Sister Ignatius had told my mother enough was enough, probably with some Latin thrown in, and that I was a bad influence on my fellow pupils at the Blessed Name of Our Holy Mother parish school. Ma, no less formidable a force, was able to negotiate my expulsion down to a year’s withdrawal, with a conditional seat the following fall, assuming I’d learned my lesson.
What lesson, my mother was happy to spell out in vivid detail. My school uniform was handed in, and the evening care and keeping of the twins was entrusted to our downstairs lodger, Mrs. Annunziata, for a reduction in rent and all the cheeks she could pinch. I would be going to work with my mother at the Fifth Avenue mansion where she was the head housekeeper.
My ma’s job was a good one, all said. She’d gone to work there when my dad returned to the road. Daddo was a vaudeville star, performing his act around the country, selling out houses to the rafters. But due to shifty bookers and managers, he was always chasing his pay, and it fell on Ma to make ends meet.
With her extra wages, my ma had managed to get us a tidy house in Brooklyn with room for a lodger. And ever since the mansion’s butler left, my ma had been in charge of the whole staff, even the footmen, which was quite the accomplishment back then. But as her employer said, “Why not? It’s running a house, not running for president.”
Her employer was Mr. J. Archer Sewell, a big-shot type who owned a newspaper. My mother’s face always lit up when she described him to me.
“A true gentleman, Mr. Sewell is. Generous not just to me, but to all the staff. At Christmas, all the housemaids were given hair combs with real crystals, and the footmen got silk suspenders. And a ham. All paid for out of Mr. Sewell’s pocket.”
I couldn’t imagine some ham and fripperies made much of a dent in a millionaire’s pocket, but Ma had momentarily forgotten my shortcomings, so I held my tongue.
“How lucky that you were born in America! Back when I worked at a grand house in Ireland, the maids were expected to turn their faces to the wall when the employer walked by! There’s a fine how-de-do. But not Mr. Sewell. We’re all ‘part of the team,’ he says, from the lowest scullery maid all the way up to the top.” She smiled; the top was her.
“Sounds like quite a large staff for a bachelor. What’s he need all those maids for?”
Ma sniffed. “One of the largest houses on the avenue requires a full staff, and as it is, we are quite short-handed. Just two housemaids to clean a ballroom, dining room, art gallery, not to mention all the bedrooms. And a footman with nothing to do but open the door now and then.” She tsked her tongue, for Ma hated nothing more than idleness.
I was just about to ask after my duties in the kitchen when she spoke again. “He’s not a bachelor, exactly.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Sewell, of course. He has a wife. Quite ill, though.”
“What’s wrong with her? She got gout?” That was the only rich people’s disease I could think of.
“Nothing with her body. It’s her mind. She’s . . .”
“A loony?”
Ma looked down her nose at me. “An invalid. A nervous type. She has strange fears and reactions to things. She doesn’t leave her rooms.”
“What, ever?”
“In a few years, I believe.”
“A few years!”
“Shhhhhh!” Ma’s eyes darted around the train car, but the commuters were mostly snoring or absorbed in the morning headlines. “The most important thing a servant brings to a job is—”
“I know, the apron.” I held mine up. “I went back for it, remember?”
“You must do something about this habit of interrupting. I was going to say: discretion. Mr. Sewell depends on us to attend to Mrs. Sewell, to keep her calm and comfortable, and above all to keep her out of trouble. And the papers, for that matter.”
“I don’t see how anyone could make the papers if they never leave the house.”
Ma chuckled. Chuckled, mind you. At home she was tired and irritable, put out over an upset water jug or the twins’ boots in the doorway. But when she talked about this other house, this other family, she was—well, different. Assured. Animated. Even happy.
“Miss Rose—I mean, Mrs. Sewell—used to be quite the scandal maker. I remember one time—”
“Hold the phone, did you know her then?”
