Most of the old mansions on upper Round Hill were now empty, cared for by a discreet army of cleaners and watchmen. Their owners had fled during the Great Hunger and these days only returned for Fourth of July picnics and the occasional June wedding. But they still controlled the town and, with others like them, what remained of the countryside. However distant, their inbred disdain triggered old anxieties. That theirs or anyone else’s disdain would have rolled off McCabe’s thick back was an added indignity. So I decided to trot out the historical record to make an impression on her. Why I wanted the Judge’s house I kept to myself: in my dreams, it always appeared as my childhood home. I knew every corner of the house from tagging along behind my mother as she waxed the floors, polished the Judge’s oak furniture, and painstakingly dusted the locked glass cabinet that held the Baccarat punch set and the icon of the Annunciation. As I got older, I was allowed to approach the cabinet, but not to touch it. The fourteenth-century icon was brittle and resented the heat and humidity of the human body, the Judge had told my mother, giving her the only copy of the tiny cabinet key that he always wore on a chain around his neck. He taught her how to read the hydrometer inside the cabinet three times a day and to adjust the humidity-control device. And she taught me—theoretically, because I was to keep my hands in my pockets. The Virgin’s terror at the muscular, winged female lunging at her knocked me out cold the first time I got close. After that I trained myself to resist her contaminating panic, focusing one month on her raised hand, then another month on the folds of her black mourning robe, until one day I felt strong enough to stare again at her terrified face. This time I managed to keep standing.
None of this I ever told McCabe, whom I distrusted not only on principle as my future victim, but because of certain revealing facts: in contrast to the fight she put up to rent the neo-Cappadocian villa, getting McCabe to agree that I’d officially be known as her maid was uncomfortably easy. “Groovy,” was all she said, as she strode down West Broadway and I trotted behind, explaining to her deaf ears that the maid conceit would allow me to remain incognito from my meddlesome (nonexistent) Elmiran relatives.
The Judge’s house was as I remembered it. McCabe took over the master bedroom that occupied the entire upper floor, while I settled in the Judge’s study on the ground floor. I never went upstairs: I didn’t want to encourage needless intimacy. Within days of our arrival, McCabe’s existential pendulum began to swing back from maudlin sop to bully. She stopped wearing sunglasses at all times. The skin around her eyes looked less and less like macerated meat. She was still crying a little at night—her eyes looked puffy and pink in the mornings—but she was definitely on her way up. Her porcine blue eyes had begun to dart about the house and the garden, looking for something to do, or say. She even looked heftier. I kept out of her way. In recovery, McCabe was even less appetizing than in pain.
Downstairs was my empire: the Judge’s study with its dark icon was the heart; the expansive dining room, the lungs; the ascetic parlor guarding the Wright chairs, the brains; the vestibule with the faience cane holder still harboring the Judge’s boar-headed walking stick, the face, which one day would be unveiled to the world, when its features finally became clearer. Kitchen and pantry, with functioning dumbwaiter, were in the sub-basement, which had a separate entrance. I hired Petrona, newly arrived from Zacatecas, Mexico, with little English (an essential requisite) but glowing recommendations from an Anatolian expatriate family, to come every afternoon, Monday through Saturday, and cook a light lunch for McCabe and dinner for two, wash and iron McCabe’s clothes, and clean upstairs—but not anywhere near McCabe’s room. I took care of the ground floor and the garden as devoutly as my parents had before me. To Petrona, I was Señora Mirtila (not my real name), Señorita Maké’s housekeeper. I spoke to her the barest minimum, always in soulless Voice of America Spanish, so that she could not place me geographically.
I ordered for Señora Mirtila the best cleaning, scouring, and polishing products from New York’s Hammacher Schlemmer—the ones my mother longed for but never got from the penny-pinching Judge, the ones in the catalogues she rescued from the Judge’s wastebasket and studied at night on our kitchen table. The gargantuan crate arrived, as planned, one afternoon while McCabe was out for her constitutional. I had the crate placed in the middle of the Judge’s studio. Plunging my hands in the packing straw, pulling out the Dutch floor beeswax and the Belgian chamois, I felt like the Magi, who upon finding the unexpected plumpness in the manger, were voluptuously and insatiably hungry.
The days flowed agreeably. I would wake up at eight o’clock and work in the garden until noon, when McCabe began stirring in bed and Petrona would arrive. After giving Petrona the instructions for the day, I would abandon myself to the pleasures of cleaning and polishing the Judge’s possessions until dinner. I developed a system. Mondays were for porcelain and faience; Tuesdays for furniture; Wednesdays for wooden floors, wainscoting and other woodwork details; Thursdays for clocks and assorted metal items like the Judge’s penholders and letter openers; Fridays for silverware, and Saturdays for glass. Sundays, I plotted McCabe’s death.
Three times a day I checked the hydrometer and adjusted the relative-humidity device, averting my eyes from the Annunciation icon. Now that I could, I dared not look at it directly, even less touch it. I wore around my neck the Judge’s key, discovered in his desk drawer. My mother’s key, which she had returned to the Judge before dying, was nowhere to be found.
I saw McCabe only at dinner, which Petrona served at six o’clock, before leaving. Bebe was never mentioned. It had been my therapeutic suggestion, but McCabe’s obedient silence should have been a warning to me. McCabe had recovered her natural volubility. She did not converse: she harangued. Her only subject was her own forcefulness, even when she was seemingly talking about something else. News items were her favorite self-launching pads. Half of her sentences began with a rhetorical, “Did you read about…” It didn’t matter if I had, or not. She would paraphrase the entire article, adding her own explanations and footnotes. At first I’d interrupt her with a sharp, “Yes, I read that,” even if I hadn’t. “What about this other… ?” she’d volley back. Soon I pretended ignorance about the first item proposed, to save us time. McCabe had an unnatural memory for facts, figures, and quotes, and a passionate enthusiasm for regurgitating them at dinnertime. She knew the rules and lore of all sports, including obscure ones like Zorbing. Money, celebrity gossip, horse racing, science, and security trivia were at her fingertips. But it was all about her. Paradoxically, she never talked shop. She warned me early on that her own line of work was off-limits, at the dinner table or at any other place or time. It wasn’t necessary, since art galleries, hers in particular, had on me the same vomitive effect as the defunct Macy’s fitting rooms. McCabe’s only conversational originality was her footnotes, always irrelevant to the issue, as when she linked Inuit whale hunting to America’s military decay. However dull her dinner blather, McCabe had started so low in my estimation that just finding out that she read the Times and the Journal every day from cover to cover (at least in her enforced Elmiran idleness) impressed me against my will. I realize it only now, under this dusty bed, as I try to breathe with what remains of my nose. At the time, her vitality exhausted me.