Gilded Mountain, page 15
“Your mother got nothin’ to say to that man,” said John Grady.
“You tell him, then, Dad.”
“What I got to say, he don’t want to hear.” John Grady slammed a fist into his palm. “Only prayer help me get through.”
“Sunday morning come to the rail spur,” Cal said. “I’ll set you up in the cookhouse. Nobody’ll see you. Marcus will meet us at Denver.” He folded Easter to his chest and held her tight, small and delicate in his arms. “Leave all this, Ma. Don’t scare off.”
“You know I don’t scare,” she said.
Father and son went away toward the icehouse, carrying the bloody sacks of animal heads. The King would take his bighorn sheep back to Belgium as a trophy.
All afternoon Easter was distracted. She burned a tray of croquettes, cut her thumb on the jagged lid of a tin can. She did not sing or joke around.
Neither did I. Seize the opportunities, the Countess had said, but it seemed to me certain opportunities were like horses bolting wild, and I did not know how to grab the reins or how to steer if I got them.
* * *
For entertainment that day, the royals had a tour of the mill sheds, the stone saws and polishing machines, and were treated to a demonstration of statuary carving. That evening they heard a lecture presented by a geologist from the Colorado School of Mines about the Riches of the Mountains, the silver and gypsum, copper and bauxite, tungsten and gold and uranium ore. After a supper of watercress soup, trout filet à l’anglaise, roasted parsnips, and Easter’s pecan tarts, they played cards and then retired, resting up for Thursday’s quarry tour. At dawn the party was driven up to Quarrytown in five wagons, to marvel at the grandeur and the Eighth Wonder of the World. A crane lowered groups of the tourists in a newly rigged gondola to watch the men pounding spike, jumping the quarry bar. I could picture it. My father driving the Snail. Tarbusch checking his watch, leering at the ladies.
The quarryhogs put on quite a show: a twenty-ton block fresh-hauled out of the mountain, lowered to the yard in a circus feat of engineering genius. Oskar Setkowski, it was reported later in the Record, “rode the white swan,” performing acrobatic tricks on the dangling stone. Nobody was crushed by rockfall. Nobody lost an eye to a stone chip. Nobody got burned by a steam blast. Nobody’s leg was mangled in a lifting chain. Nobody fell off a scaffold or slipped on ice. Not that day.
Caleb Grady and his crew served luncheon on the flats by Hairpin Point, with its vast panorama. Twenty porters carried the spread from wagon to table—ham sandwiches and deviled eggs, lemon bars and iced tea—‘a picnic’ beneath a tent erected for royal protection from the hard sun of midday and the curious eyes of Quarrytowners.
Would Henry see the spectacle? Would Maman take Nipper’s little paw, wave to the King? Voici l’roi! My father would come home to perform his imitation of His Majesty, a pickax like a sword, his chest puffed and his mouth in a sneer, la-de-da.
* * *
On their return, the guests napped. That evening they dined on hearts of palm while my own heart was consumed by worry. The ball. The King. The plan and the opportunities: to transform myself into a butterfly. I lurched between fairy-tale incarnations. I was a spy. A dupe. A wild demon. Cinderella. The goat girl of Quarrytown. All these and what else?
My jaw ached from clenching resolve: to smile, to be élégante, to flutter the eyelashes. To speak up, to stay quiet. To thrust the chest forward, to cover myself. Not to be a know-it-all. Not to envy. To be sweet and pure, a good quiet girl. To be an inside agitator and suffer for a cause instead of unrequited love or the blister on my heel. To take notes. Not to lose a chance, at least, to waltz.
* * *
All week we staff followed the schedule of assignments that Mrs. Nugent posted on the door of her office. In the kitchen Easter showed me how to skin the spikes off a pineapple and core their yellow hearts. I sliced them in rings, decorated each one with the bull’s-eye of a cherry, guilty for the ones I stole and ate. They tasted of liquor and were called maraschino. A jar of these cost eighteen dollars, the price of three months’ rent for Cabin Six. We used the entire order of two dozen jars. I liked to read the receipts tacked to the kitchen corkboard, pronouncing the names of delicacies, terrapin and gorgonzola, aghast at the cost: a hundred dollars for six bushels of iced fresh oysters from Norwalk, Connecticut. Crates of burgundy and zinfandel, champagne and brandy, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Veuve Clicquot, their names like poetry, the price tags equations in my head. In fact, I did have a head for finance: A dinner for thirty at Elkhorne cost quadruple a quarryman’s yearly salary. The cost of the Hunters’ Ball would cover the Company payroll for a year.
