Came shouts from downstairs. Whilst Maimie let herself be buttered up with flattery and cash, Bianca’d requested the head gardener’s six children to please strip naked. Her being the boss’s kid, they did so. Bianca next locked them into a gazebo. She set it cautiously afire. Dragged up to Poppa’s study, Bianca was soon being severely scolded by her folks, loud, “Why? Tell us why?”
Without knocking, Maimie rushed in. The blue envelope still plugged her uniform’s breast pocket. She posed—arms outstretched—between the girl and parents. Everyone acted startled by her doing this—especially Beech herself. She answered the Indigo Baron’s dangling question. “Why? Marse Satan. He after her. Times, my baby here just feel so left out, them three sisters all in a clump. Satan got His Eye on her.—And I tell you: she shy.”
Hid behind a white uniform, the child grabbed its starchy hem. Tears came to her great eyes, she tried blotting these onto Maimie’s crackling whites. The cloth was too stiff for absorbing much, teardrops rolled as if down plaster.—But, listening, Baby Bianca suddenly found she was. That. That Maimie’d said.—Only Maimie Beech truly knew her.
ONE of Angus’ competitors tried luring Beech away, hoping she’d come “break” his own namesake scamp and son. He offered Maimie a goodly raise—she snitched to Angus. A lover of loyalty, McCloud gave her this exact amount right then and out of pocket. Bianca now semi-behaved. Maimie’s love had done it. Miss “Secret Weapon” knew no name for her secret weapon. Talent? No, more Love.
Her brats shaped up because Beech got them totally used to her own terrible complete attention. When she arrived mornings, kids could spend thirty minutes telling Maimie what she’d missed since they spoke last night. She taught them to mistrust their little playmates and everybody but the Need itself. She then met the Need completely. Everything Beech knew and guessed, she told them. Her earnestness, they felt. Kids met it with their own. In these soft spoiling households uphill, she offered them a single certainty, one gauging straightedge. Maimie then scared her brats: They might lose their Maimie’s love. How would they like that, hunh? Who would they have then?—Her love was strict as the Old Testament contract. God often told His chosen children, “I’ll call you ‘chosen’ if you choose Me back …” And if not, His brood got extensive wilderness, boils, bears, bugs, the deaths of favorite children. Maimie’s love, like His, kept a flashy mirrored sweetness spelled across its front. (This, the hiring parents saw.) But, behind, you found a hundred slapped-on crusted layers of black lead. And yet, this very blackness made the mirror mirror.
Maimie was a strict addiction for which there won’t a known cure. None except her kids’ outgrowing it, their being packed, weeping, off to school. Children soon found: Learning to read was not a fair exchange for having been so lovingly decoded under Beech’s complete attention.
Thanks to my feisty mother’s smoothing-off, Maimie’s reputation now lifted past nanny, more towards governess almost.
5
LIKE MANY of us, this woman worked hardest to hide one precious secret—and it was the very secret everybody knew about her first. No fair.
Arriving at McCloud’s hiring interview, Beech hand-delivered fourteen excellent references. But these were notes she couldn’t read and, see, sugar, that’s the secret. One letter claimed: “Beech is a genius with children. My little Sandra called her ‘Mother’ first and, though my blood just absolutely positively boiled, I saw how, in most ways which mattered, Maimie L. actually was, alas. So be it.”
Maimie Beech’s major vanity? Pretending she “had” reading. (Some letters she herself handed Angus lightly mentioned this.) He instructed others in the house never to tease poor Beech about it.
Like I already told you, she carried her Bible everywhere, often opening and closing it, glowering around, daring anybody’s doubt. Beech used the Book as her moral guide but, too, her pedigree in these fine homes.
Prior to doing for one self-styled Baron of the store-bought color Blue, Beech had served born blue bloods. These aristocrats pinched pennies, tried saddling Beech with changing brats’ diapers and washing them. “Plenty talented launderesses around here,” she threatened quitting every time.
