by John Okas
The “cheese” stands alone. Sarah is ever more remote. With an hour’s chanting to do before meals and at bedtime added to her yoga, jotting, and other daily routines, she fusses with herself more than ever. She chee-chees her mantra as she plucks her eyebrows and combs her hair, counting the strokes, until it is as smooth and soft as milk. But however reclusive Sarah’s beauty meditations, trance poses, and sexual postulations are they are never so profound or lofty that she will not put them aside whenever her five-star general contractor knocks.
“Oh, Sugar, the trouble I’m seeing getting this house in order! Today I had to fire the old house painters for being sloppy joes. Then I had to talk to some conservatives—I’ve never heard of such a folks—to see what they say about cleaning the dirt off those darn naughty murals. And what about all these electricity wires I’ve got to get going here and there. I swear, Sugar, when you don’t know about something, someone who does can really give you the razzle-dazzle. And all the while I’ve got to keep an eye on everything. It wouldn’t be bad if that’s all I had to do, but I have to cook dinner, make beds, and keep the house clean. And on top of it all I am still the baby-sitter. I’m expected to be on duty seven days and seven nights a week. I know you pay me as if I were some kind of movie star, but what good is all that darn money when I have no free time. Even the Almighty rests one day. I thought we were as rich as any people were on this whole kerflooey Freeway. Why don’t we hire some help?”
Sarah puts her arms around Laudette. “Thank you for your patience, Miss Lord. Without you taking charge I don’t know how I would have survived. And all the while I was saying those dreadful things to you. Yes, you’re a great baby-sitter, a good friend, and both Harry and I think you’re doing a wonderful job with the renovation. Why, you’re really quite a designer! I promise you that right after the holidays we’ll see about getting you all the help you deserve.”
When Sarah next sees her husband she talks to him about a staff for the house. Harry is only too happy to prove to his sanctimonious sister that the wages of sin are bliss. “Indeed if there are spies all the better. In this house of love what can they relay but reports of nuptial delight.”
Three days after the new year, Harry contacts an agency for domestic help, but leaves the hiring in the hands of Miss Lord. A fine baby-sitter, interior decorator, and contractor, Laudette has no tooth for being personnel manager. She finds something to like about everyone. What’s more, she is naturally sympathetic. As it’s hard times and everyone who comes by is hungry for a job she can’t help wishing she could hire everybody. Finally, with the exception of the cook, a chef named Shepp, an overweight one-named wonder from L’Institut de Cuisine, she chooses the hungriest. There is a general factotum and majordomo who says he’s from the Grammar School of Fine Service named Pearly Gates. Laudette gets a kick out of his name and is impressed by his bald head, monocle, and accent, a stagy, upper-crusty Brutish. Mona Monaghan is the housekeeper. She comes with a starchy, clean uniform and a fine recommendation from a “good family” uptown. And there is a pretty little girl named Kitty Cramer to help Mona and work as a prep girl for Shepp.
Except for Kitty they all have worked with one another before, and waste no time developing a common attitude about their new situation. As the Good Shepherd is true god and true man, Laudette Lord is true boss and true worker. She comes as a friend to them, a co-worker, yet they resent her and will not accept her as one of their own. Does one of their own talk back to the Mrs as if she were family and sweeten up to her by calling her “Sugar”? Does one of their own sit in the kitchen at two-thirty in the morning eating pancakes with Mister Swan? Does one of their own sleep upstairs all fancy in an antique bed in the Suite of Roses? No, the staff must stay down in the servants’ quarters where the rooms are small and have a bad smell, like a hold full of slaves.
Their resentment shows up in their work. They are servile and willing only when the Mister or the Mrs bids them. When Laudette is around the staff cuts to another corner of the house; they are never where she needs them. Mona is a snob who does everything she can to make Laudette feel the commonness of her upbringing. And almost instantly Laudette is disappointed to see that on Pearly’s tax forms he lists his name as “Wheatstraw.” He explains to her that “Gates” is just a sobriquet. His big words now perplex rather than impress her. By the end of three months she knows that the closest he comes to being from the Grammar Isle is when he leaves the Other Eden, an Inklish style pub, at closing.
