The Gallery

by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

  By five o’clock, I was dead on my feet, but Ma was deader.

  “Ma, if you don’t get some rest, you’re going to end up in your eternal rest. I’m not kidding, Ma. Let me put you in a cab.”

  She closed her eyes as if she might kip out standing right there, talking to me.

  “I know,” she squeaked. “I’ll—”

  A phone rang in Mr. Sewell’s office. A few moments later, the master came out, his robe flapping over a collarless shirt and his nose still red. Assistants and subordinates streamed like ants from behind him.

  “Mrs. O’Doyle, good, there you are! I’m expecting a guest for dinner. Something elegant, to impress. Let’s say three—no, four courses. At eight o’clock. Good!” He clapped his hands and spun back around, slamming the office door behind him.

  Ma took a deep, rattling breath. “All right, now, there’s Chef to prepare—”

  “Ma, no!” I grabbed her by the shoulders. “This is barmy. I’ll tell Chef. Go home!”

  “But Alphonse isn’t—”

  “I’ll serve at the table. I can do it! I’ve got a clean apron! And it’s forks on the left, fish knives on the outside, and all that.” Or was it fish knives on the inside?

  Ma nodded weakly and hobbled toward the back stairs. I wasn’t sure if she’d agreed or was just nodding off. Either way, I stuck my head out the door and asked Jake, the cop out front, to hail her a taxi. Or to come get me if she didn’t appear in the next few minutes.

  I rubbed my hands together like a picture show villain. I finally had a front row seat at New York’s most exclusive—and mysterious—dinner venue.

  —

  Maybe it was post-flu psychosis, or maybe it was the hot brandies he whipped up for himself at the stove. But Chef was all smiles as he embarked on a meal for a king and barely seemed to register that the mustached man usually brandishing the silver trays was now a flushed redheaded girl.

  Mr. Sewell seemed in good spirits, too, as he rushed forward to greet the fashionably late Miss Smith-Smythe. Now smartly dressed and shaved, but still with a nose like a stop sign, he pushed past me to be the one to take her coat, a full-length mink, complete with mink feet ready to scurry away as they brushed against the floor.

  It was like the lights going up on a picture show, and Miss Smith-Smythe was its star. Everything about her sparkled: her bobbed hair was platinum, her dress an electric peacock blue, her fingers a collection of light-scattering jewels.

  “Darling!” she sang out, planting a kiss on each cheek, and then repeating the action. “It’s just as I expected, darling. A fairy tale! Show me everything!”

  “Something to drink?” said Mr. Sewell, tossing the coat practically over my head like a coatrack. “Martha, get Miss Smith-Smythe—

  “Darling! Miss Smith-Smythe is my second cousin who works at a typewriter. Please—it’s Lady Florenzia.”

  Mr. Sewell blushed. Blushed! “Ah, Martha, please get Lady Florenzia a drink.”

  I didn’t know what Mr. Sewell wanted me to offer, as the house was as dry as a dinosaur bone.

  But Lady Florenzia sized this up instinctively.

  “Do you have tomato juice?” She said it to-mah-to, like Ma. But not like Ma. “I’m only drinking tomato juice these days. It’s all anyone is drinking in Hollywood at the moment. Did I tell you I just got back?”

  She steered him to the front parlor, and I left him to give her the tour.

  By the time I caught up, they were in the gallery in front of the Rembrandt. I handed over the tomato juice like the maid handing over the goblet of poison, but the irony seemed to escape Lady F.

  “Just look at this space!” Tomato juice splashed over onto the floor as she gestured, and I noted the spot for cleaning tomorrow. “And it leads to the dining room? And to the ballroom?” She flung open the doors opposite and strolled into the great mirrored room, flicking on lights. You could almost see the dancers swirling.

  “It’s so deliciously empty, my dear. Like King Tut’s tomb, but with space for an orchestra. Oh, it’s just too too perfect!” She wrapped herself around Mr. Sewell’s arm, while I pressed myself against a wall like a good servant: at the ready, but hoping they’d forget my existence. “How dare you keep this to yourself all this time! Like a naughty boy, refusing to share his toys.” She wagged her bejeweled finger at him.

