The Peacock Feast, page 12
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Harriet said in response to Prudence’s resignation. “Elaine can do the site meetings, and you can organize the orders from home. I’ll send Billy”—Billy was Harriet’s driver—“to pick them up from you.” Prudence looked at her feet, embarrassed by how grateful she felt.
Her mother was worst at night. Moaning, she would toss and turn and fling off her blankets. Prudence would give her the strongest tincture of laudanum the doctor had said was permitted and lace with brandy the chamomile tea her mother was still able to drink.
Some nights, though, it seemed that neither laudanum nor brandy scraped the surface of her mother’s pain. Then, Prudence would feel her own exhaustion, an exhaustion that was more of her spirit than her body. The shame she felt about her self-pitying thoughts: She was twenty-three. She should be up with a talcum-scented baby, not a dying woman with a nauseating rot emanating from her lady parts.
It was nursing in its purest form, without hope of cure, with hope only of alleviating suffering. Warm compresses laid between her mother’s hip bones. Massages for her mother’s feet, the toes purple from lack of proper circulation. Hours spent reading aloud. Singing to drown out the moans.
Even as a young child, Prudence had never truly believed in God, though she’d not dared to say the words aloud until after her father died. She’d understood that she was not alone, that others questioned the existence of a deity, because of the existence of evil: If He is there, why did we have the Irish potato famine? If He is present, why do babies die? None of this had bothered her. There could be a God and He could just be mean. Or there could be a God with pain part of His greater plan. What had bothered Prudence was more elemental: If there is a God, who created Him? How could something come from nothing?
Her mother had looked at her wide-eyed when Prudence said this, as though for the first time she were seeing that her daughter was more she-goat than human. It would have been easier if her mother had slapped her or threatened to wash her mouth out with soap. Instead, she’d turned back to her mending, resigned, it seemed, to the idea that Prudence, like Prudence’s father, who’d never gone to church after they’d left Laurelton Hall, was also an infidel.
Now, though, with her mother’s unbearable moaning, Prudence prayed. Please, please, God, Lord, Jesus, Allah, whoever is there, tell me what to do. Should I put a pillow over her head? Should I strangle her with the sleeve of her bed jacket?
On the third night of her mother’s moaning, it came to her. Damn the doctor’s instructions. Her mother needed more. More laudanum. More brandy. The two together.
Prudence poured an ounce of brandy into one of her mother’s nicest glasses, from a set that had been a Christmas gift from Prudence’s father to her mother. It was still two hours until the next dose of the laudanum should have been given, but she added three teaspoons instead of the prescribed one.
“Open up,” she said to her mother.
Her mother sealed her mouth and looked off. A few coarse hairs were on her upper lip. Afterward, Prudence would tweeze them.
“You want me to, Mother, don’t you?”
Her mother weakly nodded. She parted her lips. Using a spoon, Prudence gave her the laudanum-laced brandy. Within minutes, her mother’s face relaxed.
At first, it looked as if her mother had slid into sleep, and Prudence wondered if it would be her mother’s final rest and if she would be at peace with this, with having induced an earlier death. Earlier by what? Two days? Three? But after less than a minute, her mother stirred. She pushed with her hands on the mattress, trying to hoist herself up.
With the top of the mattress raised from her mother’s efforts, Prudence saw something blue poking out. She slid her fingers beneath and pulled out the decayed top of a peacock feather.
Seeing the feather, her mother reached out a hand. Prudence gave it to her. Dimly, she recalled her mother having slept with a matted peacock feather under her pillow those first weeks after they’d moved here when she’d never left the apartment. Now she buried it in her nightclothes.
Prudence lifted her mother so she was propped against the pillows and filled a glass from the carafe on the bedside table with the water she boiled each morning, holding it to her mother’s lips.
Her mother drank a few sips, then gripped Prudence’s arm. “He was a bastard. What he did to me.”
Prudence put down the glass. She stroked her mother’s hand. She didn’t want to hear about her father’s misdeeds. “He did his best, Mum. I know he was rough on Randall, but I think Randall would have left anyway. His friend was already there, in San Francisco.”
“Pulling down me bloomers, sticking his ugly thing into me, with me a married woman with children already.”
Prudence could hear herself sucking in air. She dropped her mother’s hand. “Who are you talking about, Mother?”
“Calling me a dirty thing. An Irish pig.”
She stared at her mother’s face. The doctor had warned that the cancer might spread to her mother’s brain. Had that happened?
Prudence felt her heart pounding in her chest. To a man who had his daughters parade with roasted peacocks on silver salvers, her mother would have seemed like one of his sixty thousand belongings.
Her mother’s eyes drooped shut, a thread of spittle avalanching toward her slackened chin.
* * *
The morning before Prudence’s mother died, she asked for Randall.
“He’s coming, Mother,” Prudence lied.
Prudence gave her mother the prescribed dose of laudanum, made her a lukewarm tea with honey and a small amount of brandy. She spooned the tea to her mother slowly, kissed her dry forehead.
When the tea was done, her mother looked directly at her. “I wonder if he still has those red curls.”
Then she shut her eyes for good.
