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.
Chapter
10
I wasn’t the only one with gangsters on the brain that night.
The next morning Ma and I arrived to discover a scrum of reporters on the sidewalk—not in front of the Sewell house, but next door, in front of a swish apartment building that had recently gone up on the bones of a collapsed mansion. A handful of cops held the jostling mob at bay.
Ma went over for a quick word with a reporter, then made a beeline, tight-lipped, to the servants’ entrance. Inside she set me to work on a catalog of chores before I could ask any questions. Whatever was going on outside had no effect on today’s to-do list.
I was set to work straight off mopping that long marble hall that led from the front foyer all the way to the central courtyard. I started at the front door, hoping to find Alphonse at his station, where I could needle him for the full story that Ma refused to give me.
Unfortunately Alphonse was nowhere to be seen.
Although, I realized with a smile, that meant no one was manning the front door.
I laid my mop aside and seized the giant brass doorknob with two hands, hanging my weight on it to twist and swing the solid oak behemoth, then the wrought iron and glass outer door, on the hinges.
I was lucky that one of the cops from the building next door was going on break, crossing in front of the house at that moment.
“Pssst,” I waved him over. “Officer! What’s happening over there?”
“Haven’t you heard?” His accent identified him as a fellow from our neighborhood back in Brooklyn. “Arnold Rothstein was shot last night.”
“Who?”
“Doncha read the papers, kid?” Would everyone stop asking me that? “A gangster, one of the biggest. Bootlegging, racketeering, and, uh”—he blushed and tipped his hat to me—“other vices. The guy who fixed the World Series back in 1919! But you know what the Good Book says: You live by the sword, you die by the sword. Remember that, kid.” He tipped his hat to me again and strolled on, in search of a cup of coffee, on the house.
I closed the doors, practically trembling with excitement, and made my way back to my mop. A real-live gangster, living right next door! Did Mr. Sewell know? Was gangland violence making its way to the Upper East Side? As I swabbed my way down the hall, my head swam with shoot-outs, tommy guns, getaway cars fleeing down Fifth Avenue, and mob molls on the stoop, chewing gum and cracking wise. Wait till I told the twins—they’d insist on joining me at work the next day, even if it meant picking up a mop themselves.
I was halfway down the hallway, just in front of Mr. Sewell’s office, when I heard the explosion.
—
It wasn’t much of a bomb, the cops said, only some cheap Chinatown gunpowder mixed with ingredients found in any closet of cleaning supplies—basically, an oversized firecracker. But it was strong enough to shatter the glass on the outer door. (The wrought iron was fine.)
From the scraps of brown paper and string, they said it was a package bomb—wrapped and disguised to look like an ordinary parcel. Nothing had been on the steps when I’d last peeked out; my blood ran cold to realize it must have been placed there mere minutes—even seconds—after I went inside.
I stood frozen and clutching my mop for safety, as the rest of the house came running past me: Ma, the other maids, Mr. McCagg from upstairs, even Mr. Sewell, who, as it turns out, had been working from his office at home.
In fact, Mr. Sewell ran directly out onto the steps before the smoke had even cleared, with no regard for his own safety. He brushed off the cops and stomped out the few smoldering embers scorching the marble steps with his fine wingtips, while his employees cowered just inside, in the foyer. I tiptoed up to join them, the fear of missing out greater than my fear of being blown to bits.
Mr. Sewell was holding up his hands to quiet the reporters around the steps, who, giddy with the promise of a terrific news day, had abandoned the Rothstein building and now pulsed around him, snapping photos and flinging questions.
“Mr. Sewell, do you have reason to believe the bomb was related to the Rothstein shooting?”
“Was the attack intended for you, sir?”
“Was it a revenge attack, sir? From Sacco and Vanzetti supporters?”
Sacco and Vanzetti? I looked to Ma for an explanation, but her stone face revealed nothing.