  Mr. Sewell flushed. “It’s a nuisance, believe me. My father-in-law’s idea: throw a lot of gewgaws and marble around, pay people to polish it all day, and then invite a bunch of suck-ups over to congratulate you on it.” Despite his best efforts, he finally pulled out his handkerchief to blow his nose noisily. “What a waste. On what I spend on staff alone, I could put that money in the stock market and double it tomorrow.”

  I was tempted to walk out then and there and let him get his own tomato juice. But then I wouldn’t get to eavesdrop.

  Miss Smith-Smythe pulled a dramatic frown. “But then I wouldn’t have anywhere for my party.” She sulked.

  “What party?” Mr. Sewell glared.

  “Well, you see,” and here the lady sashayed out to the center of the ballroom, all too aware of the way the mirrors bounced her sparkling image around the room, “I’ve planned the most spectacular Mardi Gras masquerade next month. But now Mildred van der Hyden is saying that she’ll throw one, too, the same night. And she managed to get the Ritz, and the St. Regis is having construction for the next month. So you see,”—she stuck out her rouged lower lip—“I have a party, but no place to go.”

  “This isn’t a place for parties,” he said sternly, then cleared his throat. “I have . . . uh, business concerns here I can’t have disrupted.”

  “Well, we’re speaking the same language, darling!” She strolled back over to what the three-card-monte guys on the street called the mark. “That’s why I’m here, to talk business.”

  Mr. Sewell tucked his hands in his trouser pockets and chuckled. “Do you propose to rent it out like a Knights of Columbus banquet hall?”

  Lady Florenzia laughed her own birdlike laugh. “Rent? What do I look like, a grocer? I’m talking about a trade.” She put her arm through his again. “Of something you might value.”

  My stomach churned. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what she proposed to trade. Yet, despite myself, I leaned in.

  Lady Florenzia flicked a glance at me. “But perhaps—”

  “No, don’t worry about that,” Mr. Sewell said hurriedly, “go on.”

  I guessed that was me.

  “Certain people at this party,” she continued in a hushed voice that forced him to lean in, “might have certain information. Information that, depending on how you sing it, could make the market do a little dance, just for you.

  “But!” She laughed that tinkling laugh again. “They’re not the sort to get comfortable for the first boy who buys them a drink. They need to be romanced. Shown a good time—no, a bloody good time. They need to be hosted in a spectacular way, in a way that shows them that you”—she walked her fingers up his arm—“you understand that they aren’t just any source. They’re the plum of all prize plums.”

  And here their heads bent together, murmuring something so sensitive even a servant girl couldn’t be trusted with it.

  “Ah, I see.” Mr. Sewell nodded, and you could see the gears turning in his head. “And just what qualifies as spectacular, in these sources’ books?”

  It was just the invitation the lady was waiting for. “Well!” She broke off and began striding around the room, her hands conducting an invisible orchestra of lavish spectacle. “In honor of Carnival, we throw a real-live carnival! Masks and costumes, obviously. Coney Island games in all the rooms, but instead of tat we do real prizes—watches and bracelets and other trinkets. I’ve got a line with Tiffany. Cotton candy stands and roasted peanuts, along with other, uh, libations.” She cocked her head, thinking. “The
ceiling in here might be high enough for a modified trapeze act. But! An orchestra in here for dancing, that goes without saying. I’d get the band from the Cotton Club, and the dancers, too. And we’d do a scavenger hunt at midnight with a real-live treasure chest at the end.”

  Mr. Sewell looked simultaneously impressed and horrified. Perhaps he was adding up the bill for this spectacular. But Lady Florenzia kept going.

  “And let me handle the guest list. I’ve got the Fitzgeralds and the Pickfords locked up, and the New Yorker crowd is always good for a laugh. Eddie Cantor can usually be persuaded to do a set, if you throw in a little sweetening, and I’m sure I could convince Douglas Fairbanks to fly in from California for the occasion.” She came back to give Mr. Sewell’s arm a squeeze again. “Trust me, darling. The fodder for your paper’s gossip column alone will sell a million papers.”

  This seemed to turn the tide for the businessman. “And your colleagues, the, uh, crown jewels?”

  “At the top of my guest list, my dear. We’ll set up a war room, just for you and any special guests.”

