“Let me go. Let me go!” I squirm and Norman quickly puts both arms round my torso. The nurse stands, drops my travel bag, and rushes to help him hold me fast.
“Mrs. Crockett, do you have the hypodermic?” Dr. Townsend asks.
“I do, Doctor.”
I scream for my mother as the needle pierces my skin.
2
Before...
FEBRUARY 1938
I had seen the little room just off the Calverts’ kitchen plenty of times; on all those occasions I’d been called up to the big house to help with dinner parties and holidays. There was a bedstead and bureau of hardwood, curtains trimmed in eyelet, and a chenille bedcover in a pattern of cabbage roses. It had been the Calverts’ housekeeper’s bedroom, but that woman, Flora, whom Celine had often complained to and about, had been let go the week before, and Celine hadn’t yet found her replacement.
As she and I traveled home from the hospital the day of the accident, Celine told me she had decided on a plan to address both her pressing need and mine.
“So I know you’re probably not thinking about what you’re going to do to get on with life now and all of that,” Celine began, “but the truth is, you’ve been tossed into a situation where you’re going to have to start making decisions for yourself. I know all about that. You hadn’t been born yet when my parents died, so you probably don’t know there was a time when I had to take on the running of the vineyard all by myself. I couldn’t stop to feelsorry for myself, because there was so much work to do and I had to do it.”
Though my thoughts were still a throbbing tangle of fear and anger and sorrow, I remembered having overheard at a dinner party once that Celine married Truman Calvert when her father, Bernard Rosseau, was still living. Mr. Rosseau had died of a heart attack three years later, when Celine was twenty-five. She hadn’t been forced to manage Rosseau Vineyard all by herself; she had a husband. But I looked out at the passing countryside and said nothing.
“I found that work helped me move on from grief,” Celine went on. “Trust me. The last thing you’re going to want to do is lie on your bed and cry day after day. I know what I’m talking about here. If you want to keep working in the vineyard, I won’t stop you, but I think you should work at the big house. You’ve worked in my kitchen often enough to know how I like things, and I know your mother relied on you to keep house in the cottage when she was out in the vineyard. She often told me what a good cook you are, so if you’d like to give that a try, we can do that. Unless you want to go back to school.”
I had convinced my parents to let me quit school four months earlier—on my sixteenth birthday—so that I could work alongside my father instead. Many farmers’ children stop schooling at sixteen, I’d told them, and I wasn’t suited for school anyway. The colors in my mind were always fighting for my attention, and there were so many sounds at school. Too many. It had been so hard to concentrate. I loved to read, and I was fond of history and geography, but math, because of those numbers and all the colors that went with them, was impossible. And my classmates thought I was strange, even though I’d obeyed my parents’ command from years earlier to tell no one what I saw in this big world of sound. “Other people don’t see the colors that you do,” my parents had said, although Momma had told me once that a dead great-aunthad been able to see them. People wouldn’t understand. People would think something was wrong with me. I’d kept the colors to myself the best I could, pretending all the time that I never saw anything out of the ordinary. But my classmates remembered the few times I’d slipped. They whispered about me. So did my teachers.
In the end, it hadn’t taken much convincing. Daddy and Momma didn’t like the colors, but they liked less that I was unhappy. And I’d already been helping in the vineyard since I was little. I knew everything about the vines. I loved them. They were home to me. And I had promised my parents and kept the promise to continue making bicycle trips to the library in Santa Rosa to borrow books. I’d assured them I wouldn’t stop learning. Books would teach me.
“I don’t want to go back to school,” I told Celine.
“I don’t blame you. You’re going to need to make a way for yourself in this world. You work for me and I’ll see to it that you get good experience as a domestic, and I’ll write you a nice letter of recommendation when the time comes for you to move on. You’ll get far better experience working for me at the house than toiling away at the vines. And you’ll certainly enjoy it more.”
I didn’t think Celine was right about that. I had grown up chasing a giggling Tommy through the rows, and clipping the bunches of sweet fruit at harvest, and pruning back the branches in the winter to make way for the next year’s grapes. The last echoes of my life with my parents and little brother were in those vines.
And yet it wouldn’t be the same working for another vinedresser.
“What do you think? Shall we tell Mr. Calvert that’s what we’ve decided to do?” Celine asked.
I said yes.
“Good.” Celine seemed happy with herself for having soquickly come up with a plan that benefited everyone. “There is a retired chef I’ve been wanting to hire for quite a while, but he doesn’t clean houses and he only wants to come a few hours a day. I’ll see if I can hire him for the evening meals. You can handle the rest, can’t you? I’ll call him when we get home.”
When we arrived back at the vineyard, Truman seemed genuinely sad for me and suggested to Celine that I be given a couple of days at the cottage to adjust and mourn, and that after my family was laid to rest perhaps then I could join them at the big house. Even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to sleep in the cottage by myself, I’d been surprised at his kindness. I didn’t know Truman well. Even though I’d been born at Rosseau Vineyard, it was always Celine who would come down to the cottage to speak with my father or who called me up to the big house to help in the kitchen with parties. Truman spent all his time in the tasting and barrel room, a tall, wide stone-and-timbered structure built into a hillside. But Celine said it was a terrible idea for me to be alone in the cottage after having just lost everybody I loved.
“Rosie is our responsibility now, Truman. We can’t go around making careless decisions,” she said.
So I spent the first night as the Calverts’ ward in my new bedroom—the maid’s bedroom. I lay awake that night for a long time, numb with grief and disbelief. The sounds in the big house in the midnight hours were new and different. Subtle. Strange. And so were the colors that accompanied them. I kept replaying in my head the policeman coming to the big house, the sound of his car’s tires crunching on the sloping gravel drive and creating pinpricks of orange. And me, hanging laundry on the line outside the cottage, watching as he rang Celine and Truman’s doorbell. I saw over and over the policeman talking to Celine on the porch and the slow way she swiveled her head to look at me at the bottom of the little hill as I wondered why a policeman was talking to her.
I fell asleep wishing I’d been in the truck with my family.
The following day, Celine and Truman helped me take what I wanted out of the cottage so that it could be prepared for a new head vinedresser. Momma’s chipped china and faded tablecloths had still looked so beautiful before, but now everything in the cottage looked old and dull. I asked that the household goods be given away to the migrant farm camp in the next town over, and I took only my clothes, the cloisonné necklace that Daddy had given Momma for their tenth wedding anniversary, my cigar box of loose coins and Helen Calvert’s letters, and my bicycle. A book. The following day, at a graveside service attended by the other employees of the vineyard, the caskets containing my family were lowered into the ground at the local cemetery.
On the day after that, I began my new life as the Calverts’ maid.
I was now in charge of preparing and laying out the Calverts’ breakfast every morning according to a menu Celine would select each week. The Calverts would see to their own midday meal, and the hired chef would prepare the last meal of the day, which I would serve and then clean up afterward. I was in charge of putting away Mrs. Calvert’s grocery order every week as well as seeing to the housekeeping of all the other rooms in the house.
“The average pay for a maid is ten dollars a week, but because you’re just starting out and all your physical needs are already being met, let’s make it five so that you have room to grow,” Celine said as she and I sat at the kitchen table the day after the funeral and went over my duties. I would have free use of the telephone for local calls and would have Sundays off and every other Saturday afternoon and evening.
And there were to be no gentlemen callers at the house. Ever.
