The third floor, happily, was mostly closed off, and the top floor was just Mrs. Sewell and that burly nurse-babysitter, Mr. McCagg, on the landing. My mother alone took responsibility for that floor.
One floor for one hearty girl might sound reasonable, but mind you, this one floor included an imposing entry hall, a reception room, a music room, a dining room, a ballroom, an art gallery. All of which was stuffed with carved furniture and expensive baubles from the Pritchards’ many trips to Europe, where Rose’s father tried to import class and stature by the boatload. Now all those items just drew dust like flies to a dung heap.
Bridie was the first-floor chambermaid sent downstairs to take my spot in the kitchen. I could only imagine the kitchen would be the better for it, as Bridie told me she “loved a good challenge” and scoffed when I showed her the soap pads. “With copper pots, you’ve got to use lemon wedges dipped in salt. And my secret ingredient: elbow grease!” She laughed like this was a joke out of the funny pages. “You’ll see. You’ve never seen a pot sparkle till it’s met my magic fingers!” Chef nodded admiringly and set aside three petit fours for her. I left them both to all the fun they could find at the bottom of the slop sink.
Why I was cleaning at all was a mystery; none of the rooms ever seemed used. Besides his furtive, late-night dinners, Mr. Sewell didn’t care to entertain in the fashion of the society set. “He’s a businessman; he’s too busy for all that,” said Ma, adding that he often said he’d prefer a penthouse in one of those new luxury apartment buildings going up on Fifth Avenue, with “none of this frippery to look after.”
I worked my way slowly through the rooms in Ma’s prescribed rotation—the front parlor on Mondays, the dining room on Tuesdays, and so on—when Ma discovered a spilled drink in the art gallery. It must have been left over from Mr. Sewell’s supper with his reporter two nights before, the night of Mrs. Sewell’s dumbwaiter incident. In all the excitement, it had gone unnoticed, and now the parquet floor underneath it was likely warped and discolored. While Ma went to telephone a woodworker, I hauled a mop and bucket in.
The gallery led from a reception room to the ballroom, a long, wide promenade, with tall ceilings and a barreled roof. It was designed, it seemed, for partygoers to take in the impressive collection of artworks as they moved from cocktails to supper, and the room was dotted here and there with sofas and lounges, so that guests might relax to better enjoy.
What exactly? Like the rest of the house, the walls were empty. Well, nearly empty—at one point there must have been dozens, maybe even a hundred paintings crammed along those walls—the ones, I realized, that now populated Mrs. Sewell’s rooms upstairs.
Today there were just four. They were hung along one side, neatly in a row, as if someone had begun planning an exhibition and then lost interest. Each was draped with a sheet, protected from my unworthy eyes.
The spilled drink in question was located halfway between these sole survivors. The drape to one painting had been pulled aside, dragging halfway on the ground. I felt a shiver, as if witnessing the scene of a crime. I could picture Mr. Sewell strolling here with his dinner guest, stopping to show off the artwork purchased by his once charmingly cultured wife, then dropping a drink (of club soda, no doubt) in surprise as smoke and a bloodcurdling scream emanated from downstairs, from the kitchen, from the . . . dumbwaiter?
Shards of broken crystal littered the floor like a land mine, a warped circle outlining where the melting ice and liquid had seeped into the inlaid wood. A few flying shards had landed as far as the half-pulled drape, where the sheet pooled on the floor. I’d have to shake it out—without pulling down the painting behind it.
I stood back to assess the job. The painting was tall, high, much taller than me, and the sheet clung to its top right corner.
And behind the sheet, beckoned two hands. Delicate and white, with long tapered fingers, one circling the wrist of the other, which clutched—what exactly?
With my thumb and forefinger, I pulled back the sheet a bit more, revealing an apple, held possessively, close to the chest.
Now I gave the sheet a billowing yank and found myself face-to-face with the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
Eve. The apple said it all.
Poor Eve, I thought. In every stained-glass window and Bible picture, she was always cold and naked, a fig leaf stuck to her nethers, shoving an apple into Adam’s mouth. Or she’s only slightly more covered in animal skins, as God banishes her from the garden, following Adam with the requisite weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Also, she always has a belly button, which just makes no sense at all, if you think about it.
But this painter—an Italian guy, ROSSETTI, the little brass label read—lavished his Eve with a rich peacock green fabric that spilled around her like a waterfall. He’d chosen the color to match her intensely serious blue-green eyes, and against it the apple seemed frankly dull in comparison. It was some kind of apple I’d never seen before, which made sense because everyone knows the best grocers are always Italian.
Another thing I liked about this Eve is that Adam was nowhere to be found. I’d never seen a painting of just Eve alone before. Come to think of it, she usually appeared with the subtlety of a moving picture actress, batting her eyelashes at Adam or wailing behind him or letting herself be sweet-talked by the villain-snake. But here she was lost in her own thoughts, looking so fixedly at something beyond me. And instead of foisting the apple on Adam, she held on to it, like it was hers and hers alone.
Maybe if she’d kept all that knowledge to herself, I thought, there wouldn’t have been a Fall. After all, it was Adam who spilled the beans to God.
