Besides, I’d tried asking Ma about pomegranates and nature morte, but she’d just looked at me strangely and asked if I’d finished sweeping out the fireplaces.
Alphonse looked unconvinced, but after a moment he plucked up the rag I’d left on the table and made himself look busy by polishing some candlesticks. “Nature morte.” He said it with more flourish than me. “To translate, dead nature.”
I thought back to the painting with this title—just a bowl of fruit. Dusty maybe, but edible, I thought. “That doesn’t make any sense. Everything in the picture was alive. Well, at least, it wasn’t dead.”
“It is just the French way of saying what you call in English,” he paused with his rag, searching for the words, “‘stop life’—a painting of objects. No people, no animals. Nothing moving. All still.”
“Oh.”
“Still!” He smiled broadly, as if he had solved a nagging problem. “‘Still life.’ That is the name. Not stop. ‘Still.’”
Alphonse shot another look over his shoulder. Hearing no footsteps approaching, he continued his lecture, all the while staying with his busy work, moving beyond the candlesticks to the table. “Yes, because in Dutch, it is still even. Did you see the Dutch? These were the masters of the still life.”
“‘Still even.’” I remembered those words on the opulent table scene. “Does that mean dead nature, too?”
“It means ‘still the same.’ Always the same. Frozen, maybe one might say. The Dutch had this belief of death and life together. Did you not see spots on the fruit, the beginning of . . . how do you say, rotten? Of mold? You will always see these things. It means that . . . ,” the rag paused on the table as he stared in the distance, putting together some idea in his brain. “It means that something is beautiful from a distance, but once you go close you will see the flaws.” He began polishing again. “And that nothing, even the most beautiful, lasts forever.”
I hadn’t noticed rot or mold or flaws. But those bloody red seeds returned to my mind, and I shivered.
“So that is what they mean by these paintings.” Alphonse stood up, now looking at me with curiosity. “And the Picasso, what did you think?”
I shrugged. “A bunch of nothing and a name that doesn’t mean anything.”
“If it was truly a ‘bunch of nothing,’ it would be nothing—a blank canvas. No, Señor Picasso chooses the colors, the shapes for a reason.” He stopped, something on the leg of the table catching his eye. He spat on the rag and knelt down to set to buffing it out. “Nothing on that wall is an accident.”
“You mean, on the painting?”
“I mean on the wall. And The Pomegranate is indeed a name that means something, especially on that wall.”
Alphonse’s rag kept moving, so I kept talking.
“So what is a pomegranate anyway? And, oh!” I consulted the paper scrap again. “In vinculis faciebat. What’s that?”
“It is Latin. It means ‘made in prison.’ And as for what is a pomegranate,” he spat on the rag again, then shook his head forlornly. “Pomegranate—a fruit. But a very,” he searched again for the word, “specific fruit. Specific for a reason. Not that you Americans—”
“I know, Cracker Jacks and catsup. Y’know, this is all awful fancy talk for a footman. French, Italian, Latin. How many languages do you speak anyway? And how’d you learn so much about pictures? Were you a priest or something in the Old Country? Because for someone so highfalutin’, you’d think you’d have a job that didn’t bring you so low.”
Alphonse stopped rubbing. He slowly stood up and tossed the rag, spit and all, on the table, then walked out of the room.
As usual, I’d pushed too far, driving away not only the serving staff’s resident language expert but one heck of a parlormaid.
But just as I was reaching reluctantly for the spittled rag, he returned, his usually placid jaw clenched.
“There is not a thing that I know that I did not learn from a book,” he launched in. “Maybe you do not know what this is. They are this big, white things in the middle—”
“I know what a book is.”
“Do you? Perhaps they have forgotten what you look like. There is an excellent library full of these books, just over there.” He indicated the direction of Mr. Sewell’s office. “Homer, Herodotus, Virgil, Ovid.” He paused, then repeated. “Ovid. Words written many thousands of years ago, but they are still available to anyone—a millionaire, a lady, a footman, even a maid.”
