“Someone... gave wagon men money.” Ella choked it out, her lungs tight and burning. “Twenty dollars. Take away a man. I think... alive.”
“Bad dreams, dear. You should have heard yourself yesterday. Charles says you went on about anarchists. Said if he didn’t know better, he’d suppose you were out to bomb the Palmers or the Roosevelts.” Cook’s voice was full of pity.
Ella didn’t remember going inside, but she woke up on Charles’s cot near the coal bin. Later still, again with no consciousness of having moved, she found herself in a tub of tepid water in the servants’ bathroom. Maid knelt over her with a bar of soap. Like Cook, she’d wishfully relied on a kerchief over her nose and mouth to protect herself. The poor woman looked younger with her disappointed down-turned lips hidden.
“Maid,” Ella said. “Good... to me.” Her relief at having the filth from the street, from her sick body, washed away was immense. She choked back tears of gratitude because they burned her eyes worse than the coarse soap.
Cook came in, waddling as usual, as if a stick held her knees apart. She helped Maid wash Ella’s hair. “Just look at those bites,” Cook said, “and no doctors to help us. To think Mrs. Kingston came to me and said Nanny had passed. Like you might say, ‘It’s snowing.’ With the nerve, on top of it, to complain it’s too cold in the schoolroom. I looked right at her: ‘Well, of course it’s cold, you sent my Charles away.’ And she says, all accusing, ‘Didn’t I tell you to wear a mask? I won’t have you cooking for the children without one. I can’t have them exposed, that’s why I sent Charles away, and Mr. Kingston, too. If they’re well, they’ll be back soon enough, and in the meanwhile, I’ll have no drama about it. For the children’s sake, we can do without our husbands for now.’ Always the children, though you can’t blame a mother for that. And we all love them. But then, we’re all somebody’s children, aren’t we? So I said to her, ‘Well, it may be just drama to you, to send a husband away.’ Not as if mister and missus share a room, is it? He barely even pretends to care for her, now he’s got that fancy piece at the Decatur. But I’m newly wed. And I told her, ‘You can feel how cold it is, without my Charles. Call it drama if you will, but he’s of use to us.’ I didn’t say, ‘Not like Mr. K., who does nothing for nobody.’ The Roosevelts’ maid says Mr. K.’s practice is a sham, do you know? That he keeps the office because a man can’t be seen to live on his wife’s money these days, not if he means to get ahead in politics.”
“Oh, Cook.” Maid’s eyes were wide. “What did the missus say?”
“What could she say? It’s true — whatever does Mr. K. do for us here?”
“He doesn’t really have a woman at the Decatur?”
“He does. I know it because of Mr. Roosevelt, whose little Jimmy and Elliot play with our John. It was one of the nannies who told me. Mrs. R. nearly left him, she said. It’s why she took the children away last month. Found love letters to her husband... from her very own secretary, who lives at the Decatur. Which is how I know about Mr. K.’s fancy girl, because Mr. Roosevelt sent roses there when he was in Europe inspecting the fleet. Never mind that he’s Assistant Secretary, everyone knows he runs Navy himself, and we’ll win the war because of him, I don’t doubt. But the boy at the flower shop, when he took the bouquet, he saw Mr. K. there, with his woman.”
“See if the apartment house doesn’t get a bad reputation,” Maid said.
“Serves it right. Poor Mrs. R. — they say she’s very kind to the help. And poor Mrs. K., too, if she knew. Mr. K. never could go long without— Well, just say he has an appetite for the young ones. No mystery who broke the quarantine.” Cook scowled at Ella, who was shaking in the cooling tub, suddenly self-conscious about being naked under the older women’s gaze. Did Cook know what she’d done? But to her relief, Cook’s expression softened. “Whatever else I could say about Mr. K., though, I never thought he’d be one to put poor Nanny outside like that. How I’ll ever look at him again without spitting on the floor, I don’t know.”
Ella detested Charles and burned to expose him, to say it was he who’d persuaded the Kingstons to put her on the street, he who’d dragged her up the stairs and rolled her toward the curb like a sack of moldy potatoes. But she couldn’t find it in herself to upset Cook. And she certainly felt no urge to defend Mr. K.
“You should have seen the missus’s face just now,” Cook continued, pausing malevolently, “when I told her I’d brought Nanny back in. She took it very bad, and I stood there not even pretending to be sorry. No, I smiled. I did. I said, ‘Praise God Nanny survived, and no thanks to any in this house.’ ”
“Cook!” Maid sounded shocked, but even with her mouth hidden under her apron, it was clear she was grinning.
“Not as if she can fire me,” Cook said. “Find a good cook today, with everybody dropping like flies.”
While the women finished helping Ella, they listed all the dead from the neighborhood. Ella watched Cook, her bushy brows beetling over small eyes, her nose making a too-wide bump in the kerchief tied over her face. Charles called her a hag, a sow, said he’d married her only because at her age and with her prospects, she’d do things he had to pay extra for if he went whoring. And poor Maid, a skinny woman of thirty, her back hunched from bending over laundry, had, as usual, failed to achieve an old-fashioned Gibson Girl, her rolled stocking showing beneath lank hair. But to Ella at that moment, both women seemed luminously beautiful.
“Maid, go up to my room and fetch one of my gowns.” Cook’s eyes filled with tears when she added, “God forgive us, Nanny, but they had Charles bum yours. The missus worried they’d have some sickness in them. But we’ll share clothes with you, won’t we, Maid? You’re such a tiny thing, but maybe with belts and darts? You said you were a seamstress once?”
“Shirt factory,” she managed. Since she was thirteen. Her lungs had only begun to feel completely clear of cotton dust after two years here. At first, the children often left her winded and wheezing, and it had been a challenge not to show it.
“Nasty places. Well, you weren’t there for long, at your age.” When Maid left the bathroom, Cook added, “Don’t tell me you didn’t lie to get this job. Twenty-five! Why, I doubt you’re twenty yet, as womanly as you are.”
Cook flushed scarlet then, perhaps remembering nights Charles had come upstairs to her bed while Ella was in it. Ella had a sudden wish to take little John, a boy with a streak of harmless mischief and a grin to melt her heart, away from this house full of men who were no better than beasts.
The next thing Ella was aware of, she was again on Charles’s cot near the coal bin. Nearby, Maid was sobbing. Ella struggled onto her side, her limbs twisted up in Cook’s huge gown.
“Maid?” Ella coughed, the exertion draining her so she dropped her head back onto her pillow. But the coughs were no longer like hot knives between the ribs, they were barely worse than when she’d worked at the factory.
Maid was in a wing chair that had a loose arm, making it unsuitable for upstairs. The cracked glass shade of a table lamp cast a homey glow that kept the woodpile and coal bin (and Ella) in shadow. It was nighttime now, it seemed.
“Maid, what’s wrong?”
“It’s baby Annie,” Maid said. “Cook’s taking her out.”
“Out where?”
“To the street. For the wagon.” She continued to weep. “The missus has gone half mad. Didn’t want us to do it. She said to call for the ice man, ice to keep the baby from— Oh, I can’t think of it, it’s too horrible. And not a funeral home in a hundred miles that will answer its telephone. We couldn’t convince her till she saw Muriel... The little dear’s too young to understand, she kept sneaking in to the baby to hold her. When Mrs. K. saw that... Oh, Nanny, you can’t imagine.”