What a gorgeous, magical place is this America!
– – –
Justin Hademak said it again, as we were turning into its long drive: ‘We are quite the fast set at The Box you will discover.’ It didn’t surprise me, knowing my father and the people he normally consorted with. Actually I would have been surprised if they had been anything else.
Nevertheless there certainly wasn’t anything very fast about Mrs Blanca de Saulles that afternoon. We arrived by a side door – Mr Hademak made us tiptoe into the back lobby, and he closed the door behind us as if a lion and her cubs were sleeping on the other side.
‘Sssh!’ he ordered. We hadn’t made a sound.
Just then Mrs de Saulles herself tripped past us, like a ghost. We stood there, the three of us, fresh from our journey, huddled together in a knot. And maybe she didn’t see us. She was a vision, at any rate; quite out of place in our whitewashed servants’ lobby. Quite out of place – and a little lost, possibly, since it was the one and only time I ever saw her there.
She was dressed in the palest lilac: a shirtwaist of lace and voile and a silk skirt, ankle length, with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons. I can see her now, floating by in that ghostly way, only five or so years older than I was, with that thick, black, shiny hair pinned demurely at the nape of her neck, and those vast, dark, unhappy eyes. She looked as pale as death, as feminine and fragile as any woman I had ever encountered. I knew right then how my father would adore her.
‘Oh! Mrs de Saulles!’ whispered Mr Hademak, his great big block of a body rigid, suddenly, with the dreadful possibility of interrupting her. She continued regardless, slowly, vaguely . . . ‘Mrs de Saulles?’ he tried again.
‘Yes, Hademak?’ she said. Sighed. It was the softest voice you ever heard.
‘We are back!’
‘So it appears.’
‘This – this one – this is Miss Doyle,’ he said, pointing at me, looking at Mrs de Saulles’s feet. (Little, little feet.) ‘The portrait painter’s daughter. Just arrived from England.’
I think I bobbed a curtsy. God knows why.
‘And this is the new maid, Madeleine,’ he added. ‘She’s Irish. We took her from Ellis Island this morning.’
Mrs de Saulles spared us not a glance. She released another of her feather-sighs: a sigh I would grow quite familiar with. (She was tiny. Did I mention how tiny she was? Hardly above five foot, I should think, and so slim that if she stood sideways you could honestly hardly see her.) ‘How lovely,’ she murmured. She sounded more English than I did. ‘Lovely, lovely . . . ’ and then, slowly, she turned to continue her journey.
She was, there is no doubt about it, a truly exceptionally beautiful woman. And that, by the way, even after so many years, and whether I’m grateful to her or not, is about the only pleasant thing I have to say about her.
The Box was near Great Neck, on the Long Island Gold Coast, not far from many of the finest houses of the richest folk in America (and just directly up from where handsome Mr Scott Fitzgerald has set his new novel, of course, which I have by my bedside as I write.)
The Box was a frame house, large and quite important and very graceful, but not vast. Not quite like Mr Gatsby’s. It was painted white. There were wooden porches along the front, framed all round by wide, trellised archways which had been designed for flowers to grow along, I suppose, though there were none while I was there. To one side, rather like a church, there was a high, square tower, where Mrs de Saulles had her private sitting room. The house stood on its own land, with a drive of seventy yards or so, and space enough for a large, bleak garden.
In England, Papa and I had stayed in plenty of magnificent houses while my father (before they grew tired of employing him) painted portraits of their owners. And, really, it wasn’t even as though The Box were particularly large, not compared to the houses I knew in England – and certainly not compared to some of the other houses in the area. Nevertheless there was something indefinably glitzy about it. Mr Hademak was right about that. To my English eyes, fresh from all the deprivations of war, The Box seemed to offer comforts that in Europe had yet to be even imagined: as many bathrooms as there were bedrooms, for example, or not far off it, and hot, running water in all of them; and electrical lighting in every part of the house, even the servants’ rooms. The kitchen was fitted with an electrical icebox – something I had never even seen before – and another electrical machine specifically for making waffles! And in the drawing room on the ceiling there was a wonderful electrical fan. The Box had all these things and more. In its construction, it seemed every possible human comfort had been pandered to.
Yet for all that it felt uncared-for. Cold. There was my father’s – not especially good – portrait of Mr de Saulles, which hung importantly in the large white entrance hall, but other than that there were very few pictures. Nor even much furniture. And what furniture there was appeared ill assorted and unconsidered: a heavy leather couch here, a feeble rattan armchair there, and a hotchpotch of rugs across that great big, elegant drawing-room’s floor. Luxurious – and yet unloved. From the moment I walked into it I could sense it was an unhappy house.
Madeleine was summoned to Mrs de Saulles’s bedroom within minutes of our arrival, and I didn’t set eyes on her again until the following morning. In the meantime Mrs de Saulles seemed to have no interest in meeting me. She had dispatched her young son and temporary nurse to spend the day in the city with his (and my) father. So, I wandered about behind Mr Hademak trying to prise from him what, exactly, my duties would be. He was terribly vague about it. ‘Oh, just make the little soldier to giggle!’ he said irritably. For which, by the way, I was to be paid twenty dollars a week, with Sundays off. A better deal than Madeleine, then.
Poor, sweet Jack. I miss him. He turned out to be the sweetest, gentlest little friend in spite of all the turmoil that surrounded him. Afterwards I wrote several times to him, care of his grandmother. I wonder if the letters even reached him. I never received any reply, not once. But I think about him often – his bravery, mostly. And the way he looked at his mother with so much love and sorrow on that terrible, awful day . . .
Mr Hademak took me to the little boy’s nursery: the only room in the house that seemed to have any warmth to it. A jumble of Jack’s drawings leaned against the mantelpiece, and there was hardly an inch of the place that wasn’t cluttered with some new-fangled plaything: model cars and mechanical guns, circus sets and a doll-sized piano that really worked, and a steam engine that could puff around its own railway track . . . And aeroplanes that could be wound up and flown, and Houdini magic sets and . . . His father never came home without a carful of new toys for him.
‘But he doesn’t play in here much,’ Mr Hademak said airily. And then, after an unusual pause, ‘You’ll be kind to him, I’m sure, Miss Doyle. He has many toys, but he has . . . ’ He stopped for a moment. ‘Well . . . his parents adore him, of course. But – perhaps you have discovered it . . . ’ He flashed me the shyest of smiles and blushed. ‘When you are young there are many ways to be lonely.’
I nodded. A pause.
‘Tell me, are you fond of watching the flickers, Miss Doyle? I am very fond of watching the flickers. I can’t keep away. Each Sunday, if Mrs de Saulles allows it, there I go to the movie theatre at Westbury, or at Mineola. Wherever they have a movie showing. And my favourite star – who is yours? My favourite of all the stars is, of course . . . Miss Mary Pickford! Do you admire her, Miss Doyle? I hope so!’
I would have liked to answer since, from what little I had been permitted to see of them, I was already quite a fan of the movies – and of Mary Pickford, too.