“What are you doing in here?”
I whirled around. Alphonse’s head was peeking through the double doors.
“Ma sent me in.” I rattled the glass shards in my dustpan. “To clean up a spill.”
“Ah.” The head disappeared back into the hall, then reappeared followed by the rest of Alphonse’s body. His long legs had him standing by me in an instant. “You look at the paintings.” He said it as an accusation rather than an observation.
“The sheet fell off,” I lied automatically.
But he wasn’t listening. He was looking, too.
“It’s Eve,” I broke the silence. “See the apple?”
He laughed loudly. “That one is not Eve.”
“It is so,” I retorted. “And I should know, after eight years of Catholic school.”
A sound escaped the side of his mouth like a deflating tire. “You think you are the only Catholic? Where I come from, it is not just school. We are fermented in it, like wine.”
“Where’s that exactly?”
He ignored me. “That is no apple. And that is no Eve.”
“Not an apple!” I guffawed. “What is it then, I’d like to know?”
“Americans.” He shook his head. “You know nothing but catsup and Cracker Jacks.”
“That’s rich!” I shot back. “When the French eat snails! And frogs!”
“The legs of the frogs,” he retorted coolly, as if this explained it all. “And as for the lady in the painting,” he continued before I could get another word in, “you do not have to wonder. Her name is right at the top of the painting.”
He was right. At the very top, several lines of verse appeared as if written on an old-fashioned scroll. I tiptoed up to see, but it did me no good.
“It’s in some other language.”
“True,” he shrugged. “Not so difficult if you read Italian.”
“And you do, I suppose.”
He shrugged again. “But you do not even need language to unlock this painting. All you need to know is in the picture itself.”
Before I could ask him what he meant, a click of the door admitted Ma and her businesslike step. “Aren’t you done yet? Why is that drape off? Alphonse, what
business do you have here?”
Alphonse immediately took up the drape and, after shaking out the glass gingerly in the direction of my dustpan, tossed it back over the painting. I in turn scrupulously swept up the chards.
“The young lady could not reach the top. I was helping.”
Ma looked at us suspiciously. “Well, now you’ve helped enough. There’s no one on the door, and Mr. Sewell wouldn’t like it, especially with all the trouble we’ve had.”
Once the doors were closed behind Alphonse, Ma turned back to me. “I don’t like you speaking with him.”
“Don’t worry, Ma.” I kneeled down to sweep the last of the glass. “He barely talks anyway.”
“Still. I am quite serious on this. There’s to be no fraternization on my staff.”
“I’ve got no idea what that means, so I can’t imagine I’ll be doing it.”
“Enough of your sass. It means chatting up the fellas, and it’s a one-way ticket out the door with no reference letter.”
I nodded, although I knew this was an empty threat, as Ma was the one who’d be writing my reference.
“And don’t go touching the paintings.” The drape had slipped again, and Ma reached out to fix it, then stopped and pulled it back just as I had. “These are Miss Rose’s pride and joy,” she murmured, gazing at the beautiful lady, “and her ticket in.”
“Ticket to what?”
“To New York society. When Mr. Pritchard and Miss Rose moved from West Virginia to New York, no one would give them the time of day, no matter how much money they had. So Mr. Pritchard took Rose to Europe, ‘to get cultured’ he said. Came back with all this art, all the books in the library, even designed this house to accommodate the haul and the folks he hoped to attract—the gallery, the ballroom. Used his railroad connections to get a private railway platform in the basement, to lure society types direct from their country houses upstate.”
“Did they come?”
“Oh, land, yes! Half the social register turned up for the teas and dinners and dances, eager to see the fancies. And it worked. Between her father’s money and my dress skill, all the most eligible society bachelors came ’round to court her,” Ma said with certain pride.
“Including Mr. Sewell?”
“Well, yes,” she said shortly. “Of course.”
I looked around the room, with its empty walls and draped sofas. “So? Where is everyone? All these society types?”
She cleared her throat. “Miss Rose’s father died shortly after her marriage. Miss Rose hoped to step in and take over her father’s affairs, but that was absurd for obvious reasons.”
I nodded as if I understood what those obviously absurd reasons were.
“Some nephew took control of his company instead and managed to bankrupt it in short order. After that . . .” Ma paused. “Well, Miss Rose had always been . . . saucy, but after that, her behavior grew increasingly strange. She insisted on bringing all the art up to her rooms, refused to come out. All those newfound friends stayed away—not such friends after all, I suppose. And now, this”—Ma tossed the drape back over the lady in blue, turning her into a ghost again—“is all that’s left.”
“Still!” she turned back to me with a pasted-on smile. “As they say, there’s no friend like a faithful servant.”
“But you said she took all the paintings upstairs,” I said while sucking the finger I’d nicked on Mr. Sewell’s crystal. “So, what about these?” The four frames huddled together, abandoned, on the gallery wall.
