A City Tossed and Broken Read online

  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.”

  We heard the knocker and the butler was busy downstairs counting the silver because Mrs. Sump would be on him next and he couldn’t leave it. So he said I could answer the door and be quick about it.

  A young man in a good suit handed me his card, thick white paper, ANDREW JEWELL, and I put it on the little silver tray and took it in to Mrs. Sump. She turned three kinds of red and said right out loud to Lily, “The cheek! Your father can do business with whoever he likes, but I’m not bound to receive him!” and then told me to tell the man — not the “gentleman,” but the man, so that lets me see he’s not society no matter how he’s dressed — that she is not at home. And Lily rose and stood by the window as though to distance herself from all this, and Mrs. Sump snapped at her that young ladies should not be seen from the street.

  I went back and told him that the Sumps were not at home, and I could tell that he knew it wasn’t true — is being a maid all about lying as well as not talking at all? — and for a moment I saw something hard and angry in his eyes. Then he tipped his hat at me and I could see his blond hair and light amber eyes. He smiled, and I suddenly saw that he was handsome.

  Didn’t he know I noticed it, too! He smiled at me as though we had a secret.

  Then he asked how my father was. And when I looked surprised he said, “I’ve seen you at the Blue Spruce.”

  I’d never noticed him. I suppose he was just one in a pack of young gentlemen of business coming in.

  “Tell him I sent my regards,” he said. He picked the card off the tray and handed it to me. “We might have some things in common.”

  I wanted to say, Well, I don’t see how. Or, He’s gone off for good, so keep your fancy card. I didn’t appreciate his familiarity. But I just put it in my apron pocket.

  He took a step back and looked at the house and then had the nerve to wink at me before he walked away.

  Well, that was a peculiar thing.

  In the meantime I am running all ’round this house with lists of things to do, trying to please Lily with her remote airs and her round blank face. She is almost pretty when she smiles, but I’ve only seen that once when I brought her letters to her and she thanked me. Usually she seems to be just daydreaming her way through her life, which I guess you can do when you�
�re rich.

  So I find that I’m not really training to be a lady’s maid, I’m just lifting and sorting and packing. I don’t think I’m here for training at all. I think I’m here to be an extra pair of hands. Bridget and I pack trunk after trunk with clothes that will be sent ahead, and then we have to unpack them when Mrs. Sump decides she must have this gown or that petticoat with her for the journey and for her first week there. Last night she kept Bridget up until one in the morning. I just watch it all and think, This is now my life, watching a mean rich lady get everything she wants when I’ve lost everything.

  April 5, 1906

  Bridget just up and quit! She left two days early for her new job, and wasn’t Mrs. Sump in a fit. But Bridget was smart, because she’s going to work at the country estate of Mrs. Thomas Whitford out in Merion, and she is one of the big society ladies, so Mrs. Sump is too afraid to cross her. Ha!

  “I don’t know why I’m so plagued with trouble,” Mrs. Sump said. “Servants just take advantage.”

  Later that night

  I am so tired. I am writing this by candlelight. Bridget is gone and so I’m alone in the little maid’s room up in the attic. It’s funny to see how grand houses use all their space downstairs for rooms too big for the family and yet the servants above are stuffed into these tiny bare spaces. When you look at a big house from the outside, you never expect there would be rooms crammed in so small at the top.

  Oh, there is so much left to do.

  I have never imagined that one person would need so many tea gowns, and ball gowns, and skirts and bodices and petticoats of taffeta and silk and organdy, and gloves, and shawls, and fans, and corsets, and hats.

  But it is easy to wait on Lily Sump. She doesn’t talk.

  Tonight when she unclasped her bracelet (she’s not used to having a lady’s maid, I’m supposed to do that, Bridget told me) I said, “May I help you with that, miss?” and she shook her head. She was standing by the window, and, diary, I think she said this:

  “No one can help me.”

  So I stood still, and waited, because I didn’t know what to do.

  But then she just smiled and said, “I can manage, Minette,” and I think maybe I did not hear what I thought I heard.

  April 8, 1906

  I was allowed to come home to say good-bye today. Mama had already moved to the rooming house near the river. Her room was small and crammed with just a bed and a table. Mildew stained the walls. I could hear the person in the next room coughing.

  “Did you say good-bye to Sadie?” Mama asked me.

  I had been thinking I would stop by and say a last good-bye to my best friend. But in the end I couldn’t. I would write to her, I decided. I couldn’t stand to see pity in her eyes, her and her mother. Everybody feeling sorry for us — that was almost worse than anything that happened.

  I gave Mama the card from Andrew Jewell and she looked at it like she’d just discovered a rat on the table.

  “Where did you see him?” she asked, and I told her he came to call on the Sumps but Mrs. Sump wouldn’t let him in.

  “I’m not surprised at that,” she said.

  I asked her why, but she wouldn’t say. She looked so small and tired, sitting in that awful room.

  “How long?” I asked. “How long do I have to be in that house, working off the debt?” And I finally was able to say how I felt. “It’s awful, Ma. I hate it.”

  She didn’t want to hear that. I saw it in her face. She wanted me to be like a girl in a book, all brave and stalwart and cheerful. Instead of miserable and afraid and angry.

