by Mary Volmer
I was shattered, shaking, though I didn’t know it until Miss Rose disappeared into the manor and I climbed from the hansom to f ind my knees wobbling. Cyrus hovered close, but I have never been the fainting kind. Instead, the day’s emotions chattered like a room full of people, louder and louder, making no sense at all.
Until one sound rose over the mangle. Laughter.
My eyes adjusted to the winter glare. Violet, feeling ever so much better, stood on the porch, near the conservatory, next to William and Mr. Clemens, laughing. At me? At something Clemens had said? I didn’t much care. Vile Violet was laughing, turning this way and that before the men, so that her skirt billowed prettily.
Make no mistake. I knew exactly what I was doing as I placed my scrapbook beside the fountain, dried my eyes, and marched around the porch steps. Without so much as acknowledging William or Clemens, I grabbed a great chunk of Violet’s pretty hair and yanked, tumbling us off the porch, into the flowerbed. Oh, we rolled and kicked and scratched and bit, shredding Cyrus’s winter bulbs and crushing the latticework, until icy water stole the breath from me and left us both heaving on hands and knees at Mrs. Hardrow’s feet.
Miss Rose stared down at us from the porch with an open-mouthed William and flabbergasted senator, who had postponed his departure until Sunday. Only Mr. Clemens and perhaps Lizzette, whose head poked over the second-floor balcony, seemed amused. Miss Rose, furious, stomped down the steps but kept a distance from our bloody, mud-stained persons.
“Explain yourselves!”
“She!” We levied our accusations in the same overlapping breath. “Attacked—stole—me—my scrapbook!”
“No, she did not,” said Miss Rose.
Violet and I, unsure who had been exonerated, glanced at each other.
“Mrs. Hardrow took your scrapbook. At my request. Now . . .” she said, but looked back and forth between us, clearly at a loss. “Out of my sight. Both of you.”
24
Mrs. Hardrow interpreted “out of my sight,” to mean “conf ined to your rooms.” Her betrayal stunned me, though no more than the day’s other revelations. I hadn’t minded Hardrow, liked her even, thought she might even like me, but such casual aff inity was nothing compared to the loyalty Miss Rose commanded. Didn’t matter, anyway. I wasn’t about to apologize to Violet, who, after f ighting with such unexpected vigor was now shrieking and carrying on like a child. Hardrow called Lipman to attend her while I, scrapbook in hand, trod upstairs, terribly sorry for myself, to await Lipman’s return. She stopped short at the sight of me, chuckling.
“Well, my Lord and savior. Here I was thinking she must have had the worst of it. Let me see.”
The cut above my left eye had bled down my front, but would not need stitches, she said. She cleaned my scrapes, assessed my bruises, splinted my sprained ring f inger to its neighbor, all the while telling me what a fool I was, putting at risk a position like this, and for what? I hardly listened. That day had pummeled me from every imaginable angle, and only self-righteous pride prevented me from crumbling. Surely my days at the manor were numbered. I told myself I didn’t care—they couldn’t make me go because I had already decided to leave. When Miss Rose f inally called, on Monday, after two nights and a day of seclusion, I was ready with my carpetbag packed.
Miss Rose lounged on a settee in her bedroom in a cream silk dressing gown, powdered, and perfumed. Locks of hair gathered at her crown and coiled down her back. Her attention rested on six bolts of thick fabric displayed on the opposite settee.
“For the winter curtains, Madelyn,” she said lightly. “Heavens, not that one. Or that.” Hardrow gathered the offending samples.
I had never been inside Miss Rose’s bedroom. Though it faced her off ice on the other side of the spiral staircase, it was a mirror only in shape and size. What struck me most was the clutter. I had expected a room as carefully arranged as Miss Rose when she left it, but hats, collars, scarves, shoes, and underthings were strewn on the floor or draped over armchairs. Dresses hung from the bedposts and off the vanity mirror. Portraits and paintings of every size and subject fought for space on the wall; artifacts and f iligreed trinkets—carved porcelain eggs, a jeweled elephant, a headless stone woman with a belly full of baby—jumbled every flat surface.