“You may say ‘I beg your pardon,’ and before I rose to housekeeper, I was her lady’s maid, back when she was Rose Pritchard. Miss Rose was what they call ‘new money,’ or her father was, at least. A fortune dug out of the West Virginia coal mines and built into a railroad. Mr. Pritchard used that money to move to New York, buy their place in society: all the best schools, the big house, the right parties. Every privilege in the world, and Rose didn’t give two figs for any of it. She was always looking for trouble—and finding it, I might add.” And Ma chuckled that chuckle again.
“This Rose sounds like a spoiled brat,” I mumbled.
I thought Ma would jump to her charge’s defense, but instead she seemed to weigh my comment. “She was, somewhat. They were the sort of shenanigans you’d see from the girls on the lane, sneaking out to nightclubs and such. But it was more than that. It was like she was trying to prove something to her father. There he’d gone to all that time and money to give her the place in society he’d never had. But all she wanted was to prove she could make herself from nothing, like him.
“Like the time she told us she was doing charity work at one of the settlements downtown, when really she was working in a sweatshop, learning to sew neckties. ‘Learning the business from the ground up,’ she said, before her father put a stop to it. Then she ran off to Paris, living with unsavory types, buying their pictures; she swore they were worth something. And oh!” Ma laughed again. “The capers! Like the time she dressed like a gypsy woman and stood outside begging money off her father’s dinner guests. By the time dessert had been cleared, she burst in, claiming she’d turned the money three times over at the track. This, at a time when her father’s company was failing its investors. Oh, Mr. Pritchard was furious!”
“So, what happened?”
“What happens to most girls, same as me. She got married. She settled, eventually. And then—”
Her smile faded, and her face sank back into the lines I knew so well. “It all seemed harmless, back then.”
Then the train went dark, plunging underground as we reached the Manhattan side of the river.
Chapter
3
In all the years my mother talked about working at “the house,” I’m not sure what I pictured. Probably a house, and not a castle flown in from a fairy story. Its spires and turrets were visible all the way from Park Avenue, and as we turned onto Fifth, I could see that nearly half the block was taken up with marble and stone and stained-glass windows that put our parish church to shame. It faced Central Park, just across the avenue, and mimicked it with a lushly landscaped walkway that guided you up to a door like a drawbridge.
But the grotesque stone lions on either side, claws at the ready, functioned as gatekeepers to the likes of me and Ma. We traveled round to a side street and down a dark set of stairs that took us to the servants’ entrance. All the working rooms of the house—practically a house in a house, with the kitchen, laundry, pantries, and even the servants’ hall where we’d eat meals—were underground, echoing with the clattering of brooms and pans and rumbling every time a subway train ran by. This parallel underworld was where I’d be toiling under the supervision of Monsieur Leblanc, the famed chef snatched up from Paris and brought to New York as Mr. Sewell’s personal cook.
But before I could be plunged into my new life as a kitchen maid, Ma wanted to show off the fruits of her labor. I was just as eager to see that famed “house” that drew Ma out of bed at dawn and didn’t let her go till she’d fussed and fixed its ornaments like a spoiled and demanding mistress. So with
my apron now pressed and doffed and Ma’s spit holding down my hair, I was allowed a tour.
Maybe it was the imported white marble, which dominated from floor to stairs to ceiling, or maybe it was the way Ma’s words of pride bounced from one room to the next, but the house gave me shivers. The front rooms were quite spectacular, with pianos of gold and sofas of satin and so many shiny things a magpie would fly itself into a tizzy. But the deeper you went, the more rooms were closed up, curtains drawn so as not to disturb the furniture, which hibernated under protective drapes. I couldn’t tell if the rooms were simply unused, or if the rooms’ contents had been deemed so valuable that the owners’ could not risk accidental human contact.
Even the house’s centerpiece, the glass-ceilinged courtyard with its show-offy, mismatched jumble of orchids, lilacs, and orange trees, seemed false to me, a place where plants were forced to flourish no matter the season or their God-given instructions.
But most unsettling were the walls. No matter where you went, no matter how opulent the furnishings, every room was haunted by ghosts: a chessboard of discolored squares and rectangles on the silk wallpaper, nails left behind like you’d see in a cheap boardinghouse.
