As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

  Agnes Prinsen, Ursula’s employer, sits across from me, silver-haired and plump. The young maid who brought in the tea stands just to my left, her demeanor shy and hesitant. Matilda did not know she’d be asked to stay after she’d delivered the tray and I can see she very much wishes to be dismissed back to the kitchen.

  But I’ve come to the Prinsen home for help with my patient. At Dr. Bellfield’s direction, I’ve spoken with Ursula several times but have been unable to break through her armor. I’ve also had no luck in finding any of her extended family to help me piece together her history. I’ve searched all the school records and orphanages in Philadelphia for traces of Ursula’s life before she became a maid for the Prinsen household but have found nothing. Ursula seems to be a young woman with no past, but I know that is impossible. Everyone has a past, and everyone’s past matters. When I asked Dr. Bellfield if I might be allowed to go to the home where Ursula had been a maid to speak with those she’d worked with, he’d at first balked. He had never troubled himself to go to a patient’s place of employment for insights the family could not supply.

  “You’re too impatient, Miss Bright,” he’d said. “If you just continue your sessions with Ursula, I am sure in time she will reveal to you why she wanted to end her life.”

  “But if we could understand the reason why now, we could help her now,” I’d replied. “She just stares out the window, surely trying to think up a new way to kill herself. What if she’d confided in one of the other maids? What if she had told one of them why she is so sad? If I knew what it was, I could help ease her past this heartache without her having to be the one to reveal its source.”

  “Sometimes it is part of the patient’s recovery to be the one to reveal the source of her anguish,” he’d replied.

  “And the other times?” I had asked. “What about those other times?”

  He was silent for a moment as he pondered this. Then he gave me his permission.

  Agnes and Walter Prinsen, who’d made their fortune in the furniture business, were only too happy to allow me to speak to their other maid, Matilda, especially since they had little information regarding Ursula themselves. Agnes Prinsen had hired Ursula without references after they had met on the street. Ursula was selling sweets from a trolley and Agnes had taken pity on her and had bought some. They talked and Agnes soon found out the girl was an orphan sleeping on the floor of an overcrowded row house. Moved by compassion, Agnes had offered her a job as a kitchen maid and a place to live. She had not probed for more personal information because Ursula seemed guarded, as though she was hiding from someone. The Prinsens’ cook had had minimal personal conversation with Ursula in the year she was there, and the housekeeper had had none. But Matilda, the upstairs maid who made the beds and did the laundry and served guests, had shared a room with her. Surely they had become friends, at least to an extent, and had perhaps talked at night as they lay in their beds.

  Matilda stands before me now looking as though she thinks Agnes and I are somehow holding her responsible for what Ursula did to herself. She looks younger than her eighteen years. I try to reassure her that Ursula simply needs our help.

  “She is feeling better, but she is still very melancholy,” I say. “If we can discover what is making her so sad, we can help her find happiness again. You’d be doing her a great kindness if you could help me. Would you do that?”

  Matilda looks from me to her employer and back to me again. “I don’t know how I can help you, miss,” she says, her face pale with worry that her job hangs in the balance.

  “Just answer Miss Bright’s questions truthfully, Matilda,” Agnes Prinsen says, “even if you must reveal a secret Ursula told you to keep. Secrets will not help her right now. Surely you can see that.”

  “But . . . but she never told me any secrets.”

  “Did she say where she lived after her mother died? After the flu?” I ask.

  “She didn’t like to talk about her mother. Or the flu.”

  “She never mentioned an orphanage? Or who took her in? Or where she went to school?”

  “No, miss.”

  “What did she like to talk about?”

  Matilda bites her lip in consternation. “Nothing special. I did most of the talking. She just listened. I thought she was shy.”

  “Can you tell me if anything out of the ordinary happened on the day she tried to hurt herself? Anything at all? Or the day before?”

  Matilda slowly shakes her head. “It was like any other day. Both days were.”

  “And she never had visitors or letters sent to her in the mail?” I ask this of both the maid and Agnes, and they shake their heads.

  “You never woke to hear her crying in her bed?”

  “No, miss,” Matilda replies.

