A City Tossed and Broken (2 page)

Shall I replace you with books, then?
I wanted to say.

There are too many words inside, like a pot of water at a rolling boil.

That’s why I’m writing this. When the tavern closed, Cook left behind the book he wrote his recipes in. I saw it there on the counter and picked it up, grease stains on the red leather cover and faded gilt letters:
RECIPES.
It was only a quarter full of recipes, the rest of the pages were blank. He had wound a string around it to keep it together and stuck a pencil right inside the twine.

You are my secret, diary. Here is where I can finally talk.

I am starting out on a life where I can’t say anything anymore, anything of what I feel or think. I’m to be a maid, alone in a city thousands of miles away. Who will I say things to now, like,

Should I make us some tea?

What a funny hat that lady has on.

I miss Papa.

Writing things down will get them out and on a page and over with.

I hate her.

I hate Mrs. Sump.

I hate her fat husband.

I hate San Francisco.

I hate my father for leaving.

April 2, 1906

Mama came in last evening as I was stirring the soup I was making us for our dinner. She put a suitcase on the chair. It was a present. It was scuffed, the brass cloudy and scratched, though you could see she had tried to rub it shiny.

I’d never had such a thing before. I’d never had need of it. Presents were books and oranges or a new shirtwaist on a birthday or Christmas.

“If I had another way, I would take it, Min,” she said. And then she gripped the chair back and I could see her throat working, like she was swallowing an extra-big piece of roast. “I’ll save every penny and get back on my feet. Then I’ll send for you. I
will
, Min. It’s just the two of us now, and we have to save ourselves.”

I said, “What if Papa comes back?” And she laughed without any laugh inside the laughter. And then just like that she was crying.

I was so mad at her for crying I just kept stirring the soup. After a minute she walked away.

Later

Today I go to the Sumps’. It feels so bad inside me, I am scared and mad and helpless all at once. I am going away from everything I know.

Grandad Moore ran the Blue Spruce for forty years until he died three years ago when I was eleven. I still miss him. After school I’d come to the tavern, where they’d be setting up for the dinner hour. My first job was placing the spoons and forks while Grandad polished the glasses. Mama was usually writing out the menu. It changed every day. We were known for our roasts and our fish stew, and she was up and at the Reading Market every morning before sunrise.

Grandad never trusted my father, and he lived long enough to know he was right, I suppose.

“I don’t trust that foreigner,” he said, even though my father had lived in America most of his life. He came over from France with his parents, and he still spoke with an accent. I never knew my grandparents — they died before I was born. My father has been looking after himself since he was sixteen.

Before he married Mama he went door-to-door selling pots and pans — like a tinker, Grandad said. Looking for an easy life, he said, and Mama would snort and say, “So he came to a tavern? Didn’t know I was leading the high life, old man.”

My earliest memory is of my father, standing by the front door, welcoming people. Tall and black-haired like me. His name is Jacques Bonner —
Zhack Bon-ay
, it’s pronounced in French, but everyone calls him Jock.

My name in French is so pretty,
Meen-ette Bon-ay
, but in American I’m just plain old Minnie Bonner.

What bothered Grandad is that the tavern wasn’t good enough for my father. He was always wanting to try new dishes, to go for a fancier clientele. He had dreams, it seems to me, and what’s wrong with that? But Grandad never liked how he got to act like the host. He moved around the dining room, seating people, slapping backs, raising a glass, and not hardly wiping a table or polishing a candlestick.

After Grandad died, Papa suggested that Mama take the back dining room and turn it into a room for private dinners. He convinced her that all the best restaurants did that. He started to teach the cook how to make French sauces. That’s when Mr. Sump started arriving with his friends from the banks and fancy houses around Rittenhouse Square.

Papa has always been restless. The first time he disappeared for three days Mama called the police. The second time she didn’t. And then it just became part of our lives, how he’d not be there one morning when I got up, and I learned not to ask. Mama made up stories for a while and then she stopped. Jock had gone for a long walk, people joked. And the men would laugh a bit, and the women would feel sorry for us, I guess, but nobody said a mean word to our faces because everybody liked Papa too much.