* * *
A month later, Prudence learned from Harriet Masters that the fifty-seven-room Tiffany mansion on Madison Avenue had been purchased by developers, who planned to knock it down. Prudence felt surprisingly sad. Her father had died in the top-floor studio, but in many ways her own life had begun there during the afternoons when she’d sketched in the pad from Dorothy Tiffany while her father dusted the hanging glass lamps and tended the extravagant plants.
Shortly after, Harriet gave Prudence her first solo client. Ella Jameson was a Smith graduate who spoke French and Italian and was a generous patron of the arts. She and her doting husband, Lawrence, had recently purchased a town house near the newly developed Gracie Square neighborhood so as to be close to the Brearley School, which their two daughters attended. Ella wanted modern furniture. “No damask, no ferns! No Louis anything!”
Prudence showed Ella photographs of a parlor and dining room done in the Manhattan Style.
“Perfect. Only I don’t want to be bothered with any of the decisions. I have the benefit for my daughters’ school, two painters I’ve promised to help find dealers, an Italian singer who just fired the German pianist she was supposed to play with at a concert here next week…”
Prudence ordered a Jean-Michel Frank white sofa for the parlor and Breuer Cesca chairs for the breakfast room. She had curtains made in African-motif fabrics for Ella’s older daughter’s room, found a Calder-inspired mobile for the younger girl. “Oh my,” Lawrence said when he saw the Eileen Gray end tables. “Made from steel. But I suppose it makes sense. It will be so durable.”
Ella pecked Lawrence on the cheek. “Such a love, isn’t he?” she said to Prudence, who registered Lawrence’s relief that Prudence had kept his grandmother’s oval claw-foot dining table and the furniture for his library, his armchair reupholstered in a fabric similar to the original.
In the spring, Ella invited Prudence to a dinner party at her house. Prudence, just turned twenty-four, had been to the opera as Harriet’s guest and had spent time in the country homes of her clients organizing paint colors and modernizing kitchens, weeks during which she had taken meals with her clients’ families (though Elaine had warned that it might be with the staff; this had happened to her on a few occasions), but she had never been to a dinner party. Elaine helped her select a dress, but no one could help her with what she most worried about—the conversation. How would she be able to talk about the subjects she imagined Ella’s guests so easily discussing: Stravinsky versus Rachmaninoff, the situation in Europe, the best hotels in Florence and Nice?
Not until afterward had Ella told Prudence that the raison d’être for the evening was to introduce Prudence to Lawrence’s Harvard classmate: the eccentric but still quite eligible thirty-seven-year-old Carlton Theet. Four days a week during eight months of the year, Carlton ran the New York office of his Virginian family’s textile company, which he’d astutely positioned to receive the uniform and parachute contracts from the war he anticipated would come. The balance of his time was devoted to his quiet but ardent aspirations of mastering the entire repertoire of Bach piano music and reaching the summit of the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents.
Having heard Ella’s introduction of Prudence as “the talented decorator who did absolutely everything for us—you know I would never have the patience to pick out draperies or pillows!”, the first question Carlton asked Prudence was “And what are your opinions on Gesamtkunstwerk?”
Prudence felt the familiar awful flush rise from her chest to settle in her cheeks. Was the man giving her an oral examination? Black spots clouded her vision and she feared she might have to close her eyes.
Carlton peered at her. She saw that he saw that she did not understand and that it would breach what he considered good manners to acknowledge this. “I’m asking because my parents are friends of the Burlinghams. Perhaps you’ve read in the papers about the urban-improvement projects championed by Charles Culp Burlingham, CCB as most people call him?”
The name did ring a bell, something to do with the election of Mayor La Guardia two years ago, but overcome as she was with dizziness, she could not recall anything more.
Was he now going to ask her thoughts about the mayor?
“My father shares none of CCB’s politics—he considers them socialism and quite abhorrent—but they roomed together at Harvard and remain friends. When CCB’s son married Dorothy Tiffany, my parents attended the wedding at her father’s country home, Laurelton Hall. It’s renowned for being an embodiment of Gesamtkunstwerk: a total work of art, with Tiffany having designed every item from the desk blotters to the wallpapers to the fountains.”
Prudence felt so hot, she feared she might break into a discernible sweat. Was this the test: Would she admit that her parents had been servants there? That her father had cut the wisteria that had hung from the dining room rafters on the day of the wedding, that her mother had made up the beds? She imagined blurting this out, and Ella then taking her arm and leading her to the kitchen to have her meal there with the servants.
“I quite like the idea,” Carlton continued, “but my mother thought Mr. Tiffany was tyrannical in its execution.”
“I’ve seen photographs,” Prudence said, feeling like a liar about to be exposed. But was not saying something the same as a lie? And, in truth, all she’d retained from her own experience of the estate were shards of memories. What she knew about Laurelton Hall in any specific way had, in fact, come largely from the photographs she’d seen in magazines.
“Mr. Tiffany had much the same idea for the studio he built in his family’s mansion on Seventy-second Street,” Prudence continued, relieved to be able to add what she hoped was a respectable contribution to the conversation. “Now, though, the house is being demolished.”
