The Education of Bet Read online

  "Yes, yes, I am a puzzle to everybody. Please, Bet," he said. "You're not going to say 'Why, Will?' to me too, are you?"

  "No, of course not. I know why you do as you do. It is because you do not wish to be where you are."

  "Yes!" His sense of relief at being understood for once was so strong I could almost reach out and touch it with my hand, touch him to show my sympathy.

  And yet I couldn't do that. It was rare for me to touch another person and just as rare to have another person touch me.

  So instead I settled for unleashing my anger. Will and I had known each other long enough that I could do that in front of him, provided we were alone; I could do it in front of no one else in the world.

  "And do you have any idea," I said, "how insanely angry you make me?"

  He drew back at this, startled.

  I continued before he could stop me.

  "I can read just as well as you can, Will Gardener! I am just as smart as you are! And yet I am stuck here, in this house, while you"—now it was my turn to seethe, and I gestured toward him with my hand, disgusted—"you are out there in the world!"

  "You are right," he admitted softly. "It is not fair."

  That softness, that sensitivity, was almost harder to bear than his infuriating behavior. In a way, I felt as though he'd be doing me a favor if he were to laugh at my ambition. Perhaps if he did, I would think my desires silly as well, and eventually, one day, I would stop wanting what I could not have.

  "Right," I said, crossing my arms firmly against my chest. "It is not fair."

  "But it is the way of the world," he said.

  I did not like this so much. I did not like thinking anything impossible. But now I worried that if we continued on in this vein, I would burst into tears of frustration in front of him, and this I did not want to do.

  So I changed the subject.

  "Tell me, Will. I know you do not want to be at school—I think even your great-uncle understands that, even if he does not like it—but if you could have whatever you wanted, if you could have your greatest wish, what would you be doing instead?"

  "Promise you will not laugh?"

  I did not promise. I merely gave him an offended look. The very idea—as though I could not be trusted not to laugh.

  Will took a deep breath and spoke on the exhale. "I should like to join the military."

  It was a good thing I had made no promise, because I did laugh.

  "But that is ... that is ... preposterous!" I laughed some more.

  "No, it is not."

  "But you are only sixteen!" I laughed even harder. "You are too young!"

  "No, I am not." His voice grew enthusiastic; his face became animated with excitement. "Do you know, Bet, that they have tents at fairs, stalls in the streets—all you need do is go to one of these places, say you are of age, and they will believe you. They want to believe you."

  His words sobered me instantly, the idea that such an idiotically dangerous thing could be so ridiculously easy. But then I thought about it some more and pulled a face.

  "Well, if it is that easy, then why don't you go enlist right now?"

  I thought I had him. He was fine at talk. But when it came down to it, he was too scared to reach for what he wanted.

  He gave a nod of his head toward the house, where his great-uncle snored by the dying fire inside. "Because of him," he said. "It would kill him if I left."

  "You leave him all the time when you go to school," I scoffed.

  "Not like this," he said. "When I go off to school, he has good reason to be sure that I will come back, and that when I come back I will be alive."

  Now there was a cheerful thought.

  And a sensitive one as well.

  It gave me pause to think that, amidst all the lying and cheating and mischief and arson, Will had managed to grow quite a bit of compassion for other people.

  "I am all he has left," Will went on.

  I was tempted to point out that his great-uncle had me also but I did know that it wasn't quite the same thing. Family was not something that could be replaced, as I well knew. And whatever else I might be to the old man—helper, reader, on some days even friend—I was not family.

  Will confirmed as much by adding, "I did try to raise the issue with him last time I was home—I thought perhaps I could join the military in the usual fashion, go to an appropriate training school first before entering into the service—but I had to stop when he became upset. 'Don't you realize you are my only remaining relative? If something happened to you, I would die.'" Will attempted a casual shrug but couldn't quite pull it off. "It was awful."

  It was awful, to think of the old man so upset. But it was also awful, perhaps even more so, to think of people not pursuing the things they wanted most in life.

  I had one dream in this world, wanted one thing: the chance to be at school. Will had that thing I wanted most, and yet he valued it cheaply, dreamed of something else. Was there not some way Will and I could both achieve our dreams?

  I was thankful that Will was so dejected about the hopelessness of his situation that, for once, he remained silent long enough to allow me time to think. That was the thing whenever Will was home: it was wonderful having his energy fill up the musty corners of the house, bring life back to the old place, but his energy did fill it up, entirely, so there was little space for anything but Will.

  But now...

  I asked myself the question again: Was there not some way both Will and I could achieve our dreams?

  And within that blessed silence, I began to see the glimmering of an idea, which fast formed into a full-fledged plan.

  Could we...? If we both agreed...?

  As the excitement grew in me, I began to find fault with my own idea. For one thing, it could never work. For another thing, and perhaps more important in terms of my own vanity, Will would no doubt laugh in my face. If he, as evidenced earlier, did not like to be laughed at, I liked it even less. When you possess little in the world except your own pride, it is an awful thing to have it taken from you.

