Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters Read online

  This information made Cornelia feel even worse, as though Virginia had betrayed her somehow. And then she remembered that she had never actually told Virginia that she was keeping their friendship a secret from Lucy. For now, Cornelia remained silent.

  “I didn’t know that you had been visiting with Virginia so much,” Lucy continued hesitantly. She seemed at a loss for words, and struggled on. “I didn’t realize that you were interested in spending time with a grown-up at all. Although Virginia is admittedly more fascinating than most of the adults I hang around with.”

  Cornelia couldn’t control herself anymore. “You’ve ruined everything!” she shouted. “Virginia was my best friend! She’s the only one who ever talked to me and told me stories. She was the only person who ever treated me like I was my own person, and not just your stupid daughter. First my father leaves and never comes back, and now Virginia’s gone forever too! And it’s all your fault.” Hot tears spilled down her cheeks.

  Lucy was completely taken aback. She reached out for Cornelia’s hand. Cornelia snatched it away.

  “Cornelia, listen to me,” said Lucy. “Just because I met Virginia doesn’t mean that your friendship with her is suddenly going to disappear. She obviously adores you. And it doesn’t mean that I’m trying to steal or chase her away from you. But, darling, there’s something else that I need to tell you.”

  Cornelia tucked her chin into her chest. “What?” she said tersely into her shirt.

  Lucy got up and kneeled in front of Cornelia’s chair. She took Cornelia’s hands in her own. As upset as Cornelia was, Lucy’s rare display of tenderness startled her.

  “Virginia is an amazing woman,” Lucy said. “She has lived in many incredible places and known many extraordinary people. And you know better than anyone that she’s had more adventures than most people dream about in their whole lives.”

  She paused and squeezed Cornelia’s hands.

  “There is simply no easy way to say this, Cornelia,” she continued. “Virginia is very sick. She has cancer. And she won’t be with us for much longer. She has come back to New York to think about her long, colorful life, and to be close to her memories before she goes.”

  For Cornelia, the hands of every clock around the world had just stopped. Every bird in the sky froze, wings spread wide. The Hudson River and all of the tugboats in it came to a standstill. She tried to breathe and found that she couldn’t. Lucy reached up to smooth Cornelia’s hair, and Cornelia didn’t even feel her mother’s fingers.

  Lucy edged Cornelia over on the big armchair and squeezed in next to her, wrapping her arms around her daughter.

  “I’m so sorry, darling,” she whispered into Cornelia’s hair, and rocked her a little bit. “And I’m so sorry that I haven’t been here more for you. I just have never wanted to impose my life on yours. I don’t want you to be followed around by packs of hungry photographers and get dragged all over this huge, lonely world for concerts. That’s what my life was like when I was your age and I hated it. And ever since you were a baby, I’ve tried to protect you from that life.”

  She was quiet for a minute. “And I know how hard it’s been for you to grow up without a daddy. But I didn’t realize how truly lonesome and upset you were and how much you needed your mother around you. Until I talked to Virginia this afternoon.”

  Cornelia burst into real tears now, deep, convulsing sobs. Lucy hugged her closer and rocked her some more. “It’s going to be all right, darling,” Lucy told Cornelia over and over again. “I’m here now,” she murmured. Cornelia just sat there limply and cried, curling up in her mother’s arms for the first time in many years.

  Cornelia woke up with a start the next morning, surprised to find her room filled with daylight. Usually it was just getting light when she got up for school. She looked out the window, and the river gleamed like a mirror in the sunshine. Confused, she lay back and tried to remember if it was Saturday already. Hadn’t yesterday been Tuesday? Then she remembered the conversation she’d had with Lucy the evening before, and a current of distress ran through her. She got up and went downstairs to see what was going on.

  Madame Desjardins wasn’t in the kitchen when Cornelia walked in. The housekeeper had left a box of cereal and a bowl on the table, for which Cornelia had no appetite. She looked at the kitchen clock. It was eleven in the morning. She heard Lucy tinkering away at the piano several rooms away.

