Loretta drew me tight against her. “No, of course it doesn’t. Honey, you’re not a freak. That’s an ugly word. I don’t want to hear it ever again. You have differences, disabilities, but we all do.”
“We all do,” Franklin said softly. “Alida, some of us ... our disabilities aren’t obvious. They’re internal. In our minds, in our hearts. That’s not the case with you. Your mind is healthy, and your heart ... is pure. The freaks are those whose hearts are full of hate and anger. Yours isn’t. I don’t know why it isn’t, how you could have avoided becomingbitter. Maybe the reason is this ability to hold books in the library of your soul—every word—and step into them when this world is too hard. Itisa gift. A great gift.”
I held fast to Loretta as she held on to me. “Then I can stay? I can stay here?”
They were genuinely surprised by my question, and they overspoke each other as they assured me that this was my home now and forever, that if I ran off, they would find me even if somehow I got halfway around the world and they had to bring me back kicking and screaming from Sweden or Italy. Unable to repress my tears, I found myself crying openly, not sobbing wildly or blubbering like a big silly baby, but crying nonetheless and for the second time in five days. This wasn’t me. I wasn’t a weeper. Or maybe it was me. The new me. Now that I was free from the carnival and the speakeasy circuit, from daily mortification, maybe I no longer needed to be tough. I didn’t like that idea at all. My internal library was stocked with novels confirming that the world was beautiful, that life could be lived with grace and happiness,but that life was not always easy, so you had to stay tough, very tough, to make it through the hard times that were sure to come.
I let go of Loretta and sat up straight on the sofa and blotted my eyes with my hands, which is an effective procedure when you wear absorbent gloves. As I wiped my face, I apologized for misunderstanding and going sloppy on them. I assured them that I would never be like one of those weird women in some novels, members of the family who lived separate from everyone else, alone in a tower room, sniveling through the night over some lost love or other long-ago tragedy. “I don’t even know if Bramley Hall has a tower,” I said. “Probably not. A tower wouldn’t be consistent with the architecture.” Franklin said that if I changed my mind, if one day I wanted to be one of those sniveling women, he and Loretta would have a huge tower built toaccommodate me. So that was how all the crying turned into laughter from one second to the next.
“Can this be our secret? I won’t tell anyone what I can do if you won’t. I don’t want to be stared at for this the way I used to be stared at for being ... a biological oddity. I just want to be someone like everybody else, just like everybody else for once.”
“We’ll swear an oath of silence,” Franklin said, “and sign our names in blood if you want.”
I smiled and shook my head. “I believe I can rely on just your word of honor.”
“Then you have it. But I should warn you, Miss Fairchild, that being just like everybody else is no picnic.”
“I suspect as much,” I assured him. “There might not be sharks, but there’ll always be ants.”
Loretta got up from the sofa. “I’m sure you’d be happy to spend the day here in the library, but we’ve got things to do. A tour to complete, children to be introduced. Let’s get on with it.”
Thirteen
Room after room delighted me, but when I saw the kitchen, I was thunderstruck, marveling at its size and the number of appliances. Two complete O’Keefe and Merritt ranges, each with three ovens and two broilers and six gas burners, handsome works of white porcelain and stainless steel. Most amazing were the Frigidaires. In those days, maybe one in ten houses had a Frigidaire, if even that many. Here werethreelined up side by side. Loretta explained that the kitchen could serve more than a hundred guests at a party, when a catering company would be hired to cook under the stern direction of Luigi Lattuada, their cook, who was still out shopping.
The beauty and scale of the Bram were humbling and the grounds enchanting, but it was a shadowland compared to the brightness of the children. I was anxious about meeting them, but I need not have been. Toward the back of the ten-acre estate, in the shade of lacy California pepper trees, stood a two-story bungalow in the same style as the main house. The upper floor provided an apartment for Mr. and Mrs. Symington. Half the lower level was devoted to the two rooms and bath where Mr. Lattuada lived. Only those three staff members resided on the property. A schoolroom occupied the other half of the ground floor,where the nanny and teacher, Miss Imogene Blackthorn, watched after and instructed the children five days a week.
How Miss Blackthorn knew we were approaching I can’t say, but she stood waiting in front of the building. A tall, willowy woman with auburn hair and sharp but attractive features, she was dressed rather severely in a long black dress with no decoration other than a simple white-ribbon bow gathered at the collar and trailing down the bodice. Her personality belied the austere image created by her clothing. She at once favored me with a warm smile and took my hands in hers as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a girl of seventeen to be wearing black gloves on a mild September day. “I’m pleased to meet you, Alida. What do you think of Bramley Hall, these grounds? Could there be any park anywhere lovelier than this?”
