The Gallery

by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

  “Yes, I would recommend that—”

  “—would you get,” I fished around for the right word, “squirrelly?”

  He gave me that strange look again. Finally he said, “Yes. You might become very . . . distressed. But,” he said firmly, “it is the only way.”

  Who was to blame, my mind set off, for Rose’s high doses? Had the doctor written the high prescriptions? He would know the dosage was too high. Or was Mr. Sewell sneaking it in, without the doctor’s knowledge? My mind went back to the jar in the kitchen, which Mr. Sewell kept stocked with the “fancy sugar” he said Rose insisted on. He insisted on, I could see now. Maybe at first to make her more “manageable.” But then for the way it made Rose seem progressively more and more insane. Not wild or madcap or eccentric, but genuinely crazy.

  These were Rose’s pomegranate seeds, I realized: the food that kept her trapped in her upstairs version of the underworld.

  Dr. Murphy’s voice interrupted my wild wonderings.

  “Listen, Miss Marguerite, I know you may not be from”—he looked outside, where a group of boys were horsing around in the dusk—“around here. But if you have trouble with anything—with your family, with your household, what have you—you come back here. Or bring your ma or your pa or whoever it is that troubles you. It doesn’t matter where you are from. You understand?”

  I nodded.

  “We Irish have to stick together, right?” He winked.

  I laughed in spite of myself. “Yes, I guess we do.”

  “Now, you tell your ma what I told you. And if it’s all right with you, I think I might throw the rest of this away.”

  “Yes, Dr. Murphy. Please do. We won’t miss it.”

  —

  The next day, while Bridie was in the loo, I washed the “special sugar” down the slop sink and replaced it with plain old white sugar from the pantry.

  And I waited for all hell to break loose.

  Chapter

  17

  What settled over the house was more frightening than a series of rages and outbursts.

  It was a fevered, hushed silence.

  Once in the park, in the spring, my brothers were hunting for worms for fishing when they came across a small brown cylinder. They broke it open, hoping for an avalanche of those fluffy white seeds that float on the wind, but recoiled to find the fully formed, decomposing carcass of a butterfly. Its wings had been a yellow-orange meant to glimmer in the sunlight, but black rot had begun to eat away at the edges, and its fuzzy body, sheltered under its folded wings, had gone soft. The boys threw it to the ground and dared each other to touch it until they found a frog to chase, but I dug a little grave for it and said a Hail Mary. There was something unbearably sad in that cocoon, the idea that the doomed creature had been ready to be born, but died fighting for release.

  For the next few weeks, I couldn’t stop thinking about that butterfly.

  Ma raced up and down the stairs with towels and thermometers and vials, and the dumbwaiter was kept busy with bowls of broth and a collection of empty pots, which came back covered with the wet and dirty towels.

  “I’m afraid we should call in Dr. Westbrook again,” I overheard her saying early on to Mr. Sewell in the hallway. She had caught him as Alphonse helped him on with his overcoat, cold air blustering through the front doors where his new silver Duesenberg idled out front.

  “Good idea, good to get his opinion,” Sewell intoned, putting on his hat and grabbing a silver-topped cane that, I thought, made him look like Mr. Peanut. “She’s worse, you think?” he said, and I thought I heard a bit of hope in his voice.

  “She’s fevered and uncomfortable,” she said, squeezing her hands together as if she were praying. “And unable to keep anything down. Maybe Dr. Westbrook has a draft of something that could help settle her—”

  “No!” I shouted from my spot in the front parlor, where I’d been half polishing one doorknob. All three in the foyer turned to stare at me.

  “I don’t care for servants eavesdropping,” Mr. Sewell flashed to my mother. (This struck me as quite funny, as that is all that servants do.)

  Ma glared at me, but I couldn’t chance the doctor prescribing bromides again and derailing the process of clearing out Rose’s system. I jumped in before she could chide me. “Ma, don’t you always say to sweat a fever? ‘The fire that purifies,’ you say. You don’t want to stop the body doing its natural work, now do you?”

  Ma pursed her lips and finally assented. “That is true. It’s what I’d do for my own children.”