How would I describe such sums to my family, the Pelletiers of Quarrytown? It was as impossible as translating to the Countess why Signora Santorini could not bathe her children daily. Or explaining to Jace Padgett why one could not deface the margins of books. These people did not know the value of things. Or of me, Sylvie, who could conjugate Latin verbs. I’d won a prize. I was published in a newspaper. The Colonel was impressed by my report. So there.
As I chopped and peeled and whipped the cream, small eruptions of resentment formed like the blisters that burst in my shoes as we girls worked double time, breathless, running. The ladies reclined yawning while we servants picked up their dresses off the floors and tidied sixteen rooms upstairs, where we laid fresh fires in the morning and evening, the lavatories swabbed, new posies on the nightstands, hothouse lilies and roses arranged in the entrance halls. The end tables and credenzas were abloom like the tropics.
Jasper did not burst into the kitchen or linger half-asleep at breakfast. “Where’s Jace got to?” I blurted it to Easter.
“He stayed up at the Lodge,” Easter said. “With Cal, you know. Master Jace and Caleb is good friends.”
Easter was preoccupied with one of them and I was preoccupied with the other.
“J.C. never said nothing about Caleb?” she asked, pouring batter for cake.
“Not really.” Caleb gave Jace a book, of Souls. Was that the sort of information she was after? “Like what?”
“Nothing particular,” Easter said, nonchalant. “Never mind what these Padgetts say. You don’t know what devilment people get up to with all that liquor—” Distracted, she spilled a spoonful of batter on the floor. “Look what you made me do,” she said, annoyed.
“Sorry, Easter, I’ll clean it.”
“Don’t you pay me any mind, hear? All this royal business got me in a state.”
* * *
My own state was preoccupied by Saturday night. Nine o’clock. The plan. All week Inge flitted in and out of rooms, Bisou yapping behind. When the dog saw me, he wagged his tail. But the Countess carried on as if I were a statue. She was on the terrace, in the gardens, at the table with her guests, talking in French, burbling in English. She did not summon me or send me on errands. Just once she fluttered her eyelashes when she spied me around a corner. Once I said Bonjour, Madame, as she passed me setting tables on the terrace. She waved her fingers as if playing piano in the air and only went on laughing with a pair of women in white dresses, their hair coiled and adorned with tortoiseshell combs, cloisonné clips. One of them—Miss Susanne Crandall, of Newport, I don’t forget her—bumped against me as I cleared a table. She gave me a look of such menacing hauteur that it melted me down like a pool of wax.
“Are you an ox?” she said, and brushed herself off as if she’d been contaminated. As her form receded laughing down the lawn, I had a mind to tackle her and pull her hair out by the roots. The violence of my own impulse frightened me. Envy and Anger boiled in my entrails. Watching Miss Crandall, the vavoom gold-digger she surely was, flounce and swish, I could not summon Meekness or Humility to overcome my vengeful thoughts. Inge had not deigned to say good morning. Likely it was my own failure to understand that her instructions, to “help with Housekeeping,” meant that she would not acknowledge me until the fête, until the Hunters’ Ball Saturday night, when I was instructed to arrive at her closet at five p.m. to dress for the party, and to remain there until my entrance at nine o’clock. Ready.
For what? Dancing, I hoped. Transformation in the glissade and the whirl.
Silly girl, I would say now to my young self with the wisdom and superiority of the old, did you think you could simply vault over the moon? That you might sprout wings? Yes, I did.
Chapter Thirteen
MRS. NUGENT WAS COUNTING FORKS when I went to remind her I would not be on the kitchen schedule that evening. “Madame has asked me to stay with her.”
“Why she wants you tonight of all nights.”
“To take notes for her Company newsletter.”
“Tcch. You’ve made me lose count.” Nugent rattled the silver. “Since you interrupted me, you’ll stay here to tally every last spoon. There are pieces missing. Someone is a thief! And I suspect that big Croat girl.” Albina could be heard weeping. Nugent went out incensed, muttering, “Newsletter!”