But it was the japanned tallboy, black embossed with gold and closed with a bronze lock, on which my eyes lingered. I felt, in spite of myself, a shiver of wonder, for it must have contained the only articles of her costume not displayed in the disorder: her wigs. I assumed she had more than one.
“What do you think, Madelyn?” said Miss Rose. She was speaking of the curtains.
I recovered my scowl.
“I don’t think you need new curtains.”
“Oh? And if you did?”
Among the remaining samples was an olive green fabric, the same shade as the wallpaper. “Fine,” I said. “That one.”
“No,” she said quickly. “No, this one I think.”
“The other one matches the wallpaper.”
Hardrow clearly thought I’d lost my mind, but what else could I say? Why were we talking about curtains, anyway? If she knew the one she wanted, why did she . . . ?
I lost my thought in Miss Rose’s smile. “But she is right, is she not, Mrs. Hardrow?” Mrs. Hardrow said nothing. Miss Rose f ixed her eyes on me. “And we are not afraid to say—or to act on—what we think is right, are we? This one, please, Mrs. Hardrow.”
Hardrow left us. I would have given my left toe to make her remain a buffer between me and Miss Rose, shimmering in her dressing gown. Even stripped of her usual layers, her presence f illed the space between us, threatening my visions of brave insurrection. I held my carpetbag tight as she circled me, walking slowly as she had the f irst day in her off ice, her scent, lavender and rosewater, and her voice holding me in place.
“I see you plan to leave us.”
I nodded, for all my def iant words deserted me.
“I see,” she said thoughtfully. “And where will you go?”
“New York,” I said. “Or Paris. Or Rome.”
“Oh yes, beautiful cities, particularly Rome.”
“Or maybe West.”
“I see,” she said reasonably.
“Don’t!” I said, turning to face her.
“What?”
“I’m not dumb!” Her laughter cut my declaration short.
“Oh, but you are a fool ! A young fool who knows nothing of desperation. How will you get to New York or Paris or Rome? Or haven’t you considered that? What will you eat? Where will you sleep, Madelyn? Your mother has protected you well enough to make these indignities you believe you have suffered seem large. They are mere scrapes, Madelyn, to those you would suffer as a friendless, ignorant girl, alone in the world.”
“I’m not—”
“Do not oppose me, Madelyn!” Her cavalier tone vanished. “You will lose! To think of you embarrassing me with that display before the senator and Mr. Clemens. Unacceptable! Unacceptable in one so obviously intelligent. You have no manners, no tact, no self-control, and your temper! Passion is an asset, Madelyn, but temper—” She spoke from experience, I think. “If Mr. Stark had not argued on your behalf, I might have dismissed you out of hand.”
I glanced up to f ind her anger, if that’s what it had been, lifted like a curtain. Her eyes narrowed; a smile teased her lips.
“Do you know what it is he sees in you, Madelyn? I think I do. I think I did from the f irst. Now,” she said in a tone that suggested we had come to some def initive agreement. “I have discussed the matter with Mrs. French, and she refuses to relinquish her mornings with you or hear of any disruptions in your lessons. She is an obstinate woman, my dear Lorena. Did you know that until I met her, and put her straight, she’d published only under her husband’s name? And why is that, do you think?” she asked, then answered. “She
is not meek, our Mrs. French, but rather a pessimist for all her courageous ideals.” She leaned back ever so slightly in her chair. “But I shall have you. You will come to me three days a week, after you are through with my father.”
Believing the conversation over, she turned back to examine three gowns draped across the canopy bed. I was not sure I’d conceded. Not sure I hadn’t, either. She held to the light a blue satin dress with canary yellow flouncing.
“Why?” I asked. Miss Rose turned and my courage faltered. “I mean, to do what?”
“Why, Madelyn,” she said, as if this should have been obvious, “to make a record. A record of an extraordinary life.” She draped the dress over one arm. “My life, Madelyn.”
“You mean I got no choice?”
“Oh dear,” she said. “Have I chained you to the grounds against your wishes? If you were so eager to depart for those great cities, I should think you would have left yesterday, or this morning, and saved us both the labor of this encounter.
