Becoming the Butlers Read online

  My father sat very still, his eyes widening as he realized he had been addressing a liquor cabinet. “What’s wrong with me?” he asked in a low trembling voice. “What’s going to happen to us, Rachel?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. That was the truth. I literally had no idea of what would ever happen again.

  “I’ve got to go upstairs and pack,” James said, sliding off his stool and leaving several bills on the bar. “Our flight’s tomorrow at seven A.M. Got the tickets here in my pocket.”

  “So we’re really going?”

  “That’s right. What else can I do? We never should have come. God knows what I’m going to tell Mrs. Vasquez. If I hadn’t married Elizabeth and made her move to New York City, she would never have met George. You don’t have Spanish supers in the suburbs. Hey,” he said with a little smile, “now you try saying that five times fast.”

  I was glad to see he still had his sense of humor. I didn’t feel very much like joking myself.

  My father walked steadily out of the bar but in the lobby he tripped over someone’s suitcase and fell hard onto the floor. He lay motionless for a few moments, like a corpse. Two porters rushed over but James, wobbling as he sat up, brushed them away. I took his arm and helped him to stand.

  “Did you see him, Rachel?” my father asked, peering into the distance.

  “Who?”

  “George.”

  “George?”

  “I bet you think I’m loaded, Rachel. But I could have sworn I saw him by the concierge’s desk.”

  My father’s eyes grew wide and glassy, as if George’s visage would haunt him forever. A new bruise, which began to swell over his left eyebrow, looked nearly identical to the one he received when he walked into his bedroom wall. My father’s bruises would never heal.

  PART TWO

  MANHATTAN

  SIX

  My father didn’t speak to me once during the six-hour flight to New York. He sat next to me in Non-Smoking and didn’t even go into the back to light up. It wasn’t easy for him though; he chewed six packs of gum, drank three highballs in a row, and squeezed his pack of Marlboros in his fist until it was a crumbled ball of tobacco and paper. He looked truly menacing: his forehead was covered with a peeling piece of dirty gauze, and his left eye was swollen and black and blue. The woman in the seat opposite the aisle from me kept staring, as if she expected at any moment he’d pull a pistol out of his coat. The movie projector (the same one from our flight over?) was still broken, and the headset only played selections from Oklahoma. The flight seemed endless; I had too much time to rehash all that had happened in Madrid. My father gazed longingly out of his window as if the blank indigo sky held all of life’s answers.

  We had nothing to declare at customs, except perhaps my bleached hair. James slept through the taxi ride, and when we arrived home, only grunted as he picked up the suitcases and loaded them in the elevator. He forgot which key went into each lock, and banged on the door as though someone inside could let us in.

  “Professor Harris, is that you?” Mrs. Rosen, in a red quilted bathrobe, peeked out of her door.

  “Yes, we’re back,” my father told her, “safe and sound.”

  The old woman shuffled out into the hall with a stubby cigarette stuck in her mouth. Amplified voices blared from her doorway: Good Morning America. Mrs. Rosen played her TV (our old set, I suddenly remembered) so loudly that I would never have to use my alarm clock again.

  “How was your trip?” she asked, putting on her glasses to peer at my father. What she saw pleased her; a slow, smug grin bloomed over her face.

  “Over,” my father said, finally unbolting the lock with the right key.

  “But where’s Rachel?” Mrs. Rosen asked.

  “I’m right here,” I said by her side.

  “My God! I didn’t recognize you. You look like a very different girl. What did you do to your hair?”

  “She stayed out too long on the beach,” James answered for me.

  “The sun must be very strong in Spain,” Mrs. Rosen remarked. “When you were gone I collected your mail for you. Hold on, I’ll get it.”

  My father pushed all the luggage into our front hall and flipped the light switch. Nothing happened. “Damn,” he swore. “I forgot to pay Con Ed.” The apartment was freezing, but that had nothing to do with Con Ed; from November to April our apartment was as damp and cold as a boarding school on a rainy English coast. The winds off the Hudson ripped through our poorly insulated windows with a howl that never abated, rattling the Levelor blinds and knocking over the few plants my mother tried so hard to cultivate. In Spain, even though the weather could be chilly, she would always bask in George’s warmth.