I would fork her in the gills, spoon out her eyeballs. I counted cutlery, full of vengeful thoughts, queasy with nerves. I had no intention of stealing anything myself. Not then, anyway. I’d yet to learn that the silverware, as well as the sides of beef and bottles of burgundy, the linens and crystal, were themselves stolen, bought as they were with dollars filched from the paychecks of miners and cooks. The clock ticked on toward five. Mrs. Nugent returned to me in the scullery.
“It’s all there,” I said. “Sixty pieces of each, including demitasse spoons.”
“Then you’ve done it wrong.” She practically spat, enraged, as if she kept venom in the pouch below her jaw. “Count again. Albina knows full well. Knives are missing.”
They weren’t. Three times I counted sixty sets of cutlery, the spoons like rosary beads, but I remained resentful. Albina was not a thief.
* * *
At five-thirty, I ran to find the Countess in her dressing room, arrayed in a frothing lavender gown that matched her eyes. Her beauty made me stammer. “Madame, desolée, I am late.”
“Ah, Sylvie.” She did not appear angry with me, only maddened by the slippery clasp of the bracelet glittering at her wrist, held out for me to fasten. She could not even dress herself. Like a child, I thought. But hers was merely a performance of helplessness, required of a butterfly. Snap it yourself, I didn’t say.
“There’s your gown,” Inge said, pointing. “You will arrange the hair like I showed you.” She kissed me on the forehead, so I loved her again, wanted to please her. “You will be stunning. He will adore you.”
“Merci, Inge.” Who will adore me? I didn’t ask.
“Nine o’clock,” she said in a rush. “You must arrive down the big staircase, slowly. That is how everyone will remark you, like une vrai Cendrillon.” She threw me a kiss, as if tossing a coin in a fountain, and was off to the party.
So she had said it. Cinderella. I was her toy, an experiment or a joke for the guests’ amusement, like a bighorn sheep in delicate shoes. Alone I was to go down the grand stairs. The skirt would tangle. The fluttering scarf a possible noose. Moose, noose, a ruse, you lose, a rhyme of disaster. The plan was a setup… for what? Beware the houseguests, Jasper had said, some hint about Adele. Annelise’s story of the Barbarian King and his sixteen-year-old copine was another alarm. Cramps pricked my linings as if they were bleeding. I’d guessed the reason Adele outgrew her dresses.
In Madame’s closet, my thoughts lurched bouleversées. Sounds of revelry drifted from below, great roars of laughter. Rustle of silk in the hall. Someone at the closet door? I’d flee down the backstairs. Escape into the night and up the road to the cardboard barracks where I belonged. Summer was ending. I shut my eyes over the sight of the elegant clothes hanging in their thin candied stripes, and printed it inside my lids to last me my life. I see it still, can smell the tea roses. These were the last moments of the last days. God forgive me for the shallow vanity of what I wanted: Beautiful things. To twirl in society. To win the admiration of ladies and colonels, editors and an American prince.
The virtues of my past life, Meekness and Humility, would get me nowhere in this brash new wilderness. Such training had frozen me in a closet, afraid of judgment by party guests. Who does she think she is? What are you, an ox?
But why should I not be bold? If I tripped on the stairs, made some faux pas—what would I lose but my pride? At the least, I could report all to K. T. Redmond for the Record, the ice sculptures and glittering array. The excess and debauchery. My girlish young fabric suffered rips of longing for the music, petit fours with white sugar icing. Jace Padgett was still missing. He’d sweet-talked me by the river, pawing and drunk, but must’ve realized that I was too tall, too Catholic, too willing. Unrefined. Sylvester. Oh, I was nervous. The clock hands ticked: eight-sixteen, eight-forty-one. Go. Stay. Don’t just sit there like a poached egg on a wet plate, K.T. would say. Go to the party! Take notes!
Fast, I removed the black uniform, peeled the hot stockings down my legs like shedding a skin. The green silk sheath went over my head in a whisper of grass. I pinned my hair, painted my lips, and combed my eyelashes, fastened on the sparkling necklace, the ear drops like hanging baubles of hope and dread.
