The Gallery (8 page)

The more I walked, and the more Mrs. Ellsworth talked, the less I understood about the pomegranates. Depending on where I looked, they were sometimes juicy, sometimes dusty. Sometimes the seeds looked like gems, sometimes like blood, sometimes like small insignificant pebbles. Sometimes they meant life, sometimes death, and everything in between.

It seemed that the pomegranate could really mean anything. Which meant it meant nothing.

We finally found ourselves back in the great entrance hall, where, without any paintings or sculptures to prompt a lecture, Mrs. Ellsworth finally stopped to place her full attention on me.

“So, dear,” she said, settling back onto her stool behind the desk, “was that enough pomegranates for you, then? Did you find what you were looking for?” She studied my uniform with narrowed eyes. “Which household are you with, did you say?”

As part of New York's Fifth Avenue set, Mrs. Ellsworth surely knew the Sewells. Or knew of them, at least. And just as I was about to open my mouth, I remembered what Ma said: Discretion is the heart of a good servant.

Then again, would I be at the museum right now if I were a good servant?

Whatever my motivations, I had no trouble answering the question. “I work for the Duke house. Just across the street.”

—

Here's something you may not know: There are no clocks in the Metropolitan Museum.

I realized this as I stepped back out onto those majestic steps and found the sun dancing along the treetops in the park. It must have been at least four o'clock, I realized in a panic, and no matter how long Ma's errand downtown would take, it would be over by now.

As my feet flew down Fifth Avenue, all the useless pomegranate-stained knowledge tumbled around my brain: life and death and seeds and orbs and babies and poo.

But what did it all mean to Mrs. Sewell? No matter how many pomegranates I saw or cultures I visited,
none of it changed what it meant to one lady in her own strange reality.

I was flying past Seventy-Eighth Street when, out of the corner of my eye, something stopped me in my tracks: a fruit peddler across the avenue. He was packing up his cart with a forlorn look, his long beard not quite covering the soup stains on his waistcoat. Business was bad today, he shook his head, bad every day if he was honest. Maybe another corner, another neighborhood. I cut him off, and delightedly he told me he had what I was looking for. Left over, he said, wrapping it in a brown paper bag, from some recent Jewish holiday. It felt a bit mushy in my hands, but it would do.

—

I was just going to open it, see the real appearance of the pomegranate's seeds for myself, place one on my tongue and . . . what? Bite down? Suck until it disappeared like a candy button? Would it be juicy? Hard? Tart? Sweet? I slipped quietly through the servant's entrance and headed for the kitchen, passing Ma's hat and coat already hung on her usual hook. I cringed to think how long they'd been there.

“Martha O'Doyle!” Bridie tutted as I plucked up the sharp knife at her elbow. “Now where have you
been? Your ma has been searching high and low all afternoon for you.”

I stopped, the knife tip poised on the fruit's flesh.

“What do you mean? Wasn't she at the grocer all day?”

Bridie giggled. “No, silly, just until noon. She was called back; Mr. Sewell has a new guest tonight. I heard it might be Clara Bow!”

I groaned loudly enough to make Chef holler I'd make his soufflé fall. “You covered for me, right?”

“Why, no, I said I had no idea where you were!” She nudged me gently out of the way as she hoisted up Mrs. Sewell's supper tray—the sweetened tea, the sweetened porridge. “Really, I was so worried about you!”

I'd have to come up with a really good story this time. Maybe something about a subway track fire. Or a lost orphan. I hadn't used that one yet.

“Where were you anyway?” Bridie slid the tray into the dumbwaiter, then stopped, taking in my strange fruit. “Out shopping for produce? You know we order in all the marketing.”

I looked at the pomegranate still held firm to the cutting board. Suddenly I had no interest in seeing its glistening, glimmering guts.

But then I had another idea.

“This,” I shoved the pomegranate into Bridie's hands. “It's for supper. For Mrs. Sewell. Ma asked me to get it.” Bridie blinked. “As a treat,” I finished.

