The Education of Bet (3 page)

"Perhaps," I said, feeling the smile stretch across my face, "there is a way we can help one another out."

Will called me Bet because when we first met he hadn't been able to say Elizabeth. For my part, I could not say Will and called him Ill instead, but whereas he was allowed to keep his nickname for me, I was hastily dissuaded from using mine for him.

We set eyes on each other for the first time when we were four years old, even though we had lived under the same roof since we were born, Will screaming his way into the world just a month before me.

I had no memory of Will's parents, but I had seen paintings of them in Paul Gardener's home.

Will's father, Frederick Gardener, had been that most masculine of clichés, tall, dark, and handsome, like his only son, and he had made his personal fortune in the import-export business. His wife, Victoria, was also tall, but there all physical similarities between husband and wife ended. In her portrait, Will's mother had hair the color of honey shot with gold, and eyes that looked as though the artist had borrowed parts of a summer sky to re-create them. And where Frederick looked as though he was at least trying to maintain some appearance of seriousness, Victoria had a smile that was broad, open, and generous.

Occasionally, Will would talk about that earlier house we'd both lived in: what ways it was the same, what ways different from the house we later lived in with Paul Gardener. But his reminiscences—of croquet mallets strewn across the lawn, of a nursery crammed full of decorations and toys, not to mention of the kind nanny that went with it all—were for me like hearing about a country I had never traveled to. For myself, I remembered with clarity only one small part of that house, and that a part that Will had never seen. I had also been in Frederick Gardener's study and one other part of the house, or so I'd been told of the latter—the wide foyer on the one and only occasion I crossed the threshold of that house—but I was exiting rather than entering, leaving that house for the last time, my face pressed into the shoulder of the person carrying me, and so I had no memory of what I was leaving behind me.

Will's father had been a handsome and successful businessman, his mother a beautiful society matron who could afford to choose whether to be kind or not. Who had been my mother?

Why, she had been the maid, of course.

My father? I had no idea. Nor was there anyone left alive who could tell me.

In all my memories of my mother—and I am sorry to say there are not many, and there are fewer and fewer as the years move on—she is impossibly young. Becky Smith was pretty in a way that was wholly different from Victoria Gardener's expensive beauty. My mother was tiny and dark—I can only assume I inherited my great height from my father—and she was always busy, busy, doing whatever was required of her to help the household run smoothly. I would glimpse her briefly in the still-dark early hours of the morning when she rose from our shared bed to start her day, and at the end of that long day when she fell back into bed, exhausted. Occasionally, if she could steal a few minutes, she would visit me in between. The rest of the time, particularly when I was very small, other servants took turns attending to my various needs.

I understood, from having overheard the conversations of others, that when my mother "got herself into trouble," as the saying goes, there had been some talk of putting her out on the street. It would have been the usual thing for a family like the Gardeners to do. What use was a maid who suffered bouts of morning sickness? Why should a respectable household even consider keeping on a maid who had been foolish enough to get herself in the family way with no husband in sight? It would be unseemly. It was unheard-of.

And yet, to Victoria Gardener at least, it was not unheard-of. Perhaps her own condition, being with child, made her more sensitive to her maid's? Perhaps that made her more empathetic than other women of her position in society would have been, and she could imagine how frightening it would be to be pregnant and alone and suddenly find oneself put out on the street with no hope of a better prospect? Whatever her reasoning, she made the kindly decision, prevailing upon her husband to go along with it, to let the maid stay. So long as Becky Smith kept her baby confined to the servants' quarters at the top of the house, so long as the household itself was not disturbed in any discernible way, Will and I were to be allowed to grow up under the same roof.

Later on, when I learned what had happened, it was odd to think of Will and me living our early years in the same house, never seeing each other, our experiences of that house so vastly different. Will told me later that he had been happy back then, and I believed him. For myself, my few memories indicated that I had been happy too. There was food to eat, a place to sleep, I was cared for when people had the time—what other life had I ever known?

And then the typhoid came.

***

Typhoid is a fever contracted from consuming food or water that has been colonized by bacteria. I knew this from reading I'd done on the subject when I was old enough to become curious.

Typhoid causes a very high and sustained fever, an enormous amount of sweating, stomach disturbances, and diarrhea. The progression of the disease is typically four weeks, the four different stages of it distinguishing each week.

In the first week, the patient experiences a steadily increasing temperature, general tiredness, persistent headache and cough. There may be hemorrhaging from the nose, and even the eyes, and many experience abdominal pain.

During the second week, the fever elevates to a level of approximately 104 degrees Fahrenheit and remains there for quite some time. Delirium is frequent at this stage, and the patient sometimes becomes quite agitated. In approximately one-third of patients, rose-colored spots appear on the lower chest and abdomen. Labored sounds can be heard from the lungs and abdomen, the latter becoming distended and painful. The spleen and liver also become enlarged, and the diarrhea can be green and awful.

Over the course of the third week of illness, a number of complications may set in: intestinal hemorrhage, intestinal perforation, encephalitis or acute inflammation of the brain, abscesses.

In the fourth and final week, the fever remains very high, extreme dehydration occurs, and the patient becomes almost constantly delirious.

Sometimes, somewhere during all that misery, the patient dies.

Not always, but often enough.

I could talk about typhoid only in a medical-textbook sort of way, as I have done here, for to do any differently would mean dwelling on memories that were too painful to think of.

***

The typhoid took Will's parents.

The typhoid took my mother.