  “Home Sweet Home,” my father declared to the dark silence.

  “Here, we are, Professor.” Mrs. Rosen returned with a pile of envelopes that looked to be mostly bills. My father brought the mail into the hall and examined every postmark beneath the light. I knew he was looking for a foreign stamp.

  “You owe me one dollar and twenty cents for a C.O.D. package,” Mrs. Rosen announced.

  “I’ve only pesetas,” James told her, heading back to our apartment. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Rosen.”

  “Wait!” she cried, grabbing my father’s sleeve. “Aren’t you going to tell me what happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” my father said tersely.

  “But Elizabeth…”

  “We didn’t have much time for sight-seeing. We ate at a restaurant called Museum of Ham. And that, Mrs. Rosen, is what we did on our vacation to Spain.”

  “But Professor… Rachel, surely you must have…” My father slammed the door. Now, I thought, he’ll finally say something. But he only went down the hall and disappeared into his bedroom.

  “Don’t forget to pay Con Ed,” I yelled. The early morning sun was trying to filter through the filthy panes and I could just see the outlines of our furniture. Even in happier times, the apartment was never hospitable. My parents had no money when they got married (you don’t get checks when you elope, James always said), and had agreed to take the furnishings of the previous owner, a terminally ill French teacher who was moving to Quebec. The Empire sofa with sagging defeated cushions, the heavy drapes with a seashell brocade, a frayed Oriental rug with coffee stains like the map of the United States, even the spines of the leather books were all that same sickly green of the old man’s face. (Even today I can’t look at the color chartreuse without smelling dust.) The hallways were winding and narrow, and distorted what was being said in other rooms. A kind remark sounded strident, a word of love a complaint, a sigh so hopeless that it would chill the listener. Maybe if we had moved to a different apartment, my mother wouldn’t have left.

  I went into my room, closed the door and thought, What Next? The girl who stared at me in the mirror still looked like a stranger. Mrs. Rosen hadn’t recognized me at all. If only you could swap yourself for another person as a shopper might exchange a faulty purchase. As long as I could remember, I had never been too happy being Rachel Harris. The school I attended, the Winfield Academy, was filled with gorgeous, very rich girls. I was only there because my father was a teacher and the tuition was free for all faculty kids. My arrangement, I realized, wasn’t so very different than Pilar’s situation in our apartment building.

  Not only did I need to become someone else, I needed to join another family. My plan made a lot of sense. If your car gets wrecked in a crash, you buy another model. If your home is destroyed in a tornado, you take the insurance money and move into a larger house in a better neighborhood. My family was demolished, razed like an abandoned building that no one wanted to renovate. So why not join another family that was whole and secure? A family where people like George Vasquez simply couldn’t simply break up a home.

  I decided to telephone Nicole Rudomov. She was one of the most sophisticated girls I knew in a class of extremely sophisticated Manhattan girls. Although she probably could have joined the smal
l exclusive clique everyone envied, Nicole was very much a loner. I think her family’s upheaval had made her feel like an outsider, and she felt a kinship with me, the teacher charity kid: another oddball.

  “Who’s this?” she answered on the first ring.

  “Rachel.” Her abruptness always caught me off guard. And that voice. Her magisterial voice was so authoritative that not only did you do what she asked, you volunteered to do more.

  “I wondered what happened to you. You haven’t been around. Your doorman said Mr. Parallel Lines and you went on vacation.”

  Nicole had given James this nickname because once in class he supposedly shouted: “To Hell with Parallel Lines… Who needs them?”

  “Can you meet me for donuts?” I asked. “I know it’s kind of sudden but…”

  “Of course, Harris,” she said. “I’ll see you at Twins in half an hour.”

  I changed my clothes and went to my father’s bedroom to tell him I was going out. Behind the closed doors I could hear him shouting on the telephone. He could only be talking to my half-deaf and very senile grandmother in the nursing home.

  This wasn’t the time to interrupt him. I scribbled something illegible about shopping and ran out of the door.