But not in Angus McCloud’s openhanded home. Everything he touched … From Maimie’s first day on the job, his forty-room house—with its stained glass, its mantels like altars—seemed almost a weekday white folks’ church, some church you’d never have to leave. “McCloud’s Mansion”—it sounded worthy of the 100 Psalms that Beech had memorized. Corridor walls were paved with thirty paintings of one castle. The place rang all day with three pianos, players good and getting better. Skylighted rooms sprouted potted palms even taller than Miss Maimie. Though Maimie knew that the word “Psalms” had more sighs in it than Palms did, she’d seen such plants in Sunday-school lithos. She let herself enjoy blending the Bible with this house. Before the accident, while chasing Bianca through downstairs chambers, Beech seemed to aim towards palms, smiling, eyes shut as stray fronds whisked her face. On the huge stairwell (a makeshift pulpit when won’t nobody around), she mumbled the sweeter Psalms. She recollected her favorite book’s incense, its cedar tabernacles and marble steps, its chimes, the pretty sounds of captive nations’ native tongues offering praise to the Lord.
When Angus came inland from indigo growing, he entertained local mayors and some foreign guests. French was sometimes talked at dinner. Maimie listened at the cellos sawing underneath French’s surface jabber. Working in five decades of rich folks’ homes, Beech’s manner had slowly changed. She now kept her long neck extended at a haughty angle. Her pleated face stayed wide open with a look of full entitlement. At table, she was spared having to speak the native tongue of strange nations herself. This way, she could just enjoy the sounds—follow them from mouth to mouth. (Letters printed in Maimie’s Bible—the antlike dots and dragonfly squiggles—looked to her lots more like choir-book sheet music than signs for plain dull English. To Beech’s ear, French sounded much more Bible-days Oriental.) She sat here, awestruck but contained, following its music back and forth. For Beech, French became the official Psalmish gong-and-tinkle she heard steadily belling in her head.
And little Bianca eating right here—one hand stowed safe in Beech’s—this darling babe-and-suckling spoke the holy tongue.
6
TO FOLKS most interested in rightful owners’ control, parenthood can be the hardest job of all.
Later, waiting to know if his high-tempered pet would live or be a vegetable or what, handsome Angus McCloud lunged around the overdecorated home. He avoided a second floor where doctors buzzed near one baby swollen unrecognizable. Experts wore dark wasp-waisted coats. They’d buggied from far-off Richmond. Young local Dr. Collier had been bypassed, not good enough for this. Till now Angus had believed a person got what a person paid for. The oldest daughters hunted their addled poppa, floor to floor. Since the accident, girls wore black full-time. They’d sacrificed their major joy: they locked the lids of three massive pianos. Household mirrors were covered with jet crepe. Angus’ wife and elder girls found him crouched alone in the attic. Poor man was slowly tapping his right temple against one wooden upright. Strapping McCloud then galloped downstairs, he yanked velvet drapes off windows in twenty-nine steep and perfect rooms. “Light,” he called loud. “It’s light she’ll be needing more of.” He didn’t blame skinny zealous Maimie L. Beech for his daughter’s accident, though the culprits had been black as Miss Beech. Nurse could be heard now weeping out in the garden house, tearing strips from her white uniform. (“I won’t asleep, just resting my eyes after ex-cess Bible reading.”) Angus’ womenfolk followed him chamber to chamber as he ripped down curtains. Daylight showed rooms full of floating dust—gold, yes, but gnatlike—a terrible corruption working everybody’s air. “Will ye look at it all,” he studied motes. “Two dozen people cleaning a house and they canna keep out pieces this size?—No wonder.”
Loved ones allowed this temporary madness, just the way they’d admired
his earlier gift for managing.
“Let him”—for some ladies, it’s a whole philosophy of life.
ANGUS respected America’s Indians (“Ye have to hand it to them”). Angus praised Beech in front of company and mentioned her Tuscarora forebears: chieftains and lairds, no doubt. How could Maimie fall from being so wedged and high up, chapter and verse, in the House of Palms? Child, I’m getting to the accident and lapse.
