Corpus Christmas (2 page)

He propped his tripod against the opposite side of the fireplace and smiled diffidently at a kind-looking brunette whose graying
hair was tied back with a red silk scarf. “Is Mrs. Beardsley here?” he asked.

“Is God in his heaven?” the woman replied in an unexpectedly deep voice.

“Oh Helen, you’re awful!” giggled a shorter, round-faced woman.

“Shh!” a third woman warned.

Sensible leather heels tapped down the wide marble staircase at the right of the hall as Mrs. Gawthrop Wallace Beardsley,
senior docent at the Breul House, descended triumphantly, followed by a man in dark green coveralls whose face was obscured
by the boxes he carried.

“We found them,” she said, bustling over to the group. “I
knew
we had more decorations than these.” Her all-seeing gaze fell upon Rick Evans and she halted to consult the old-fashioned
gold watch on her wrist. “Mr. Evans. Surely I told you the tree would not be ready to be photographed until
after
lunch?”

Rick fiddled with the lens cap on the camera still slung round his neck. “Yes, ma’am,” he admitted, “but I had some free time
and I thought maybe I could shoot some of the ornaments individually or something? I mean, aren’t some of them pretty special?”

His voice trailed off in uncertainty.

The deep-voiced woman with the kind face took pity on him. “Yes, they certainly
are
special. Melissa, show him one of Mrs. Breul’s glass angels.”

Melissa, the widow of Dr. Higgins Highsmith Jr., whose many trusteeships had once included the Erich Breul House, plucked
an ornament almost as delicate as she herself from its nest of tissue. From girlhood, Sophie Fürst Breul had collected dozens
of fragile glass Christmas tree ornaments, charming souvenirs of carefree winter visits to relatives in Germany and Austria.

This particular angel had been blown from a pearly, opalescent glass and its features then hand-painted in soft pastels. Its
robe was pale green and, incredible after so many years, fragile glass hands still held to those rosebud lips a gilt paper
trumpet stamped with stars.

“Over a hundred years old!” marveled Melissa High-smith. “And it’s only frayed a bit here.” Her wrinkled fingers sketched
a circle around the trumpet’s flare without actually touching the tattered edge.

“Do be careful,” Mrs. Beardsley warned.

Her words were meant for the man, who was trying to set down his load of boxes without tipping them, but Mrs. Highsmith guiltily
replaced the angel in its tissue as the deep-voiced woman stepped forward to help Pascal Grant.

Carefully, the workman straightened the boxes until each right corner was square with the one below, then turned to Mrs. Beardsley
for approval with such innocent expectation that Rick automatically lifted his camera to his face to shield himself from so
much physical beauty.

He knew that the Breul House contained basement quarters for a live-in handyman, but had not yet met him. In listing the people
who worked there, his grandfather had hesitated at Pascal Grant’s name and murmured something about a lamb of God, one of
His poor unfortunates, which had led Rick to expect someone defeated or with an obvious physical handicap. A crippled alcoholic,
perhaps.

Instead, now that the boxes no longer hid the man’s face, Rick saw someone who looked like one of Sophie Breul’s angels stepped
down from a Christmas tree.

Pascal Grant was slender and finely built—even the coarse green coveralls he wore could not disguise that—with eyes as blue
as the Virgin’s robes and golden hair like spun glass. He had a thin, well-shaped nose, a rounded chin, and an upper lip so
short that his mouth was seldom fully closed.

It must be those parted lips that made him look so innocent and young, thought Rick, twisting the barrel of his portrait lens
until Grant’s seraphic features filled the viewer. Too, the janitor seemed to keep his head tilted down so that when he spoke
to anyone he had to look up from beneath level sandy brows like a child looking up at an adult.

He was looking now at Rick. “Hello,” he said in a voice as light and sunny as his smile, and held out his right hand as if
they were at a formal dinner. “You’re Mr. Munson’s grandson. You’re going to take new pictures of everything. I’m Pascal Grant.”

Puzzled, Rick lowered the camera and extended his own hand. “Rick Evans.”

He was surprised by the unexpected strength of the janitor’s grip, and noted that Grant’s hand was calloused and that his
fingertips were grease-stained beneath the ragged nails.

