A City Tossed and Broken (3 page)

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 sleeping 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.

“Maybe he’ll do,” she says.

Lily stares out the window.

April 13, 1906

Lily’s not a bad sort, although I have to say, she does not seem to possess a sense of humor. Perhaps because she seems sad.

You can tell that she is ashamed a bit of her mother, when Mrs. Sump is rude to the porter. She calls them all “George” no matter who they are. I don’t think she can tell them apart.

Maybe it’s being on a train — you get to see the bad up close, the people who complain and the people who make the best of it. You get to smell the perspiration and the bad breath so why not the bad character, too?

When Mrs. Sump falls asleep for her nap, Lily tells me she’s going to get some fresh air so she walks to the back of the train to stand on the platform. She is always back by the time Mrs. Sump wakes up. No doubt she just wants to be alone. I know how she feels.

I just realized that
Sump
rhymes with
grump
. Ha!

Midnight

What a big country this is!

I’m used to the rocking now. We all are. And I’m almost used to sleeping sitting up. I try to stay awake to write this. We’re well past the Mississippi River now. The sky is the biggest thing I’ve ever seen. Stars tossed across it. Prairie out the window, miles of it. And every once in a while, the stars fall and gather in a tiny twinkling heap, and that’s a town.

April 14, 1906

We’ll be going over the mountains today. I have to say I’m looking forward to that. I can’t help it. Everyone is excited to see California.

Is this why Papa left us all the time? Just to go somewhere else? Just to see something new, just to breathe new air? I’m wondering about that. Because there is something exhilarating about it.