The Peacock Feast, page 3
The dinner, Prudence read, was heralded by a procession of five nubile young ladies trailed by children of descending heights showcasing the paons en volière (roasted peacock) and cochon de lait farci (suckling pig) prepared for the meal by the chefs of the Delmonico Restaurant from produce and animals raised at Laurelton Hall. As the famed Harry Rowe Shelley played the organ, a somber Miss Phyllis de Kay, whose father was in attendance, led Tiffany’s three youngest daughters and one of their friends, all five costumed in white Grecian gowns affixed by straps that crisscrossed their breasts and encircled their buttocks, from the terrace to a palatial dining room laden with apple-tree branches and overlooking the Sound, now with night having fallen, sparkling with lights. Miss de Kay wore a headdress constructed from a peacock, its face draped over her forehead so the gaping beak rested between her eyes and the crest of head feathers formed a small fan above. She and the two girls behind her carried what must have been extraordinarily heavy platters on each of which a roasted peacock whose full plumage had been artfully reattached was arrayed, while the other two girls bore enormous bouquets of long peacock feathers.
Studying the caption under one of the photographs, Prudence saw that it was Dorothy who shouldered the third peacock, which she held, as though in silent protest, a bit lower than the others. Unlike her twin sisters, ahead and behind her, her face was hidden by her long hair, her gaze on the creature’s head, but Prudence could sense Dorothy’s misery in the sharp bend of her elbow and the tight way she stood, as though herself one of the Laurelton Hall columns with their glazed capitals.
Behind the girls were six children, Tiffany’s grandchildren and the grandchildren of his friends, also in white gowns with scarves that flowed from their heads to their ankles. Gripping lit torches, they sprinkled rose petals from wicker baskets on the 150 men of genius seated at large octagonal tables. At the rear were four even smaller children dressed as portly cooks with long aprons tied around their pillow-padded middles, each holding a platter on which sprawled a suckling pig.
In the photographs, the peacocks’ glazed eyes had not been visible, but in Prudence’s memory, the little boy crouched with her behind the potted lemon tree had cried in horror. Even at two, she must have known that they should not be there, secretly watching, because she’d put her hand over his mouth.
Prudence’s next memory of Laurelton Hall is of being held aloft by her father as she watches a bride emerge from a gleaming black car. She remembers the car door opening and a white-slippered foot and then the burst of applause from the servants and guests. Not until Prudence met Carlton, whose parents, close friends of the groom’s father, had attended this very wedding of Dorothy Tiffany and Robert Burlingham, had Prudence attached a date to the image: September 1914, just a few months after the Peacock Feast. A date Carlton recalled because it had been his first year at Groton, when he’d been ashamed of how homesick he felt and how strange the mostly northern boys seemed, as strange as if he’d gone to England for boarding school, which he might have had the war not begun.
Carlton’s mother’s first letter had included a report of the trip she and his father had made to Oyster Bay for the wedding, just days after they’d left him at school. A small affair, she wrote, only family and close friends with a brief ceremony at the church in Cold Spring Harbor and then a simple wedding breakfast at the Tiffany home. Prudence had blushed when Carlton told her that his mother had described how Tiffany’s servants had framed the entrance to the dining room: the women with starched aprons and bouquets of pink peonies in their white-gloved hands, the men with carnations dyed the same pink pinned to their black lapels. Blushed to think that Carlton’s parents had perhaps glimpsed her own parents, positioned within Tiffany’s design.
The scent of the wisteria hanging from the beams and in huge pots on the tables in the Laurelton Hall dining room had been so overwhelming, Carlton’s mother reported, it was frankly nauseating. Between the lines, Carlton could read his mother’s disapproval that the wedding had been unfitting for the son of CCB, such a prominent figure in New York City politics, not to mention for a Tiffany, and her resentment that she’d been deprived of a grander affair that would have included a wedding gown with a sixteen-foot train and a lavish dinner dance with a full orchestra to which she could have worn a gown herself. That she’d traveled all the way to Oyster Bay to see Dorothy in what had been her mother’s plain wedding dress (a dress befitting the marriage of Dorothy’s mother, a woman who at thirty-five had been presumed a spinster, to a widower) and to then be served a breakfast not very different from what might be on her own table Easter morning.
