The Gallery (17 page)

Chapter

B
y the time March rolled around, everything was looking up.

At least, that's what the papers said, and they were never wrong, were they?

Hoover was finally inaugurated president, promising prosperity for one and all. An astrologer in the papers said the same and assured her clients, including Charlie Chaplin and even J. P. Morgan, that the market would keep going up up up. The
Daily Standard
featured a different company every day, each one promising to make the Next New Thing (and to the savvy, promise the Next Big Stock Tip). The
Yodel
splashed advertisements of shiny new cars and appliances and invited you to buy on credit, no matter what your lot in life.

“Now anyone can live like a millionaire!” the advertisements crowed.

The more time I spent in that hollow and haunted house, the more I thought: Who would want to?

—

After the party, we started shedding staff like cargo rolling off a sinking ship. Chef suffered a collapse, whether from overwork or overdrink I never knew. As soon as the last of the party's canapés had been plated, he staggered out in the wee hours of the morning and never came back. The silent Magdalena left a letter in her place one morning, claiming a brother offering a job out West. (Her English was near perfect, it turns out.) Bridie spoke officially of an ailing mam back home, but whispered to me as she wrapped the strings around her apron, “It's cursed, this house. There's some black pishogue 'round here, and I wouldn't stay for love or money.”

Ma replaced no one. With no more parties, no visitors, and most days no Mr. Sewell, Ma and I soldiered on. Any evidence of that tragic traveling carnival disappeared. The house was put back to sleep, the furniture under billowing white shrouds. The courtyard, which just weeks before had been coaxed into such brilliance for the party, with wild, brash
blossoms and ripe fruit, slumped and shed its bounty to be swept into the bin.

Perhaps the flowers just did what flowers do: burst into life, then fade into a finish, dropping exhausted to the floor. Or maybe Ma simply forgot to call the gardeners. Ma's full attention, once again, was on Rose. Ma went quiet at that time, speaking only to direct me to one task or another. She climbed the stairs each day, carrying the shots Dr. Westbrook had recently prescribed to keep Rose calm and a copy of the
Daily Standard
under her arm to pass the hours by Rose's bedside. “But,” I sputtered when I first saw the syringe, “didn't you say that bromides—”

“These aren't bromides,” Ma cut me off. “And this is none of your concern. You wouldn't understand, so please leave this to the adults.” And with that, I understood the source of the eerie stillness that had returned to the top floor and had settled back down into the house's bones.

Still, under the quiet, something was churning.

Alphonse was disturbingly quiet, too. He avoided my eyes when we passed in the hall and left the room when I entered. In his eyes, I saw the guilt of the innocent bystander. Because we both knew: if he'd only helped me—if he'd abandoned his belief that
nothing made any difference so why bother, just for one evening—Rose would be free now.

In need of something to hold on to, we all returned to our routines. Mr. Sewell was either at his stockbroker's or at the newspaper office, even sleeping there some nights, if his still-made bed in the morning meant anything. He returned home only to consult with Dr. Westbrook. There were more visits from the doctor, more whispering between the men. “She's a danger, and always has been, and now everyone knows it,” Mr. Sewell insisted one morning as I helped the doctor off with his coat. “It's time she was in a place where no one else can be hurt by her actions.” The ground under the hallowed doctor seemed to be shifting, and through the office door, I overheard him wearily uttering words like “court-ordered” and “incompetent,” plus “sanitorium” and other ominous Latin terms.

For days I waited with clenched stomach for Sewell to demand answers: How did Rose get out that night of the party? But days, then weeks went by with Mr. Sewell passing me in the hall. No words were ever exchanged.

In the end, I realized he didn't care. The outcome was better than any he could have planned, with Rose's madness dragged on display for all of New
York society. Who would doubt him now that his wife was really and truly mad?

And who would guess that her madness was of his own design? To all of New York society, he was the model of the self-sacrificing husband, so in love with his wife he couldn't bear to let her be removed from her childhood home—until it became entirely unavoidable, of course.

It was a story you'd never read in the
Standard
. Of course you wouldn't; why would the paper's owner allow scandalous reports about his own wife? But any
Yodel
reader would know all the lurid details. It was no wonder that that
Yodel
snitch reporter kept showing up for back door dinners and Mardi Gras parties.

He was getting his information straight from the leak himself: Mr. Sewell.

—

As these Lenten weeks dragged on, I thought a lot about purgatory, that waiting room for the souls of the not-quite-damned. Rose was trapped upstairs in her own drugged limbo, and with no parties to prepare for and no daring, dramatic escapes to orchestrate, my days of maid work became—well, just work. Even the weather was contrary, waffling between wet snow and spitting rain with occasional unkept promises of sunshine.

Every day in the house seemed a drab, pointless exercise, as we all waited to see where we would end up.

“Sisyphean,” Alphonse muttered to himself one day as I was sweating and buffing the same spot on the foyer's marble floor where Mr. Sewell's shoes always left a black mark.

I sat back on my heels. “Who's a sissy?” I never let Jimmy Ratchett call me that, and I wasn't about to let Alphonse. Especially as he'd given me the silent treatment for weeks.

Something about this response tickled him, and he stopped and laughed to himself, despite the painting he wrapped his arms around.

“Sisyphus. Although I would not call him a sissy. He was a—how you say?—Strong? No, fierce king, cursed with an impossible task. To roll a large rock up a hill and then watch it roll back down again. The next day he did it again. And the next day. And the next. For eternity.”

I looked down. The marble in front of me was spotless, sparkling. For now.

“So it is Sisyphean. Your work and mine. Back and forth, this way and that. But nothing changes.” He shifted the weight of the bundle in his arms.

