“Heck,” Harry said, “I’d never jump off the roof and leave a mess. I’d drink those forty bottles while sitting in the Cadillac and then drive at a hundred miles an hour into a bridge abutment.”
“Is that,” Gertrude asked, “the same bridge you would have jumped off if you could have walked there?” She turned from her brother to me. “Sometimes boys just don’t make any sense at all. Have you noticed that, Alida?”
Mr. Symington found us in the pavilion and said that Loretta and Franklin were waiting for me in his study and I should hurry along. I was so rattled by the events of the morning that I could not discern from either Mr. Symington’s expression or intonation what my guardians might wish to say to me.
As I walked to the house and passed through the ground-floor rooms, I shuffled my deck of memories of the recent incident, worrying that I would find a joker, something I’d done that could be construed as being emotionally damaging to the children. After all, what did I know of families, never having had one of my own? What did I know of the traditions and shared experiences of the Fairchild family? Very little. The surface only. And yet, having been there just a week, I had engineered the dismissal of Miss Blackthorn—or so it might seem. Yes, Loretta and Franklin participated in my setup of the teacher by remaining out of sight and eavesdropping, but in retrospect, they might have found the experience demeaning.
The study door was open when I arrived, and I closed it behind me. Loretta and Franklin stood at a window, staring at the gardens. They turned at the sound of the door.
“Are you all right, Alida?” Loretta asked.
“Yes, ma’am. But I’m sorry for all the inconvenience I caused you, what with Miss Blackthorn leaving and no one to replace her.”
In addition to the desk, the room provided a button-tufted sofa upholstered in deep-red leather and two armchairs with footstools. Loretta patted the sofa, and I sat. She settled beside me and took one of my gloved hands. That was when I thought I might be okay.
Franklin perched on a footstool. “Alida, dear, I have made the mistake before of valuing college degrees more highly than I should, but I’ll never make that mistake again. Loretta and I finished high school. No higher learning. No money or time for that. Imogene had a degree from the finest women’s college in America. That was the deciding factor, why she was hired. She graduated summa cum laude. Labored tirelessly with President Wilson in his attempt to establish a League of Nations. Took a job atThe Smart Set, a witty intellectual magazine. After her parents were ruined in the great recession of 1920–’21 she went two years without getting a stipend from them, but then she needed a job with better pay, benefits. She seemed humble. Claimed to love children, felt the need to protect their innocence. We felt so fortunate to find her.” He rapped his knuckles against his forehead as if to say it was as wooden as the head of Pinocchio. “Tradesmen who live by their skills, laborers who earn their way with muscle and hard work, farmers, salesmen, secretaries—I’ve never known any who surrendered their precious common sense to an ideology. But in my experience and Loretta’s, a certain kind of person finds the academic world not merely prestigious but also glamorous, a throne of power. They believe ideas are more important than people. They relish the chance not to encourage young minds to be independent thinkers, but instead to grind and polish them into mirror images of the teacher’s prejudices and delusions. We thought we’d protected our little brood from corrupting influences like that, but we were wrong.”
Loretta gently squeezed my hand. “Miss Blackthorn’s behavior was treacherous. But her blathering about eugenics meant nothing much to children as young as Izzy, Gertie, and Harry. I tell myself, at some point they would eventually take it more seriously, realize how evil it is, and come to us about it. Like most mothers, I think my lambs are too smart to be taken in by some loathsome flimflammer. But the human heart can be an easy conquest for darkness incarnate. At least one of our babies might have ... have been lost to us forever, turned into an engine of hatred by that bitch.”
“No,” I said. “Not any of yours. Each of them has a strong mind. And when they’re together, they’re ten times stronger.”
She brought my gloved hand to her lips and kissed the back of it. “You’re a godsend, Alida.”
“I’m only me.”
She smiled. “Isn’t that what I just said?”
“The kids are proficient at math,” Franklin said. “Loretta and I can teach them how to apply what they know to personal finances and to managing a business if that eventually interests them.”
Loretta said, “We can bring in a tutor just for basic biology and science, if that seems necessary.”
“What we’re about to suggest,” Franklin assured me, “is exactly that—only a suggestion. If you say no, then nothing changes. You’re a knowledge sponge. The kids are eager learners. You’ve had hard experience of the world, harder than most people ever will, and you haven’t become a hater like Imogene Blackthorn. Strange as it might seem to some people, we believe the more we can educate them within the family, the better. Would you teach literature, history, and civics to our ducklings? Would that be something you’d enjoy?”
A sinking sensation overtook me. Every child inhabits both this world and one of his or her imagining. When children are entwined in a covenant of friendship, their secret worlds mesh into one. Though I wasfive years older than the oldest of the Fairchild siblings, they welcomed me into their private universe. For the first time in my life, I had friends. As their teacher, would I remain to them as I was now, sharing their secret world? Would distance open between us? Would I lose what had been so precious to me after only a week?
Loretta understood my silence as completely as if I had shouted my concern. “Nothing needs to change, dear. You don’t need to be the stern teacher and dour disciplinarian. Just be an older sister, one of them, sparing them from the tedium of the typical classroom by sharing books and ideas that have delighted and enlightened you. Let them discover history as it really was. Help them find the truth of life, truth in a sea of lies. After that, it’s up to them.”
