Gilded Mountain, page 12
“Do you go to school?” she asked. “You must go every day! Do you have any toys? What should I tell St. Nicholas is your heart’s desire?”
Make note: For all little girls a baby doll, the boys to get toy trains.
She was Christmas in summer. Bisou ran about yapping while the anxious mothers watched, telling the children in Czech or Polish and Italian, Behave. Be good. Smacking them away from the fine lady. Inge tickled their skinny ribs. Perhaps their mothers wondered, like I did, why she didn’t have any bambinos of her own.
The women poured out wishes from their frazzled hearts, told her what they lacked: shoes and milk, meat and medicine. I wrote it down. One cabin had no door, another a leaking roof. Make note. Whole families slept on mattresses that filled smoky rooms shared with flies and chickens, a goat wandering through. Cesspits. Dust. Make note. We saw tents with tin pipe chimneys, a baby sleeping in an apple crate, as Nipper had done. Inge interviewed a girl, my age, an infant strapped on her back, a toddler at her skirts, gaps where her teeth used to be.
“What do you need?”
“A good sleep!” The girl laughed so the black holes showed.
Six or eight kids followed our carriage as if we were a circus parade. “Hey, Contessa! Dolci, dolci.” “Please thank you.” We doled out caramels.
“A lotta good that does,” Jasper said. “Give ’em cash, not candy.”
Again he caught me smiling under my hat.
“Oh, phooey to you, Jace,” said Ingeborg. “The men talk already of a strike on the mill. The Colonelle will smash their heads like at Ruby. Do you want that?”
My stomach lurched. Strikes seemed a world apart from this wagon, these fancy people talking about head-smashing. Such violence was what my mother feared, the reason she would not talk of unions and did not welcome Lonahan the organizer.
“We try to keep the people happy,” Inge said. “Why you are so gloomy?”
“Must be the mountain air,” Jace said. “I prefer the damp fog of New England.”
It was a fog: his sarcasm and argument, the sidelong glances he threw at me. I was riveted by their talk and disappointed when he found an excuse to quit us, “Ladies, I’m forced to go back to my studies.”
“Enfin, then leave,” said Inge, pouting.
Jace winked at me and jumped off the carriage. At the corner, instead of turning toward Elkhorne, he went the other way, toward the saloon. Grady watched him go, shook his head.
“He isn’t happy, that boy,” Inge said.
Why he was not happy in a château with all that orange juice was a mystery to me. I stayed quiet so she might explain.
“His father says he was always a nervous child,” she mused. “Of course, he never had a mother.”
“I saw her portrait,” I said. “She was beautiful.”
“Duke loves the beautiful women,” Inge said, not without vanity. “But Jace, he is alone.” In French she whispered, “He was raised by these people, just poor Negroes.” She cut her eyes at John Grady driving, at his straight back, the reins loose in his hands, as if the Gradys were at fault for raising a motherless boy. “And then the second wife—!” Inge continued. “She sends the boy away to the Massachusetts academy, he is only eight years old. And now? Phh. At the university he learns many wrong ideas. He talks against his father, against even the grandfather, who was a general in the war, you know? He was wounded at Manassas.” She had switched to English.
“I saw his portrait too. The Brigadier General, right?”
“Very famous, yes. He lost his leg, lost everything. All their lands, and property.”
John Grady began to whistle without any tune.
“That is why my husband will build the monument to the Confederate. For honor to his father. My husband cannot forget, his own papa home from the war, his leg cut off, can anyone imagine?” Inge shuddered.
I thought of Pete Conboy, the surgeon’s saw. Mr. Grady whistled loudly.
“But Jasper—he does not care. He’s too shamed. He prefer to forget. For my husband, the son is a grief. He is… difficile, for me too. Three years I try for him to be my friend, but he is angry to me. He’s a frustrate.”
“A frustration,” I said.
“Yes. A frustration.” She leaned against me.
With trepidation, I patted her silken head. “I’m sorry, Inge.”
She wiped her eyes and straightened up. “Never mind. It’s nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing. Jace was difficult and morbid and sarcastic. Also charming and bookish and witty. He had winked at me as if we shared some understanding.