Here is a funny thing I just realized, diary — when I said at the beginning that my family talked about things, I never realized that we can talk and talk and talk, and yet not say one word about the most important thing.

When he’d come in the door at last, after a week or two, Mama wouldn’t say a word, just put his plate and cup down on the table. And sometimes I was relieved and sometimes I was mad, and I guess I was both at the same time. He’d pick up his cup and wink at me. And I couldn’t help smiling at him, because he was my papa and he made me happy. In a few hours or a few days Mama would be smiling, too. He would be calling her
“ma belle”
and bringing her onto his knee. He says her name like this:
ah-zhel
, and it sounds as soft as feathers. Much better than Hazel, isn’t it? Mama has big hazel (
ah-zhel!
) eyes with long black eyelashes, but she’s not named for her pretty eyes, because Grandad said they were blue like mine when she was born. She has long auburn hair to her waist and is the loveliest woman in the world except for right now when I am not speaking to her.

April 3, 1906

Well, here I am, a maid. How do you like that, diary? I don’t.

Yesterday I walked from the tavern to their house near Rittenhouse Square. It’s the right district for society folk, but it’s not the right house. Even I can see that. Society in Philadelphia is all about not showing off, you see. It’s about how long your family has been in America, who your great-grandfather was, did he own land, was he prosperous. I know who my great-grandfather was — he started the tavern — but we are just trade folk. That makes us one step up from riffraff, I’m guessing, in this part of town.

The Sumps are rich, but that’s not enough in Philadelphia. Mr. Sump made his money in real estate and invested in railroads out West. No one in Philadelphia knows his family. He says he’s from Chicago. He arrived with money and made more money, buying up land north and west of the city. Mrs. Sump refers grandly to her “family in Cincinnati,” but her father was a tailor. The Sumps have their noses pressed up to the fine windows of the elegant houses of Philadelphia society. They will never let them in.

Mrs. Sump thinks we don’t know she’s been snubbed by real society here. Maybe she doesn’t realize that
all
of Philadelphia knows. It’s a city of taverns and coffeehouses and gossip. Mama used to say that’s how the Constitution was written, just men talking and arguing in Philadelphia taverns, and then writing it down.

You can see it, how badly Mrs. Sump wants to be noticed. The brass knocker is brighter than on anyone else’s door, the blue is the wrong color, the black trim too shiny. The house is like a bully with his chest stuck out saying,
Look at me.

I am wearing a maid’s uniform. In a paper bag I have another and two aprons. I went last week to a seamstress and the money will come from my wages, nine dollars a week, except I’ll only get two dollars in my pocket. The rest goes to Mama.

I have a gray dress for mornings, black for nighttime, with a long white apron and cap. I am too young to be a lady’s maid but I’m tall and so people will think I’m older, I guess. And now I’ll have a week’s training in Mrs. Sump’s house. I have no idea what I’ll be doing. Polishing things. Fetching tea. Helping Miss Lily Sump dress and doing her hair. Tending to the fires and making beds.

I’d rather wash the greasiest pots in the tavern. I’d rather clean the fish.

My mother told me not to knock at the front door whatever I do. To go around to the side. The cook made me wait. The floors were full of wooden crates and spilled straw and the servants were rushing about with the packing of tureens and saucers, preparing for the great move.

I was sent up to the “morning room.” Rich swells have a room they only use in the mornings! Mrs. Sump was at a desk, wearing a lilac silk gown trimmed in green ribbons. The lacework on her sleeves draped over her knuckles. She looked like a petit four melting in August heat. She gave me a ticking glance, up and down,
tick tick tick
, not bothering to hide that she was staring. I made a plan to imitate her later for my best friend, Sadie Millman, but then I remembered that I wasn’t going home.

“You’re to go ’round with Bridget,” she said. “She’ll show you your duties. You’ll come out with Lily and I on the train.”

Lily and me,
I thought, but I suppose it’s not good to correct your employer.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Pity you don’t have an accent,” she said. “You
do
speak French, though?”

