The Gallery

by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

  I stood back. This Bacchus was no god. He was a half-drunk boy who smirked and beckoned, who pawed food with dirty hands. I would only drink the cup he offered me if I wanted to find myself knocked out and relieved of my pocketbook.

  “You see the joke now?”

  “Ye-es.” I hesitated. “Mr. Sewell?” Alphonse nodded again. “But it doesn’t make sense, really. I mean, Mr. Sewell is a teetotaler—”

  “Bacchus—how do you say?—he intoxicates. Not only through wine. Through words.”

  “Through stories.” I whispered.

  “There is a play by Euripides—you know—?” He stopped himself and smiled, knowing I’d never heard the name in my life. “—A play called The Bacchae, in which Bacchus drives his rival mad, then convinces his followers that this man is actually a wild animal. These worshippers, they fall into a frenzy, they tear the man limb from limb with their bare hands—all because of what Bacchus made them believe.”

  A shiver ran up my spine, not only from the specter of Rose, being carried through the party like wild game fresh from the kill, but from the burst of cold air that had just been let in from the front door.

  Mr. Sewell blew in, the door wide open behind him. “Keep it running!” he shouted to the shining black Rolls that had replaced the not-as-new Duesenberg. “By God, isn’t someone supposed to be at the door—ah, there you are Alphonse, good,” he said, eyes never leaving his pocket watch. He launched in with a barrage of directions involving spilled coffee and his checked shirt and lunch with the mayor, storming past the painting of his alter-ego still leaned against the wall.

  By the time he returned in the fresh shirt and tie, I’d returned to my spot on the floor, unfortunately directly in Mr. Sewell’s path.

  Had it not been for Alphonse’s quick hand under the master’s arm, Mr. Sewell would have slipped and gone headfirst into the bucket of slop water.

  There followed a great deal of swearing and blustering and blinding, as expected, and I bobbed curtsies up and down. But something about the near fall had shaken Sewell out of his focus on shirts and his pocket watch, and as Alphonse helped him regain his footing, the two men found themselves face-to-face.

  Maybe it was the mustache, which as I mentioned had become quite luxuriant in the past few weeks. Or maybe Mr. Sewell wasn’t accustomed to actually looking at his servants.

  But he stopped there for a moment, regarding his footman, the same way Alphonse and I had just been staring intently at the painting.

  “Has anyone ever told you—” Sewell started, then narrowed his eyes. “Where did you say you were from?”

  Alphonse smiled placidly. “Strasbourg. That eastern part of France that is also Germany, depending who you ask. Perhaps you know it from your travels?” And then he released a stream of French that sounded quite different from Chef’s.

  Alphonse, I could tell, was gambling that Mr. Sewell didn’t speak French, and it was a bet he won. Mr. Sewell looked at the man suspiciously for a moment, then strode away without another word.

  But before he left, he turned to me. “Tell your mother I need to speak with her as soon as I return this evening.”

  I curtsied again, noticing, as I looked down, that Sewell had left another black mark on the floor.

  With a groan, I sank back to my knees, while Alphonse turned back to the painting.

  “What happened to Bacchus,” I asked while kneading the scrubbing brush into the floor, “in the end of that story?”

  There was a pause, and when I looked up, I noticed that Alphonse’s hands were shaking as he picked up the painting by its frame. “Nothing happened,” he said. “He was a god. The gods live forever.”

  —

  On the way home, I finally understood what had rattled Mr. Sewell so.

  It was on one of those long subway rides home, where the silence of the house pursued us all the way to Brooklyn. Ma had started reading the Standard with renewed interest, poring over its pages instead of lecturing me about my posture or my work habits. It was as if she was studying for a test, soaking in every word Mr. Sewell had approved with the attention of a scholar.

  Like the bearded men on the subway who bobbed and nodded over their prayer books, Ma worked her way backward through the paper, starting with the business section and working right to left up to the headlines.

  I tilted my head to read the front page.

