Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters Read online

“Hmmm. Remarkable. I have heard her play before, many times,” Virginia said. “Where is she today, Cornelia?” she asked.

  “Morocco. At a ‘retreat.’”

  “What a coincidence!” exclaimed Virginia, rearranging the pillows around herself. “And here you are, in my Moroccan room, having an adventure of your own. Tell me, do you have any other ideas to make this room even better? Your idea about the fountain is going to change everything in here. Maybe I’ll hire you as my decorator.”

  To Cornelia’s surprise, tears of gratitude welled up in her eyes. Usually when people found out who Lucy was, they were no longer interested in Cornelia or her ideas. They only wanted to know more about Lucy, and what it was like being her daughter, and what their apartment was like, and what Lucy ate for breakfast and that sort of thing. And now, in Virginia’s Moroccan forest, Cornelia suddenly became an interesting, independent person for the first time in her life.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  Yet she knew immediately that she wouldn’t want to change a thing about either the room or its owner.

  In a few minutes, Patel reemerged through the curtains with a gleaming silver tray heaped with glasses, spoons, sugar, and a teapot of steaming tea. The clean, soothing smell of mint filled the room. Then came the approaching click of dog toenails behind the door curtains.

  “Gah!” cried Patel as he gingerly placed the tea tray on a little table next to the daybed. “How did he get out of the kitchen?” The curtains swayed around the bottom, and Mister Kinyatta emerged victoriously through the part in the center.

  “Mister Kinyatta! You are the worst, most presumptuous creature I have ever met!” Patel snapped. “This tea is not for you!” He leaped toward the dog and they immediately started running in circles around the room. Cornelia gleefully dodged Mister Kinyatta on his first lap.

  “Patel,” cried Virginia. “Don’t worry—I’ll take care of him. Mister Kinyatta! Pay attention!”

  The dog screeched to a halt and looked at her.

  “I bet someone would like to come up on the bed, wouldn’t he?” Virginia said slyly. Mister Kinyatta trotted up to the edge of the daybed, still keeping an eye on Patel.

  “Cornelia, can you help Mister Kinyatta up here? He thinks that he’s a lot bigger than he actually is,” said Virginia. Mister Kinyatta clearly understood his owner, for he looked at Cornelia expectantly.

  “Let him sniff your hand,” Virginia suggested. “Mister Kinyatta, do you remember Cornelia? She brought you cupcakes a few weeks ago.” She paused, then said,

  “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t remind him about that, since he didn’t actually get any of the cupcakes in the end, did he?”

  The dog looked suspiciously at Cornelia as she knelt down next to him. After appraising her for a few moments, he seemed to find her acceptable and gave her an arrogant little lick. Cornelia lifted him up and put him neatly in the middle of the daybed.

  “He is the most spoiled dog in the Western Hemisphere,” Patel grumbled.

  He walked over to what looked like a leather suitcase and opened it up, revealing the antique record player Cornelia had seen on her first visit. He attached the big horn to it.

  “This is very old,” Patel informed Cornelia. “You used to have to wind it up. But we fixed it so you could plug it into the wall, like a toaster or something.”

  He looked through a pile of old records stacked next to the machine, pulling out a few discs and considering each one carefully. “Mozart,” he said to himself, placing a record on the turntable and switching it on. The sound of pops and scratches soon came out of the machine as the record warmed up. In a few seconds, they heard the first tinny strands of a Mozart symphony. Satisfied, Patel got up, poured tea into two little etched glasses on the tray, and left the room.

  “Why does Patel sometimes call you Virginia-ji, and call me Cornelia-ji?” Cornelia asked when the coast was clear.

  “Patel-ji is from India,” Virginia answered. “In that country, when you add the suffix ‘ji’ to someone’s name, it’s a sign of affection. I say it all the time without thinking—sometimes even to women in stores and waiters.

