The Peacock Feast, page 5
“You drank beer at fourteen?” Grace asked.
“We drank anything anyone would give us. Beer was cheaper than milk, which is what I really wanted, but it filled the belly.”
When the boy who swept up and handled the constant trash was let go for taking a few discarded blooms for his mother, Charlie recommended Randall to Mr. Crowell, the shop owner. Soon, it was noticed that Randall seemed to have a way with flowers. “I guess those years at Laurelton Hall, growing up in a place with forty gardeners, rubbed off on me.” Randall was promoted—if you could call it that since there was no more money and only longer hours—to florist’s apprentice, which he had the wisdom, even at fifteen, as he was by then, to recognize as an opportunity.
Crowell—a dour, small man with hands etched with scars from shearing mishaps—had a loyal following of San Francisco society matrons who never questioned his Victorian approach to floral design, with its focus on opulent displays of compact bundles of richly colored, symmetrically arranged stems placed in ornate containers—an approach he’d appropriated during the three Dickensian years he’d spent as an apprentice himself in a renowned shop in London. After six months as the boy who fetched the flowers from the buckets, then the boy who trimmed the stems, Randall was entrusted to do the “finishing off”: adding the greenery to the bouquets and floral arrangements, the twisted wire to the corsages, the paper wrappings like a bishop’s hat.
Within a year, Randall was promoted again, to assistant florist, with his own apprentice to do everything he had done before himself. The work was largely cookie-cutter centerpieces for ladies’ luncheons and church benefits, but as Randall began to read on his own, most particularly the writings of the innovative English gardener and artist Miss Gertrude Jekyll, who advocated an informal, naturalistic but design-influenced attitude to flowers in the home, he tried out these sparer, subtler arrangements on a few carefully chosen clients. As he correctly intuited, particularly receptive to this fresher style was Mrs. Cecelia Brown, an elegant, tall woman who as a child had summered in the south of France with an aunt who’d taken her for dinner with Matisse in Collioure, had married into a Chicago railroad family, and was now mistress of a nine-bedroom mansion with dizzying views of the bay, not yet marred, as she would later lament, by the Golden Gate Bridge.
When Mrs. Brown requested of Mr. Crowell that Randall design the flowers for the Pacific Heights Ladies Auxiliary Charity Costume Ball, an important event in the San Francisco calendar of which she was the chair that year, Crowell fired Randall on the spot, intimating that Randall had stolen something. It was an error in judgment on Crowell’s part since the slander so outraged Mrs. Brown, she decided to set Randall up with his own shop and commenced a campaign to have all of her friends switch their business to him. In a matter of days, she’d found a storefront for Randall on Jackson Street and funded the initial rent and equipment as an advance on the fees for the flower arrangements at the ball. It was 1928 and Randall was nineteen years old.
* * *
Grace’s grandfather weathered the Depression by working eighteen hours a day. He hired a widow to greet customers and keep the books and help out with the cleaning up, but he did everything else himself: the trips to the flower market before dawn, cutting the blooms, the arranging, the wrapping, the prodigious disposal of garbage, even the deliveries when his customers could not send their drivers to the shop. The cottage-style centerpieces he’d done for the costume ball had received attention in the society pages, and he never lacked for customers. In 1931, Mrs. Brown invited him to accompany her to England, where they visited Miss Gertrude Jekyll and Mrs. Brown financed Randall’s acquisition of many of Miss Jekyll’s simple vases. Back in San Francisco, Randall used the vases as a platform for what became his signature dishabille mode of flowers languidly arranged like the courtesans in the Matisse paintings Mrs. Brown had shown him.
For a while, Grace wondered if her grandfather had been Mrs. Brown’s lover before he’d met Grace’s grandmother, but later she surmised that her grandfather, exempted from the war due to having failed the hearing test, had been the escort, with Mrs. Brown’s encouragement, for many young ladies whose beaux were officers abroad.