  Cornelia tiptoed up the hallway and listened at the closed door of the piano room. She thought that she recognized the music that Lucy was playing, but she couldn’t place it at first. Then she realized that it was the same Mozart sonata that Virginia sometimes played on her record player. It was strange to hear the song without the pops and scratches of the old phonograph. Cornelia silently went upstairs and got dressed. And then she walked out of her apartment and stood in front of Virginia’s front door.

  She looked at the door for a long time, remembering the first time she’d walked past it and puzzled over the blue sign. She laughed to herself when she thought about Patel scrambling around and chasing after Mister Kinyatta in that very hallway. In her mind, she saw Virginia perched on her Moroccan daybed, surrounded by silk pillows and shaded by palm trees. She thought about all of the black-and-white photos of Alexandra, Beatrice, Gladys, and Virginia in each of the rooms.

  She reached out and rang the doorbell.

  Patel answered the door quickly for the first time in weeks. “Ah, Cornelia-ji,” he said. “You are here just in time, as usual. I need you to help me carry some things up to Virginia.”

  Cornelia followed him into the kitchen. Patel ran around the room, piling a silver tray high with teacups, biscuits, sugar, and milk. Finally, he clattered a hot silver teapot into the center of the tray. Cornelia looked at him doubtfully.

  “I think it might be too heavy for me,” she said apologetically.

  “No, no, no,” said Patel. “I will carry this. You carry that.”

  He pointed to a small, battered old leather suitcase. Cornelia recognized it as the case containing the phonograph. “It is heavy too, but you are strong,” Patel added. He bustled out of the kitchen with the tray.

  The Indian bedroom was bright with midday light. Virginia was sleeping lightly in her big white bed when Patel and Cornelia came into the room. Patel delicately placed the silver tea tray on a table near the bed and Cornelia set the phonograph case down near the window. She and Patel quietly set up the record player and put an old record onto the turntable.

  Virginia stirred and opened her eyes when the first strands of music came through the phonograph’s old horn. She looked confused for a second, and then smiled. “I almost forgot that I was in New York for a minute,” she said. “I thought that we were back in India, Patel.”

  Patel nodded. He looked at the ceiling as if he was trying to keep from crying. Then he left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Virginia watched him go and then looked at Cornelia. She waved her hand gracefully toward the white chair next to her bed. “Please be seated,” she said.

  Cornelia sat down on her small throne. The tea steamed up from its silver pot.

  “Isn’t it Wednesday?” Virginia asked Cornelia after a moment of silence. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “I don’t know,” Cornelia replied honestly. “I woke up late, and now here I am.” It was quiet again.

  Virginia arranged the white covers around her. “Look over there, Cornelia S.,” she said, pointing to the windowsill. Cornelia turned around and saw her colorful bouquet, gleaming in a crystal vase in the sunshine. It looked beautiful.

  “Virginia,” Cornelia said tentatively, still feeling as tender as a bruise from her talk with Lucy the night before. “Why did you invite my mother over to tea yesterday?”

  “So I could speak with her about you,” Virginia said frankly. “About how extraordinary you are. Everyone is always telling you how extraordinary she is, which is true. And now it’s time for Lucy to start hearing
the same about you.”

  Cornelia looked down, both flattered and flustered. She didn’t say anything.

  “Cornelia,” Virginia said softly. “Your mother loves you very much. And it is very important for you to know that, especially now. But she isn’t as adept with words as you are and might have a hard time telling you so sometimes.”

  Cornelia still said nothing.

  “One of the reasons you and I got along so beautifully from the very start is because we both love words so much,” Virginia continued. “We both wend in and out of dictionaries and tales and books, and so we understood each other very well right away.”

  Cornelia blinked back a tear. “But my mother doesn’t understand or speak that language,” she said. “Except for last night, she hardly ever talks to me at all. And I already told you that she doesn’t even care about words and stories like we do.”

