The Eleventh Year (2 page)

E
mily was always perfect
. As a child, Lesley could remember her older sister's pink and white beauty, the ribbons in her blond hair that gently curled, that never rebelled. Em the Gem. The wide town house near Central Park held an entire suite of rooms for the two of them, Em the Gem and Les the Mess, and their Swiss governess, Mademoiselle Blanchard. Zelle. Zelle would irritate Lesley so, with her dry accent, with the tuft of hair sprouting from the mole on her chin, with her dull chignon. But Emily, three years her senior, never seemed to mind. Holding hands, Lesley and her sister would take their daily walk in the park, while Zelle pointed out a flower by its generic name, or explained a rock formation. Lesley never listened to the dry dull voice, but Em did. Lesley knew she did. Em never faulted anyone for being boring, because she had been born that way herself. Poor old Em the Gem. It wasn't always fun being the little golden princess, the one who bobbed the perfect curtsey to Daddy's clients and Mama's august relatives from England.

Lesley loved New York City with its wide avenues, its marble houses. Fifth Avenue was where they lived, behind elegant iron grilled windows. Slowly during Lesley's childhood the carriages and prancing horses had begun to make way for the automobile, and the pretty ladies who drove by no longer warmed their feet under quilted blankets but wore goggles beneath wide-brimmed hats tied down by chiffon scarves. A new era. Daddy owned several wonderful machines, as Mama's relatives in Great Britain called them. At first he had had them shipped from Europe. Then she could recall the large Packard—with twelve horsepower!—and its high steering wheel and deep leather seats. Some time later he had bought Mama a tiny motor car, what she had called a “horseless carriage”: the Kiblinger Model N. Such odd, coded names. A delicate covered wagon on four frail wheels, with a tooter that resembled a French horn in an orchestra. Lesley had wondered where all the horses had gone and missed them. Later she would be taught to ride and to jump hurdles, but very young she had already liked to draw the horses in the park, with their flowing manes and dainty legs. Les the Mess, because there was always a paint spot on her clothes. Zelle didn't understand.

It wasn't that Lesley disliked Emily, it was simply that they were too different to understand each other. Later Lesley would ascribe that essential difference to the two sides of their family: the English and the Irish. Em was like their English mother, blond and white and porcelain pink, thin and tall and therefore pretty; Lesley didn't wonder whether or not she was pretty too, with her red hair and green eyes. She was the different one, the one who was always asking “Why?” while Emily did what she was told. About her coloring, her father used to say: “It's the Irish in you,” although Lesley hadn't known what he meant. For after all, Daddy had been born in Chicago, and that was part of the United States. Mama had been born in England, spoke with a crisp accent like a new dollar bill, and that made her a foreigner.

Lady Priscilla Aymes had come to New York for a visit and had met the eager young advertising executive who had made her want to stay. Priscilla was the daughter of Lord Arthur Stephen Aymes, Earl of Brighton, a noted peer. Edward Franklin Richardson was the son of an Irish meatpacker from Chicago, who had come to New York with ideas for promoting products. In those days at the end of the nineteenth century, advertising agencies had been very crude shops that printed simple pictures with simple slogans. Ned Richardson had begun by selling his ideas, by placing better pictures with more clever slogans and charging the merchant company bargain prices. Now he was chairman of the agency he had founded, Richardson and Associates, and he was a legend in New York, like his competitors, J. Walter Thompson and Roy Durstine. Lesley thought he was handsome, with his reddish-brown hair and his rich brown eyes, and with the dimple in his chin—a burst of color. When he had married Lady Priscilla, society had ceased to consider him merely as a creative young genius on the rise. He had become a man never again to be discounted. People had forgotten his plebeian origins and had even been willing to overlook his Catholicism. He and his bride had built the white marble mansion on Fifth Avenue, and he had revolutionized the concept of advertising. Em had been born in ‘95 and Lesley in ‘98; and Em was a miniature Priscilla, picture perfect, whereas she, Lesley, was like Ned Richardson. The Irish side. Later she would learn that the English had never been able to understand the Irish, nor the Irish the English, and then she would accept the differences between her own nature and that of the cool, diplomatic, calm Emily.