“Where are all the pictures?” I asked Ma in a whisper. It only seemed right to whisper. “Stolen?”
Ma seemed annoyed. “Not exactly. Miss Rose—that’s Mrs. Sewell to you, by the way—she keeps them in her rooms.” She paused. “They comfort her.”
In the glare of all things golden, I’d almost forgotten about the house’s resident lunatic. I pricked up my ears, listening for the distant howls of a madwoman. But there was nothing but the same silence, from room to entombed room.
I was never so happy to hear it was time to go to work.
—
An hour later I was elbows up in scalding water, sweat pouring down in streams, scrubbing the remains of some food charred past recognition off the bottom of a pot. My introduction to Chef (as he insisted I call him) consisted of a grunt and the splash of a hot pan tossed into a greasy sink. And another. And another. It became quickly apparent that Chef had had a whole kitchen of assistants and sub-assistants and dishwashers and sub-dishwashers in Paris, and not just one girl who usually told her mother she made her brothers a nice, home-cooked meal but really bought them dinner at the frankfurter cart.
By the end of a week, I’d learned to do the work of at least ten French boys. I chopped onions, ground garlic, boned chicken, and rendered lard. When I wasn’t cooking, I was washing dishes; when I wasn’t washing, I was drying; and when I wasn’t doing either, I was learning French under Chef’s instruction. Brunoise meant he wanted “things cut into little cubes,” bâtonette meant “little sticks,” and idiote meant just what you’d think it did.
Mademoiselle Flanagan’s French class, with its bright, sunny classroom where I could doodle and play pranks when the work didn’t suit me, seemed like an exotic paradise, lunch and recess like a luxury. Now I ate lunch alone every day. I’d hustle to get the noon dinner on the table for the other servants—Ma, plus her two housemaids, Bridie and Magdalena, and the footman, Alphonse—who filed into the servants’ hall without a glance my way. I supposed they, like their employers, assumed the food was the result of some subterranean magic. And the cleaning, too; I toiled alone over the pots while Chef smoked a cigarette in the alley and a quiet murmur of polite conversation drifted out of the lunchroom. Once Ma’s team had returned above stairs, I’d clean up their dishes and eat leftovers at the sink. Over my head, by the street level window, I’d watch a parade of feet carry their owners to destinations with conversation, laughter, and sunlight.
My mind kept going back to the time we went to the Rockaways, when I sat all day on the pier, unable to swim and unwilling to learn. As the sun went down, Daddo claimed he saw a puppy in the water, and when I leaned over to get a better look, I felt his foot on my backside. Next thing I knew, I was at the bottom of the ocean, sunk like a stone.
I screamed, but with the air replaced by water around me, no sound came out. I looked up to the sky and saw light streaming, white water, legs thrashing with wild abandon, but heard only a muted, distant fog. Terrified, I flailed and kicked until I broke through to the surface, desperate to leave that watery universe behind.
That’s what working below stairs was like, I realized too late—like living underwater. There was a world up there, above the surface, brighter and shinier than this one, divined only in glimpses and muffled echoes.
For example, there were Mr. Sewell’s food requests. These seemingly random menus, summoned from on high, were all we saw of a revolving calendar of late-night suppers, always held after most of the servants had left for the night, always contrived for a guest list of one. Their identities, a mystery to all but the footman who served them, clearly dictated the cuisine. One night it was herring and pickles. Another night it was a six-course meal of Neapolitan splendors. Another was nothing but oysters. Each request set off scavenger hunts through the well-stocked pantry—a floor-to-ceiling emporium that rattled and shuddered whenever a subway train ran nearby.
Sometimes the word came down that Mr. Sewell would be dining out after all, and the vegetables Chef had spent all day carving into flower shapes were thrown angrily into the bin.
Then there were the particular culinary needs of Mrs. Sewell, and these I studied most closely for clues to the madness. The mysterious lady partook of the same uninspired menu, day in day out. In the mornings, there was toast and tea, with some broth or boiled vegetables for lunch. And in the early evening, just a bowl of porridge.
