A-Splendid-Ruin(8)

Then one day, I’d lost my temper over something small—I don’t remember now what it was—and kicked the table, which rocked so the Centennial candy jar fell to the ground and shattered, and I began to cry. To think of it now, my mother’s horror at my misery, the things I said . . . “Why must we live like this if he’s so rich? Why doesn’t he come for us? Why does he want us to be poor?”

I was young; it embarrasses me now to think of it. It embarrasses me to think of the look in Mama’s eyes—though what did she imagine, when she planted in my head such stories of riches and what my life should have been and would one day be?

As I raged, she tugged one of my drawings from the wall and turned it over, then shoved it into my hands. “What would you rather our rooms looked like? Draw them for me, May. Show me what you dream about.”

That was how it started. My railing at circumstance transformed my world, if only on paper. There, I drew a fantasy for us both, rooms to escape the cheap meanness of our lives, safe harbors of beauty and peace, the places Mama told me I belonged. Her hopes for my life—wealth, comfort, society, with nothing to do but spend my hours going to balls and suppers and making my home beautiful—became my own. Those scrap pages gave way to sketchbooks, bought with hoarded pennies for my birthday, for Christmas, and then one day, a leather case with my initials stamped into the corner in gold leaf. I slipped each new sketchbook into it. I don’t know how Mama afforded it, and she only smiled when I asked her and told me it was a reminder that these designs belonged to me. “Be sure to sign each drawing, May. They are so beautiful you must claim them as your own.”

I’d taken such pride in her delighted joy when one of my ballrooms made her smile. “It makes me think of a moonlit night.” Or an orangery brought a sigh. “One can imagine falling in love here.” I drew rooms to please her, to elicit that faraway look when I knew she was thinking of my father, hoping always that she might reveal some snippet, some clue, and whenever she did—“He would love this bedroom, May”—I’d go over every detail of the drawing as if I could somehow divine what it was he would have loved, what of him I had captured, what of him was in me, that I could access this part of him so unknowingly. She revealed nothing of him, and yet, my anger with him faded a bit with every room she told me he would like.

Those hours with Mama were our best, and now the memory brought a tightness of grief that almost made me put the sketchbook down again. But no, she would be so disappointed if I let sorrow and loneliness triumph over the joy I took in this.

I crawled back into bed and opened the sketchbook to the most recent page, which I’d drawn on the train, and lost myself in the decorations, which were beautiful and harmonious, and had no clashing colors, designs, or patterns, no surfaces so crowded with ostentatious demonstrations of wealth that taste had played no part in their selection. It was a relief to draw a room where china cupids did not form a celestial army that kept one awake in fear of being battered by tiny wings.

There was a light tapping on my door, and I remembered last night with a mix of dismay and anticipation. But this time, it was not Aunt Florence who cracked open my door, but Goldie. She peeked around the edge. “You’re awake? What are you doing? Reading? Is it a novel?”

“No, it’s nothing. A sketchbook.” I tried to put it aside.

“You can draw?”

“A bit.”

“You must let me see.”

She was so insistent that I put the book into her hands. Only Mama had ever seen my drawings, and I couldn’t deny that I hungered for a compliment from my cousin and hoped that my mother’s were not just out of fondness. And perhaps too, I hoped that Goldie might become the admirer, the friend, my mother had been.

Goldie leafed through the pages rapidly at first—no, too quickly, she was hardly looking—but then she slowed, suddenly attentive, and I felt a tense little anticipation.

She stilled. “They’re all rooms.”

Patience, I counseled myself. “Yes. I’ve always drawn them. When I was young, Mama thought it would—”

I’d meant to tell her the story, but I stopped at the look on her face, a careful consideration that changed to something I couldn’t define. “Why, these are perfect!”

“Perfect? Thank you, but I—”

“But I’ve never heard of a woman interior architect.”

She’d put a name to what I’d been doing with my drawings. Something I’d never thought about. That’s what it was called. Interior architect. It had an interesting sound, even alluring, but her skepticism at the word woman dampened my pleasure at her praise. I reached for the sketchbook. “It’s hardly as if I’m planning to be one.”

Goldie held the sketchbook beyond my reach. “No, of course you aren’t. That would be absurd.” She flipped to a sketch of a library with arched ceilings and a squared pillar in the center with desks positioned all around it. “You could put in a few statues.”

“The books are the decoration. Imagine their colors. Calfskin bindings and morocco and gold-leaf—”

“All with uncut pages, no doubt. What’s the point of a book if no one reads it? Are there any paper covers on those shelves?” Goldie handed it back. “You need a new case too, one with a better leather. Look, all the gold is flaking off. Anyway, I’ve come to tell you to get dressed. We’re going shopping.”