by Tom Murphy
Christine Nilsson tossed her dark, strikingly pretty head so that the single long braid cunningly entwined with daisies fairly flew back over her elegant shoulder. She laughed a rippling, mountain-brook kind of laugh. “It was, then, not a failure?” They were alone now, sitting in the small library having cordials, at nearly three o’clock in the morning after Madame Nilsson’s little concert.
Lily smiled at her guest: she had come to feel close to the Swedish woman in these few days. Christine knew how to enjoy life, how to laugh, how not to take herself seriously despite the fame and the money and the endless hours of practicing. And she sang the way Lily had always imagined the angels singing, with a clear true voice whose power was perhaps less in sheer volume than in the vast artistry with which Madame Nilsson projected it, burning each phrase unforgettably into your memory. Lily had never especially liked opera, although Brooks kept a box for business friends. Now, hearing the legendary Nilsson, Lily awoke for the first time to the potential of great singing.
“It will be remembered forever, Madame Nilsson,” said Brooks.
“And tomorrow,” Lily added with a laugh, “half the women in San Francisco will be braiding their hair as you do, or buying false braids.”
“Forever?” Christine Nilsson smiled the smile of one who has, perhaps, seen forever come and go more than once. “I am happy, in any event, if I please you kind people.”
A hundred thousand dollars’ worth of kindness, Lily thought, and well worth it. For that was the fee that Chaffee, Hudner had negotiated with Madame Nilsson’s agent in New York: one hundred thousand dollars for one evening’s performance, and all expenses paid, and the fee never to be discussed. Lily would have gladly paid—how much?—to see the expression on Mamie Dickinson’s face, and on Stanford’s.
“I must,” Lily said, “tell you a secret. Tonight I won a bet.”
“Which I,” said Brooks, laughing, “must pay, or I will never hear the end of it.”
“What was this famous bet?”
“A certain woman…”
“Who shall be nameless.” Brooks laughed louder.
“…thought I was not elegant enough to visit, and Brooks bet me a cottage if ever she came here.”
“Which proves, madame,” said Brooks, “that you are irresistible.”
“Let me guess,” said Christine, entering in the spirit of their laughter. “She is not a nice woman. With many rubies and no chin, and a face like one who has swallowed a rotten egg?”
“Exactly. That’s Mamie to the bone.”
“Not,” repeated the soprano, with some emphasis, “nice.”
“Why do you say that? I give you great credit for your instincts, madame, for you are quite right. She is not a nice woman—on the contrary, quite cruel if she can be.”
“Indeed.” Christine Nilsson smiled, sipped her apricot cordial, and spoke. “After supper—which was delicious!—this one, this Mamie, finds me, to my sorrow, in a corner. She smiles the smile of a cat who has stolen little fishes from the fishbowl. And she whispers something into my ear that I do not like whispered.”
There was a pause, for both Lily and Brooks could well imagine what Mamie had said, and they were disgusted by such behavior under their own roof.
It was the soprano who broke the silence, and in a way that startled Lily and her husband.
Nilsson laughed, a loud, sudden, fishwife’s laugh. “You are,” said Christine, “afraid. Do not be. Is not necessary. Shall I tell you what that one said, and what I have replied?”
“Do.” It took more strength than Lily imagined to say that one small word.
“She whispers, that you are…something not nice.”
“A whore, is probably what she said.”
“A whore.” Christine’s nose wrinkled at the word, and Lily thought: She’ll leave right now, and scandalize us before all the world—that is the price of my boldness. “Well,” continued the singer, “I must say this did not produce the response I am thinking she wanted, that one.”
“What did you say?” Brooks spoke softly, and there was no laughter in his voice now.
“First, a little pause…for the drama, you see, my stage training. Then I laugh—ha-ha-ha, trilling, a merry little laugh, and then I take her arm, thus…” Christine rose and took Lily’s arm in a most seductive manner. “And then I say loudly, ‘But, madame, I too am whoring, all the time, this singing is but a hobby for me.’ She ran, this nasty woman.”
Brooks roared. Lily, laughing too, rose and kissed her guest on the cheek.
“That was a brave and very kind thing to do, madame, and I will never forget you for it.”
Nilsson laughed, and suddenly the empty halls of three o’clock resounded with it. They said good night then, and, laughing still, climbed the great stairway to bed.
Undressing in the pale light of emerging dawn, Lily found herself laughing again.
“I would give,” she said softly, “almost anything to have seen that.”
“Madame Nilsson is a great lady.” Brooks came to her, and enfolded her in his strong arms, and whispered into her ear: “But no one is as great as my Lily.”
“Not even Lily Cigar?”
“My Lily,” he said, between kisses, stroking her, finally sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her to the bed, “is a thousand Lilys, and they are all wonderful, and there is no way I can ever love even one of them enough.”
“Try…” she whispered, praying that, in the smoky blue light of early dawn, he wouldn’t see her tears. “Oh, please try, my darling.”
And he tried.
46
Lily sat on the veranda of her little cottage high on Lily’s Hill, writing a long, long list.
