The Body in the Boudoir Read Free Page A

water or attractive the tiny decorative castle. “Is she old enough for makeup?” “Do you think it’s wise to let two young college girls go to Europe on their own?” Quite polite people who would never ordinarily make comments about others in public felt entitled by membership in the congregation not only to comment but also advise. “Faith, you seem to be having trouble finding your path, not like Hope. Did I hear she just got another promotion? How about teaching? You’d be so good with small children.” Or worse, “My adorable nephew is in town. The one who just finished Harvard Law. I know you two would hit it off.”
    Smile, just smile. Think about converting to Buddhism and definitely repress the impulse to hit the speaker.
    It was true that Faith took longer to “find her path” than Hope, but Hope had been reading the Wall Street Journal all her life, moving rapidly from Pat the Bunny to The Little Engine That Could and from there to the Dow Jones. After college, Faith had returned to the nest, where she had in fact spent most weekends, and embarked on several months of serious socializing, becoming a regular on the Hampton Jitney. By the end of August, her mother’s unsubtle hints left on Faith’s pillow—jobs circled in the newspaper, a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? —were having the opposite effect intended. Faith felt even more lethargic and depressed about her future. She had no idea what she should do. There was no clear path that she could see. The last straw was when her dear father left a copy of Robert Frost’s poems open to “The Road Not Taken” next to her place at dinner—she was eating at home for the first time in a week and they were having the usual, a variant of a nice piece of fish or a nice piece of chicken and a little salad. Jane Sibley still fit into her wedding dress and the one she’d worn when she came out.
    Faith had been annoyed and embarrassed. “Two roads.” Great. Yet, as the meal progressed and she listened to her mother talking about the real estate boom and Hope talking about the stock market boom and her father not talking much, but presumably thinking about some sort of celestial boom, she made a decision. She would take the road “less traveled by,” and she wouldn’t talk about it. Not yet.
    The next day she enrolled in Peter Krump’s New York Cooking School and talked her way into an unpaid apprenticeship at one of the city’s top catering firms. Whether they were swayed by her interest or the fact that they thought she could use her influence to get them jobs didn’t matter. She was in.
    When she mentioned vaguely to her family that she was taking some career courses, they didn’t seem to notice that she was coming home dead tired and with the occasional smudge of flour on her face. It was enough that their darling daughter was doing something.
    Jane Sibley had always had a housekeeper who dropped off the evening meal or stayed to cook it. And Faith had always enjoyed being in the kitchen with these women, some happier to have her underfoot than others. Over the summer, and even more during the fall, Faith had realized that the one thing she liked to do—that could translate into a respectable career, that is—was cook. The brownie recipe with dried cherries she’d invented when she was thirteen had given way to other desserts and then meals, although her mother warned her not to get in the latest hire’s way: “Good help is hard to find these days.”
    So Faith had decided to be the help, and after she finished her studies, went to her parents with her business plan, informing them that she was using some money her grandparents had set up for their granddaughters in a trust as capital. They were taken aback at first, advising that she work for another firm to start, but Faith had quickly realized that the jobs she’d been