Ellis Island (13 page)

“He’s a cold bastard,” Sheila interjected. “Leaves her here for months on end on her own. Isobel’s lonely. That’s why she drinks.”

“And the rest of it,” Mrs. Flannery said, with a derisive snort.

“If Isobel knew you were saying such things . . .”

Mrs. Flannery stopped chopping fruit and pointed the tip of her knife at Sheila; she narrowed her eyes and said, in a clipped Cork accent without a hint of an American twang, “You’d be the smart girl now to mind your tongue, Miss Connelly, or you’ll be on the next boat back to whatever backwater bred you. You can be certain it’s not your precious ‘Isobel’ signing the checks around here—you’ll do yourself no favors cozying up to that one. Or to any of them, for that matter. As far as they, and I, are concerned you are an Irish peasant, and don’t you forget it.” Sheila tutted, but she was shaken and Mrs. Flannery resumed her chopping. “Know your place and carry out your duties with pride,” she said to the audience in general, taking a handful of raisins off the table and stuffing them into her mouth. “Remember—there’s many a fool goes hungry in the land of plenty.”

Mrs. Flannery was a talented cook and taught me how to make yeast bread: fermenting the yeast, then adding it to the bread mix instead of soda and buttermilk, to make it rise. Its stretched, sinewy texture replaced my own, crumbly soda cake to become my new daily bread. I tasted things in her kitchen I had never tasted before—coffee, chocolate, oranges; I made her laugh at least once, when I took a mouthful of grapefruit and shuddered violently at its unexpected bitterness.

Every night, Sheila sat up in bed and read Isobel’s discarded fashion magazines by the light of the electric lamp. She was thrilled to have me to share them with: we sat with our arms and legs crossed over each other’s bodies to make more room, as she introduced me to drop-waist dresses and beaded bags, babbling on about the fashions of the day—“This is the Cuban heel, Ellie, it’s a
must
for dancing, and a fringe . . . every dancing skirt must have a fringe . . . Josephine Baker made that popular. You’ve heard of Josephine Baker?”—until I nodded off on her shoulder. My arms loosening around her waist, I would hear her voice vaguely admonish me for my lack of interest, before she laid me gently on my side and spooned her body around me so that her soft breasts pressed into the arch of my back. “Good night, Ellie,” she would whisper. “I am so glad you are here.” And in the sweet fuzz of vagueness just before sleep came, I would forget where I was and imagine it was John beside me.

Chapter Twenty-Three

That August was hot. Isobel lay for hours on the chaise longue in her drawing room, the tall windows at opposite ends of the room standing open, fanning herself with copies of
Harper’s Bazaar
and complaining about the dreadful heat. She was unbearably crotchety, constantly calling for jugs of iced tea and cold compresses. Sheila leaped like a hare every time the bell rang, but it took two of us to wait on Isobel. Sheila would be on her way downstairs with some fresh demand—for sorbet, or to fetch the newest edition of
Vogue
from another room—when Isobel would call me up with some tiny, needless request: a change of water for some flowers, a fresh handkerchief. Sometimes I suspected she was just desperate for company. But although she spent her days lounging listlessly, she cheered up in the late afternoon when the sun began to sink behind the high treetops of Central Park and she could respectably have a cocktail before getting dressed for dinner. Prohibition was in effect, but we saw no real sign of it in Isobel’s life.

After cocktails at five, if not dining in town, she might ask us to prepare a light supper for herself and one or two friends in her sitting room, before they went on to the theater or a club. Or, if dining alone, she would take her dinner on a tray in her sitting room. When not in the drawing room, Isobel lived in her bedroom and the smaller sitting room beside it. Our jobs were mainly carried out in these two rooms, and it was only when Isobel held her first big party at the end of that summer that the grand scale of the apartment was truly brought home to me.

It was also the first time I had seen my mistress show any real purpose.

She rose early, calling instructions: “Sheila, get François around here, I need my hair set by lunchtime . . . Ellie, tell Mr. Flannery I want two troughs of flowers left at the entrance tonight, and don’t forget I want the silver polished by five and the table now set for twenty-six, not twenty-four . . .”

From eight o’clock in the morning there was a constant stream of deliveries as the apartment filled with extra staff—merchants, decorators, chefs, florists, hairdressers, waiters in fancy white suits, each bringing with them still more riches and the instant life of a party in waiting. Several magnificent ice sculptures in the shape of horses and fish were set in the dark, cold room next to the pantry, with buckets and buckets of ice, and Precious was left on guard, wide-eyed and terrified to look at them in case they would melt under her stare and she’d get the blame. Flower arrangements, dozens of them—many of them as tall as the men carrying them—were carefully placed all round the apartment, beautifying usually ignored corners, turning empty, austere rooms into lively, scented meadows. The ballroom was opened up, and men came with long wooden tables that they covered with enough starched white linen to sail a ship. They set up silver serving trays, like those I had seen on RMS
Celtic
, and a pyramid of glasses, from which they later made a fountain of champagne.

