Anne knew her sister had lost her marbles when she moved the chandelier outside to the garden. She wasn’t even sure how Alice had done it; Anne knew the chandelier was very well affixed to the entryway ceiling, and it was a very high ceiling, so she must have secured a very tall ladder Anne didn’t previously know they had. Alice had been slowly seizing things from their appropriate places and depositing them in their garden (English it was, purposefully overgrown, not at all the French way) but the chandelier was absolutely the last straw. Anne could not have her sister running around the house pilfering items like a night bandit. What happened when she required the sterling tissue box? What happened when she went to set her tea on the ivory side table, and the ivory side table wasn’t there? This was no way to live.
Alice felt rather sneaky about the chandelier. After all, it was the dripping crystal type and quite large and heavy. She heard her sister snoring loudly (enough to rock a ship, she had once told her) on the cordovan velvet sofa in the North study, so she located the ladder in the kitchen (Peter told her where it was, but she searched for it and supervised) and insisted he climb up to the top rung and remove it. He was only ten or eleven, she couldn’t quite remember, so his back and chest were not filled out yet. She worried his measly arms would quiver and shake, and the whole thing would come plunging down in hideous, ruinous descent. However Herver, the chef, dashed from the kitchen in time to help, diverted by the commotion, leaving a cacophonous trail of French obscenities like bread crumbs along the way. Alice shushed him to make sure not to wake “Queen Anne”. If Anne were to wake up, she would scrupulously question her about the chandelier and why she was displacing it, and that was a conversation she didn’t feel like having in the entryway with the help standing all around her.
Herver refused to help hang it in the garden with an unarguable, “Non.” In truth, he was scared of Anne and perhaps a little in love with her. Alice had always thought so. The rumor was that long ago, before Anne buttoned all her buttons (and she buttoned every single one, all the way up to the top of her neck, where the flap of her chin hung down) she and Herver had relations in the pantry. Alice was not sure if it were true, but she developed an aversion to canned green beans and uncooked angel hair regardless. Passing the kitchen, she often shuddered at the thought of dry goods.
Luckily Jose, the gardener, was there that day. Most days, she wasn’t sure he did much of anything but stand around with his hose on. She never saw him trim or cut back, which she was now thankful for, as it gave her coverage from whatever could attack at night. Yet the roses all bloomed come rose season and the peonies in peony season and the rhododendrons in rhododendron season and so on, so she never saw reason to complain. And because he was relatively strong and came from a culture wherein it was acceptable to stand on the side of the road, offering to move furniture, he helped her suspend the chandelier on a branch of the largest tree, the giant oak under which she had placed the Victorian day bed only days before.
Anne knew Alice thought Anne didn’t know Alice was misappropriating all the furniture because mostly she lifted from obscure rooms no longer used, like exterior salons and second floor dining rooms. However, what Alice didn’t realize was that Anne conducted daily tours around the house, making sure there was a place for everything and everything in its place. She knew the very first day when Alice confiscated the matin toile chair from the salon west and was eyeing closely her sister’s choice of furniture since. But now, with the chandelier, Alice simply went too far, displacing one of the key elements and leaving a gaping hole in the entryway ceiling.
That day for lunch, Herver started them with a butternut squash soup, which he devised from real butternut; Alice saw Peter squashing it earlier with his bare hands. It was a lovely soup with a hint of cinnamon. Alice was thoroughly reveling in the flavor, rich yet not creamy, unlike Anne’s soup, to which she added crème fraiche and even some chive.
Anne was not aware she had destroyed an otherwise subtle soup. She was instead preoccupied with the Louis XIV bar, which previously sat in the corner, but was no longer there. The china that formerly rested on it was arranged in its same formation on the floor, as if awaiting a cocktail party for miniature people.
Anne lay her silver spoon down on the mahogany table. “When are you planning on returning the furniture?”
Alice looked up, her blue eyes primed to jump out of her skin. “Returning it to who?”
Anne blinked noisily and patted her bun. “To whom.” She cleared her throat. “To the estate.”
“It is still on the estate,” Alice responded easily.
“It is not in its rightful place.”
Alice swirled her spoon around in her soup, observing the yellow broth swoop in circles around the bowl. “Who is to say what is rightful?”
Anne grew bright red, and Alice was worried she was suffering from an allergy to chive. But Peter entered to remove the soup, and the red slowly drained from Anne’s head, as though it were but one giant measuring cup decanting crimson dye.
“Are you planning on repairing the giant hole in the entryway ceiling?”
“I hadn’t thought of it.” The truth was Alice hadn’t. She was much less concerned with what wasn’t in the house than she was with what was now in the garden.