  “You know, a friend of mine gave me a big, fancy stereo a few years ago,” she sighed, changing the subject. She lay back on the pillows, listening to the music for a few moments with her eyes closed. “It had a thousand buttons and huge speakers and probably cost as much as a car. But I couldn’t get used to it. In fact, I disliked it. The music sounded too clear to me. Doesn’t that sound silly? But I don’t have any memories attached to music that sounds like that—at least, not in my home. I like listening to music this way, on an old record player. That’s how I used to listen to music with my sisters when we were young, like you.” She opened her eyes.

  “How many sisters do you have?” Cornelia asked politely.

  “Three of them. Alexandra and Beatrice were twins. Gladys was the plump one,” Virginia smiled naughtily.

  “And I was the youngest of the four. Actually, there’s a picture of us, over there, if you want to see what they looked like.” She pointed to an old black-and-white photo on a low shelf across the room.

  It was a lovely picture of four young ladies sitting with great poise in a room very much like Virginia’s palm court. The first three ladies were slender and elegant, with long necks, and the fourth was plump and impish-looking. Wonderful, nearly matching hats perched on their heads, and the sisters toasted one another with Moroccan tea glasses. Grinning men in white robes and dark caps with flat tops and tassles surrounded their table.

  Cornelia examined the picture with great interest. Since she was an only child, other people’s brothers and sisters fascinated her. The very idea of siblings was novel. The ladies in this photo reminded her of three swans and one big quacking goose. She looked at their faces and detected a young and pretty Virginia under one of the old-fashioned hats.

  “Do your sisters live in New York as well?” Cornelia asked.

  “No,” said Virginia sadly. “I’m the only one left.”

  Cornelia didn’t know what to say. The room was silent for a moment, until Virginia continued, “We were in Morocco when that picture was taken. We grew up here in New York, and lived in a big apartment on Fifth Avenue with a butler and lots of maids. Not bad, of course, but we were so restless. It was hard being a girl back in those days. You got watched and chaperoned and had to behave nicely all the time. All of those white gloves and manners! We couldn’t get away with anything, Cornelia. That was especially tough on Gladys, who was such a tomboy. So as soon as we were old enough to travel without our governess, we left to see the world. Anywhere and everywhere a train or a boat or a plane could take us. Or even a bicycle or camel or horse.”

  Cornelia couldn’t quite believe this. She always thought that it was the parents who traveled, leaving behind their children, not the other way around.

  “How did you get your parents to let you go?” she asked. “If I’m gone for more than an hour, our housekeeper calls every store in the neighborhood.”

  Virginia smiled. “Well, we had to be very crafty about it. You see, most girls didn’t go to college back then. But we pleaded and begged and told our parents that we needed some sort of an education before we got married. We told them that we wanted to study the art and customs of many different countries so we would have more interesting things to talk about at parties and to suitors when we got back. I don’t think we ever really fooled our mother, but Gladys badgered our father so much that he finally said yes.

  “Our poor father,” she continued mischievously. “All he wanted was a son. And he kept getting daughters, one after another. When there were no sons, all he wanted was a son-in-law. He couldn’t wait for us to get married, and then none of us ever did.”

  “Why not?” asked Cornelia. Although only mildly rebellious herself, she still wanted to hear about any and all forms of rebellion against non-understanding parents.

  “We didn’t see any reason to,” V
irginia answered.

  “The Somerset sisters were always together and we were never lonely as a result. No one ever met Alexandra’s standards for Beatrice, and vice versa. Gladys was too robust and she was always getting into trouble.

  “And as for me—well, all my life, I’ve somehow frightened people away with my flashy vocabulary,” she continued. “I’m a writer and storyteller, and therefore words are very important to me. But people get intimidated sometimes when you use long words, and run away. So the very thing that made me special also has always had the potential to make me lonely. On the other hand, this talent can also be very useful in deflecting unpleasant or vexing people.”

  “I know exactly what you mean!” Cornelia exclaimed.

  “Our housekeeper, Madame Desjardins, is always buzzing around me like a bee. The only way I can get any privacy is to use longer and longer words until she gets mad and goes away,” she explained.

  “Aha,” Virginia said. “So you too practice the art of parisology. A very smart weapon when one encounters a person who is multiloquous, or when you are subjected to bavardage.”

  Cornelia was stumped. “What?” she asked. Ironically, she almost found herself saying “Comment?” like Madame Desjardins.