  Mr. Sewell looked annoyed. I knew he hoped to get the doctor in to show off how “sick” Rose was, to continue to build his case for her incapacity. But he still needed Ma on his side, for her to think he thought the world of her.

  “Then it’s settled,” he said reluctantly. “But keep an eye over it, Mrs. O’Doyle, and don’t hesitate to call Dr. Westbrook if you think she takes a turn!”

  As he turned to go, I couldn’t help but think he stopped to regard me a split second longer than a man like him should regard a parlormaid. Which is to say, a split second at all.

  —

  With Rose under her care, Ma was distracted and left more of the work to our discretion. This did nothing to inspire more rigor in my work.

  Instead, I spent my energies on plotting Mrs. Sewell’s escape, once she was well and clear of the poisons clouding her system.

  You might wonder why I didn’t go straight to the police. That’s what they do in movies, and it’s the first thing they teach you at school: If you’re lost, find a policeman.

  First of all, one couldn’t help but notice that our block had more cops than you could shake a stick at: reserving an unofficial parking spot for Mr. Sewell’s Duesenberg, moving along any riffraff, working a beat that seemed to consist of this block and this block only. Something told me that Mr. Sewell gave gladly and generously to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.

  Second of all, there was the kidnapping.

  Last year, I’d had a fight with Ma over my plan to join an overnight campout at Breezy Point. A kid from the neighborhood had an aunt with a summer cottage there, and we were all going out on a Friday night to swim and fish and build a bonfire and sleep under the stars. Sheila Morrison said she’d say I was staying at her house, but then a particularly affecting homily by Father Riordan had her examining her conscience and confessing all to her mother, including some past capers of ours that really could have stayed buried.

  The neighborhood party line ensured Ma knew everything, and she vowed she’d lock me in my room if she had to. But then Mr. Sewell had one of his late visitors that Friday night which required Ma’s attention, and when she wasn’t home by supper, I parked the boys at Mrs. Annunziata’s and headed to the A train.

  I stayed at the shore all weekend, even though it poured a cold, sodden rain as if it were winter in Belfast. Eventually, the girls drifted home in twos, bored by the boys’ efforts to make their own gin and impress us with their poor wrestling skills.

  On the train home on Sunday, my stomach churned to think of the lashing I’d get—for lying, for abandoning the twins, for ruining my mother’s one day off, for making her “sick with worry,” the most common illness up and down the streets of Brooklyn, it seemed. I feared less the punishment than the row that I knew would go into the night, and the leaden guilt that would stay with me for days, maybe weeks, afterward.

  I was walking from the train in a dark downpour when I passed the local police precinct. And my feet seemed to just carry me inside, to that dry, well-lighted hall, where the red-haired cops were all familiar faces from Daddo’s haunts. Before I knew it, I had a blanket thrown around me, a mug of tea in my hands, and a tale spilled out that impressed even me with its lurid details and scope, a tale of chloroform-wielding kidnappers and rope and dank basements and a mysterious woman masterm
ind named “Mexicali Rose.”

  The station went into an uproar; phone calls were made, and wires were sent. When I heard the examination room door open, I was sure it would be a journalist from the New York Times, but my stomach dropped to see a frowning Ma. In the end, I wasn’t helped by the fact that I’d lifted most of the details of my story from something I’d read in the tabloids, a lady preacher from California who’d pulled the same stunt.

  So any credibility I would ever have with the New York Police Department had been destroyed. For life.

  —

  In the rescue of Rose, I’d get no help from New York’s Finest. So I examined doorways and windows, looking for an exit that might go unnoticed. Once, when McCagg was in the washroom, I tried quickly to pick the lock to Rose’s room as I’d seen Declan Leary do once, but Mr. Sewell had invested in some kind of lock that already knew the tricks of a girl’s hairpin. I looked for opportunities to steal Ma’s keys, thinking that if I could get a copy made of the key to Rose’s room, I could let her out myself. If I distracted McCagg. And Ma, and all the rest of the household staff. And Mr. Sewell.