The women smiled approvingly at Rick. Even the patrician Mrs. Beardsley softened. “This is Helen Aldershott,” she said, gesturing
to the tall, deep-voiced woman. “And Melissa Highsmith, whom you’ve just met.”

“So pleased,” murmured Mrs. Highsmith, taking his hand between both of hers.

Her thin, arthritic fingers flashed with accumulated diamonds and he sensed that several of the rings were too loose, as if
fashioned for younger, less gnarled hands. He wondered briefly how many generations of Highsmith fingers those rings had adorned.

The round-faced giggler and her shusher were Mrs. Dahl and Mrs. Quinones.

“Now then, Mr. Evans,” Mrs. Beardsley said briskly. “Perhaps you can help Pascal bring down the last load? I don’t possess
quite the stamina I once had.”

“You’re amazing and you know it, Eloise,” said Mrs. Aldershott. “You must have been from the basement to the attic a dozen
times this morning. It’s enough to tire anyone.”

“I’ll be glad to help,” Rick said politely.

He hung his fleece jacket on the tripod, piled his camera and case next to them, then followed Pascal Grant up the broad marble
staircase, which turned back on itself at a landing halfway up the height of the hall.

At the left of the stairs, eight thick red candles filled a freestanding fourteenth-century bronze candelabrum, and Mrs. Beardsley
and her troops had garlanded the white stone balustrade in evergreen swags and tied them with red velvet ribbons.

On the wide landing, out of the way of passing traffic, stood the dummy figure of a woman, dressed in a ruffled, high-necked
blouse and green serge skirt and buttoned shoes. Looking up at her from the curve of the balustrade on the floor below was
her male counterpart, clothed as if on his way out for a stroll around Sussex Square on a December morning in 1905.

Thrifty Sophie Breul had seldom discarded anything, so the attic held trunks and boxes full of period clothes. When Gimbels
closed its Broadway store, someone had salvaged several fashion mannequins for use at the Breul House.

It was almost like having a Ken and Barbie set for adults, and the docents enjoyed dressing the figures to suit the changing
seasons.

Today, the gray-haired male figure wore a top hat, white silk muffler, and long black overcoat, and he carried a gold-headed
cane.

The second floor was also open to the public, and it consisted of a wide central hall that was richly somber with a coved
wooden ceiling and walls covered in dark burgundy silk. Two tall windows overlooked the park at one end and a carpeted mahogany
staircase rose majestically at the other.

Narrow marble-topped tables hugged the walls beneath sumptuously framed oil paintings. The more important pieces of the Breul
collection were displayed in the gallery downstairs. These were some of Erich Breul’s less discerning purchases and the massive
frames, each with its own small lamp, only mocked shrunken reputations. Here was a seascape by Henry Babbage, once praised
as “the American Turner”; there, a landscape by Everett Winstanley, “our Constable”; plus a pair of heroic battle scenes with
heavily muscled horses, plunging and rearing about with flared nostrils, the work of Genevieve Carlton, whom the late scholar,
Riley Quinn, had called the Rosa Bonheur of central New Jersey.

Between the paintings, every door stood wide to reveal bedrooms and dressing rooms, Erich Breul’s oak-paneled study and Sophie
Breul’s sitting room. The latter was elaborately carpeted, draped, and cluttered with fringed shawls, tasseled cushions, gilt
mirrors, cut-glass lamps, and other ornate bric-a-brac that passed for tasteful decor in the late 1890’s.

Halfway down the hall, they had to press themselves against the wall as a docent exited from the main bathroom with eight
German tourists and their tour guide in tow. To judge by the laughter and bright chatter as they passed, the Victorian bathroom
had been a great hit. Rick Evans had never seen a bathroom quite that large himself, nor one that lavish: walnut commode,
a walnut-enclosed tub deep enough to float in, a wide marble lavatory, and all the brass fixtures fitted out with china knobs
and handles.

At the end of the hall, the gloominess of the stair landing was relieved by an oval Tiffany window that Erich had ordered
as a tenth anniversary present for Sophie. Even on this gray December day, its stained-glass leaves and flowers glowed with
jewellike intensity.

Pascal Grant paused beneath it and smiled at Rick shyly. “This is my second favorite window in the whole house,” he said.
“You should take a picture of it.”