Chapter Ten
RAIN SLUICED OVER THE GLASS roof and down the walls of the Greenery. We were fish in a bowl, the fronds of palm leaves and ferns a seaweed around us.
“Please write up all the notes from our field trip,” Inge said, languid on her chaise. “We make a report about the conditions in the camp for recommendations. First: to close the saloons. Number two: to plan the sewers systems. Number three: what else?”
I paged through my notebook. “To translate?”
“Yes, translate.” She waved the air to clear it and yawned. “But not now, please. A report is too tedious. We worked too much yesterday, non? Today something fun.” She patted the chair next to her. “I’m so boring.”
“Not boring,” I said. “Bored. Ennuyée.”
“Bored, I mean. Monsieur Padgett is at Denver. He wished me to come along, but—” She dropped her voice. “The ladies there do not care for me. They say the rumors about me. They’re sheep. Vaches et moutons. They don’t like the European way or how I swept him, my husband. They prefer to talk about church. About nothing. Just recipe. They don’t care for the music, the dancing. Do you know, Sylvie?”
The only dancing I knew was the aunts and uncles stomping in their hard clogs to the sound of my father’s fiddle in the barn, the cousins hopping, possibly primitive. “Not proper dancing,” I said.
“You don’t know how?” She jumped up with alarm. “But Sylvie! You must prepare for le Grand Bal. Three weeks is plenty of time. I will teach you.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Stand up.” Facing me, she held up her left hand and curved the opposite arm at my waist. Delicate Countess fingers laced my thick knuckles. She drew me toward her in a clamp, ushering me forward and backward, humming, “Un, deux, trois! Step step step, around and step!” She broke away and danced by herself, laughing her bubbles of laughter. Bisou began to bark, so she picked him up and danced with him a minute, then returned to steer me, laughing and whisking around. I followed, looking at the loaves of my feet as she waltzed with the oaf of me.
“Look up! Don’t be stiff!” She sang waltzing notes. “Ta-ta-ta-ta-TA! You are skating, you are flying on ice, glissade. You are so light as a feather, Sylvie!”
Then, as if dusted by fairies, my feet got the hang of it. We careened about, both of us humming, skating out into the vaulted hallway. “Waltz, Sylvie!”
I abandoned myself to the rush and glide on the polished floors. Uh-oh. There was Nugent, clacking along the parquet in her disapproving heels, eyebrows alarmed, as if we were debauched in an opium den and not infected by imaginary music.
“Dancing lessons!” Inge cried.
“Yes,” said the housekeeper, ice in her voice.
“Join us, Mrs. Nugent!” Inge sang out.
The housekeeper reared her head. The sight of her pinchface convulsed us in fits of laughter. Behind her back, we sucked in our cheeks to make fish lips, only to see Nugent turn and glare. She had caught me. Tant pis, I did not care. Inge waltzed us backward into the Greenery in hysterics. We collapsed on the divan, holding our sides.
“Sylvie, ange, you dance like the circus elephant.”
“I’m a clodhopper.”
“Clod-hoppaire,” she said, howling. “What is this, clod-hoppaire? Never mind. You only make yourself a feather in the arms of the man, and he twirls you like you’re nothing.”
“Well, perhaps I am nothing,” I said, testing.
“Hmm. I don’t think so. Here in the American mountains, you are—whoever you say, non? As I am the Countess, and Monsieur Jerry Padgett from Richmond, Virginia, is called Duke. What do you desire to be? You say it, et voilà, it’s true.”
What did I desire to be? The possibilities seemed limited. “You cannot just wish something and have it be the truth,” I told Inge. “You can’t just decide what to be—”
“Oh no?” Inge took a tendril of my hair between her fingers and played with it. “Six summers ago, I had a wish. And then I met Jerome Padgett, dancing the waltz. So you realize, Sylvie, that it’s important for you, the Hunters’ Ball. All the society will arrive with their money. A hundred guests. The gentlemen will ask you.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, to fight against hope infecting me. I knew only one so-called gentleman, but Jace did not seem the dancing sort. Would he whirl me about if I made myself a feather in his arms?
