Vera by Carol Edgarian (year 7 reading list TXT) 📕

“What do you have to be so serious about? Have you got big plans? I think you do. Good. But let’s address a few things first, eh? Next week, at Caruso— Vera, are you listening to me?”

“Yes.”

“Next week, all of San Francisco will turn out at the opera: the mayor, the Hearsts, the Spreckelses—and yes, Morie, the real Sarah Bernhardt. They’ll be there, dressed to the bells, standing on their hind legs. Everyone who counts, and most who don’t. I want you to be able to tell me who is who—who are the players and why. It’s what you’ll need to master if you want to make something of yourself. If you don’t have beauty, child, work your smarts. They last longer. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“The mayor,” she went on, “he’ll be there. He wouldn’t miss a chance to welcome Caruso. Schmitz will be surrounded by the press. Everyone will want a picture of the mayor’s grin on his last night of freedom. I don’t imagine I’ll speak with Gene—that’s one photo neither of us can risk—but you’ll want to say hello to Eugenie, yes? When you do, hand Schmitz this.” She held out the envelope. “Go on, put it in your bag. Have you got a decent evening bag?”

“Good enough,” Morie said.

Rose looked me over, hair to toe, one last time. “The nuns may teach you penmanship, Vera, but next Tuesday night will commence your real education. Now, what will commence?”

“My education.”

“And how will you hand the note?”

“Subtly.”

“You, with the words.” She smirked. “That’s right, subtly.”

I was thinking of the difference between how she educated a girl downtown and how she was bent on educating me. Let me live with you, I longed to whisper. But, of course, I said no such thing. Instead I asked the question whose answer I dreaded.

“At Caruso, will you sit with us?”

“Don’t look for me,” she said.

There is poor as in not enough to eat or drink—we would know that kind of deprivation soon enough. But there is another kind of poverty—of spirit.

I was silent on the way home, not at all certain I liked myself. My betrayal of Tan sat like a stone in my throat. That, and not being beautiful, which of course I knew, but to hear her say it?

Morie and Pie were likewise stunned. The visit had whittled us all.

Hank pulled up at the curb in front of our house and we hurried to the door. Morie headed for the parlor with Pie trailing behind her, but I escaped to my room.

I undressed quickly and climbed into bed. I felt wretched and lonely. I felt I’d lost—this may sound hokey and perhaps it is—I’d lost my honor. I feared I’d never get it back. With Rogue stretched out beside me, and Rose’s pearls around my neck, I willed myself to sleep.

But sleep wouldn’t come. Eventually, I climbed out of bed with the thought of going downstairs to get a glass of milk. As I stepped into the hall, Morie called to me.

“Vera?”

She was in bed with the lamp lit, my hag-of-the-night in her muslin gown, hair hanging loose to her waist. I was relieved to see she was sober. She smelled of the sandalwood soap she bought in a little shop on Fillmore Street. I’ll say this, Morie was always clean. The scent brought forth our early life: how Morie wielded those hard sandalwood cakes as she scrubbed our young backsides and legs, how if she were jolly we’d laugh and pretend we were her little fishes; and those evenings, post-bath, when she bequeathed to Pie and me her tricks with cards.

“I can’t sleep either,” she admitted. “I am too much wondering—tonight, what stopped you from tattling on your old Morie? Eh?” She reached for my hand and tugged, not letting go till my bum perched on the edge of the mattress beside her.

I didn’t rightly know. What was my fealty to this mercurial Swede, who every Christmas made us sing songs of Santa Lucia as we decorated the scarecrow-like Swedish tree with its pepparkakor ornaments made of gingerbread for Pie and me? I didn’t know. But it pleased her to think I hadn’t abandoned her after all, and if that wasn’t love, well, it was something.

“You’re not so bad, you know,” she said, and to my surprise tears welled in her pale-blue eyes. “Yah-yah, we don’t need to say, do we.”

I shrugged, thinking: Every so often it wouldn’t hurt.

“You’re not so bad either,” I said, and meant it. She had done the best she could.

“I am always telling them at the hall: Vera, she is the one with the smarts.” Morie held my arm in a death grip. “Oh, but that hora of yours. How she turns us into little beggars in her big hora house.” Morie sighed. “Ev-er-y day, I ask the good Lord: Shoot me with arrows, plague me with boils, send me like old man Job to the desert, but why did it have to be her?”

I took back my arm, thinking: And what would have become of you if not for Rose? Me and Rose.

But what I said, I meant so deeply my voice broke. “Morie, I am not a beggar.”

“Not a beggar, eh?”

I glanced at the nightstand, at the daguerreotype of her with Lars. She had been so pretty—so pretty and young.

“How much do you owe the Haj?” I asked.

Not wanting to answer, she made a study of her hands, bending them into little church steeples, then folding them flat. She gazed at her portrait. “I wish you could have seen me. The time before last I was up-up-up. The people, they were wondering: How does she do it, winning week after week? They were all impressed, looking at me, you know, with the green eye.”

“How much, Morie.”

She shrugged. “Two, maybe three months.”

“Three months! The full-boat three months? School fees and the rest—all she gives us?”

She hugged her ribs and rocked ever so. “Six—six months.”

“Morie!” Rogue had followed me into her bedroom,