Downstairs Mrs. Flannery was faint with stress, not least because she was about to be invaded by Monsieur Jerome. One of the best chefs in New York, he swept through her kitchen with his team, filling her traditional domain with such monstrosities as quail and lobster, emptying cutlery cabinets in search of a single spoon, moving saucepans from their rightful places, complaining loudly about the shortage of jelly molds and sauté pans and generally casting aspersions on Mrs. Flannery’s capabilities while taking over her kitchen. “Just go home to bed, woman,” Mr. Flannery pleaded with her, when called up from the lobby to calm her mounting hysterics. But the Irish dame steadfastly refused to leave her post, guarding her kitchen from the Frenchman’s chaos. Without the authority to admonish him, she simmered quietly, glowering in disapproval at his staff and putting things back in their places, only for him to move them again.

I stayed downstairs for most of the evening. However, once the event started, I found there was very little for me to do. Monsieur Jerome’s dozen or so staff had completely taken over. Having prepared their lavish meal, they went about serving it with appropriate aplomb. “The show has begun, gentlemen,” the chef called, and the kitchen became a whirl of action, dressed plates whizzing in and out of the dumbwaiter, waiters in immaculate white suits running up and down the service stairs, doors opening and closing simultaneously, dodging one another with hot dishes and trays teetering on the edge of raised fingertips. I sneaked out onto the service stairs to look for Sheila.

She had spent the afternoon dressing Isobel, and had refused my offer of help. I was hurt that she would not let me join in the business of Isobel’s personal preparations, and felt certain Isobel would have been happy to have my assistance as well. But Sheila was possessive over her relationship with Isobel, and I could understand that she did not want me muscling in on her territory. She worshipped her socialite mistress and earlier that afternoon had come rushing into the kitchen, flushed with the glamour of it all, and started babbling excitedly, as if it were her own party, “Our mistress is wearing the red satin gown. She says tonight is a night for red
alone
. It’s going to be the party of all parties, Ellie. She’s booked ‘Kid’ Ory, who is coming all the way up from New Orleans with ten of his orchestra, and there are all sorts of wonderful people coming. The guest list is quite deliciously mixed. The guest of honor is a perfectly
brilliant
writer—Fitzgerald he’s called—I wonder if he’s Irish? Isobel has designs on him, I think, but it seems he is affianced. He wrote a book called something-something
Paradise
. . .
anyhow, he’s promising to be quite, quite famous!”

“Suffering Mother of Christ,” Mrs. Flannery said, “will you quit out of that stupid talk before I ‘quite, quite’ tan your hide. It’s bad enough having to listen to yer woman’s flimsy wittering, without getting it from you too!”

“I don’t think you should talk about our mistress like that, I don’t think it’s . . .”

“I don’t care what you think, young woman. Our mistress is not ‘Isobel,’ she is Mrs. Adams—and she is
not
your friend, and this is
not
your party, and the quicker you get it into that stupid little of head of yours that you are a servant, a common-or-garden servant, no better nor worse than
that
poor creature over there”—and here she waved her tea towel in the direction of Precious, who looked over sideways from her washing-up post, her face impervious to insult, impossible to read—“the happier we will
all
be.”

Sheila hated being compared to Precious. Although she would not see the scullery maid put out of her room on my behalf, I knew it irked her that the Negro girl had her own room while we shared a bed. (“That child is worth a thousand of you uppity Irish straps,” I had once heard Mrs. Flannery say.) After Mrs. Flannery’s tirade, Sheila stormed out of the kitchen and I hadn’t seen her since.

The service stairs were full of waiters flitting, so I decided to take advantage of my virtual invisibility and go down to our bedroom and freshen up before going back upstairs to sneak a look at the party. The servants’ corridor was empty of life, and as I came toward our room I felt a surge of relief to be on my own, away from the madness. I approached the door quickly, but, as I reached out for the handle, I heard something move inside the room. Nothing so definite as a voice, but enough to make me turn the handle with caution and open the door quietly.

There were two people making love on my bed. I recognized Sheila’s knees and stockings; they were all I could see of her. By the cut of the shoes and trousers that lay on the floor by the bed, the man whose buttocks confronted me was a gentleman. They continued their grunting and grinding as, shocked, I closed the door. Hoping they hadn’t heard me, I quickly walked straight back up the stairs into the service corridor to the guest quarters, where I correctly guessed there would be nobody around. There, I stood for a few moments trying to take in what I had seen. Sheila making love to a gentleman in our room. Was this somebody she knew? A lover? If so, had she just met him, or was she keeping the affair a secret from me? It made me panic to think Sheila had secrets from me. I was so far away from home, away from John and everything I loved. Sheila was my link with Ireland, and I needed to feel close to her. I hated the idea of her lying to me, or keeping things from me. Suddenly, I felt very alone, stranded in this strange place . . .

“Excuse me.”

“Ah!” I nearly screamed. A man’s head had appeared right in front of me, unconnected to a body, as if materialized out of thin air.

“I was looking for the bathroom and I . . .” As the whole of him emerged, wearing evening garb and squinting slightly as his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the service corridor, I realized he had simply stuck his head out from behind one of the bedroom doors. “So sorry—did I frighten you?”

“No, I . . .” I didn’t know what to say.

“Oh—hello,” he said. “It’s you.”

I bobbed slightly and turned to go.

“No,” he said. “I really do know you . . .”

I pretended not to hear and kept walking away down the dingy corridor toward the service stairs. But I knew who he was, just as well as he knew me. It was Charles Irvington, the man I had met on the boat not one month before. It unsettled me that I remembered his name.