“Oh, well then, thank you! What an interesting addition. How do I prepare it then?” Bridie questioned cheerfully. “Shall I slice it for her, or perhaps I could—”

I grabbed it away, searching and finding a small, deep bowl, which would keep the pomegranate from rolling away. “Like this,” I said, placing the bowl on the tray and closing up the dumbwaiter. “Just . . . just like this.”

And before Bridie could ask any more questions, I pulled the cord, pulled and pulled and pulled it, sending the fruit to its destination in the sky.

What would that simple red globe mean to Mrs. Sewell? Heaven? Earth? Life? Death? Or simply a snack?

Would it be the very thing she'd been craving, hoping for, obsessing over? Would it cure her of her obsession, bringing her confusion to an end?

Or would it set off an episode that would make the Night of the Plain Porridge look like a tea party?

For the next hour, I alternated between being chased out of the kitchen by Chef, playing Cat and Mouse with Ma, and sneaking back down to
the kitchen again. When I heard the squeak of the dumbwaiter descending past the first floor butler's pantry, I flew down the stairs again.

“Mrs. Sewell did
not
care for that fruit, I can tell you.”

I pushed Bridie out of the way (in true Bridie fashion, she apologized to me: “Oh, so sorry, I'm so clumsy!”) and snatched back the pomegranate.

Bridie was right. The fruit was still where I'd placed it on the tray, unopened, mushy and unappetizing.

But then I picked it up. And I saw that Mrs. Sewell had done the same.

And with small, shallow nicks—pressed in with a fingernail, it looked like—she had spelled out a single word:

HELP.

Chapter

S
unday, for me, was no day of rest.

When I was in school and it was just Ma who worked, Sundays started early. With Daddo always on the road, it was up to me to give Ma a break. I'd let her sleep in a bit and help get the boys ready for Mass, which meant twenty wriggling toes to stuff into four stiff shoes and one million hairs to plaster down, each one pointing a different direction. Then there was Mass itself which our Father Riordan seemed to want to wrap up as quickly as we did, but it still meant forty-five minutes of distracting the monkeys so Ma could listen to the homily.

Then we'd all pitch in—well, Ma and I would while the boys snuck away to play army men under the bed—on all the cleaning that'd gone undone all
week. After that was Ma's “Sunday holiday.” This was Ma's one and only luxury in life: an hour or two in bed, her corset discarded, a pot of tea and
Jane Eyre
near at hand.

I was charged with keeping the boys out, and when I was younger, chasing the boys through the rain or bracing myself for another snowball fight, I resented Ma's laze abouts. Now that I, too, had spent from Monday dawn to past-dusk Saturday on my feet, I should have demanded a holiday of my own.

But now a day running after the boys felt like a lark compared to a day up to the elbows in Murphy Oil Soap. I thought through our usual Sunday haunts: the stickball game on Willoughby Street, the empty lot where you could shoot bottles with Jimmy McGarry's BB gun, following the drunks as they left Donovan's speak, hoping for falling pennies.

But the fall weather had taken the weekend off, allowing winter to visit in its absence, and the gray skies and biting wind were conspiring to drive us inside.

—

“Aw, sis, this place is lousy. Whadda we s'pose to do here?” Timmy whined loudly.

Though I'd never entered its halls before, something about the library made me shush my brother
with a rap on the head. It wasn't so much the quiet or the other patrons as the dark wood and hanging brass lamps put me in mind of being in church.

“Nah, Tee, you got it all wrong.” Willy had already pulled a reference book off the shelf and was preparing to rip a page right down the middle. “Lookit all the paper airplanes we can make.”

“C'mon, Dubs, that won't work. Put some spit on it!” Timmy jumped in when the page stayed fast.

“Hands up!” I broke in, and both boys reached for the sky, like cornered gangsters, knowing from Daddo that a dawdling response would mean a slap on the head. I swiftly cleared the table of all books, the one I'd gotten from the librarian safe under my arm. “You're in a library for pity's sake. Keep up the roughhousing, and you'll get raw chicken for dinner like the junkyard dogs you are.”

“I wanted to go to the pictures!” Timmy huffed. He'd gotten the idea somewhere that my newfound wages were earmarked for his pleasure budget.