  I am gaining no new ground here, and it perplexes me. I don’t want to merely hope that someday Ursula will tell me why she wanted to end her life. I can’t assume that I have the luxury of time. What if she finds another way to kill herself? What if she somehow escapes from the hospital and runs in front of a train or an automobile, or gets ahold of a pair of hospital scissors and slices her wrists? What if the second time she tries to commit suicide she is successful? She would be no different from Sybil then, a beautiful woman I cannot save. Every time I see Conrad Reese visiting Sybil, or holding her hand, or kissing her cheek, my heart feels riven in two. The devotion Conrad has for her is everything I want for myself. It is what I want for Maggie and Willa and even Papa were he to marry again. It is why I don’t think Maggie should settle for marriage to a man she is merely fond of. It is why I can’t keep my gaze off Conrad when he visits his wife. If only there was something I could do to restore Sybil to him. It angers and pains me daily that there isn’t. But I know I can help Ursula. I know I can. If I can just figure out what happened to her.

  I am pondering this when Matilda clears her throat.

  “She . . . she did have a secret place in our room where she hid things.” The maid practically whispers this, and her face turns crimson. Matilda had snooped into this secret place; this is obvious.

  “It’s all right, Matilda. It doesn’t matter that you know about it,” I assure her. “Can you show us? Can you show us where it is?”

  She looks to Agnes for approval, and when the woman nods, Matilda asks us to follow her.

  The maid takes us through the kitchen and down a half flight of stairs that leads to two sets of quarters half aboveground and half part of the cellar. We enter one of the rooms. Inside the small space are two metal-framed beds separated by a nightstand and a hooked rug, along with a bureau, a washstand, and a wardrobe. A painting of irises hangs on the far wall. Only one bed is made up with linens; the other stands empty and available. Agnes Prinsen must expect Ursula to return to her. She has not filled the vacancy and given the bed to another girl. This adds fuel to my desire to help Ursula, to bring her back, to end her suffering. To do for her what I cannot do for Sybil and Conrad Reese.

  Matilda turns to Agnes and me. “It’s not my way to spy on other people. I was just curious, that’s all.”

  “You’re not in any kind of trouble, Matilda,” Agnes replies. “Just show us the place.”

  Matilda crosses the room to the nightstand and kneels. She reaches between the legs of the table for a brick in the wall and shimmies it back and forth. The brick comes away from the cracked mortar around it, leaving a darkened rectangular space. She reaches in and pulls out a slender wooden pencil box. When she rises, she hands the box to Agnes, who opens it. Inside are a necklace, some dollar coins, a key, and several papers. Agnes removes the documents and flips through them. One is a single sheet of paper, a list of some kind, written in a foreign language that I don’t recognize. Another is a photograph of a woman and a little girl of about five years. Ursula and her mother, perhaps? The last is an envelope addressed simply “Ursula.” Inside is a letter and an exp
ired train ticket from Camden, New Jersey, six miles away. The letter was written on a piece of stationery printed at the bottom with the name “The Franklin Hotel” and dated on the top: May 17, 1924.

  “This date is just a few months before I hired her,” Agnes says. She opens the letter and reads aloud:

  Dear Ursula:

  I know I can’t change your mind about leaving us, but you need to know Cal didn’t mean what he said. He knows it’s not your fault what happened to Leo. We all know it’s not your fault. You were sick and you didn’t know what you were doing. Sometimes the war and the flu and all that happened just gets to Cal and he drinks too much bootleg and then he says things he doesn’t mean. He feels bad about what he said. He really does. You will always have a home here with us at the hotel, no matter what Cal said. So when your money runs out, and if you want to, come on back.

  Rita

  Agnes looks up from the letter. “Who is this Rita?”

  Matilda shakes her head. “I don’t know. Ursula never mentioned any of these names to me.”

  “She never mentioned living at a hotel in Camden?” I ask.

  “No, miss.”

  Agnes stares at the letter for a minute. “Come with me, Miss Bright,” she says. With the letter and pencil box still in her hand, Agnes leads me from the back of the house to a library across the house’s marbled foyer and next to the drawing room we’d been in before. She stops at a desk made of polished cherry. A squat black telephone sits atop it.

