Chapter 15
Fifteen
No experience in my life had been closer to perfection than my first dinner at the Bram.
The food was marvelous, the conversation lively.
The autumn twilight purpled the world beyond the windows so that the candlelight grew more magical course by course.
Having won the chair beside me, Harry proved to be gracious enough to thumb his nose at his sisters only once when the appetizer was served and once again as we received the entrée.
As welcome here as anywhere in the house, Rafael lay in a corner, watching us with interest, certainly not an advocate of the rule that he must never be served from the table but nonetheless obedient and hopeful.
Because I had read so many English novels, I knew which fork to use for what purpose and was not surprised when the salad came after the entrée, before the dessert.
Prior to retiring to my suite, I visited the library to borrow a copy of Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope.
The day had been so long and tiring, so filled with event, that it seemed as if Tuesday had folded all of Wednesday into itself.
After I prepared for bed and donned my lovely new nightdress, I found that I would rather dream than read.
When I switched off the nightstand lamp, I turned my head to the windows and saw, beyond the pale shape of the balustrade, nothing but a sky full of stars, as if the great house were untethered from Earth and floating serenely in the vastness of the universe.
I dreamed of Bramley Hall, though my mind reorganized the order of its many rooms, changed some elements of the decor, made the big house even larger, and replaced its electric lights with candles throughout.
I was searching for someone I couldn’t name, but the residence seemed to be deserted.
The eerie quiet was disturbed only by the click-click-click of a dog’s claws on stone floors or the soft padding of paws on a Persian carpet.
Wherever I looked, Rafael was not there, yet I sensed him in the shadows and somehow knew we were searching the Bram for the same person, not for any member of the family, but for someone who did not belong there.
At one point, I dreamed that I woke—which had been a feature of previous dreams—and that someone stood at my bedside, gazing down at me as I lay in the pallid light of the risen moon.
In a voice thick with sleep, I murmured, “Are you there?” She whispered, “No,” and turned away into the darkness.
“Who?” I muttered, but I knew, for even from that one word I recognized Anna May’s voice.
She was surely a figment of my slumbering mind.
She couldn’t be there, for she was not on staff at night and lived off the estate.
I faded from a dream of being awake and again into the funhouse-like distortion of the Bram, searching through pulsing candlelight with unseen Rafael always nearby.
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were sunny settling-in days, as Tuesday had been.
I familiarized myself with the estate and embraced whatever opportunities arose to interact with family and members of the staff.
If this was to be my world, I wanted to know it end to end and top to bottom, understand every nuance of its operation.
The most interesting—and to a degree unsettling—conversation of that period occurred on Thursday, when I kept company with Harmony for an hour as she stalked through my quarters like a long-legged red-haired freckled stork.
Among other things, she was assigned to clean my rooms and service them daily.
Twice I’d made my bed in the morning before going to breakfast. Now she made it clear, gently but firmly, that I must not relieve her from any chore that was hers.
“The children’s parents require them to make their bed, but not the adults.
It’s a hard world right now, Alida, even in this golden state of milk and honey.
Five million have lost work, and others will soon.
Loretta and Franklin are more generous than makes sense.
I will never find another job as sweet as this.
You may put your laundry in the hamper yourself, if you must, but leave everything else to me.
” I explained I hadn’t intended to put her livelihood in jeopardy, that I made the bed because I enjoyed doing so.
Until the Bram, I’d never had a bed of my own, only a lumpy mattress on the floor, one sheet, and one blanket.
“Well, knock me down with a mop!” she declared.
“Is that true, girl?” I had no idea what she meant by the mop, but I assured her I wasn’t fabricating anything.
Anyway, it wasn’t a hardship except when there were rats.
Harmony said, “I’ve known rats of both kinds, the two- and four-legged varieties, but I’ve never had to sleep with either species.
You must have quite an up-from-under story, here now at the Bram.
” She heard the curiosity in her voice and said, “Don’t listen to me.
I must have been a cat in nine other lives and still have some feline blood.
Your past is yours, and I’ve no right to it.
That’s been explained to us in a most sincere fashion, and I take the instruction seriously.
Five million out of work. You understand? ”
“Perfectly,” I said. “Anyway, I’m not keen on reliving any of it.
They say the past is never really past, but I’m going to prove them wrong.
I’m all about what happens next, not what happened then.
I can’t believe my luck, Harmony. Do you believe God is in control, and He works everything out for the best?
I do. But then it seems blind luck has so much to do with it.
Loretta and Franklin being where they were on the particular night they were, having the means and the desire to do what they did for me.
Mr. Einstein says God doesn’t play dice with the universe, and he ought to know, I guess. ”
As she hung fresh towels in my bathroom and I watched her from the open doorway, Harmony said, “God’s got it all covered, but He has to allow luck because people have free will.
People make our luck, Alida, our good luck and bad, by what they do that turns our lives one way or the other.
It was the same people that slammed me with the worst bad luck ever and at the same time good luck that saved my life.
It was all so stupid crazy, tragedy and comedy all twined together.
It was as ridiculous as one of those movie jokes where some guy gets one foot stuck in a bucket and stomps around like a fool, hilarious as anything—but then he falls down the stairs and breaks his neck. ”
“Tell me. Tell me everything.” Stories were what had kept me sane, taught me how to live, how to survive, how to hope.
Harmony’s story sounded like one I needed to hear.
I wasn’t the kind of person to whom stories happened.
My life had been cloistered, shut in if not shut away.
Stories had always been for reading. Now they were also for gathering from others that I could write of them. “Please tell me, Harmony.”
“I probably shouldn’t.”
“You’re not supposed to ask about my past,” I said, “but it’s okay for me to ask about yours. Nobody told me I couldn’t. So tell me, Harmony. Please. I won’t lose my job, and neither will you.”
She said, “And what job is it you have?”
“Well, if I have one, it’s to annoy the hell out of you.” She laughed. I said, “Unless it’s painful. I don’t want to upset you.”
“It was painful at the time. Devastating. But that was in 1919, a lot of years ago. The pain mostly fades when you have enough years to pore over the absurdity of the thing.”
While she wiped down the vanity mirror and the sink below it, she talked me back to Boston, where she had lived in 1919.
Harmony had been twenty, a talented pianist who provided music for customers as they shopped in the city’s finest department store.
“I also performed livelier music in a nightclub the year before prohibition. In those days, it wasn’t a thing many women would set their mind to do, but I had a bit of dreamer in me, which some called a bit of devil.
I expected to secure work in one of the dance bands that were achieving success as the popularity of jazz grew. ”
On January 15, 1919, a Wednesday, Harmony was celebrating her twentieth birthday, having taken off work at the department store to enjoy a long lunch with her parents at a restaurant in Boston’s commercial district.
Shortly past noon, at the Purity Distilling Company, a fifty-foot-high iron holding tank exploded.
People in the vicinity were killed by shrapnel, but that was only the first wave of death and destruction.
Instinctively, Harmony broke into a run, but her mother and father halted and turned to look back.
“When I realized they weren’t with me,” she said, pausing in her cleaning to stare into the vanity mirror, “I stopped and turned and shouted at them to run. The explosion had killed the driver of a Purity delivery van, which came hurtling down the street, a runaway Ford, wide of my parents but angling toward me. Beyond the truck, farther uphill, something strange was happening, but it didn’t make sense—what I was seeing—and the truck was my first concern.
I’d passed the firehouse before I looked back, and now I dodged into a service passage between the next two buildings.
The truck went past and crashed into something, so I didn’t need to keep running, but panic had hold of me because of the horses, the screaming horses. ”