I once overheard Olive remark to a guest: “Bernadette is Irish, of course. But she is not violently Irish, so we keep her on.”
This is the kind of thing that people used to say back then, Angela.
Unfortunately, that’s all I can remember about Bernadette.
The reason I don’t remember any particular details about Bernadette is because I didn’t pay much attention to maids back then. I was so very accustomed to them, you see. They were nearly invisible to me. I just expected to be served. And why was that? Why was I so presumptuous and callow?
Because I was rich.
I haven’t said those words yet in these pages, so let’s just get it out of the way right now: I was rich, Angela. I was rich, and I was spoiled. I’d been raised during the Great Depression, true, but the crisis never affected my family in any pressing manner. When the dollar failed, we went from having three maids, two cooks, a nanny, a gardener, and a full-time chauffeur to having just two maids, one cook, and a part-time chauffeur. So that didn’t quite qualify us for the breadline, to put it mildly.
And because my expensive boarding school had ensured that I never met anybody who wasn’t like me, I thought everyone had grown up with a big Zenith radio in the living room. I thought everyone had a pony. I thought every man was a Republican, and that there were only two kinds of women in the world—those who had gone to Vassar, and those who had gone to Smith. (My mother went to Vassar. Aunt Peg went to Smith for one year, before dropping out to join the Red Cross. I didn’t know what the difference was between Vassar and Smith, but from the way my mother talked, I understood it to be crucial.)
I certainly thought everyone had maids. For my entire life, somebody like Bernadette had always taken care of me. When I left my dirty dishes sitting on the table, somebody always cleaned them up. My bed was beautifully made for me, every day. Dry towels magically replaced damp ones. Shoes that I tossed carelessly upon the floor were straightened out when I wasn’t looking. Behind it all was some great cosmic force—constant and invisible as gravity, and just as boring to me as gravity—putting my life in order and making sure that my knickers were always clean.
It may not surprise you, then, to learn that I didn’t lift a finger to help out with the housekeeping, once I moved into the Lily Playhouse—not even in the apartment that Peg had so generously bestowed upon me. It never occurred to me that I should help. Nor did it occur to me that I couldn’t keep a showgirl in my bedroom as a pet, just because I felt like it.
I cannot comprehend why nobody ever throttled me.
You will sometimes encounter people my age, Angela, who grew up experiencing real hardship during the Depression. (Your father was one such person, of course.) But because everybody around them was also struggling, these people will often report that they were not aware as children that their deprivations were unusual.
You will often hear such people say: “I didn’t even know I was poor!”
I was the opposite, Angela: I didn’t know I was rich.
FIVE
Within a week, Celia and I had established our own little routine. Every night after the show was finished, she would throw on an evening gown (usually something that, in other circles, would’ve qualified as lingerie) and head out on the town for a night of debauchery and excitement. Meanwhile, I would eat a late dinner with Aunt Peg, listen to the radio, do some sewing, go to a movie, or go to sleep—all the while wishing I were doing something more exciting.
Then at some ungodly hour in the middle of the night I’d feel the bump on my shoulder, and the familiar command to “scoot.” I’d scoot, and Celia would collapse onto the bed, devouring all my space, pillows, and sheets. Sometimes she would conk right out, but other nights she’d stay up chatting boozily until she dropped off in midsentence. Sometimes I would wake up and find that she was holding my hand in her sleep.
In the mornings, we would linger in bed, and she would tell me about the men she’d been with. There were the men who took her up to Harlem for dancing. The men who took her out to the midnight movies. The