  ITALIAN BOMB PLOT FOILED IN CHICAGO

  —

  Three men were apprehended today after bomb-making materials were found in the car they were driving and at one of the men’s homes. Police suspect the men, two of whom were of Italian origin, of anarchist sympathies and indicated the bombings may have been intended as revenge for the trial and execution of known anarchists and murderers, Sacco and Vanzetti.

  My eyes flitted around the subway car, and sure enough, as the other riders opened and folded their Daily News, their Posts, their Yodels, the same story flashed in and out:

  SACCO AND VANZETTI LIVE! SHOUT ANARCHISTS

  ANOTHER FOILED PLOT, THANKS TO CHICAGO’S FINEST

  With each story, mugshots of three small-fry hoodlums stared out, looking bewildered. But next to them, always, was a photo I’d seen reproduced so many times I’d stopped looking.

  It was two men, sitting handcuffed together, side by side, very somber. One was clean-shaven, but the other had a great bushy mustache like a walrus.

  Like a thicker version of Alphonse’s.

  These were Sacco and Vanzetti, the men executed—some said wrongly—a couple of years back. Since then, their supporters had unleashed a string of attempted bombings on those (they said) responsible for their persecution: the judge, a juror, the executioner, the governor. There had even been a bombing at the Twenty-Eighth Street subway station here in New York City, where dozens of subway riders—just like the ones bouncing and dozing their way downtown in this very car—were bloodied.

  I peered at the picture of the mustached one, called out as Mr. Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The resemblance was impossible to ignore.

  Didn’t Alphonse say he had an older brother? A brother who convinced him to immigrate to America? Who, he said, was dead?

  I waved away the thought at first. What fish off the boat didn’t have a brother along? And a brother who’d died was hardly news. There was no shortage of ways for the poor and hungry to expire in this city.

  But most young immigrants didn’t share the eyes of America’s most hated anarchist, I thought as I stared at the photo that confronted me from every side. Or the same mustache, the same rounded jaw, the same jutting forehead.

  Was Alphonse actually Vanzetti’s younger brother?

  Was it coincidence that he ended up working for Mr. Sewell—the very man whose newspaper had pursued his brother into the electric chair? Who painted his brother as ten kinds of guilty before he even made it to court?

  Or was it by design?

  Alphonse gave the impression of a defeated man, and if this story were true, I supposed it made sense. When years of protests, marches, letters, and vigils worldwide couldn’t free your brother, why would you believe anything you did would free the wife of one powerful man? A man whose every word became the truth, simply because he owned a newspaper?

  But I remembered a story, front page of the tabloids a few years back, about a servant at a fancy club in Chicago. He poisoned the soup at a party, sickening two hundred people. The servant turned out to be an anarchist, and the act his revenge against the rich and powerful.

  And I remembered the explosion on Mr. Sewell’s very front steps, and Alphonse’s mysterious absence.

  That’s why Alphonse—Alfonso?—Vanzetti, was in that house. Behind that false front of defeated apathy, underneath his cold detachment, he was most likely waiting for the right moment to finish the job.

  Ma’s eyes met mine over the top of the paper
. She saw the picture, too. She saw that I saw. But without saying a word, she folded up her paper, stuffed it in her bag, and closed her eyes, pretending to sleep.

  —

  The next day, Alphonse had shaved his mustache.

  But it was too late.

  “May I have a word with you in my sitting room?” Ma beckoned him as soon as she got in that morning.

  An hour later, he was gone.

  Chapter

  25

  So then there were four.

  Mr. Sewell. Mrs. Sewell. Ma. And me. (Five if you counted McCagg. I didn’t.)

  And no one was talking.

  At least not to me.

  Whenever I tried to talk to Ma—to apologize, to ask about Rose, to warn her of the sticky, icky, dark feeling I felt lurking in the silence—she stopped me. “You’ve done enough. Believe me, you’ve done enough.”

  But then everything changed.

