The Gallery Read online

  Dial Books for Young Readers

  Penguin Young Readers Group

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  eBook ISBN 9781101614259

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fitzgerald, Laura Marx, author.

  Title: The gallery / Laura Marx Fitzgerald.

  Description: New York, NY : Dial Books for Young Readers, [2016] |

  Summary: In 1929 New York City, twelve-year-old housemaid Martha O’Doyle suspects that a wealthy recluse may be trying to communicate with the outside world through the paintings on her gallery walls.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015029009 | ISBN 9780525428657 (hardback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Mystery and detective stories. | Household employees—Fiction. | Art—Fiction. | Irish Americans—Fiction. | New York (N.Y.)—History—1898–1951—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Mysteries & Detective Stories. | JUVENILE FICTION / Historical / United States / 20th Century. | JUVENILE FICTION / Art & Architecture.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.F575357 Gal 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015029009

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket illustration © 2016 by Sarah J. Coleman

  Art direction by Lindsey Andrews

  Version_1

  For Mom and Dad

  and

  Anne Cope

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Chapter

  1

  May 2016

  One of the tabloid papers, the New York Yodel, has a midsection where they feature some poor sap who’s hung around long enough to make it to one hundred.

  This time, the poor sap is me.

  Last week the paper sent this young whip of a girl to interview me. She bounced around the linoleum room, poking around the photos on my bureau.

  “Is she awake?” she asked Jolene, the day nurse, like I wasn’t even there, and as soon as I stirred, she started shouting questions like “What’s the secret to happiness?” in my ear.

  Like living to one hundred makes you happy, and not creaky and constipated.

  I just gave the addled smile I use to make people think I’m senile and pointed lamely to my throat. I haven’t been able to speak for thirty years, since I had my voice box removed. Cancer of the larynx. Don’t smoke, kids.

  “Oh, right,” the young reporter ducked her head. “I forgot. Well, here—” she thrust a legal pad and a pen into my lap. “You can write the answers.”

  I held up my gnarled hands and shrugged. Arthritis.

  “Oh.” She gingerly picked up the pad and pen again, afraid to brush against my paper-thin skin. Back they went into this large satchel like newsboys used to carry. “Do you know,” she said, rustling around for something else, “I looked you up in our archives, and I found you! Martha O’Doyle, right? I checked the dates. This must be you.” She pulled out a regular sheet of paper, but printed on it was an old newspaper article. It was the last time I was in the papers, eighty-seven years ago. I recognized the headline.

  March 26, 1929

  BOMB KILLS NEWSPAPER TYCOON AND HIS “WILD ROSE”!

  Priceless Art Collection Destroyed!

  Rose “battier than a church bell!” says maid.

  New York society was rocked last night by a bomb that exploded just past midnight in the home of newspaper tycoon, J. Archer Sewell. Killed in the blast were both Mr. Sewell and his wife, the former Rose Pritchard, heiress to the Union-Eastern Railroad fortune.

  The couple’s lavish Fifth Avenue mansion, once site of some of society’s most opulent entertainments, was destroyed.

  Lost, too, was Mrs. Sewell’s art collection, described as “unrivaled” by experts and glimpsed only by guests of the increasingly reclusive Sewell family. The collection—which included paintings by great artists like Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Courbet, as well as living painters like the “modern” sensation, Pablo Picasso—was speculated to be worth millions.

  As of this morning, it is an ash heap.

  The attack came as no surprise to J. Archer Sewell’s detractors. As publisher of this newspaper’s rival, the Daily Standard, Sewell was known as a staunch defender of traditional American values in today’s rocky times. His hard-charging rhetoric made him not a few enemies, especially among immigrants, “wets,” anarchists, and other targets of his paper’s wrath.

  Yet the drawing rooms of Fifth Avenue are abuzz that “Wild Rose” herself may have been behind the bombing. The former Miss Pritchard’s outrageous teen-aged antics are familiar to the Yodel’s more faithful readers. The young heiress was rumored to have suffered a mental breakdown shortly after her marriage.

  Sources close to the heiress say that her behavior had become increasingly erratic, and in recent years she often refused to leave her rooms. Mrs. Sewell’s more recent outbursts were captured in this very paper.

  But was this former debutante capable of an act of such shocking violence?

  “I wouldn’t put it past her,” shared Martha O’Doyle, a young housemaid of Irish extraction. “She was nuttier than a fruit cake, always howling in her room like a right lunatic. If you ask me, she set off that bomb herself.

  “She should’ve been locked up in a madhouse,” continued the outspoken young “colleen.” “It was only through Mr. Sewell’s kindness, God bless him, that she could remain in her home, with all her comforts about her.” Here young Martha stopped to wipe her eyes. “He was a true gentleman, Mr. Sewell was.”

