The Education of Bet Read Free Page B

Frederick looked as though he was at least trying to maintain some appearance of seriousness, Victoria had a smile that was broad, open, and generous.
    Occasionally, Will would talk about that earlier house we'd both lived in: what ways it was the same, what ways different from the house we later lived in with Paul Gardener. But his reminiscences—of croquet mallets strewn across the lawn, of a nursery crammed full of decorations and toys, not to mention of the kind nanny that went with it all—were for me like hearing about a country I had never traveled to. For myself, I remembered with clarity only one small part of that house, and that a part that Will had never seen. I had also been in Frederick Gardener's study and one other part of the house, or so I'd been told of the latter—the wide foyer on the one and only occasion I crossed the threshold of that house—but I was exiting rather than entering, leaving that house for the last time, my face pressed into the shoulder of the person carrying me, and so I had no memory of what I was leaving behind me.
    Will's father had been a handsome and successful businessman, his mother a beautiful society matron who could afford to choose whether to be kind or not. Who had been my mother?
    Why, she had been the maid, of course.
    My father? I had no idea. Nor was there anyone left alive who could tell me.
    In all my memories of my mother—and I am sorry to say there are not many, and there are fewer and fewer as the years move on—she is impossibly young. Becky Smith was pretty in a way that was wholly different from Victoria Gardener's expensive beauty. My mother was tiny and dark—I can only assume I inherited my great height from my father—and she was always busy, busy, doing whatever was required of her to help the household run smoothly. I would glimpse her briefly in the still-dark early hours of the morning when she rose from our shared bed to start her day, and at the end of that long day when she fell back into bed, exhausted. Occasionally, if she could steal a few minutes, she would visit me in between. The rest of the time, particularly when I was very small, other servants took turns attending to my various needs.
    I understood, from having overheard the conversations of others, that when my mother "got herself into trouble," as the saying goes, there had been some talk of putting her out on the street. It would have been the usual thing for a family like the Gardeners to do. What use was a maid who suffered bouts of morning sickness? Why should a respectable household even consider keeping on a maid who had been foolish enough to get herself in the family way with no husband in sight? It would be unseemly. It was unheard-of.
    And yet, to Victoria Gardener at least, it was not unheard-of. Perhaps her own condition, being with child, made her more sensitive to her maid's? Perhaps that made her more empathetic than other women of her position in society would have been, and she could imagine how frightening it would be to be pregnant and alone and suddenly find oneself put out on the street with no hope of a better prospect? Whatever her reasoning, she made the kindly decision, prevailing upon her husband to go along with it, to let the maid stay. So long as Becky Smith kept her baby confined to the servants' quarters at the top of the house, so long as the household itself was not disturbed in any discernible way, Will and I were to be allowed to grow up under the same roof.
    Later on, when I learned what had happened, it was odd to think of Will and me living our early years in the same house, never seeing each other, our experiences of that house so vastly different. Will told me later that he had been happy back then, and I believed him. For myself, my few memories indicated that I had been happy too. There was food to eat, a place to sleep, I was cared for when people had the time—what other life had I ever known?
    And then the typhoid came.
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    Typhoid is