Chapter 30
Thirty
Having gotten up quite early, having had a brown-sugar muffin and a glass of milk in the kitchen before the staff began their day, I was reading Look Homeward, Angel in the schoolroom, waiting for the children to arrive for their lessons.
In a state of great agitation, Victoria Symington came to tell me that Gertrude had been taken to the hospital and that her parents had gone with her, Loretta in the ambulance and Franklin in the new Cadillac.
Isadora and Harry were currently in the care of Chef Lattuada, the only one on staff who could calm them.
“The sweet child was so hot, Adiel. Our Gertie, she was burning up. Burning up and delirious.” The housekeeper’s face glistened, beads of perspiration looping across her brow.
She was a sturdy woman in the best sense, a picture of good health, though not at this moment.
She seemed to have been withered by having felt the terrible heat of Gertrude’s fever.
I dropped the book and rushed to the door, and she followed me.
“We don’t know why, what it is that’s happened to her.
It was so fast.” I ran toward the house, and she hurried after me, assuming that I had not understood.
“Addie! Addie, she isn’t here. The ambulance is already gone.
” The great beauty of the gardens, the magnificence of the Beaux Arts house, the peaceful refuge of the estate—none of it would be the same without Gertie.
None of it would matter. No light could penetrate this place once the shadow of her death had fallen upon it.
I crossed the terrace and entered the house by a library door, with the head housekeeper close behind me.
I was breathless more from dread than from the long run through acres of gardens.
My voice was raw when I said, “I have to get to the hospital. Can you take me, Victoria, Mrs. Symington? Can you take me to the hospital?” She said there was nothing we could do there, that it was in the hands of the doctors now, the doctors and God.
Loretta would call with a report as soon as she had news.
“No, no,” I objected. “Please. You don’t understand.
There’s no reason you would. There is something to be done, something I can do.
I don’t know how. I don’t know why. But I can do it.
” The woman was distraught. She had known the siblings since they were babies.
She and Julian were childless. She loved the Fairchild children no less than if they had been the offspring of a cherished sister, perhaps even as if they were her own.
Fear and grief gripped her, but even if she’d been calm and thinking clearly, there was no reason she should make sense of what I was saying.
I thought of Anna May. Years had passed since her brother had schemed to destroy my happiness.
We were friends. All wounds were healed.
But she would feel an obligation to help me without having to be persuaded that what I claimed made sense.
“Where’s Anna May?” I asked. “I need to find Anna May.” Mrs. Symington thought Anna May was in the laundry room, and I hurried across the library with the dear woman confused and trailing close after me.
When I came into the main ground-floor hallway, I heard voices.
I looked to the left and saw Mr. Symington talking to Lynette Rollins in the foyer.
The day was cool, and Lynette was wearing a coat over her uniform.
She always reported for work on time, so she must have been departing for somewhere rather than just arriving.
Intuition told me that Lynette, rather than Anna May, was my best hope of getting to Gertie in time.
I called out to her as I ran down the long hallway.
When I reached her, I saw tears standing in her eyes and jeweling her lashes.
She was fumbling car keys out of her purse.
I asked where she was going, and she said, “I can’t focus on work.
How could I? With all this, I can’t stand it here.
I need to be there, the hospital.” I asked her to take me with her.
I had never learned to drive. I’d never seen a need to learn.
Now I felt stranded, helpless. “Get a coat, Adiel. Hurry.” I had no need of a coat.
All I required was to be on our way. I threw open the front door and hurried down the steps of the portico.
The employee parking area was near the head of the circular driveway, on a wide lay-by concealed behind a tall hedge.
We arrived together at Lynette’s 1930 DeSoto coupe.
As she started the engine, she said, “I don’t think I can take this again. I really can’t. I’d rather it was me.”
The car was small, the compartment tight.
Lynette drove fast but well, although sometimes she had just one hand on the wheel as she blotted her eyes with the sleeve of her coat.
The hospital was in West LA at least half an hour from the Bram unless she jammed the pedal down.
I asked if she could go faster. She put on more speed, though she said, “I want to be there, but not to say goodbye. God help me, if that’s the way it has to be, then I’d rather get there after it’s too late for goodbye.
Holding her hand when she slips away, the horror of it .
. . I don’t have the courage for that.” The tremor in her voice and the note of dismay that bordered on despair suggested she was tormented not just by what might be coming but also by what had occurred somewhere in her past.
Perhaps it is a consequence of having read hundreds of novels through which I have been propelled by an abnormal curiosity, but when my interest is piqued, I can’t repress it. Lynette’s need to tell was equal to my need to know. I asked whose hand she had been holding when death had come.
After a hesitation, she indicated her purse, which stood on the seat between us. “Photos. In the picture windows of my wallet.”
The wallet held six snapshots of a dimpled girl of ten or so. Her winsome smile, which would have charmed in life, could in memory devastate.
“Her name was Elizabeth,” Lynette said shakily.