“I’m really not a butler,” he boasts, “but an out-of-work thespian. If it weren’t for all the bad luck I’ve had, and other actors with connections purloining parts that should have been mine, I’d have no doubt been as eminent as Sir Edgar Humphreys.”
“No doubt, Pearly. But, gee, when you get a chance, could you come help out with the garbage in the old garage?”
The latest construction site is next to the servants’ quarters. Originally outside as part of the stables and the carriage house-garage, this space is being overhauled, rewalled, and attached to the house to serve as pantries and assorted storage cubicles. The whole week there have been grey clouds of dust hanging in Laudette’s life. Mona is a strict specialist in silverware polishing and using the feather duster. She will not touch construction debris with a ten-foot broom handle. Pearly lifts one bar, totes two pails of broken lathing, and takes a break. He’s sweet on Kitty, the cute cookie in the kitchen with the coffee. Chef cooks but the others are totally remiss; they dare Laudette to fire them, judging her too much of a mushy sap to do it.
For six days straight Miss Lord works with the dust pan and the broom cleaning up the mess of old boards and chunks of plaster left by a demolition crew, while the four of them are in the kitchen, whistling around the coffee pot. On the seventh day, Miss Lord has had it. She goes to Sarah and cries, “Sugar, thank you but no thank you for that staff. Why I’d rather lean on vipers. You should see the mess of cracked-up plaster and rotten boards those wreckers left downstairs in the old garage. And, can you believe it, that big hunk Pearly Gates leaves hauling it all for me! And Mona’s not much help, either. All she’s good for is rubbing the forks and knives shiny and dusting her way through the mystery books in the library. And the girl does nothing all day but make coffee. At least the cook worked out; he knows what he’s doing, I’ll give him that. But he’s in with them, thick as a pack of thieves. If I don’t get some support around here, I swear I’m getting on a downtown subway and going straight across the river to live with my sister Florene.”
It is a boon to Laudette that most of her family still live in Kingsborough. Having several loving homes to go to increases her bargaining leverage.
Again Sarah is not so lost that she loses sight of the fact that losing Miss Lord would be a sin.
The statuesque Madam Swan puts on a day dress and goes to the kitchen. She finds Pearly halfway through one of his daily dozen cups of coffee, making eyes at the little kitty who holds the pot.
“Mum!”
“Mister Gates, if you don’t mind, will you come with me, please.”
“Yes, Mum.”
She leads him along with Laudette to a pile of old wood, the remnants of stalls.
“Now Miss Lord is having trouble finding someone to carry those crossbeams. Surely you don’t expect her to do it by herself? All this needs to be taken out right away and by a stronger back than hers. This is what you were hired for.”
“Mum, I’m allergic to horses,” says the fair-haired Pearly.
“But there hasn’t been a horse in here for over ten years, Mister Gates.” says Sarah.
“It runs way back in my family, Mum. The Gateses are all very sensitive to animals. Every single one of us breaks out in a rash of boils and blisters at the slightest contact with anything four-legged.”
“Come on, Pearly, you’re not even a real Gates,” Laudette injects. “You’re a gosh-darn Wheatstraw.”
“Quite,” says Sarah. In the meanwhile she summons M
ona. The housekeeper’s best defense also runs along family lines. “We Monaghans have always worked for the better families, you see, the ones who have dark people to clean up such messes.” Then she adds, offhandedly, as if she were stating the obvious. “Well, menial work is in their blood.”
Instantly Laudette’s eyes light up with outrage and indignation. Dark people? She shoots a dark look at the housekeeper. Just who do you mean? Laudette’s dear old godmother was “a dark person” and many were the Sunday mornings she washed herself clean of sin and prejudice in the Dipster’s big tub, scrubbed the backs of her brothers and sisters, whatever their color, and had her back scrubbed by them.
Of course, Gloria, the present Swan heiress, is the shade of brown sugar, and might not be able to pass the housekeeper’s standards. “Miss Monaghan,” Sarah says, “in case you haven’t noticed, my daughter happens to be ‘a dark person’.”
