Lucy: Daughters of the Sea #3 (2 page)

T
HROUGH THE FRONDS
of the voluminous potted palm in the Ogmonts’ Fifth Avenue apartment, Lucy Snow saw young Elsie Ogmont heading toward her with the Ogmont cousin Lenora Drexel, her brother Eldon Drexel, and his fiancée, Denise De Becque.

The three women were all very elegantly dressed in the latest fashion, Lenora in particular. Denise was the least attractive but had a great deal of style. She was wearing a blue watered-silk gown trimmed in ivory silk at the cuffs and neckline. As they came closer, Lucy wondered if it was perhaps Denise’s expression, more than anything, that made her unattractive. She always looked vexed, a scowl of disapproval that bordered on outright contempt.

What if they come this way? What will I say?
Lucy desperately tried to conjure up suitable topics for discussion, but her mind drew a blank. Luckily, Elsie spoke first.

“Lucy, I want to introduce you to Lenora. Of course, you already know her brother Eldon.”

“Hello.” Lucy extended her hand. “It has been a while.”

“Yes,” Lenora said. “I went to Paris almost three years ago.” Lucy became acutely aware of how dull her gray faille tea gown must look next to Lenora’s silk confection.

“But I have been a full-time Yankee,” Eldon Drexel said. “And I have rarely seen you out. No excuse, Miss Snow. We need to see more of you, my dear, and not just in church.” This evoked gay laughter from the three women, which made Lucy squirm.

She couldn’t tell whether Eldon was mocking her or being sincere. In this strangely complex world, one had to speak but not actually say anything of substance. This was a world that rewarded glibness and sly wit and most often left her a-stutter.

“Did you not wish to see Paris, Mr. Drexel?”

“Some of us have to stay home and work, mind the coffers, so to speak.”

So to speak?
Lucy wondered if such a metaphor worked despite the fact that the Drexels owned banks. The coffers were real. Lucy noticed that when Denise’s fiancé said the word
coffers
, her left eyebrow hiked up just slightly into the vast plains of her broad forehead. Her family, too, were bankers, and Lucy wondered if Denise somehow wanted credit for the healthy state of the Drexel coffers. This had been considered the engagement of the season — two old families with two old banks. A match made by Mammon!

Elsie seemed to pick up on Denise’s disquiet and made a quick course correction in the conversation.

“Isn’t Lenora’s dress the most exquisite? The overlay of lace looks almost like a fine mist.”

“Charles Worth,” Lenora replied airily, as if wearing a five-hundred-dollar dress were as common an occurrence as brushing one’s hair.

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard of him,” Lucy said. The three young women exchanged slightly withering glances. Lucy realized immediately the stupidity of what she had just said. Everyone had heard of Charles Worth, the most famous of Parisian designers.

Suddenly, it seemed very warm in the room. Her foot had begun to hurt. Probably from standing in one place. She knew she should mingle, as her mother would suggest. But with whom? Lucy knew she had been invited only out of deference to her father. She was sure the other guests had little interest in making conversation with a girl whose bloodlines were short and who had no prospects for an inheritance, not to mention her terribly outdated dresses.

The three ladies had begun to move away although Eldon lingered.

“Well …” Lucy was eager to move away before she made another blunder, but she did not know how to disentangle herself. Should she talk about banking? He must be good with figures and accounting. Perhaps she could ask him that.
Are you good with figures?
Lord, how vapid did that sound!

“Well?” Eldon Drexel cocked his head slightly and looked at her inquiringly. There was a light in his eye that she found disturbing.

“You must get very tired as a banker. I imagine it must be hard work looking at all those tiny figures all day long.” He looked momentarily confused. “Gives you a headache, I suppose.”

He threw back his head and laughed. It was a horrible, sneering sound. “Ah! Now I catch your drift. What a queer little creature you are. Surely, dear girl, you don’t suppose we have to do that ourselves. We have people who do that. You know, the men with the green eyeshades.”

Immediately, Lucy realized her mistake. Of course they had people like that. All the people in this room had people like that to take care of the small monotonies of life, to do everything. She was just thankful that her mother had not heard this exchange. She would have been mortified.

“I must really be going. I have an appointment.” The color rose in her face. She blinked several times and tried to look over his shoulder as if something had caught her attention on the other side of the room.

“The church keeps you busy, I suppose, being a reverend’s daughter and all.” Then he tipped his head again to one side and looked at her in a way that made her feel quite uncomfortable. “I suppose that’s what makes you so” — he paused as his eyes flitted down her gown — “refreshing.” She caught sight of Denise glaring at both of them. There was no question about Denise De Becque’s expression. She was livid.

“Yes, very busy,” Lucy said abruptly. “Excuse me.”

Two minutes later, she stepped out the front door onto the street. She knew she should have thanked her hosts, but she simply had to get out. Lucy breathed in great drafts of fresh air, but as she exhaled, all she felt was guilt. What would her mother say? Why couldn’t she be like the other girls at the party? Eldon Drexel was dreadful, but there must be other young men who were nice, even if they were all rather boring. But maybe after the first flurry of love, marriage became boring. Then she stopped abruptly mid-thought. Was she even looking for marriage? What kind of life could there be without marriage? None, she supposed, but perhaps something in between where she was now and the inexorable future that was expected for her by her parents, by society, by everyone in Western civilization.

