These were new friends. She knew none of them two days earlier. Maybe they had forgotten her. If they did, Miss Weaver would be furious, that much she knew. And then they’d resent her, and would have to drag her along just because they were told to.
She’d have to earn their friendship, that was all. Her resolve solidified. She sure wasn’t going to spoil it right off by being a baby. Was friendship something everyone else had to work so hard for? She sat on the bench and waited. A lone bird sang but she couldn’t identify what kind. If Icy were here, she’d look it up in her bird book. For some time she listened to its chirpy melody. It reminded her of a passage in a Chopin etude Mother had taught her.
A twig broke. When she heard voices, her breath came in a surge of relief. She stood up and wiped her damp palms on her hips. Someone said her name. Her name. At least that was something. “Boy, am I glad you came back,” was all she said. She made it a point to smile and look in the direction from which she heard her name.
Chapter Seven
The single chime signaled one o’clock. “Halleluia. No more French until tomorrow morning.” Jean heaved an exaggerated sigh of relief. “I’ve got to admit it is getting easier.” She remembered Miss Weaver’s standard, all-occasion line, “Of course you can. Just set your mind to it.”
Elsa Flagstad slammed the book shut. “I’m never going to learn that frilly language. English is hard enough and I already speak good enough German.” Jean had been translating orally the French lessons into German for her. It gave her a sense of acceptance with at least one of the girls, but Elsa was different from the others, too. She was foreign. Maybe that was why Miss Weaver had them room together.
“Is German anything like Norwegian?”
“No, but all Norwegian children study German.”
As with the study sessions with Lorraine back at Bristol High, Jean and Elsa couldn’t stick to the subject and fell into talk about other things, usually Elsa’s mother, Kirsten Flagstad, the Wagnerian soprano making her debut at the Met that season. The world of music and opera librettos was far more interesting to both of them than conjugating French verbs in the pluperfect.
Jean gathered up her music and made her way to the piano in the parlor. The room smelled of roses. Eventually, the other girls thumped down the stairway in their riding boots, heading for the stables and riding ring. “See ya later, Jean,” Dody called into the room. Dody always did. Most of the others just walked right by every day.
For a moment after they passed, the room echoed with their footsteps. Then, alone again. She took a deep breath and started in on “Liebestraum.” It was a comforting melody but the awkward Braille music was slow going. She had to stop every few measures to read with her fingers. Maybe the Chopin etude Mother taught her last summer would be easier. She played the Chopin four times up to a point and each time the notes trailed off to nothing. Her hands dropped to her lap and she sat still for a long time. Always there was struggle. Always something separated her from the others. She drew her mouth inward.
“What’s wrong, Jean?”
It startled her even though Miss Weaver’s voice had a rare softness. She hadn’t known anyone was in the room. “I can’t remember. Mother taught me the whole thing. It took most of the summer. And now I can’t get beyond that measure.” She tried to make her voice sound casual.
“I’ll investigate a professional teacher. I think I know of one in Manhattan who will take you. Maybe she can come once a week.”
Miss Weaver’s thick heels clomped down the hall. “Thank you,” Jean said after her. But her words sounded weak. Just a fumbling thank you wasn’t enough. She knew Miss Weaver would find someone, too. When that woman made a decision, she always got results.
At dinner the girls made up for what they didn’t say in French at lunch. Miss Reynolds—the girls called her Rene—sat at one table, Miss Weaver at the other.
“LCW will start another book tonight, don’t you think?” Dody said to Rene. They had fallen into the habit of calling Miss Weaver by her initials. She didn’t seem to mind.
“What a bore,” Sally Anne whispered. “Pinch me if I fall asleep.”
“It’s not a bore,” Jean answered, keeping her voice low. “I love it.” After dinner in the library, Francisco, the Filipino butler, served coffee in demitasse cups on a silver tray and they all listened to Miss Weaver read novels or plays in her throaty voice. It was a warm, animated time. The room seemed peopled by characters living out their triumphs and defeats, with Miss Weaver’s raspy voice unraveling the struggles of all humanity. Through language alone, she could see a boy selling newspapers on a bridge in the rain, a mother sitting by the roadside weeping over a sick child, an immigrant’s chest heaving in anxiety and excitement as he stepped off a train in a strange city. She always imagined herself the female lead and felt anguish at her fictional choices. Through stories she could, momentarily, live more broadly.