“Yes, ma’am, a bit,” I said. I only know a little, what my father taught me. He’s always spoken to me in French and tried to teach me, but it’s mostly kitchen French, the names of dishes and sauces, meats and vegetables.

“Your name, Minette, your full name, that’s what we’ll call you. Not Minnie, you’re not a tavern waitress. And don’t think this will be easy — you’ll work.” She lifted a finger. “I don’t stand for servants taking advantage.”

“I’m used to working, ma’am.”

“
Madame.
That’s what you’ll call me. And when you speak to Lily I want you to use easy French phrases, you know, that she can use in conversation.” I wasn’t about to tell Mrs. Sump that Lily will wind up knowing the words for “boiled potatoes” or “braised with onions” instead of “if you please” and “how very kind.”

She lifted her chin for a big sniff, like she was sucking down celestial air. “They have Chinese for servants out there, I hear, godless little men wearing slippers! I’ll teach them a thing or two about what real society is.”

I was lucky I grew up in a tavern. You learn to keep your face straight while people do or say the stupidest things. So I didn’t laugh. I can’t pretend to know what real society is like, but I bet Mrs. Sump doesn’t know any better than I do. Look at her, she doesn’t even sit like a lady, not quite. Her feet just planted on the floor, long and wide as barrel staves. You can tell by the way she picks up her cup and puts it down again. You can tell by the way she gestures. She is not grand at all, she is doing it like a play, like a charade.

“Lily will have a proper French maid,” she said with satisfaction.

And then suddenly I see why I’m there, and why she made this deal with Mama. She expects to go out West to a fine city that’s new, to people who won’t ask who her father was. Money is all she needs. And she thinks she’ll be the grand lady from Philadelphia showing them how it’s done.

With a French maid. That’s me.

It would be fun to laugh at her, but I guess the joke is on me.

April 4, 1906

There’s a butler to answer the door and a housekeeper to keep things running and a cook. There’s a parlormaid — Bridget — who also waits on Mrs. Sump. Mrs. Sump speaks of how there will be a “full staff” in San Francisco, because of the larger house. Mr. Sump has already hired them out there, she says. Mrs. Sump said right in front of Bridget to her daughter, Lily, that all servants were lazy and Mr. Sump was too soft, so she might have to hire new staff herself all over again, once they settle in.

“Well, I feel sorry for ’em,” Bridget said as we all had our tea in the kitchen. “She’s as tough as old boiled boots.”

“Hush now, Bridget, you with your talk,” the housekeeper, Mrs. Greenlee, said, but you could tell she agreed.

Bridget plopped a scone on my plate. “And I hear they murder twenty people a day out where you’re going. I’ve got me a new position in a better house out in the country.”

I don’t know anything about San Francisco except what I’ve heard about the Barbary Coast, how it’s a place of murder and gambling, but I suppose the fortunes out there are newer and shinier so things aren’t the same. No matter what, I can’t imagine it will be easy for Olive Sump. Who is now calling herself Olivia. I saw her practice writing it on a piece of paper.

In the meantime I lay out Lily’s clothes and help to pack her trunks with Bridget and start the fires and bring the tea, and learn the right way to do things, like you can’t hand your mistress a letter with your own hand, you have to put it on a tray. Just in case your skin touches hers.

Later

Something funny happened this afternoon. Mrs. Sump canceled her shopping trip, saying she had too much to do. That meant she stood hovering over me as I counted all her gloves and set aside the ones she wants for the trip, and the others she will pack to be sent ahead, and then did the same with her shawls, boots, and coats.

She’s afraid the servants will steal from her while they are packing all her things. She is afraid that the dressmaker will not finish her evening cape on time. She is afraid that the portrait artist will not properly crate the painting she posed for and it will be damaged on the way to San Francisco, and she wants to hang it in the study. And the rest of us in the house have to hear all of this, over and over and over again.

“And remember, Lily, all those afternoons we had to pose?” she said. “Will it be all for naught? You can’t trust anybody, you know. Nobody knows the right way to do things. Fold that again, Minette, or it will get creased.”