“She wanted to be called Libby. Her father was the worst, walked out on us when Libby was three, but she . . . she was the very best. There was no meanness in Libby, never a tantrum or a pout. She was always upbeat. She had a strong sense of herself, the way Gertrude does. But like Gertie, she was self-aware and could be so funny. She was never bullheaded. I was seventeen when I brought my baby into the world and . . . and only twenty-seven when she left me. It was 1918. How old were you then, Addie?”
“Four,” I said.
“So you won’t remember much how it was. A million of our men were fighting the war in Europe.
Meat, wheat, and sugar were all rationed.
There was plenty of work for women, work men had done before they went overseas.
Like so many others, Libby and I adapted.
Life was challenging, but it wasn’t hard.
We had each other. We were happy. And then came September. ”
That autumn, I’d been too young to understand events occurring in the wider world.
Even then I was in a freak show, displayed in my own stall, though not yet the star.
I was too young to know why carnival season was cut a month short.
I read about the crisis in later years. The nation had been ravaged by the Spanish flu, for which no cure existed.
One out of four people had come down with the illness.
Many thousands of adults and children died.
“My Libby was hit hard by the contagion and confined to an influenza ward with more than a dozen other children. If she had been eighteen, in an adult ward, isolation rules would have barred me from visiting her. But the hospital was dealing with a severe shortage of nurses, many felled by influenza. Because children often got more desperately ill than adults, requiring closer attention, anybody willing to risk infection by properly attending to a loved one was granted dispensation from the rules if they seemed competent for the task.”
I could speak only in a whisper. “You were with her when . . .”
“Yes. I could have been nowhere else.” All these years later, racing to Gertie Fairchild, Lynette felt as if she were reliving the greatest tragedy of her life.
“All those years ago. Sixteen years. Seems like yesterday. Seems like today. Gertie’s not in the same hospital as Libby was.
If it was the same, I’m not sure I could do this.
Gertie’s like a niece to me. No. More than a niece.
I don’t know how to say it except . . . God, I love her.
I love them all so much. I took this job when Izzy was three and Gertie was a baby because I knew I’d never have another of my own, never dare risk it .
. . the loss, the pain. I wanted to die after Libby passed.
I considered all the ways I could . . . check out.
But if there’s a world after this world, she’ll be there, and maybe if you take your own life you don’t get the next one. One day I want to see her again.”
“You will,” I said, as if I knew anything about it. But what else could I say. “You will.”
“So if I couldn’t leave,” Lynette continued, “then I wanted to be around children, help them grow and prosper in whatever small way I could. Two little girls, and then Harry. It’s been so lovely all these years.
So safe. So safe here in the Bram. Shelter from .
. . from everything. And by the end of this year, it would have been even better. But it’s like Harmony says—”
I finished her sentence—“Stay alert”—as she swung the DeSoto onto the approach road to the hospital and was forced to slow down behind drivers on less urgent business than ours.
I asked, “Better by the end of the year?” She revealed that the Symingtons recently decided they were ready to retire to a little house they owned in San Clemente.
Franklin and Loretta felt that Lynette, with her two-year degree in accounting and having successfully managed a small hotel when Libby had been alive, could take over as property manager of the Bram and hire new housekeepers to fill the positions she and Victoria would be vacating.
She would move onto the estate, into the apartment now occupied by the Symingtons.
She wanted nothing as much as being fully in the embrace of the Bram and the Fairchild family.
“So why didn’t I . . . in all these years, why didn’t I realize if you love them and lose them, it doesn’t matter a damn if they’re yours or they’re someone else’s babies? Why didn’t I realize it rips you up just the same if you love them so much?”
As she sought a parking space in the crowded lot, I said, “Why? Because maybe then you would never have taken this job you so much wanted. Maybe you wouldn’t have gotten past thinking about all the ways to check out.
You wanted to live. For Libby. Sometimes, to go on, we have to wrap ourselves in a little self-delusion until we don’t need it anymore. ”
She pulled into a parking space and switched off the engine. “Adiel, I don’t want to go in there.”
“You’re going. Come on. Come on.”
Together we hurried across the parking lot. The low winter sky was a seamless white from horizon to horizon, as blind as the eye of some merciless carved-stone god last worshipped five thousand years ago. The day had gotten colder since we’d come out of Bramley Hall.
When we stepped into the hospital lobby, Lynette took my gloved hand and held tightly to it as we got Gertie’s room number from the woman at the information desk.
She continued to hold my hand all the way to the third floor, letting go only when we stepped out of the elevator.
I thought she would halt, but she stayed at my side as we followed the main hall, reading the room numbers.
Franklin came out of 332 looking ghastly, as though he’d stared into the Pit and the Pit had stared back. He seemed not to recognize us for a moment. His voice was tortured, as if he hated not just the words he spoke but also hated himself for speaking them. “There’s nothing to be done. It’s over.”