by Mary Hogan
Mother has already advised me to lower my standards. “You’ll never find a perfect husband,” she said.
“What about Father?”
“No man is perfect.”
What I have yet to mention is my desire to find the ideal husband for me. I don’t care the slightest bit if he’s perfect for anyone else.
After Nettie helps me out of my lavender skirt and petticoat, she removes my matching blouse and lays the entire outfit on my bed to prepare it for another day’s wear. In my underclothes, I sit at my dressing table and brush my hair. “You needn’t fuss over those frocks now,” I tell her. “Have Ida pack you a picnic and enjoy a day at the lake.”
“What about your hair, miss? Your washbasin—”
“I will take care of myself.”
She poorly contains her glee. “You’re certain?”
“I am. But first, please open the green hatbox at the back of my wardrobe.” Now I poorly contain my glee. A giggle escapes through my lips.
As instructed, Nettie trundles over to the corner of my room and opens the wardrobe. Bending over to retrieve the hatbox, she slides it out of its hiding place and opens it. Inside is my favorite summer straw hat.
“Under the hat,” I chirp.
When Nettie peers beneath the hat, her eyes open as round as ivory buttons. I put my finger to my lips. “Mother needn’t know.”
“Bloomers, Miss Elizabeth?”
“Why corset myself up just to sit alone in my room?”
Nettie reaches into the hatbox and gently removes the scandalous cotton and lace undergarment, holding it aloft.
“Isn’t it divine?” I leap up to join her. “Tilly brought it back for me from her holiday in France. There, they have all sorts. See the beautiful stitching.”
The world is changing. Why can’t I be modern, too?
“Today,” I say to my maid, “we are both liberated.”
Nettie grins and whispers, “I won’t breathe a word.”
Before she leaves, Nettie sets out the plain brown clothes I’ve brought to the lake for solitary walks in the woods. It can get terribly muddy after a rainfall. She helps me out of my ordinary drawers and into my extraordinary new bloomers. Together, we both admire the prettiness of the pink satin ribbon that secures the soft fabric to my knees. The sensation of liberty is almost sinful. I want to skip through the cottage singing.
Let the other girls have the counterfeit royal, Mr. Tottinger. I have something much more desirable: freedom.
“Have an enjoyable day, miss,” Nettie says, leaving me alone to finish dressing. With only a basic skirt and shirtwaist to slip over my bloomers and camisole, it takes but a minute to dress. I even remove my leather shoes and stockings to let my toes wiggle in bare abandonment. Why haven’t I thought of this before? A lady needs occasional solitude to gather her wits about her. Mother has said so often.
“Let James Tottinger impress himself,” I say out loud.
The cottage is blessedly silent. As is—it seems—the entire world. From my second-story window, the view is splendid. A vast sparkling sapphire. Our cottage feels as though it’s floating on top of the lake itself. A huge houseboat, adrift. I notice the gentle bobbing of our skiff secured to our dock. Father often uses our small rowboat to patrol this far section of Lake Conemaugh for driftwood and dead foliage that would mar our blue view. The dense woods surrounding our lake are forever shedding branches into the water. Colonel Unger, the club’s caretaker, often bemoans the clogged spillway. The heavy mesh fish guards installed to prevent the lake’s bounty from swimming downstream into Johnstown is a catchall for every manner of lake debris.
“We can’t have townspeople fishing from our stock,” he’d exclaimed when someone suggested removing the mesh to let the lake’s runoff flow freely into the valley rivers down below.
Of course not. Lake Conemaugh is our lake. The “No Trespassing” sign before the dam crossing (and other spots throughout the woods) makes that abundantly clear.
In my room, I place both hands on my torso and feel it rise and fall. With each unfettered inhalation, I rejoice in the emancipation of my lungs. Air rushes in and out as nature intended. It’s an almost indescribable joy. As if I were sleeping while awake. I feel complete calm.