“C’est sure, they will,” Inge said. “Take the advantage, les opportunités.”
* * *
Over several afternoons at my desk, I typed up the notes from our expedition, studying the Sociological Department report about the town of Ruby, written by Adele two summers before. At Inge’s suggestion, I retained passages from the eminent Dr. Richard Corwin, father of the movement for Industrial Betterment. Certain fragments of his ideas I edited out, in small acts of subversion, like an inside agitator.
BUSINESS ADVANTAGE
The company’s parental solicitude and the employees’ filial subservience and loyalty will increase tranquility, and keep out union rabble and Socialist influences. Profits will increase. We do not seek credit as philanthropists, but aim to carry out business ideals, as a corporation with a soul. The Golden Rule of brotherly love is the foundation of Social Betterment in all Padgett Company camps.
I typed in Inge’s commentary from our field trip. Adele’s report was my template, and the prettified Padgett coal camp in the town of Ruby was the model for Moonstone.
VICES: Vices, especially drunkenness, common in most mining towns, could be reduced to the minimum by an ordinance banning liquor and careful surveillance exercised by the company.
SHOES: The Company must provide an exchange of children’s boots, etc., at the Mercantile to keep students appropriately shod.
I wrote on in this fashion, quoting Inge’s ideas. I was half in love with them, with her philosophy of kindness and candy boxes, the way I’d once been in love with the goodness of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, cleansing lepers. Lady Bountiful Mrs. Padgett would build a theater. A hospital. She would bring light and sparkling health, caviar and roses and toilets. She’d have a library and a playground, a Moonstone Orchestra playing Mozart.
CHRISTMAS: The Company will provide an annual Christmas party for the employees, with roast turkey and a pudding. Every child under the age of eight will receive a gift: baby dolls for the girls, little train cars for the boys.
Moonstone was a dream city shining on the mountain, the way Inge described it, the way I wrote the philosophy of Industrial Betterment, even as a voice whispered, Don’t be a dunderhead. Caramels and Christmas turkeys would not last long; clodhoppers like me would never learn to waltz. I ignored that whisper, trusting that soon there would be skiers schussing down the snowy alpine meadows. Ambrosia and nectar. Rainbows.
Instead, there would be unrest and bloodshed and death.
* * *
“It’s excellent, the report,” Inge said on Monday morning, looking it over. “You have written me exactement. I made only a few notes. You must typewriter it. Colonel Bowles will come to dinner Friday, and I will give him the recommendations.”
I shut myself in the Greenery and typed the ten pages of “The Padgett Company Sociology Department Report on Conditions in the Moonstone Camp, with Recommendations for the Betterment of the Populace.” By Wednesday, I was finished. Thursday morning, Inge pronounced herself satisfied. “Tomorrow I show the Colonel.”
* * *
Friday, likely as revenge for my fish-lips face, Nugent assigned me to the kitchen “in uniform.” She handed me the black dress and a mobcap, hideous and ruffled. “Colonel and Mrs. Bowles are coming to dinner with some Denver people. Look sharp.”
Instead, in that hat, I looked like a toadstool.
All day Easter had me peeling and hulling, shucking and chopping, for two dozen guests. I soaped trays and spoons, the slicks of gravy and glazes, the white dollops of pommes de terres à la Normande. My arm was sore from churning butter. Easter molded it into pats shaped like flowers. I brought these morsels to the icehouse and sat stealing time in the cool shade with the river running below.
“Where’d you get to?” Easter said when I returned. “Just when I need a girl to watch the oven, you dawdle out.” She was cranky and hot in the steam off the stove pots, wiping sweat on her apron. “Twenty-five guests to dinner, and you go missing?”
“Sorry, Easter.” She never stayed mad long, but that day she was irked. When John Grady came in the kitchen for a glass of water, she handed it to him without a word.
“Mrs. Grady,” he said, “breaks my heart when you scowl like that.”