Peter brought out the lamb shank with couscous (Herver was feeling very Moroccan that week, and they already dined on minced chicken in puff pastry with a sprig of mint on Monday night) and it was clear as he placed it in front of Miss Anne that there were small, shiny beads of sweat settling on the long, dark hairs of her upper lip and around the hairline.
Anne breathed deeply, attempting to calm herself. “So you are just going to keep everything in the garden?”
“That,” Alice said, ingesting a bloody square of lamb, “I am.”
Alice knew Anne could not comprehend it, but what she truly desired was a room of her own. She had been reading Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette Queen of France by Jeanne Louise Henriette Genet Campan, and she realized that much like Miss Antoinette’s hamlet, every woman must secure a place of their own to think, to clear their head of all the frivolities of this ephemeral existence, and to ponder what they would become. Since childhood, her favorite novel was The Secret Garden and her next favorite was Great Expectations, so she decided that the perfect place for this room would be in the garden. After all, the sisters had an aunt (their father’s sister, very uninterested in the frivolities of ephemeral existence) who joined a tribe of gypsies long before she or Anne were born and could possibly acquaint themselves. Thus she felt this very bohemian lounge (who would match an Asian carpet with a French chandelier and a Victorian day bed other than a gypsy?) was guiding her to understand from where she came, who she was, and all the places she could go. And if stanza meant room in Italian, well then, was there ever a place of more poetry than this outdoor room?
Anne, sur l’autre main, was indifferent to poetry. Her interest lay in essay and structure and with, first and foremost, fixing the hole in the entryway ceiling. It was a blight on the landscape of an otherwise perfect house, and she could not bear it. Even if no one came in or out but she and Alice (or, rather, Alice, as Anne didn’t go out), she could not stand the dreaded sight of that black hole rising to infinity to the floor above. It destroyed the aesthetic her grandfather had manned many oil rigs to create. It would absolutely not do.
That evening, over seared tuna on a bed of mixed greens with a lemon ginger vinaigrette, Anne voiced the opinion she felt empowered by her grandfather’s oil stained hands to express. “You are going to move the chandelier back into the entryway.” It was quite a declaration, and Anne’s heart fluttered like a wounded moth trapped in a window screen with the fearful excitement of it all.
Alice shook her head while surgically removing the pepper corned edges from her tuna; she absolutely hated peppercorns, she didn’t know why Herver always insisted on putting them all the way around. “I’m sorry, but it belongs on the tree now. It looks quite beautiful there. You can come see, if you like.”
Anne could not imagine how a chandelier could look beautiful anywhere other than precisely where it was meant to go. “I have no interest in visiting whatever habitat you have constructed.”
“Well,” Alice said creating a barricade of peppercorned tuna on the side of her plate, “that, I’m afraid, is your loss.”
Anne recognized that Alice was not going to give back the chandelier. She had an utter disregard for a place for everything and everything in its place, not to mention the house their grandfather built. However, what Alice was too young to remember was that their grandfather lay on his death bed in this very house (the East upstairs day room, as it received the best light) on a twin bed of white linen embossed with his own initials in cursive script. Laying there, he recounted the time he was a young boy in Russia and the trees were frosted over, the government was harping around every street corner in intimidating uniform, and he clutched the few rubles he had as though they were Spanish diamonds with frayed and fingerless gloves, thinking, with these few measly kopecks, “I am going to build a better life.” So he cashed in his filthy coins and took a steamship past the horizon, nearly dying of scurvy and the putrid stench of rotted planks, landing in America to build a sparkling fortune worthy of a small country with no political turmoil. Fifty years later, he said to Anne that very day before he took his very last breath while she held his hand that ceased to work a year ago and yet was soft and manicured all the same, he wheezed, “Не доверяйте французам.” Unfortunately, Anne had never picked up Russian, but their maid at the time (her grandfather would only trust a Russian) spoke both languages and translated. “Don’t trust the French,” he said. But also, “Заботьтесь об этой жизни, которую я строил.” (Take care of this life I have built). And if that were the man’s dying wish, if he had traveled a globe to come here and conquer, she would have no choice but to abide.