And so it happened that in the fall of 1942, Randall, then thirty-three, was commissioned by Mrs. Brown to escort Carolyn Duprew, a willowy, anemic-looking blonde of twenty-two whose pilot fiancé was overseas, to a private club’s annual dance. Both Carolyn’s father, Winston, a gout-ridden banker with an affected English diction, and Carolyn’s mother, Anita, a shrill woman whose Mississippi family was renowned for treating their help like the slaves they’d once owned, would be in attendance as well.
It was Winston who an hour into the dance was informed by an air force officer, who, having come to the Duprew house, had been directed by their butler to the club, that the plane piloted by his daughter’s fiancé, Boyd Alexander, had been shot down over the Libyan Sea.
With his cheeks red from alcohol and elevated blood pressure and his voice raised over the orchestra, Winston asked Randall to accompany him to the men’s lounge, where he blurted out the dreadful report.
“Bloody awful,” Winston kept saying over and over. He pulled on his bow tie. “And bloody hot in here, wouldn’t you say, chap?”
With the chap, Randall realized both that Winston Duprew did not recall his name and was panicked about what to do now: scared both of his daughter, who had fainted in public on more than one occasion, and his wife, who was prone to dramatic displays of emotion.
“Well, sir, if you would allow me to offer an opinion…”
“Absolutely, young man. Any advice here would be most appreciated. Carolyn is going to just take it terribly. I’m thinking maybe I should have a doctor on hand. Don’t they have injections they give for this sort of thing?”
“Perhaps we could finish the evening and I could bring Carolyn home and you could then tell her once she’s back in your house?”
Winston stared at Randall as though he’d discovered how to turn lead into gold. “Brilliant. Of course, of course, that’s what we’ll do. I’m going to take my wife home now so I can inform her…” Winston Duprew shook his head side to side, as though imagining what that would entail. “And we can prepare ourselves,” by which Randall felt certain Winston meant I can get out of this bloody dinner jacket and belt down a few whiskeys first. “You follow along with Carolyn as soon as it seems a decent hour to leave.”
“Yes, sir. Sounds like a solid plan.”
Then, Winston looked at Randall with what appeared to be sheer terror. “But you’ll stay until after we tell her, right, chap?”
For a moment, Randall had the impulse to say Are you a downright idiot? I just met your daughter tonight. But then he thought about it from Carolyn’s point of view: what would it be like to learn the news of her fiancé’s death with only her wheezing father and pompous mother there?
Carolyn Duprew surprised Randall by having no reaction other than a slight shudder of her shoulders. Her father was sweating profusely, and it was her mother who was sobbing, in part because she’d already put a 50 percent deposit on a wedding gown for her daughter by a man who’d been Madeleine Vionnet’s most prized designer before war rationing had shuttered the Parisian couture houses. Anita Duprew—a woman who could not understand that a consommé and a Waldorf salad would be more elegant than the lobsters à la Newberg and the filet mignon with sauce à la beurre et champignons she served at her luncheons (meals deemed showy, “vulgar,” as one of Anita’s guests was overheard whispering)—was simultaneously famously cheap. It would slay her to lose the exorbitant sum she had additionally paid to have a hundred pearls individually pierced so they could be sewed to the bodice and along the fitted wrists of her daughter’s wedding dress at a shop so exclusive one needed an introductory letter before an appointment could even be made.
Carolyn accompanied Randall to the front door. She extended her hand and thanked him for taking her to the dance. She apologized for his having had to witness … she raised an eyebrow rather than completing the sentence. Then she smiled sweetly and Randall’s heart split in two.
The following Sunday, Randall called on Carolyn Duprew, who scandalized her mother by announcing that she and Mr. O’Connor would be going for a walk and tea. The moment they were out of sight of the house, Carolyn took Randall’s arm, leading him to the steep Lyon Street steps, which she raced down, laughing like a schoolgirl. They made their way to the bay, walking east to Fisherman’s Wharf, and then taking the cable car up to the Mark Hopkins Hotel, where they had tea and little cakes, and then cocktails and caviar toasts, as Carolyn told Randall how she’d come to be engaged to Boyd Alexander.