“I’m going to,” Rick agreed. He had noticed it when Benjamin Peake, the director, had given him a hurried tour of the public
rooms the previous week, but he planned to wait for a sunny day when the window would be more brilliantly backlighted.

“So,” Rick said as they moved on up the steps to the third floor, “what’s your first favorite window?”

“The front door downstairs,” the other answered promptly over his shoulder. “Not the big door.
My
door.”

Rick remembered seeing steps that apparently led down to a doorway recessed beneath the stoop of the main entrance. “The service
entrance?”

Pascal Grant paused at the top of the stairs and nodded. “That’s mine. I’m service. I have a key and everything.” He pulled
a tangle of keys from his coverall pocket. “See?”

Even though he stood a step or two higher than Rick, his head was tilted so low that he seemed to be looking up at someone
taller as he returned the keys to his pocket.

The third floor was as solidly built as the second, but the hall was narrower and the ceiling was simple plaster except for
the cast moldings. Benjamin Peake had made a point about them, but at the moment Rick couldn’t remember if the director had
said they were special because of the oak-leaf-and-acorn design or because of the process by which they had been cast. Whichever
the reason, Rick decided he’d better borrow Grant’s stepladder, rig some lights, and take a couple of close-ups.

The front rooms had belonged to Erich Jr. before he went off to France; but in 1948, an imaginative curator had removed the
young man’s personal effects to a bedroom on the second floor and restored these rooms to their original state as a nursery
and playroom. Like so much else, Sophie had naturally saved everything her only child ever used, so the public now saw baby
Erich’s cradle, his crib, his nursemaid’s narrow bed, and, in the connecting playroom, his horsehide rocking horse with its
genuine mane and tail, the mane sadly reduced to stubble by much hard riding.

There were also wind-up toys, books, blocks, even a handful of wax crayons which were now scattered beside a childish drawing
of stick figures labeled
Papa and Mama and Erich
in straggling letters across the picture. Another Gimbels mannequin, this one resembling a four-year-old boy, sat at the
table with a crayon fastened in its hand. It was dressed in short pants and a jacket of gray serge, a white batiste shirt,
a black silk bow, long black lisle stockings, and high-top, button-up shoes.

Here again were more visitors. Watched by a woman whose apprehensive air immediately identified her as a docent, seven young
day-care kids and their teacher were getting a first hand look at how one privileged child had lived a hundred years earlier.

“Where’s his television?” demanded a tot as Rick and Pascal Grant passed the doorway.

“
I
have a television,” Pascal whispered to Rick. “Mrs. Beardsley and her ladies gave it to me. For my birthday.”

“That’s nice,” Rick answered, a shade too heartily. Never before had he been required to interact with someone mentally handicapped
and his natural compassion was jumbled with both embarrassment and uneasiness.

Physically, Pascal Grant could be any age from sixteen to twenty-six.

Mentally, he probably wasn’t too much older than those children.

A damn shame, Rick thought soberly. The guy was so good-looking. Of course, there were no rules that said it had to be otherwise,
but still—

They passed through an open set of frosted glass doors that bisected the third floor. At the far end of the hall stood a mannequin
dressed as a housemaid in a long black cotton dress and white bib apron, with her hair neatly pinned up under a starched white
cap.

On this half of the third floor lay bedrooms for the servants, their one small bath, and a back stairs that ran from the basement
kitchen to the attic. In the old days, the glass doors were normally kept shut, but after touring the spacious quarters of
the master and mistress, modern visitors always wanted to see where the live-in staff slept when they weren’t cooking and
cleaning or fetching and carrying for the Breul family.

The docents might loyally insist that the Breuls were enlightened and considerate employers, but most visitors gleefully picked
up on how even the floor coverings defined class lines. On the nursery side of that translucent glass, the carpet was a thick
wool Axminster; on the servants’ side, woven hemp matting.

At the rear stairwell, black velvet ropes barred the public from further passage. From kitchen to attic, the steps were wide
enough to accommodate wicker laundry baskets, cleaning equipment, or storage chests, but they rose much more steeply than
the wider public staircases and they were uncarpeted. Pascal Grant unclipped one of the ropes from its brass wall hook, waited
for Rick Evans to pass, then carefully clipped it back again before leading the way up to the fourth-floor attic.