  “Sit yourself down. I’m going to make a call.”

  I take a seat on a settee near a wall of books and Agnes lifts the telephone’s handset. A moment later she is asking the switchboard operator to connect her to the Franklin Hotel in Camden, New Jersey. And a few moments after that, she is speaking to the woman named Rita.

  I cannot help moving to the edge of my seat to listen to the half of the conversation that I can hear. Agnes gives her name and asks politely how the woman knows Ursula Novak. Then she explains that she is Ursula’s employer and that the girl has had a difficult time—the vaguest of references to what actually happened—and that she’s now recovering in a mental hospital in Philadelphia. Agnes mentions the letter she holds in her hand. Rita must now be asking what Ursula did that landed her in a mental hospital, because the next thing Agnes says is that Ursula tried to do herself mortal harm.

  “And she has given her caregivers every indication she will likely try again if afforded the opportunity,” Agnes says. “I was hoping you might share with me what happened to Ursula so that I can apprise her doctors. They are at a loss how to help her. She won’t tell them anything.”

  I am itching to jump off the settee and snatch the telephone out of Agnes Prinsen’s hand. I want to ask the questions and I want to hear the answers.

  “Well, what is it here that you mention in this note to Ursula?” Agnes says, apparently not happy with the entire answer Rita gave her. “What is not her fault? Who is Cal? Who is Leo?”

  A moment later Agnes seems to have been turned to stone. All movement ceases. She stares at the bookshelf in front of her with wide eyes that are obviously picturing something other than books.

  “Oh my!” Agnes says a few seconds later, her voice having lost some of its regal authority. “Oh, how dreadful.”

  “What is it?” I whisper, unable not to ask. “What happened? What’s not Ursula’s fault?”

  But Agnes doesn’t hear me. She is listening to more revelations.

  “Yes, yes,” Agnes continues. “I’ll tell that to the doctor.”

  “Tell me what?” This I say at normal speaking volume.

  Agnes turns to me, shaking her head slightly. Then she crooks an eyebrow and looks off in the distance again. “Wait. No one is demanding you pay for her care, Mrs. Dabney. That’s not why I rang you. I called because—”

  She stops and listens. “Well, all right. I will pass along the message. Good day.”

  I reach for the telephone to speak to this Rita Dabney myself even as Agnes lays the receiver on its cradle, the connection ended.

  “I don’t think that woman is entirely a very nice person,” Agnes says, frowning. Then she turns to me. “She doesn’t think it’s a good idea for her and her husband to come to visit Ursula, and she doesn’t want you or anyone else at the asylum contacting her. I think she’s afraid you will force her to pay for Ursula’s care, and she says they can’t afford it.”

  “Who are they?” I ask.

  “Rita and Maury Dabney took Ursula in when her mother died. They are her stepfather Cal’s parents. He was married for three years to Ursula’s mother but was off fighting the war in France when she died. Ursula didn’t have any other family but the Dabneys, such as they are. So they took her.”

  “What was so dreadful?” I ask, sensing that we are at last, at last making progress. “What wasn’t Ursula’s fault? What happened?”

  Agnes inhales and exhales. “Very sad. Very sad indeed. Ursula had that awful flu, too. She was delirious with fever the day her mother died and she tossed her baby brother—Cal’s only child at the time—into the Delaware River.” Agnes shakes her head gloomily. “He drowned, Miss Bright.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Willa

  It’s not that hard to do something you’re not supposed to if nobody thinks you’d ever even contemplate doing such a thing anyway.

  The first night I snuck out to the speakeasy, my heart was pounding as I climbed out Alex’s bedroom window while he slept—my window in the attic is too high—and it pounded the whole time I was on the street trying to get there, and while I was meeting with Albert, and every second that I was sneaking back home. But when I tiptoed back inside my house, all was just as I had left it—everyone fast asleep in their beds. No one missed me because no one was awake.