On a cushioned seat in front of my window, I sit and feel the deliciously forbidden weight of my long swirling hair down my back. To launch my relaxing day, I open the book I’ve been reading nightly. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Tales. I begin to read. Then I stop. Ribbons of yellow sunlight angle through the glass. The glare bounces off the page oddly. It makes me squint. I move away from the window to my settee in the corner, but I can’t find a comfortable position. Perhaps I’ll read later this afternoon, when a cloud forms.
Feeling the cool of the polished wood floor beneath my bare feet, I skip over to my desk, sit down, and retrieve paper and pen from the top drawer. A thank-you letter to my New York friend, Tilly Hinton, is overdue. Though it requires a bit of subterfuge since Mother has recently taken to reading my correspondence to ensure my grammar and diction are suitable for a young lady on the verge of her debut.
“Nothing can be the slightest bit amiss,” Mother said. “Only if we are extremely careful will you be the belle of the ball.”
If Mother had suspected I’d returned from my visit with Tilly hiding bloomers in my trunk, well, surely her reins would be pulled ever tighter.
For inspiration, I gaze out my window over the sparkling lake, its water now as blue as Bristol glassware. “Oh, Tilly, to be strolling through Central Park, deeply inhaling the green scent, on a day such as this,” I write. Then, grinning, I add, “On your recent visit to France, were you free to roam the Tuileries unfettered?”
Tilly will know exactly what I mean.
Pen in hand, I find it difficult to compose a third sentence. Especially when Lake Conemaugh seems to extend all the way to the horizon. As yet undisturbed by boats, its surface is as smooth as ironed silk. Has Colonel Unger cut back on the fish stock? I wonder. Is the water warm or cold? When I go for a sail later in the week, will I see fish dart away through the transparent swells?
Setting Tilly’s unfinished note aside, I decide to write a different letter to a friend from school who has moved to a horse farm in Vermont.
“How lovely it must be to look out over a pasture of viridian green.” (We both excelled in literature class.) Again, I gaze out my window for inspiration. The lake, I notice, is trimmed all the way around in trees of every possible shade of green. Emerald, olive, sage, and yes, viridian. The pines are vibrant beryl where their peaks puncture the sunlight; below the tree line, their needles darkened to moss. At nightfall, when the lake is so black it seems to swallow the jagged mountains surrounding it, the trees are the very definition of forest green. How terribly interesting, I ponder. Nature produces more color variations than humans can devise proper words to describe. Why, there should be dozens of words for green. And in fall, how could one ever adequately capture the spectrum of reds alone?
Curiously, the rhythmic ticking of the clock in the far corner of my room suddenly seems to grow both louder and slower. As I sit at my desk, I begin to anticipate the tick, then the tock. Then the tick again. How have I managed to sleep through such noise?
I set my pen aside. I consider walking downstairs to practice the piano, but I’m not in the mood. Instead, I twirl my bracelet around and around my wrist to watch its rose-cut diamonds send flickers of light bouncing about the room. Just looking at the exquisite swirling stones makes me happy.
Soon my thoughts drift back to life in Pittsburgh. It’s a plain fact for a woman born into my circumstances: every day is as predictable as a sunrise and sunset. Nettie attempts to wake me with the swooshing of velvet drapes across my shiny bedroom floor. She’s never successful. Not even direct sunlight on my face can rouse me. My maid tells me it takes a full minute of shoulder jostling for me just to open my eyes. It’s no secret that mornings are my least favorite time of day.
All that bustle when I’m barely awake.
“My daughter, the somnambulist.”
Without fail, Father greets me in the breakfast room by tipping down the corner of his open newspaper. Mother, in turn, regards him reproachfully. She disapproves of reading at the dining table, considers it the height of bad manners. But Father dismisses her with a smile. “How else can I keep up with my patients?”
At precisely eight o’clock in our Upper St. Clair home—Father insists on early rising, much to my dismay—our butler, Mr. Tilson, enters the breakfast room carrying a platter of freshly fried meats. Unfailingly, Father exclaims, “Splendid.” He then lifts himself up with a grunt and makes his way to the buffet at the end of our long paneled room. That’s the moment Mother and Mr. Tilson exchange glances. Theirs are two expressions I know well. My mother’s pleading eyes beg our butler, “Can’t you please fill our breakfast buffet with healthful foods?”
