The Gallery (3 page)

“So, what happened?”

“What happens to most girls, same as me. She got married. She settled, eventually. And then—”

Her smile faded, and her face sank back into the lines I knew so well. “It all seemed harmless, back then.”

Then the train went dark, plunging underground as we reached the Manhattan side of the river.

Chapter

I
n all the years my mother talked about working at “the house,” I'm not sure what I pictured. Probably a house, and not a castle flown in from a fairy story. Its spires and turrets were visible all the way from Park Avenue, and as we turned onto Fifth, I could see that nearly half the block was taken up with marble and stone and stained-glass windows that put our parish church to shame. It faced Central Park, just across the avenue, and mimicked it with a lushly landscaped walkway that guided you up to a door like a drawbridge.

But the grotesque stone lions on either side, claws at the ready, functioned as gatekeepers to the likes of me and Ma. We traveled round to a side street and down a dark set of stairs that took us to
the servants' entrance. All the working rooms of the house—practically a house in a house, with the kitchen, laundry, pantries, and even the servants' hall where we'd eat meals—were underground, echoing with the clattering of brooms and pans and rumbling every time a subway train ran by. This parallel underworld was where I'd be toiling under the supervision of Monsieur Leblanc, the famed chef snatched up from Paris and brought to New York as Mr. Sewell's personal cook.

But before I could be plunged into my new life as a kitchen maid, Ma wanted to show off the fruits of her labor. I was just as eager to see that famed “house” that drew Ma out of bed at dawn and didn't let her go till she'd fussed and fixed its ornaments like a spoiled and demanding mistress. So with my apron now pressed and doffed and Ma's spit holding down my hair, I was allowed a tour.

Maybe it was the imported white marble, which dominated from floor to stairs to ceiling, or maybe it was the way Ma's words of pride bounced from one room to the next, but the house gave me shivers. The front rooms were quite spectacular, with pianos of gold and sofas of satin and so many shiny things a magpie would fly itself into a tizzy. But the deeper you went, the more rooms were closed up, curtains
drawn so as not to disturb the furniture, which hibernated under protective drapes. I couldn't tell if the rooms were simply unused, or if the rooms' contents had been deemed so valuable that the owners' could not risk accidental human contact.

Even the house's centerpiece, the glass-ceilinged courtyard with its show-offy, mismatched jumble of orchids, lilacs, and orange trees, seemed false to me, a place where plants were forced to flourish no matter the season or their God-given instructions.

But most unsettling were the walls. No matter where you went, no matter how opulent the furnishings, every room was haunted by ghosts: a chessboard of discolored squares and rectangles on the silk wallpaper, nails left behind like you'd see in a cheap boardinghouse.

“Where are all the pictures?” I asked Ma in a whisper. It only seemed right to whisper. “Stolen?”

Ma seemed annoyed. “Not exactly. Miss Rose—that's Mrs. Sewell to you, by the way—she keeps them in her rooms.” She paused. “They comfort her.”

In the glare of all things golden, I'd almost forgotten about the house's resident lunatic. I pricked up my ears, listening for the distant howls of a madwoman. But there was nothing but the same silence, from room to entombed room.

I was never so happy to hear it was time to go to work.

—

An hour later I was elbows up in scalding water, sweat pouring down in streams, scrubbing the remains of some food charred past recognition off the bottom of a pot. My introduction to Chef (as he insisted I call him) consisted of a grunt and the splash of a hot pan tossed into a greasy sink. And another. And another. It became quickly apparent that Chef had had a whole kitchen of assistants and sub-assistants and dishwashers and sub-dishwashers in Paris, and not just one girl who usually told her mother she made her brothers a nice, home-cooked meal but really bought them dinner at the frankfurter cart.

By the end of a week, I'd learned to do the work of at least ten French boys. I chopped onions, ground garlic, boned chicken, and rendered lard. When I wasn't cooking, I was washing dishes; when I wasn't washing, I was drying; and when I wasn't doing either, I was learning French under Chef's instruction.
Brunoise
meant he wanted “things cut into little cubes,”
bâtonette
meant “little sticks,” and
idiote
meant just what you'd think it did.

