SCRUBWOMEN
The townhouse is almost bigger than the Eden Musee, and nothing here is faked in wax. They are working their way down through the stories under the supervision of Mrs. Coldcroft, who becomes distant and red-cheeked by the late afternoon.
“She’s been rearranging that liquor cabinet again,” Molly will say after the housemistress has made her way, chin elevated but gripping the balustrade tightly, down the grand staircase. “No dust on them bottles.”
It is Brigid and Molly and the colored girl with a week’s labor in the palace, dusting and scrubbing and scraping and polishing and scrubbing some more. Molly talks as much as she scrubs, maybe more, and the colored girl seems unsure of the work, as if she has never done a great deal of it.
“It’s criminal, if ye ask me,” says Molly from her knees on the massive parquet floor of the ballroom. “One family with all of this. Ye could shelter half of Kilkenny in here.”
“Thank Jaysus that’s not who we’re cleaning up after,” says Brigid.
“Greedy people,” says Molly, looking around disapprovingly at the huge room, dozens of chairs pushed together in one corner, a balcony large enough for a small orchestra over her head.
“Fortunate,” Brigid corrects, head down, digging into where the baseboard meets the floor with her rag. “They’re fortunate people.”
“Fortune — yer right, that’s what it is. Fortune has smiled upon them. Fortune has emptied its bloody pockets into their laps, is what it’s done. Railroad money, if I’m not mistaken.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Molly sniffs the air. “To me it smells like railroad money.”
“And to me,” says Brigid, wringing the cloth into the bucket, “it smells like Sapolio and vinegar.”
The colored girl works steadily, silently, by the heavy velvet drapes, now and then stealing a glance at Brigid to take note of how she is doing it. Not that there’s any mystery.
“Hot water, brown soap, and elbow grease,” her Ma used to say. “And plenty of the latter.”
The family has left “for the season” as Mrs. Coldcroft put it, though what that season might be Brigid has no idea. She wonders if Harry comes from a house like this down in the South, with its gas lighting in every room, its entrance hall and staircases, its beautiful stained-glass windows in the parlor and delicate gilded tea tables in the salon, canopied bed in the lady’s room and wallpaper with huntsmen on it in the gentleman’s, with a dining room that will seat a hundred, four chandeliers required to light them all, its marble floors and skylights and domed ceilings and fireplaces and dark-wood library that smells like the inside of a humidor. Did he grow up with servants, colored girls perhaps more robust than their working partner, to see to his every whim? When Brigid asks about it he tries to divert her to another subject, revealing only that his father is a judge of some sort.
“Darlin, ye’ve got to put some muscle into it,” Molly calls to the colored girl, who shyly told them her name was Jessie. “Just pushin the soap around won’t get it clean. Have ye never washed a floor before?”
“Why don’t ye demonstrate it for her?” says Brigid, lightly. “Bein an expert at the trade.”
Molly gives her a narrow look but does go back to her scrubbing. The only way to deal with it is to concentrate on what is within your arm’s reach and not think about the vast areas yet to come. The best bedroom was more detail work — putting camphor gum in the linen chests, replacing the sachets in the emptied drawers of the vanity, polishing the beautifully carved rosewood posts and headboard of the bed with beeswax, hauling the Oriental rugs out back to be beaten and aired. Mrs. Coldcroft was there all the while, of course, to be sure none of them pocketed a souvenir or curled up for a nap on the plump, inviting mattress, but the light, filtered through damask curtains, was lovely in the morning and the smell of the room was like a spring garden. It is the hallways and the stairs, carpets pulled up for their ministrations, and this football pitch of a ballroom where it took an hour just to wipe the dust off the top of the dado rail all around, that are apt to break your spirit.
Brigid finds it all so beautiful, and wonders if the lady, whoever she is, does not merely move from room to room during the day, looking upon each finely crafted detail with awe and admiration. Or is the society life so engaging that you barely have time to notice your surroundings? She doesn’t worry much about how the family came by their fortune, only that such a place exists, exists on a block of similar houses in the very same city that she herself resides in, a palace that puts the one moldy-stone Irish castle she’s seen to shame. If only it were available for everyone to enjoy, like the Musee—
“It’s about time to change, wouldn’t ye say?” calls Molly, looking into her bucket.
Mrs. Coldcroft insists that they get their water in the scullery, which is three floors down.
Brigid sighs. “So yer hungry.”
Molly is a strapping Kilkenny girl with an appetite to match her size. “Ye’ve read me mind,” she smiles. “I was just feelin a bit light-headed, I was.”
The colored girl follows them down, careful not to spill on the stairs. The idea is to go from top to bottom, cleaning backward out of every room, so as never to foul their own handiwork.
Mrs. Coldcroft is in the kitchen, slumped over the baking table, sleeping with her head resting on her arms.
“They probably run her ragged when they’re here, poor thing,” whispers Molly as they pass through. “I’d crave a drop or two meself.”
They lift stools into the butler’s pantry to eat at the shelf where the meals are arranged before going up to table in the dumbwaiter. Molly crosses herself, bows her head over her bulging ham sandwich.
“May the good Lord and all the saints above bestow their blessing upon us,” she says, “and kape our poor Mr. McKinley on the road to recovery.”
“Did ye vote for him then?” asks Brigid, who knows that Molly has family, mostly coppers, in the Tammany machine.
“I did not,” she snorts, indignant. “But I’d sooner have him at the top than that little Roosevelt. He tossed me cousin Hughie off the force, fer nothin more than a little tit-fer-tat.”
“He’s a reformer—”
“Let him reform the bankers and the coal barons as rubs elbows with him in his fancy clubs, then,” says Molly, attacking her sandwich, “and lave our byes in blue alone.”
The colored girl has only a poppyseed roll without butter.
“And where d’ye hail from, darlin?” asks Molly, who has not a mean bone in her body nor a sharp thought in her head, as she attacks her sandwich. “Somewheres in the South, is it?”
“North Carolina,” says Jessie.
“And what brung ye up here to the cold and the crowd?”
The girl thinks for a long moment before answering. “It was time to leave,” she says.
Molly accepts it for an answer. “Can ye imagine this lot here,” she sniffs, nodding her head toward the upstairs as she eats, “houses scattered all over Creation, luggin their entire mob of servin people, except poor Mrs. Coldcroft, from pillar to post every time they want a change of scenery? A dozen staff for only the two of em and a set of wee twins. There’s a photograph of em in the gentleman’s library.”
“It’s a lot to manage,” Brigid agrees.
“And d’ye have children yerself?” Molly asks the colored girl.
“I have a baby daughter,” says the girl. “Her name is Minnie.”
“Well, it’s a start,” Molly approves. “I’ve got five meself, and I believe they’ll be the death of me. They say there’s war in this Philippines — ye should see the slaughter I’ve got to face every night when I come into our rooms. A mob of heathen savages, that’s what they’ve become, with me out workin every day.”