“I won’t be able to use the telephone ever while I’m here?”
“You can write letters if you want. As many as you want, although they will be viewed before they are sent. But the telephone is off-limits.”
I swallow my disappointment the best I can, but I can feel tears of frustration begging for release. Writing a letter won’t help me. A letter to the big house would be opened by Celine. In all likelihood, Truman would never see it. A well-timed phone call to the barrel room would have been different, though. Celine isn’t in there as much as Truman is...
But I can’t think of that now. If I happen upon an unattended phone, I will find a way to use it. Until then, I’ll have to bury this frustration along with all the others.
The two of us walk back out into the hallway and to the nurses’ station.
“She’s ready,” Nurse Tipton announces.
Norman slips another forkful of his lunch into his mouth, wipes his face with a napkin, and then comes out. He says nothing as he withdraws a key and walks to the door. Nurse Tipton and I follow him into the foyer and then into the stairwell. At the second-floor landing Nurse Tipton pulls out her own key ring to leave us.
“Thank you.” It seems like the right thing to say in that moment, though I’m not sure what I’m thanking Nurse Tipton for.
“Take care,” the woman says with a casual tip of her chin.
I follow Norman down the rest of the stairs to the first floor and to the large cafeteria at the back of the building. It is a large space filled with long tables where dozens upon dozens of womenof all ages are seated and eating. There must be close to three hundred diners. Some look like they are only twelve or thirteen, and others have gray hair and faces lined with age.
Only a handful raise their heads to look at me, new and pregnant and arriving late to lunch. The rest continue to eat and talk.
The sound of their voices in a room empty of anything soft to absorb the noise casts an arc of drab green as I walk into the room.
4
Before...
MARCH 1938
I didn’t feel—not for a moment—that I worked for both the Calverts, even though it was the couple’s house I cleaned and both of their clothes and towels and linens I laundered. I knew it was Celine Calvert who made all the decisions and instructed me on every detail of what I was to do. Truman had few comments on my duties as their maid and fewer still in his role as a co-guardian of my welfare, which seemed to suit Celine just fine.
Daddy had started working at Rosseau Vineyard before I was even born, and while he never spoke badly about his employer, I caught on early that Celine was someone he never wanted to disappoint. Despite her petite stature and being a woman, Celine had always been fully capable of running the vineyard’s business without much help from anyone, near as I could tell. She expected every employee’s absolute best effort, just as she gave the vineyard her own. I had always thought of her as not only being in charge but loving that she was in charge.
Celine Calvert was the only vineyard owner in Sonoma CountyI knew of who wasn’t a man. It was known around the county that years earlier, before the new Prohibition laws took effect, Celine had contracted with Catholic dioceses up and down the West Coast to make sacramental wine, the only kind that would be allowed to be made. Rosseau Vineyard hadn’t only survived during Prohibition; it had thrived. Daddy told me once that when Prohibition began, there had been more than seven hundred California wineries. At its end, only fifty were still active. Celine’s was one of them.
To me, Truman Calvert had always seemed the exact opposite of his wife. He was tall—a good ten inches taller than Celine—and he walked with a slight limp from a battle injury in the Great War, making his gait slower than hers. When they walked the property together it seemed like she was in a hurry and he was always trying to catch up with her. Truman spent most of his time bringing in restaurant owners and hotel managers to sample the Rosseau vintages. He was a quiet man who didn’t come down to the vinedresser’s cottage much, and he seemed to let Celine make all the major decisions related to the vineyard. I had long supposed it was because the vineyard had been Celine’s inheritance, not his, but it was almost laughable how tiny Celine ran the show while her tall husband just watched.
The Calverts’ only child, Wilson, was away at college at Berkeley. It had been a long time since I had seen him up close. There had been one year, when I was six and Wilson was ten, when he liked to come down to the vinedresser’s cottage to play with me, and we would build forts in the vines or kick a ball to each other. Tommy was just a baby then. But it was just for that one year. By the time Wilson was fourteen, he was attending a fancy boarding school in San Francisco and was home only on holidays and term breaks. Those early days of our friendship were never repeated, not even during the summer months when Wilson was home.
On my days off, I would walk the vineyards. When I climbed the hill back to the big house, I often paused on the flagstone patio that overlooked the acres and imagined my parents and Tommy hovering just above me in paradise, perhaps just beyond the clouds. Not so very far, just far enough not to be able to reach them with a touch. Celine had been right about the work being a way of distracting me from the heaviness of not being able to bridge that gap. The work was its own kind of consolation.
•••
A month into my new life at the big house, Celine reminded me—just after the evening meal and after she’d downed several glasses of Rosseau wine—that she’d always wanted a daughter and had been disappointed to have been given only a son and no other children.
“I was going to name any baby girl I had Francine, after my mother,” she said as I started to clear away the supper dishes. It was nearly eight thirty. Celine was lingering at the table and Truman had long since left it. “I suppose we would’ve called her Francie. That sounds nice alongside Rosie.”
Celine giggled and reached out for my hand to hold it. She was clearly tipsy. Drunk, perhaps.
“Um, yes,” I said. “It does.”
“You’re very pretty, you know that, don’t you?”
I felt the cool weight of Celine’s hand in mine and said nothing.
“My Francie and you might have been friends when you were little,” Celine went on dreamily. “Just think of it. Francie and Rosie. My Francie would have been fair-haired like me, though. That’s how I would have been able to tell you two apart.” She swung her other hand out, nearly knocking over her wineglass. “I’d look out over the vineyard, and I’d see you two playingtogether. Pretending to be princesses with daisy-chain crowns in your hair. I’d see your two heads, and I would know which one was mine.”
I searched for appropriate words for a reply. None came to mind. I was still considering the awkwardness of the situation when Celine suddenly closed her eyes and the hand in mine grew limp.