  One day, in late March, I looked up from my mop and saw that the lion outside had been cloaked in lamb’s clothing. Bare trees budded, slush drained into the gutters, and up and down Park Avenue, tulip shoots struggled to break free of their underground exile.

  And overnight, the silence of the house had been banished by babble.

  Every room in the house now found itself inhabited by a radio, switched on and nattering, one room to the other. It was a bizarre sensation, to say the least. Ma had always hated the radio—“Isn’t there enough talking in the world?”—and wouldn’t abide them in the servants’ quarters, even in the kitchen, where a little music would’ve helped those dishes wash themselves. But maybe now the silence was getting to her, too.

  As I cleaned and polished, chased from room to room with music and news and Pepto-Bismol advertisements, the radios should have been welcome company. But instead it felt like a nervous old biddy trying to fill an awkward break in the conversation. And if I tried to turn it off, Ma swept in behind me and switched it back on. Without a word.

  —

  In the midst of that chatter came Rose’s last message.

  It was a Saturday at the end of March. It was raining—not one of those soft spring rains, but a soaking one, that drenched Mr. Sewell in that short walk from his new Rolls-Royce to the front door. I ran forward to collect his hat and overcoat before the puddle underneath him required a mop.

  “Eh—Martha.” He looked around and it was as if he’d just noticed I was the only servant left.

  “Good evening, Mr. Sewell.” The wet coat over my arm had soaked through the left side of my body, but with my dry hand I retrieved an envelope on a side table. “Dr. Westbrook left these papers for you, sir.”

  If Mr. Sewell could have rubbed his hands together like a movie villain, he would have. Instead his hands were too busy ripping the package open. He scanned the papers quickly, his thin mustache dancing over his twitching mouth.

  I strained my eyes to the very corners to peek. I only saw a few words I recognized: recommendation . . . Rose . . . sanitorium . . . assets transferred.

  My eyes were stopped by Mr. Sewell’s own. I lowered them while he stuffed the papers back into the envelope.

  “You’re a curious girl, aren’t you, Martha? So I expect you’ve been reading the Standard then?” He didn’t wait for a response. “And what did you think about today’s front page? How about that new company we profiled, Ameriwin? Put your money on them, girl; that stock’s going to be a skyrocket.”

  What money, I thought. But I said, “What do they do?”

  “Oh, they’re on to a very important invention.” He tucked the envelope away in his suit pocket. “Trust me.”

  I didn’t. “Well, I do have that extra fourteen cents a week . . .”

  This bit of sarcasm flew right over the master’s head. “And this is the stock! With the right knowledge,” he put his finger alongside his nose, “a chambermaid might become a millionaire, hmmm? As a wise man once said, knowledge is power. Also,” he added, glancing at his watch, “time is money.”

  “Pluck not luck,” I murmured in response.

  He seemed pleased. “Why yes, exactly! That’s what I’ve been saying. Your destiny is knocking! Seize the reins!” He attacked the metaphors with an eggbeater. “Now when you see your mother, tell her I need to speak to her. In my office.”

  He patted the envelope in his pocket and hummed his way down the hall.

  Before I could summon my mother, I was distracted by a thumping on the stairs.

  Thump.

  “Ma?”

  Thump.

  I ran to the bottom of the stairs, expecting to see the end of our little drama unfold: Mr. McCagg drags a heavily sedated Rose down the stairs. Mr. Sewell produces a letter from her doctor, stating that, yes, she would be better off institutionalized. An ambulance appears outside to whisk her away, and all her assets—her house, her paintings—are on the auction block in time for Mr. Sewell to invest the whole lot in Ameriwin. And Ma and I are out of jobs, while Mr. Sewell enjoys penthouse living.

  But it was only Ma. In Alphonse’s absence, it was her arms wrapped around a painting, almost as big as she was, and it landed heavily as she bumped it down each stair.

  “I told her,” she huffed to herself—or to me? I wasn’t sure. “I told her this was entirely unnecessary. But she never did listen to me.”

  “Mrs. O’Doyle!” The office door shook with Mr. Sewell’s voice. “Is that you? In here, madam, we have much to discuss.”