  Virginia leaned toward the silver tray and poured herself a cup of tea.

  “Did it ever occur to you that your mother speaks through music and not words? And that is a very complicated, nuanced language indeed. Every note on every sheet of music is a word on a page to her. Every note she plays on her piano is a word spoken. If you want her to try to understand your language, you’re going to have to start trying to understand hers as well. I don’t mean that you have to become a pianist like her. I know your reasons for avoiding that path. But you must try to live in her world more than you do now.”

  Cornelia must have looked defeated, because Virginia added, “And that is not a dreary assignment, by the way. If you grow to understand both music and words, there will be no stopping you in this world.”

  She watched Cornelia for a second. “When I first met you, many months ago, you were such a closed book, Cornelia,” she said. “You wove yourself into a maze of longer and longer words so nobody could find you. And now you use words as bread crumbs through that maze. When I first met you, you used dictionaries as fortresses. Now you’re beginning to understand that the words in those heavy books are also about the stories those words compose. And, like I’ve always told you, stories exist to be retold and shared with others.

  “Not that I’m not impressed that you know such long words,” Virginia continued. “But sometimes I think that the simplest language is the best language. Listen to this.”

  She pulled an old book out from under the sheets. Cornelia could not see its cover.

  “This is a conversation that takes place between two friends,” Virginia explained. “One friend has just saved the other’s life. And the one who saved the other one is telling him why she helped him in the first place.” She began to read:

  “‘Why did you do all this for me?’ [the first friend asked]. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’

  “‘You have been my friend,’ replied [the second friend]. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die…. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.’”

  Cornelia listened attentively. “I’ve heard that before,” she said. “What is it?”

  Virginia clapped the book shut. “It is from Charlotte’s Web by a wonderful writer named E. B. White. You probably read it when you were younger. It is a children’s book—but the simple words in it say more than most grown-ups can say with every long word in the dictionary. Don’t you agree?”

  Cornelia did agree. Her heart filled with love for her friend, and at the same time, she was sure that it was going to break.

  “Virginia,” she said softly.

  “Yes?”

  Cornelia swallowed. “Are you afraid of dying?”

  For the first time in their friendship, Virginia’s eyes filled with tears.

  “A little bit, Cornelia.” She took a deep breath. “But you have to remember that I have done a lot of living in my seven and a half decades. And Alexandra, Beatrice, and Gladys have been gone for many years now. I miss them with all of my heart. Maybe I’ll meet them again when I leave this world, and we’ll have the biggest adventure of all.” She was quiet for a moment. “You just never know what’s going to happen.”

  Just at that moment, the record finished playing and the old phonograph clicked off. Yet they could still hear the soft sound of Mozart playing. After a minute, Cornelia realized that it was Lucy playing the piano in the apartment next door.

  For a long time, the two friends sipped tea and quietly listened to the faint music together through the sky-colored wall of Virginia’s Indian bedroom.

  Epilogue

  “You must be very pleased that school’s out for the summer,” the saleswoman said to Cornelia. “Although New York City gets so hot in July,” she added complainingly.

  “Yes,” answered Cornelia. “But my mother is taking me away on a vacation with her. To France. That’s why I need these new suitcases.”

  The saleswoman looked over Cornelia’s new luggage, brown leather with gold letters all over them. Cornelia liked the bags because they looked so old-fashioned, and reminded her of one of the books in Virginia’s English library.

  “Well, I do admire your choice,” the saleswoman said, tapping away at the register.

  “She inherited her mother’s good taste,” Lucy said, paying for the suitcases. “Let’s go home and have some lunch, darling,” she said to Cornelia.

  Cornelia looked out the window of the taxi as they drove downtown. They sped past Central Park with its zoo and tall green trees and sailboat pond. Down Fifth Avenue with its famous hotels and fancy stores. Past the dirty electric shock of Times Square, past the train station, and finally into the confusing tangle of streets in Greenwich Village. Cornelia could see the Hudson River gleaming as they neared her building.

