“No, no, this won’t do.” The doctor turned his back to the bed and addressed the others in the room. “Mrs. Sewell needs calming influences, not provocative material. Now,” he rubbed his hands together, “what about yesterday? Any changes in routine? Is she still on the diet I prescribed?”
“Toast and tea, some broth at midday. And porridge at night, to make her sleepy, just as you prescribed.” My mother waved me forward out of the shadows. “My daughter, Martha, made the porridge herself.”
“It’s too salty!” came the strained voice behind the curtains again. Which was just silly, if you asked me, considering the heaps of fancy sugar I poured into it.
But not last night, I remembered.
I stepped forward a bit to a spot at the foot of the bed where the curtains parted; a bedside lamp softly illuminated the inmate, the crisp sheets pulled all the way to her shoulders, as if straining to pin her down. Her thin, pointed face was framed by a halo of patchy hair like straw, clumped over the pillows that were piled behind her. Her eyes narrowed when she saw me, sizing me up, and when I met her gaze, a hand appeared from under the covers to scratch wildly at her cheek, which I saw was red and inflamed with a fiery rash. But as if fatigued by the effort it took to hold my gaze, her eyes fell to the silk coverlet.
“It’s too salty,” she insisted wretchedly.
I turned and gave a small shake of my head to the doctor, to show him that this couldn’t be true. “It’s just plain porridge, sir.” When Ma looked at me strangely, I continued. “With raisins and cream and sugar, of course.”
“Interesting. Another symptom.” He stroked his beard, then took out a small notebook and jotted something down. Then he proposed lots of syllables, explaining that this was when the brain confuses two flavors or smells. “Could be a sign of seizures. Or a sensory hallucination, most associated with dementia praecox—schizophrenia, as it’s also known.” This last term I recognized as the one Mrs. Riordan used about George. “We may be drawing closer to a diagnosis,” the doctor opined, raising one finger, “but we will never clarify what is the illness and what the disruption until we can provide an entirely calming environment for our patient.”
“Doctor,” interrupted Mr. Sewell, “there are days she doesn’t even recognize me.” He ran his fingers through his hair, and he looked less like a titan of industry than a lovesick schoolboy. “I wonder, are we doing all we can? Is this the right environment for her? I just wonder about the influence of these paintings.”
“Yes, I agree. They’re too stimulating, many of them.” Here I caught the doctor eyeing a canvas where a half man, half goat pursued a particularly nimble and naked forest nymph. “Better that they be removed.”
And here is where, as one would say, all hell broke loose.
Mrs. Sewell rose up on her bed like a demon, tearing down the curtains around her and attacking the doctor, her husband, even my mother, as one and all scrambled to simultaneously contain her and protect themselves from her claws.
The doctor produced a shot from his bag and, with the help of the man in white, whose ham-hock arms were able to absorb her fury, injected Mrs. Sewell with something that transformed her from she-devil to blubbering mess.
“I had hoped we wouldn’t have to do this again, Rose.” The doctor shook his head.
My mother took the weeping Mrs. Sewell in her arms like a child, murmuring and smoothing her hair—like my brothers when they fell, I thought, and me too once—while the doctor gestured for the men to join him in the next room. I stayed frozen where I’d retreated near the door, just beyond their circle.
“Do you see her in there, crying like a baby, holding on to that maid like her own mother? Entirely necessary,” the doctor opined. “Here we have a woman entirely alienated from her own femininity. I see it every day in my practice. Women given the vote, but not the judgment to exercise it. Women given an ounce of freedom, which they use to smoke and drink, to dance on tables! Do you see?”
“Quite so,” interjected Mr. Sewell. “Why, I’ve always said—”
“When women think they’re equals to men,”—I was impressed to see that the doctor’s self-importance did not shy even for my employer’s—“like men, they will gravitate to what is attractive and easy, and society will lose its moral center.” With a deep sigh, the doctor produced and popped in a peppermint, like an orator after a great speech. He turned finally to Mr. Sewell. “Now, Archer, I know that you are anxious to speed your wife’s path to recovery. And yes, while there are many excellent facilities—why, we Americans are at the forefront of modern psychiatry! The forefront, I say!—Mrs. Sewell’s best chance at recovery lies at home. For it is here that we must help her reconnect with her femininity. Her mother died when she was young, yes? So let her be mothered again”—my own mother stepped into the circle at just this moment—“here in her childhood room, and she will mature into a true woman again.”