  Nicole and I always met at Twin Donuts at Seventy-third and Amsterdam: a brightly lit shop with shiny tables still wet and redolent with Fantastic spray. A yellowing New York Post was usually crammed behind the leather cushion and no one ever left more than a quarter for a tip. My breakfast consisted of the kind of donuts with sugar that blew up in white clouds all over your face, while Nicole loved those special cream pastries that were so sticky that flies could get stuck in the frosting. She sat in our usual rear booth by the framed Jimmy Durante photograph, wearing her favorite outfit: her father’s Eisenhower army jacket over her mother’s old sixties black Dior dress, with authentic Rotterdam clogs. My father always said Nicole, with her high cheekbones, slanting eyes, and fair hair, looked like a Czarina or an impoverished Central European Countess, and I knew she had a famous poet-uncle supposedly still languishing in a Siberian jail.

  “Hey, Harris,” she said in the midst of lighting a cigarette. Why was I fated to be surrounded by people bent on destroying my lungs along with their own? “Bronoski,” she shouted out to the old store-owner. “Two cups of Java!” Mr. Bronoski lumbered over with a scowl. Nicole said something to him in Polish, which made him laugh and pinch her cheek with fat doughy fingers. Nicole spoke Polish, Russian, German, and a smattering of Urdu. But that wasn’t so unusual for a talented Winfield Academy girl.

  “He adores you,” I told Nicole after the old man stumbled off, still chuckling.

  “I know. He’s already proposed marriage twice.”

  “Really?”

  “Christ. You’re so gullible, Harris.”

  Nicole’s fingers drummed the linoleum tabletop. Her nails were painted in her usual outrageous shades: this time orange and green.

  “So where have you been?” she asked.

  “Nowhere, really.”

  “But your doorman said…”

  “We just went to visit my uncle,” I said quickly.

  “But I thought you told me your uncle lived in Japan with a Geisha.”

  “No, my other uncle.”

  “You mean your mother’s brother?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s his name?” Nicole asked, narrowing her eyes with suspicion.

  “George,” I answered too quickly. Then, wondering what Nicole had heard, I stammered, “I mean, Ricardo.”

  “You seem pretty unsure about this uncle. Are you sure you saw him?”

  “Why should I lie?” I said defensively.

  “I have no idea,” Nicole said, leaning back to blow the smoke away from my face. At least she was considerate. “But you could have told me you were leaving. I kept calling and no one ever answered. I thought you two were abducted by space creatures.”

  I bit into my donut as Mr. Bronoski brought over two cups of coffee. He spoke some more Polish to Nicole, and then pointed at me.

  “What did he say?” I asked after he left.

  “He asked me what happened to your hair. I was kind of wondering the same thing myself, but I was waiting for you to bring it up.”

  “Well, I bleached it.”

  “Obviously. But why?”

  “Why not? Can’t a person change once in a while?”

  “I’m not arguing with you, Harris. You look very different.”

  “Really?” I asked hopefully. “Who do I look like?”

  “I don’t know. But not Harris.”

  “Listen, Nicole,” I began, my voice scratchy with nervousness. “I have a question…”

  “Shoot away. I’m all ears.”

  “Well…” Even though my coffee was burning hot, I made myself sip it for courage. “If you wanted to become another person, who would you be?”

  “Do they have to be female?” she asked.

  “I guess not.”

  Nicole gulped half her cup of coffee down before she gave her answer.

  “Johnny Cash. Not Johnny Cash as he is now, but Johnny Cash ten, fifteen years ago.”

  “Isn’t he the guy who sang ‘A Boy Named Sue?’ Then went to jail?”

  “That’s right. He can’t help it if he’s such a free spirit. I just love the way he looks—you know, like he can just get up and go wherever he wants. No questions asked. No hearts broken. He doesn’t even own a suitcase. Just the clothes on his back. Even his gravelly voice sounds like an open road.”

  I decided my question had been way too broad. I couldn’t become Johnny Cash, or any other celebrity. It would have to be someone closer to home, someone I saw and heard everyday.

  “How about at school?” I asked. “And the person better be female.”

  “At Winfield?” Nicole mused. “They’re all such snobs. But the answer’s pretty obvious. Olivia Butler.”