  Virginia laughed again. “‘Parisology’ is when you use words that are unnecessarily complicated so that no one understands what you’re talking about. ‘Multiloquous’ means ‘very talkative,’ and ‘bavardage,’ which is one of my favorite words, means ‘foolish or empty chatter.’”

  Cornelia was a little bit daunted. “Those are good words,” she said. “I didn’t know any of them.”

  “Not many people know those words, so don’t feel bad. Anyway, I can tell that you’re very smart. I wasn’t a parisology master until later in life.” Virginia studied her young guest with admiration for a minute.

  “I wish that I could go on a trip around the world,” Cornelia sighed. “But I bet I’d have to take Madame Desjardins too. How old were you when you got to go?”

  “We left on our voyage when I was twenty years old, in 1949. Alexandra and Beatrice were twenty-two and Gladys was twenty-one. We called ourselves the Somerset Adventuresses. And interestingly, the first stop of our voyage was in Marrakech, a city in Morocco.” Virginia looked wistful for a moment. “Would you like to hear a story about some of our time there? You can imagine your mother there as well, maybe even doing the same things.”

  Cornelia peered at the faces in the photo again. The Somerset sisters indeed looked vivacious and defiant and extremely happy to be where they were. For a moment, the room around Cornelia seemed to turn black and white and she thought she could hear the voices of the ladies and their servants. She looked at Virginia.

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  Virginia reached out for a glass of tea. Long mint leaves had unfurled inside the glasses on the silver tray. She handed one to Cornelia and took one for herself.

  “One should always toast before drinking, Cornelia,” Virginia said ceremoniously. “To conversations, as opposed to foolish chatter,” she declared, holding her glass up to clink it with Cornelia’s. “And to adventure.”

  She took a sip, and began to tell her story.

  Chapter Four

  Morocco, 1949

  “It took us a long time to get to Morocco. First we took a huge ocean liner called the Mauretania II from New York to England. And by the time we got off the ship, the crew members and the captain could not have been happier to see us go, for every single night, Gladys would clean them out in poker games. Even if the games lasted until three in the morning, the next day she would always join us for breakfast, looking as innocent as a nun.

  “Then we had our trunks and bags hoisted onto another, smaller ship, and sailed down to Portugal. From there, we caught a third ship, which took us from Europe to Africa. We finally arrived in Casablanca, one of the famous port cities in Morocco.

  “None of us had ever seen anything like it. You and I are used to American cities, with all of those skyscrapers and cement, with taxis darting around us and subways shaking the ground below our feet.

  “Casablanca was completely different. From the moment you set foot on the land, the most wonderful chaos surrounded you. Hundreds of people filled the streets, selling things, running about, shouting to one another. Dust swirled in the air like smoke. Small, square buildings, most of them made out of white clay, lined the streets instead of tall steel towers. Dry palm trees baked under the hot sun, and the strong smells of fish and cooking lamb wafted up from the market stalls along the docks. Dozens of dirty braying donkeys pulled carts up and down the roads, driven along by barefoot boys or men with long robes and red hats with flat tops and tassels called fezzes.”

  Cornelia pointed to one of the servants in the photo of Virginia and her sisters. “Is he wearing a fez?” she asked.

  Virginia squinted at it. “Yes,” she answered. “I love those little hats, but they’ve always looked terrible on me. On our first night in Morocco, Gladys won a fez from a hotel manager in a card game of fan-tan. She wore it all the time, until it blew away in a sandstorm.”

  She continued her story.

  “French soldiers idled about in the streets and cafés. At the time, France ruled the country, although Morocco still had an important sultan whose family had been ruling the country for centuries.

  “Our trip wasn’t over when we got off the ship. Right away, we boarded an old train already overflowing with people and even a few animals. We sweltered in the heat until Gladys opened the window of our compartment. So much dust flew in that our faces grew gray and we couldn’t breathe. We closed it again and fanned ourselves with our tickets for the rest of the journey. I had never been so filthy, and let me tell you, Cornelia, it was wonderful.

