Across its breadth, the noon sky was cloaked in clouds as dark as ashes marbled with soot. The air pooled so still that even the laciest trees with the most delicate leaves did not tremble.
Although I knew the answer, I asked, “Why do you insist on my being something that I’m not?”
“Maybe youarewhat you think you’re not.”
“That’s not an answer. That’s an evasion.”
She smiled, aware that those were words with which she had earlier chastised me. “Why do I insist? My stubborn heart. I have no faith in anything until I’m given evidence faith is warranted. I was married to Julian years before I could believe he loved me. Life has taught me to require proof or suffer the consequences of blind belief in anyone or anything.”
Her inbred and all but implacable doubt in all things saddened me even as I understood that it was a reasonable response to this world of deceit. I said, “If I could command the clouds to roll back and the sky to be blue from horizon to horizon, I would do it for no other reason than to change your stubborn heart forever. But I can’t do that because I’m not a citizen soul of New Jerusalem come down to Earth on a holy mission that might also make a nifty storyline for a Paramount movie. I’m just a freak both physically and in some ways mentally. If you’d rather call me an oddity, a nonesuch, a weird duck—that’s okay.I won’t be offended. I’ve come around to calling myself a freak without dismay. To deny that humbling word would also be to deny the talents and the gifts that came with my physical deformities. It’s all part of my birthright. Do you see?”
“I donotsee. Why should you be born with terrible burdens, even if you’re willing and able to live with them? And why should Julian and I be unable to have children in a world full of them?”
Every person is a puzzle. I had just been given a corner piece of the puzzle that was Victoria. I let go of her hand in order to hug her. “When you get bored with retirement, please come visit me for as long as you like. Me and the children. Everyone will be so happy to see you. As long as there’s a Bram, you belong here. And as a guest, you won’t have to make your bed.”
Her heart might have been stubborn, but it was not hard. She kissed my cheek. She couldn’t speak. In silence, we walked together through the house. As we entered the foyer, she found her voice. “It will be a blessing to sleep in late, never again be required to herd you little savages to breakfast and off to school.”
As I opened the front door, I said, “We’ll miss being able to exasperate you to the point where you sputter.”
“That sounds like an admission. I always assumed the morning chaos was the consequence of an excess of youthful energy. Am I now to understand that it was scripted?”
“We often stayed up well past midnight, planning every detail. Precisely timing each spill. Deciding exactly when the door would be left open to entice a squirrel into the kitchen. Determining which of us would roll a piece of sausage across the floor to send Rafael on a wild scramble that would incite the maximum disruption of your routine.”
“Hellions,” she said as we descended the steps to the driveway.
“And proud of it, ma’am.”
Everyone in the Bram had said their goodbyes earlier. Only Julian waited by their Ford. He helped Victoria into the front seat and closed the passenger door. He half bowed toward me. “Miss Adiel Fairchild, it has been one of the greatest pleasures of my life.”
I offered him my hand. “Mr. Symington, sir, the pleasure has been all mine.”
He took my hand. “I did not bother to tell the family that from now on you are the majordomo who will keep this place from tumbling down. I was sure they already understood.” His voice broke only when he said, “Goodbye, dear,” and shook my hand precisely three times.
I watched the Ford dwindle down the palm-lined driveway as thunder rumbled and rain began to fall.
It was Christmas Eve. We would be going to church in the rain. The staff was on vacation. Chef Lattuada left us a week of feasts. On New Year’s Eve, with sparklers, we would paint bright but short-lived patterns on the darkness.
Part Three
1938
In the third of four blue dreams, I wandered in an open forest at night. The light by which I found my way came from three glowing spheres the size of a fortuneteller’s crystal ball, one off to my left, one to my right, and the third ahead of me. I was searching for someone, perhaps for several people, but also for a place. I did not know any names of the people or what they looked like, for I had not met them yet. And I worried that the place I sought existed for others, not for me.
My dream quest began with an expectation of wonder and good fortune somewhere ahead, but during my long fruitless wandering, exuberance faded into a doleful longing. At last I came to a stop when a wolf crossed my path and spoke as animals do in fairy tales and fables. “If you find what you’re seeking, what makes you think it will last forever when nothing else in this world does?”
In answer, I said, “There is one thing that lasts, and you know it. Tell me no more lies.” After that, I walked and walked through vast colonnades of trees, walked until I woke.
—from a letter by Alida, April 17, 1927
Thirty-Six
In the wider world, the three years following Gertie’s crisis were marked by the false promise of imminent economic recovery and by the very real threat of war. Japan attacked China. In Munich, the European allies betrayed Czechoslovakia to placate Hitler.
In the smaller world of the Bram, Lynette Rollins proved to be a superb estate manager. She had hired a woman named Leda Zentner to take Victoria Symington’s place as head housekeeper and a younger woman, Peggy Powell, to assume the position from which Lynette had been elevated. Leda and Peggy adapted to the Fairchild universe as though it had all the same habits and quirks as their own families. Three years had passed without significant drama.
The new year, 1938, continued to flow forth days as lacking in turbulence as the waters of a stream with minimal slope. Yet, for no reason I could define, with increasing frequency, I warned myself tostay alert. By the middle of June, the siblings had all celebrated their latest birthday; Isadora was twenty, Gertie eighteen plus, and Harry seventeen. Two years earlier, I’d ceased to be their teacher, not because of their age, but because they were autodidacts and each was obsessed with a subject that I knew less about than they did.
On the last Monday evening in June, the entire family, minus one, plus the estate’s seven employees and two of their husbands (Harmony’s Allen and Peggy Powell’s Tommy), boarded a chartered bus to be taken from the Bram to Los Angeles for dinner and a special treat. The owner of the Palomar Ballroom billed the place as “the largest and most famous dance hall on the West Coast.” It was a restaurant, a bar, a nightclub, a dance hall, and a concert hall all in one, providing seating for ten thousand. Although you might think a nightclub would remind me of my speakeasy days and conjure bad memories, I was excited and eager to see the fabled Palomar.