  My heart doesn’t pound like a scared rabbit’s anymore when I go. I’ve been back to the Silver Swan—that’s the speakeasy’s name and I like the way it sounds—seven times now and haven’t had a hint of trouble. But I’ve also perfected my technique. For my bed, I make a dummy out of pillows and rolled-up pajamas, and then I sneak out onto the ledge and down the trellis outside Alex’s window after everyone else has gone to bed. You can’t see his window from the street at night because it’s too dark, so I can pop out from the little alley between our house and the apartment building next door looking like I just materialized out of the bricks.

  That first night I went to meet with Albert, I had to get there on my own once I was on the boulevard, which meant I had to hail a cab like a businessman. That wasn’t my favorite few minutes of the evening. But I did it, and since Albert liked my singing so much and wanted me to come back and entertain his patrons, he had a driver take me home. The driver’s name is Foster. He now collects me on the opposite corner after I’ve snuck out the window and brings me back, like I’m a Broadway starlet. Albert doesn’t want me meeting the wrong sort on the street, so he told Foster and Mr. Trout, who is like the Silver Swan’s own policeman, that I am always to have a car bring me in and take me home.

  Getting back into my room after I’m done is easy, too. I have pocketed one of the spare keys to the side entrance where Papa brings in the bodies. I can slip in there at one o’clock in the morning and no one sees me or hears me. I can’t chance going out that way because sometimes Papa’s light is on. He might hear me walk past. Then I come through the kitchen, hang up my coat in the hall closet, and make my way up the stairs to my bedroom.

  I always grab a glass of water on my way past the kitchen sink so that if I should see Papa or Maggie or Evie on the stairs for some odd reason, I can just say I was thirsty. I usually am thirsty after singing a dozen songs. I haven’t quite figured out what I’ll say if they ask why I have on street clothes if that should ever happen. I suppose I can say I fell asleep before I had a chance to put my nightdress on. They won’t see any rouge or li
pstick or face powder because I’m always very careful to take it off before I leave the Swan. Albert doesn’t want me to wear too much paint, as he calls it, because my stage name is Sweet Polly Adler and he wants me to look innocent and childlike like Mary Pickford in Pollyanna. The costumes I wear are all ribbons and lace and bows—nothing like what I would choose to wear—but Albert says everyone loves it that I sing like an angel and look like one, too, because the world above can be a dangerous, miserable place. At the Silver Swan, however, people can forget their troubles, drink some fine bootleg whiskey, and listen to Sweet Polly Adler sing their woes away.

  I’m not the only singer at the club. There is a lady named Lila who has the reddest lips I’ve ever seen. She wears her black hair in a cute bob and smokes cigarette after cigarette from a skinny ebony holder. Her long, lacquered fingernails—the shiniest crimson—click on everything she touches. Lila’s costumes are all fringe and feathers and sequins. I’d much rather wear her dresses. Lila is the one who puts my lipstick and rouge on and curls my hair with a hot iron.

  Sometimes when I’m done singing, men want to come back to where we get dressed or they want me to come sit at their tables, even on their laps. Lila always tells them she’ll kill them if they so much as touch a hair on my head. And then she always adds, “But you’ll already be dead because Albert’ll kill ya first.” Those men laugh like it’s a joke, and Lila does, too. But everyone can tell she’s not joking.

  I think Lila likes me all right. It’s hard to tell. She told me a few days ago that she always wanted to have children but never did. She said if she’d had a little girl she would have named her Winnifred. But then after she told me that, she ignored me the rest of the night.

  I usually do two shows. One at eleven and one at midnight. And I get three silver dollars every night that I sing. I must hide my money, of course, and I can’t buy anything with it because there would be questions. But someday, when I’m older and on my own, I am going to buy Papa something wonderful with all the money I’m making right now. I don’t know just what I will buy, but something amazing. Like maybe a solid gold watch or a horse that he can board in the country, or passage to England so that he can see Big Ben and the Tower of London and the lions in Trafalgar Square. He told me once he’d like to see London someday. Maybe I’ll have enough money to go with him. And we could take Alex. Maggie will probably be married to Palmer by then and who knows where Evie will be. But I can see Papa and me and Alex sailing on a ship as beautiful as the Titanic had been and then riding around London in a horse-drawn carriage like we haven’t a care in the world.