And there she was, Sylvie altered. The glass image made me cold. She was a pretender in a costume. It was not too late to keep her here, secret. I could plead illness in the morning. What would I miss? Humiliation. Also, the party. Les opportunités. A change of fortune. What other chance would there be to sip champagne? “Putain,” I cursed aloud, and smiled at the imposter. She flapped her lashes like butterfly wings. “Go now, imbécile,” she told me in the mirror. “Go meet the King.”
Surely this was the actual Satan’s staircase, where I stood on the top step listening to the bubbles of the party rising in a frightful froth of laughter that stole my nerve. To make a grand entrance, as instructed, would be to hurl myself off a cliff. Go down. I teetered precariously on the precipice of the top step. I could not do it.
I turned and went shoeless down the backstairs, holding the petals of my skirt above the risers. I put on the dainty slippers and emerged through the service door hidden behind a ficus tree in the grand hall. The better to observe, not be observed. At the time I was ashamed of my cowardice, but now it is a secret point of pride that I resisted the Cinderella plan, Inge’s method of elevating me.
The house was full of luminous people in organdy and satin, stiff white collars and cuffs. A pair of guests considered me, little question marks in their eyes. Was I someone? In a clutch of revelers was Colonel Bowles. He tapped my scandalous display of shoulder—to turn me around and throw me out, I thought.
“Good evening, Miss Pelletier,” he said, bemused. “Bonsoir.”
“Bonsoir.” I slipped and slank through the moiling party. Across the great hall was His Majesty the King, an eddy of importance around him. He was stationed in his medals by the grand staircase down which I had not descended. From the outskirts of the room, I watched him speaking to Inge, her throat and wrists and hair glittering with diamonds. By her side was rotund Duke Padgett in a white tie and a pintucked shirt, laughing, the King chuckling, all of them har-har-har, hoisting flutes of bubbles, the very Veuve Clicquot I had unloaded in the icehouse that morning to chill.
A catering fellow came along, carrying a tray of golden elixirs, to ask, “Would you care for champagne?” and I would care, “Yes, please,” arming myself. A swallow went down my throat like a zipper unzipping, the taste of fizz. Inge glanced frequently toward the staircase. She stood on tiptoe and whispered to the tall monarch. He nodded. She took the Duke’s watch from his pocket and checked it, swept her gaze around the party. There. She spied me in the corner, widened her eyes in puzzlement, then beckoned me with a lift of her chin. I threaded through the throng.
“Madame,” I said.
She pulled me near, her warm arm on my cold skin. “Your Majesty,” she said in French, “I present you my young friend Sylvie. The one I have mentioned. This is the girl. La favorite de l’été.”
The favorite of the summer. I curtsied low, head dipped as she’d instructed, and did not shake his hand. Inge had warned me not to, because the King feared poisoning by enemies or contamination by microbes. “Enchantée de vous connaître, Majesté,” I said.
The King’s eyes glittered small in his old ruined face as he measured me. From under my suspicious lids, I sized him back. If you encountered him on a mountain road without his trappings, you would think him a wild man of the hills, his beard a blanket. I could not stop marveling at his nose, the long slope of it. I had never seen one of such impressive dimension. “Mademoiselle,” he said, looking down the length of it at me, so green in my green dress of nothing. “You are Canadienne.”
“Mes parents sont de Québec,” I said.
Inge looked on, her eyes amused as she told the King, “Une fille vraiment elegante, non? She is only sixteen.”
Seventeen. I did not correct her.
“Seize ans?” he said. “She is tall.”
“She has such the charming American air of innocence, non?”
“Is it an air?” The King smiled with an arch of his eyebrow, half his mouth.
“No, Majesty, she is just as she appears.”
Leopold looked me over, his eyes cold peas in their sockets. He said something in Inge’s ear. She laughed and curtsied. A shimmering silver-clad woman appeared at his elbow. “Ma Belle,” he said.
She lifted her chin to gaze at him, adoring. “Mon Vieux,” she said.
“Dear Caroline!” cried Inge. The women traded kisses, and the Baroness Caroline slid her merry dark eyes over me. “Jolie,” she pronounced to the assemblage. “So many pretty girls in America, yes?” She steered the King away, her silver dress trailing behind like moonlight on a lake.