Prudence’s last memory of Laurelton Hall begins with a smell: the scent of fermented apples in the kitchen crate where she is feverishly sleeping, her mother at work on the third floor while Molly, the cook, watches over her. Molly, with her yeasty breath, her hands dusted with flour as she spoons cold water into Prudence’s mouth. Molly lifting her onto the outhouse seat.
Then screaming. A terrible quantity of screaming. Molly, she thinks it is Molly, holding Prudence’s mother, making her swig from what Prudence knows now but would not have known then was a whiskey bottle, tucking a blanket around her mother, slumped over in the back of one of Mr. T’s cars. It is Prudence’s first time in an automobile, but young as she is, she is aware that she must hide her excitement, and then everything changes and they are no longer living in the gardener’s cottage but in the apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
* * *
Her father leaves every morning, taking the streetcar to the fifty-seven-room Tiffany mansion on the corner of Madison Avenue and Seventy-second Street. It’s her father’s job to tend the tropical plants in the top-floor studio, with its freestanding four-hearth fireplace that majestically rises to the double-height ceiling. On occasion he comes home late and mean from a bar where he goes on paydays with the other men who work at the Tiffany house. Her mother leaves the apartment only to shop for groceries or attend mass with her hair covered by a white lace scarf. She sleeps with the matted top of a peacock feather under her pillow.
Soon, Prudence is in school, and her memories thicken to include other children and classrooms and snowstorms and a horse she sees fall to its knees on a cobblestoned street and then roll onto its side with white froth on its lips. All of this, it seems, a prelude to the night when her father shoves her mother and Randall raises his fists.
Her mother cries out, “You cannot strike your father. You cannot. God will curse you, and we’ve had enough curses on this family.”
“Let ’im, let the little bastard try,” her father taunts, and then he takes a swing at Randall, who ducks, and her father loses his balance and falls backward, hitting his head on the table.
Her mother tends the knob that forms on the back of her father’s head. “Go, Prudence, quick, fetch me some ice,” she calls out, but Prudence is sitting on the edge of her bed in the room she shares with her brother, watching him pack his rucksack: two pants, two shirts, his newsboy cap, the Irish fisherman’s sweater their grandmother had made for their father and that is now Randall’s, his copy of The Call of the Wild. On top he places the flat wooden box, the length and width of a school notebook but thicker, with a brass clasp he sometimes lets her open to see the white stones and the glass tile and the upper portion of a peacock feather, not ratty like the one under her mother’s pillow but carefully dusted, with its eye still royal blue.
“Christ almighty,” her mother yells as her father vomits on himself. “Prudence, get me a wet cloth,” and her brother is leaning over and whispering in her ear, “I love you, Pru. I’ll write you,” and she is staring at the floorboards, too terrified to say anything back.
* * *
Prudence writes her first and only poem the day after Randall leaves:
My brother is missing.
We don’t know where he’s gone.
I don’t feel like kissing.
Mother cries until dawn.
She reads the poem over and over again that first week while she stares at the bed where her brother slept, knowing that he won’t be coming home in a few days as her father claims. The poem, she discovers, transforms her misery from brute pain, a pressure in her chest that makes her feel that she must lie down and curl her knees up to her stomach, into something she can hold in her mind.
With Randall gone, her mother stops going to church and sends Prudence to the grocer’s with a list. Dreading finding her mother in bed on her return from school, Prudence takes to visiting her father at his job. She comes in through the servants’ entrance, and if Mr. T is out, as he usually is in the late afternoons, the underbutler lets her go unaccompanied up the back stairs to the three-story-high studio where her father might be pruning the plants that grow like a toy rain forest in a greenhouse alcove, or on a ladder polishing the lamps that hang on wrought-metal chains made of little figures of elephants and monkeys and birds. Sometimes she brings pieces of brown package paper and, using a pencil from her school satchel, sketches the room: the fireplace with the chimney like the trunk of a very old tree, the goldfish bowl suspended over a fountain, the paintings, some of them, she discovers, Mr. T’s own work.
