Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
During the three years after my first Christmas at the Bram, much happened in the wider world.
The economy plummeted. The Empire State Building rose.
Prohibition came to an end. Five thousand banks collapsed.
Ten million people were out of work. Russian communists were murdering tens of thousands.
Elsewhere, fascism was ascendant. War was in the wind.
Fewer motion pictures were profitable. Having fallen from fame to obscurity, from wealth to penury, some Hollywood players committed suicide.
In a world full of dire drama, the smaller world of the Bram remained an island of peace and plenty, for which we were grateful.
Indeed, life within the walls of the estate was so pleasant and so little disrupted by the problems of the age that, although I wrote of those days in my journal, I have decided not to include them here.
Some would find them uneventful and therefore boring.
Others might resent such ease in a time when multitudes were struggling, though I wonder how many people of that mind would tour a freak show when next a carnival came to town and give its human oddities no more consideration than would be given to the animals in a zoo.
Three years meant three birthdays, which brought me to twenty, Isadora to fifteen, Gertrude to thirteen, and our Harry to twelve.
Children grew up faster in those hard days, both children who lived on the fraying edge of want and those more fortunate who were taught, as we were, that prosperity was a blessing but not a promise of eternal success.
Even for young Harry, ghost hunts and other late-night games lost the appeal they once had.
Although the Clyde Tombaugh Club was never officially disbanded, it ceased to exist without our quite realizing that it was no more.
Isadora had matured into a serious pianist. She had been taking lessons since she was ten but never considered a career in music until the summer of 1931.
That was when Harmony, now Mrs. Sussman, approached Loretta to say that, as she performed housework, she listened to Isadora practice.
Because Harmony’s once promising career had been brought to an end by the explosion in Boston twelve years earlier, she was distressed almost to the point of anguish to see the promise of Isadora’s talent go unfulfilled.
“Her teacher, Mrs. Arnett,” Harmony said, “is a lovely woman, but her own talent is suitable for little more than teaching society girls how to play recitals when they have their coming-out parties. She simply isn’t good enough to perform on a concert stage or even with a first-rate band.
Isadora is that good, maybe even great. But Alice Arnett is incapable of recognizing it and sadly unable to help Isadora reach her full potential. ”
Impressed with her housemaid’s concern, Loretta went straight to the point.
“Harmony, dear, I know what a musician you once were, what you lost, and how dedicated you are to whatever you undertake. If you say Isadora has such potential, I’m sure you’re right.
So will you do for her what Mrs. Arnett cannot? ”
Surprised, Harmony said, “Oh, no. I’d love to if I could. But with my hands as they are . . . I could play examples of passages for her, but never as well as what a public performance requires. Not anymore.”
“Music is of the heart,” Loretta replied, “and technique is born in the mind. You have a great heart and a fine mind, Harmony. When playing a few bars or even more, as an example for a student, it isn’t necessary for you to play well enough for Carnegie Hall.
What matters is that the student should be inspired to play better than the teacher. ”
Harmony wanted to be persuaded, and Loretta was intent on persuading her. Soon the red-haired and freckled Mrs. Sussman, while still a valued housemaid, was offered an additional salary to serve as a piano teacher.
I have sworn to remember so many special days at the Bram that it’s a good thing I have a prodigious memory.
The day Harmony took that second job will always be one of them.
She came to my rooms to share the news, and she seemed to be only half a step below a state of euphoria.
Twelve years after losing all hope of a career as a pianist, she felt that her derailed life had been put back on track.
She was such a good soul that the prospect of guiding Isadora to a life as an acclaimed musician gave her almost as much satisfaction as if she could have become a star herself.
Since then, all of us in this special place had heard Isadora’s playing move steadily toward the high plateau that Harmony was sure the girl could achieve.
During those three quick years, Gertrude had become a teenage beauty without losing any of her elfin charm.
She turned away every compliment about her appearance as though she thought the words were mere flattery.