“I don’t care if you think I’m silly. I don’t ever want her to stop.”
“Well, she will tonight,” Rene said, “because I’m reading!”
“You?” Sally Anne’s spoon clanked on her plate.
Served her right to be embarrassed.
“What’ll you read?” Jean raised her spoon to her mouth. The beef broth dribbled off and splashed into the bowl. Her cheeks flushed hot. Rats. Just when they were probably looking at her. She dipped in again and concentrated on holding her spoon flat. When she touched it to her lips the spoon was empty. The thin, clear soup didn’t weigh enough for her to tell if she’d gotten any. Beef broth nights were always humiliating.
“Ibsen’s
The Doll’s House
. It’s a play.”
“Sounds like a nursery. What’s it about?”
“A young wife who’s unhappy with her perfect, narrow, protected married life. It brought a storm of protest when it came out about fifty years ago in Norway and now a new production of it is opening on Broadway.”
Every night that week Jean listened intently, her eyes watering in empathy for Nora. When Rene got to the end of Act III, the room was quiet for a few minutes. Jean heard people shift their positions in the tall wingback chairs. “I feel for her,” she said. “She wanted a real life so desperately, not some phoney, prepared little world.” No one else said anything. “I can hardly believe she did it, though. Left just like that, walked right out the door.” Jean’s voice dropped. “I wonder if any of our lives will be that narrow.”
“Not mine,” Polly declared.
“Of course not yours, but you’re a westerner. For us in New England, it’s different.”
“How?”
“More stuffy. More controlled.”
At the end of that week, they all went to see the Ibsen opening on Broadway. Jean cried in the darkness during the third act.
Most of their evening reading was related to theater they saw: Katherine Cornell as Shaw’s
St. Joan
at the Martin Beck Theater, Helen Hayes in
Victoria Regina
at the Broadhurst, the Lunts in
Taming of the Shrew
. And then there was opera. Miss Weaver always made them read the librettos first. “We’re going to do it right,” she said.
The girls went in style. They wore long gowns and black velvet capes and were driven in a pair of black limousines. They often went to dinner first, usually at some little restaurant in Greenwich Village. Once it was Spanish. Jean could feel the flamenco dancers and tambourines pounding out their heated rhythms right near their table. She felt her heartbeat quicken, and she leaned forward in her chair during the whole meal.
More than anything else the girls did together, Jean loved going to the opera. She didn’t need to have everything explained to her. Strong emotions shot out from the stage in sound. With opera, nothing was denied her. At the Met that season the girls cried at
Madama Butterfly
and thrilled at
Lakme
with Lily Pons. But Madame Flagstad’s performances enthralled them most, for she was theirs. When she sang Brunhilde in
Die Walkure
the girls cheered. When she sang Isolde, they wept. After every opening the girls trooped backstage to see the grand diva, object of their worship.
Elsa and Jean went alone by taxi to Beethoven’s
Fidelio
. They had been invited to Madame’s hotel afterwards. Back of the Met after the show a crowd of people still shouted “Brava, brava.” They thronged Madame for autographs, overpowering her and the two girls. Jean was shoved. For a moment she lost Elsa’s arm and stood alone among shouting, shoving people, trying to keep her balance. Shoulders, backs and elbows jabbed at her from all sides. She felt like a thin reed sucked in a spiraling eddy. The world swirled in terror. An arm grabbed hers and yanked her through the crowd and into a car.
“Oh, Yeanie,” Madame said in heavily accented English, “I’m so sorry it frightened you.”
“It’s all right. Nothing happened.”
But her eyes watered and she was quiet for a while in the back seat of the taxi. This was what she had wanted, though, to be out in the world. This was adventure. She took a deep breath and tried to settle herself.
“Madame Flagstad, what’s your favorite role?” she asked.
“That’s a hard question, Yeanie. There are too many. Isolde, I think. I love the
Liebestod
aria in the end.”
“I was hoping you’d say that. It’s so tragic.”
Trips through New York crowds made Jean feel more mobile even though she always walked holding someone’s arm. Once they went to Madison Square Garden to see the National Horse Show. Dody sat next to her and described the equestrian moves in terminology she had just learned from their riding master. “It must be impressive,” Jean said wistfully.