  Mr. Sewell smiled like a lion looking at a lame zebra. “Well, then, it sounds like we have details to hammer out. Shall we retire to the dining room?”

  Lady Florenzia took a single sip of her glass of to-mah-to juice and set it down with a clang on my tray, as if I were a coffee table.

  “Oh, I’m not hungry anyway. Let’s go out and celebrate, darling!” She grabbed his arm and pulled him as she swept out of the room. “Louis Armstrong’s playing a private set tonight at a place in the Village. . . .”

  My heart raced. A party with movie stars, right here! A masquerade, no less, with costumes. With guests milling and circulating and too occupied with their own partying to notice who came or went.

  A perfect opportunity to spring Rose loose.

  I had to make a plan. I had to somehow get word to Rose. I had to clean up the tomato juice. I had to tell Chef that his four-course creation would once again end up cold and untouched.

  But first I had to fall facedown on the floor.

  I had the flu.

  Chapter

  19

  For three feverish days, I lay in bed. Whenever I opened my eyes, I didn’t know whether I’d be greeted by the light of day or the black of night, whether it would be Ma wiping down my limbs with a damp rag or Mrs. Annunziata spooning soupy rice into my mouth.

  I drifted in and out of dreams. One in particular kept coming back for me, pulling me by the hand. Over and over I was trapped in a labyrinth of rooms, the walls covered with pictures of gods and goddesses who whispered to draw closer and cackled when I pressed my ear to their flawless painted mouths. I’d run for the door, just to discover that each door led only to another room, and each window was covered to the top with dirt, the sound of a subway train rumbling somewhere through the cold, sleeping earth.

  When the fever broke, and I found myself in bed, Ma sitting in the corner humming and darning by lamplight, it took me a moment to remember whether I was a girl named Martha or Rose.

  Whoever I was, I had to find the exit.

  —

  As soon as I could stand, I insisted on going back to work. I could tell Ma was impressed by my newfound work ethic, but of course, it wasn’t that. I had to get word to Rose of the new plan.

  As it turns out, I didn’t have to.

  Ma must have told her mistress about the upcoming party, whether in excitement or complaints. And according to the painting Rose sent down shortly thereafter, Rose landed in the same place as me.

  The regal Sophonisba and her poison chalice were gone, cleared out along with the toxins in Rose’s blood. In its place was a single painting. At only about ten inches high, the tiny canvas made the grand gallery look like it had sprouted a blemish. But unlike a pimple, the only word I could use to describe it was flat. It was as if the image wasn’t so much painted as glued together out of red, yellow, and pink scraps of paper, like a child’s handmade valentine.

  And what was the image, anyway? The label claimed them as Pierrot and Harlequin, which I knew were the names of circus performers, but it took looking at it from several angles to identify them, and one still looked more like a duck to me. And no matter how much I looked, I wasn’t sure why their noses pointed one way and their eyes another, or where one fellow’s arm started and another’s ended.

  “Picasso,” the label said. It figured that the same man who turned a pomegranate into lines and squiggles would see a circus act as a melted box of Crayolas.

  But one thing was clear: The two figures were wearing masks.

  I leaned in to listen to that pip-squeak of a painting: Let’s not call attention to ourselves, it whispered. Be inconspicuous. Be inscrutable. Find the right disguise.

  —

  From what I gathered from Ma’s grumblings, the party promised to be a boisterous affair. Half of New York had been invited, Lady Florenzia insisted: “The perfect combination of the right half, the ‘right now’ half, and the just-wrong-enough half.” Though the math didn’t add up, Lady Florenzia, who now visited daily to assess and reassess each room and yammer ever-changing plans at Ma, had no doubt of the party’s success.

  “Costumes will be de rigueur, darling,” she said as Ma waved away the smoke from her ridiculously dramatic cigarette holder. The more I studied Lady Florenzia, the more she resembled less a duchess and more a character inspired by characters mashed together from the pictures. And I was sure I’d heard her accent slip a couple of times, once when Ma—accidentally?—opened a door on her foot, and Her Ladyship uttered an oath I’d never heard outside a Brooklyn tavern.

