That night, I had a dream in which Captain appeared and said,The two most dangerous human flaws are greed and envy. Therein lies the cause of most murders.I woke trembling and sweaty. After an hour or so, I convinced myself it was a dream, not a premonition, and I settled back into an uneasy sleep.
The remaining days of that December went by faster than magic reindeer can fly. For the first time in my life, midway between my seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays, I experienced Christmas. It was all I could have hoped. On Wednesday, Christmas Eve, we went to church one hour before midnight for a service lit by one thousand candles. From Thursday through the following Tuesday, the family played games together, threw balls for Rafael until he surrendered toexhaustion, and set off on delightful expeditions—including to the late Henry Huntington’s vast gardens in San Marino. We baked cookies together, prepared meals, and dealt with basic housekeeping because the staff was off on holiday through the first of January; none of it seemed like work because we were doing it together.
Chef Luigi Lattuada, who was vacationing at a seaside hotel in Mexico, sent telegrams for five days—December 26th through the 30th. They were addressed not to Franklin and Loretta, but to me and the siblings. As none of us had received a telegram before, the first one was flat-out magical and the next four were highly anticipated. The messages were, in the order received:having a wonderful time without you;I do not miss you at all;when I dreamed you checked into the hotel,I woke screaming;if you come here I will throw myself off a cliff into the sea;on second thought, if you come here I will throw you off a cliff into the sea. Each of the five was signed,your much-loved chef. One thing was certain—in addition to being a fabulous chef, when Mr. Lattuada was in a joking mood, he sure knew his audience.
On New Year’s Eve, after dinner, we enjoyed glasses of lightly spiked eggnog in the library while listening to recordings by Duke Ellington and his twelve-piece band. At eight o’clock—eleven on the East Coast—Franklin tuned the radio to Chick Webb and his band performing in Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. There was no stopping this jazz, this swing style. If you heard it once, you knew it was going to be the music of our lives, which it proved to be throughout the 1930s and the war.
At midnight, we were in the gardens with a supply of sparklers, carving the darkness with blades of glittering light. The hissing and crackling, the gunpowder smoke, the scent of the chemicals that gave the sparks color, the minims of light like fireflies born and at once gone—it was exciting and lovely from the moment Franklin lit the first until the final encrusted length of wire sputtered away its last feeble sparks.
Loretta said it was time for bed, whereupon much groaning and pleading and general consternation arose from us. We were as awake as we had ever been! Surely we could not sleep for hours yet! The stroke of midnight brought a new day, yes, but it also closed the old world and opened a new one. We needed hours to adjust to these new circumstances. Loretta smiled and gave us fifteen minutes as she and Franklin retired for the night.
We members of the Clyde Tombaugh Club had earlier agreed to conduct a secret post-midnight ghost hunt after the adults went to bed. Previous ghost hunts had not turned up anything supernatural. The siblings were willing to consider that no one had yet died in the Bram and that they might have let their imagination spin a bit out of control. However, Mr. Reinhardt had poisoned mice and rats on occasion, mostly in and around the garage. It was disquieting to think that a horde of rat ghosts might be slinking through the house at night, looking for ways to get even with us. If that might be the case, the wise thing was to get proof of them to persuade a rodent exorcist to banish their spirits from the Bram. With that fanciful theory to build a game around, the night should have been ours.
However, as we stood in the dark gardens where the astringent smell of sparklers was slowly fading, weariness came over us quicker than we expected. The long day had been so tiring that we decided to postpone the rodent ghost hunt until later in the month. We went to our rooms, slightly miffed at ourselves for lacking the energy to fulfill our rebellious intentions.
Rafael spent the first few hours of 1931 snoring in my bed. I dreamed of a ghostly Pied Piper leading multitudes of red-eyed rat spirits through the dark rooms and hallways while we slept. When I saw the Piper’s ghost was that of Captain, I began to issue soft cries of alarm. Although I didn’t at once wake myself, I disturbed the slumber of theshepherd. He snuggled against me with his head on my shoulder and licked my neck until I woke with a gasp and sat up from my pillows.
After an absence of months, Captain had crept back into my dreams twice in two weeks. As before, I told myself that these visitations meant nothing. In fact, considering how long I’d lived under the yoke of the freak-show master, I should have had horrid dreams of him every night.
A small electric night-light in the form of a candle relieved the worst of the darkness. In that dim glow, I denied Captain any hold on me by calmly lying down again. I turned on my side, now face-to-face with Rafael. His habit was to maintain eye contact as long as I did. I repeatedly smoothed one gloved hand along his flank and said, “I sometimes wonder if we once traveled far together on the road from Nineveh to Media.” He thumped his tail three times on the mattress, but I didn’t know what to make of that.
