Blythewood (5 page)

As Mrs. Hall looked back up at me, lorgnette poised on her
long narrow nose, I took courage from Agnes’s hand squeeze.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m exactly the same height as my mother. She measured me on my birthday.” The thought that it had
been the last birthday I’d ever spend with my mother sapped all
the courage out of me and froze my throat.
Mrs. Hall lowered her lorgnette and stared at me. “Well,
perhaps it is I who have shrunk. You look like a giant looming
there. Sit down before I strain my neck looking up at you.”
She waved her lorgnette toward a footstool beside her feet. I
sank down on it, next to the statue of the kneeling Moor whose
eyes seemed to say, “Watch out or you’ll end up like me, frozen
for all eternity at Medusa’s feet.” The notion that all the statues
in the room were live creatures petrified by my grandmother’s
glittering black gaze only increased my terror. What if I began
raving about such notions to her? She’d think I belonged in the
madhouse. Was that what the “interview” was for? Another insane asylum?
“Well,” Mrs. Hall said after she had examined me thoroughly. “You haven’t got Evie’s beauty, but perhaps that’s for
the best. Have you had any education?”
I tried not to show that I minded being told I wasn’t as
beautiful as my mother. Of course I knew
that
. Instead of my
mother’s rich chestnut hair, mine was a paler, washed-out version. Instead of my mother’s emerald-green eyes, mine were a
murky hazel that shifted between gray blue and olive green as
if they couldn’t quite decide what color they wanted to be. Even
the bones of my face were a little vague, lacking the sharpness
of my mother’s classical profile. But at least my mother had bequeathed me
something
.
“My mother taught me Latin and Greek and we read books
together and talked about them. She had a subscription to the
Astor Library even though we could ill afford it and we spent
our spare time reading there, or in the Seward and Hudson
Park branches of the New York Public Library  .  .  .” My voice
trailed off as I recalled the strange books that my mother would
ask for, often causing the librarians to stare. But I didn’t mention that to my grandmother.
“In the evenings while she trimmed hats I read aloud to
her.” I recalled my mother’s slim white hands flitting deftly
among the ribbons, beads, and feathers of her craft and felt
a sudden pang when I realized that the box of her trimmings
I’d kept after her death must be gone now. My landlady had no
doubt sold it when she saw my name among the dead.
“But you’ve had no real schooling?”
“We moved too often for me to attend a regular school.”
“No doubt to keep your whereabouts a secret from me. It
wasn’t until my detective saw your name listed among those
who had died in the fire that I even knew you were in New York.
Imagine, a granddaughter of mine working at a shirtwaist factory with common laborers!”
I bristled at this, thinking of Tillie and all the other girls I’d
worked beside. “It was honest work,” I said, “and the other girls
I worked with weren’t
common
at all. Some of them were quite
extraordinary.”
Mrs. Hall jerked her chin back, surprised as I was at my outburst, but then a faint smile appeared on her face. “Ah, I see
you’ve caught the reformist fever. Just like Evie! I only meant
that I would never have willingly let my daughter and granddaughter live in poverty. Is that what your mother told you?”
“No, she never spoke of you at all,” I said quickly—too
quickly to think what effect my words would have on her.
I watched as the color leached out of her cheeks and her lips
thinned. She looked shrunken, suddenly, and as lifeless as the
carved Moor at her feet.
“Well,” she said at last, “well. I always did teach her that if
one doesn’t have something pleasant to say, one shouldn’t say
anything at all.” She laughed a dry, bitter laugh. “So Evangeline
did heed my advice about
something
. Did she speak of her past
at all?”
“She spoke very fondly of Blythewood,” I replied, wracking my brain for some shred of comfort I could offer up. I had
always assumed that it had been my grandmother who had severed ties with my mother, not the other way around. I knew my
mother could be sensitive—and proud. In recent years she’d
become suspicious and fearful, and in the last few months of
her life her eyes had taken on a hunted look. Perhaps the fault
hadn’t all been on my grandmother’s side. And so I added, “I’m
sure she was very grateful that you sent her there.”
Her face froze as if she were Medusa and Perseus had just
held up his shield to freeze her with her own reflection. In the
silence that followed even the carved Moor seemed to shrink
lower into his crouch, and the ormolu clock on the mantel
seemed to miss a beat.
“If she had been truly grateful,” Mrs. Hall said at last,
speaking through a clenched jaw, “she wouldn’t have disgraced
me by leaving as she did.” She lifted her lorgnette, regarding
me though its crystal lenses as if I were a rare species of insect.
“Perhaps you shall do better there. But we shall speak of that
later.”
She raised her gloved hand, palm out, as she had before, to
forestall the questions bubbling up inside me. “Here’s Agnes,
come to show you to your room. Let us hope you are right about
being the same height as your mother so you’ll find something
in her closet to wear—and let us hope it is the
only
trait you
have in common with her.”

I left the drawing room feeling as though I had been drained of
every ounce of vitality. Agnes steered me up the grand staircase
and down a long hall lined with portraits of stern-looking men
and women who glared at me with disapproval.