Only once does she actually see Mr. T. She is drawing in the corner of the room when she hears heavy footsteps. Her father’s body stiffens in alert. Frightened, she ducks behind a settee, but it is unnecessary since Mr. T only pokes his head in as though looking for someone and then leaves without even greeting her father.
One afternoon, a lady arrives. At first, like Mr. T, she peeks into the studio, but then, spotting Prudence’s father, she comes in.
“Eddie, I didn’t know you worked here.”
“Yes, Miss Dorothy. Pardon me, Mrs. Burlingham.” Her father puts down his tin watering can, wipes his hands on his canvas apron. “It’s been seven years now.”
The lady touches his arm with her bare hand. “Please call me Dorothy. You’ve known me since I was a girl.” She shakes her head slightly. “It is just too peculiar to hear you call me Mrs. Burlingham.”
When Dorothy notices Prudence sketching in the corner, Prudence’s heart pounds out of control. Will her father lose his job because she is here? Will the lady drag her downstairs to be whipped by the frightening Mr. T?
“Is this your daughter, Eddie?”
“It is. Prudence. She comes here sometimes after school.”
The lady approaches her. Even at eleven, Prudence knows that Dorothy, with her bob and brown dress with no adornments aside from a thin belt and a white collar, is not glamorous in the way that a rich lady should be. Moreover, her eyes make her seem simultaneously odd and exotic: deep set under heavy brows, with an expression that is warm but also detached, as though she were observing Prudence through a pane of glass.
When she smiles, though, a mother smile, everything changes. She crouches so she can examine the sketch Prudence is working on of the four-sided fireplace. “You handle perspective very well. And you’ve captured how magical and almost frightening the hearth looks. Like something out of a fairy tale.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking!” Prudence blurts out. “It always makes me think of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’”
“A place where an ogre might roast small children…”
Prudence glances over at her father to see if he objects to her talking with the lady, but he has taken his watering can to the greenhouse alcove and is tending the potted orchids. “Or maybe where a sad giant would live all alone?”
“You are kinder than I am. My daughter Mabbie likes to draw too. But she is only six. Not nearly as skilled as you are.”
A week later, the lady returns with a rag paper sketchbook and a box of pastels. “These were on Mabbie’s easel, but she doesn’t need them. Now you can draw the plants and the flowers. I suspect you’ll make them look so real, I’ll be able to smell the blooms.”
* * *
On the day that Randall’s first letter arrives, Prudence comes home with her father from the Tiffany mansion to find her mother no longer in bed but making dumplings for the chicken she has gone to the butcher herself to buy. Her mother reads Randall’s letter aloud, then watches while Prudence takes the separate one folded inside for her into the room that she’d shared with Randall and is now hers alone. Later, Prudence dries the dishes while her mother washes, grateful that her mother has not asked to see Randall’s letter to her. Instead, her mother inquires, “Who is Charlie? Your brother wrote that he is staying with a boy named Charlie,” and Prudence feels important that she knows: the boy with the lock of black hair that fell over his forehead, he wore a newsboy cap, smoked cigarettes on the train platform. Randall had talked about how Charlie had just picked up one day—“Got himself out of this hellhole”—and gone to San Francisco.
When she looks over, her mother is dabbing her eyes with the hem of her apron. Later, her father puts his arms around her mother, and for the first time since Randall left, she does not pull away.
* * *
It is from a tall ladder in Mr. T’s studio that her father, the following year, falls. Her mother says he must have lost his balance, reaching to dust one of the glass globes, but a footman spreads the rumor that Eddie came back from lunch having had a nip or two. He dies in the ambulance. Her mother is nearly catatonic, leaving Prudence, now twelve, to handle with her aunt the arrangements.