  Two years isn’t so very long, she said. I’ve done some figuring, and I’ll be able to put enough by in two years to get a proper place for us to live. It will be gone in a blink of an eye.

  I made an exaggerated blink. “Still here,” I said.

  And this was when the fight began.

  Mama said she still deserved my respect.

  Why, I said. Why wasn’t money set by for hard times? That’s what Grandad always did. How did they manage to lose every cent we had?

  All the money went back into the tavern, she said. It was fine because we had a place that was ours.

  So I said, if I’m old enough to be sent away to help out, I’m old enough to know.

  Here is something I learned, diary: Sometimes it is better not to know, I think.

  Here is what she said, the words spilling out so fast:

  “Your father is the reason we are here like this, left with nothing. He lost it, he lost everything. He was so proud to be invited into that back room, with the rich men gambling. Yes, Min, they were playing cards. And when this man” — and she shook the card at me — “this Andrew Jewell won all that money, he demanded it all right away. He made threats against your father. He said he knew people in the police department who would shut down the tavern. He wouldn’t wait for his money, and why should he, really, since he won it? So Mr. Sump took pity on your father and gave him a loan to cover the debt. He said not to worry about paying it back, he wouldn’t charge interest, but to use the tavern as collateral. And then suddenly he says because of this move to San Francisco his partners insisted on him collecting. So your father had to give up the tavern.”

  “But how could he have left?” I asked. “Without even saying good-bye to me?” Diary, I tried not to sound like a little girl when I asked that. Even though I felt like one. “Why did he leave for good? Why didn’t he stay and help?”

  That’s when she said he didn’t leave, she threw him out. She said to go away and never come back.

  “So there’s no forgiveness?” I asked her.

  “Not for this,” she said. “I was a sap. A silly fool with my head in the clouds. Your father is a gambler, Min. That’s why he goes away and comes back. He gambles and loses and can’t face me. So yes, all our money was tied up in the tavern. We could never get ahead.

  “It’s up to us now, Min,” she said. “We will start over from scratch. We can do it. I wish I could do it with you beside me, but I can’t.” She said she couldn’t bear to bring me here, that I would be living in a fine house, that Mrs. Sump had promised to look after me.

  “I could get a job,” I said. “I could work in a factory. I could say I was sixteen or seventeen, people would believe it. I always get taken for older than I am.”

  No, she said. Not that life. That would be worse.

  “This is worse!” I screamed.

  And I said I hated her for it.

  And I ran out the door.

  Later

  Midnight

  I am packed and ready to leave tomorrow. My life hadn’t seemed quite so small before. Now it is something you could hold in your fist. Just a few things in a suitcase.

  Look, diary, how the paper is all splotched and sodden. I didn’t think there were so many tears in the world.

  April 10, 1906

  What a time getting on the train! She fussed and fussed, getting settled with all her parcels and boxes, and then when she saw my little suitcase she complained about my taking up too much room!

  And Lily, what a creature, doesn’t say much just follows behind her ma’s big behind.

  I haven’t had a minute to myself, not even to cry.

  April 11, 1906

  We changed trains in Chicago and now we’re going all the way through to California. Mrs. Sump and Lily are in the fancy Pullman car where they swivel the seats at night and make lovely private beds for you, but I have to sleep sitting up. I don’t mind. I get to have a whole seven hours without her voice in my ear. I do not think she stopped talking for one minute altogether yesterday.

  I sit and lean my head against the window and wait for the towns, when the conductor swings his lantern in the dark as we pass, and the people asleep in their houses make us a part of their dreams.

  April 12, 1906

  The days are full of her complaints, too hot, no too cold, needs tea, find her pillow, mend her gloves. Not allowed to rest until she’s sleepin
g and then I fall asleep like a rock fell on my head.

  And the train wheels on the track are saying this: You’re alone you’re alone you’re alone.

  Later

  She keeps a green case with her always, right by her feet. I am guessing it holds her jewelry because even I can’t pick it up and she makes me carry everything.

  This morning she shouted at me in front of the whole car and called me “ignorant girl” when her tea wasn’t hot enough.

  I am not so ignorant. I know this much: She is a terrible old thing.

  Later

  I am finally able to write. We have our routines now. In the afternoons she falls asleep after lunch.

  Mrs. Sump has made a list of all the eligible bachelors in San Francisco. Lily is sixteen so she has two years, Mrs. Sump said, before the bloom is off the rose. Courting by seventeen, engaged by eighteen and a half, married by twenty, she said. Lily just stared out the window.

  She’s been studying up, and she’s got the names. She’s going to start with the wife of Mr. Sump’s lawyer, she told Lily — Mrs. Hugh Crandall. Not that she’s quite the upper crust, but she is invited to the bigger events. She’s a second cousin to one of the big San Francisco families, so the Crandalls, according to Mrs. Sump, have managed to climb their way to the lower rungs of society, despite being “in trade.”

  “That will be my entrée,” she said. “One always needs an entrée at first.”

  And she plants her feet on her green case and gossips about people she doesn’t know, about who would be “suitable” or not. She talks about the great San Francisco families like she knows them. I’ve become her secretary, for I have to copy down who she expects to call on within the first six months. De Young and the Spreckels and Hopkins and Flood and Crocker and Tevis and Haggin and Kohl. And sometimes she mentions a young man’s name, and she frowns and considers.