Of course, Mother doesn’t eat pork, nor any organ meats or shellfish, but she insists there are plenty of other delicious options. Mr. Tilson’s unspoken reply lets her know he is powerless to defy Dr. Haberlin’s wishes. If the doctor asks for bacon or deviled kidneys or plump sausages or all three—which he often does—the staff is obliged to comply. Mother can only sigh—which she often does.
Day after day it is the same routine. How many scales and arpeggios can a person practice in an afternoon? How many peacocks and pastoral scenes can one girl needlepoint without noting the pointlessness of it all? I take my seat across from Mother with a slice of toast and milk tea.
“Elizabeth, please eat more than a sparrow.”
Forever, Mother is after Father to eat less and me to eat more.
“I ate two eggs, five bits of potato, and half a bowl of porridge,” Henry chirps from his perch at Mother’s right elbow.
“Fine boy,” Father booms, though his attention is fully focused on bacon and the next item of news in the paper.
“Henry, a gentleman never boasts about his abundance,” Mother says, sipping her own milk tea.
I yawn behind my hand. As I always do. In Pittsburgh—in spite of my recent intensification in debutante training—life is a series of minutes, gathered into hours, twisted into days, braided into months, and coiled into years. Never have I been able to embrace the monotony. Most often I feel like a racehorse trapped in the starting gate.
Until summer. Oh, how I love summer at the lake.
At that precise moment, a warbler opens its black beak and calls to me. Swee, swee. Or is it the eastern bluebird? The chirping begins just outside my window, then grows fainter. Did the bird fly to the opposite shore? Was it silenced by the sight of an animal wandering through the woods?
I rise from my desk and return to the window seat. Opening my window as wide as it will go, I lean out to inhale the fresh mountain air. My lungs lusciously expand to their full capacity. A whispery breeze tickles my loose hair. I decide to compose a poem.
Water of azure, sky of teal . . .
Surely there are hundreds of words that rhyme with “teal.” In my head, I begin listing all I can recall: zeal, conceal, real, reveal, meal, feel.
When no adequate couplet enters my head, I wander over to my full-length mirror and gaze at myself, turning this way and that, examining every inch of my reflection. My nails, I notice, are imperfectly oval. How careless of Nettie not to remark upon it. Thank goodness I caught it before Mother noticed. Returning to my dressing table, I use the sterling file Mother gave me to slowly shape each fingernail to flawlessness. I massage a touch of rose oil into each cuticle and camphor cream into my elbows. Around and around I rub until the cream disappears. Then I add a dab more for good measure. Around and around and around.
By the time Ida knocks on my bedroom door with a lunch tray, I can stand it no longer.
“Set it anywhere,” I say, brusquely, attempting to secure my hair into a top twist. It falls lopsided, the amethyst-tipped clips creating only the barest semblance of a proper bun. How does Nettie do it so expertly every day?
A shocked look flares in Ida’s eyes when she sees my state of dress.
“Are you unwel—?”
“Never felt better.”
With tendrils springing onto my face and neck, I leap up and grab the stockings I’d worn that morning, rolling them onto my feet. Ida stands there, befuddled, as I hastily step into my boots and haphazardly secure the laces. Dashing past her, down the stairs to the side door, I leave her standing in my room holding a steaming tray of roasted beef and summer squash.
CHAPTER 12
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Present
As Valerie feared, Lee was instantly obsessed with her new identity. “Maybe the woman in the photo was a nurse,” she said in the car as Valerie drove them home from Social Services. “Have you ever known me to, like, faint at the sight of blood?”
In the sludge of rush hour, on the misnamed freeway, they lurched forward foot by foot. Valerie stared numbly at the scratched bumper on the car in front of her. “What about that genetic Ashkenobi thing?” she asked her daughter. “You know, the reason this whole trip was important?”
“Ashkenazi. I think Ashkenobi was a character in the original Star Wars.”