The room we entered woke me up. Unlike the dim and cluttered drawing room, this one was light and airy, its walls papered in a yellow floral print, the furniture and bedstead painted white, the windows lightly swathed in white lace and open
to an interior courtyard with a pretty garden. A book lay open
on the window seat as if its reader had just lately left the room.
I picked it up and saw it was open to Tennyson’s “The Lady of
Shalott,” my mother’s favorite poem.

“Mrs. Hall kept the room just as Evangeline left it,” Agnes
said, picking up a framed photograph from a grouping of many
on the desk.

I looked at the photographs. Girls in white shirtwaists,
long dark skirts, and straw boaters frolicked around a maypole, wielded hockey sticks, drew bows, or posed like Greek
statues in a garden, all of it like something out of Mrs. Moore’s
girls’-school books. I picked out my mother because she was the
tallest in every group, but I wouldn’t have recognized her carefree expression otherwise. In one she stood arm in arm with a
blonde girl below an arched doorway engraved with the words
“Blythewood Academy—
Tintinna vere, specta alte.
”

Ring true, aim high.
It was Blythewood’s motto, which my
mother had often quoted to me.
I noticed a box sitting atop the dresser. Looking into it, I
saw it contained books, ribbons, a blue-and-white willow-pattern teacup, an untrimmed straw hat, feathers—a long black
feather among them—and a familiar-looking green bottle.
“I got your address from the Triangle Company and went to
your lodgings,” Agnes said. “I hope you don’t mind that I took
the liberty of collecting your . . . things. Some of them looked
like mementos of your mother. I thought you’d want them.”
I held up the green bottle. It looked wrong in this yellowand-white room. How had the girl who grew up here ever ended
up as the woman who drank from it?
I looked around the room. A pink-and-gray pennant hung
above the bed. A bow and quiver of arrows learned against the
bureau. Bronze trophies for archery, Latin, falconry, and “bell
ringing” lined the bookshelves. Everything in the room referred somehow to Blythewood.
“Mrs. Hall mentioned an interview,” I said, almost too
afraid to ask the question. “Did she mean . . . ?”
“An interview for Blythewood,” Agnes replied. “Now that
you’re sixteen you’re just the right age. The interview is in three
days. You’d better get some rest. The next few days are going to
be trying. We have a lot of work to do to get you ready.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief that the interview wasn’t for an
insane asylum, but then, looking at the pictures of happy, smiling girls, I wondered if the gulf between them and me wasn’t
even wider than the one between the girl who had grown up
here and the woman who’d died drinking laudanum. A gulf far
too wide to bridge in three days.

AGNES WAS RIGHT about the next few days being trying. I
felt as if I were trying out for a part—and one I wasn’t even sure
I wanted. It had always been my dream to go to my mother’s
alma mater, but without her here to see me realize that dream,
going there seemed cruelly ironic. And while the pictures of
frolicking girls certainly made the place look like fun, when I
studied those girls—as I did closely for the next few days—I
saw the cosseted daughters of wealthy families. It wasn’t their
dress, which seemed to be some sort of uniform, but their
carefree expressions. Even though Agnes assured me that Blythewood was a finishing school for girls ages sixteen to nineteen, the girls in the pictures looked younger to me. I couldn’t
imagine any of these girls working in a factory or delivering a
hat by the back door or explaining to the landlady that the rent
was late again. How would I, with my work-coarsened hands
and haphazard schooling, ever hope to fit in?

Even at the dressmakers’ I felt as though I were being measured for more than a wardrobe. Miss Janeway’s establishment was a small first-floor shop off of Stuyvesant Square with
elaborately feathered hats displayed on wire forms in the window, and white paneled cabinets, mirrors, and robin’s-egg-blue

hangings and carpet in the discreet showroom. I could hear the
hum of sewing machines and women’s voices coming from a
workroom in the basement, a sound so familiar from my days
at the Triangle Waist Company that I felt a pang for those lost
girls.

But this was a very different sort of place than the Triangle. It was exactly the kind of smart establishment my mother
sometimes dreamed of running, but I was surprised that Mrs.
Hall didn’t patronize one of the more glamorous French dressmakers.

“All the Blythewood women use Miss Janeway,” Agnes explained in a whisper as a shop girl escorted us into the dressing
room. “Caroline Janeway went to Blythewood on a scholarship,
as I did, and she still practices the old ways—at least when it
comes to clothes,” she added, her lips quirking.

The
old ways
again. What did that mean in a dress shop? I
wondered. Was I going to be outfitted in leg-o’-mutton sleeves
and stiff crinolines? I was expecting an antiquated fossil, but
Miss Janeway turned out to be quite young and pretty. She wore
a crisp white smock, a slim gray skirt, and a red beret pinned
jauntily over her smooth dark hair. When Agnes introduced me
to her, Miss Janeway held out her hand and shook mine briskly,
then folded it in both of hers.

“I was very sorry to hear about your mother, Miss Hall.
Evangeline was a legend at Blythewood. I’ll make you a dress to
do her proud—I think a French blue tea dress with white lace
trim for the interview, don’t you, Agnes?” She snapped her fingers and a shopgirl appeared with a little gold notepad affixed
to a chain around her neck, identical to the one that hung from
Miss Janeway’s neck.