“For goodness’ sake, why?”
“With Mr. Tiffany having passed, no one is living there. The family has sold the property, and Mr. Candela is going to build an apartment building on that corner.”
After dinner, Carlton on piano accompanied Lawrence on cello in what Lawrence explained was the Gounod melody, known from the Ave Maria, overlaid on Bach’s Prelude in C from The Well-Tempered Clavier. Despite Prudence’s untrained ear, she sensed that Carlton’s technical skills outstripped his musicality, constricted by a tension in his limbs and a rectitude that prevented him from fully immersing himself in the music, but she was moved by his close attention to Lawrence, the way Carlton adjusted his tempo and volume to the slight shifts in the cello. Seated on one of the swivel Le Corbusier chairs she’d purchased for Ella’s music room, Prudence noted the intimidation she’d first felt with Carlton dissolving into a benign protectiveness. She could see herself beside him at the Steinway piano, placing a light hand on his shoulder and, as he signaled with a sharp downward movement of his chin, turning the page of his music book.
* * *
A week later, Prudence was in her small office at Masters Design making a list of which vendors she needed to write to again to inquire about the status of deliveries for the Newport house when Elaine ushered in Carlton with a package under his arm.
“May I?” he asked, pointing to the chair opposite Prudence’s desk. Behind his back, Elaine raised an eyebrow and gave an arch smile.
“This past Tuesday, I lunched with Charles Burlingham. I believe I mentioned him to you?”
Prudence nodded.
“He told me that his daughter-in-law, Dorothy, had written to ask if he would arrange for one of her father’s watercolors from the Madison Avenue house to be given to the daughter of one of her father’s gardeners.”
Carlton glanced at the package he’d leaned against the desk. For the second time with this man, in what was only their second meeting, Prudence felt the terrible heat rising up from her chest as she imagined, again, that the moment had arrived when she’d be exposed: Harriet marching in, perhaps with an outraged Ella in tow. How dare Harriet entrust the daughter of a gardener to decorate her home? My God, Ella had given Prudence keys to her house, access to her most private rooms.
When Carlton looked up, however, what she saw in his eyes appeared to be an apology, an apology for having mentioned something he knew that she would have preferred not to discuss.
“It would have been indiscreet at Ella and Lawrence’s dinner for me to hold forth on Robert and Dorothy, but it is a tragic situation. Robert has not accepted the reality that Dorothy is not coming back from Vienna. She has started an entirely new life there with the Freud family. All of her children have been in psychoanalysis with Professor Freud’s daughter, and she is apparently training to be a psychoanalyst herself.”
It made no sense—how would Carlton know about Mr. Feeney and his Sunday visits to her mother?—but Prudence could not shake the thought that Carlton was aware that she’d heard much of this before.
“Dorothy wrote that she’d been very attached to one of her father’s gardeners and that his daughter as a child had shown promise herself as an artist. When CCB said the name, I realized it was you. I told him I’d deliver the watercolor myself.”
Carlton lifted the package onto Prudence’s desk. She avoided his eyes as she untied the twine and unwrapped the brown paper.
The watercolor, impressionistic in style with thick brush marks, was of a field of daffodils in a frenzy of colors. In the foreground was what looked like a man in worker’s garb, his face obscured as he bent over to examine one of the blooms. In the background were three redheaded children, barefoot with a small ball they were kicking between them.
Prudence looked up. Carlton was studying the painting upside down. He knew her. He knew who she was. Yet he was still sitting here, across from her in the chair on the other side of her desk.
“I’d like to write to Mrs. Burlingham and thank her. Could you provide me with an address?”
“Of course. I will ask CCB and will send it to you.”
Carlton stood. She could see his eyes lingering on the painting, on, she imagined, the children in the background, refraining, she felt certain, from asking, Perhaps one is you?
* * *
Prudence hung the watercolor on the wall across from her desk. A few days later, a note arrived from Carlton with Dorothy Burlingham’s Vienna address. Immediately, Prudence wrote to her.
Dear Mrs. Burlingham,
Thank you for the beautiful watercolor by your father. It is especially meaningful to me because of what appears to be a gardener tending what might have been one of the fields at Laurelton Hall. I am very grateful to you for sending it to me.
I was very saddened to hear that your father’s home will soon be demolished: I have so many memories of his studio there, with the huge four-sided fireplace, and of your kind visit to bring me your daughter’s pastels and sketchbook.
I am afraid you might be disappointed at the road I have taken. I did not pursue becoming an artist; instead, I studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art so I could work as a decorator. I have a good job now with the Masters Design company. With the economy as it is, not too many people are doing large-scale redecorating, but we still have a few major projects, and I am in charge now of one of them. I do a little bit of sketching, but most of my time is spent as the intermediary between the craftsmen and the clients.
Your father-in-law’s friend Mr. Theet delivered the painting to me and kindly provided your address. He told me that you are training to be a psychoanalyst. It must be so very interesting.
Prudence paused. What she wanted to write were questions that were impossible to ask: Are you happier since you left your husband? Do your children accept your decision? Why did you not come back for your father’s funeral?
