“Not you, sweetie.” Kathleen holds out her arms and Mercedes approaches. Kathleen pops her onto her knee. “He doesn’t get after good little girls. What shall we read?”
“Water Babies.” Mercedes chooses Frances’s favourite out of love for her little sister, who doesn’t mean to be naughty.
Kathleen eyes Frances’s crooked grin. “Come here, you rascal, you can listen too.”
Frances climbs onto the other knee. The two little girls look at each other and squirm, hands clamped over their mouths, cheeks ballooning with suppressed rapture.
“Quit wriggling or I’ll stick you on a pin and use you for bait in the creek.”
Mercedes composes herself; Frances shrieks with laughter and asks, “Can I play with your hair?”
“What do you say?”
“Please.”
“What else?”
“With a whole bunch of cream and a cherry and fruit and candy.”
“What else?”
“And a sword and a bug and a worm. And a bare bum!”
Mercedes says to herself on behalf of Frances, “Sorry dear God.” Kathleen laughs and Frances giggles passionately, poised to plunge both hands into the red sea, but Kathleen holds out,
“What word am I thinking of?”
“Lantern.”
“Nope.”
“Stick.”
“Nope.”
“Matchbox.”
“No.”
“Teapot.”
“Right.”
“Yay!”
“Don’t pull it or I’ll skin you. ‘Once upon a time there was a little chimney sweep….
Kathleen has taken to spending time with her little sisters. At first she does this for Daddy’s sake, because she knows that otherwise they get nothing but their mother’s barbaric yammer during the day while she’s at school — she can smell it hanging in the air when she gets home. But as the school-days and the war drag along and Kathleen becomes lonelier, she grows to cherish the time with her little sisters every bit as much as they do. Sunday mornings, she allows them to sit on two stools at the threshold of her room — “If I’m in the mood” — and witness her toilette. They sit as still as they can, enthralled, while Kathleen sings the world’s greatest songs in her opera voice, and slips on a white cotton blouse over her lace-embroidered petticoat. She turns the cuffs, fashions a Windsor knot in her striped silk tie, and pulls on her tan linen skirt, flared at the ankle — “My bicycling costume,” she calls it, although she does not possess a bicycle. Evenings after school, she stands with her arms akimbo at the door to the forbidden chamber, and groans, “Oh all right, you can come in. But not a peep! I’m studying.”
The little girls always cross the threshold with a sense of awe, for Kathleen’s room is a temple of sophistication. Its shelves are lined with every girls’ book you could ever think of, from Little Women to Anne of Green Gables. Its walls are plastered with pictures of great artists and beautiful underthings cut from magazines.
There is a picture of a man with wild hair and a flying necktie, pouncing upon the keys of a piano. This is Liszt. Kathleen is in love with Liszt. Kathleen says even his name sounds like a romantic sigh. Mercedes and Frances breathe the name to each other as a kind of all-purpose adjective for everything divine: Jell-O, fresh bed linen, Mumma’s molasses cookies, all are wonderfully “Liszt!”
There is a picture of a beautiful dark woman in a wide hat and an old-fashioned dress cut low, with a rose in her lap. This is Maria Malibran. “La Malibran,” Kathleen says dramatically, “the greatest singer who ever lived.” Kathleen has told Frances and Mercedes the tragic story of how Malibran went out riding on the wildest horse in the stable. She fell, caught her foot in the stirrup and was dragged over stones for a mile. She got up, powdered her cuts and bruises and sang that very night — beautifully, as usual. Then she died of a swollen brain and “she was only twenty-eight.” Mercedes always says a little prayer to herself for Malibran, while Frances tries to put the pretty lady in the picture together with the idea of her being dragged with her head bonking along. It’s terrible.
There is a big poster of “the woman of a thousand faces” — although in the poster she has only one. Her name is Eleonora Duse. She has burning dark eyes and piles of black hair. Daddy sent it to Kathleen from England before he went to the Front. Duse is “the greatest actress who ever lived.” In the poster, she stands inside the front hall of a nice house. She is wearing an overcoat and her hand is reaching for the doorknob. The poster is for a scandalous play called A Doll’s House. Daddy sent it with a letter, “to remind me not to get married and wreck my career,” Kathleen has explained. Mercedes can’t understand why Kathleen would not want to get married and have babies like Mumma, but Kathleen just snorts, “Marriage is a trap, kiddo. A great big lobster trap.”
Every evening when Kathleen opens her door and grudgingly admits them, Mercedes and Frances wait in obedient silence for five endless minutes, after which Kathleen proclaims her homework finished. Then there are just too many treats to choose from.
Often all three of them wind up lying on their stomachs on Kathleen’s bed, chin in hand, going through a priceless issue of Harper’s Bazaar, picking out fashions and accessories “for those in the know”.
“That’s me,” says Mercedes, and Kathleen reads the description. “‘A saucy confection of pale mauve crêpe de Chine touched up with rosettes of pussy-willow silk.’”
“Chic,” says Mercedes wisely.
“Très chic,” says Kathleen.
“I’m that one.” Frances points and Kathleen obliges. “‘She lost her head over this good-looking and comfortable pair of corsets from La Resista. The lacy brassière has the unmistakeable Paris hallmark.’”
Frances giggles and echoes, “Brassière!”
Even though there’s a war on, there’s still plenty of fashion pouring out of Paris — although according to the magazine the designers only keep it up for the sake of their poor seamstresses, who would otherwise be out of a job.
Kathleen teaches her sisters to mimic the effects of rouge by pinching their cheeks, and of lipstick by mercilessly biting their lips. “‘Beauty is a powerful weapon,’” she reads, at once sarcastic and enthralled. “‘To Fashion’s Throne must the free untrammelled girl be brought for sacrifice.’”
The sisters invariably dine at Sherry’s on Fifth Avenue, where Kathleen greets them in a French accent, “Good evening, mesdemoiselles, what would you like? We have Caviar on Toast, Vol au Vent of Sweetbreads, Brandied Peach Tarts and Green Turtle Soup. Or would you prefer Jellied Tongue?”
It’s not all frivolity, however. Kathleen is religious about reading Lady Randolph Churchill’s series on the war, By the Simmering Samovar. The sisters all hold their breath when they come upon a picture of a French casino that’s been converted to a hospital. No … Daddy is not there.
And Kathleen always reads aloud the latest instalment of a racy story while the little girls listen, mystified, and gaze at the illustrations over her shoulder: “‘Go! You are nothing but a brute!’”
Kathleen eagerly awaits every issue of Harper’s Bazaar that Mrs Foss of the Orpheus Society passes on to her, and she savours them with a combination of delight and disgust. For example, there is one picture that Kathleen has cut out for her wall just in order to remind herself that philistines are not confined to her own hometown — they can even be found amid high society: the photograph is supposedly of the great Geraldine Farrar singing Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera House of New York. Yet in the foreground sits a boxful of Astors admiring each others’ jewellery. It had never before crossed Kathleen’s mind that people might go to the Opera out of anything but a passion for opera. “Let that be a lesson,” she thinks, vowing, “When I sing, no one will be allowed to look anywhere but at the stage!”