Now Lillian was intrigued. “Why’s that?”
Bertha lowered her voice. “He was known to be brutal to any workers who dared to go on strike. And get this, someone even tried to kill him. A mad Russian anarchist broke into his office, and he barely survived. He was shot and stabbed”—at this Bertha made the appropriate gestures and accompanying ghastly noises—“and yet he lived. They said it was a miracle. But that was decades ago. These days he’s better known as an art collector than a union buster.”
“What are you girls doing?”
Helen Frick stood at the end of the hallway, hands on hips, a pink flush quickly consuming her freckles.
“Sorry, Miss Helen,” said Bertha, going pale.
She’d been so friendly to Lillian, the first person to do so in some time, that Lillian hated the thought of her getting into trouble. “It’s my fault,” she said as Miss Helen approached. “I opened the door thinking it was your sitting room. Bertha was just guiding me out.”
“My sitting room is on the east side of the house. Over here.”
Bertha shot Lillian a look of thanks before scuttling past her employer. Lillian followed Miss Helen into the proper room, unnerved at how much she might have heard. The sitting room had several glass-doored bookcases and a desk angled in one corner, with a view out a window that ran almost from floor to ceiling. The morning sun poured in.
The bookcases were stuffed with the collected works of Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, George Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, and more, the handsome leather bindings gleaming in the sunlight. Above the fireplace hung another portrait of the young girl with a ruddy complexion and strawberry-blonde hair—similar to the one in Mrs. Frick’s bedroom—which Lillian was now certain had to be Miss Helen as a child.
On the far wall was a massive portrait of an intimidating older man: Mr. Henry Clay Frick, the man who built this mansion, and Helen’s father. In fact, his visage was scattered throughout the entire room. A posed photograph was propped up on a bookcase shelf; another showed him golfing. On the desk sat a smaller portrait, drawn at a slightly different angle from the larger one, framed in silver. His likeness overwhelmed the room, like a Frick-faced hall of mirrors. In the paintings, his white whiskers and thick mustache were as bright as snow, his blue eyes pale and guarded; in the sepia photographs, they turned a ghostly gray.
“Now, Miss Lilly, I have to see Mother downstairs, so I’ve left you an article on the desk about the house and my family to familiarize yourself with.”
“Yes, Miss Helen.”
She took a seat at the desk. The article had been written in 1915, a year after the house was completed. It mentioned that the Frick mansion was built on the former site of the Lenox Library, before it had been folded into the Public Library on Forty-Second Street in 1911, and how Mr. Frick had hired the architect Thomas Hastings to build a simple, conservative home for his family and artworks. Mr. Frick, it said, had strong opinions on the matter of his new mansion, and wasn’t interested in competing with his neighbors in terms of size or ostentation. Mr. Frick desired a comfortable, well-arranged house, simple, in good taste, it read. The result was a long, bungalow-like residence with a fine picture gallery, with plenty of light and air.
If this palatial manse was a bungalow, Lillian was Marie Antoinette. She stared up at the figure looming over her from the gilt-framed painting and stuck out her tongue. Mr. Frick might be worth millions and millions of dollars, but she wasn’t about to let him—or his daughter—intimidate her.
“What are you doing?”
Miss Helen had silently reappeared.
“Nothing, miss.” She pointed to the article. “Very interesting.”
“You have a funny look on your face, Miss Lilly. Is there something you’d like to share with me?”
“Not at all, Miss Helen. I’m eager to get started.”
“So am I. If I could bother you so much as to come sit at my own desk, that would be very much appreciated.”
Lillian jumped up, hating that she was allowing Miss Helen to boss her around so. She rarely had to tolerate this kind of snippy self-importance from the artists she worked for. But it was only temporary. She’d get the first month’s pay and be out of there before anyone could blink. That would show Miss Helen what it meant to abuse her employees so. Not that the woman would notice. She’d simply hire another one to take Lillian’s place.
Only a month.
Miss Helen began with the day’s correspondence. “You shall open all of my mail for me before I arrive, and lay it neatly in the center of the blotter, in order of agreeable to disagreeable. If it’s marked Personal or Confidential, open it anyway. It’s usually some salesman or social climber putting on airs to try to get my attention. Go ahead.” She handed Lillian the stack of mail and a heavy silver letter opener, which probably cost more than Lillian’s monthly rent. “Begin.”
She had just lifted the opener to the corner of the first envelope when Miss Helen gave out a loud yelp. “No! You can’t do it that way.” She snatched the envelopes back to demonstrate. “First, gather the letters, unopened, in a pile with edges even and all the addresses facing toward you. Then pound them on the desk on their left narrow sides. This means the letters have less chance of getting cut when the envelope is open. Papsie taught me that.”
It was all Lillian could do not to take the letter opener and jab it into Miss Helen’s neck. Could she last a month under this fussy tutelage?
Over the next three hours, subjects ran from the elaborate filing system for said letters, the preferred method for adding appointments into the daily calendar, and the inner workings of the accounting ledger. Miss Helen had just opened up the checkbook to show Lillian how to prepare a check for her father’s signature when a slight knock at the door interrupted them.
Mrs. Frick opened the door and stood in the entryway, one hand to her forehead. In a soft voice, she told her daughter that she couldn’t possibly make it to lunch today. “I have a terrible headache.”
“But you promised, Mother. Papsie wants us all to be together, including Miss Lilly. We can discuss his birthday dinner.”
“That’s ages away.” She nodded at Lillian and brightened. “Besides, now you have a helper, you don’t need me.”
“I have a private secretary, Mother. Not a helper.” She turned to Lillian. “This is Miss Lilly, Mother.”
Mrs. Frick gave a wincing, brief smile, as if lifting the corners of her mouth caused her pain. “Nice to see you again, Miss Lilly.”
Before Lillian could respond in kind, Miss Helen jabbered on. “The birthday dinner, Miss Lilly, is an important one with important people. We don’t entertain often, which means when we do, it’s written about in all the gossip columns. You’ll be in charge of menus, seating, all that kind of thing. I assume you’ve done that before, in your previous employment?”
Lillian gulped. “Of course. Many times. When is the dinner scheduled for?”
“The nineteenth of December.”
She would be long gone, and mentally filed it under Ignore.
As Miss Helen and her mother conversed further about the intricacies of whether Mrs. Frick ought to attend today’s lunch, Lillian studied the checkbook. On the left-hand side of each check was a drawing of a young girl in a white ruffled shirt. Miss Helen’s features were unmistakable. Even though the woman in front of Lillian had to be nearing thirty, her infantilized portrait was everywhere. No wonder she’d grown up to be such a spoiled creature.
Lillian looked at Miss Helen, studying her, then back down at the drawing.
“What?” Miss Helen’s tone was sharp.
“Sorry. I was noticing your likeness to the girl on the checkbook. Such a beautiful child.” A little false flattery couldn’t hurt. “Your father must enjoy seeing your image very much.”