As I listened for more than an hour, I had moved forward on my chair, until I sat on the edge of it.
“Mercy Village,” Loretta said, “was merciless, but that’s a story for another time. I’ve told you all this and brought you to the orphanage so you’ll understand what I’m about to share. It’s something I’ve found strange and wonderful since we walked out of Blue Mood with you more than three years ago, but after what you did for Gertie, it’s stranger and more wonderful than ever. Two things got me through those ugly years at Mercy Village. One was Franklin, who also had been taken there, but that’s for him to tell. The other was a future that I imagined for myself. I spent hours every day elaborating on it. That future was the hope that sustained me. I imagined I’d fall in love with a fine man. We would take on the world together and never back down. We’dbesomething, build a business to ensure we never wanted for anything. There would be children, a family so strong that nothing could tear it apart. Of course that man became Franklin. And here’s the strange, wonderful thing, Adiel. This family I imagined would include a girl whom we adopted. She would be a girl who, like me, had lost everyone and everything. We would embrace her as ours no less than the children we made together. That was my childish bargain with God, Adiel. If I promised to save a girl as miserable as I was, swore I’d give her all the world has to offer, then God would be obliged to give me the future I wanted. Bargaining with the deity is wrong and silly. It reduces Him to an old rug merchant or used-car salesman. Of course, it’s what children do. And not just children. Sorry. I’m babbling.”
“Not at all,” I disagreed. “I believe in miracles. You saved me from Captain. You are my miracle.”
Years had passed since I’d thought about what Captain might have done after Loretta and Franklin paid him off, what my few little “daymares” might have meant. Having mentioned his name, I found myself wondering what fate had befallen him. He surely hadn’t built the small retirement home on the oceanside lot. He would have realized that sitting on a porch and staring at the sea for the rest of his life wasn’t for him. He needed to feel important, respected, feared. Holding power over others gave his existence meaning. I pitied whoever was currently his chattel, and I was grateful that he was out of my life.
Thirty-Four
The economic depression grew worse in 1934, but the state of the economy was not the only thing that shaped the times. For one thing, it was also a year of great music. Early big bands continued to introduce Americans to a sound they didn’t know they wanted until they heard it. Formed that year, the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra came on strong. Instead of three trumpets and two trombones, the Dorseys used one trumpet and three trombones. The sound was huge.
After three years with Harmony Sussman as her teacher, Isadora had become, in her family’s opinion, a musical genius. She could play a romantic piece like Liszt’s “Dream of Love” and follow at once with a piano sonata by Haydn in high style. However, on those occasions when Izzy smiled while at the keyboard, she was playing a number by Duke Ellington or the Hot Five, or a tune Chick Webb’s band performed on a broadcast from the Savoy Ballroom.
On Saturday, April 14, almost two weeks after Easter, she heard the Dorsey Brothers’ “Stop, Look and Listen” just once on the radio and hurried to the music room the moment the number ended. Relying on memory, in little more than two hours, she adapted the orchestral arrangement into a piano solo. Throughout that process, I sat towardthe back of the room, listening to her with admiration just short of amazement. In four years, she had become an accomplished young woman and seemed to have found her passion.
The following Monday, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Chef Luigi Lattuada and I were standing on opposite sides of the center island in the kitchen, having coffee, when the subject of Isadora came up somewhat indirectly. I said, “This is really good coffee.”
“I add a little chicory root when I brew it.”
“Chicory root,” I said. “I’ll have to remember that.”
“Yes, a day might arrive when your life depends on remembering chicory root. You never know.”
“Is the difference only chicory root?”
“I also add a little cinnamon. I hope remembering both thatandchicory won’t tax your memory too much.”
“This is really, really good coffee.”
“Even though I take great pride in my coffee, such pride that I would kill any man who spoke against it, forgive me if I suspect you came here to talk about something else.”
After the siblings rushed out of the schoolroom at the end of the day’s instruction, each hurrying to the object of her or his fascination, I had wandered the gardens with no conscious purpose. I was in a state of mild melancholy that I could not explain. In truth, I didn’t desire to understand the source of it. I wasn’t a moody person and didn’t want to slide into being one.
