Only the Beautiful, page 7
“Yes,” I say hesitantly.
“Nurse Tipton said you were quite upset about it.”
“Well, it was mine,” I say, as though the offense wasn’t that my amaryllis was tossed into the garbage but that something that belonged to me was taken.
“But it was more than just a flower bulb to you, yes?” he asks. “It had additional meaning? It might assist me in helping you if I understand why.”
In my mind I see an amaryllis brilliantly in bloom on Celine and Truman’s kitchen counter, a gift from Helen Calvert to help me bear my first Christmas without my family. I see the note in her fine handwriting explaining to me that a blooming amaryllis at Christmastime has been lovingly coaxed into life by a gardener who has convinced it that it is spring, and that it will continue to bloom every year if I care for its bulb the same way. I was enchanted by the way the word amaryllis fell on my ear, and the color that filled my mind when I said it out loud. It was such a beautiful word.
And I loved even more the notion that its bulb was a promise of beauty to come, despite the harshness of winter.
But I will not share this with the doctor. The bulb is gone now. What does it matter that I feel this way about it? “The person who gave it to me said it would bloom every year if I took care of it,” I say with a casual lift of my shoulders. “I was upset because now I can’t. The bulb wasn’t trash, but it was treated like it was. I should’ve been asked.”
I wait to see what Dr. Townsend will say, and after a moment he seems satisfied with my answer.
“Fair enough,” he replied. “Now. You mentioned a few moments ago that you understand now why you are here. I’d like to hear more.”
I’m glad to move on from talking about the amaryllis. I wasn’t prepared to talk about it. This conversation, though, this I have practiced for. As I open my mouth to speak, I feel as though I am stepping onto a stage. Donning a mask. I have indeed been rehearsing my next words for several days.
“It’s because of the colors I told people I can see. I shouldn’t have been doing that. It is wrong. I realize that now. Lying to people, especially to my parents, was a wicked thing to do. I’m ready to learn how to be the kind of person who doesn’t lie.”
Dr. Townsend sits back in his chair. “So you are telling me you don’t see colors and shapes in your mind when you hear sounds? That names and places and titles don’t all have assigned colors?”
“That’s right,” I say. “I lied to my parents about it and I lied to Mr. Calvert when I told him.”
“And why would you do that?” the doctor asks. “Why would you make up such a falsehood?”
“I guess because I got attention from my parents when I first started pretending, and then I didn’t know how to stop pretending. Some people seemed to be more interested in me when I told them I could see the colors.”
“People like Mr. Calvert and his son?”
I will myself to shrug indifferently. “It didn’t matter who I chose to tell it to. Everyone I told the lie to gave me attention.”
“But you didn’t tell everyone you could see these colors, right? No one at school?”
“I did when I was younger. My teacher in second grade didn’t appreciate it and the other kids made fun of me, so I stopped telling people at school. I stopped telling nearly everyone. My parents insisted on it.”
“So you kept up the lie in front of your parents, even though it alarmed them, and Mr. Calvert and Wilson Calvert, all for their attention, but never around any other people?”
I can see how what I am saying doesn’t make much sense, but I shrug as if I had just been a stupid girl who hadn’t thought things through.
“If we’re going to be able to help you, Rosie, we need to be truthful with each other.”
“I am being truthful.” The fib tastes sour on my tongue.
“I don’t think you are.”
“I am.”
The doctor turns to one of the boxes next to him and lifts off the lid, revealing a portable gramophone with a shiny silver crank that he obviously turned in preparation for my session. Dr. Townsend sets the turntable spinning and lowers the arm with its needle onto the record already placed there. Music from Tommy Dorsey begins to fill the room. It is a bright, happy tune. I instinctively put my hands over my ears as ribbons of sky blue begin to fall all around the insides of my mind.
“Put your hands down, Rosie,” the doctor says, plenty loud enough for me to hear.
I slowly obey, lowering my arms as the music continues to play and the colors swirl like flags in a breeze.
“I’d like to know what you are seeing,” Dr. Townsend said.
I swallow hard. “I don’t see anything.” I tighten my grip on the armrests of my chair and hold his gaze—and my breath—willing the colors to fade.
The doctor stops the turntable and switches recordings. The next beautiful array of sounds I recognize from Celine’s set of Christmas albums. “The Waltz of the Flowers” from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite fills the space around me, and instantly magnificent puffs of yellow and pink and scarlet began to burst like fireworks in the folds of my mind.
“Tell me what you see, Rosie,” Dr. Townsend says.
“Nothing!” I shout. “I don’t see anything.”
He leans toward me as the recording continues, the music becoming more enchanting with every measure. “I could attach electrodes to your head and monitor your brain waves and I could prove that I know you’re lying,” he says, gently and yet forcefully. “You’re seeing the colors right now. I want to know what you see.”
“Stop, please stop,” I beg.
“Tell me what you see.”