Mademoiselle Flanagan's French class, with its
bright, sunny classroom where I could doodle and play pranks when the work didn't suit me, seemed like an exotic paradise, lunch and recess like a luxury. Now I ate lunch alone every day. I'd hustle to get the noon dinner on the table for the other servants—Ma, plus her two housemaids, Bridie and Magdalena, and the footman, Alphonse—who filed into the servants' hall without a glance my way. I supposed they, like their employers, assumed the food was the result of some subterranean magic. And the cleaning, too; I toiled alone over the pots while Chef smoked a cigarette in the alley and a quiet murmur of polite conversation drifted out of the lunchroom. Once Ma's team had returned above stairs, I'd clean up their dishes and eat leftovers at the sink. Over my head, by the street level window, I'd watch a parade of feet carry their owners to destinations with conversation, laughter, and sunlight.

My mind kept going back to the time we went to the Rockaways, when I sat all day on the pier, unable to swim and unwilling to learn. As the sun went down, Daddo claimed he saw a puppy in the water, and when I leaned over to get a better look, I felt his foot on my backside. Next thing I knew, I was at the bottom of the ocean, sunk like a stone.

I screamed, but with the air replaced by water around me, no sound came out. I looked up to the sky and saw light streaming, white water, legs thrashing with wild abandon, but heard only a muted, distant fog. Terrified, I flailed and kicked until I broke through to the surface, desperate to leave that watery universe behind.

That's what working below stairs was like, I realized too late—like living underwater. There was a world up there, above the surface, brighter and shinier than this one, divined only in glimpses and muffled echoes.

For example, there were Mr. Sewell's food requests. These seemingly random menus, summoned from on high, were all we saw of a revolving calendar of late-night suppers, always held after most of the servants had left for the night, always contrived for a guest list of one. Their identities, a mystery to all but the footman who served them, clearly dictated the cuisine. One night it was herring and pickles. Another night it was a six-course meal of Neapolitan splendors. Another was nothing but oysters. Each request set off scavenger hunts through the well-stocked pantry—a floor-to-ceiling emporium that rattled and shuddered whenever a subway train ran nearby.

Sometimes the word came down that Mr. Sewell would be dining out after all, and the vegetables Chef had spent all day carving into flower shapes were thrown angrily into the bin.

Then there were the particular culinary needs of Mrs. Sewell, and these I studied most closely for clues to the madness. The mysterious lady partook of the same uninspired menu, day in day out. In the mornings, there was toast and tea, with some broth or boiled vegetables for lunch. And in the early evening, just a bowl of porridge.

Any chink in this feast of blandness could spark some kind of fit. So the toast had to be golden, with nary a burnt spot, and the water for the tea had to be caught before it rolled over to a boil. And the porridge must have some fancy sugar stirred into it that Mr. Sewell secured from some specialty grocer and which was kept in a big jar next to the tea things.

Because the sight of anyone at mealtime made Mrs. Sewell
overstimulated
, the tray had to be loaded into the dumbwaiter, a sort of cupboard-sized miniature elevator that traveled up from the kitchen, past the dining room, past the second floor hallway, all the way up to a turret at the tippy-top of the house, directly into her suite of rooms. She'd nibble her meal in that protected solitude, then send the plates
back down in the dumbwaiter to be washed (by me).

This was what it meant to be rich, I'd think as I hoisted the dumbwaiter up to its destination. Every whim, whether salmon soufflé or a bed of unblemished banana peels could be summoned with a snap of the fingers, eaten (or ignored) at leisure, and left on the table for someone else to clean up.

And you could hire someone like Ma to give their life over to you, while their own family got left with the scraps.

—

It went along like this, a month of carrot cubes and crusty pots and tea trays, until one Friday evening in October when Alphonse, the footman, wandered in. And spoke.