And so it was that in less than a week at the Bram, I became not just a member of the Clyde Tombaugh Club but also the big sister responsible for the education of my siblings. I was well read not just in fiction but also in history and the sciences, and I retained everything I read word for word. To my surprise, I found within myself not a teacher as much as an enthusiastic guide who offered adventure-filled excursions to exotic lands, deep into jungles of strange knowledge, across mysterious seas of possibilities. My students and I had fun in the classroom, experiencing together the wonders of Earth, studying the myriad life-forms that the planet nurtured, seeking an understanding of the human condition as the finest literature presented it. During the next two months, no distance opened between me and them, as I feared would happen. In fact, the bonds between us seemed to grow stronger by the day.
The autumn of 1930 was mild even for Southern California. The rose bushes put forth as many flowers in early November as they had during the summer. Hummingbirds lingered mid month before departing on their migration. Beginning the last Tuesday of the month, the maids and Mr. Reinhardt were given six days off forThanksgiving. With them went the balmy weather. On Wednesday, from the northwest, a gray tide washed across the sky. The day dimmed. The air grew cool, and a breeze rose, and the fronds of the palm trees made a sound like wire whisks being lightly stroked across snare drums.
Thanksgiving at the Bram involved everyone who lived on the estate. Franklin, Loretta, the Symingtons, and Chef Lattuada began preparations that Wednesday, all of them busy in the kitchen, each of the four amateur cooks taking instructions from the professional. They would be almost as busy on the day itself, and at dinnertime tomorrow, all would be at the table with the children and me—nine of us and, prowling the room hopefully, one German shepherd.
This tradition confirmed for me what I suspected—that neither Franklin nor Loretta had any family other than the one they had created for themselves. On the night the siblings and I had climbed the hidden stairs to the roof and gathered at the obelisk, Isadora implied that there were tragedies in her parents’ past of which it was not her place to speak.They’ll tell you when the time is right, when you’ve settled in and all the legal hooey has been dealt with.
So on Wednesday afternoon, with the adults in the kitchen, I was at loose ends. The lively conversation and occasional bursts of laughter suggested that the proper functioning of a culinary team required lubrication with a little wine. Elsewhere in the house, each sibling was engaged in a solitary pursuit.
I put on a jacket designed for me by Marjorie Hollingsworth Merrimen and went outside to stroll the gardens.
Twenty-Three
I find it hard to convey the extravagant sense of freedom that informed me during those early days at Bramley Hall. There was no Captain Farnam to obey. No show times to meet. No marks whose stares of abhorrence pierced as cruelly as the pins that fixed an exotic insect to an entomologist’s specimen board. The burdensome aspects of life rested so lightly on my small shoulders that at times I felt as if I were floating through the rooms and hallways of the house and along the garden paths, my feet not quite making contact with the surfaces over which I crossed. Never having needed more than three hours of sleep, I had a few times awakened in my dark bedroom with the conviction that I was liberated from my body and from all concerns, a mind within a soul, neither in this world nor the next, but adrift in a dimension between lives. That illusion lasted less than a minute, until I could not deny that a mattress and bedclothes cocooned me, and although this experience was both disquieting and delightful, it was always much more the latter than the former.
On the afternoon of Thanksgiving eve, under an overcast sky, I set out to explore the gardens. Even by then I knew those acres and all their attractions as though I had been born within the estate walls.Nonetheless, when alone I toured the gardens at a leisurely pace, for every enclave was no less beautiful for being familiar, and always some small details, if not new to me,seemednew and charming on rediscovery. In the gray light of the cloaked sun, the last roses of the season flourished, all petals intact, some blooms red, others coral pink, still others as pale orange as peaches. In spite of my intention not to hurry, I found myself moving past the roses without pausing to admire them. I took a fork in the path that led beyond the pavilion to a one-acre lawn groomed for games and dog play. In memory, I heard Harmony’s voice,Stay alert, Alida. Life is a great gift, love and mercy are the promise of it, but stay alert.
Beyond the deep lawn stood a grove of five large well-sculptedMetrosideros excelsa, which Mr. Reinhardt said were more commonly known as New Zealand Christmas trees. Showy tufts of crimson flowers crowned their branches, an arresting spectacle even now and more so when bathed in sunlight.Stay alert.I did not know what to be alert for, but I felt that I should not delay out of excess caution. The lawn was due for mowing after the holiday. Trembling in the breeze, the grass lapped at my feet as if I were walking on water.
The trees were broadly crowned, the branches densely leafed, so the floor of the woodlet was for the most part carpeted in darkness. What little ashen light sifted between the big trees did not diffuse beyond the natural mulch on which it settled. Letting my eyes adjust to the gloom, I eased forward. Dead leaves crunched underfoot, and the breeze soughed softly through the highest branches. I did not know what had drawn me here, but I knew I had come with a purpose. Sometimes in dreams, without knowing why, we’re compelled to proceed through a maze of unfamiliar rooms or wend deeper into an ominous landscape until a sudden encounter shocks us awake, some threat we cannot remember when we sit up in bed, sheathed in sweat. This felt like a waking version of that experience. I stopped tramping through the leaves, and the breezeseemed to subside. In the hush, I scanned the murk, my head cocked to the left, to the right. The faint sound was detectable less because of the volume than because of the quick rhythm. Even so, I can’t rightly say my ear led me to the source. Strange as it might seem, I felt that my heart led me, for I was overcome by a sudden sense of impending loss, by pity and sorrow, that reeled me urgently through the gloom until I saw a shape of lesser darkness lying on the black ground. As I knelt, I recognized the rhythmic sound as the panting of a dog. When I put my hand on his side, I knew that he was our Rafael. His heart raced, and his breaths were shallow whiffs. At my touch he issued a thin whimper, leaving no room for doubt that he was in great distress.