“Yes, but what about these paintings?” interrupted Mr. Sewell. “They’re making her crazy.”
My mother broke in with urgency. “I’ve promised her they won’t be moved. They may not provide the calming environment we hope for, but the prospect of their absence is far more disturbing to her than their presence.” She seemed to only realize her boldness, as she ducked her head, casting her eyes down, away from her employer. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sewell, it’s just I’m sure it’s the right thing for her.”
“She has a point, Archer,” the doctor murmured from the notes he’d started scribbling.
Mr. Sewell’s face froze for a moment, the dam of his composed face holding back his irritation at being disputed. After a pause, he bowed lightly. “You’re right as always, Mrs. O’Doyle. As Dr. Westbrook says, the important thing is to keep Rose calm. And happy. There’s no rush—that is to say, we mustn’t rush the process.”
“Well.” The doctor tucked his notebook in his pocket and then patted my mother on the arm. “You are a good role model for her now. By withdrawing from the world”—Dr. Westbrook had begun packing as if onstage in front of his audience, and I shifted to relieve my weary lower back—“she has retreated back to her infancy, returning to seed, as it were. Let us nurture her; let us give her the peace she needs to sleep through this winter of the soul. When she is ready, she will reemerge and blossom in her full womanhood.”
Ma nodded, and finding me in the corner, indicated I should follow her out. We descended silently, step by step, back to the servants’ quarters, and when we reached Ma’s office, really the former housekeeper’s sitting room, Ma closed the door behind us and sank into a chair.
“Gee, is she always so-—”
My mother just held up a hand to stop me. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. Probably what happened was—”
“Please, no lies this time. What did you do?”
I looked down at my hands, which twisted my apron into knots. “I forgot the sugar,” I mumbled.
And with this, my mother dropped her head into her hands. I noticed for the first time traces of gray shot through her hair.
“I’m sorry, Ma! It won’t happen again! I’ll make sure . . .”
When she looked up again, her eyes were red. “She’s a shadow of the girl I first knew. Once she was resilient, unstoppable, a force of nature, that’s what she was! And now the least change in routine sends her into a tizzy. All the strength and life drained out of her, or worse, distorted in these bizarre outbursts! And whatever we do—the sleep therapy, the restraints, the baths—she just fades more and more into the shadows.” She wiped roughly at her eyes with her handkerchief. “Mr. Sewell says we should stay the course, listen to the doctor, but I’m starting to believe we won’t ever get her back.”
Ma indulged her sorrow a few moments more, then blew her nose and tucked her handkerchief away. As she rose to splash her face with water from the washbasin, she said, “Go home, just
go home. Tomorrow you’ll work upstairs, as a parlor maid. I can’t chance any more changes to Miss Rose’s diet or routine.”
—
I ascended out of the basement to a glorious autumn day in New York, the sun shining and a free day ahead of me.
So why did I still feel such subterranean misery?
Because my carelessness had gotten me in trouble—again.
Because I’d caused Ma such grief—again.
And that grief wasn’t even for me.
Chapter
5
Despite my free pass to play hooky, something more attractive beckoned me: sleep. It had been weeks of up at dawn, an hour on the train, on my feet for ten, sometimes twelve hours, followed by another hour on the train, and practically collapsing on our house’s stoop. I understood now Ma’s “weekly holidays,” her two hours every Sunday afternoon, napping and reading in bed while I kept the twins out of her hair.
I dozed the whole train ride home, dreaming of a proper kip on the sofa and an after-school runaround with the twins. But the door was open and lights on when I got home. Which meant no afternoon nap. It meant something much better.
Daddo was home.