  “We finally pulled into the train station in the city of Marrakech, where we planned to live for several months. We opened the train’s door to the platform and stumbled out, happy to stretch our legs at last. People streamed off the other cars around us.

  “When the cloud of dust finally settled down, a young man stepped forward to greet us. His skin was the color of hazelnuts, and a long robe draped his tall, skinny frame. A fez sat neatly on his head, and he wore an amused look on his face.

  “‘Miss Somerset?’ he asked.

  “‘Yes,’ all four of us replied in unison.

  “‘Marhaba,’ he said graciously, nodding to each of us in turn. ‘Ismi Pierre. I am Pierre. I am your guide in Marrakech. Ahlan wa sahlan,’ he added.”

  “What does A-ha-lon wa sa-ha-lon mean?” interrupted Cornelia, stumbling over the new words.

  “It means ‘Welcome’ in Arabic,” said Virginia. “Although we had no idea at the time. He could have been saying ‘I’m going to cook you for dinner’ and we wouldn’t have known the difference.”

  “Now, months before, our mother had written ahead to a travel agency and rented a magnificent Moroccan house for the four of us. Pierre was one of the servants who would live with us and help us while we were there.

  “‘Follow me, min fadlik,’ Pierre said, which meant ‘please,’ and we followed him out of the railroad station. A grand but disheveled old car waited for us outside.

  “‘I will follow with the luggage and meet you at home very soon, inshallah,’ Pierre said, opening the back door of the car for us. I learned later that inshallah meant ‘God willing.’ ‘This is your driver, Ahmed, and he will take you to the medina, the old city, where your house is.’

  “Alexandra and Beatrice looked worriedly back at our trunks and suitcases piled up on the sidewalk of the station.

  “‘I wonder if we’ll ever see them again,’ Alexandra said, but she climbed into the car anyway. The rest of us trundled in after her.

  “We drove slowly through a labyrinth of ancient winding, narrow streets lined with low ramshackle buildings. Ahmed made a great racket, honking at every person or donkey that got in our way. People peered into the windows at us and even tapped
on the glass. Once while the car was stopped at an intersection, an old man tried to sell Gladys a smelly goat, but Ahmed leaned out his window and yelled at him until he went away.

  “Finally, the car turned onto a deserted street and parked in front of a splintery-looking, filthy old building. From the outside, it looked like it might crumble into dust if you even touched it. Ahmed turned off the car, popped out, and opened the back door for us.

  “‘Ahlan wa sahlan,’ Ahmed said. My sisters and I looked at each other in confusion.

  “‘Hina, hina,’ Ahmed said, meaning ‘Here, here.’ He smiled and pointed to the door. ‘Beyt,’ he added. ‘Home.’

  “Alexandra opened her purse and pulled out a piece of paper from the travel agency with an address written on it. She showed it to Ahmed, who nodded vigorously. ‘Aywah! Yes!’ he exclaimed. ‘Hina!’ He began to pull our hand luggage out of the trunk.

  “‘This can’t be right,’ Alexandra stammered. ‘Our mother would never stick us in such a dump! What should we do?’ She helplessly started flipping through her Arabic phrase book. A broken shutter swung in the warm breeze, creaking on its rusty hinges.

  “Beatrice took control of the situation. ‘What about the photos they sent us? The descriptions? A Moroccan palace, indeed!’ she hissed. ‘Give me that!’ she said, and snatched at the phrase book. She marched up to Ahmed, who was lugging our bags to the front door.

  “‘Inwehn…umm…ghalat,’ she told him, trying to say ‘Wrong address.’ She found another word that worked for her. ‘Aha!’ she shouted. ‘Uteel!’

  “‘What does that mean?’ Gladys asked her.

  “‘Hotel, I hope,’ Beatrice said, and began dragging the bags back into the trunk.

  “‘What do you mean, hotel?’ shouted Alexandra. ‘He just has the wrong address. Our mother went through all of that trouble to rent the house, and we’re going to find it! Give me back that book!’

  “Gladys gave a loud sigh of disgust and pushed past us. She stomped up to the front door of the house and knocked noisily on it. The door opened and a young boy in a white robe appeared in the doorway.