I stare at the doctor as the music plays. Perhaps as a doctor he is curious. Curiosity is different from fear or shock or disbelief. Perhaps because he is a doctor, especially the kind of doctor that he is, he is intrigued by my ability to see the colors. Perhaps if I tell him what he wants to know, he will decide that I have a talent—a strange one, yes, but still a talent, and not a handicap. Perhaps he is the only kind of person who will. And yet there is risk in telling him. I need some kind of assurance that my cooperation will benefit me, too, not just him.
“If I tell you, will you let me leave?” I ask. “I’d like you to let me go if I tell you.”
“Discharge you?” he says. “You are a homeless, pregnant, unmarried seventeen-year-old without a means of supporting yourself. You will not leave this place until after you’re able to demonstrate that you can maintain a responsible life, with a proper job and a suitable place to live, and that you aren’t a liability to society. But I can assure you that will not happen until you successfully complete these therapy sessions. If you want to be discharged from here, that process starts today with you telling me what you see.”
I can’t imagine staying in this place for endless months or years. It is an impossible notion. I know now for certain that my only hope of escape with my child is if I appear to willingly submit to every requirement of me—every single one. I simply must gain Dr. Townsend’s trust. So even though the puffs of yellow, pink, and crimson are beginning to diminish, I tell the doctor I see them. I describe their shape, their hue, their radiance. Their beauty.
And Dr. Townsend writes down my every word.
8
Before . . .
JUNE 1938
Wilson arrived home late in the afternoon. Alphonse had taken the night off but had prepared dishes the day before and had left instructions for me on how to reheat and assemble them. I’d been busy seeing to all this and hadn’t heard Wilson come in the front door. I emerged from the kitchen a little after five o’clock to prepare the dining table and there he was, standing with his parents across the entry in the open living room, sipping an aperitif.
He’d turned toward me and smiled when I stepped into the dining room.
Wilson had grown tall and good-looking like his father, with the same sandy-brown hair and strong build. But he had Celine’s nose and cheekbones, and even from yards away he radiated the same confidence as his mother. He seemed a perfect blend of his parents’ best physical qualities.
“Rosie, come here a moment,” Celine said.
I crossed the entry to the living room, wishing with all my might I’d had a moment to redo my hair and check a mirror for smudges on my face.
“You remember Wilson, don’t you?” Celine asked.
“I . . . Yes.”
“Well, hey.” Wilson’s self-assured smile deepened. His voice was draped in forest green. “So you’re living and working for my parents here in the house now, eh?”
“Y-yes.”
He was even more handsome at only a few feet away.
“Are you liking the new job okay?”
I couldn’t tell if he was joking, his smile was so deceptively charming. Did he really expect me to say if I didn’t like my new situation with his parents standing right there?
“I . . . I do. I mean, I am.”
“She’s doing great,” Celine interjected, almost proudly. “And she makes the most wonderful omelets. You’ll see, Wilson.”
“They are quite good,” Truman added.
I felt my face blush a little at the praise. “My mother was a good teacher.”
Wilson tipped his head up slightly as if suddenly remembering. “Oh yes. I heard about what happened to your parents and brother. That’s so awful.”
His tone was mysterious. Was he sincerely sad for me? Or was he just saying what one would be expected to say? I couldn’t tell. The color of his voice was the same, yet different somehow.
“It was,” I said. “It was awful.”
An uncomfortable hush filled the room. It was obvious no one knew what to say next.
“Well, go on with what you were doing, Rosie,” Celine instructed, breaking the silence. “We don’t want to keep you.”
Half an hour later, the family came to the table just as I was setting down the last dish. As they took their places, Wilson asked why there were only three place settings.
“Rosie doesn’t eat with us,” Celine said amiably. “She prefers to take her meals on her own.”
Wilson turned his attention to me. “You do?”
“I doubt that’s how she would describe it,” Truman said under his breath as he reached for the wine bottle.
Celine leveled her gaze at her husband. “I told you before, we are trying to help this girl prepare for her life on her own. She is going to make an excellent domestic with the training she is getting here. It would be ridiculous of her to think she could sit with the family she works for at their dinner table.”
“Yes, but she doesn’t just work for us,” Truman said as he poured wine into his glass. “We’re guardians of her care.”
“Like foster parents?” Wilson asked.
“Something like that,” Truman said, setting the bottle down.
“No, it is not like that,” Celine said. “We are not her foster parents. We are just her custodians until she can make her own way.”
“It’s all right,” I interjected. “I don’t mind.” I wanted nothing more than to go back to the kitchen and not be the cause of a family squabble.
“Well, I think you should join us,” Wilson said, and then he turned to Celine. “One meal can’t hurt, Mother. I am sure Rosie won’t start asking for the keys to the Packard after one meal.”
Wilson’s invitation startled me. Delighted me, too. But still. “I don’t know if I should,” I said. “I’m in my uniform. And it’s family time.”
“No one cares what you’re wearing,” Wilson said. “Sit and eat.”
“Why don’t you?” Truman added easily.
“Oh, all right, then,” Celine said. “Get another place setting, Rosie.”
“I can do that,” Truman said, rising from his chair. “You can go change if you really want to.”