Social lists had no power to harm her now, especially not this one. How much had altered in the two years since the house was built in San Francisco, and how delightfully! Here she sat, on the porch of the beautiful little cottage Brooks had built for her, true to his bet, starting the very week after her triumph over Mamie Dickinson and the prudes who had hung on Mamie’s social apron strings.
Lily had always been happy with Brooks, but that happiness had ever been mixed with her fears and her doubts, with her sense of inadequacy that seemed to grow deeper as their position in the world grew more prosperous and commanding.
The evening with Christine Nilsson had changed her outlook. Many of Lily’s old fears had faded then, to be replaced by the astonishing discovery that she really cared much less for acceptance in the eyes of the world than she had imagined: it was like watching a children’s game from a distance, for the prizes to be won seemed insignificant in proportion to the effort involved. Lily knew there were still people in the town who would never really accept her, or forgive her, and it seemed to matter hardly at all: a priceless lesson had been learned that night.
And here she sat, happy task, writing the guest list for Katie’s wedding, sure that whoever she might ask would come.
It seemed impossible, but here it was 1878 and Kate was twenty-one, an advanced age, some people thought, for a young lady to still go unmarried.
Yet Katie had her mother’s determination, and determined she was to finish the course of education at the Mount Holyoke Seminary. That being done, her engagement to young Dane Atkinson, of the New York Atkinsons, would be culminated in the finest wedding Brooks and Lily could provide. Which, Lily reflected with irrepressible pride, would be very fine indeed.
Chaffee Produce was producing revenues at an ever-increasing rate, but for all that, Brooks’s other activities were doing as well, some of them better.
Lily’s heart and the true home of her mind’s voyaging would forever be the ranch. Yet they seemed to be spending more and more time in town these days, and Lily found herself minding that much less than she had ever dared to hope.
After the triumph of the Christine Nilsson concert, invitations had poured into the big house on Nob Hill. Lily and Brooks were selective about accepting them, but the inevitable result was
that their social life was busier now than it ever had been.
And there was the orphanage.
Lily had long wanted to involve herself in some useful work, and now that the ranch was organized to a fare-thee-well by Fred Baker, and now that their social position in the town seemed assured, a kind of restlessness came over her.
This was a new and unpleasant sensation: to have time and leisure and no specific way to fill the long golden afternoons. Brooks was more and more involved in his office, and traveling to find new lands to buy, new possibilities for investment. The boys were at school now almost all day long. Lily began a systematic investigation of the schools, hospitals, and orphanages of the town, and before very long reached the conclusion that none of the existing orphanages were satisfactory.
And she decided then and there to found her own.
The memory of her own days at St. Patrick’s orphanage on Prince Street in New York was vivid for Lily to this day. And while the nuns and priests had surely been kind to her, and the place had been clean and well-run in many respects, it was far from ideal.
The teaching, to name one example, had been slapdash: a child could count himself lucky if St. Paddy’s taught him the bare essentials of reading and writing, much less science or history or any of the other subjects that might help an orphan make his way in the world. Lily had, indeed, learned to sew a fine seam there, and to embroider nicely, but these things came from her own interest rather than the guidance of St. Paddy’s.
Lily began to dream of an ideal orphanage, and being Lily, she soon found means to start this dreaming along the road to reality.
It would, to begin with, be in the countryside. There would be trees and green lawns and maybe even a small working farm. There would be, instead of one large jail-like building, clusters of individual houses, each holding no more than ten or twelve children, each the permanent home of a married, teaching couple. Thus the militaristic atmosphere that contaminated so many otherwise worthy institutions could be largely avoided. The children would have close supervision, a familylike atmosphere, and, God willing, love. There would be sports and games and music and a regular program of serious study. There would be useful training for the older children, each according to his or her abilities. Some might even go on to college!
In this, as in all her plans, Lily had the full and enthusiastic support of Brooks.
“I can’t think,” he had said when she proudly showed him her prospectus, all neatly written out in great detail, “of a better thing to do, my dear, and anything I can do that might help will surely be done.”
“It will come down to a question of money, and quite a lot of it, I’m afraid.”
“You and I can give a handsome sum to get the place started, then we’ll see. There are many ways to raise money for a good cause.”
“The hundred-dollar dinners, you mean? I’ve always hated those.”
“We’ll see. The important thing is to find the site, and find the right people to teach there.”
The very next day Brooks set up a special bank account at Wells Fargo for the Fergus and Mary Malone Academy. Lily insisted that nowhere would the sad word “orphan” appear in the academy’s literature, although every child enrolled would indeed be at the least half-orphaned. They found a good site high on a hill in San Mateo, close enough to town to get there in under an hour on the new coastal road, more than one hundred acres, and not expensive, since it wasn’t really prime farmland. Then came the discussions with architects, the approval of plans, the interviewing of teaching couples, administrators, and other workers to run the establishment smoothly.
The children would come by referral from any number of churches—the Malone Academy would be nondenominational—schools, and even the police.
In less than a year the academy was opened, while still abuilding, with just three of its houses finished and thirty-one children enrolled.
Before it was finished, Lily and Brooks had spent more than a quarter-million dollars on the academy, and the endless details of organizing it seemed to fill more hours than there were in the day.