Daddo was what everyone in the neighborhood called him, short for Daddy O’Doyle, from when I was a wee thing and he’d show me off at the saloon. When Ma thought he was perambulating me around the park, he’d roll me instead into Gallagher’s place, sit me on the bar, and we’d do patty-cake and handy-dandy-sugar-candy. And everyone would roar with approval and stand him a pint and tell him we should go on the road together, Daddy O’Doyle and his Delightful Daughter.
His back was to me in the kitchen, and as I threw my arms around him, I felt through his coat how thin he’d gotten on the road. The scent of his hair tonic wound its way into my nose. Still Brilliantine.
He spun around and snatched me up, getting crumbs in my hair from the soda bread he was eating. “Marty, my pearl!”
This was in the days when a Brooklyn pearl sounded like poyle and boil like burl.
“You’re supposed to be, that is, I thought you were at school. Could it be you’re playing hooky, you scamp?”
I pushed him into a chair at the kitchen table. “Don’t eat standing up; you’re getting crumbs everywhere, and you know what Ma will say. Let me fix you something. When d’you get back? How long are you staying? You know I’m a kitchen girl now? Well, I was. I can make you some eggs, some potatoes. I can run out and get some sausages.” I pulled the empty Ovaltine jar where we kept grocery money off the shelf and started to dig around the bills.
He popped up again and went to the icebox, where he took a swig straight from the milk bottle. “No, no, don’t go to any trouble, pet. I’m due back on the four o’clock train to Syracuse.”
I sagged against the kitchen counter. “Four o’clock? You won’t even see the boys.”
“How are the rascals?”
“The same. I think, the same. I mostly see them when they’re asleep, now that I’m working.” I sighed. “They’re such angels asleep.”
“Ah, so not the same at all.” He winked.
I laughed. “No, I suppose not. How are Creak and Eek?”
“The talk of Wisconsin!” Daddo did a little soft shoe on the linoleum, two imaginary skeletons on his side. A few years ago he beat a guy at cards who was an orderly at a teaching hospital. He couldn’t pay out, so he stole a male and a female skeleton for my father instead, whom Daddo christened Creak and Eek. He designed this kind of marionette-ventriloquist frame that made it look like they were dancing and talking alongside him. “O’Doyle and His O-mazing Spook Show” was born.
“We sold out our Lake Superior tour, and now the Lake Ontario crowd got wind, so we’re heading upstate on the silo circuit. Halloween time’s always big for the skeletons.” Daddo wrapped the rest of the soda bread in a napkin. “Mind if I take this for the train?”
I took the napkin from him and laid the bread flat on the counter again, slicing three more pieces which I spread thickly with butter and mustard and laid on with ham. Then I wrapped the whole thing back up in the napkin with an apple and a couple of Italian cookies Mrs. Annunziata brought back from her niece’s wedding and put it back in his hands.
“So you’ll be back after Halloween?”
“That depends on the box office, don’t it? The more the folks want Creak and Eek, the less you see your dear old Daddo.” He tucked the dinner bundle into his suitcase, sprawled open on the kitchen table, then started to buckle the straps. “Trust me, it’s good that I’m gone so much. Means more money in the till.”
I leaned back against the kitchen counter. “So stay a few more hours. When the boys get home from school, we can take them for an egg cream. Or stay till evening, and when Ma gets home we can go to the pictures. You can take a Pullman sleeper car upstate and sleep on the train.”
The well-traveled suitcase swung from my dad’s hand, his limbs already in motion. “Can’t do it, dearie. I’ve got to swing by my agent’s on West Twenty-Eighth before my train. Harry Beecham owes me for the last two tours, and I’m not taking no for an answer this time.” He snaked an arm around my waist and pulled me in for a kiss on the head, then produced the Ovaltine jar from behind my back. “Tell your ma I’m taking a few shekels to tide me over,” he said as he dug in. “Harry’ll have a check here by the end of the week. Next week, tops.”
“I’ll tell her, but you know she’ll be sore.”
“Ain’t she always?” He winked again. “You know what the Presbyterians say: You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
“Yeah, well, we ain’t Presbyterians.”