I didn’t recognize half the words in his little speech, but I did recognize a dare when thrown in my face. And that name—Ovid—sounded familiar, but I wasn’t sure why.
I faked a guffaw. “Available to everyone? Really? Not when that library is in Mr. Sewell’s office. Which is always kept locked, I believe?”
Alphonse stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth in the doorway. “There is one person in this house who stands guard at the door. One who meets the postman every day, takes the post, and places it on Mr. Sewell’s desk. For this job, he is trusted with a key. And this person, he is very worthy of this trust, but sometimes, maybe he does not always remember to lock the door behind him.”
As he turned on his heel, I heard a jingling of keys from somewhere in his pocket. And then, farther down the hallway, the unmistakeable click of a lock turning.
—
Ma and Chef were still doing the inventory. Mr. Sewell was at the newspaper offices, and Magdalena was silently working her way through the second floor. Alphonse was now nowhere to be seen.
In other words, there was no reason—outside of it being absolutely, entirely, and indubitably forbidden-—not to go in the library.
I tiptoed over to the doors. The knob turned with an easy click, and without even a look over my shoulder, I slipped in.
No longer filled with Mr. Sewell’s outsized presence, the room felt cavernous.
Bookshelves covered three of the four walls, shadowed as the storm flung leaves and twigs in staccato against the park-facing windows. The wall switch flipped with a sharp click that made me jump, and the electric lights overhead shone a garish spotlight on the walls of rich leatherbound volumes—brown, red, green, like the wet leaves stuck to the windows.
While handsome, those neat rows of satiny spines made finding a particular book near impossible. There were no titles imprinted, no authors listed, no labels on the shelves indicating History or Philosophy or Greek Mythology, and on closer inspection, there were many gaps and breaks in the shelves’ soldier-like order.
A large ledger lay open on a stand in one corner which seemed to hold the key to the mysterious collection. It looked like each book had been added to the catalog as it was purchased. The catalog showed the bulk of books dropped in one go at the beginning and the rest added chronologically. But each was then shelved according to a numerical system with unhelpful tells like 876.544F.
This system meant that there was no alphabetical order to guide me to Ovid, whoever or whatever that was. It required going through the ledger, page by page, starting from the beginning.
Luckily I found several books identified as Ovid early on, part of that first haul from Mr. Pritchard’s European travels of 1910 (so the ledger said).
But to the right of most entries, I saw my mother’s long, looped handwriting: “Removed by Mrs. O’Doyle, for Mrs. Sewell.” March 3, 1927. April 4, 1926. October 2, 1925. The dates were scattered like seeds across a span of the last few years.
And then I remembered where I’d heard that name, Ovid, before Alphonse. It was the book the doctor noted on Rose’s bedside. The book, he suggested, was too provocative, too stimulating for such a fragile woman. Maybe any woman.
Was the doctor right? Was this Ovid helping to drive Mrs. Sewell crazy?
Maybe the words in these books were some kind of ancient spell, I mused as I hunted for the number (873.01),
where the Ovids were meant to be found. Maybe they were designed, when read, to scramble your mind or spark an insane frenzy,
True to the register, in a section with a small brass plaque labeled 870-880, half the shelf was empty. I eyed the ransacked shelf with suspicion. Maybe an ancient spell wasn’t entirely believable. But then what could be so dangerous here? And what was the subject that held Rose’s fascination? Art? Botany? Fruit?
I warily plucked up one of the leftovers.
The soft, expensive leather gave nothing away, but after a few brittle pages Ovid’s name was revealed, followed by Fasti, as if this explained anything. I flipped to the middle:
“. . . When from her saffron cheeks Tithonus’ spouse shall have begun to shed the dew at the time of the fifth morn, the constellation, whether it be the Bear-ward or the sluggard Bootes, will have sunk and will escape thy sight. But not so will the Grape-gatherer escape thee . . .”
The doctor might be right about the books. Writing like that would drive anyone crazy.