“Then I’m a sorry woman,” she said. After he’d gone, she drained a pot of scalded onions for me to slip free of their skins—a good trick she taught me. “Truth is, I don’t deserve that man. If you get one half as good, you’ll find yourself under a lucky star.”
“How’d you get him?”
“Way back,” she said. “When we was small, we played in the yard. But Grady’s people run off Belle Glade the minute the war came. His daddy signed up for a Yankee soldier, but the Rebs shot him and gave Ma Grady and the children no choice but to came on back.” The memory riled her. “Ma Grady never got over it, but for me, the luck of it was John Grady set his eyes on me, and they’re on me to this day.” She softened, thinking of it. “There’s a wheel turning in my heart for that man still.”
That the human heart had wheels was news to me. Ever since she said it, I have felt the wheels of my own, turning, turning.
When the guests were seated, the Croatian sisters carried supper into the dining room. Mr. Nugent stood at attention in his butler clothes, ready to fill three different kinds of glasses with claret or champagne or ice water from the Diamond River. When the swinging door flapped open, we heard the clank of silver on china, fragments of the guests’ loud talking.
“Typhoid!”
“Oh, not at the table, please.”
“We had that mule by the ears.”
“Oh, stop, Jerome, mon amour.” That was Inge, laughing.
For dessert we decorated individual tartes au citron with sprigs of mint. I snipped the leaves while Easter planted them like delicate flags, placed frosted rosettes no bigger than forget-me-nots on her handmade chocolates. She was an artist of sugar and pastry, intent on her creations. Just as dessert was ready, the kitchen door swung open, and there was Jace Padgett in his dinner jacket, blowing steam. He loosened his tie with sideways pulls.
“You leave that,” Easter said, wrangling trays. “Go on back and sit.”
“I can’t tolerate it! All these people rattling on about copper futures and stock portfolios. If I mention just one word about the incident last week in Richmond,” Jasper fumed, “they change the subject to the markets—”
“You try one of my lemon tarts.” Easter cut him off as if distracting a child.
Jace plucked one from a tray and leaned over the counter where I snipped leaves. “Hello again, Sylvie. Sylvester.” His grin like a challenge. “Sylvester. Your new nickname.”
“Yours is Jester, then,” I said.
“Jester! I like that.” He laughed. “But listen, you heard what happened—”
“Not now.” Easter rapped the counter with her spoon.
Jace sighed and regarded me with a lopsided smile. “You can do without that cap,” he said, and plucked it off my head. “The better to display your crowning glory.”
“Hey!” I grabbed it back.
“Stop that now, hear?” Easter said. “Go on in to your company.”
“I’d rather poke myself in the eye with a meat skewer,” Jasper said, but returned to the party, casting plaintive looks over his shoulder as if I might throw him a rescue line. I wished I had one.
“Some people never satisfied,” Easter said, disgusted. I wanted to ask, What incident in Richmond? But it was plain she didn’t want to talk about it.
* * *
After dessert, Jace returned to the kitchen and parked himself at the table. He watched me scrape plates into the slop bucket for the pigs. “Glad that’s over,” he said. “What a bore.”
Easter sat down next to him, took her shoes off, and blotted her forehead with her apron. “What all has you so aggravated?”
“First, the incident no one will discuss,” Jace said. “Second, those people get on my last nerve. Dull as dishwater.”
“What you know about dishwater?” Easter rubbed her small delicate feet.
“Are you all right?” Jasper asked her. “You tired, Ma?”
“Don’t call me that. What’s griping you?”
“They keep on asking me about my plans,” he said. “What about my prospects?”
“I got some prospects for you.” Easter rose from her seat and went to the pantry, returning with a sack of walnuts. “Tomorrow I’m making my prize walnut pie.” She set the sack on the table and handed Jasper a nutcracker. “So, get on with this.”
“I will, if Sylvester pitches in.”
“You call her by her right name,” Easter said.
“I don’t mind,” I said, “I like it.”
Later, the name Sylvester would serve me as an alias.
“Whatever your name is,” Easter said, “come on over here to lend a hand to this grown man whining.”
