I have sworn to remember so many special days at the Bram that it’s a good thing I have a prodigious memory. The day Harmony took that second job will always be one of them. She came to my rooms to share the news, and she seemed to be only half a step below a state of euphoria. Twelve years after losing all hope of a career as a pianist, she felt that her derailed life had been put back on track. She was such a good soul that the prospect of guiding Isadora to a life as an acclaimed musician gave her almost as much satisfaction as if she could have become a star herself. Since then, all of us in this special place had heard Isadora’s playing move steadily toward the high plateau that Harmony was sure the girl could achieve.
During those three quick years, Gertrude had become a teenage beauty without losing any of her elfin charm. She turned away every compliment about her appearance as though she thought the wordswere mere flattery. For a while, I thought she might be so self-conscious of her deformed hand that when she looked in a mirror she couldn’t see how lovely she really was. However, she seemed indifferent to her disability, making no effort to conceal the hand, frequently gesturing with it. Eventually I understood her reaction to anyone who praised her good looks; it was genuine modesty and nothing more. When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she had recently begun to say she intended to be her mother. “Maybe I’ll write and produce movies. But they’re not going to be all dark and grim like some of what Mother writes. If you knew Mother only from her movies, the noir stuff, you’d think she woke up every morning expecting to be falsely imprisoned for murder and went to bed at night expecting to be shot in her sleep. I might like to be therealLoretta, make comedies and romances, go for laughs and the good kind of tears. Or I could be a music critic, following Isadora around and getting even for what an insufferable older sister she’s been to me.”
As preposterous as it might seem, at the tender age of twelve and in spite of his rambunctious nature at times in the past, Harry had become a scholar. Oh yes, like other boys, he collected not just battalions butarmiesof cast-lead hand-painted toy soldiers, each two inches tall and with the stoic expression of one who fears not death. And yes, Harry often put the two game room tables together, re-created famous battles, and imitated machine guns, explosions, and the miserable wheezing of men dying from mustard gas. Unlike other twelve-year-old boys, however, these activities were not play, or at least not primarily play. Harry was seriously pondering alternative strategies and tactics that might have resulted in the loser winning so decisively that history would have been radically changed. He had read so much military history that he would soon know more on the subject than General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing.
His interest in the past began a few years earlier when he immersed himself in a series of nonfiction books about pirates. We often found him walking the halls while reading, shirt open to the waist, a rubber replica of a dagger clenched in his teeth, a colorful bandanna tied around his forehead, and one of Loretta’s earrings dangling from his right ear. Lynette Rollins, the housekeeper who looked like the writer Anita Loos, was a favorite of Gertrude’s, and with Lynette’s help, the imp acquired a colorful plastic parrot. She suggested to her brother that he fix the bird to his left shoulder. Though he loved Gertrude, Harry was not amused. He wasseriousabout history as he had not been about anything else. All of us were relieved when his interest in pirates was exhausted and he moved on to less flamboyant historical figures. He had recently begun to supplement his interest in military history with books about famous explorers.
As for me, I spent those three years being the best adopted child and sister that I knew how to be, while also serving as the teacher schooling the siblings. For a while, my biggest concern was that the three were being inadequately socialized because they had no interaction with other children their age. I had read Sigmund Freud and knew him to be a charlatan. Nonetheless, some of his prescriptions for mental health, especially as rebottled and sold with slicker language by his legion of acolytes, seemed to be worth consideration to ensure that my three charges would be well rounded.
I stopped worrying on a party night when the Bram hosted sixty guests. I came upon the siblings in the conservatory with Fletcher Henderson, the leader of a big band, and a marvelous young singer named Ethel Waters. Also present was a magazine writer, James M. Cain, who was working on a novel to be published the following year under the strange titleThe Postman Always Rings Twice. A lively conversation was underway. As I listened, I realized the children were neither bothering nor boring the guests. These former members of theClyde Tombaugh Club were wowed by the accomplished adults, and at least for the time being, Henderson and Waters and Cain were likewise charmed. The family, the staff, and the family’s friends had socialized my students while I wasn’t paying attention.
And so we arrived at Christmas and then New Year’s Eve, which were only for family. There were games, including those with Rafael, and expeditions and movies. There were sparklers in the gardens as 1933 rolled into 1934. After three years as blessed and enchanting as perhaps anyone had ever known, I didn’t feel I was tempting fate when I said sleepily to Rafael, “Three more years just like them.”