She certainly did not want to go home in this state and face her mother’s inevitable questions about who was there and what they wore and how Lenora Drexel was after her “finishing off” in Paris. That was what her mother had called those three years, “Lenora’s finishing off.” It conjured up all sorts of peculiar images in Lucy’s mind, from putting the final varnish on a painting to sewing the eyelids shut on a corpse and then adding a touch of rouge to the cheeks so the dead might be presentable, appear “healthy” while dead as a doornail. Her mother often talked about how nice So-and-So looked after attending a parishioner’s funeral, always extolling the services of the Edwards and Beecham funeral parlor. “They deal only with the top drawer.” “Top drawer” was one of her mother’s many expressions for describing the celebrated upper echelons of New York society, alive or dead.

Slightly renewed by being outdoors, Lucy walked several blocks west, then caught a trolley up to the Museum of Natural History. With its miles of corridors and capacious galleries, the museum felt like an oasis from all the city’s hubbub, the crowds and commotion, the clanging trolleys and barking street vendors.

Lucy knew some might think it odd that she could find solace among so many dead things — the skeletons of dinosaurs, along with other long-dead animals, preserved by whatever was the taxidermy equivalent to Edwards and Beecham. But something about the museum put her at ease, particularly the exhibits devoted to exotic cultures, their artifacts, and their ways of life.

Lucy wound her way through the natural history gallery to a new exhibit entitled Above the Circle: Spirits Revealed and began walking through the dim light of the vast gallery dedicated to Arctic culture. On the other side of the hall, a man was standing in front of a large case, addressing an audience.

“The Indians of the Arctic, the Inuit, were bound culturally by the regions of Canada as well as Alaska to the extreme west. I am here to talk to you today about an Inuit word. That word is ‘
Inua
.’
Inua
best translates into the word ‘soul’ or ‘spirit.’” Lucy glanced at the figures inside the case. Even the frozen statues had more spirit than Eldon Drexel or anyone else at the Ogmonts’ reception.

“From the paddles for their kayaks, or
umiaks
, as they called their sealskin boats, to the beading on their boots, the objects reveal the spirits that guided their every action.”

A woman raised her hand. “Pardon me, Doctor Forsythe, but among these tribes, how were fishing boundaries established?”

“Madam, you make a common error. There were no tribes among the Inuit. The word ‘
tribe
’ designates a political unit rather than a cultural one. The Inuit population was small, and the people were spread out too far over the vastness of the Arctic, to be organized into tribes like the Indians of our country and to have to concern themselves with boundaries.”

“Oh, I see,” the woman replied softly.

Lucy pressed closer to the front of the group. She now had a clear view of the small sealskin boat. In it sat a mannequin of an Inuit bundled in a sealskin parka with a hood trimmed in fur. A harpoon had been set in his hand. Museum artists had sculpted “ice” floes about him, and he appeared to glide across a painted sea. In the background was a twilit sky with stars just rising. It was a beautiful seascape. One that Lucy had never quite imagined. The lighting in the museum gave the sky a luminous greenish tinge. It almost made her chilly to look at it. So opposite to what she had felt less than an hour before as she stood near the potted palm.

And what would our objects reveal of our
inua? Lucy mused as she thought about the party she had just left. The sparkling chandelier under which Eldon Drexel had informed her that he did not wear a green eyeshade and never touched the figure ledgers. She imagined a museum some time in the far distant future where the artifacts of Ogmonts and Drexels and the like might be displayed. For were they not a tribe, with their Charles Worth dresses, their Harvard or Yale signet rings? There could be two display cases really — one for the masters’ artifacts and one for the servants with the starched black dresses and snowy aprons and, of course, the green eyeshades of the clerks. But of course the Inuit on their icebound outposts at the edge of the sea most likely did not have servants. There was no time for such class distinctions, she thought, as she looked longingly at the figure in the boat gliding across the painted sea.

Dr. Forsythe was answering a man who had asked a question about Inuit trade. “He is most likely hunting the bearded seal down the coast a bit. What I mean by easy commerce is that the spirit life for the Inuit was as alive and vital as their temporal life. The borders between these two worlds were easily traversed, crossed over.”

“Did they only fish in the summer?” someone else asked.

“Really, there were two basic seasons for the Inuit — Ice and No Ice. They went in their boats when the ice was clear or nearly clear. And when it wasn’t, they went in their sleds and found the blow-holes for seals or walrus.”

Lucy was mesmerized by the model maker’s replica of the sea. She raised her hand shyly. “Did they ever cross the sea in those boats?”

“Ah, a very interesting question, miss!” Dr. Forsythe, a tall man of perhaps fifty, with very pale blue eyes behind his thick bifocal spectacles, leaned forward to see her better. He had a trim beard and sported a thick set of muttonchop sideburns, but his domed head had nary a hair and seemed like a perfect vessel for all the fascinating knowledge he had collected over his years of Arctic travel.

“Curiously enough, because of the strong westerly winds and currents, some of those Inuit in their sealskin boats were pulled out to sea and fetched up on the western coasts of Ireland and on Scotland’s outermost islands.” Dr. Forsythe’s pale eyes sparkled with a new light behind the thick lenses. “And what would the Scottish lass walking on the beach with her beau find?” A hush had fallen on the small group. “What would they think at the sight of a man sitting upright and rigid in his
umiak
? The boat in perfect condition and the man seemingly perfect as well. For he was flawlessly preserved, that is, in death.”