“Occasionally,” Ma sighed, “Miss Rose gets it in her head that certain paintings need to be downstairs. For Mr. Sewell’s visitors. So she’ll direct me to bring this one or that one down.” She peeked under the drape again. “Come to think of it, it’s been donkey’s years since she had me switch them out. Maybe she’s finally grown tired of the whole exercise.” Ma slid the sole of her shoe around the floor until she found a stray shard. “You’ll need to sweep this whole area again. We can’t have visitors slicing their slippers on glass.”
I slid my foot, too, mimicking with the toe of my boot. “Wouldn’t a bit of linseed oil treat this spot? At least, as a measure until the woodworker arrives?”
Ma thought for a moment. “Yes, I believe it would. Good thinking, Martha. There’s some in the supply cupboard.” She checked her watch. “I have to run to meet with the grocer. When I return, I want the spot treated and the room vacated. Understood?”
I nodded and watched until the door closed behind her with a shudder of glass.
The linseed oil was instantly forgotten as drapes were whisked away from each of the cloaked paintings, sheets piled on the floor.
It was an odd collection of paintings, there was no denying it: some larger than life, some small enough to tuck under your arm and walk out the door.
I also saw that, for a woman who ate only broth and mush, Mrs. Sewell seemed quite obsessed with fruit.
The painting next to Eve—or whoever she was—dulled in comparison, a ho-hum looking bowl of fruit, dusty, patchy apples in a pile, and here again was that strange-looking apple I’d seen in the lady’s milky-white hands. Nature morte, a title on the frame read; the name on the frame was Courbet, and then the words: in vinculis faciebat.
The painting next to it was quite pleasing. Still even, the plaque said, by Willem Kalf. Large, imposing, and undeniably rich, it made me think of the dishes that came down after Mr. Sewell’s more indulgent dinners: half-finished crystal glasses of wine, a mussed tablecloth, crumbs on the table and silver decanters overturned. But something about the way this one was painted made the whole scene seem delectable rather than messy. The silver glinted, the fruit shone, the linen tablecloth beckoned, and I impulsively reached out for it, feeling silly when I discovered it cold and flat against my finger.
The showpiece against all the finery was that fruit again, and now I had to admit Alphonse was right—this was no apple. The fruit had split open as if exposing its guts, an explosion of glossy red. Against the soft white linen tablecloth, a single scarlet, glowing seed had fallen, and the maid in me wanted to sweep it into my dustpan.
The whole display felt obscene somehow, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. It was like it was something impossibly rich and lush, and yet at the same time . . . too much. Just looking at it gave me something of a stomachache.
And what was “still even” about it? I had no idea.
The final painting also baffled me.
Unlike the previous picture, there was nothing rich or delicious or enticing here. Instead the small canvas—I could pick it up easily, if I’d wanted to—mashed up a confusing maze of shapes and lines and smudges of brown, gray, and orange, like a subway train at rush hour. Black seedlike dots speckled the scene here and there. Above the action hovered the hazy words cafe 3, like a shop window shining through the fog.
Was this malarkey supposed to be a painting of a café? I looked closer.
But the title, next to the painter’s name on the frame (Pablo Picasso), explained nothing: The Pomegranate.
Chapter
7
That night I dreamed of the beautiful lady.
I hadn’t dreamed at all since I started working at the house—too tired, probably, falling into what Ma would call “the sleep of the dead.”
But that night I dreamed.
I was in the house’s lavish courtyard—it seemed I couldn’t even escape the house in my sleep—where all the trees and shrubs had been draped in white sheets. From beneath one, two milky-white hands appeared. They held that strange fruit, and when I reached out for it, placed it safely in my own chapped hands. But as I raised the fruit to take a bite as I would an apple, it burst open, spewing the seeds, the juice staining my apron, dripping between my fingers like blood.
When I woke up, I swore I could taste that juice—both tart and sweet
—on my tongue.
—
“Do you really speak French?”
I was supposed to be beating rugs behind the house that day, but it was raining, a steady November rain that drowned the autumn leaves, so I’d been given permission to dust the front parlors instead. I spent an hour on the front reception room alone, waiting to catch Alphonse at his station in the neighboring foyer. But Alphonse had been sent on some errand, and just when I thought I might dust the end tables down to wooden nubs, he returned to his post.
My question must have startled him, because he froze, his face drained of color.
I stepped out from the shadows and held up my dust rag, as if showing I wasn’t armed.
He finally cleared his throat and answered, “Of course.”
“Courbet”—I pronounced it Cor-bett—“it’s a French name, right?”
Alphonse’s shoulders dropped and he let out a breath. “Ah, so you were looking at the paintings?”
“’Course. So is it French?”
“Yes. Yes, he was a French painter.” Alphonse seemed to warm to his subject. “They call him a ‘Realist.’ He wanted to paint what truly was, not what the people want to see.”
“So,” I fished in the pocket of my apron for the note I’d scribbled after closing up the gallery, “‘nature morte’—what does that mean?”
Alphonse looked down the hall, back toward the servant stairs. “I do not think your mother wants me talking to you.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, settling myself in a chair easily worth more than our house on Willoughby Street. “Ma’s doing the inventory with Chef downstairs. They’ll be ages.”
The Gallery Page 5
