Thrifty Sophie Breul had seldom discarded anything, so the attic held trunks and boxes full of period clothes. When Gimbels closed its Broadway store, someone had salvaged several fashion mannequins for use at the Breul House.
It was almost like having a Ken and Barbie set for adults, and the docents enjoyed dressing the figures to suit the changing seasons.
Today, the gray-haired male figure wore a top hat, white silk muffler, and long black overcoat, and he carried a gold-headed cane.
The second floor was also open to the public, and it consisted of a wide central hall that was richly somber with a coved wooden ceiling and walls covered in dark burgundy silk. Two tall windows overlooked the park at one end and a carpeted mahogany staircase rose majestically at the other.
Narrow marble-topped tables hugged the walls beneath sumptuously framed oil paintings. The more important pieces of the Breul collection were displayed in the gallery downstairs. These were some of Erich Breul’s less discerning purchases and the massive frames, each with its own small lamp, only mocked shrunken reputations. Here was a seascape by Henry Babbage, once praised as “the American Turner”; there, a landscape by Everett Winstanley, “our Constable”; plus a pair of heroic battle scenes with heavily muscled horses, plunging and rearing about with flared nostrils, the work of Genevieve Carlton, whom the late scholar, Riley Quinn, had called the Rosa Bonheur of central New Jersey.
Between the paintings, every door stood wide to reveal bedrooms and dressing rooms, Erich Breul’s oak-paneled study and Sophie Breul’s sitting room. The latter was elaborately carpeted, draped, and cluttered with fringed shawls, tasseled cushions, gilt mirrors, cut-glass lamps and other ornate bric-a-brac that passed for tasteful decor in the late 1890’s.
Hallway down the hall, they had to press themselves against the wall as a docent exited from the main bathroom with eight German tourists and their tour guide in tow. To judge by the laughter and bright chatter as they passed, the Victorian bathroom had been a great hit. Rick Evans had never seen a bathroom quite that large himself, nor one that lavish: walnut commode, a walnut-enclosed tub deep enough to float in, a wide marble lavatory, and all the brass fixtures fitted out with china knobs and handles.
At the end of the hall, the gloominess of the stair landing was relieved by an oval Tiffany window which Erich had ordered as a tenth anniversary present for Sophie. Even on this gray December day, its stained-glass leaves and flowers glowed with jewellike intensity.
Pascal Grant paused beneath it and smiled at Rick shyly.
“This is my second favorite window in the whole house,” he said. “You should take a picture of it.”
“I’m going to,” Rick agreed. He had noticed it when Benjamin Peake, the director, had given him a hurried tour of the public rooms the previous week, but he planned to wait for a sunny day when the window would be more brilliantly backlighted.
“So,” Rick said as they moved on up the steps to the third floor, “what’s your first favorite window?”
“The front door downstairs,” the other answered promptly over his shoulder. “Not the big door. My door.”
Rick remembered seeing steps that apparently led down to a doorway recessed beneath the stoop of the main entrance. “The service entrance?”
Pascal Grant paused at the top of the stairs and nodded. “That’s mine. I’m service. I have a key and everything.” He pulled a tangle of keys from his coverall pocket. “See?”
Even though he stood a step or two higher than Rick, his head was tilted so low that he seemed to be looking up at someone taller as he returned the keys to his pocket.
The third floor was as solidly built as the second, but the hall was narrower and the ceiling was simple plaster except for the cast moldings. Benjamin Peake had made a point about them, but at the moment Rick couldn’t remember if the director had said they were special because of the oak-leaf-and-acorn design or because of the process by which they had been cast. Whichever the reason, Rick decided he’d better borrow Grant’s stepladder, rig some lights, and take a couple of close-ups.
The front rooms had belonged to Erich Jr. before he went off to France; but in 1948, an imaginative curator had removed the young man’s personal effects to a bedroom on the second floor and restored these rooms to their original state as a nursery and playroom. Like so much else, Sophie had naturally saved everything her only child ever used, so the public now saw baby Erich’s cradle, his crib, his nursemaid’s narrow bed, and, in the connecting playroom, his horsehide rocking horse with its genuine mane and tail, the mane sadly reduced to stubble by much hard riding.
There were also wind-up toys, books, blocks, even a handful of wax crayons which were now scattered beside a childish drawing of stick figures labeled Papa and Mama and Erich in straggling letters across the picture. Another Gimbels mannequin, this one resembling a four-year-old boy, sat at the table with a crayon fastened in its hand. It was dressed in short pants and a jacket of gray serge, a white batiste shirt, a black silk bow, long black lisle stockings, and high-top, button-up shoes.
Here again were more visitors. Watched by a woman whose apprehensive air immediately identified her as a docent, seven young day-care kids and their teacher were getting a first hand look at how one privileged child had lived a hundred years earlier.
“Where’s his telebision?” demanded a tot as Rick and Pascal Grant passed the doorway.
“I have a television,” Pascal whispered to Rick. “Mrs. Beardsley and her ladies gave it to me. For my birthday.”
“That’s nice, ” Rick answered, a shade too heartily. Never before had he been required to interact with someone mentally handicapped and his natural compassion was jumbled with both embarrassment and uneasiness.
Physically, Pascal Grant could be any age from sixteen to twenty-six.
Mentally, he probably wasn’t too much older than those children.
A damn shame, Rick thought soberly. The guy was so good-looking. Of course, there were no rules that said it had to be otherwise, but still-
They passed through an open set of frosted glass doors that bisected the third floor. At the far end of the hall stood a mannequin dressed as a housemaid in a long black cotton dress and white bib apron, with her hair neatly pinned up under a starched white cap.
On this half of the third floor lay bedrooms for the servants, their one small bath, and a back stairs that ran from the basement kitchen to the attic. In the old days, the glass doors were normally kept shut, but after touring the spacious quarters of the master and mistress, modern visitors always wanted to see where the live-in staff slept when they weren’t cooking and cleaning or fetching and carrying for the Breul family.
The docents might loyally insist that the Breuls were enlightened and considerate employers, but most visitors gleefully picked up on how even the floor coverings defined class lines. On the nursery side of that translucent glass, the carpet was a thick wool Axminster; on the servants’ side, woven hemp matting.
At the rear stairwell, black velvet ropes barred the public from further passage. From kitchen to attic, the steps were wide enough to accommodate wicker laundry baskets, cleaning equipment, or storage chests, but they rose much more steeply than the wider public staircases and they were uncarpeted. Pascal Grant unclipped one of the ropes from its brass wall hook, waited for Rick Evans to pass, then carefully clipped it back again before leading the way up to the fourth-floor attic.
The huge attic was warm and smelled almost like a hayloft-a clean, dry mustiness compounded of old cardboard, lavender, and mothballs. Odds and ends crowded the space in an orderly fashion: wooden wardrobe boxes, storage cartons of all sizes, trunks, spare furniture, and, to Rick’s surprise, a makeshift office of sorts.