After a while Zelle had become more of a companion and chaperone, less of a governess, and the girls had gone to the Clara B. Spence School. It was small and exclusive. The girls wore uniforms and came in chauffeured motorcars, such as the turquoise-canopied Pierce-Arrow that drove Lesley and Emily uptown. Emily was good at everything and wrote essays in her lovely script that brought praise from Miss Spence herself. Lesley's essays brought questions. Where was the girl getting her bold opinions, on labor unions and the rights of women? But Lesley wasn't really a rebel. She was quiet enough, and ladylike, and had many friends. It was simply that she felt the world around her more deeply. She read the newspapers and wondered—about the miners in Pennsylvania, about the Hungarian illiterates, about the rising tide of bad feeling among the countries of Europe. “That's because you haven't forgotten where you came from, lass,” her grandfather Sean from Chicago had told her. After that she hadn't seen her grandfather and grandmother much at all—and then they'd died, and she hadn't even been told about the funerals. That was certainly strange, considering Daddy's friendship with the monsignors in Boston and New York. For Daddy was still a Catholic, and although Lady Priscilla didn't go with him, being herself a member of the Church of England, he attended mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral whenever he could. The girls went along, and nothing was ever stated about Mama's absence. “Whenever he could” might be twice a month, or it might only be on Christmas Eve and for Easter—but Daddy would go, the blond sylph that was Em on his right, the smaller, pert Lesley on his left, holding his hand. And the elegant ladies would raise their gloved hands to him and the men would incline their heads. People always noticed Daddy wherever he went, and sometimes the monsignor would come to the marble house for a reception, in his special, festive robes. Daddy wasn't ashamed to be a Catholic. But he'd gone alone to his parents' funerals, and the newspapers hadn't carried the obituaries, and the Society sections hadn't printed a photograph of Daddy at the cemetery. Yet when Lady Priscilla's mother had died in her country estate in Yorkshire during Lesley's third year of high school, black had been hung from the windows of the marble house on Fifth Avenue.

Growing up. Emily Jane, well trained like a racehorse. A glowing debut in New York, another in Washington, D.C. Graduation from Spence. Lesley, at fifteen, had wondered what her sister would do. But Emily was sensible—another good, healthy trait. Emily had met a young stockbroker in Newport, Rhode Island, and George Brandhurst had proposed marriage to her in the magnificent drawing room of the marble mansion, all decorated in blues and grays and delicate Louis XVI furnishings. Lesley had seen the two young people from the hallway. George had wanted to take Em in his arms, but she had resisted—“Now
really,
darling . . .”—interposing her white hands between him and her and laughing that rather high, shrill, quick laugh of hers, so like a filly's whinny. George, poor George, had shrugged and accepted instead Em's long, strong fingers, with the large platinum ring, its emerald-cut diamond sparkling like the embers in the fireplace. Lesley had felt—she didn't know why—that somehow George had been cheated. But George had married Emily, and Lesley had been her maid of honor, and the couple had gone to England for their honeymoon, to visit their widowed grandfather, Lord Brighton, who would arrange for a presentation at Court. On their return Daddy and George's father had set up the young couple in a smaller version of the Richardson mansion, only this one was of fine red brick, with grillwork. Lesley hated it. Lady Priscilla gave Em some of her august family's bone china, and Lesley hated that too.

At some point Lesley had decided that she wanted to take hold of her own life as she would the reins on a headstrong thoroughbred. She couldn't recall when the vague ideas, more like auras and colors, took root in her conscious mind. Perhaps they had always existed, lying in wait, fallow during childhood. She read a lot, but mostly she was a visual person. She loved the outdoors, the seaside resorts where they vacationed, Long Island Sound. She liked the oranges and golds and purples of the sunsets. God was not the Host but the rays of an early-morning dawn, spreading coldly over green lawns. He breathed life into the lonely moorhens searching for breakfast in the tall reeds. God was in the animals and in the wildflowers. Lesley sketched and painted and took long walks. And she watched and listened.