But Lily had only to visit the academy and see the blooming faces of the children to be rewarded out of all proportion to the time and energy and money she had invested there.
Sometimes, impulsively, she’d take one of the new arrivals by the hand and show the child his new home. The new ones were almost always speechless with fear, and this was a feeling that Lily remembered very well, even after all these years.
“You must remember, dear, that no one here will harm you. We love children, and that is why the Malone Academy exists.”
“They won’t harm us, then, or put us to work in the mills?”
The child was a boy, thin as a sparrow, maybe seven years old.
“Nothing like that, Joe. If you were to be very, very naughty, I’m not saying you might not get spanked properly. But you’ll have classes, too, and learn useful things: see, there’s the schoolhouse, we’re just finishing it, and over there, the playground, and there, just over the hill, is the farm, where you can learn how animals live, and even milk the cows one day, maybe.”
She saw the wonder blooming in the boy’s eyes like a flower, and felt his fear melting, and at times like that Lily thought that if she had done nothing but this in her life, she would have done a good thing.
In imagining the academy, Lily had gone by her own sure instincts about what sort of environment would be the happiest for an orphaned child. She had remembered bitterly the shock of her separation from Fergy in St. Paddy’s, and it was considered a radical innovation that brothers and sisters be kept together under the same roof, and separated as little as possible. Before many months had passed, Lily found that she had created a model orphanage, that educators had begun writing about it, visiting the place, and holding it up as an example for orphanages everywhere.
“Model be damned,” she said, laughing, reading one such complimentary article in a learned journal. “It’s no more than good common sense, that’s all.”
“Common for you, my love, is anyone else’s rare.” Brooks looked up from his breakfast of coddled eggs and sausages and smiled. “I’m very proud of you, Lily—I hope you know that.”
She said nothing, but just reached across the small table and touched his hand, as if for luck.
The academy had consumed the year 1877 in one quick gulp, it seemed to Lily. And now that the academy was on a relatively even keel in its second year of life, Lily’s energies were focused on fund-raising to secure the academy’s endowment, and on the forthcoming wedding of Katie.
Kate, modest as ever, had wanted a simple family wedding at the ranch, and her mother agreed. Brooks, bursting with pride in both of his womenfolk, wanted to make a bigger splash in town.
The inevitable compromise consisted in giving Katie her way about the ceremony itself, which would be so intimate as to virtually duplicate Lily’s own wedding to Brooks. But it would be preceded two days earlier by a grand supper party and dance in the mansion on Nob Hill. And it was over this guest list that Lily was toiling now, high on her hill at the ranch.
Kate had missed out on the social life that lay waiting for Neddy and little Jon like a gilded trap.
Growing up on the ranch, she lacked the coveys of girlfriends that a girl in her position might be expected to have. She was bringing three girlfriends from the seminary to be bridesmaids, however, and young Dane’s party would include his brother and another college friend, not to mention the senior Atkinsons and Mr. Atkinson’s brother. It would be a jolly party on the two private railroad cars Brooks had ordered for the cross-country journey.
And they were arriving in just three weeks! Lily looked at her list and wrote faster. It seemed that the wedding day was gaining on her, that there were a million details yet to be considered, from the wine and the flowers to the food and the music. She knew, from experience, that these things would seem, to their guests, to fall into place apparently by magic, and that th
e only magic involved would be plenty of hard work on the part of Mrs. Brooks Chaffee herself. Well, it could hardly be in a happier cause.
Yet the wedding meant losing Katie, for they would be living in the East, in New York, where Dane would become a partner in his family’s law firm. Well, the trains were getting much more reliable these days, and there was even talk of a canal to be cut in Colombia or Panama that would drastically reduce the sailing time. When the boys were a little older, long visits would be possible in both directions. Kate and her children could come to California in the summer, perhaps.
Kate and her children! Lily laughed out loud at her surprise. To be a grandmother. Well, and why not—she had celebrated her fortieth birthday last year. A grandmother. Lily Cigar a granny, and quite a respectable one too, thank you very much. How old Sophie Delage would roar with laughter at the thought.
And suddenly a rush of the old fears came back at Lily, chilling her happiness. She wondered, but had never dared to ask, what Kate might have told her fiancé about her mother’s past. And would he care, and would his family be scandalized?
Well, Katie was a grown girl now, loyal and smart, and Lily trusted her instincts. If anyone could find a way to be true to both parents and lover, it would be Kate. Frowning just slightly, Lily went back to her lists.
The next day found Lily and her lists in town again.
Now the generalship would begin in earnest, and all of the final arrangements for the ball and the wedding itself must be made and confirmed. Luckily, Kate being away so much of the year, Maison de Ville had a dressmaker’s dummy of the girl, and so the wedding dress was nearly completed, awaiting only the final fitting. Lily smiled at the thought of her Katie wearing the fine linen scarf that was all they owned from her maternal grandmother’s trousseau. Something old, something new…Well, the old pain, the ancient shame, all seemed buried now and nearly forgotten, and everything that was new had a special, happy glow.
Lily was in the silver closet counting forks when the maid brought her the letter.
