t she just kept her mouth shut? It seemed that any time Cornelia said something that wasn’t from her book of superior words, everything just went wrong. And with Lucy staring at her now, she blurted out the first thing that came to her mind.

  “I saw something about them on TV,” she whispered, her cheeks burning. “On the Entertainment Channel.”

  Lucy frowned. “I’m going to tell that Madame Desjardins not to watch those trashy shows in front of you,” she said.

  Just then, the waiter brought the food to the table. “Your moules, Mademoiselle,” he said grandly as he set down a big dish of pungent mussels in front of Cornelia.

  It was all too much. Cornelia hated seafood, and seeing the mussels and garlic steaming away under her nose was the last straw. Tears started to roll down her face.

  After a few moments, Nina looked up from her endive salad. “Uh-oh—somebody’s being a little dramatic,” she said nastily. “Now what’s wrong with you?”

  “Cornelia!” Lucy said with great concern. “What’s the matter?”

  Cornelia didn’t answer. She was afraid that if she talked, the dam inside her would burst and she would really start crying.

  After a few moments of cajoling and awkwardly soothing her daughter, Lucy realized that it was hopeless. “I’m going to take her home, Nina,” she said, throwing some money down on the table. “She must be overtired or something. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Nina could not have looked more horrified and wronged if Lucy had just run over her dog. “Don’t call too early,” she said sniffily as she allowed Lucy to peck her good-bye on the cheek.

  Then the most unexpected thing happened.

  Lucy and an upset Cornelia were hailing a taxi outside when suddenly a bright flash blinded them. Cornelia blinked several times before she could make out the figure of a photographer and a man with a pad of paper standing in front of her. Cornelia felt like Beatrice and Alexandra at Picasso’s studio the night of the big party.

  “Miz Englehart—I’m Dick Nugent from the Daily News,” the man with the pad said, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. “You got any comment on your exhusband’s newest wife? Look at the camera and say cheese.” The camera flashed again as a taxi pulled up.

  Lucy grabbed Cornelia and strode toward the taxi. “No comment,” she told the reporter viciously. “Get out of here.”

  The man looked at Cornelia and beckoned to the photographer, who squatted in front of her and snapped her picture close up.

  “Little girl,” the reporter said. “Whaddya think about your playboy daddy getting married again? Maybe you’ll get some new sisters and brothers.”

  Lucy pushed Cornelia into the taxi and slammed the door shut. Cornelia heard Lucy shouting at the top of her lungs at the man.

  “Don’t you ever, ever talk to my daughter again! Ever! Do you understand me?”

  Cornelia watched in shock as her mother began to beat the reporter with her purse and fists. People on the street stopped and stared, and the photographer took pictures of the commotion until Lucy violently knocked his camera onto the sidewalk. Several waiters from the restaurant ran out and tried to pry her away from the men.

  Lucy hit the reporter one more time for good measure and ran to the taxi. “Just drive,” she yelled at the driver as she got in and banged the door shut behind her. “Go, go, go, go, go.”

  Breathing hard, her eyes wild and damp, Lucy looked over at Cornelia. “I’m so sorry about that, darling,” she said as she lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. “Those men will never bother you again. Just forget all about what that reporter said to you.”

  And then she did something that she hadn’t done since Cornelia was a little girl: she reached out and took Cornelia’s hand.

  The whole scene had completely bewildered Cornelia. She didn’t understand what the reporter had been talking about, and she was still sickened at the prospect of having her friendship with Virginia discovered and changed forever. It had been a terrible night.

  But just for the moment, in the leather cocoon of the yellow taxi, Cornelia just lay back and held her mother’s hand, with its long, talented, famous fingers wrapped around her own.

  The next day was Saturday, so Cornelia didn’t have to wake up early for school. She slept for a long time, but she still felt bleary when she woke up. She padded downstairs in her pajamas. Madame Desjardins bustled her to the kitchen table and set down a croissant for her.

  Lucy treaded down the stairs. She came into the kitchen wearing a silk bathrobe and poured herself a cup of coffee.

  “Good morning, darling,” Lucy said weakly. She was never particularly social in the morning. “How are you feeling this morning?”

  “Fine,” said Cornelia from behind a tall glass of orange juice. “But like I’m under water.”

  Lucy sipped her coffee. “I know how you feel,” she said, and walked over to the table. She kissed Cornelia absentmindedly on the forehead, and then walked out of the room. A minute later, she closed the door to the music room and plunked out a melancholy tune at the piano.