“I don’t have much experience of parks, Miss Blackthorn. But this seems more than that, like another world and time, where tree nymphs and fairies are everywhere, keeping just out of sight.”
“Now that you’ve put it that way,” she said, “I will never be able to think of it otherwise. You like stories about fairies and such, do you?”
“Oh, I like stories of all kinds, ma’am. Stories are the best thing we have.”
“You’ll get along well with the children. Their imagination gets more exercise than they do. They live in stories of their own invention as much as they live in Bramley Hall.”
Loretta said, “If we’re not careful, they’ll end up telling stories in the movie business.”
“God forbid,” said Franklin. “We haven’t coddled the little dears only to throw them intothatcauldron.”
“You mean because of the humorless sharks?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
Miss Blackthorn said, “They’re very excited about meeting you, Alida. I’ve warned them to be on their best behavior, but don’t be surprised if they ricochet around the room a little bit.”
Looking past her, I saw three faces crowding one another at a schoolroom window. The moment they realized they had been seen, the children seemed not merely to retreat but toflingthemselves away from the glass.
As the teacher led us inside, I was nervous and self-conscious about facing this small but important class of students. Many years had passed since being displayed onstage had affected me this way. Captain and the slack-mouthed marks had not withered my sense of modesty. I still shrank from anything indelicate and from being observed too eagerly. In the Museum of the Strange and in the speakeasies, I resisted becoming as bold and decadent as the audience by developing a strong sense of reserve, holding myself aloof from my surroundings, holding back feelings from expression, refusing to communicate. I retreated into my novels, which were more real to me than the tawdry place in which I actually existed. Now I found it curious that, having had respectability bestowed on me by my new guardians, I felt less self-assured than I did as a freak-show exhibit, at least during this early stage of my new life. When you have hope, everything is so much more important and meaningful than when you don’t.
The classroom was spacious, with a wall of cupboards that no doubt contained instructional materials, a large blackboard, and a cork bulletin board on which were pinned drawings and poems by the students for the admiration of all. Three desks were lined up side by side, and the children sat there, facing the teacher’s larger desk, in a posture that denied they had been at the window only a moment earlier.
Each of them had been tasked with writing a special greeting in rhyme. As she was the eldest, twelve-year-old Isadora went first. A pretty girl in the image of her mother, she had flaxen-blond hair lighter thanmine and lovely striated eyes neither entirely blue nor entirely green. She stood up and said, “My dear Alida, welcome to the Bram. May you be as happy here as I am. I have but one request to make. Please always let me have the last slice of cake.”
Evidently, they had composed their salutations without sharing them until now, for Gertrude and Harry giggled and clapped approval.
Gertrude rose to her feet when Isadora sat down. As she would make clear at dinner that evening, she was not a child of ten, but ten and a half. Gertrude had flaxen hair, and her eyes were so blue they appeared to be lit from within. Although she, too, resembled her mother, her features were elfin, whereas Loretta’s were as classical as those of a goddess in Greek mythology. Throughout her life, Gertrude would more often be called “cute” and “adorable” rather than beautiful, though she was no less attractive than her sister. Anyway, being regarded as cute and adorable is often a more winning look than great beauty, which can be intimidating. Gertrude read her greeting from an index card, which she held in both hands. It was then, as she was about to speak, that I realized her left hand was incomplete. The little finger and ring finger were missing. That might have been the consequence of an accident if not for the fact that half her palm was gone as well. Although the heel of her hand joined her wrist in a sudden swell of flesh, her thumb and remaining two fingers appeared to have full function. There was no obvious scar tissue. Indeed, in spite of what it lacked, the hand looked well formed, strangely natural. I knew in my heart that this was how little Gertrude had come into the world. In that moment, I better understood Loretta and Franklin Fairchild—the kind of people they were, as well as one reason why they were that way. Beginning in the dressing room at Blue Mood, they had inspired my love, and my love had grown, but now it began to mature into something more. At that moment there began to be devotion in it, though I am unable to properly articulate what I mean. Recognition of their journey with theirdaughter somehow consecrated them in my affections, made hallow my intense and tender feelings for them.