  It drove me crazy, when I took my quick midday dinner in the servants’ hall by the kitchen, to hear the subway roaring by somewhere behind the basement walls. I imagined tunneling through somehow, putting Rose on a subway train, and sending her to the end of the N line, somewhere in outer Queens.

  I studied Mr. Sewell’s erratic schedule to the best of my ability, looking for times when he would reliably be out without stopping home to change clothes for the club or take a morning call to Munich. Harder still to predict were those late-night dinners with his mysterious parade of visitors: portly gents who arrived in limousines that parked around the block; showgirls who poured themselves out of taxicabs; characters who wore their coat collars up and their hats down over their eyes.

  Alphonse served at those dinners, but refused to let a word pass on what transpired. In fact, since he’d told me about his life in the Old Country, he had withdrawn, and I got the sense that he regretted saying as much as he had. His eyes followed me as I skulked in the shadows of the house, testing window locks and rattling doors, but whenever I turned to face him, he looked away, refusing to meet my eye.

  By the time the worst of Rose’s illness had passed, we’d seen Thanksgiving come and go, and I had the skeleton of a plan.

  I detailed it in tiny writing on a scrap of paper that I folded and folded and folded again, as if preparing a note to pass under Sister Ignatius’s wary eye. It was a simple plan, involving me making a ruckus in front of the house one day, drawing everyone’s attention, while Rose smashed a window in her room and escaped over the roof. Although I wasn’t sure how she’d get down exactly. Or where she’d go. Or what she’d do next.

  By now, I was an expert at distracting Bridie’s flittering attention through random observations and compliments that I’d volley her way while she prepared Rose’s meal trays. When she turned her back, heaping, I noted, spoonfuls of that benign sugar into Rose’s tea, I slipped the bit of paper underneath the slight hollow that formed between Rose’s delicate dishware and the silver tray on which it rested.

  Up went the dumbwaiter, and because I couldn’t risk Bridie finding Rose’s response, I stuck by her side, diving back into the dishes. “Well, isn’t this a treat to have some company!” Bridie kept exclaiming as I scrubbed at Chef’s mounting piles, while he swore under his breath in French at me, afraid I’d corrupt Bridie somehow with my propensity to drop crockery.

  “Oh, let me, Bridie dear.” I leaped when I heard the familiar squeak of the dumbwaiter, making its return descent. “You take a load off those poor toesies, and let me fix you a cup of tea.”

  “Well, I never!” she exclaimed, settling down with a sense of luxury on a nearby stepladder. “Really, Martha, a girl could get used to this!”

  But any tea was forgotten as I tore apart the lunch tray. The note was gone, but the tray—except for toast crumbs and a few soupy, soggy parsnips—was empty, devoid of any response.

  Chapter

  18

  Bridie found herself a partner in dishes all the way into December, as I kept poring over the returned trays. I sent up other notes—first adapting my scheme slightly, then spitballing new plans one after another—but received nothing in return.

  I shortly found out why.

  “Dear me, no,” Ma answered when I casually asked if Mrs. Sewell ever sent any letters. “Not since she tried to stab Mr. McCagg with a fountain pen last year. No pens or pencils for her, I’m afraid. Dr. Westbrook wanted to prescribe bromides after that. But I told Mr. Sewell no. Not after what I saw happen to Florence Adamo—well. I simply told Mr. Sewell what could happen if she abused those bromides. And he agreed with me—it was too dangerous to start down that road.”

  So Ma didn’t know that Mr. Sewell had secured for his wife a whole cookie jar of “special sugar,” dosed out several generous spoonfuls at a time, and turned his maids into dispensaries.

  “Calm and quiet, that’s all she needs. And look at her now. Quiet as a mouse, she just sits nicely and studies her pictures all day. It’s the nicest Christmas present we could have gotten.”

  So Rose was thinking, too, quietly plotting alongside—or rather above—me.

  I kept sending notes. And I waited for Rose to send me an answer, in the form of those pictures she studied so nicely.

  —

  I waited through Christmas, with its holly and bright paper in the shops and glittered cardboard angels that fluttered on our drafty windows.