“Sorry, Mrs, I certainly didn’t mean any offense to you or the Miss. It’s just I don’t see the Miss as dark.”
Nonplussed, but trying not to show it, Sarah turns to Laudette to hear what she should do, “Miss Lord, I see what you mean. On your say-so, I’ll fire these two for being lazy and shiftless.”
Laudette believes that they know not what they do. Her irritation gives way to feeling sorry for them. Times are tough and she would not want their unemployment on her conscience. Miss Lord helps those who help themselves, and even those who don’t. “Sugar, just tell them to work with me instead of against me and everything will be all right.”
“Did you hear that? You both have Miss Lord to thank for your jobs. If you want to continue to work here I suggest you get busy picking up this garbage.”
The staff does as they are told, but they do not thank Miss Lord. Instead, in their hearts, they harbor a hatred of her: that uppity fat woman with the gold-capped tooth who not only informs on them, but has the mammoth nerve and the warmth to forgive them. They know they would never respond in kind to her trespass.
Tin Pan Alley Cat
The playboy knows wine and song are the appetizers of love. An expert on wine, he puts together a knowledgeable “cellar” in the museum’s cavernous basement. More modest about his musical intelligence, he makes his selections with some trepidation. The equipment the recordings are to be played on, however, give the playboy a finite field to master. He becomes something of an audiophile, owning several phonographs and insisting on the very best for his wife’s listening pleasure.
The heavy walnut wood cabinet contains a radio and a turntable with a spindle and stylus that shine like birds of chrome. The speaker cones are boxed in walnut with gold-threaded fabric on one side. Cheerful-giver Harry gives Sarah the machine along with a big stack of platters—baroque, classical, and romantic—to replace the Jujuban bells she currently calls him with.
While she sits on the love seat saying her “cheese” quietly to herself, elegant as a lady of leisure in a Gourmet court, he installs the machine inside the top cabinet of the spacious armoire next to her bed, making it into a huge music box that will resonate in the walls and up the back stairs to the workshop. “Cupcake, whenever you’re game, just spin a little of what you fancy. I’ll be waiting to get the message and I’ll come right down.”
Sarah’s father, the Reverend Blanche, would raise hell if he heard even a lick of anything but stale frontier fundamentalist ditties. He had forced her to join the choir, put on a pious face before the tabernacle, and sing songs that made her retch. To this day Sarah has not yet rooted his prickishness out of her psyche and struggles against the feeling of being browbeaten by the rod of male authority where her taste in music comes in. In fact, at the time she met Harry, Sarah preferred jazz as much as did he, only pretending to like classical music so the playboy would not think she was a cheap trick. Admiring her affectation, her poise, her air of class, he fell in love with her, and instantly found his taste in music broadened.
The phonograph and records are nothing new to Sarah. Laudette has one and Sarah often goes in and listens to jazz records with her when Harry and Gloria are not around. Split when it comes to family integrity, she would rather neither of them see the rag doll in her soul. In fact she is genuinely pleased to have the fancy machine and cannot wait to hear what Laudette’s swing band collection is going to sound like on such a set-up. Sarah likes the spinning disks, but wheels within wheels, her world goes around by resistance. Within her contradictory heart, conformity is non-conformity. She knows Harry expects her to display a certain amount of displeasure with his gift, so she puts on a disagreeable face and says, “I do think this appliance is aptly named: what comes out of it sounds quite phony. Rather than hearing music, it only makes me miss the real beauty of it.” Thus the artificial purist speaks a phony piece and sits pat, smoothing her plucked eyebrows with her finger. “And did it ever occur to you, Harry, that I might not want to go along with these masquerades. Most of the time when I want sex, I just want it. I don’t need violins, soft lights, and lace.”
Harry is delighted. He finds her scowl breathtaking. “Nonsense,” he says, trying to get her even more riled up. “Women love this sort of thing. You’re a woman, aren’t you? You’re lucky you have a husband who’s sentimental. Anyway, what can a little pretense hurt? Haven’t I been a good boy indulging your fantasies, playing the roll of this devil you worship? You never minded satisfying me before we were married.”