I worried about what ill fortune might befall my new family, but the following three years were good for the Fairchild clan. We enjoyed a period of warmth and honey, even though events beyond the walls of Bramley Hall seemed always to be moving toward something cold and bitter.
Part Two
1934
The second dream in shades of blue was set in the Museum of the Strange. Rain drummed on the stretched canvas of the tent. Only two human oddities were on display. I was the sole paying customer.
The first occupied stall was crowned by a banner that declaredGreed. On the stage, Captain Farnam sat at a table, spooning gold coins from a bowl and eating with ravenous appetite. His teeth broke as he ate and fell in bits onto the table, but he cared not.
The next exhibit was titledEnvy. Here Captain was dressed in a magician’s tuxedo. From a top hat, he produced a dove whose wings were bound so it could not fly. Captain returned the bird to the hat, plucked flames from thin air, and threw the fire onto the dove.
Horrified, I ran back to the entrance and halted at the sight of rain. Instead of bearing the wordsAdmit One, the ticket in my hand saidCompassionand on the flip sideRevenge. I wiped my thumb across the latter and erased it. The old woman selling tickets took mine, and thestorm stopped. I stepped outside into sunshine. The ten-in-one was gone with all the carnival except for the ticket seller. She said, “Compassion is not that easy, dearie,” and she too disappeared.
—from a letter by Alida, April 17, 1927
Twenty-Nine
During the three years after my first Christmas at the Bram, much happened in the wider world. The economy plummeted. The Empire State Building rose. Prohibition came to an end. Five thousand banks collapsed. Ten million people were out of work. Russian communists were murdering tens of thousands. Elsewhere, fascism was ascendant. War was in the wind. Fewer motion pictures were profitable. Having fallen from fame to obscurity, from wealth to penury, some Hollywood players committed suicide.
In a world full of dire drama, the smaller world of the Bram remained an island of peace and plenty, for which we were grateful. Indeed, life within the walls of the estate was so pleasant and so little disrupted by the problems of the age that, although I wrote of those days in my journal, I have decided not to include them here. Some would find them uneventful and therefore boring. Others might resent such ease in a time when multitudes were struggling, though I wonder how many people of that mind would tour a freak show when next a carnival came to town and give its human oddities no more consideration than would be given to the animals in a zoo.
By 1934, Franklin and Loretta were working harder than ever. As I would discover, they had been tempered by terror and tragedy in their youth and learned how to bend adversity into advantage. Two of their recent movies were runaway hits. In addition, they owned a piece ofThe Champ, which earned Wallace Beery an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1932, and they had an even more profitable piece ofGrand Hotel, starring Garbo and Barrymore.
Three years meant three birthdays, which brought me to twenty, Isadora to fifteen, Gertrude to thirteen, and our Harry to twelve. Children grew up faster in those hard days, both children who lived on the fraying edge of want and those more fortunate who were taught, as we were, that prosperity was a blessing but not a promise of eternal success. Even for young Harry, ghost hunts and other late-night games lost the appeal they once had. Although the Clyde Tombaugh Club was never officially disbanded, it ceased to exist without our quite realizing that it was no more.
Isadora had matured into a serious pianist. She had been taking lessons since she was ten but never considered a career in music until the summer of 1931. That was when Harmony, now Mrs. Sussman, approached Loretta to say that, as she performed housework, she listened to Isadora practice. Because Harmony’s once promising career had been brought to an end by the explosion in Boston twelve years earlier, she was distressed almost to the point of anguish to see the promise of Isadora’s talent go unfulfilled.
“Her teacher, Mrs. Arnett,” Harmony said, “is a lovely woman, but her own talent is suitable for little more than teaching society girls how to play recitals when they have their coming-out parties. She simply isn’t good enough to perform on a concert stage or even with a first-rate band. Isadoraisthat good, maybe even great. But Alice Arnett is incapable of recognizing it and sadly unable to help Isadora reach her full potential.”
Impressed with her housemaid’s concern, Loretta went straight to the point. “Harmony, dear, I know what a musician you once were, what you lost, and how dedicated you are to whatever you undertake. If you say Isadora has such potential, I’m sure you’re right. So will you do for her what Mrs. Arnett cannot?”
Surprised, Harmony said, “Oh, no. I’d love to if I could. But with my hands as they are ... I could play examples of passages for her, but never as well as what a public performance requires. Not anymore.”
“Music is of the heart,” Loretta replied, “and technique is born in the mind. You have a great heart and a fine mind, Harmony. When playing a few bars or even more, as an example for a student, it isn’t necessary for you to play well enough for Carnegie Hall. What matters is that the student should be inspired to play better than the teacher.”
Harmony wanted to be persuaded, and Loretta was intent on persuading her. Soon the red-haired and freckled Mrs. Sussman, while still a valued housemaid, was offered an additional salary to serve as a piano teacher.
