As Bright as Heaven(84)
Here again she knows without my saying it what burdens me just as much as not being sure if I’m in love with Palmer. What would my marrying and moving away mean for Alex? Can I take Alex away from his home here? Should I?
“Palmer says we can bring him with us. We can raise him as our own, alongside our own children.”
Evie closes her eyes for a moment, her hand motionless atop the tea tin. She is imagining what I have been picturing in my head the last half hour. Alex leaving this house with me. Alex saying good-bye to her and Papa and Willa. And for whose ultimate good? Mine or his?
“I don’t know what to do,” I say. “I can’t imagine leaving Alex, and I can’t imagine taking him from Papa. And you and Willa. I don’t know what to do!”
Evie exhales deeply as she opens the tin. “Don’t you?” she asks gently.
“No! I don’t. I think I love Palmer. But I’m not sure. Shouldn’t I be sure? I don’t even know what this kind of love between a man and woman is supposed to be like.”
And there it is. This is what is perplexing me and tying my stomach into knots. The only love I had ever had for a man is the old one that belonged to Jamie Sutcliff, someone I barely know and whom I haven’t seen or heard from in six years. In the first week after meeting Palmer, I’d spent more time with him than I had with Jamie Sutcliff in all the years I’d known him. And yet a buried part of me still yearns for Jamie.
“I don’t know what this kind of love is supposed to be like,” I say again, more to myself than to Evie.
My sister opens Mama’s tea infuser in the shape of a cat and plunges it into the tea leaves.
“Yes, you do,” she says, practically whispering.
I just stare at her.
Evie withdraws the infuser, fat with leaves, and clasps it shut. She stares at it for a second and then turns to me. “I think you do. I think we both do.”
I open my mouth to ask her how she can know that, but Papa and Alex are suddenly there, having come into the kitchen so that Papa can make them both hot cocoa.
I wait for another chance to speak with Evie alone, but it doesn’t present itself before she excuses herself and goes to bed.
Later, when I have tucked Alex into his bed, the light in her room is off and all is quiet behind the door.
I head to my own room with her earlier words swirling about in my head, challenging me to believe they are true.
CHAPTER 54
Evelyn
The front parlor in this house is the finest room I’ve ever seen. The furniture is upholstered in expensive velvet brocade with satin trim, the wool rugs are Persian, the woodwork gleams, and the crystal chandelier above my head sparkles like it is made of starlight. Fresh flowers in Oriental vases grace every table even though it is October. The teacup in my hand is delicate bone china with gold filigree.
Agnes Prinsen, Ursula’s employer, sits across from me, silver-haired and plump. The young maid who brought in the tea stands just to my left, her demeanor shy and hesitant. Matilda did not know she’d be asked to stay after she’d delivered the tray and I can see she very much wishes to be dismissed back to the kitchen.
But I’ve come to the Prinsen home for help with my patient. At Dr. Bellfield’s direction, I’ve spoken with Ursula several times but have been unable to break through her armor. I’ve also had no luck in finding any of her extended family to help me piece together her history. I’ve searched all the school records and orphanages in Philadelphia for traces of Ursula’s life before she became a maid for the Prinsen household but have found nothing. Ursula seems to be a young woman with no past, but I know that is impossible. Everyone has a past, and everyone’s past matters. When I asked Dr. Bellfield if I might be allowed to go to the home where Ursula had been a maid to speak with those she’d worked with, he’d at first balked. He had never troubled himself to go to a patient’s place of employment for insights the family could not supply.
“You’re too impatient, Miss Bright,” he’d said. “If you just continue your sessions with Ursula, I am sure in time she will reveal to you why she wanted to end her life.”
“But if we could understand the reason why now, we could help her now,” I’d replied. “She just stares out the window, surely trying to think up a new way to kill herself. What if she’d confided in one of the other maids? What if she had told one of them why she is so sad? If I knew what it was, I could help ease her past this heartache without her having to be the one to reveal its source.”
“Sometimes it is part of the patient’s recovery to be the one to reveal the source of her anguish,” he’d replied.
“And the other times?” I had asked. “What about those other times?”
He was silent for a moment as he pondered this. Then he gave me his permission.
Agnes and Walter Prinsen, who’d made their fortune in the furniture business, were only too happy to allow me to speak to their other maid, Matilda, especially since they had little information regarding Ursula themselves. Agnes Prinsen had hired Ursula without references after they had met on the street. Ursula was selling sweets from a trolley and Agnes had taken pity on her and had bought some. They talked and Agnes soon found out the girl was an orphan sleeping on the floor of an overcrowded row house. Moved by compassion, Agnes had offered her a job as a kitchen maid and a place to live. She had not probed for more personal information because Ursula seemed guarded, as though she was hiding from someone. The Prinsens’ cook had had minimal personal conversation with Ursula in the year she was there, and the housekeeper had had none. But Matilda, the upstairs maid who made the beds and did the laundry and served guests, had shared a room with her. Surely they had become friends, at least to an extent, and had perhaps talked at night as they lay in their beds.