Daddy spoke of business. His marvelous laughter was a sensuous delight, full-powered and rich. He would sometimes take her to lunch when she had a school holiday. She would meet him at the office, she in her trim little good-girl outfit picked out by Zelle, he dressed in a well-cut suit of flamboyant tones and the office all desk and glass and charts and posters. She would look through
Harpers Bazaar
while she heard him giving specific instructions to his assistants as to the copy of a certain advertisement: Bruce's Peppermints, which were to emphasize their medicinal value, as opposed to Caraway's after-dinner mints, which were to capture the essence of a fine cognac. “And don't forget the key thrust of our business: You sell them on the single differentiating point, John. Don't hit them over the head with all the marvels of our product—one will do, thank you, if that's what makes it unique. We want to be
recognized.”

Yes, Lesley thought, I too want to be recognized. And she said to her father: “Women are more intelligent than men, if they use their brains. I'm going to be a suffragette.” And then, calmly, she bit into her pineapple salad. He stared at her and then shook his head, and laughed—but he wasn't angry, and he didn't disagree. “I don't want to have children,” she then declared. “I'd like to travel through Europe and visit the museums, and really learn how to paint.”

“You're not strong enough for that kind of life,” he replied seriously. “You need an inner core of survival that you don't have, Lesley. Maybe I should have seen that you got it. I had it, God knows, and your grandparents on my side had it too. As for your mother, she can survive any storm. And Em will go along with the crowd, so she'll be all right. But you—you're the mystery among us, girl. There's something there, a particular need, that isn't going to let you alone. You want—I don't know—you want a
connection.”

“We all want a connection, Daddy. That's simply being human.”

Ned Richardson smiled. “Then you're too human to be a barren woman. Maybe that's why I see you surrounded by little children.”

Lesley's eyes filled with tears. “I'm disappointed in how poorly you know me,” she stated.

“Time will tell. Time alone will tell.”

She would never forget that conversation at the Waldorf-Astoria. She had thought her father a religious old fool and herself invincible and modern and brave. She was sixteen and it was the year the war had started in Europe.

Later that fall she told her father that she had thought things through and that she wanted to go to college. Em was expecting her first child, and the house was in an uproar, maids running in and out with baskets of infant linens and elegant maternity clothing. Her mother and sister had been on a shopping spree. “I don't want my daughter to be a schoolteacher,” the Lady Priscilla said. Coolly, in the midst of all the confusion.

“I don't know what I want to be. Probably a painter, or a sculptress.”

“Oh, Lesley.”

“Higher education is very much in fashion,” the pregnant Em said, falling back against lace pillows. “You can meet fine fellows there, Mama. Yalies. Mmmmm. . . .”

“Emily. Georgie went to Harvard.” Mothers always remembered.

“Yes. I forgot.” Stifling a yawn.

“You don't really love him, do you?” Lesley cut in. Her tone of voice was anything but hostile—it was simply curious, as if suddenly she had realized something of import. “Why'd you marry him, Em?”

Emily smiled. “We were suited to each other. And of course I love him, Les. It isn't like Romeo and Juliet, but then neither are we. We're grown-up, sensible people.”

Something rebelled inside Lesley, something turned over. She could feel the tightness in her throat. Her father said, saving her: “So. You want to go to college. I don't think that's at all a bad idea. What does Miss Spence think?”

“She agrees with my choice: Vassar.”

“So you've already decided?”

“Yes.” Lesley waited quietly, her hands folded in her lap. She wasn't so sure of him anymore, not since that discussion about her need to “connect.” She wasn't sure of him, and she didn't really know what her mother thought. Nobody ever knew, for sure. The Lady Priscilla seemed conventional enough, but in her day she'd done a most unusual thing: She'd married an American of dubious family and the Catholic faith. That was why Lesley, although she didn't want Mama for a friend, still felt, at odd moments, a kind of bond—tenuous at best, but nonetheless existent.

“Well, then,” Ned said brightly, “there's no more to be discussed.” And he watched as the muscles in Lesley's arms relaxed, as the scene shifted once again to the boxes of eyelet lace and trimmings that had been set down at his wife's feet. Lesley turned around, very quietly, and left the room. She didn't belong there anymore, not anymore.