I tossed the volume back on the shelf and grabbed another: A Commentarie and Arguement, Most Humbly Submitted, on a Translation of the Most Noble Verses, Metamorphoses . . . The title dribbled over at least a page and maybe into two. This book at least contained pictures, although not even in color: just black-and-white block prints.
As I flipped the book open, it fell to the center plate.
Here I saw a girl clinging in terror to a rock, shinking away as a scaled creature rose out of the waves that crashed at her feet, his talons threatening to rip open her flesh.
On closer inspection, I saw that she was actually chained to that rock, with no chance of escape.
I quickly turned the page.
The next illustration was no better. Here a creature hulked over a waif of a girl, cornered in the dead end of an elaborate maze. Some kind of half-and-half monstrosity, with the body of a strong and strapping man, but the head and feet of a snarling bull: it was labeled The Minotaur. Teeth bared, horns glinting, he drew upon the quivering maiden.
But I never found out what happened next because with the sound of the library door swinging open, the book dropped from my hands.
“What!”
Just that one word, in Ma’s mouth, said everything.
(This is the problem with books. When they’re bad, they drive you away with their forthwiths and thithers, and you’ll never finish them, no matter how much your teacher harangues you. But when they’re good, they lure you in and won’t let you go, and that can get you into just as much trouble.)
I snatched up the Ovid and shoved it back on the shelf, whether in the 100s or 900s, I didn’t know or care. From my apron pocket I produced that spitty rag and began frantically polishing the books with Alphonse’s saliva.
“I was just walking by, and the door was open, and I was going to close it, but the books looked so dusty. I mean, look at that dust . . .” I coughed, I thought, convincingly. “And we’re all a team here, aren’t we, so I just thought I’d pitch in.”
“That’s rubbish. This room is never left unlocked. Unless . . .”
Her eyes narrowed a bit, and I did feel bad that Alphonse was going to take the blame.
“Locked or no,” she continued slowly, “you should never enter this room without permission. There’s not just the matter of Mr. Sewell’s private papers. Each one of these books is worth a month’s wages, some more. If you so much as ripped a page . . .” Ma left the thought unfinished, a ripped page an unspeakable offense.
I took a step back from the bookshelves, now afraid of even accidental contact. “No wonder Mr. Sewell wants to sell them.” I whistled under my breath. “Not that he needs the money, of course.”
“Mr. Sewell’s financial decisions are no concern of yours,” Ma snapped, but then paused. “But it’s like Mr. Sewell said, I suppose: living near the source of wealth—well, we could all learn from his vision.”
Ma crossed over and withdrew my hastily shelved book.
“I’ll have you know it’s not that Mr. Sewell doesn’t care for the books. Heavens, no! One of the most cultured, most learned men in New York, Mr. Sewell is! It’s that, as he says, these books could be working for him, instead of him for them. If he sold them, he says, he could put the money in the stock market and double it overnight! With all the information that flows into the paper, Mr. Sewell is always the first to hear of any stock tip.” Ma nestled the book back into its proper place in the 800s. “I’ve been thinking of putting a bit of money in the market myself. With Mr. Sewell’s guidance, of course,” she murmured to herself.
I stood back and looked at the sea of books. Each one worth at least forty dollars, times what? A thousand, and then that doubled in the market . . . “So why doesn’t he sell them?”
Ma stood back, glancing over the stacks to make sure all was in order.
“They’re not his to sell; they belong to Miss Rose. The books, the paintings, the house. They were all left to Miss Rose by her father. So as long as she chooses to keep them, Mr. Sewell is their keeper and protector.” Her eyes passed from one end of the bookshelves to the door. “And hers,” she murmured.
She put her hand on my shoulder—a familiar grip the twins and I called “The Claw”—and began to steer me back toward the door. “And as his deputy, it’s up to me to see that all is maintained in the same condition in which it arrived in this house. Which means”—here she pushed me out into the hallway and stepped out behind me, blocking the door—“no unauthorized visitors. And that includes you.”