Four days later, early on Thursday morning, Gertrude was taken to the hospital by ambulance, in such critical condition that she was not expected to live.
Thirty
Having gotten up quite early, having had a brown-sugar muffin and a glass of milk in the kitchen before the staff began their day, I was readingLook Homeward, Angelin the schoolroom, waiting for the children to arrive for their lessons. In a state of great agitation, Victoria Symington came to tell me that Gertrude had been taken to the hospital and that her parents had gone with her, Loretta in the ambulance and Franklin in the new Cadillac. Isadora and Harry were currently in the care of Chef Lattuada, the only one on staff who could calm them. “The sweet child was so hot, Adiel. Our Gertie, she was burning up. Burning up and delirious.” The housekeeper’s face glistened, beads of perspiration looping across her brow. She was a sturdy woman in the best sense, a picture of good health, though not at this moment. She seemed to have been withered by having felt the terrible heat of Gertrude’s fever. I dropped the book and rushed to the door, and she followed me. “We don’t know why, what it is that’s happened to her. It was so fast.” I ran toward the house, and she hurried after me, assuming that I had not understood. “Addie! Addie, she isn’t here. The ambulance is already gone.” The great beauty of the gardens, the magnificence of the Beaux Arts house, the peaceful refuge of the estate—none of it would be thesame without Gertie. None of it would matter. No light could penetrate this place once the shadow of her death had fallen upon it.
I crossed the terrace and entered the house by a library door, with the head housekeeper close behind me. I was breathless more from dread than from the long run through acres of gardens. My voice was raw when I said, “I have to get to the hospital. Can you take me, Victoria, Mrs. Symington? Can you take me to the hospital?” She said there was nothing we could do there, that it was in the hands of the doctors now, the doctors and God. Loretta would call with a report as soon as she had news. “No, no,” I objected. “Please. You don’t understand. There’s no reason you would. Thereissomething to be done, something I can do. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. But I can do it.” The woman was distraught. She had known the siblings since they were babies. She and Julian were childless. She loved the Fairchild children no less than if they had been the offspring of a cherished sister, perhaps even as if they were her own. Fear and grief gripped her, but even if she’d been calm and thinking clearly, there was no reason she should make sense of what I was saying.
I thought of Anna May. Years had passed since her brother had schemed to destroy my happiness. We were friends. All wounds were healed. But she would feel an obligation to help me without having to be persuaded that what I claimed made sense. “Where’s Anna May?” I asked. “I need to find Anna May.” Mrs. Symington thought Anna May was in the laundry room, and I hurried across the library with the dear woman confused and trailing close after me. When I came into the main ground-floor hallway, I heard voices. I looked to the left and saw Mr. Symington talking to Lynette Rollins in the foyer. The day was cool, and Lynette was wearing a coat over her uniform. She always reported for work on time, so she must have been departing for somewhere rather than just arriving.
Intuition told me that Lynette, rather than Anna May, was my best hope of getting to Gertie in time. I called out to her as I ran down the long hallway. When I reached her, I saw tears standing in her eyes and jeweling her lashes. She was fumbling car keys out of her purse. I asked where she was going, and she said, “I can’t focus on work. How could I? With all this, I can’t stand it here. I need to be there, the hospital.” I asked her to take me with her. I had never learned to drive. I’d never seen a need to learn. Now I felt stranded, helpless. “Get a coat, Adiel. Hurry.” I had no need of a coat. All I required was to be on our way. I threw open the front door and hurried down the steps of the portico. The employee parking area was near the head of the circular driveway, on a wide lay-by concealed behind a tall hedge. We arrived together at Lynette’s 1930 DeSoto coupe. As she started the engine, she said, “I don’t think I can take this again. I really can’t. I’d rather it was me.”
The car was small, the compartment tight. Lynette drove fast but well, although sometimes she had just one hand on the wheel as she blotted her eyes with the sleeve of her coat. The hospital was in West LA at least half an hour from the Bram unless she jammed the pedal down. I asked if she could go faster. She put on more speed, though she said, “I want to be there, but not to say goodbye. God help me, if that’s the way it has to be, then I’d rather get there after it’s too late for goodbye. Holding her hand when she slips away, the horror of it ... I don’t have the courage for that.” The tremor in her voice and the note of dismay that bordered on despair suggested she was tormented not just by what might be coming but also by what had occurred somewhere in her past.