Alice loved her room. After indulging in a light and fluffy lemon soufflé, she escaped to her outdoor chambre and was now assembled Indian style on her Asian rug under the moonlit chandelier, listening to the sound of the crickets in the thicket and contemplating the human form. She had finished more than twenty-five nude sketches (she read Drawing the Male Nude by Giovanni Civardi, Surrealizing the Nude by Paul Delvaux, et Le Dessin enseigne par l'Exemple: Etude Du Corps Humain No. 3, Le Nu Femmes by Albert Genta and each so many times that every page was browned and thinned along the edges) and she was wondering if she could open a gallery one day, cultivating her own garden. Since she was finished growing in all sorts of other ways (she didn’t expect to get any taller and wished not to get any wider), she felt that would leave her plenty of time and space to refine her palette, and to one day become a great artiste. She knew without a room of her own she would become something like Anne, whittling (or rather burgeoning) away in an oversized house with a place for everything and everything in its place. Instead Alice longed to be a woman her estranged aunt would hold in the highest of esteems. Alice was unsure if her aunt were still alive but took pleasure in picturing her riding the back of a longhaired Sherpa, wrapped in hand woven colored blankets (the kind with fringe made of horse hair) as they visited all the wonders of the Ancient world. As Alice thought of her aunt soaring like a shooting star through exotic skies, she was suddenly over swept with emotion infinite as her long blond hair. “It is such a lovely and necessary thing to have a room of one’s own,” she said out loud to no one in particular. “It really is.”
Anne knew she needed to somehow fetch back the chandelier. This posed quite the problem. She certainly could not get it herself. She had once been diagnosed agoraphobic, and since they told her this meant she was never to go out of the house, she never had and thus developed a fear of what lay beyond the front door. As well, she was quite nervous of spiders and any other insect brazen enough to bite her, and it was not the least bit proper nor ladylike to scramble up trees. She surmised she could ask Herver, but he did not seem as though he could balance on a ladder with any sort of facility; she was afraid he’d break it. And if anything were to happen, no one could make a stewed duck quite like he. Granted she had never sampled anyone else’s stewed duck, nor would she ever want to. In that secret place from which she never spoke, she fancied Herver’s hands sculpting her meals, as though in feeding her he was professing his desire to nurture her as she had him that one afternoon, so many years ago among the canned peas. She could ask Peter, but he was not yet fifteen. If something terrible were to transpire, Anne was worried his mother, an awful woman always carting him to theatrical auditions in the hopes he could be her ticket out, would request an amount of money she was not sure they had. Nor could she acquire it selling off the furniture because Alice had already snatched it up, which was what put her in this mess in the first place. After exhausting all options to recover what was rightfully hers (and her grandfather’s, may he rest in peace), she was exhausted, and before making any sort of conclusion, fell right there at the dining table into a loud and fitful sleep.
For the next few days, Alice worked to bequeath upon her room a celebratory ambience. She gathered votives (she asked Peter to do this, but it was her vision) and mirrors and hung them from the foliage lined walls of her private room while contemplating the fourth wall. She imagined herself tearing it down, always in séance, and reaching out to her beloved unknown aunt, as well as raising any spirits, Cezanne, or perhaps Gauguin, that could aid with her artistic plight. She had taken to wearing a Japanese kimono splashed with tangerine colored fish draped over her Mexican Cinco de Mayo Fiesta dress and strands and strands of rainbow beads she found in a drawer in the main dining room. The energy of the cosmos channeled itself through her chandelier and entered her little room where she was in perpetual celebration of her newfound independence. She shared French macaroons with the birds (they loved pistachio!) as if it were a party and often contemplated what it meant to be an artist. She knew the road ahead of her in her little room would not be easy, sometimes, particularly in winter, it would get quite cold. But she also knew that if she kept at it, the world would eventually see her as she saw herself, and Alice Northrup could be a name known far and wide. She would leave a footprint, an indelible sketch, which could never be washed away.
While Alice was busy constructing garden dwellings, Anne’s dress clung to her wet armpits and in the small (well, large) of her back. She hadn’t so much as touched the flayed fish, the butterflied ham, nor the truffled pot roast (she touched them ever so slightly but absolutely did not clear her entire plate) that were served since the evening she realized Alice had stolen the chandelier for what was most likely forever. Even if Alice were to return it before she one day laid on the white linen twin bed in the East dayroom, looking back on the casualties of her life, the chandelier most certainly would have aged twice as fast as they, and it would not be fit for an obscure hallway in the South wing leading to a servants’ chamber, let alone to be the coup de theatre of the front entryway. She decided to attempt to calm herself with a daily round and inventory but discovered Alice pilfered over a third of the candlesticks in the house as well as various silver hand mirrors once belonging to their great grandmother that were of great, great sentimental value. And so, in her fury, she decided to do what she presumed was the only viable remaining option and rang a chandelier repairman in the hopes that she could persuade him to fetch it from the tree.
