Page 15 of The Scarlet Ball

I dried myself with a towel as big as some of the blankets I’ve slept beneath. Mielle had thoughtfully left me a velvet robe on the back of the door. I twisted my hair up and out of the way and I sighed as I put on the robe. What did I have to cry about anyway?

When I emerged at last, Mielle had laid out a silk gown in pale blue. It was a simple design with delicate embroidery around the neckline, over a corset so new it creaked, and a good petticoat. As Mielle rummaged in the lower drawer of the wardrobe, I took a few steps in my bare feet, turning to hear the silk swish.

“Where am I going in such a pretty thing?”

“You are going to work,” Mielle said.

MIELLE SAID THAT I was going to work, and I very quickly realized that she meant it. I wasn’t a stranger to hard work, especially since I’d come to the United States, but expected something closer to what I had known in my old life. In France, there are shoes for dancing. Some of them only last a few quadrilles before they dump you on your ass, others are bespoke and stitched with spells so fine that no one will dance like you again. There were a pair of aqua moiré satin slippers owned by some Bavarian noblewoman that let her dance on water. One pair of russet boots, worn by a girl I knew, allowed her to kick over her head. When they came after her for the trouble she made with the workers’ strikes in Paris, she kicked up her heels and gained the rooftops, and no one’s seen her since.

When marvels like that could be had by everyone with the means, of course it is only American debutantes who must be taught dancing the old-fashioned way, drilled into the muscle and into the head.

Mielle had me up every day at eight in the morning, dragging me through processionals and waltzes and quadrilles until my feet twitched in my sleep. Some of the dances were new to me, but America had imported most of them from the Continent. Knowing the choreography was just the beginning, though; Mielle would drive me to the point of fits, my steps too long, my arms too far from the center of my body, stopping just short of me actually screaming.

“You’re not hopeless at the dancing,” she said abruptly one morning a week after we met.

“Of course I’m not,” I said. “I didn’t actually climb out of a gutter, no matter what Mrs. Howard told you.”

“She tells me only what I need to know, and where you learned to dance was not a part of that.”

“What girl with ambition doesn’t? My mother taught me some dances from her country, though I don’t know their names. At the convent school, they were preparing us to be wives. No one in France wants a graceless wife, so they had a tutor in twice a week. After that, well, of course I danced. I didn’t do too badly at it, but I never wanted to work so hard for a living.”

In Paris, if you wanted eyes on you and your bag stuffed with cash, you danced. I danced in halls with men paying for the privilege, with other girls for the fun of it, even a few times on stage before I realized I didn’t love performing enough to make it worth the long hours of practice or the egos involved. Nothing takes the joy out of things like a choreographer screaming the steps at you from the rafters, and I’d made my way to the houses with the mirrored walls and the late nights very quickly.

If I had previously thought I was competent in the ballroom, I never even considered the dining room. It wasn’t just physical exertion that Mielle demanded, but a kind of refinement that was equally exhausting. I had had no complaints about my table manners, but every luncheon became a lesson in some form of dining, formal or informal, full courses or a light meal I might take with one or two other ladies. Mielle taught me the niceties of dining à la russe, every course presented as if by magic and then whisked away again, and the pleasantries required for a simple meal with friends of the family. I did worse at table than I did on the dance floor—no one had ever paid me for the pleasure of eating beautifully. I preferred to enjoy my food, which Mielle insisted was not the done thing. You ate corn straight off the cob as neatly as you could conspire to do so, and when you washed in the finger bowl, you always dabbed your lips as well, three discreet pats before drying with a napkin. Fork tines down, chin up, sip your soup from the side of the spoon, and I was not permitted to ask for my favorite bits no matter how charmingly I did it, or to clean my plate no matter how good the food was, and it was good.

I watched a particularly fatty bit of duck sent off with one of the maids, an exaggerated look of woe on my face.

“When am I going to be allowed to eat exactly what I like, exactly when I like it?”

“No one does that,” Mielle replied crisply, but I knew that was wrong. Mrs. Howard and her friends must do it, and it set an itch in the back of my skull, the possibilities there, desire that lived so close not to possibility but to reality.

After lunch, Mielle, unsatisfied with just punishing my feet, sat me down at the pretty spinet desk in Ginny Marshall’s room to beat my brains. The books she produced were English and French, some history and art, the odd volume on philosophy and politics. I had been a good reader since the convent school, but I kept only the bits that interested me, almost never names and dates. Mielle hovered over my shoulder as I read, and when I couldn’t recite back what she demanded, she produced paper, dip pen, and inkwell.

“Copy it,” she said on the second day, and I stared at her in disbelief.

“What? Which?”

“All of it.”

She meant it, and mutinously, I sat for hours copying out passages about Descartes and the forest primeval, filling page after page with elegant lines of script. Of course I couldn’t scrawl—every line needed to be as neat as a scrivener’s hand, and if I splotched or dripped, I needed to start the line over. It helped to put the information in my head even if it gave me a terrible hand cramp. I improved, and Mielle was not forced to take more drastic measures, which involved a charm and my actually eating the pages cut from the books.

“Would I at least be allowed some bechamel?”

“No, that is a German philosopher. A French sauce would not suit.”

“Are you fucking with me?”

She wouldn’t say either way, but I could at least approximate a young wealthy woman’s education. I would know when to gasp, offended, and when to laugh softly, and while I couldn’t back up any of my nascent opinions on economics or politics, I wasn’t expected to. No one wanted to hear what a debutante thought about the fighting in Mexico; she only needed to know that there was fighting in Mexico and to validate the opinion of the man who had brought it up. It was, as Mrs. Howard said with heavy irony, the difference between a true education and simply knowing many things.

Dinner was taken with the Howards, usually the first time I saw either of them in the day. A few times we dined formally, something I suspected was mostly for my benefit. Mrs. Howard watched, eagle-eyed, as I forked painfully thin slivers of filet mignon à la portugaise into my mouth. Nothing quite pleased her, but by then, I suspected nothing ever would.

Otherwise, it was an informal meal in the little dining room, me seated between Mr. Howard with his empty plate and Mrs. Howard with her cuts of duck and liver. They didn’t speak much, but I got the idea it was because they did not need to. Their silence was one of long understanding, and even without speech, without food, Mr. Howard was perfectly content to sit and watch Mrs. Howard at her meal. When she wasn’t correcting me, Mrs. Howard was preoccupied with her own thoughts, her days consumed with her search for her granddaughter. The food was better than good, the company undemanding, but leaving that room was always a relief, a weight rolled off my chest.

After dinner, Mrs. Howard came by with the newspapers, both the papers of record and the ones I was more familiar with, limp broadsheets that left your fingertips black with ink and headlines so lurid they might as well have bled. I pressed my thumb against one such headline, the story of a woman on Columbia Street who had killed her little daughter and shoved her down a privy.

“You know these mostly aren’t true.”

“Of course they aren’t, but more importantly, they’re read. It’s never a bad idea to know what lies are spreading through the city.”