Any chink in this feast of blandness could spark some kind of fit. So the toast had to be golden, with nary a burnt spot, and the water for the tea had to be caught before it rolled over to a boil. And the porridge must have some fancy sugar stirred into it that Mr. Sewell secured from some specialty grocer and which was kept in a big jar next to the tea things.
Because the sight of anyone at mealtime made Mrs. Sewell overstimulated, the tray had to be loaded into the dumbwaiter, a sort of cupboard-sized miniature elevator that traveled up from the kitchen, past the dining room, past the second floor hallway, all the way up to a turret at the tippy-top of the house, directly into her suite of rooms. She’d nibble her meal in that protected solitude, then send the plates back down in the dumbwaiter to be washed (by me).
This was what it meant to be rich, I’d think as I hoisted the dumbwaiter up to its destination. Every whim, whether salmon soufflé or a bed of unblemished banana peels could be summoned with a snap of the fingers, eaten (or ignored) at leisure, and left on the table for someone else to clean up.
And you could hire someone like Ma to give their life over to you, while their own family got left with the scraps.
—
It went along like this, a month of carrot cubes and crusty pots and tea trays, until one Friday evening in October when Alphonse, the footman, wandered in. And spoke.
“Your mama,” he murmured quietly, “she need you upstairs.”
Alphonse was somewhere in his twenties, tall, clean-shaven, and just handsome enough to be pleasant to look at but unthreatening to the master of the house. He sported neat fingernails, a perfectly pressed uniform, and an elegant, vaguely French accent—at least, I thought he did, because he said as little as possible. In short, he dressed immaculately, spoke rarely, heard nothing, and glided through the house unnoticed. He was the ideal servant.
I shut off the water sloshing in the sink and wiped my sweaty forehead on the top of my sleeve.
“What, now?”
Alphonse just raised his eyebrows slightly.
I dropped the copper pan I’d been working on, the last one of the night, back into the sink and wiped my hands on my grease-spotted apron.
Alphonse looked pointedly at the apron. “But she say clean up,” which was easier said than done. “It’s time to meet your maker.”<
br />
I froze. What shortcut or misstep of mine had been discovered? “She said,” I squeaked, “it’s time to meet my maker?”
Alphonse shook off the phrase with a quick toss of his head. “I’m sorry, my English. That is to say—your master. It is time to meet your master. You go to meet Mr. Sewell.”
—
Mr. Sewell’s office was as big as a ballroom (or so I thought, until I saw the ballroom), overlooking Central Park and anchored by an enormous carved desk and a Persian rug I expected could fly you to Arabia. I later learned that this had once been the library, which explained the floor to ceiling shelves lined with books in fancy leather bindings.
Mr. Sewell’s desk was covered not with the classics, but all the latest editions of the city’s newspapers. It figured, as he owned one of the biggest newspapers in New York, the Daily Standard. We weren’t much for newspapers in our house, though I loved to glance at the headlines on the New York Graphic or New York Yodel, which kept us up-to-date on what socialite had poisoned her lover or which politician was spotted in what speakeasy.
Ma had told me all about Mr. Sewell—how he lunched with the mayor, how he flew with Lindbergh, how the outlawing of alcohol in this country had him to thank—but what she hadn’t told me, as he came around his desk to inspect me, was that he was an absolute dish. He was tall and broad-shouldered and with a face that I suspected Ma’s romance magazines would call “chiseled.” And when he looked at you, it was with these swimming pool blue eyes that made you wonder if he might not be a little bit in love with you, if you were someone else entirely.
So to think that my ma not only knew but was whispering with this titan of New York society—well, it was enough to set my knees to rattling.
After a few quiet words to Ma, Mr. Sewell strode over and shook my already-shaking hand.
“So, Martha, is it?” He towered over me, unwavering as a flagpole. “Welcome to the team. I call it a team because we’re all in this together, making this a happy and efficient home. Aren’t we, Mrs. O’Doyle?”
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