That evening, Herver composed a meatless lasagna. It was not a particularly inspired dish, but he sensed a tension in the giant house like the taut strings of an orchestral violin, thinking perhaps the sisters were suffering from complications digestive. He felt a simple lasagna would be soft on the stomachs and prevent any sort of internal rupturing. He did, however, not eat such mediocre cuisine and was sure to prepare some fois for Peter and himself.
Anne divided her lasagna squarely into quarters while Alice deconstructed and reconstructed hers, picking apart the long, flat layers and removing the small shards of zucchini until it was composed in such a way she preferred.
Anne felt a new surge of smug security with the knowledge the repairman was coming and that everything would soon be righted. “Does it not get cold at night in the garden?” she asked her sister, hoping she could prod like an iron fire poker until Alice saw the foolishness of her ways.
“I suppose. But what is life without struggle?” Alice replied, building up and tearing down her Italian-inspired meal.
Anne had assumed her sister would not be responsive to helpful, sisterly advice. “It is,” said Anne, “a great many better things.”
Alice took a sip of her wine and laughed a charming laugh that spread throughout the entire estate like the jingling of keys.
Anne was in the main wing of the house, pacing. It was five fifteen and the day the repairman was scheduled to arrive. He said he was coming between ten and noon of that morning and then rang and said he would not be there until between the hours of noon and two, and then rang again and said, “Somewhere between two and four.” Yet he was still not there. Anne stood at the window, the ever faithful watchdog. Finally, at five twenty-five, the repairman miraculously appeared.
“You’re late,” Anne snapped.
The repairman parked his dusty red tool kit on the entryway floor. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Where is the problem?”
Anne pointed to the gaping hole.
Fortunately Anne was not exhaustive enough with the repairman over the telephone, so he did not bring sufficient tools to fill the void. He only brought a smattering of plaster (“You never said how big the chandelier was,” he informed her) and only enough to blanket an insignificant surface area, perhaps where the bell shaped attachment affixed to the ceiling. Thus he would need a chandelier. Since the repairman was both muscular and seemingly agile, Anne felt confident that he was the perfect man to secure its retrieval. “You must get the chandelier back from the oak tree in the garden and bring it here,” she commanded.
The repairman was deathly afraid of the looming figure before him, expanding like an angry balloon. Her large head seemed destined to burst, so rather than questioning the decision to put the chandelier outside in the first place and the subsequent resolution to fetch it, he just said, “Sure.”
Alice was seated on her rug, sketching in charcoal, when she first spotted the repairman walking in long strides across the fresh grass. What she noticed after studying the male form for the last four years were his striking features and classical symmetry. He had a face that appeared to have been sculpted from marble, as though something in the Louvre had come to life to pay her a call (and if it were true, such fun!). His high cheekbones and impressive wingspan caused her to nearly choke on her raspberry macaroon. She knew she recently let in energy from all ends of the stratosphere, but she didn’t realize she would be repaid so swiftly. But, upon closer inspection, the man was not a statue come to life. Rather he was only a mechanic of some sort, standing on the footstool from the pantry, just under the chandelier.
The repairman was attempting with difficulty to dislodge the chandelier. The mad witch who lived inside the mansion failed to say that A) she kept a nymph in middle of the garden and B) the chandelier was the dripping crystal type and quite large and heavy. As well (C) it seemed as though it had been outside, where it was quite damp, for so long, it had begun to mold itself to the tree. The whole situation was so undesirable and very poorly lit that he was not sure if he could actually perform his full repairman’s duties. Yet he thought about the frightful woman inside and what could happen to him if he were to fail, and fearing it might involve a leather belt and burly lashings, he felt the strength swell inside of him to face his task at hand.
Alice would not have a mechanic steal her chandelier. It was both rude and highly inconsiderate that he should disrupt her room of her own this way (his way), and she could not imagine he would have any need for it. He seemed the sort whose room of his own would consist of screwdrivers and table saws and drawers choked with tacks. She could only imagine why he was planning to dismember it, subsequently pawning the crystals in a dirty attempt to earn some quick cash. She wondered if she ought to phone the police. “What on Earth are you doing?” Alice shouted up to the man.
“Putting the chandelier back,” he said rather loudly, as though he were partially deaf in one ear.
Alice was quite befuddled. He didn’t seem to be “putting” anything but rather “taking” something that was clearly not his. “But it isn’t yours.”
The repairman was curious if that were an appropriate response to anything. He only had to listen to the nightly news to know ownership could be, nay usually was, quite fleeting. But he decided to answer the young nymph as best he could. “I’m sorry, miss,” he said, battling the monstrous light fixture, “but the lady of the house said I am to fetch it.”