“Your mama,” he murmured quietly, “she need you upstairs.”

Alphonse was somewhere in his twenties, tall, clean-shaven, and just handsome enough to be pleasant to look at but unthreatening to the master of the house. He sported neat fingernails, a perfectly pressed uniform, and an elegant, vaguely French accent—at least, I thought he did, because he said as little as possible. In short, he dressed immaculately, spoke rarely, heard nothing, and glided through the house unnoticed. He was the ideal servant.

I shut off the water sloshing in the sink and wiped my sweaty forehead on the top of my sleeve.

“What, now?”

Alphonse just raised his eyebrows slightly.

I dropped the copper pan I'd been working on, the last one of the night, back into the sink and wiped my hands on my grease-spotted apron.

Alphonse looked pointedly at the apron. “But she say clean up,” which was easier said than done. “It's time to meet your maker.”

I froze. What shortcut or misstep of mine had been discovered? “She said,” I squeaked, “it's time to meet my maker?”

Alphonse shook off the phrase with a quick toss of his head. “I'm sorry, my English. That is to say—your master. It is time to meet your master. You go to meet Mr. Sewell.”

—

Mr. Sewell's office was as big as a ballroom (or so I thought, until I saw the ballroom), overlooking Central Park and anchored by an enormous carved desk and a Persian rug I expected could fly you to Arabia. I later learned that this had once been the library, which explained the floor to ceiling shelves lined with books in fancy leather bindings.

Mr. Sewell's desk was covered not with the classics,
but all the latest editions of the city's newspapers. It figured, as he owned one of the biggest newspapers in New York, the
Daily Standard
. We weren't much for newspapers in our house, though I loved to glance at the headlines on the
New York Graphic
or
New York Yodel
, which kept us up-to-date on what socialite had poisoned her lover or which politician was spotted in what speakeasy.

Ma had told me all about Mr. Sewell—how he lunched with the mayor, how he flew with Lindbergh, how the outlawing of alcohol in this country had him to thank—but what she hadn't told me, as he came around his desk to inspect me, was that he was an absolute dish. He was tall and broad-shouldered and with a face that I suspected Ma's romance magazines would call “chiseled.” And when he looked at you, it was with these swimming pool blue eyes that made you wonder if he might not be a little bit in love with you, if you were someone else entirely.

So to think that my ma not only knew but was whispering with this titan of New York society—well, it was enough to set my knees to rattling.

After a few quiet words to Ma, Mr. Sewell strode over and shook my already-shaking hand.

“So, Martha, is it?” He towered over me, unwavering as a flagpole. “Welcome to the team. I call it a
team because we're all in this together, making this a happy and efficient home. Aren't we, Mrs. O'Doyle?”

“Indeed we are, Mr. Sewell.” My mother beamed.

“And this team needs strong players who are willing to pitch in and do their share, never looking for glory for themselves—only for the team. Am I right, Mrs. O'Doyle?”

My ma gave a little nodding bow. “Correct as usual, Mr. Sewell.”

“Let me ask you a question, Martha,” and here he settled himself on the edge of his desk. “Do you read the paper?”

“Oh, yes, every day, Mr. Sewell,” I lied, and Ma frowned.

“So who do you like in this election—Hoover, or your countryman there, Mr. Al Smith?”

Everyone in our neighborhood loved Al Smith, New York's former mayor, a mick like us who, as a “wet” called for the end of Prohibition—for alcohol to be made legal again. You couldn't walk the street without hearing his campaign song, an old saloon favorite, “The Sidewalks of New York.” But I looked at Ma before answering and saw that she shook her head, ever so slightly.

“I couldn't exactly say, Mr. Sewell.”

Here he laughed and looked at Ma. “Here's the
problem with you ladies: you get the vote, but you don't necessarily get the brains.”

I could only think of what wrath Ma would rain down on some poor neighborhood chump who said this. But here, in Mr. Sewell's office, she just nodded.