A third cousin twice removed on her mother’s side, Boyd Alexander was from a Hattiesburg family who’d gone from owning cotton plantations with north of a thousand slaves to owning banana plantations in Colombia with workers as imprisoned as slaves. Stationed for his pilot training in Oakland, Boyd had obeyed his mother’s instructions that he must call upon the Duprews. At first, Carolyn had been charmed by Boyd’s Southern manners and his self-assurance, but it was as though he’d inherited a streak of the cruelty from the great-great-grandfather who was his namesake, a man known for the relish he’d taken in personally whipping his slaves—men, women, and children—rather than leaving the job for his foreman.
Randall’s fists formed rocks when Carolyn told him that she’d been in her second year at Mills College in Oakland, an art-history major and on the volleyball team, when Boyd had forced himself upon her and she’d become pregnant.
“I know, looking at me now, you’d never think I could play volleyball, but when I started at Mills, I had twenty more pounds on me and I was the strongest girl on the team. I could do a dozen boy’s push-ups and run three miles without even getting winded.” She sighed. “Now I look like a character from a Brontë novel. Like a strong wind could blow me over.”
When she’d realized she was pregnant, Carolyn had confided in her mother, begging for help to arrange an abortion, but her mother had refused both the abortion and to acknowledge what had happened as a rape rather than a moral failing of Carolyn’s. Instead, her mother had insisted on an engagement, with the plan that Carolyn would go away before she began to show and the baby then given up for adoption, after which Carolyn would return for a proper wedding. The Carolyn before her pregnancy would have fought this plan like an alley cat, but she was felled by a vicious morning sickness that her mother told everyone was a stomach ailment. At thirteen weeks, she miscarried, losing a dangerous amount of blood on account of her mother not calling an ambulance, out of concern, Carolyn felt certain, that with a hospitalization, the news of her pregnancy might become known. That was eight months ago. She’d become so anemic, all she’d been able to do was lie on the couch with a novel, a relief only in that it was an excuse not to see Boyd before he shipped out.
“So, you see,” Carolyn said, “here I am, having to playact grief for a man I despised, having to playact being sickly when I’m really recovering from having been maltreated during a miscarriage that resulted from a rape. And down the road, what is there in store for me? Having to playact being a virgin to my future husband…”
She took a long sip of the sherry she’d ordered. “You are the first person aside from my mother and our doctor who I’ve told the true story. My mother made me swear to not even tell my father.”
Randall put his hand over hers. He had to bite his tongue not to ask her to marry him on the spot.
Unable to begin a courtship under the circumstances, Carolyn and Randall devised an arrangement whereby she became his tutor, teaching him French and the art history she’d learned during her two years at Mills College. Three evenings a week, they met in her father’s library with the leatherbound books Anita had ordered to fill the shelves and that neither she nor Winston ever opened. After Carolyn and Randall had completed the day’s lessons, together they read books on the history of architecture and landscape design and the monographs of Frederick Law Olmsted on the role of public parks in the acculturation of immigrants to American democratic ideals and customs.
When Randall introduced Carolyn to Gertrude Jekyll’s work, she responded even more passionately than he and Mrs. Cecelia Brown had—such a liberating contrast to her mother’s cloyingly bright and overly decorated home, where Carolyn had never felt there was a square inch of serenity or sincerity. A mother with one of Miss Jekyll’s gardens, Carolyn thought, would have wept when her daughter told her she’d been lured into a shed by a claim of newborn kittens by a man who smashed his beefy hand over her mouth and went at her with such force, there were chafe marks on her buttocks and thighs afterward. A mother with one of Gertrude Jekyll’s gardens, where the lanes were bordered with roses and the lettuces and peppers flowed into the cutting flowers, would have found a reputable doctor to do an abortion, would not have responded by sending a deposit for a wedding gown that would cost more than her maid’s annual salary.