The repairman pointed and Alice followed his finger like a dagger until it reached a large shadowy figure standing at the French door, the sheer taupe curtain pulled back just enough so Alice could just see the snarling face of her sister. Suddenly Alice had a flash of herself as a small child. She wore an oversized straw hat and her mother’s shoes, and a woman with long strawberry blond hair and yellow topaz rings kissed her on the cheek and pressed a red colored pencil into her palm. She smelled like chocolate, sweet yet bold, and Alice knew it was her gypsy aunt, giving her a taste of a different life. And so Alice realized she must scale the great oak in her Cinco de Mayo Fiesta dress with beads dripping down and fling herself upon the chandelier, elated she finally had something of her own to protect.
Anne, who was watching from the window, shivered through a cold sweat as though the air were the interminable frost of a Moscow winter. She remembered her grandfather who lay thin and breathless on a white twin bed, having survived, having conquered, and Anne knew there was only one thing she could do.
***
They buried Alice in the family plot. Anne, Herver, and Peter were in attendance, and even the repairman came to speak a few tear-stained words. He felt the experience opened his eyes to his own superhuman strength, and he was now on a path of enlightenment, learning to hone the channels of energy coursing through him. He also discovered comfort in Peter, what he called “the tenderness of a young boy’s spirit”, and as they clasped each other’s calloused hands at the funeral, Anne thought it was lovely that Peter had a real man to look up to. They lowered Alice’s casket into the wet ground, and the priest swayed to the rhythm of the long blades of grass wheezing a brief yet stirring sermon about Mary, Martha, Jesus and Lazarus. Anne costumed herself in appropriate mourning attire, complete with black tea gloves and a lace veil. She paid no heed to the fact that there was a crust of dried dirt on the heel of her sensible shoe; she stoically accepted the consequences of being outdoors.
That fateful evening when Anne saw Alice scale the great oak in an ardent display of unladylike behavior she felt as though her grandfather’s life passed before her own eyes. She saw, in flashes, dirty hands clutching foreign currency, the tear of hope and fear in a seasick boy-who-was-not-yet-a-man’s eye, silver tins of snuff, and even caught a whiff of vodka, strong and stringent in the air. She realized in that moment she had no choice but to overcome thirty-five years of remaining indoors, gazing at high ceilings in place of blue sky. And so she committed herself to the impossible: Anne went outside. Perhaps it was the shock of fresh air, perhaps it was the knowledge that she had liberated herself from a condition she wasn’t sure she had, in order to salvage something of her grandfather’s memory. But from the depths of her sizeable being that dark, murky place other women might name a womb, she felt a large and echoing scream that escalated in pitch by measured intervals like the calculated clack of a metronome. It was a scream of fear mingled with liberation, a scream similar to the noise her grandfather must have made when he first glimpsed a bright new world shining from a stone torch as his ship released its anchor at Ellis Island.
The repairman had been hard at work dislodging the chandelier and, immediately distracted by the scream, forgotten there was little still holding it to the tree. When the medical examiner came to the estate, he found upon intimate inspection that the force of the scream reverberated throughout the garden and broke the last tie marrying the chandelier to the great oak. He informed the living parties via theatrical reenactment it was not only the weight of the chandelier that killed Alice because that would only cause severe injury (here he mimed what seemed to be a crippled hunchback with a clubbed foot) . It was, rather, its weight in combination with the angle of impact, which so swiftly severed Alice’s head from her body (here, the medical examiner drew his finger across his throat, tilting his head all the way to his left). Anne was saddened and horrified at her sister’s beheading (there was quite a lot of blood spilt), but she had warned her sister not to be such a silly girl in so many words. Had Alice cooperated and not tried to remove things from their respective places, then she wouldn’t have ended her short and poetic life. Luckily her blood only stained the Asian carpet; Anne was quick to employ Peter in the return of the rest of furniture, and he could be seen the rest of that day running back and forth across the lawn, carting various pieces of their interior design. Jose was responsible for raking together whatever debris (human and otherwise) that had been left behind, and it was the sketches which fell into the latter category. Ordinarily it follows that art increases its value after the death of the artist. However, Alice did not ever have the chance to grow in the ways she could; one could argue that the chandelier saved her from a life of watching dreams fall like stars into the great beyond. At the very least, Anne was comforted by the fact that Alice spoke repeatedly about ephemeral existence, so she felt, in the end, her sister was fulfilled in her untimely death because what could make life more ephemeral than that? And so Anne sat at the mahogany dining table, with now only a place laid for one, admiring an impeccable household far above reproach. She smiled a thin smile and rubbed the tip of her spoon with her thumb. She felt certain there would always be a place for everything and everything in its place.