“Mabel, check that we have enough of the white
featherpatterned lace and the French blue serge. I heard you worked at
the Triangle Waist Company, Miss Hall,” she added, as though
it were an afterthought.

“I did,” I said, holding my chin up, determined not to be embarrassed. “I was a sleeve fitter.”
“A difficult job,” Miss Janeway said, making a note in her
little book and turning to Agnes. “Shall we also make three
Blythewood skirts and matching shirtwaists with the Bell and
Feather?”
“Leave off the Bell and Feather for now,” Agnes said.
“Of course, we can add the insignia in a trice. You know,
Miss Hall, I worked as a seamstress in a factory before I went to
Blythewood,” she said, leading me toward a raised platform in
front of a set of triple mirrors and unceremoniously helping me
strip off my dress down to my loose cotton chemise.
“Really?” I asked, encouraged that someone from my own
background had made the transformation to Blythewood.
“Yes,” she replied, a smile quirking her lips. “Not
all
of us
Blythewood girls come from the four hundred. I remember
only too well the dreadful conditions in the factory, the long
hours with no breaks, the stifling heat, the humiliating searches
at the end of the day. When I think of those poor girls locked in,
unable to escape the fire, forced to jump from the windows . . .
Well, it makes me so angry I could spit! And how many women
among us are forced every day to make such horrible choices?
Without the power to determine our own fates we are like those
poor girls, choosing between fire and the street, which is really
no choice at all, now is it?” She looked up at me and I realized
she was waiting for an answer.
“I thought the same thing,” I said softly, my voice quavering, “when I saw the girls jumping . . . that they were like butterflies trapped between panes of glass.”
“
Exactly
, Miss Hall,” she said with shining eyes, “butterflies trapped between panes of glass. I couldn’t have said it better myself. It’s high time we broke that glass, don’t you think?”
Then she turned to Agnes. “You’re right, Aggie, she has the fire
in her. She’ll make a fine Blythewood girl. Maybe she’ll shake
things up a bit there. The bells know the old place needs it.” She
snapped her fingers and another shopgirl appeared with a measuring tape and began taking my measurements.
“You’ll scare Ava with your radical talk, Carrie,” Agnes
said. “She hasn’t even gotten through her interview yet.”
“Nonsense,” Miss Janeway said briskly. “A girl who’s survived the Triangle fire won’t scare easily. And it’s time things
changed. If we continue adhering to the old ways simply because of tradition we will end up preserved like old Euphorbia
Frost’s specimens behind glass, as Miss Hall has so aptly put it.”
I started to object that I hadn’t been talking about Blythewood, but Agnes was heatedly replying. I had a feeling that
this was an argument that the two women had had before.
“You know I want the same things you do, Carrie, but I believe we have to work from the
inside
. These things take time.
Violent measures will not win our cause. We must be patient.”
Were they talking about the vote for women? I’d heard such
debates between Tillie’s friends, some advocating the rockthrowing violent measures that the British suffragettes had adopted, others maintaining that peaceful, decorous protest was
the best way to persuade the men in power to give women the
vote.
“How can we be patient when so much is at stake?” Miss
Janeway objected. “Have you heard about—”
Glancing down I intercepted Agnes giving Miss Janeway
a warning glance. “Perhaps we should discuss this later,” she
said, sliding her eyes from Miss Janeway back to me.
“Of course,” Miss Janeway said, “you’re right as always, Aggie. Now, what do you think about an archer’s costume?”
“But I don’t know how to shoot arrows!” I pointed out, distracted from their argument by the idea that I might be expected to shoot arrows at my interview.
“You’ll learn, my dear,” Miss Janeway said, snatching the
tape measure away from her assistant and stretching it across
my back. “You’ve got the shoulders for it and”—she stretched
out my right arm to the side—“the arms.” Leaving my arm extended midair she pulled back my left shoulder with one hand
and turned my chin to the right. “There! You have the natural
stance of an archer.”
Out of the corner of my eye I stole a look at myself in the
triple mirror. Three Avaline Halls drew three invisible bows. In
my loose white chemise I looked like the statue of Diana in my
grandmother’s foyer. I looked, I dared think for a moment, like
a Blythewood girl. I could see from the expressions on Agnes’s
and Miss Janeway’s faces that they thought the same. All their
disagreements seemed to vanish, replaced by fond memories of
their school days.
I began to turn to them to share Agnes’s triumphant smile,
but a movement in the mirror drew my attention back to its
reflective surface. A blur of wings, as of a black bird flying
through the dressing room, passed over each of the three panes
and then vanished. I whirled around, nearly knocking over the
shopgirl still taking my measurements, to see where the bird
had gone.
The only feathered creature in the dressing room was Agnes’s plumed hat, which bobbed as she bent over a pattern book
with Miss Janeway. But that feather was white. The black bird
had been as much an illusion as the image of myself as brave
hunter and Blythewood girl.