  Cornelia chewed her croissant and thought about the night before. She couldn’t believe that she’d almost let the cat out of the bag about Virginia. But maybe, she reasoned, things on this front weren’t as bad as she’d thought in the restaurant. Even though Lucy knew that one of the Somerset sisters might be living in the building, what was the likelihood that she would really track Virginia down and vi
sit her? After all, her mother was hardly ever here in the first place. Perhaps Cornelia had overreacted.

  Furthermore, the incident with the reporter and photographer was getting strangely mixed up in her mind with Virginia’s story about the reporters in Paris more than fifty years ago. Now in the daylight and with Lucy back in the music room, the whole incident didn’t even seem real anymore. Cornelia finished her breakfast and ran upstairs to read.

  It was an overcast March day. Later, after lunch, Cornelia went for a walk. She browsed around her usual haunts on Bleecker Street and stopped in at the Biography Bookshop. The owner greeted her enthusiastically.

  “Look what we have here, Cornelia!” he said. “It just arrived.” He handed her a new book titled The Greatest Pianists of Our Time. “Both your mom and your dad are in it. Why don’t you take this copy home with you? It’s a present.”

  Cornelia thanked him and took the book across the street to a little park. She flipped through the pages until she came to the photographs in the middle. She recognized many of the performers’ faces from her mother’s cocktail parties: Alicia de Larrocha, André Watts, Murray Perahia. There was Gunner Joerg, the pianist who got drunk and fell on their Christmas tree one year. A photo of Lucy on Chapter 8 showed her onstage at Carnegie Hall, the most famous concert hall in New York City.

  And there, on Chapter 8, was a photo of her father. The caption under the picture read: “Leonard Zajac Mazur performing at Alice Tully Hall on June 8, 2003.”

  She looked at his handsome face for similarities to her own but could see none. She knew that Leonard Zajac Mazur was her father, but he was a complete stranger. They didn’t even have the same last name.

  As she examined the picture, Cornelia thought about what the reporter had said to her at the restaurant. So her father was getting married again—that much was obvious. It shouldn’t have made a difference to Cornelia one way or another, since he’d never been a part of her life in the first place—but the news bothered her. Why would he want a whole new wife and new children when he had a perfectly good daughter here in New York? Why didn’t he want to live with her and Lucy in their big white apartment on Greenwich Street? Had Cornelia done something to drive him away? No, that wasn’t possible, for she hadn’t even been born yet when he left her mother.

  Cornelia just didn’t understand it. It seemed that everyone in the world wanted to get close to Lucy, except for Leonard Zajac Mazur. He clearly wanted to stay as far away from both of them as possible.

  She closed the book and left it behind on the park bench for some lucky new owner.

  When Cornelia got back to her building, she went straight to Virginia’s front door and rang the doorbell. To Cornelia’s disappointment, no one answered. She rang the bell again. Just as she was about to go back to her apartment, Patel whisked the door open.

  “Oh, hello, Cornelia-ji,” he said, holding the door open for her. “Please come in.”

  Cornelia came in and took off her shoes in the usual place next to the door. She glanced up at Patel and did a double take. He wore an apron colored with dashes of paint, and his fingernails were various shades of blue, brown, red, and yellow. Paintbrushes poked out of his apron pocket. Even his neat white turban had a smear of green paint on it.

  “Virginia is in the library, I think,” Patel reported.

  “Follow me.”

  “Patel, are you a famous painter like Picasso?” Cornelia asked, tagging along next to him as he led her to a door that she hadn’t been through yet.

  “No,” he replied. “I am not that famous yet, but I am almost as good.” He smiled at her benevolently.

  “What are you painting?” Cornelia pressed.

  Patel looked very mysterious. “You will find out soon, but not today,” he answered after a pause. “It will be a nice surprise.” He knocked on the door in front of them.

  “Virginia-ji is writing today,” he informed Cornelia.

  “Come in,” called Virginia distractedly from the other side of the door. “Oh! It’s you, Cornelia. Thank you, Patel.”

  Cornelia trotted into the room and was once again transported to another era and place. This time, she felt like she had entered an ancient library filled with secrets and knowledge. Tall, dark wood bookshelves towered to the ceiling all around her. Every sort of book imaginable crammed the shelves: novels, novellas, epics, biographies, autobiographies, encyclopedias, and atlases. There were books of plays, poems, fables, myths, limericks, and short stories; tomes about history, war, art, and music. On the slices of wall between the bookshelves hung gigantic paintings of racehorses and castles. Magnificent chairs with gargoyles protruding from their wood frames were arranged in clusters around the room. A chess set made of crystal shone on top of a round leather table, its pieces standing in four straight lines and waiting silently for battle.