  “Olivia Butler,” I exclaimed. Her name rolled like cream against my tongue. “Of course.”

  “Who wouldn’t want to be her? She’s got looks, dough, and brains. But so do a lot of other girls at Winfield. No, Olivia has something else. It’s almost historical.”

  “What do you mean?” I demanded.

  “It’s almost as if she’s in the wrong century,” Nicole said dreamily, waving her lit cigarette. Clouds of smoke enveloped our table and I felt as if we were in the middle of some movie flashback. “She belongs in a medieval castle, surrounded by an iron gate and moat. You’d have to travel far and endure many hardships before you could reach this castle, and then the only way to cross this moat would be by a rickety boat that might sink at any moment. And there would be Olivia, sitting by an open window, her long blonde hair flowing like a golden stream, playing a lute or a harpsichord or whatever they had in medieval times.”

  Nicole sat up abruptly and ground her cigarette in the ashtray. “Listen to me,” she said in a different tone of voice. “I sound like a nut. She’s never said a word to me. Maybe once I asked her for the time, but of course she didn’t answer. Her brother, though gorgeous, isn’t much better. It must be very reassuring to be a Butler. Never a moment of doubt. Of course it helps to be beautiful. And they are all very beautiful.”

  “Do you think it would be possible,” I said slowly, “to become one of them?”

  Nicole gasped so loudly that the regulars, mostly old women still wearing bedroom slippers and truck drivers, glanced nervously at our table.

  “What do you mean—become one of them?” Nicole asked. “You make it sound like some sort of Frankenstein experiment.”

  “Nicole, I’m serious. I’ve been thinking about joining another family and now that you’ve mentioned it, they seem ideal.”

  “Look, Harris,” Nicole said, leaning over, her blue eyes cold in the harsh fluorescent light. “I don’t want to dash your hopes, but come on, Olivia and Edwin probably don’t even know who you are. I bet if you stood right on top of t
heir beautiful Butler toes they’d look right through you as if you were glass. But the Butlers would probably ignore the Pope, Greta Garbo, even Mick Jagger. They’re quite comfortable knowing only themselves.”

  “I’ve spoken to Edwin before,” I said stubbornly.

  “When?” Nicole asked, scrunching up her nose in disbelief.

  “Last spring he stood next to me on the volleyball team and I always had to ask him to pass the ball.”

  “Get serious, Harris. You don’t even know anything about their family. The mother could be an ogre, the father a sexual deviant.”

  “I don’t think so,” I told her.

  “You’re right,” she said, crossing her arms. “Let’s face it, the Butlers are perfect. Who wouldn’t want to be one of them? But you aren’t making things very easy for yourself. If you wanted to become Sally Kane, or Lucy Ludlow, or even Gina Fonseca…”

  “I know what I’m up against.”

  “Well good luck to you, Rachel. I’m sorry I laughed. But how are you going to do it?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her.

  “Neither do I. I mean, it’s not like going in for a nose job or face-lift. They live at 860 Fifth Avenue, in case you’re interested. At Sixty-eighth Street. I only know that because my father has a penthouse office next door. It’s a real snooty building. They probably wouldn’t let anyone in who didn’t claim a Mayflower ancestor. Look, I got to go. Another shrink session. I wonder what Dr. Golden would think of all this. Miss Harris doesn’t like being herself,” Nicole said, mimicking a German accent. “Being Rachel Harris isn’t so awful, is it?” she asked, briefly touching my shoulder. I looked away. “If I can help, I will,” she said softly. “You have my number. And hey, don’t disappear again.”

  I watched Nicole leave and then left some change on the counter. The Butlers. Of course. I wasn’t intimidated by the fact that neither Butler had ever had much to do with me. Nicole was right: they would look through me as if I were glass. But I didn’t mind being an Invisible. The Butlers treated most people as Invisibles, and really didn’t have any friends but Hangers-on. And these Hangers-on, who we Invisibles envied because of their proximity to the Butlers, were in turn scorned by the Godlike Ones. Even the teachers were intimidated, and when waiting in line at the water fountain, would always let a Butler go first.