Familiarity breeds contempt. Contempt is the glue that holds them together. “Just who do you think you are to jeer at me and my God, Harry? Why, you’re nothing but a smug little man with a need to scoff at what you don’t understand.”
“What is there to understand? This hero of yours is all in your mind. I am the real man who loves you. And you love me, although you’re too ashamed to admit it.’
The pea sits up stiff in her chair, purses her lips, and shakes her head no. But her protests, true to her heart, also belie it. Shame is the very thing that feeds her acting. It makes her pretend to be a lover of classical music when she would much rather be tapping her feet.
The playboy, who cannot feel desire without some amount of discord and resentment, knows her smirk of cool critical piety is the mask of her heat. He understands that her father wanted her to put a man’s face on a woman’s mystery, and therefore it excites her to do the naughtiest things she can think of. Why not? He is excited by the very things he was told he should be humiliated by. And rage has a way of tickling a body’s subtle pathways, sending signals of passion. Shame on them both! And hurrah for it!
He smiles and puts the needle to the beginning of the duet La Fontana d’Amore from Giacomo’s opera La Donna Cantabile. “Come, my love, keep an open mind,” he says jovially. “They’re playing our song. And we don’t have to go out to hear it.”
He takes a place on the floor in front of the love seat and gently reaches out and kisses her knees. Noting the flutter of her calves in her silk stockings, he presses his lips further, under her gown, past her garters, all the way up to her powder-scented Elysian lace crotch.
She parts her legs but remains from the waist up self-possessed, every button, bow, and hair in place. On the surface she is the white phantom mistress of the opera, at home with having the aural luxury of the classics in her home; on the inside she is a tin pan alley cat with a yowling soul.
Even as her insides melt, her countenance remains composed, a no-show of lust for the tom below, as he ventures up her legs to kiss her secret face. When the high note of the duet comes and he is just about to lubricate her love with his tongue, she gives him the monkey business: a short hiss of hot, tea-scented rain, a spray that leaves the mark of the wild tigress in her all over him, her, the love seat, and the carpet.
Beautiful Dreamers
It’s no accident that the dissociated mother and daughter get together the following afternoon just after Laudette has the grand piano brought in to the back parlor.
To look at them, each sitting alone in her bed, Sara
h with her eyes half-closed in meditation, trance-posed, limiting her mind to nothing but “chee-chee-cheese”, her daughter, the natural born freethinker, mature and earnest for her age, playing with her imagination on her pillows in the rosy parlor, mother and daughter seem like birds of a feather, beautiful dreamers, anti-socialites, recluses who share a bent for contemplation. But by nature the pea is split, back and forth between one end and the other and the Bee is balanced between extremes. Sarah prays for relief from the pain of low self-regard, while Glory dwells in the love she has for herself and existence.
When they wake up and come down to see the piano, the difference is apparent. Sarah steps gingerly, rigid and controlled, a deadly woman looking demure. Her contact with Lord Z brings her in touch with her weakness, but she is still only half-capable of understanding herself. There is a war in her spirit between rectitude and corruption, and she masks the heat of the battleground with this face of respectability.
Gloria, on the other hand, is mercurial, airy as her father and jovial as her stepfather. She whizzes by her mother, giving the slow sphinxish Mummy a quick smile and a wink, then dives the rest of the flight, to be the first to see the marvel the delivery men have just rolled in. Slender and wild, with her even, flawless, honey-smooth tan and her long legs, lean and racy as a black cat’s, she’s a tall and tawny temple of homogeny. Sarah’s face beckons to be noticed. Gloria’s stands out because it is so standard. At first sight she could be almost anybody’s white, brown, red, yellow, or black sister or daughter. But on second glance, she is more compelling. In a race of her own, she only seems plain because she is too thoroughly exotic for words. Taken one at a time, her eyes, ears, nose, lips, throat, brow, cheeks, and chin are typical. Yet surely their perfect compatibility and consistency with one another is atypical. And lights glow in her dark face. Her eyes are clear, star-spangled, and beam with an iridescence. Her hair is a coat of many colors, a bounteous wavy brown mane shimmering with highlights of pitch black, sandy brown, chestnut, silver, and gold.