  Despite promises in his last postcard, Daddo didn’t show, although he did send his friend Stan Pettite (a little person whose Mini-Hercules act “astounds with feats of strength!”) to deliver oranges for me and the twins and a ham, which Stan promptly invited himself to help us eat.

  Ma and I gave the boys baseball gloves. They gave us some chewing gum they’d bought at the drugstore at the last minute. I gave Ma some cologne I’d bought at Dr. Murphy’s shop. She gave me a sensible black tam that looked just right with a maid’s uniform. I knew she’d stayed up nights knitting it.

  “It’s very becoming on you,” she nodded, catching a stray strand of hair and returning it to its rightful place. “Very grown-up. I’m only sorry it will cover the lovely hair comb Mr. Sewell gave you.”

  Mr. Sewell—or rather, Ma—had chosen hair combs for all the female servants in the house. Styled in the shape of butterflies, their wings shone with cloisonné enamel in autumn colors: red, orange, russet. The men had gotten tie pins.

  “That’s real gold, that is,” she said, giving me a kiss on the head where the comb belonged, then turning to climb into her bed. “Mr. Sewell doesn’t skimp when it comes to those he values.”

  I knew Mr. Sewell’s definition of “value” differed greatly from mine. What exactly were we being rewarded for? What did he hope we’d “yield”?

  As Ma reached for Jane Eyre, I knew she’d dream of poor Mr. Sewell and his lonely Christmas. I would dream of Rose.

  —

  I waited and plotted through New Year’s, pushing past the throngs on the subway bound for Times Square. In this bright new year of 1929, the whole city seemed a party fueled by an extra dash of optimism (and a little bathtub gin). And why not? The stock market bounced as frenetically as the Charleston, but like the hemlines, kept going up. Movies now had sound, thanks to Steamboat Willie, and it was only a matter of time before we knew what Charlie Chaplin sounded like. And Mr. Hoover, waiting for his March inauguration, kept promising chickens in everyone’s pots.

  I eyed the merrymakers wistfully as they headed to their festivities. But as it turned out, the new year had its own party in store for me. And the opportunity I’d been looking for, in the form of a bankrupt British socialite-poetess by the name of Lady Florenzia Smith-Smythe.

  —

  Influenza was batt
ering New York that winter, and Ma ruled both home and work by her seesawing health codes: Wash your hands! Keep your hands dry! Air out this room! Don’t catch a chill! Get some fresh air in your lungs! Close the door before you catch your death! Ma ordered Chef to juice all the oranges from the trees in the courtyard.

  Despite the precautions, members of the Sewell household started falling like tin soldiers, starting with Mr. Sewell. He demanded a bed made up in his office, where he sat for a week, shouting down the telephone and commanding an army of reporters who made pilgrimage to his bedside, all the while roaring, “I am not sick! Our health is our greatest wealth! A sound body is the child of a sound mind!”

  Next went Ma, her position on the front lines finally catching up with her. By sheer willpower, she crept through each day, shuffling between the Sewells, meeting each of their needs between frequent rests on the stairs. “I just need a cup of tea,” she kept insisting breathlessly, her face ghostly gray. I offered to take over her duties with Rose, reaching for her keys. But Ma said she could handle it, if I could take over the menu planning with Chef?

  But Chef was toppled, too, and then Bridie, leaving me to fix not only Rose’s meals but those for the demanding Mr. Sewell. Luckily chicken soup was all that anyone wanted—servant meals included—so I boiled up all the chickens in the icebox, and when we ran out of those, I simply called down to Katz’s Delicatessen and had them deliver it by the gallon.

  By the time Chef could stand upright again, Alphonse was down. But by now, Mr. Sewell was up and puttering, and I got a taste of what his fleet of reporters must put up with every day. Demands for items—newspapers from Hindoostan, fresh handkerchiefs, the address of the attorney general, some health elixir only sold in San Francisco—were lobbed constantly, and admittedly I hid as much as possible, hoping the demands would fly over me and stick to some other barely standing soul.