Perhaps I had wandered into the kitchen because the analysis and advice of a chef seemed far less likely to damage my psyche than would the diagnosis of a trained psychotherapist. Were I to praise Chef’s coffee a third time, I would appear insincere; though superb java, it wasn’t so good that he could justify murdering anyone who spoke ill of the brew, and we both knew it. When I began to discuss my melancholy, I realized I knew the cause of it after all. “Isadora is sixteen. She’s findingherself, her talent, her purpose so fast that in a couple years she’ll be off on her own. And a couple years after that, Gertie will go, and then Harry. It’ll all fly by as if it were a few months. What will the Bram be like without them?”
Chef deeply inhaled the fragrant steam rising from his mug and sighed with pleasure. “It will still be the Bram in every way that matters,” he said, as if he could discern the future from the aroma of a particular cup of coffee as reliably as phyllomancers could predict events by studying tea leaves. “What comes next surely could be less charming, though we might be surprised. Franklin and Loretta built this place for the love of family and to delight children. A place that’s built for such reasons, whether grand or modest, will always inspire love and provide delight. We just have to be patient and see how it works out. Baby birds shed their eggs for a nest and then the nest for the sky. But these baby birds won’t ever shed us, Adiel. They have been inoculated against every cold affliction of the heart. They’ll be warmhearted all their lives, and they’ll love us as much as we love them. Family is important to them, to us all.”
When birds leave the nest in which they hatched, they make a new nest elsewhere. A nest provides safety, high above the reach of most predators. Bramley Hall was the only nest that I had ever known, and I didn’t have the instinctive skills to build a new one. Franklin and Loretta made me a beneficiary in their wills, promised me a life in the Bram, and it was their nature to ensure that every promise they made was ironclad. I was not afraid of being put out of Bramley Hall to forage for myself. I was not worried that Franklin and Loretta and my three siblings might go away. However, by the power of some unpredictable calamity, they might betakenaway—leaving me the last of the Fairchild family and alone.
There is less to fear when you have nothing to lose.
Following Gertie’s crisis in January, Franklin and Loretta had been swept back into a troubled film project that he described as like an ocean vortex, whirling ever faster, pulling everyone—cast and crew—into oblivion. Time passed, and the shoot wrapped, and they marveled that the film was “less embarrassing than expected.”
Late in the afternoon of the third day of July, Franklin was sitting in a lounge chair, under a patio umbrella, on the deck by the swimming pool. He was casually but smartly dressed. In an hour, he and Loretta were having dinner at a restaurant on the beach in Santa Monica to celebrate the completion of the picture.
I settled in the chair beside his. “You look as handsome as that new guy—Cary Grant.”
“You’re a terrible liar, Addie. No one but Cary Grant is as handsome as Cary Grant. He’s going to be the biggest thing ever.”
“Well, he’s always well put together. In that outfit you’re as well put together as he is.”
“I’ll accept that much. I’m more a Buster Keaton type who can dress like Cary Grant.”
Six months had passed since Loretta recounted what happened to her in the earthquake of 1906. She’d left it to Franklin to tell me about Mercy Village, the orphanage to which they had been committed separately.
Now, as the sun painted ripples of orange light on the swimming pool, he said, “Mercy Village isn’t worth the time it takes to damn its name.” Franklin was not given to anger often, perhaps because anger is said to be, after pride, the most lethal emotion to the prospects of the soul. Now his voice was marked not by rage but by impersonal displeasure at unworthy acts, a cool indignation. “I was sent there on the same bus with Loretta. I had more low experience than she did. I knew right off that the place was a sewer. I knew what risks a young girl took by being in the care of the couple who owned the place—Nigeland Marigold. Loretta was so innocent. I had to look after her. We became friends, though we never imagined where our friendship would one day lead.”
Two iridescent ruby-throated hummingbirds were busy in the day before us, hovering in feathered splendor and then abruptly darting to another flower to sip what it offered.
