dropping.
“I have no high hopes of filling in my family tree all the way back to the Magna Carta,” Irene admitted as we stood outside 120 West 35th in what Irene had assured me was the “fashionable”Murray Hill district. “But I do have expectations of being entertained, at the least. Come. We are expected for tea.”
It struck me that only Americans would begin the pursuit of a person’s probably scandalous origins over a civilized serving of tea.
The house required us to mount enough stairs to add up to a year, had they been months. Nothing much distinguished this entry, façade, or block of buildings from many others that crowded the walks bracketing New York’s cobblestoned streets.
The building stone was dark, not from London’s numerous coal-smoke-laden fogs, but due to its very nature. Brownstone, it was called, and it managed to cast a pall on the day without a bit of English fog in the offing.
The entry was narrow and the door was opened by the former associate we had known only as “Pink,” an American prostitute in Paris, until her true self had come to light: Nellie Bly, another false persona.
Now we met the girl’s no doubt much-put-upon mother, a woman past sixty with her daughter’s handsomely regular features. Her iron-gray hair was parted in the middle as in the days of her youth, and she seemed a comfortable sort of person and most cheery.
I must admit that I hoped that such a cozy maternal figure would suit admirably for Irene’s lost mother, or for my own dead one.
“Do come in,” Mrs. Cochrane urged. “I seldom meet my daughter’s associates. And all the way from England.”
“Paris,” I corrected.
“As high a star over my existence as London, my dear. I am a homebody,” said this disinherited widow of a judge, a woman who had subsequently married a monster. I recalled Pink’s stories of her stepfather, Jack Ford, breaking the furniture and ruining the laundry simply to make this mother and her children work harder, so he could undo their efforts all over again.
“Miss Huxleigh,” she murmured at our introduction. “You do not seem much older than my little Pink . . . nor does Mrs. Norton, yet you are both grand ladies.”
“Not I! I am as . . . simple as scones.”
“Scones?”
“A Scottish delicacy,” Irene explained. “Something like a rather tasteless cookie.”
By then we had been ushered into a small but well-accoutered parlor, numerous ferns filtering the daylight beyond the bow window.
“My daughter says that you ladies took her under your wings when she was abroad on newspaper business.”
Irene and I accepted our teacups from the woman’s hand, so wrinkled and pale she might have been wearing lace gloves.
( I saw all the ironing turned out on the floor, trampled by muddy boots. “Now, do it again!” the ogre thundered. So came heated irons and the re-pressing of every little pleat, sweat and tendrils braiding down a forehead. I recalled the sweatshop poem called “The Song of the Shirt.” )
Something made me glance to the archway. Pink stood there making a picture in a frame, wearing a pale summer plaid gown of pink and lavender organdy. She was neat and wasp-waisted, a slip of girl who looked as if she’d never heard of madhouses or sweatshops or most especially brothels.
“How charmingly you are dressed,” I couldn’t help remarking. I glanced to her beaming mother. “Is that how she earned her childhood nickname? The color pink truly becomes her hazel eyes and brown hair.”
Pink flushed at my question, only intensifying the effect I had remarked upon.
“All the other little girls wore dull black stockings and brown calico,” Mrs. Cochrane said. “I put Pink in white stockings and starched pink dresses. She was as cute as a button and quite the little attention-getter even then.”
Pink’s face was now scarlet under a hat of lilac straw festooned with rose satin ribbon.
“Are you ready for our afternoon expedition?” she
“I have no high hopes of filling in my family tree all the way back to the Magna Carta,” Irene admitted as we stood outside 120 West 35th in what Irene had assured me was the “fashionable”Murray Hill district. “But I do have expectations of being entertained, at the least. Come. We are expected for tea.”
It struck me that only Americans would begin the pursuit of a person’s probably scandalous origins over a civilized serving of tea.
The house required us to mount enough stairs to add up to a year, had they been months. Nothing much distinguished this entry, façade, or block of buildings from many others that crowded the walks bracketing New York’s cobblestoned streets.
The building stone was dark, not from London’s numerous coal-smoke-laden fogs, but due to its very nature. Brownstone, it was called, and it managed to cast a pall on the day without a bit of English fog in the offing.
The entry was narrow and the door was opened by the former associate we had known only as “Pink,” an American prostitute in Paris, until her true self had come to light: Nellie Bly, another false persona.
Now we met the girl’s no doubt much-put-upon mother, a woman past sixty with her daughter’s handsomely regular features. Her iron-gray hair was parted in the middle as in the days of her youth, and she seemed a comfortable sort of person and most cheery.
I must admit that I hoped that such a cozy maternal figure would suit admirably for Irene’s lost mother, or for my own dead one.
“Do come in,” Mrs. Cochrane urged. “I seldom meet my daughter’s associates. And all the way from England.”
“Paris,” I corrected.
“As high a star over my existence as London, my dear. I am a homebody,” said this disinherited widow of a judge, a woman who had subsequently married a monster. I recalled Pink’s stories of her stepfather, Jack Ford, breaking the furniture and ruining the laundry simply to make this mother and her children work harder, so he could undo their efforts all over again.
“Miss Huxleigh,” she murmured at our introduction. “You do not seem much older than my little Pink . . . nor does Mrs. Norton, yet you are both grand ladies.”
“Not I! I am as . . . simple as scones.”
“Scones?”
“A Scottish delicacy,” Irene explained. “Something like a rather tasteless cookie.”
By then we had been ushered into a small but well-accoutered parlor, numerous ferns filtering the daylight beyond the bow window.
“My daughter says that you ladies took her under your wings when she was abroad on newspaper business.”
Irene and I accepted our teacups from the woman’s hand, so wrinkled and pale she might have been wearing lace gloves.
( I saw all the ironing turned out on the floor, trampled by muddy boots. “Now, do it again!” the ogre thundered. So came heated irons and the re-pressing of every little pleat, sweat and tendrils braiding down a forehead. I recalled the sweatshop poem called “The Song of the Shirt.” )
Something made me glance to the archway. Pink stood there making a picture in a frame, wearing a pale summer plaid gown of pink and lavender organdy. She was neat and wasp-waisted, a slip of girl who looked as if she’d never heard of madhouses or sweatshops or most especially brothels.
“How charmingly you are dressed,” I couldn’t help remarking. I glanced to her beaming mother. “Is that how she earned her childhood nickname? The color pink truly becomes her hazel eyes and brown hair.”
Pink flushed at my question, only intensifying the effect I had remarked upon.
“All the other little girls wore dull black stockings and brown calico,” Mrs. Cochrane said. “I put Pink in white stockings and starched pink dresses. She was as cute as a button and quite the little attention-getter even then.”
Pink’s face was now scarlet under a hat of lilac straw festooned with rose satin ribbon.
“Are you ready for our afternoon expedition?” she
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