For a while, I thought she might be so self-conscious of her deformed hand that when she looked in a mirror she couldn’t see how lovely she really was.
However, she seemed indifferent to her disability, making no effort to conceal the hand, frequently gesturing with it.
Eventually I understood her reaction to anyone who praised her good looks; it was genuine modesty and nothing more.
When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she had recently begun to say she intended to be her mother.
“Maybe I’ll write and produce movies. But they’re not going to be all dark and grim like some of what Mother writes.
If you knew Mother only from her movies, the noir stuff, you’d think she woke up every morning expecting to be falsely imprisoned for murder and went to bed at night expecting to be shot in her sleep.
I might like to be the real Loretta, make comedies and romances, go for laughs and the good kind of tears.
Or I could be a music critic, following Isadora around and getting even for what an insufferable older sister she’s been to me. ”
As preposterous as it might seem, at the tender age of twelve and in spite of his rambunctious nature at times in the past, Harry had become a scholar.
Oh yes, like other boys, he collected not just battalions but armies of cast-lead hand-painted toy soldiers, each two inches tall and with the stoic expression of one who fears not death.
And yes, Harry often put the two game room tables together, re-created famous battles, and imitated machine guns, explosions, and the miserable wheezing of men dying from mustard gas.
Unlike other twelve-year-old boys, however, these activities were not play, or at least not primarily play.
Harry was seriously pondering alternative strategies and tactics that might have resulted in the loser winning so decisively that history would have been radically changed.
He had read so much military history that he would soon know more on the subject than General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing.
His interest in the past began a few years earlier when he immersed himself in a series of nonfiction books about pirates.
We often found him walking the halls while reading, shirt open to the waist, a rubber replica of a dagger clenched in his teeth, a colorful bandanna tied around his forehead, and one of Loretta’s earrings dangling from his right ear.
Lynette Rollins, the housekeeper who looked like the writer Anita Loos, was a favorite of Gertrude’s, and with Lynette’s help, the imp acquired a colorful plastic parrot.
She suggested to her brother that he fix the bird to his left shoulder.
Though he loved Gertrude, Harry was not amused.
He was serious about history as he had not been about anything else.
All of us were relieved when his interest in pirates was exhausted and he moved on to less flamboyant historical figures.
He had recently begun to supplement his interest in military history with books about famous explorers.
As for me, I spent those three years being the best adopted child and sister that I knew how to be, while also serving as the teacher schooling the siblings.
For a while, my biggest concern was that the three were being inadequately socialized because they had no interaction with other children their age.
I had read Sigmund Freud and knew him to be a charlatan.
Nonetheless, some of his prescriptions for mental health, especially as rebottled and sold with slicker language by his legion of acolytes, seemed to be worth consideration to ensure that my three charges would be well rounded.
I stopped worrying on a party night when the Bram hosted sixty guests.
I came upon the siblings in the conservatory with Fletcher Henderson, the leader of a big band, and a marvelous young singer named Ethel Waters.
Also present was a magazine writer, James M.
Cain, who was working on a novel to be published the following year under the strange title The Postman Always Rings Twice.
A lively conversation was underway. As I listened, I realized the children were neither bothering nor boring the guests.
These former members of the Clyde Tombaugh Club were wowed by the accomplished adults, and at least for the time being, Henderson and Waters and Cain were likewise charmed.
The family, the staff, and the family’s friends had socialized my students while I wasn’t paying attention.
And so we arrived at Christmas and then New Year’s Eve, which were only for family.
There were games, including those with Rafael, and expeditions and movies.
There were sparklers in the gardens as 1933 rolled into 1934.
After three years as blessed and enchanting as perhaps anyone had ever known, I didn’t feel I was tempting fate when I said sleepily to Rafael, “Three more years just like them.”
Four days later, early on Thursday morning, Gertrude was taken to the hospital by ambulance, in such critical condition that she was not expected to live.