“Oh . . . okay.”
I hurried to my room, stepped out of my maid’s uniform, and put on a soft cap-sleeved dress printed with daisies that fell to my knees in a flared hem. I usually wore it only for special occasions. It was my favorite. I yanked my long brown hair out of its ponytail and ran my fingers through the strands. I pinched my cheeks for color and was back at the table in less than five minutes.
We filled our plates and began to eat. It was such a pleasant sensation to be there at the table with all of them. I could almost see myself as a part of this family—and in this way, not as a maid. The food was wonderful and the music Celine had put on the phonograph so lovely, I felt happier than I’d been for a long time. I wasn’t contributing to the conversation—I was more than content to just listen and imagine—so I was only half-aware when they began to talk about the time Truman and Celine had taken a very young Wilson to see a staging of A Christmas Carol and he’d been so afraid of the Ghost of Christmas Past that they had to leave the theater. I was smiling, imagining a young Wilson wailing at the specter of the Ghost of Christmas Past while audience members laughed or shook their heads in annoyance. I didn’t hear Wilson say my name. It wasn’t until he said it a second time that I realized he was asking me a question about ghosts.
“Beg your pardon?” I said.
“I said, didn’t you tell me once a long time ago that you can see ghosts? Or something like that?”
The air in the room seemed to turn cold. “What?”
Wilson furrowed his brow in thought. “I’m trying to remember now what you said. Let me think a minute. We were hiding in the vines from . . . I can’t even remember from what . . . and you told me you could see ghosts or hear ghosts?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Wilson, what are you talking about?” Celine picked up her wineglass and took a sip.
“It was ghosts, wasn’t it?” Wilson said the words as if it was nothing to ask this question, the simplest thing in the world. Darts of bright purple spun around his question.
“I don’t . . . I . . .” But I couldn’t form a reply. What had I told him about what I could see? And when?
Wilson laughed. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, Rosie. I’ve never met anyone who saw ghosts. That’s pretty keen, if you can.”
All three of them were looking at me, waiting for me to answer a question I wasn’t prepared in the least to answer.
“It’s not ghosts!” I blurted, words finally flying out of my mouth. But they weren’t quite the right ones. The Calverts’ stares widened.
“It’s not ghosts?” Celine said, echoing me.
I blinked back my rising alarm. “I mean, I can’t see ghosts. Of course I can’t see ghosts.”
Celine turned to her son. “How long ago was this?”
Wilson kept his eyes trained on me. “I don’t know. I was probably ten or eleven.”
Celine waved her hand. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Wilson. She would’ve been only six or seven. Of course she was pretending. You always were too trusting.”
Wilson didn’t break his gaze. “Were you pretending?” He looked at me as though I was holding back on him now and this saddened him. Hurt his feelings, maybe.
“Of course she was!” Celine laughed. “Or she was teasing you. Girls like to tease boys as much as boys like to tease girls. Don’t they, Truman?”
Truman was looking at me with concern. “Yes,” he said, but he didn’t sound like he meant it.
I attempted a smile and a light laugh. “I guess we do like to tease.”
“Well, there you go,” Celine said. “No more talk of ghosts, now. It’s creepy.”
Wilson shrugged like he didn’t mind overly much that the conversation was going to be moving in a different direction. But he reached for his wineglass and looked at me over the rim.
Perhaps you don’t see ghosts, his look was saying to me. But you see something. And when you were six and I was ten and we were friends, you told me what it was.
9
APRIL 1939
For the next six weeks, every time I attend my therapy sessions, Dr. Townsend extracts some type of noisemaker from within the boxes in the room, produces a sound, then asks questions about what I see. He has brought out a metronome, a cuckoo clock, a train whistle, a duck call, a bell. He has dropped a porcelain dish, clapped his hands, bounced a ball, dragged his chair across the floor. He has played recordings of farm animals and chugging locomotives and opera singers and gunshots and falling rain and a crying child. He writes down what sounds produce vibrant colors and which ones nearly hueless shapes. He has placed colored numbers in front of me to find out which are the right colors according to me and which ones are wrong. He has had me list the colors for January, February, March, and so on; the color for his name, my name, the names of my family—my dead family in heaven. And even though he said the electrodes would be used only if I refused to tell him what he wanted, he nonetheless straps them to my head and has me listen to the sounds all over again while he watches a skinny stretch of paper become splattered with ink from a moving needle.
Sometimes Stuart Townsend comes into the room during our sessions. Dr. Townsend asked me if I minded the first time he came, and since I thought it would be to my benefit to say that I did not, I told him I was fine with it. Stuart is polite but curious, and I often catch him looking at the mound that is my tummy. But I have made a point to be nice to Stuart on the off chance that doing so will help me gain favor with his father. And I do in fact like Stuart. I have been able to tell as the days have progressed that Dr. Townsend expects much from him and is insistent that Stuart pay attention to everything he shows him regarding the running of the institution. I now have the impression that Stuart’s future has been decided for him, and I am wondering if he would have set his sights on being a doctor like his father if the choice had been left to him.