The morning after her father’s death, one of Mr. T’s lawyers, a ruddy-cheeked Mr. Bromston, comes to the apartment with instructions to send the funeral bills to him. He removes neither his overcoat nor his top hat and addresses her mother with a tone of sternness and contempt that frightens Prudence. Was her father’s death a crime? Will her mother be taken to jail in his stead?
Some of the staff from the Madison Avenue house attend the wake in Prudence’s mother’s parlor—not the butler, whom her father used to call behind his back Mr. Too-Good-for-Us, but one of the footmen and two of the chambermaids and Mr. Feeney, who during the years her parents were at Laurelton Hall had run the furnace housed in the blue-tiled minaret and now tends the cars Mr. T keeps in the city.
Mr. Feeney makes a little bow to her mother, immobile in the chair by the grate with her hair combed by Prudence’s aunt and only an ounce or two of water fed to her in a spoon having passed through her lips since Prudence’s father’s fall. When Prudence asks if she can bring Mr. Feeney a glass so he can have some whiskey with the other men, he tells her, “Thank you. No, I don’t partake no more.” He narrows his eyes as if to say, If only these other lugs would do the same, and Prudence thinks he would mean her father too if he were still here.
“Would you like some tea, then, Mr. Feeney?”
“What a polite girl you are … If it’s not too much bother, some tea would do me good.”
After Prudence brings him a cup of tea and a saucer and a biscuit to go with it, he pats the spot next to him on the divan. “Sit, keep me a company,” he says, and then he tells her how her father had been the only gardener at Laurelton Hall whom Mr. T permitted to touch the plants he selected and arranged himself each week for the fountain courtyard. And how after a maid had been attacked by one of the peacocks that roamed the property, it had been Prudence’s father who’d gone to Mr. T to say that the birds needed to be fenced off.
“They’re beautiful beasts,” Mr. Feeney says. “Made Mr. Darwin sick that it’s the males who have those colorful feathers and that it’s the ladies who choose. But they can be vicious, especially when they’re in heat. Heard tell of them gouging out eyes.”
Mr. Feeney sips his tea and takes a delicate bite of the biscuit. “He loved his peacocks, Mr. T. Every fall, after they molted, he’d have his gamekeeper, Riley, gather the feathers. Riley would wash them and dust them with talcum, and then it would be your father who’d make them into bouquets. Hugest one you ever saw in this urn on the mantelpiece in the drawing room. So we were all afraid to ask. Your father was just as scared as the rest of us, but he knew it was dangerous for Mr. Tiffany’s daughters and grandchildren, and for youse too, for those birds to be wandering free, so he screwed up his courage and told Mr. T. And next thing we knew, the peacocks was moved to the back of the property.”
For a few foolish hours, Prudence imagines that Mr. T or maybe his daughter, Miss Dorothy, the lady who gave her the sketchbook and pastel crayons, might come to the wake or the funeral, something she longs for but also dreads on account of her mother looking like a madwoman in her chair by the grate.
Mr. T does not come, but on the morning of the funeral a letter arrives for Prudence from a Mrs. Robert Burlingham. Not until she begins reading does Prudence understand that Mrs. Robert Burlingham is the very same Miss Dorothy.
Dearest Prudence,
I am so sorry to hear about your father’s tragic accident and death. I am in Connecticut with my four children, and my youngest, Mikey, is quite ill. Otherwise, I would most certainly attend the funeral.
I have such fond memories of your father. I used to love watching him change the disks in the color wheel under the fountain at our house. My father always had such strict instructions about them, and he was always happy after he saw the results your father achieved.
When I was fourteen, I went off to a boarding school in Catonsville, Maryland. It was a girls’ school called St. Timothy’s, and even though I’d pleaded to be permitted to go, once there, I quite hated it. We’d been raised as free spirits in many ways—ruffians collecting flowers and oysters—though my father was a tyrant about punctuality and our not causing disarray in the house. I was terribly homesick and would count the days until summer holidays.