As usual, Willy joined in. “Me too!”

“Well,” I settled myself in a chair at the table, “what I'm going to read you—”

A chorus of wails went up, with responsive shushing from the room's occupants.

“
Read you
,” I repeated, “has more thrills and chills
than the latest Douglas Fairbanks picture!” Under my breath I muttered, “I hope.”

So far, my forays into the Sewell library and the city's museum had yielded no keys or clues, just story after story, whose meanings shifted with the storyteller.

But there was only one storyteller whose story mattered. And so far, her only writing was a single word, pressed into produce with a fingernail.

HELP. The word followed me around the house over the next few days, tapping me on the shoulder as I cleaned from room to room. As I mopped the hallway outside the gallery, I felt those grand, expensive paintings held the secret to something. Something dark and threatening. And the pomegranate was at the center of it.

Of course, I couldn't dismiss the idea that maybe Mrs. Sewell was afraid of pomegranates full stop. She was crazy, after all. But if she were, I thought as I rubbed Brasso onto various shiny gewgaws, would she pick it up, write HELP on it? Why didn't she tantrum, throw it across the room, cower in a corner in fear? No, she picked it up thoughtfully, used it to write a message, not even knowing who was at the receiving end of it.

Whatever it was about pomegranates, they had to
stand for something specific—not to Egyptians, or Indians, or chubby baby Jesus, but something specific to Mrs. Sewell.

And I had nothing to go on but four paintings about pomegranates.

Well, almost nothing. There was one other thing: the book on her bedside table by someone named Ovid.

I needed to connect the dots somehow. I needed to go somewhere where I could find all the stories I needed without keys or admission fees or fear of Ma walking in.

The public library.

And thankfully, here a sweet young librarian, with only
pomegranate
and
Ovid
to go on, directed me to
one
story. In a book called
Metamorphoses
.

Apparently it detailed various Greek types and the ways they changed into other things. “Like a caterpillar,” the pretty young librarian said searchingly as she put the book in my hands. “Metamorphosis, yes?”

The term sounded familiar, and I had a vague memory of copying it down from the blackboard in Sister Catherine's class that spring we hatched and released butterflies.

Looking at the book and all its big words made me feel I was in the presence of something—not holy
exactly, although I had some urge to cross myself. So I settled the boys, made them sit up, wiped the mustard off their cheeks. And read:

Not far from the walls of Enna, there is a deep pool. There, it is everlasting spring. While Proserpina was playing in this glade, and gathering violets or radiant lilies, Pluto, almost in a moment saw her, prized her, took her.

“See,” I tapped the book, “kidnapping, boys!” Timmy lifted his head up from the table, where he had pretended to fall asleep. I continued:

The frightened goddess cried out, and the flowers she had collected fell from her loosened tunic. The ravisher whipped up his chariot, and urged on the horses through deep pools and sulfurous reeking swamps.

“What's sulfurous?” broke in Willy.

“Smelly,” I responded, “like a lavatory.”

“Ewwwwww,” Willy reacted with a disgusted smile.

“Waitaminute,” broke in Timmy. “I saw this same
story last week at the picture show, but it was starring Mary Pickford, and they were in the Wild West.”

Meanwhile Proserpina's mother, fearing, searched in vain for the maid.

“Hey, she's a maid like you, sis!” snickered Willy. Then came a whole subplot about a nymph who turned into a pool of water, which lost the boys to a discussion about whether they'd ever seen a mermaid. I flipped ahead until I found the mother, named Ceres, again.

In her anger, she dealt destruction on farmers and the cattles in their fields, and ordered the ever-faithful land to fail. The crops died as young shoots, destroyed by too much sun, and then by too much rain.

Then the water goddess Arethusa lifted her head from her pool, saying “O great goddess of the crops, I saw your Proserpina. She was sad indeed, but she was nevertheless a queen, the greatest one among the world of shadows, the consort of the king of hell!”

“Marty said a bad word,” Willy sang gleefully, craning his head around so that the entire reading room could share in their disapproval.

I plowed on.

Ceres rose in her chariot to the realms of heaven. There, her whole face clouded with hate, she appeared before Jupiter.