  However, detectives are investigating all possible suspects, including members of the Sewell household staff, one of whom is said to have recently fled the country. Police were unable to share more details, but have asked readers to come forward with any information that might aid their investigation.

  I let the page flutter to my lap.

  Like most stories in the paper, it was full of lies.

  “I’ve been reading up
on the bombing. Did you know you’re the only living eyewitness?” the girl reporter said breathlessly, her pen at the ready. “The only one who knows what really happened.”

  I shrugged again.

  She heaved a frustrated sigh, her schemes to move off the back page human-interest stories clearly roadblocked. “I mean, you’re a hundred years old! You won’t last forev—”

  Here I pretended to fall asleep, which I sometimes do in the middle of conversations anyway. By the way she poked my arm with her finger, I could tell she thought I had joined the heavenly choir. When I heard her footsteps die away, I opened my eyes again. Her business card was resting on my lap.

  —

  Today, a week later, the morning staff crowded around my bed singing Happy Birthday, and Jolene brought me the paper.

  “Now, looka you, Miz O’Doyle. You just as pretty as evah,” she said as she opened it up to my photo.

  LOCAL LASS LICKS 100!

  —

  Miss Martha O’Doyle, lifelong Brooklyn resident and longtime bon vivant, raises a glass of bubbly to celebrate her hundredth! She credits her astonishing longevity to “always looking on the bright side.”

  I didn’t say any of that. The picture shows me sitting in my wheelchair with a glass of champagne the girl reporter stuck in my hand; I didn’t drink that either. All I can take are these energy shakes now.

  “And whatta nice smile,” continued Jolene. “Like a beauty queen.”

  I was just trying to stifle a belch. Which was nice of me, I thought, because usually I don’t bother. I gave the paper back to Jolene and had her wheel me over to the window.

  Most folks at Shaded Acres (actually a sun-blasted high-rise surrounded by “acres” of Brooklyn concrete) won’t take rooms on the cemetery side. But I requested this side for the same reason I always ride in the front seat: I like to see where I’m going.

  I can see where I’ve been, too. Because from my window, I can make out Rose’s final resting place on the hill. Even though it’s surrounded by auto-body shops today, Green-Wood Cemetery was once the final destination of the rich and fancy, and lucky for me those folks paid their gardeners in perpetuity.

  At this time of year, I have front-row seats to the spectacle. First the shock of yellow forsythia against the bleak gray sky, then the Japanese magnolias, the cherry blossoms, the lilacs. After the grand finale—the climbing roses—the summer leaves fill in like a curtain coming down on a show. And I have to wait until winter strips the place bare before I catch sight of the Pritchard family plot again.

  Every spring, it’s like Rose is signaling me in this blooming-and-dying Morse code: Meet me here.

  That girl reporter was right. This would likely be my last spring show, my last message from Rose, my last chance to tell my story.

  —

  The next day, I got one of those youngster volunteers to show me how the computers work. He brought me the kind that folds up and showed me how to open a page, type on it, erase my mistakes.

  The day after that, I rubbed some Ben-Gay into my hands, gave up my Jell-O to Saint Peter for a little more longevity, and, with my crooked fingers, I looked for the truth among the keys.

  Chapter

  2

  September 1928

  I learned early that if you ask an adult for the truth, usually you get a story.

  Sometimes two.

  Take the story of my birth. My dad said that Ma labored brave and hard all night with me all topsy-turvy in her belly—never leading with my head, sure, nothing’s changed, he’d say—and that as I finally made my way into the world, the dawn broke and light streamed in through the window, sunbeams warming up both sets of cheeks. And the doctor said I was the most beautiful baby he’d ever delivered, and I should be named Aurora for the goddess of the dawn, and Daddo still wishes that’s what they’d named me.

  My ma said that’s malarkey, that I was born in the unnaturally hot blaze of a May afternoon, with a single nurse and not a doctor to be found for the likes of a poor mick like her, and how would Daddo know anything about it when he was at the saloon the whole time? And my name was always going to be Martha, for my great-aunt Martha who paid my ma’s passage over from Ireland when she was a girl.

  Which one is true? Maybe both, probably neither.

  So this time, I’m telling the story.

  I mean, the truth.

  —

  Late September in Brooklyn can be delightful, with wisps of fall in the air, or it can be as hot and muggy as August.

  That was the kind of day it was when I sat in catechism class, trying not to let Sister Ignatius see me scratching my sweaty behind under my regulation wool tights. I had an idea that I might sneak out and walk to the elevated train. I’d be at Coney Island before French class even started, to la diablo with Mademoiselle Flanagan.