  Ma abandoned the painting in the hallway, hurrying to the office where the door closed behind her.

  I don’t know how I knew. How I knew what it would tell me. Maybe I suspected Rose’s desperation. Maybe those few glimpses at Mr. Sewell’s documents planted the seeds of dread.

  I crept over to the painting, muffling my footsteps from the office or the painting, I wasn’t sure which.

  No, Rose, I shuddered as I caught the first glimpse. Please, no. Not this plan.

  Judith and Her Maidservant read the label, along with a fantastical Italian name I couldn’t pronounce, let alone spell.

  The painting was simply, dark: two women standing in a dark hall in the dark of night, illuminated only by a beam of light streaming in from a corner. The women are united in their mission and, in the moment, both look nervously over their shoulders, stealing away from that light, as if they’re afraid they’ve been discovered.

  The plump one was Judith, I supposed, in her jewels and velvet, the beautiful rich widow who scolds her people for their refusal to fight off an invading army. (I had to offer some silent thanks to Sister Ignatius for grilling us on the Old Testament.) The maid has her back to the viewer, faceless and anonymous, as all maids are. But why so nervous, Judith and Maidservant? Maybe it’s your cargo. For Judith has a sword slung over her shoulder like a pirate, while the maid (always left the dirty work) carries a basket containing the blood-dripping head of Holofernes, the enemy leader Judith has just assassinated.

  I wrapped my arms around my own shoulders, as if shaking sense into myself. Is this what Rose wanted? My help in destroying—beheading?!?—her enemy?

  How? When? Was I the one to plan it? I was a liar, that I knew. I’d even been a thief at times, and certainly a slacker.

  But I was not a murderer.

  But how else would Rose escape Mr. Sewell’s plan to toss her in a loony bin and get his hands on her art, her house, her everything?

  And yet, how did trading the loony bin for a spot in the electric chair make for a good plan?

  Before I could stop my mind from swirling around these questions, the office door opened. I stayed frozen to the spot before the painting as Mr. Sewell breezed past that ominous prophecy.

  “Make up my room, Mrs. O’Doyle,” he called over his shoulder as he conquered the stairs, two at a time. “I intend to have a good night’s sleep.”

&nbs
p; —

  The next day was Sunday. Our day off.

  My sleep had been fitful, with dreams where swords danced with pomegranates, threatening to split them open with every swing.

  All through church, through the boys’ stickball game in the rain-slicked streets, through a cold supper and an only slightly warmer bath, I thought only of that sword.

  I was the first to wake on Monday morning, the first to dress, and the first out the door, dragging Ma behind me as I raced to the subway.

  I had to know what was waiting on the other side of the river.

  Chapter

  26

  Ma, on the other hand, seemed in no hurry. She settled into her seat on the train, paging her way leisurely through the newspaper and finally breaking her silence as we broke through the underground tunnel and burst onto the bridge.

  “Do you know what day it is?” she asked as she flipped another page.

  I held up a hand to the low-hanging morning sun in my eyes. “Monday. March twenty-fourth. No,” I said with a glance at the front page, “the twenty-fifth.”

  “It’s Annunciation Day.” She looked at me. “Which is—” she prompted.

  This was an easy one. “The day the Angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she’ll give birth to Jesus. Aw, no,” I whined, “we don’t have to go to church for a Holy Day of Obligation, do we?”

  “No,” Ma said with a twinge of annoyance. “Back home they called it Lady Day, for Our Lady of Sorrows.” The sun struck Ma’s face with the same brilliance, but she accepted its glare with barely a squint. “Some said it was the day Christ died as well.”

  “That’s Good Friday,” I interjected. Surely Ma, practically a saint herself, knew that. “And that’s not till, well, Friday.”

  “’Tis just a tradition,” she continued. “That Christ would be conceived and would die on the same day. That death and birth would twine together. It falls at the vernal equinox, see.” She looked out the window, toward the glare. “The first day of spring.”