“Then you should know, a good Catholic always asks forgiveness, just never permission.” And with one more wink, he was gone.
—
I didn’t bother telling the twins that Daddo had “come and gone,” as they’d say. I gave Mrs. Annunziata the day off and treated them to egg creams myself, then let them play at the park all afternoon, while I dozed on a park bench. On the way home, I bought them gingersnaps for dinner.
“Ma used to get these for us,” said Timmy, spraying cookie crumbs all over his school uniform.
“Yeah, but I like Mrs. Annunziata’s cookies better,” answered Willy. “She makes them herself. Why’d you have to pick us up?”
“Gee, thanks, pal. I thought you missed your big sis, or does Mrs. A. give you noogie kisses, too?” I planted a kiss and drove my nose into the top of his head at the same time. The boys loved-hated it.
Willy squirmed away, but smiled. “Nah, it’s good to have you around, I guess. But why couldn’t Ma come home, too?”
“She’s busy.”
“She’s always busy,” observed Timmy.
“Or tired,” added Willy.
“Or crabby,” said Timmy.
“Always crabby,” nodded Willy.
Before, I would have joined in: Yah, Ma’s worn down to the bone. Ma’s dead on her feet. Ma’s on the warpath.
But now that I felt busy, tired, and crabby, too, it didn’t feel right to slag off Ma for the same. So I summoned my last bit of energy instead. “If it’s yer ma ye be wanting, it’s yer ma ye’ll get,” I bellowed in a grand exaggeration of my ma’s brogue, “but sure, I’ll be beatin’ the divil out o’ ye two with this here wooden spoon,” and I brandished a stick I found on the ground. The boys screamed with delight and bolted for the corner.
The boys easily outran their tired old sis, and by the time they reached our front door, I was a half a block behind. Assured they’d gone inside already, I stopped to catch my breath at the corner, in front of the newsstand, where Mr. Conescu was packing up the morning papers.
The Daily Standard was still out, and I picked up a copy to read, as Mr. Sewell had instructed. “You got two cents for that?” Mr. Conescu asked. “It’s still Saturday, on my
watch.” I put it back and just browsed the headlines:
COPS BEAT BOOTLEGGERS BACK
SMOKELESS CIGARETTES? SIR WALTER TOBACCO SAYS YES
AL SMITH “WET” BEHIND THE EARS . . .
But my attention soon turned to the Yodel’s front page, still with its Wild Rose headline, and while Mr. Conescu’s back was turned, I flicked the front page over to the story inside.
With all of the city’s pleasures just outside her door, what drew Wild Rose to the kitchen last night? Midnight snack, joyride, or something more sinister? Our sources inside that secretive citadel tell us—
“Hey!” shouted Mr. Conescu. “What’d I say?”
I dropped the paper and trotted off before Conescu could squeeze me for my hard-earned pennies. But the article had confirmed what I suspected. “Our sources.” So Mr. Sewell was right; there was a leak inside the house. And with only one servant present at the time of the escape, there was only one reasonable suspect: one tight-lipped footman, who may not speak much to me, but sure didn’t mind squawking to the Yodel.
Chapter
6
I reported to my first day on the job as a parlormaid with a brand-new apron and a new sense of optimism. For whatever there was to do upstairs, it couldn’t be harder than kitchen work, and at least I could catch a stray sunbeam falling in through the windows.
That was before I knew how busy Ma intended to keep me. I think she figured it was the only way to keep me out of trouble.
You couldn’t blame her for trying.
My responsibility was the whole of the downstairs and halfway up the grand marble staircase. Magdalena, the other chambermaid, started at the landing and continued on up to the second floor. I did my best to be friendly when I ran into her at that midway point, with a “Hiya” and a “Some day, hey?” But she never moved her eyes off the rag before her. Ma claimed Magda, a recent immigrant from Poland, understood well enough to decode “dust this” or “sweep that,” but I was starting to think she spoke no English at all. Or that maybe she pretended not to, saving her from any questions (or answers) about that strange household.
The Gallery Page 4