“Coming or going?” I asked, indicating the painting.

“Going.” He tipped it down so I could get a peek. It was the painting of Bacchus that Rose had hung for the party.

I nodded. Said nothing.

It was Sisyphean to ask, I thought to myself, because what would be the point? Why endeavor to know anything?

But I did anyway.

“And what's in its place?”

“Nothing.”

I stood up. The image of that gallery, empty of Rose's visual schemes, made my heart drop like a stone in a cold, still pond. “Nothing at all?”

He shrugged and twitched his mouth, causing his mustache to dance. It had filled in a bit more, becoming somewhat unruly, and with his high forehead and dark bushy eyebrows, he was beginning to look increasingly like a young walrus.

“No new paintings in the gallery, then?”

Alphonse shook his head. No new messages from Rose. Not only had I destroyed her one chance at escape, I had killed her hope for another.

From several paces away, I craned my neck to peek at Bacchus. “Can I see it? One more time?”

Alphonse glanced around, and seeing no one approaching, set the painting down on the marble
floor, leaning against the marble wall. It seemed that marble covered every surface in this house, like a cold white creeping moss.

Now that I had time to stop and really look at the painting, this Bacchus looked funny to me. He may have been a god, but he looked more like Giuseppe, Mr. Latonza's son from the cobbler shop. No long wizened beard or muscled arms that held up the world. This Bacchus was slight and lean, his baby-face cheeks pink with wine, and his toga slipped off in a way that had . . . was it improper to say sex appeal? He held out a thin glass goblet of wine—so shallow it looked like the liquid might spill all over his nice white toga at any moment—but when I looked closer, I saw something strange:

His fingernails were filthy.

Instinctively, I looked at Alphonse. He nodded, as if he'd been waiting for me to get there. “And the fruit,” he said.

There, underneath the goblet, was the fruit bowl that seemed to pop up in every canvas, signifying bounty or something like that. There was that grotesque pomegranate again, its seedy guts bursting. And around it was fruit of all kinds—some glossy and vibrant, but most . . . bruised, I saw now. Mushy. Rotten.

I stood back. This Bacchus was no god. He was
a half-drunk boy who smirked and beckoned, who pawed food with dirty hands. I would only drink the cup he offered me if I wanted to find myself knocked out and relieved of my pocketbook.

“You see the joke now?”

“Ye-es.” I hesitated. “Mr. Sewell?” Alphonse nodded again. “But it doesn't make sense, really. I mean, Mr. Sewell is a teetotaler—”

“Bacchus—how do you say?—he intoxicates. Not only through wine. Through words.”

“Through stories.” I whispered.

“There is a play by Euripides—you know—?” He stopped himself and smiled, knowing I'd never heard the name in my life. “—A play called
The Bacchae
, in which Bacchus drives his rival mad, then convinces his followers that this man is actually a wild animal. These worshippers, they fall into a frenzy, they tear the man limb from limb with their bare hands—all because of what Bacchus made them believe.”

A shiver ran up my spine, not only from the specter of Rose, being carried through the party like wild game fresh from the kill, but from the burst of cold air that had just been let in from the front door.

Mr. Sewell blew in, the door wide open behind him. “Keep it running!” he shouted to the shining black Rolls that had replaced the not-as-new
Duesenberg. “By God, isn't someone supposed to be at the door—ah, there you are Alphonse, good,” he said, eyes never leaving his pocket watch. He launched in with a barrage of directions involving spilled coffee and his checked shirt and lunch with the mayor, storming past the painting of his alter-ego still leaned against the wall.

By the time he returned in the fresh shirt and tie, I'd returned to my spot on the floor, unfortunately directly in Mr. Sewell's path.

Had it not been for Alphonse's quick hand under the master's arm, Mr. Sewell would have slipped and gone headfirst into the bucket of slop water.

There followed a great deal of swearing and blustering and blinding, as expected, and I bobbed curtsies up and down. But something about the near fall had shaken Sewell out of his focus on shirts and his pocket watch, and as Alphonse helped him regain his footing, the two men found themselves face-to-face.

Maybe it was the mustache, which as I mentioned had become quite luxuriant in the past few weeks. Or maybe Mr. Sewell wasn't accustomed to actually looking at his servants.

But he stopped there for a moment, regarding his footman, the same way Alphonse and I had just been staring intently at the painting.

“Has anyone ever told you—” Sewell started, then narrowed his eyes. “Where did you say you were from?”

Alphonse smiled placidly. “Strasbourg. That eastern part of France that is also Germany, depending who you ask. Perhaps you know it from your travels?” And then he released a stream of French that sounded quite different from Chef's.

Alphonse, I could tell, was gambling that Mr. Sewell didn't speak French, and it was a bet he won. Mr. Sewell looked at the man suspiciously for a moment, then strode away without another word.

But before he left, he turned to me. “Tell your mother I need to speak with her as soon as I return this evening.”

I curtsied again, noticing, as I looked down, that Sewell had left another black mark on the floor.

With a groan, I sank back to my knees, while Alphonse turned back to the painting.

“What happened to Bacchus,” I asked while kneading the scrubbing brush into the floor, “in the end of that story?”

There was a pause, and when I looked up, I noticed that Alphonse's hands were shaking as he picked up the painting by its frame. “Nothing happened,” he said. “He was a god. The gods live forever.”

—

On the way home, I finally understood what had rattled Mr. Sewell so.

It was on one of those long subway rides home, where the silence of the house pursued us all the way to Brooklyn. Ma had started reading the
Standard
with renewed interest, poring over its pages instead of lecturing me about my posture or my work habits. It was as if she was studying for a test, soaking in every word Mr. Sewell had approved with the attention of a scholar.