In the beginning, I did not understand what was happening to her. Well, in truth, for the entire month that followed, I did not understand. All I knew was that my mother, with her special sunny smile that she reserved for me, was no longer waking in the still-dark hours of the morning to start her workday. In fact, she could not even get out of bed.

The other servants tried to keep me from her—whether because they did not want me to see her in such a state or because they feared I would get the illness as well, I could not say. She was kept quarantined, as Will's parents were quarantined in their own far more spacious section of the house. I was ordered to sleep with one of the other servants.

But I would sneak out in the middle of the night when everyone else was sleeping to visit her.

Sometimes, seeing her in her delirium, I did not even recognize her
as
my mother. I did not understand half of what she said. But I could yet remember what her smile looked like, what it felt like to have her hand touch my cheek, and so I would crawl into bed beside her, my body clinging to her feverish one.

We were like that one night when her breathing labored once more, then slowed, then stopped, and I felt that seemingly eternal fever finally leave her as the cold settled into her body.

They told me later that when they found us in the morning, my small arms were gripped around her stiff neck so tightly, they had to pry me from her.

***

On the face of things, there were some startling coincidences between my life and Will's: the way his parents and my mother had died, our close birthdays, even the way we looked. Paul Gardener liked to say that there were no accidents in life, that everything happened out of choice or through design, that everything happened for a reason. But from where I sat, so much of life did seem accidental, haphazard. How else to explain why one person lived while another died? How else to explain why one was born a boy, one a girl, one into the upper class, one into a substantially lower social stratum, the fortunes and futures of both dictated wholly by things over which they had no control? If there was any choice or design in that, I couldn't see it.

After the deaths of Frederick and Victoria Gardener, it was decided that Will would go live with his great-uncle, Paul Gardener. It was not just because he was the only relative remaining who shared Will's last name, but also because all of Victoria's relatives taken together could not come close to Paul Gardener's wealth. He had the best kind of fortune: a family fortune.

When Paul Gardener, not yet an old man, came to collect his charge and settle affairs at the house, which was to be sold, he took some time to talk to the staff. They needed letters of recommendation, as they now had to seek new employment. Will was present at the time, and he told me later about the exchange that transpired between his great-uncle and one of the servants.

Paul Gardener was in his nephew Frederick's study, going through the dead man's bills, when a servant came in bearing tea on a tray.

"I hope you will be able to find a suitable placement," he said, addressing the servant with kindness. "I would gladly give all of you positions in my own home, but I fear the old place is already overstaffed as it is."

"Thank you, sir. I'll manage."

"My nephew and his wife—they were the only ones unfortunate enough to succumb to the typhoid?"

"Oh, no, sir. One other died as well." When Will would tell this part of the story, I always pictured the servant shrugging as he said what came next, as though the other life lost was of little matter. "It was just one of the maids."

"I see. That is hard. And it must be very hard on the poor maid's remaining family."

"Oh, but she had none. Unless of course you include her daughter."

"A daughter!"

"Yes, sir. An orphan now, though, since she is no longer anyone's daughter."

"What has been done with her?"

"Oh, she is still here. Well, but not for long. The proper authorities—"

"Bring her to me," he commanded.

A moment later, I entered Paul Gardener's life; I, with my downturned eyes and my old brown dress. Out of the corner of one of those downturned eyes, I glimpsed a boy, the first I'd seen outside of pictures in the books my mother had occasionally borrowed from the Gardeners' vast library. The boy was about my age, I thought, and wearing knee pants.

At that time, Paul Gardener was clear-sighted and vigorous, nothing like the man he would be twelve years later.

He came down to my height, bending on one knee with ease and not exhibiting any of the creakiness that would plague him later in life. He reached out his hand to me slowly, as though trying not to startle a skittish animal, and with gentle fingers raised my chin so that we were eye to eye.

"What is your name, child?"

"It is Elizabeth, sir."

"Elizabeth," he said softly. "A fine name. Perhaps someone fancied that one day you would be a queen." He paused. "Do you know what is to be done with you, Elizabeth, now that your mother is ... no longer here?"

I met his steady gaze. My mother had taught me to use precision when answering adults, and I sought to do so now. "They say I am to go to an orphanage, sir."

"An orphanage!" He barked a laugh but it did not sound to me as though he was genuinely amused. "The workhouse, more like."

I did not know to what he was referring, but from his expression I guessed it was no place I would ever want to go.

"Tell me, Elizabeth," he said, his voice gentle once again. "If I gave you a choice between going to this ...
orphanage
place or coming back with me and the boy to live in my house, which would you choose?"

I bit my lip. I was not used to choosing anything for myself. I thought about the fact that the orphanage—or workhouse, as he called it—was a complete unknown to me while this man seemed kind, and the boy looked like he had the potential to be ... interesting.

Despite my mother's advice to always speak precisely, I still had trouble with my w's, so when I spoke, my words came out: "I 'ill go with you, sir."

Paul Gardener laughed. "I can see you have a bit of trouble pronouncing some of your letters." He looked at the boy with a twinkle in his eye, but when he next spoke, his words carried a jolly teasing in them and not a cruel one. "She has difficulty with w's, while you have trouble with words of too many syllables. But already, boy, she speaks better than you."

It was then—as I realized for the first time that I would never see my mother's face again, would soon leave behind the only home I had ever known, and for what, I did not know—that I started to cry. I don't think I had fully understood until that moment that my entire world had changed in irreversible ways. The shock of it filled me with sadness and fear like nothing I had ever experienced.