Perhaps it is a consequence of having read hundreds of novels through which I have been propelled by an abnormal curiosity, but when my interest is piqued, I can’t repress it. Lynette’s need to tell was equal to my need to know. I asked whose hand she had been holding when death had come.
After a hesitation, she indicated her purse, which stood on the seat between us. “Photos. In the picture windows of my wallet.”
The wallet held six snapshots of a dimpled girl of ten or so. Her winsome smile, which would have charmed in life, could in memory devastate.
“Her name was Elizabeth,” Lynette said shakily. “She wanted to be called Libby. Her father was the worst, walked out on us when Libby was three, but she ... she was the very best. There was no meanness in Libby, never a tantrum or a pout. She was always upbeat. She had a strong sense of herself, the way Gertrude does. But like Gertie, she was self-aware and could be so funny. She was never bullheaded. I was seventeen when I brought my baby into the world and ... and only twenty-seven when she left me. It was 1918. How old were you then, Addie?”
“Four,” I said.
“So you won’t remember much how it was. A million of our men were fighting the war in Europe. Meat, wheat, and sugar were all rationed. There was plenty of work for women, work men had done before they went overseas. Like so many others, Libby and I adapted. Life was challenging, but it wasn’t hard. We had each other. We were happy. And then came September.”
That autumn, I’d been too young to understand events occurring in the wider world. Even then I was in a freak show, displayed in my own stall, though not yet the star. I was too young to know why carnival season was cut a month short. I read about the crisis in later years. The nation had been ravaged by the Spanish flu, for which no cure existed. One out of four people had come down with the illness. Many thousands of adults and children died.
“My Libby was hit hard by the contagion and confined to an influenza ward with more than a dozen other children. If she had been eighteen, in an adult ward, isolation rules would have barred mefrom visiting her. But the hospital was dealing with a severe shortage of nurses, many felled by influenza. Because children often got more desperately ill than adults, requiring closer attention, anybody willing to risk infection by properly attending to a loved one was granted dispensation from the rules if they seemed competent for the task.”
I could speak only in a whisper. “You were with her when ...”
“Yes. I could have been nowhere else.” All these years later, racing to Gertie Fairchild, Lynette felt as if she were reliving the greatest tragedy of her life. “All those years ago. Sixteen years. Seems like yesterday. Seems like today. Gertie’s not in the same hospital as Libby was. If it was the same, I’m not sure I could do this. Gertie’s like a niece to me. No. More than a niece. I don’t know how to say it except ... God, I love her. I love them all so much. I took this job when Izzy was three and Gertie was a baby because I knew I’d never have another of my own, never dare risk it ... the loss, the pain. I wanted to die after Libby passed. I considered all the ways I could ... check out. But if there’s a world after this world, she’ll be there, and maybe if you take your own life you don’t get the next one. One day I want to see her again.”
“You will,” I said, as if I knew anything about it. But what else could I say. “You will.”
“So if I couldn’t leave,” Lynette continued, “then I wanted to be around children, help them grow and prosper in whatever small way I could. Two little girls, and then Harry. It’s been so lovely all these years. So safe. So safe here in the Bram. Shelter from ... from everything. And by the end of this year, it would have been even better. But it’s like Harmony says—”
I finished her sentence—“Stay alert”—as she swung the DeSoto onto the approach road to the hospital and was forced to slow down behind drivers on less urgent business than ours. I asked, “Better by the end of the year?” She revealed that the Symingtons recently decided they were ready to retire to a little house they owned in SanClemente. Franklin and Loretta felt that Lynette, with her two-year degree in accounting and having successfully managed a small hotel when Libby had been alive, could take over as property manager of the Bram and hire new housekeepers to fill the positions she and Victoria would be vacating. She would move onto the estate, into the apartment now occupied by the Symingtons. She wanted nothing as much as being fully in the embrace of the Bram and the Fairchild family.
“So why didn’t I ... in all these years, why didn’t I realize if you love them and lose them, it doesn’t matter a damn if they’re yours or they’re someone else’s babies? Why didn’t I realize it rips you up just the same if you love them so much?”
As she sought a parking space in the crowded lot, I said, “Why? Because maybe then you would never have taken this job you so much wanted. Maybe you wouldn’t have gotten past thinking about all the ways to check out. You wanted to live. For Libby. Sometimes, to go on, we have to wrap ourselves in a little self-delusion until we don’t need it anymore.”
She pulled into a parking space and switched off the engine. “Adiel, I don’t want to go in there.”