  But what was I talking about? Why let pride stand in the way of what I wanted? And why give up and declare a thing impossible before even trying?

  I had to try.

  But before that, I did still have to point out, breaking the silence:

  "You do realize war is stupid?" I said, eyes narrowing at Will.

  "I do know that girls think that," he allowed.

  "And girls are right." I paused. "Still..."

  "Still what, Bet?" he prompted when I did not speak for a long time.

  Considering how often males were the center of attention in the household, never mind in the greater world, it was nice to feel as though I could occupy that place as well, when I had a mind to.

  "Let's see," I said. "You want something I don't understand and have no use for—to go to war. And I want something you think is silly and do not want—to get an education. Have I got that right?"

  Will shrugged, looking perplexed and even a trifle annoyed at what he no doubt regarded as my pointless statement of the obvious: facts of life that could never be changed. "I suppose."

  "Perhaps," I said, feeling the smile stretch across my face, "there is a way we can help one another out."

  Chapter two

  Will called me Bet because when we first met he hadn't been able to say Elizabeth. For my part, I could not say Will and called him Ill instead, but whereas he was allowed to keep his nickname for me, I was hastily dissuaded from using mine for him.

  We set eyes on each other for the first time when we were four years old, even though we had lived under the same roof since we were born, Will screaming his way into the world just a month before me.

  I had no memory of Will's parents, but I had seen paintings of them in Paul Gardener's home.

  Will's father, Frederick Gardener, had been that most masculine of clichés, tall, dark, and handsome, like his only son, and he had made his personal fortune in the impo
rt-export business. His wife, Victoria, was also tall, but there all physical similarities between husband and wife ended. In her portrait, Will's mother had hair the color of honey shot with gold, and eyes that looked as though the artist had borrowed parts of a summer sky to re-create them. And where Frederick looked as though he was at least trying to maintain some appearance of seriousness, Victoria had a smile that was broad, open, and generous.

  Occasionally, Will would talk about that earlier house we'd both lived in: what ways it was the same, what ways different from the house we later lived in with Paul Gardener. But his reminiscences—of croquet mallets strewn across the lawn, of a nursery crammed full of decorations and toys, not to mention of the kind nanny that went with it all—were for me like hearing about a country I had never traveled to. For myself, I remembered with clarity only one small part of that house, and that a part that Will had never seen. I had also been in Frederick Gardener's study and one other part of the house, or so I'd been told of the latter—the wide foyer on the one and only occasion I crossed the threshold of that house—but I was exiting rather than entering, leaving that house for the last time, my face pressed into the shoulder of the person carrying me, and so I had no memory of what I was leaving behind me.

  Will's father had been a handsome and successful businessman, his mother a beautiful society matron who could afford to choose whether to be kind or not. Who had been my mother?

  Why, she had been the maid, of course.

  My father? I had no idea. Nor was there anyone left alive who could tell me.

  In all my memories of my mother—and I am sorry to say there are not many, and there are fewer and fewer as the years move on—she is impossibly young. Becky Smith was pretty in a way that was wholly different from Victoria Gardener's expensive beauty. My mother was tiny and dark—I can only assume I inherited my great height from my father—and she was always busy, busy, doing whatever was required of her to help the household run smoothly. I would glimpse her briefly in the still-dark early hours of the morning when she rose from our shared bed to start her day, and at the end of that long day when she fell back into bed, exhausted. Occasionally, if she could steal a few minutes, she would visit me in between. The rest of the time, particularly when I was very small, other servants took turns attending to my various needs.

  I understood, from having overheard the conversations of others, that when my mother "got herself into trouble," as the saying goes, there had been some talk of putting her out on the street. It would have been the usual thing for a family like the Gardeners to do. What use was a maid who suffered bouts of morning sickness? Why should a respectable household even consider keeping on a maid who had been foolish enough to get herself in the family way with no husband in sight? It would be unseemly. It was unheard-of.

  And yet, to Victoria Gardener at least, it was not unheard-of. Perhaps her own condition, being with child, made her more sensitive to her maid's? Perhaps that made her more empathetic than other women of her position in society would have been, and she could imagine how frightening it would be to be pregnant and alone and suddenly find oneself put out on the street with no hope of a better prospect? Whatever her reasoning, she made the kindly decision, prevailing upon her husband to go along with it, to let the maid stay. So long as Becky Smith kept her baby confined to the servants' quarters at the top of the house, so long as the household itself was not disturbed in any discernible way, Will and I were to be allowed to grow up under the same roof.

  Later on, when I learned what had happened, it was odd to think of Will and me living our early years in the same house, never seeing each other, our experiences of that house so vastly different. Will told me later that he had been happy back then, and I believed him. For myself, my few memories indicated that I had been happy too. There was food to eat, a place to sleep, I was cared for when people had the time—what other life had I ever known?

  And then the typhoid came.

  ***

  Typhoid is a fever contracted from consuming food or water that has been colonized by bacteria. I knew this from reading I'd done on the subject when I was old enough to become curious.