“Or do you wish something else in exchange? Very well, Madelyn. What is it you want out of this arrangement? Remember, I have already agreed to keep you, feed you, educate you. But if you feel compensation is yet required, tell me what you want. Stand up straight, Madelyn, and tell me what you want.”
What did I want? A peacock screamed outside. A tumult of rain dashed the window. The demanding weight of Miss Rose’s silence pressed upon me, yet I could not say the word. However many times I’d dreamed, even written the desire down, I couldn’t say it, and I flinched when she did, though she spoke the word quietly.
“Beauty, Madelyn, is but the perishing bloom of youth. ‘Every fair from fair sometime declines.’ Look at me.”
Through my tears, I could see f ine lines webbing her eyes, grooves framing her mouth, her cheekbones so sheer and fragile that for a moment the ghostly image of the old woman overwhelmed me. And for all of this, I still thought her beautiful, maybe more beautiful than I had before. Self-righteous anger left me, and having no other source of resistance, I found myself drawn to her, inexorably drawn, by a wretched, needy hope.
“I will give you more. What, you ask? What will you give me, Miss Rose, though I remain ever so ungrateful?”
She turned to one of the vanity mirrors standing at attention by the bed, raised her head, lowered her shoulders and f illed the room. “Comportment, Madelyn. I will teach you how to carry yourself, how to talk and walk, what to wear and how. Come.”
She pulled me close and turned me around until we were framed together in the mirror.
“I know what you want, Madelyn,” she said, holding my face between her kid gloves so I could not look away. “But you are mistaken. A woman’s power comes not from her beauty, but her allure.” The word stopped me cold. “It will be your carriage and your manner, not your face, that tells the man in the f irst and the farthest corners of the audience what to think of you.”
She swept my hair from my face while I stood, clutching that carpetbag, tears in my eyes.
“Look. Look, Madelyn,” she whispered and stepped away, leaving me alone in the frame. “What do you see?”
A scowling, ratty-haired girl in a hand-me-down dress. A girl with a black eye, nail gouges scoring one cheek, a birthmark on the other.
“Look,” she said. “Do you see what I see?”
So began the next stage of my education in the manor.
The following afternoon, I arrived in Miss Rose’s off ice to f ind a little writing desk beside the settee. On top was an inlaid pen inscribed with the initials R. S.W., an inkwell, and watermarked stationery doomed to suffer the indignity of my penmanship, barely passable even when I wasn’t rushing to keep up with the great flourish of words with which Miss Rose described any simple thing. She never sat long, but paced, gesticulating with such animation that I sometimes forgot to write anything, losing myself in her . . . well, her memories, I guess. I wasn’t sure. For how could she have been born on a frigate in the Atlantic, on a sugar plantation in New Orleans, and in Maine in midwinter? And how could her mama have been a French heiress, a Creole princess, and a dance hall girl? She tried on versions of her beginnings like dresses, twirled them before me, altering them as the mood suited her, or discarding them entirely. And as if these variations weren’t enough to baffle me, she also embraced Mr. Clemens’s suggestion of beginning her recollections at no particular time in her life, wandering freely all over, and dropping a topic the moment it threatened to pale.
“When I was conceived,” she said, “the Mississippi flowed backward . . .”
“Once, when playing Iphigenia at the Adelphi in London, a woman in the balcony was so moved by my performance that she leaped to her death in the pit . . .”
“I was for a time mistress of the King of Bavaria . . .”
“In California, before the war, I loved a man who died twice in one day . . .”
And off she’d go as long as the thread lasted.
On the second day, she laid open before me three vellum scrapbooks bulging with articles, playbills, pictures and reviews. “You are not the only one with the documentary impulse, my dear,” she said fondly touring the pages, her richly layered voice enveloping me. “A girl of my standing was not supposed to take the stage, Madelyn. But the stage, you see,”—she turned a page—“it was my siren call, my saving grace. It made an independent woman out of me, beholden to no one, except, of course”—and here she laughed—“the audience.”