  And of course, a black-and-white picture of the young Somerset sisters sat on one of the shelves. This time, the ladies stood in front of an airplane with propellers, and they wore leather flying helmets and goggles.

  Virginia sat behind an ancient-looking black typewriter on top of an immense mahogany desk. She wore a dark blue scarf turban-style around her head, and a huge sparkling sapphire necklace glistened at the base of her throat. She had a pencil tucked behind her ear, and her elegant fingers stretched across the keyboard of the typewriter. A neat stack of paper sat on either side of the machine. Mister Kinyatta, who seemed to be getting lazier every time Cornelia came to visit, slumbered under the desk. He lay snoring on his back with all four paws folded in the air and his jowls hanging back to reveal his teeth. A small green desk lamp provided the only light in the room.

  “It’s a little dark in here, I know,” Virginia said to Cornelia. “Sorry about that. I always write in a dark room. If I’m near a window, I get so easily distracted, as you know. Anyway, welcome to my English library! I modeled it after a room in the famous Bodleian Library at Oxford University, which is many hundreds of years old.”

  Cornelia walked along the edges of the room, running her fingers over the bindings of the books. “I love it in here,” she said, feeling immediately at home.

  “You’ll love it even more in a moment,” said Virginia.

  “Look over there.” And she pointed across the room from her.

  Then Cornelia saw the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf of dictionaries Virginia had told her about on the first day of their acquaintance. She had never seen so many books about words, not even at the bookstore on Bleecker Street. Row after row of dictionaries in English, French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, and even Greek and Arabic. There were dozens of them, some of them old with crumbling gilded edges and bindings, and others with new taut canvas covers. Cornelia stood on her tiptoes to peruse all of them.

  “They’re beautiful,” Cornelia exclaimed, more excited than Virginia had ever seen her. “Oh! And thank you very much for the new book. It already came in handy.”

  “You’re very welcome,” said Virginia. “I know it’s a lot to learn, but a girl has to work hard to stay at the top of her game.”

  Cornelia sat down in a particularly big wooden chair, which reminded her of the Moroccan bride’s throne. “Are you working on your new idea?” she asked Virginia. “And what’s it about again?” she added, hoping that Virginia would slip up and tell her about the novel.

  “Ingenious ploy, Cornelia S.,” said Virginia. “In other words, nice try. You know that it’s a secret. But I’ll tell you this much: it’s a wonderful story. It’s very sad at moments, but filled with hope and promise underneath.”

  “Wow,” said Cornelia. “Did you get your idea from spying with your binoculars?”

  “Not this time,” responded Virginia. “I was inspired by something else. Why don’t you stay here and read while I finish this chapter. Once I’m on a roll, I have to keep going or I’ll forget what I was going to say.” And she began to clack away on the raised, shaky keys of the old typewriter.

&n
bsp; Cornelia trolled the shelves for a book to read and selected an aged copy of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. She learned that the story of King Arthur was one of the most famous myths of England, and no one knows even now if he and his sidekicks ever really existed. The pages were made of fine fabric, and gold-laced painted illustrations of Sir Lancelot, Merlin, and Guinevere accompanied the text. Cornelia curled up in a large leather armchair, drowsy and secure in the warm library.

  She read and Virginia wrote until the light began to fade around the edges of the drawn curtain over the window. Cornelia leaped up when she realized how much time had passed. Virginia stopped her feverish typing and looked up.

  “Oh, are you leaving, Cornelia?” she asked, still clearly in another world. “Would you like to come back and read with me again tomorrow?”

  Cornelia nodded. She went back every day that week.

  That Sunday, Madame Desjardins pulled out Lucy’s suitcases again. This time, Lucy was going off to England to give a recital at Buckingham Palace with The Howling Dog. They had been practicing for days. Sometimes while Cornelia stowed away in Virginia’s library, Nina hit a particularly high note in the apartment next door and Mister Kinyatta would leap up and growl. When Lucy and Nina finally left for London, everyone in the building seemed grateful.

  Cornelia tiptoed into Virginia’s library that afternoon and picked up her King Arthur book. Virginia looked up at her from her usual spot at the desk.

  “It’s awfully quiet this afternoon over there in the Englehart apartment,” Virginia said. “I bet that The Howling Dog has been arrested for creating a public disturbance and was hauled off to jail—am I right?” Cornelia had told Virginia about Nina’s secret nickname several days earlier.

  “No,” said Cornelia, sitting down and opening her book. “They left for England this morning, to give a concert for the royal family.”