  Typhoid causes a very high and sustained fever, an enormous amount of sweating, stomach disturbances, and diarrhea. The progression of the disease is typically four weeks, the four different stages of it distinguishing each week.

  In the first week, the patient experiences a steadily increasing temperature, general tiredness, persistent headache and cough. There may be hemorrhaging from the nose, and even the eyes, and many experience abdominal pain.

  During the second week, the fever elevates to a level of approximately 104 degrees Fahrenheit and remains there for quite some time. Delirium is frequent at this stage, and the patient sometimes becomes quite agitated. In approximately one-third of patients, rose-colored spots appear on the lower chest and abdomen. Labored sounds can be heard from the lungs and abdomen, the latter becoming distended and painful. The spleen and liver also become enlarged, and the diarrhea can be green and awful.

  Over the course of the third week of illness, a number of complications may set in: intestinal hemorrhage, intestinal perforation, encephalitis or acute inflammation of the brain, abscesses.

  In the fourth and final week, the fever remains very high, extreme dehydration occurs, and the patient becomes almost constantly delirious.

  Sometimes, somewhere during all that misery, the patient dies.

  Not always, but often enough.

  I could talk about typhoid only in a medical-textbook sort of way, as I have done here, for to do any differently would mean dwelling on memories that were too painful to think of.

  ***

  The typhoid took Will's parents.

  The typhoid took my mother.

  In the beginning, I did not understand what was happening to her. Well, in truth, for the entire month that followed, I did not understand. All I knew was that my mother, with her special sunny smile that she reserved for me, was no longer waking in the still-dark hours of the morning to start her workday. In fact, she could not even get out of bed.

  The other servants tried to keep me from her—whether because they did not want me to see her in such a state or because they feared I would get the illness as well, I could not say. She was kept quarantined, as Will's parents were quarantined in their own far more spacious section of the house. I was ordered to sleep with one of the other servants.

  But I would sneak out in the middle of the night when everyone else was sleeping to visit her.

  Sometimes, seeing her in her delirium, I did not even recognize her as my mother. I did not understand half of what she said. But I could yet remember what her smile looked like, what it felt like to have her hand touch my cheek, and so I would crawl into bed beside her, my body clinging to her feverish one.

  We were like that one night when her breathing labored once more, then slowed, then stopped, and I felt that seemingly eternal fever finally leave her as the cold settled into her body.

  They told me later that when they found us in the morning, my small arms were gripped around her stiff neck so tightly, they had to pry me from her.

  ***

  On the face of things, there were some startling coincidences between my life and Will's: the way his parents and my mother had died, our close birthdays, even the way we looked. Paul Gardener liked to say that there were no accidents in life, that everything happened out of choice or through design, that everything happened for a reason. But from where I sat, so much of life did seem accidental, haphazard. How else to explain why one person lived while another died? How else to explain why one was born a boy, one a girl, one into the upper class, one into a substantially lower social stratum, the fortunes and futures of both dictated wholly by things over which they had no control? If there was any choice or design in that, I couldn't see it.

  After the deaths of Frederick and Victoria Gardener, it was decided that Will would go live with his great-uncle, Pa
ul Gardener. It was not just because he was the only relative remaining who shared Will's last name, but also because all of Victoria's relatives taken together could not come close to Paul Gardener's wealth. He had the best kind of fortune: a family fortune.

  When Paul Gardener, not yet an old man, came to collect his charge and settle affairs at the house, which was to be sold, he took some time to talk to the staff. They needed letters of recommendation, as they now had to seek new employment. Will was present at the time, and he told me later about the exchange that transpired between his great-uncle and one of the servants.

  Paul Gardener was in his nephew Frederick's study, going through the dead man's bills, when a servant came in bearing tea on a tray.

  "I hope you will be able to find a suitable placement," he said, addressing the servant with kindness. "I would gladly give all of you positions in my own home, but I fear the old place is already overstaffed as it is."

  "Thank you, sir. I'll manage."

  "My nephew and his wife—they were the only ones unfortunate enough to succumb to the typhoid?"

  "Oh, no, sir. One other died as well." When Will would tell this part of the story, I always pictured the servant shrugging as he said what came next, as though the other life lost was of little matter. "It was just one of the maids."

  "I see. That is hard. And it must be very hard on the poor maid's remaining family."

  "Oh, but she had none. Unless of course you include her daughter."

  "A daughter!"

  "Yes, sir. An orphan now, though, since she is no longer anyone's daughter."

  "What has been done with her?"

  "Oh, she is still here. Well, but not for long. The proper authorities—"

  "Bring her to me," he commanded.

  A moment later, I entered Paul Gardener's life; I, with my downturned eyes and my old brown dress. Out of the corner of one of those downturned eyes, I glimpsed a boy, the first I'd seen outside of pictures in the books my mother had occasionally borrowed from the Gardeners' vast library. The boy was about my age, I thought, and wearing knee pants.