“Who's Jupiter?” Willy again.

“The king god.”

“God the King? Where's Jesus?”

“No, Jesus isn't in this one.” I gritted my teeth. “Just listen.”

“Jupiter, the daughter I have searched for so long has been found. If only Pluto will return her!”

And Jupiter replied, “Proserpina shall return to heaven, but on only one condition: that no food has touched her lips, since that is the law, decreed by the Fates.”

“What kind of law is that—you can eat anything?” broke in Willy again.

“Same kind as we have now 'cept you can't
drink anything!” retorted Timmy. “In't that right, Marty?”

“It is, in a fashion. Now listen, this is the gist of it.

Jupiter spoke, and Ceres felt sure of regaining her daughter. But the Fates would not allow it, for the girl had broken her fast, and had pulled down a reddish-purple pomegranate fruit from a tree, and taking six seeds from its yellow rind, squeezed them in her mouth.

Here it was. I sent Willy for the
P
encyclopedia.

Now Jupiter divides the year equally. And the goddess, Proserpina, shared divinity of the two kingdoms, spends so many months with her mother, so many months with her husband.

I looked up from the book. Timmy's gaze jumped between me and its pages expectantly.

“And?”

“And,” I closed the book slowly, “that's it. I guess.”

“So she never escapes? She just has to stay down there in—”

“Hades,” I finished as Willy arrived back from his encyclopedia errand, ears open to what he'd missed. “And the story says she gets to leave half the year.”

That answer satisfied the boys, especially when they discovered that the following page included an engraving of Proserpina with a rather close-fitting tunic. Their attention was then entirely directed to finding illustrations of unclothed maidens, so I left them to the Ovid. That left me the
P
encyclopedia, and sure enough, Alphonse and the Metropolitan Museum were right: a pomegranate was no apple. The illustration showed the fruit split open, its seeds like teeth spilling out of a monster's mouth, calling to mind Mrs. Sewell's painting of that luxurious table, with the single seed threatening to stain the white tablecloth.

In Classical mythology,
read the encyclopedia,
Persephone—also called Proserpina—is doomed to spend half the year in Hades after eating six pomegranate seeds, and it is this time that is said to account for the winter, or fallow, season.

I sat back, and the boys pulled the volume out of my hands, giggling as they hunted for other words beginning with
P
. The feeble light from the high windows drew my eyes up, the only view the
now-bare branches, blowing wildly and scratching at the glass.

Did Mrs. Sewell see herself as a real-life Proserpina? It made sense, in a way. Her early years sounded like a perpetual springtime of fun and capers. But now she seemed to be imprisoned in a winter of her own mind.

The question was: What had she done—what “pomegranate seeds” had she ingested—that doomed her to this life?

—

The boys wore me down with their crabbing, so I relented and took six bits out of my wages for the picture show.

We missed half of the live act, but it was just a couple of klutzy tap dancers who couldn't hold a candle to Daddo's Creak and Eek routine. Then there was an Oswald the Rabbit cartoon that already seemed obsolete; the papers said there'd be a talkie cartoon out next week called
Steamboat Willie
. Then there was a Three Stooges that had the boys laughing so hard they spat our their Goobers, which annoyed me plenty as that was their supper.

The newsreel kicked off with Tuesday's presidential election. The boys joined with most of the
audience by hooting and booing and throwing popcorn at Herbert Hoover on the screen, and I didn't stop them. When Al Smith came on, we all joined in singing “The Sidewalks of New York,” drowning out any predictions that Hoover would win by a landslide.

The feature,
The Racket
, was quite the caper, about a gangster pretending to be a model citizen; a cop, two newspaper guys, and a nightclub singer join forces to take him down.

The boys and I had quite the shoot-out on the way home, with Timmy and Willy expiring with great flair about a dozen times each. And after I tucked them in, first checking them all over for gunshot wounds with tickling fingers, I fell asleep with that picture show and that Greek myth all tumbled together in my mind, with bowls of fruit shot up by tommy guns, their sinister seeds spilling out on the sidewalks of New York.