But even without reading the papers, I knew the names. Everyone did.
Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian immigrants who tried to rob a factory in Boston and shot a couple of people in the process. A lot of people said they were innocent and the papers were prejudiced against them because they were Italian. Everyone was suspicious of Italians in those days—they were anarchists or terrorists or bombers, they said (although that hardly described Mrs. Annunziata to me). But innocent or guilty, last year they got the electric chair, so I guess it didn’t matter what people thought. It was all over Mr. Conescu’s newsstand—from the Yodel to, I guess, the Daily Standard.
Mr. Sewell cleared his throat, and the reporters all stopped to poise pencils to notepads.
“I was not the target,” Mr. Sewell boomed, “of this dastardly act, an act born out of the violence that threatens to swamp this great country of ours, from the streets of Chicago to”— and here he winked at the reporters—“‘The Sidewalks of New York.’” (The reporters all chuckled here.) “No, the real target was the American way of life. America itself is under siege, attacked on all sides. By whom, you ask? By bootleggers, drowning this country in the depravity of alcohol. By gangsters, who’d rather smash and grab than earn an honest living. By the immigrants and anarchists who’d rather destroy our way of life than adapt to it.”
Pencils scratched frantically. Even I could tell this was good copy.
“Now, I don’t know which of these nefarious forces have conspired to do me harm. But I can’t say I’m surprised. The voice of the righteous is always resented by the forces of darkness.”
A smattering of applause here, from some of Mr. Sewell’s guys in PRESS: DAILY STANDARD badges. Probably the same guys who’d laughed on cue.
Mr. Sewell held up his hands again, as if calming a roaring crowd. “But I do know that there’s one man to keep this country on track and its enemies at bay. A man with grit. A man with character. A man with”—here it comes, I thought—“vision. That man,” Mr. Sewell paused dramatically, as if the assembled were held in suspense, “is Herbert Hoover.” Clapping again from the Daily Standard suck-ups, and this time even they looked embarrassed about it.
“And that’s why the Daily Standard staunchly endorses Herbert Hoover for president! Read the paper tomorrow for our official endorsement and all week for electio
n coverage! That’s all for today. Thank you.”
Mr. Sewell pushed the doors closed against the onslaught of flashbulbs and throwaway questions and locked it with a flourish.
“Well!” He smoothed over his already flawless hair as the servants scattered back to their posts. “I think I said everything that needed saying. What did you think, Mrs. O’Doyle? And, eh, you there.” I tried to slink away. “Martha?”
What I thought was that he seemed to be in an awfully good mood for someone who’d almost gotten blown up.
Fortunately, Ma spoke first. “A powerful speech, Mr. Sewell.”
“Yes, very, um, powerful.” I nodded, my eyes trained on my mop.
“But, Mr. Sewell,” Ma continued, “shall we get a man or two on the perimeter of the house? For security? That was a close call, to be sure, and after the threats you received last month . . .”
Mr. Sewell wasn’t listening to a word Ma said. He was looking at me. “You don’t sound convinced, Martha. Do you have a difference of opinion?”
I looked at Ma, who closed her eyes wearily, as if telepathically willing me to agree with him.
“As I’ve said, we are all a team here, and as a member of that team, I value frankness in all matters. Now, what do you have to say?”
“It’s just . . .” I could see Ma’s eyes fly open and widen. “It’s just that I didn’t think newspapers were supposed to say who should be president.” I opened my eyes back at Ma, as if to say, “What, did you know that?”
“Ah, is that the issue? Or is it that you disagree with my endorsement?” Mr. Sewell took a step closer to me. “Could it be that your allegiance lies with your countryman, Mr. Al Smith?”
I said nothing, and in response to my silence, he guffawed. “I take it you did not read my paper this morning? For if you did, you would know you’re throwing your hat in with a loser.”
I lowered my eyes. My extra fourteen cents this week had all gone to the gangster film.
The Gallery Page 8