A year after Boyd’s death, Randall asked Winston Duprew for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Winston, thick as he was, had sufficient horse sense to know that Randall, with his intelligence and stable nature, would be a good match for Carolyn, who, after what he believed she’d been through—stomach ailments, the tragedy of losing Boyd—he thought deserved some happiness. Anita, however, was apoplectic, acceding only after Mrs. Cecelia Brown, of whom Anita was both in awe and afraid, paid her a call during which she intimated that were Anita to act like a bitch, Cecelia might leak the true story about Carolyn. How Cecelia Brown had found out, Anita Duprew would have given a pinkie finger to know. That scoundrel doctor who’d come to the house when Carolyn miscarried? Carolyn herself?
The latter was, in fact, the correct answer. Carolyn, having anticipated her mother’s objections to her marrying Randall, who, despite his success, her mother viewed as a déclassé shopkeeper, had invited Mrs. Brown to tea. They’d met at the teahouse in Golden Gate Park, a place Carolyn had been certain neither her mother nor her mother’s friends would frequent, with the Japanese family who’d run it for half a century now in an internment camp. “Oh, my dear. My dear child, how absolutely horrid,” Mrs. Brown said after Carolyn revealed what had happened with Boyd. Carolyn had seen in Mrs. Brown’s eyes genuine sadness for her, which turned to outrage as it dawned on Cecelia Brown the role Anita Duprew had played in the girl’s ordeal and the measures she would take to block her daughter’s marriage to Randall for being Irish and Catholic and having no family—no family meaning to Anita Duprew no family wealth. Randall did have a family, a mother and a sister, whose name, Prudence, Cecelia Brown now recalled. In that moment, she had half fallen in love with Carolyn herself, for her spunk, for wanting to spend her life with Randall, whom Mrs. Brown viewed as the finest young man she knew, with more grit and better character than any of the sons of the society set to which she and Anita Duprew belonged.
“Anita, sweetheart, beloved,” Cecelia Brown added, taking Anita’s hand and thinking, What a wicked woman. I hope her servants poison the disgusting turtle soup she still believes it fashionable to serve. “Just think, you will now be able to use the deposit on the dress by the man from the Madeleine Vionnet house. With Randall supervising, the flowers will be divine. You will be the goddess of Pacific Heights.”
In the year since Boyd’s death, Carolyn had put on some weight and regained her color. With her golden hair and her green eyes and her rounded upper arms, she looked to Randall like one of the farm girls he’d glimpsed twenty years before from the flatbed of a train and then fantasized about: girls rising to milk cows or sweep porches or hang laundry, strong and generous and content with the joys of warm sun and plump babies. When she asked Randall if he would mind terribly waiting for their wedding night to be intimate—it would mean so much to her to have what she was going to think of as her first experience after they were married … that first time … she raised her chin and inhaled deeply and held her head high … that was not making love, that was an assault—his eyes again welled with tears, not from sadness and anger as they had when she’d told him about the rape, but because he loved her all the more for having the courage to say this outright.
As a peace gesture, Carolyn allowed her mother to plan the wedding. Walking with her new husband into the ballroom at the Fairmont Hotel in the dress with the hundred pearls sewn to the bodice and wrists, she squeezed Randall’s hand, as if to say, Just a few hours. After this, we will have our own lives. Alone that evening in the four-story Victorian on Locust Street that Carolyn’s parents had given them as a wedding present, which was where Carolyn wanted to spend their first night as man and wife, Randall, who’d anticipated treating his new bride with caution and patience, had felt his cup runneth over as he discovered how lusty and adventurous she was in their marital bed.
To her mother’s horror, Carolyn worked side by side with Angela. Together, they did the sweeping, the dusting, the polishing, the laundry, the ironing, the shopping, the cooking, the baking. Late afternoons, they would go to the Julius Kahn Playground, where they played tennis and, scandalizing the neighborhood, basketball too. Evenings, while Randall tended to the shop’s bills and correspondence in the second-floor library, Carolyn would set up the dining room as a school with a chalkboard on an easel and a stack of ruled paper. She taught Angela to read, to do arithmetic, the rudiments of American history. When they were done with the lessons, Carolyn would cajole Randall to join them in the music room, where she would play the piano while Angela, who had a beautiful voice, would sing lamentful Schumann songs in a German Carolyn had phonetically transcribed.
