The Life of Objects Read Free Page B

funeral. I wore tweed skirts and cardigans in the shop, with wool stockings and brogues. In summer, a cotton dress with lisle stockings and brogues. I had two flannel nightdresses, a shawl, a brown tweed coat, knit gloves, and a gray felt cloche that I wore to church. Rubber boots, of course. I did not own a party frock or a pair of high-heeled shoes. The countess dressed as if she were going to a party every day, wearing a suit (
tailleur
, she said, not “suit”), silk stockings, hat, and gloves. In the evening, she wore a chiffon tea gown, with satin shoes in shades of pale blue, gray, or rose. She carried a little gold bag in which she kept a compact, a lipstick, a lighter, and a cigarette case. She wore jewelry in the day (diamonds only after dark) and lipstick all of the time, even when she went to bed.
    One night when she went to the dining car, leaving me to put away her clothes, I opened her red leather traveling case to dot some perfume—it was called
Cuir de Russie
and smelledlike oranges and birch bark—behind my ears and on my wrists, and to brush some powder on my cheeks. I had just settled a black grosgrain hat on my head, tilting it so that the feather swept the side of my face as I had seen her do, when the door of the compartment opened. Startled, I knocked the box of powder to the floor.
    She stood in the doorway, not particularly surprised at the sight of me in her hat (if I’d known any better, I’d have seen that she glinted). She came inside and closed the door, stepping around the spilled powder so as not to dirty her pretty shoes. “That color is a bit pale for you,” she said. “Your skin is too yellow.” I lifted the hat carefully from my head and put it in its box. I returned the empty box of powder and the scent bottle to her case. As she found the gold lighter she’d forgotten, she said, “They have Saint-Vaást oysters tonight.” She opened the door and looked at me over her shoulder. “Are you coming?” I said that I’d be there in a moment, after I cleaned the powder from the floor.
    As we crossed the German border, the countess, wearing a black silk peignoir (another new word for me, and one with unsettling connotations), suggested that she hold my passport for the rest of the journey, not wishing me to be further troubled by tiresome customs officers. Later, I threw my coat over my nightdress and made my way through the train to retrieve a book of lace I’d left in her compartment. As I moved from car to car, I felt that I had never been so happy in my life. My new independence, and my equally false sense that I could look after myself—the elation at having left Ballycarra behind—wereso strong that I even walked differently (the countess’s own walk may have contributed to this). When I reached her door, I was surprised to hear laughter and a man’s voice. I hurried back to my berth, my coat clutched around me, no longer quite so elated. I wondered if the countess had changed compartments and forgotten to tell me.
    On the last night of our journey, as the countess smoked a cigarette after dinner in the dining car, she confided that she owed everything in the world to Herr Metzenburg. He’d taken her, Inéz Cabral, a young girl of fifteen, straight from Cuba, where he’d found her, and groomed and dressed her. Herr Metzenburg’s house was the meeting place for the most fascinating men and women in Europe—not only politicians and diplomats, but writers and musicians and film stars—and he’d introduced her to a world that would otherwise have been closed, if not unknown to her. She confessed that her new manners and all the couture in Paris would not have amounted to anything in the end had Herr Metzenburg not stood behind her—and even then, she added mysteriously, there had been difficulties. After an arrangement of several years (living contentedly, she said, as slave and master), Felix invited his friend Count Hartenfels to a week’s house party to introduce