  “We’ll turn away anyone without a costume, it’s that simple. After all, the theme is Carnival!—more specifically, Coney Island Carnival—and the dress code is Circus Chic. In my experience, it’s the costumes that inspire people to truly forget themselves. Speaking of which, did my, erm, contact get in touch?”

  I couldn’t help but look over at Ma, who took a long, deep breath over her clipboard. I was in prime eavesdropping position, polishing the mirrored walls as Lady Florenzia stalked the ballroom and shouted directions. Two Latvian sisters worked alongside me, brought in for the coming weeks to help get the house in order, and whether they didn’t understand the language or just wanted to keep their positions, they didn’t look up once from their work.

  But I was all ears.

  Ma tapped the clipboard, measuring her words before responding. “Have you spoken to Mr. Sewell about these . . . refreshments? Because Mr. Sewell is a law-abiding man, and this has been a godly house since I’ve been here.”

  Lady Florenzia stroked my mother’s arm like a child’s, in the same gesture I’d seen her use with Mr. Sewell. “Of course, my dear! And that’s why we have New York’s Finest just outside the door, making sure everything stays within these four walls. Now,” giving Ma a little side hug, “don’t fret. Mr. Sewell understands the need to entertain his guests with style. And you’re welcome to prepare some—what? Let’s say punch?—for any teetotalers in attendance. Perhaps on a table, over there.” She fluttered her sparkling hands at a dark and distant corner in the hallway.

  Ma shook her head, but ever the ideal servant, bit her tongue. Mr. Sewell had told Ma to give Lady Florenzia “free rein,” and the lady had seized those reins and was riding roughshod over the neat and honorable house Ma had helped build over the years.

  But the wilder the party’s plans, the sharper in focus my own plans became. Costumes. Dancing. Gambling. Copious quantities of dubious liquor. There would be enough distraction at this party to allow a herd of elephants to traipse through unnoticed, let alone an unassuming woman in a disguise exiting a dumbwaiter and walking out the front door.

  But what disguise exactly? What costume would allow Rose to exit unrecognized—and how would I get my hands on it? And even if she did get out the door, then what
? There was that cop outside—maybe more with the event—and there would probably be journalists from rival papers trying to get the evening’s scoop. And in the middle of February, it would be freezing, not a night for a stroll.

  “Now, entertainment,” Lady Florenzia was saying. “We’ll have a stage built here for the orchestra, and this bit here will be for dancing. And—this is too too much, you must agree—I’ve got the projectionist from The Roxy setting up in the mezzanine to project real-live moving pictures on the gallery walls! We’ll transform the art gallery into a nickelodeon!”

  She said this like it was a good thing.

  “And we have the carney games—the shoot-’em-up, the windup pitch, oh, and a dunk tank!—in the front parlors. But it feels like we just need something else, don’t you agree?”

  “A freak show!”

  As the idea took me, I leaped off my stepladder and let the vinegar-damp rag drop from my hand. “Just like on the boardwalk. You know, wandering contortionists, sword swallowers.” I cleared my throat. “A bearded lady.”

  “Oh, darling.” Lady Florenzia crossed over to me and caught up my hands in hers, as if we were long lost friends. “You’d have Scott Fitzgerald dancing with the fat lady, Dorothy Parker toasting King Hottentot, a duet with Cole Porter and a fire breather.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was shocked or delighted.

  She threw her arms around me and peppered my face with kisses. “Oh! It’s absolutely brilliant! But where to find these specimens. . . .”

  “Vaudeville,” I said too quickly, and avoided Ma’s eyes as she stared daggers at me. “Um, we know some vaudeville folks. Maybe we could convince them to do it.”

  “Well, I’ll leave it to you then, um . . .”

  “Martha.” I smiled as I wiped the lip rouge off with my sleeve. “Of course, there’s just the question of price. . . .”

  I knew with Lady Florenzia’s—or rather, Mr. Sewell’s—bottomless budget, I could convince some of Daddo’s vaudeville pals to play the freak for the night. There were The Flying Finns and the Boxing Baroulian Sisters. There was Stan, the aforementioned Mini-Hercules, who could lift up to two times his weight. There was even Frau Brunnhilde, an A-above-high-C opera singer who could serve as a fat lady in a pinch.