  I figured I could fake lady complaints and ask for a pass to the nurse. Flanagan would think I was at the nurse’s office, and the other girls would tell our last period calisthenics teacher I was excused from exercises. As a plan, it couldn’t fail.

  “Martha O’Doyle, I asked you a question.”

  “May I go to the nurse, Sister?” I doubled over my desk. “It’s my time.”

  “Well, how apropos, as we were just talking about the Curse of Eve. And wasn’t it the curse last week when I asked you to recite the Second Lesson on God and His Perfections? And the week before that when it was your turn to clap the erasers?”

  I groaned louder and clutched my stomach.

  “Or could this be your punishment for ignoring your studies last night?”

  I’d meant to memorize the Fifth Lesson after I fed, bathed, and tucked my little brothers into their prayed-over bedsides. But I’d heard on the way home that Declan Leary bet Jimmy Ratchett that he could pull his dad’s Ford around the block with his teeth. (He couldn’t.) So after the show, the boys and I wheedled beer-splashed peanuts off of Dom Donovan’s speakeasy and hosed off under a fire hydrant. By the time Ma got home from her job in Manhattan, all she saw was a clean kitchen and wet heads on the pillow.

  So, no, there’d been no time to weigh the sins of Eve.

  “So I will ask you again, Miss O’Doyle: How was Eve tempted to sin? Speak from personal experience if you can’t remember the details.”

  The other girls giggled, damn them.

  “Erm . . . a snake. No, a serpent.”

  “Yes, Eve was tempted into sin by the Devil, who came in the form of a snake and persuaded her to break God’s command. And that command was?”

  “To eat . . . I mean, not to eat the apple.”

  “The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. And which were the chief causes that led Eve into sin?”

  Now my stomach really did churn. Before bed I’d flicked through an issue of Dime Detective, not the Bible. So I casted around for words left over from Father Quinlan’s homilies. Fruit. Sin. Naked. Shame. Knowledge.

  “Knowledge.”

  “What about knowledge?”

  “She—Eve—wanted to know. To know what God knew. What he forbade her from knowing.”

  “Yes, this was the primary sin: She admired what was forbidden instead of shunning it. And the other—”

  “Hold a tick,” I heard myself saying.

  “What did you just say, Miss O’Doyle?”

  “I mean, just a minute. Why was Eve punished for knowledge? Ain’t—sorry, Sister—isn’t that what we’re all sent here to do? Learn things?”

  “Just like our spiritual parents, Adam and Eve, you are here to learn the things God deemed fit and right to learn.”

  “And how are you supposed to know that something’s not fit and right until you, well, know it already? That’s a bit of a barn door behind the horse. It just seems to me Eve got a bum rap is all. Whoever wrote this thing—”

  “This thi
ng! Is that how you refer to the living Word of Our Lord?”

  “The Bible, I mean. Whoever wrote it sort of put it all on Eve. Who can blame her for wanting to know some big secret like that? And why does God point it out so much and then forbid it? I know that if Ma tells my little brothers, ‘Don’t go eating the pie I just made,’ I’ll find their fingers in it as soon as her back is turned. Better to just hide it under the bed and let them wonder why the place smells of cherries.”

  “Martha Doyle, I warn you to stop talking this instant.”

  Here’s the thing. Once I set to wondering something, my mind skips straight ahead. Like my brothers running into traffic.

  “And I don’t see how Adam is some great hero in this story. It’s not like he took too much convincing to do the same thing Eve had the guts to do first. Why’d Eve get the curse? Why can’t boys spend a week out of every month sitting on a rag bundle like the rest of us?”

  As I paused to contemplate Declan Leary and his gang complaining of cramps, I caught sight of Sister Ignatius’s face. It resembled a mushroom I once saw at a Chinatown market: squat, purple, and bloated.

  And I knew that, just like Eve, my wonderings had gotten me expelled from what would—in retrospect—seem like Paradise.

  —

  “You think your schooling is some grand joke? Well, missy, you’re about to get a taste of the life of labor. You’ll see what I’ve been warning you about.”

  My ma’s nasal Irish tones carried over the clacking of the elevated train. She lectured her way over the Manhattan Bridge, but I let my attention wander out the train window, to the boats in the harbor, lit up by the early morning sun, and Lady Liberty waving us over to the Manhattan side.

  “Sit down properly, and stop your gawking out the window. Dear me.” Ma shifted her address to the more general public as she waved away a gust of dust. A gentleman next to us rushed to close her window. Ma had that effect on people. She gave him a nod and resettled her hat. “I’ve arranged a position under Mon-soor Lerblanc, the cook. Lucky you we binned a kitchen maid this week. Let’s see how a year washing pots and chopping onions compares to a bit of study.”