  Walter helped Lucy and Cornelia heave the suitcases out of the taxi’s trunk and into the elevator. Cornelia lowered her head as they walked past Virginia’s front door to their own apartment. There was a pale square above the doorknob where the blue ATTENTION! CHIEN BIZARRE sign had been.

  Virginia had been gone for several months now. Recently, two tall women with immovable blond hair had gone into her apartment with clipboards, and a few days later, all of the furniture had been carted away to auction. Out went the grand desk from the library, the Moroccan daybed, the fountain, the Saraswati statue, Cornelia’s white chair—even the twenty palm trees, roots and all. Then workers had gone into Virginia’s beautiful apartment and chipped away the marble tiles in the Moroccan room and the cloister of the Indian room. Dusty bins lined the hallways as workers filled them with broken tiles and wood. And after that, they set to work making the apartment look just like Cornelia’s again, with its stark white walls and wood floors. Just like it did before Virginia and Patel had arrived.

  A new young couple moved in when the workers were done. The couple had a baby, and the little family was very quiet. Every time Cornelia thought about the smashed, vanished kingdom next door, her throat tightened.

  Madame Desjardins opened the front door the second Lucy put her key into the lock.

  “Oh!” said Lucy, surprised. “Thank you, Dominique. Can you help us with Cornelia’s luggage set?” She tugged a trunk through the door.

  Madame Desjardins had a strange look on her face. “Cornelia Street has a guest,” she said.

  “Is it Natalie?” Cornelia asked hopefully. She wanted to say good-bye to her friend before she and Lucy left on their trip the next day.

  “No,” said Madame Desjardins. Lucy and Cornelia looked up at her. “The guest has asked to speak with Madame Lucille first, and is waiting in the study. With a package for Cornelia.”

  Lucy raised her eyebrows at her daughter. “Wait here, darling,” she said, smoothing down her hair. She walked down the hallway, entered the study, and closed the door behind her.

  Cornelia was wild with curiosity, but of course, Madame Desjardins
wouldn’t let her eavesdrop at the door. So instead Cornelia anxiously paced all over the apartment: through the kitchen, the living room, all of the bedrooms upstairs, and back again. As a last resort, she grabbed the cup from the upstairs bathroom and ran down into the piano room. While Madame Desjardins busied herself in the kitchen, Cornelia held the cup against the music room’s red wall and pressed her ear to the cup’s bottom, trying to catch snippets of the conversation taking place in the study on the other side.

  “Cornelia Street!” said a voice behind her. It was Lucy, standing in the doorway of the piano room. Cornelia leaped about five feet in the air. “What do you think you are doing?”

  “Nothing,” said Cornelia guiltily, and skulked away from the wall.

  “Go ahead into the study, darling,” said Lucy, gesturing to her. “I’ll have Madame Desjardins bring in some tea for you.”

  “Who is it?” asked Cornelia as she ran into the hallway. Her heart pounded nervously as she opened the study door. When she opened it, she could hardly believe her eyes.

  Sitting there neatly on a couch inside was Patel.

  “Hello, Cornelia-ji,” he said, standing up.

  Cornelia ran into the room and threw her arms around him, tears flowing down her cheeks. She hadn’t seen him since Virginia died months ago. She didn’t let go for a long time, and he patted her hair while she hugged him.

  “Hello, Patel-ji,” she managed finally.

  “I have missed you,” he said, sitting down again.

  “And so has someone else.” He pointed under the desk.

  “Mister Kinyatta!” Cornelia shrieked, and dove on her stomach down onto the floor next to the sleeping dog. He woke up and blinked sleepily at her, and gave her hand a few lazy licks. Cornelia kissed the dog on the forehead and felt the little pads of his feet. She was still crying and tried to collect herself.