She turned back, and with her own jangling ring of keys, which dwarfed Alphonse’s, she turned the lock with a definitive click.
And that was the end of Mr. Sewell’s library, for me.
Chapter
8
That night on the subway home, I scanned the car for Daily Standard headlines while mentally depositing two pennies in my own Ovaltine jar.
There wasn’t much to hold my interest (“TROY MOTOR COMPANY STOCK CLIMBS” “INTEREST RATES RUMORED TO DIP”), so I leaned back to read the Yodel over the shoulder of the engrossed office girl to my right. Today’s top story was a corker: A chorus girl from the Follies had been caught in Montreal with a congressman, pretending to be his wife. The real wife reportedly got wind and took off the next day for Reno for a quickie divorce, with a Portuguese waiter in tow. And now the chorus girl’s mother was suing the congressman for kidnapping. A delicious, scandalous mess, the whole thing.
By the time I got home, I couldn’t remember what was so interesting about pomegranates and Ovid anyway.
And Mrs. Sewell, if I thought about it.
Did anyone care what made Georgie Riordan think he was King Tut? No, they just tipped their hats to him on Flatbush Avenue and told his ma “no charge, ma’am” when she came into their store. What made me think it was any stranger for a rich person to go loopy than some joe from the neighborhood? If anything, in that house filled with books of monsters and paintings of squiggles, it made more sense.
So let the lady of the house lie in bed, eat porridge, read about half men–half goats, and stare at pictures of watermelons and alligator pears. Whatever the source of Mrs. Sewell’s troubles, I wouldn’t discover it in all the myths of Ancient Greece and Rome combined.
At least, I was pretty sure.
—
“Land, the racket, Martha!” Ma flew into the Sewell music salon, where I was cleaning the piano’s keys, approximating Gershwin (I thought) in the process. “Though at least the noise led me straight to you. I need you to run an errand.”
I had my apron off before Ma could even give me a destination. After a week of rain, the light glimmered and danced outside, and it was exactly the kind of day I would have faked a stomachache at school and headed to the park or the beach or simply anywhere.
“I see the schemes in your eyes, young lady, and you�
��ll be wise to check them right there before they meet up with your brain.” Ma took the apron and looped it back over my neck, spinning me around and tying the strings together with a yank. “You’ll be in an official capacity, a representative of the Sewell household, and I expect you to comport yourself accordingly.”
I loosened and retied the strings around what Daddo called my jelly belly. “All right, all right. Where to?”
“Mr. Sewell needs this note hand delivered to the Dukes. It’s got to get there right away, before Mr. Duke leaves for their golf game. Mr. Sewell can’t make it, you see. It’s just a bit farther up Fifth Avenue, across from the museum.” She stared in my eyes. “Shouldn’t take you more than fifteen minutes. I’d go myself, but I must go downtown and give the grocer a what’s what. And Alphonse . . .”
“Ma, I’ve got it!” I snatched the letter out of her hand. “Across from the museum, easy.”
Ma took a deep breath, looking like she’d already regretted the decision. “Can I trust you on this, Martha?” She looked over her shoulder, and I knew she was wondering if the silent-but-compliant Magdalena was within shouting distance.
“Of course!” I jumped in her line of sight, to block any further thoughts of Magdalena. “Just a trot up Fifth Avenue and back. What could be easier?”
—
To my credit, I skipped straightaway to the Duke place, strangely pleased to find their fairy-tale mansion slightly smaller than the Sewells’. But any haloed grandeur I felt was in my own mind alone, because the footman refused to even open the front door to my maid’s uniform. He met me instead at the servants’ entrance, where he took the letter between two fingers and coldly closed the door in my face.
But even that couldn’t get me down. It was one of those delicious fall days in the grand finale of the season: sun beaming through the branches, just a few golden leaves left clinging, its red and orange sisters already carpeting the ground. I inhaled deeply, drawing in the toasted scent of sunbaked leaves, the smoke of fireplaces coming back to life. The clean, cold bite of winter was waiting in the wings.
The Gallery Page 6