Tarnished gray tintypes and lithographs of Miss Rose as Cleopatra, noble head adorned with a diadem; as the sprightly Puck, grinning over the shoulder of a bearded Oberon; as Saint Joan in armor, tied to a pyre, ecstatic supplication on her face. Miss Rose as the tormented Hamlet. “No female character allows for the full exploration of human sorrows as does that of Hamlet, Madelyn. I have never thought him mad. He arranges the details of the play, represents the assassination of his father. Such,” she said, “is the conduct of a sensible person.”
What a thrill it was to write I did this, went there, saw that, when I had done nothing of note in my life! I fled with Miss Rose and a young actor, Pierre De La Croix, from New Orleans to New York; followed her from chorus to leading lady to actor-manager. I floated with Miss Rose down the Thames in a flatboat and high over the Seine in a hot-air balloon, staring down on slate-shingled roofs and towering cathedrals. Theaters and cities came and went. And then the war.
In Chicago, performing during the war at the Soldiers’ Fair, she met Mrs. French, one of the organizers, along with Mrs. Livermore, “who never much liked me, though I made her three thousand dollars on eight performances alone.”
“You will discover, Madelyn,” said Miss Rose, closing the scrapbook for the day, “that I have been unjustly persecuted, no matter my endeavor. For I am original without trying to be so, my voice, my prof ile distinct, and I have never been able to lend myself to any hypocrisy. And that is a high crime against society.” She looked down at me.
“We are creatures quite apart, my dear.”
Vulnerable as I was, it didn’t take her long to win me with such gestures and statements of sorority. My presence, she said, loosed the words inside of her. And I gained a great deal of cruel satisfaction knowing how much this intimacy distressed Violet.
If intimacy is what it was; we never again met in her bedroom. After that f irst day, I found her in her off ice, her wardrobe and wig in place. I never once saw her without her gloves. If she felt a headache coming, she would not see me. (She saw no one on these occasions but Mrs. Hardrow.) At the end of every session, she gathered my scribblings and her scrapbooks and locked both in the bottom drawer of her desk with a little brass key she wore on a chain around her neck. And although she addressed me, Madelyn, when she spoke it was as if the walls of the off ice fell away and a curtain opened to a distant audience, greater in number even than the myriad reflections attending her.
/> The only part of our time I dreaded took place the moment I walked in, before lessons in elocution and recitation, before sitting down at my desk. Each day, you see, Miss Rose made me stand before her vanity mirror, and look at myself.
“Lift your chin, Madelyn, and your dignity will follow. Smile. My dear, are you in pain? Relax your shoulders. Your shoulders, Madelyn. You must learn to see yourself as you wish to be seen.”
She could not fathom that maybe I did not wish to be seen. Except, perhaps, by William.
25
The rope broke, and the red curtain, sagging morosely over the newly erected stage, crumpled to the ground.
“Not good enough, Mr. Brisson,” Miss Rose sang. She stood, arms akimbo, in the middle of her father’s warehouse, her dress and hat a splash of color in the otherwise drab expanse. Nearly a month had passed. There were three days until Christmas, one until the Nativity play, and Miss Rose’s grand vision of a theater had yet to overwhelm the dilapidated reality of that drafty brick building.
R. S. Werner had built his warehouse, a grain silo, and a gristmill along the waterfront, years before the war—maybe because the spirits told him to, Miss Rose allowed, but also to steal a share of trade floating south from the confluence of three rivers into the Mississippi. The spirits should have told him to put his faith, or at least his money, in the railroad. Had he done so, other investors might well have shunned Alton for a slightly northern route from Springf ield to Saint Louis. Reliance, not Alton, would have flourished.
By the time I arrived, ugly, cumbersome barges transported most of the dwindling river cargo. Only two steamboats a day stopped in Reliance, weather permitting. The town was living off the brewery and the glassworks and the farmers, mostly Bohemians, tilling the inland prairie. The gristmill had closed, and Old Man’s warehouse, emptied of goods, was suffering clear signs of its unsanctioned uses, namely cockf ights and Saturday night boxing matches. Patches of dried blood stained the splintered floorboards; I’d found more than a half dozen human teeth in the sweepings. And, after four days of airing, there remained a mangy, wet-dog smell to the place. Really, I was beginning to worry that Miss Rose’s plans for it might be, as Mrs. French feared (and Stockwell surely hoped) too ambitious.