They both laughed. Val felt a surge of tenderness. She hadn’t seen her daughter this animated in months. Not since before her father ripped off her future like a hot wax strip. Lee bent her neck over the iPhone screen in her hand, her thumbs in motion. On the other side of the freeway’s cement partition, headlights blinked on like fireflies. Inside the car, a faint glow of green haloed Lee’s mass of dark curls.
“Interesting,” she said after a minute or two.
“Tell me.”
“Ashkenazi comes from the Hebrew word ashkenaz, meaning ‘Germany.’ My peeps are German.”
A pinch stung Valerie’s chest. She wanted to shout, Hey! I’m your peep. Her grip tightened around the warm vinyl steering wheel. She felt a sudden urge to snatch Lee’s phone and hurl it out the window. “Hmm,” she said, instead.
“Ninety percent of American Jews are Ashkenazim,” Lee went on. “Seems we may have migrated from Palestine to Europe.”
We. Valerie pressed her lips together.
“There’s some controversy, though.” Lee expanded the word size on her iPhone. “The debate is, did Jewish men and women migrate together? Or mostly just men? Like, did the guys arrive with their Jewish wives? Or did they marry European women later and convert them?”
“Why does it matter?”
Lee looked up and grinned. “I’m not sure. I’ve only been Jewish for twenty minutes.”
Her mom exhaled a laugh. She said, “Why don’t I treat my Jewish daughter to a Shake Shack burger for an early dinner.”
“Aren’t we broke?”
“Completely. But I have an emergency twenty for moments like this. Two hungry girls out on the town.”
Normally, Lee’s eyes would light up. With money so tight, they rarely went out. Valerie had become a wizard at the microwave meal. “Steamed broccoli à la Cajun turkey breast. With crushed cornflakes for crunch.”
From behind her curtain of hair, Lee smiled an acknowledgment of her mother’s effort and parried back, “Okay, but no bacon.” Grinning, she continued her Internet search. Again, Val felt a twinge in her chest, the spot directly above her heart. The nook where a mother holds love. Front and center. As she inched north on the San Diego Freeway, she pressed her fingers on her chest as if she could pluck out her heartache and crush it in her fist. She cursed her body for threatening tears. She also cursed her husband, Gil, for leaving her to handle this alone. They both knew this day would come . . . somehow. If not by letter, then via an ancestry search or a blood test or a call on a weekend evening while they were watching TV.
Um, sorry to bother you, but I’ve been doing some digging . . .
Of course Valerie was happy for her daughter. Of course. They had joked about Lee’s biological roots a hundred times over
the years.
“Maybe you’re a long-lost relative of Czar Nicolas and Alexandra?”
“Great-great-grandchild of Crazy Horse!”
After the CDSS letter had been pushed through the mail slot in their old front door, their musings became more current.
“Perhaps I am Chaz Bono’s secret love child from before she became a he.”
Speculation had been fun. Especially in the past months when they both needed to imagine a life different from the one they were living. Fantasizing alternative families was a bright spot in their dismal year.
Still.
In the harsh glare of genuine DNA, Valerie felt something she hadn’t expected to feel: excluded. Gil was gone. Scott had slipped off the grid. Now Lee was on a journey away from her. How had life become a series of losses?
“C’mon, c’mon,” Valerie muttered as she flipped on her blinker in an attempt to cross four lanes before the next exit. “Let me in, pleeeeease.”
On a Los Angeles freeway in rush hour—the birthplace of road rage—relinquishing your spot in the herd is considered a weakness. A limping zebra on the African savannah. Allow one commuter to squeeze in ahead of you and the whole freeway will smell your vulnerability. You’ll never get home. Valerie’s green-light traffic karma was lost in the lanes of bumper-to-bumper.
“Thank you!” Valerie waved to a young colt in a convertible who accidentally allowed a gap while he answered a text.
“Wow,” Lee piped up. “My people are a genetically tight group.” She read: “Every Ashkenazi Jew is a thirtieth cousin.”
Lifting her head, facing her mother, Lee beamed. “I must have family everywhere.”