Don't Forget to Write: A Novel(7)

My eyes widened, but she was already halfway up the stairs. Mama—here? She’d said she had spent a summer at the shore and that Ada was strict, but she’d never even hinted at a past. I wasn’t naive enough to believe she had sprung out of the ground prim and proper and had done nothing until she married my stodgy father. But it also never occurred to me that the reason she took my side so often was that she had gotten herself into trouble as well. And I was determined to pry that story out of Ada if it took me the whole summer to do so. What had Mama done?

Ada opened the heavy oak door, and a small gray ball of fur launched itself at her, yapping shrilly. “My baby,” Ada crooned, picking up the terrier. “I missed you too, darling. Mumma is home now.” She looked at me. “Shut the door. You wouldn’t want Sally to escape.”

“Sally?”

She held the dog out toward me, and the little creature bared its teeth, growling. “She’s an excellent judge of character,” Ada said, pulling her close to her chest. “You know a problem when you see one, don’t you, sweetheart?”

“Lovely creature,” I murmured. I held out a hand toward the dog’s face, hoping it wasn’t about to get bitten off. “I’m friendly,” I told Sally. “I promise.” Sally snapped her teeth as if she didn’t weigh all of fifteen pounds soaking wet.

“Champion bloodlines.” She set Sally down, and the dog scampered off to a bed in the living room below a window, where she lay, eyeing me suspiciously. Ada removed her scarf, hung it on the coat rack beside the door, and fluffed her hair in the mirror next to it, pursing her lips slightly to admire my lipstick.

I looked around my new home. It was furnished tastefully in modern decor with an emphasis on Scandinavian minimalism, despite the clearly prewar hardwood floors and ornate woodworking on the banisters. Not at all what I pictured for a matchmaking spinster. I expected the look and smell of a grandmother’s purse, not these clean lines accentuated with bright pops of color. But Ada obviously had money, and, if her car and scarf were any indication, she cared about fashion and appearances. “Matchmaking must be profitable,” I said.

“It’s rude to discuss one’s finances,” Ada said. “I’ll show you to your room. Dinner is at six sharp. At seven, we take our evening walk.”

“And in bed by eight, I assume.”

“Don’t be foolish. Ed Sullivan is on at eight.”

“Of course. Silly me.”

She looked at me sharply as I followed her up the stairs. “Impertinence will not be tolerated either.”

“Duly noted.” I continued in silence as we went down a long, narrow hallway. There was a small staircase at the end, which I assumed led to servants’ quarters. Knowing my luck, that was where I would end up.

Instead, she stopped at the last door on the right and turned the knob. The room was austere, with a brass bed covered in a white eyelet coverlet, a dressing table, a nightstand, and a freestanding armoire instead of a closet. It smelled vaguely of mothballs and disuse. “Home, sweet home,” I said with as much fake cheerfulness as I could muster.

“The bathroom is next door. My room is down the hall. Lillian’s room is next to mine. You’re not to open closed doors.”

“Lillian?”

“My companion.”

“Ah. Mama said she had to go home—sick mother or something?”

“‘Sick mother or something,’” she mimicked. “Her mother is dying. A little compassion goes a long way.”

“I’m sorry for her—impending—loss.”

Ada nodded curtly. “You’ll be taking on some of her duties until she returns.”

“Which will entail . . . ?” If she intended for me to do the cooking, she was about to be sorely disappointed. I could barely make toast.

“Doing as you’re told.”

“Right, of course.”

She nodded. “I’ll let you unpack. I have work to do.”

And she was gone, closing the door to my new jail cell behind her. I sat on the bed, which creaked. No radio. No books. And while I was sure she had both downstairs, I wasn’t allowed to touch anything.

“Daniel Schwartz was not worth this,” I said to myself. Then I stood up and pulled the key from my purse and opened my trunk.

As I went to put away my underthings, a piece of paper in the back of a drawer caught my eye. After glancing over my shoulder to make sure this wasn’t a test and that Ada wasn’t watching me from some portrait on the wall with eyeholes cut in it, I removed the page. But it wasn’t paper—it was a photograph. Two women stood on a boardwalk, Atlantic City’s Steel Pier behind them. The younger had her arm around the elder and was planting a kiss on her cheek. The elder was clearly Ada, younger, her hair darker, but vibrant and smiling, an arm raised in the air in a celebratory pose. And the younger—I squinted. It was hard to tell from the profile, but I was pretty sure the younger was my mother. I flipped the photograph over and sure enough, in my mother’s script were the words “Rose and Ada, August 1932.”

I looked to the door again. Did she put this here on purpose? Or was my mother the last person to stay in this room? Turning back to the image, I studied it more closely, spinning a story in my head about the circumstances that could have led to her arriving in this room. And how on earth did she look so happy with Ada? Had the fun been sucked out of my great-aunt in the preceding twenty-eight years by age or some tragedy?