She wrote home every week afterward to find out whether Father had asked Dr. Wheeler if she could ride. Maybe riding was something she could do. All the other sports the girls did—tennis, squash, skiing—were beyond her, but riding might not be. It’s true, she did the ski joring, being pulled on skis by a horse on flat ground, but the girls didn’t do that often. Riding they did every day. If she could ride, she wouldn’t have to be alone in the afternoons. She’d be one of them.
Finally, a letter came from Mother. Jean had Dody read it. “The reading club was here yesterday. We discussed Balzac. Father was appalled. He said the ladies are titillated by the vicarious living they do at the reading club meetings. Bill is doing well at Yale and Lucy is planning a party for next month. Mort’s learning how to punch a time clock at Babson. Dr. Wheeler called yesterday and said he would see no further harm in your riding.”
Jean grabbed the letter and headed for the landing, felt for the handrail and scrambled down, counting the stairs.
“What’s your hurry, Jean?”
“Where’s LCW?”
“In her room, I think.”
She turned on her heel back up the stairs. One, two…thirteen. To the left she heard bath water being drawn in LCW’s suite. She knocked on the door anyway.
“Yes?”
“Miss Weaver, I can ride. Father asked my doctor, and he said it’s okay.”
“Of course you can ride, Jean. I knew you could all along,” she said through the door.
“When can I start?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll tell Herr Frederich and we’ll measure you for breeches.”
Andrebrook horsewomen wore khaki gabardine jodhpurs with leathers, black wool blazers, polished black boots, white silk shirts and stocks, white gloves and black derbies. Custom. The bill was sent to Father. Miss Weaver wasn’t going to have her girls wandering through the Rockefeller estate looking like a bunch of ragtaggles.
Frederich, the riding master, lived above the stables, a respectable distance across the sloping lawn from the main building and the girls. English saddle was his specialty, so all the girls rode English. He gave Jean Glory Girl, a white nag, gentle and safe enough for her, he promised Miss Weaver. “She’s an old poke,” Jean grumped the first day. “Can’t she go faster?”
When Herr Frederich announced a moonlight ride through the Pocantico Hills, the girls tittered in excitement.
“Oh, Jean, he looks so handsome and he rides so tall and straight. He rides ahead of us and we can see his silhouette on his horse up ahead. It’s divine.”
“You mean he’s divine, Sally Anne. Don’t quibble. We know you’re in love with him.” Dody’s was the voice of reason.
“I am not. It’s just that he looks so—hm—in the moonlight. It’s the moonlight, Jean, that makes it all so dreamy.”
“Doesn’t matter to me if it’s moonlight. I’m just glad I get to go.”
“He’ll make you ride on a lead line, though,” Dody reminded her.
“So what?”
“Just imagine.
He’ll
be holding the other end.” Sally Anne fabricated a swoon.
“I don’t care.”
“Listen to you,” Sally Anne teased. “You do, too. It makes you special.”
“You’re just jealous because I get to ride closest to him.”
“Did you know Frederich watches you all the time?” Dody asked.
“I don’t believe you.”
“He does, Jean,” Sally Anne agreed.
“He just feels protective. He doesn’t need to, though.”
“Don’t tell him that. He might stop.”
She did anyway. Not being singled out was far more important than Frederich. Eventually, in preparation for the yearly Andrebrook Horse Show, Herr Frederich allowed her to ride without the lead. He still rode right ahead of her in order to give her warnings like “turning right” just in time for her to adjust her weight.
One day something spooked Glory Girl and she shot off in front of Frederich and everyone. He took after her at a gallop. “Low branch, Jeanie,” he shouted.
Jean bent down next to Glory Girl’s mane. Her derby flew off and she felt twigs scrape across her shoulders. She raised up again and held on.
“Duck!”
This time she stayed down, close to Glory Girl’s mane. It seemed to her a perfect position, just like a jockey. The movement felt different. She’d been afraid to lean that far forward before. Eventually, Frederich caught up and Glory Girl stopped. “Are you all right?”
“Of course, I am.” She smirked even though she was breathing hard. That’s what Miss Weaver would say. “It was terribly exciting. How far did I go?”