Like lots of religious unschooled folks in those days—Maimie’d memorized well over a third of the Holy Scriptures. But when quoting from memory, she preferred to fake a somber reading of it. Didn’t matter if her selection came from Genesis or Revelation—Maimie always opened the Book midway to Psalms. At impossible speed, her finger blurred over printed lines. She sometimes paused, rubbing her eyes the way she’d noticed other readers do. Maimie Beech seemed to feel that reading—with its joys and power—must be very thrilling but mighty wearing on you. Jealous McCloud servants said they’d often seen Beech check the gold cross engraved across her Bible’s front. This was her guide in holding the book right side up. If the cross’s T bar was near the top, she knew she was safe from being discovered. Then her deep voice spoke God’s word with fresh, level authority.
Before the trouble, Maimie and her Bible arrived to work hours early. Long before Bianca woke around eleven, here came the black spinster armored in the crispest of white uniforms. She fondled the brass cross bobbing at her throat. She forever wore that perched unaddressed envelope of a nurse’s cap. While tiptoers waited for the baby of the house to rise, Cook let Maimie go sit in a place of honor, on the low three-legged in the stove’s corner of the kitchen. Maimie’s outfit was so starched: the first time she sat each day, you heard her break like pasteboard egg cartons.
She could rest over there for the longest time, staring down into a Bible big as any cookbook. Other servants sniggered. The chief gardener sometimes asked, “What you studying on so hard today, Miss Famous Maimie Beech?” And—convicted—furious, without even lifting her head, the woman would suddenly spout four minutes’ worth of Leviticus, citing chapter and verse, finger blurring at a angel’s speed over one page of Psalms. She seemed to consider that a book was like a bucketful of water—pretty much the same contents floated on its top as on its bottom. Dip in anyplace, all water. The text she wanted would rise, up up through pages—drawn to the bait and lure of so hardworking a fingertip. Maimie got no credit for these feats of memory. She could sure concentrate. The selfsame focus she usually pinned on some scared flattered child, Beech now pegged square upon one page. The old woman paused only to massage strained eyes. She did it with such conviction, child, you found: your own had started burning.
IN ACCEPTING this job, she’d told Angus, “Can’t stay here long. Maimie likes them young.”
Miss M. L. Beech always gave notice the day her babies turned six. White folks believed Maimie just specialized in toddlers. But truth is, she couldn’t bear it when the children found her out.
Till school spoiled things, Maimie might sit, with some beautiful picture book opened in her lap, a living baby tucked snug under either arm, and—free as air or water—spin out any tale she chose. It felt like swimming and walking at the selfsame time—a promenade along some river’s glassy lid. Her lore was partly fairy tales like one about a poppa-king whose golden touch proved butterfingered. Her lore was partly Bible rehash, part neighborhood gossip from Baby Africa downhill, partly whatever stepping-stone footholds the pretty pictures gave. Her finger was careful to skim to and fro, fro and to—a dorsal fin keeping her afloat. Beech’s tales ofttimes starred little dervishes she’d tended at other rich white homes in Falls. Her latest charges felt right honored to join a list of local children already so famous they’d been wrote up in national books.
Years back, a child Maimie’d shepherded through six years and thousands of changed diapers—betrayed her. This blond-ringleted boy, a Saiterwaite, was the first to do so: She never planned to live through that again. He sat listening—he watched her needling clockly finger move over the dark wasp shapes swarming in rows, shapes she’d patiently explained to him were Letters. He had only been a schoolboy for six weeks. He piped loud in front of adults, “That’s not what this book says, Maimie. You just make it up. I think you made up every book you ever told me. Did you, Maimie, hunh?” She smiled at him, tears stood thick as lenses in her either pouchy eye. Come morning she politely resigned, moving next door to the neighbor’s brand-new baby, a baby who’d admire and forgive Maimie Beech till school unlocked the mystery of a black-and-white page.
Maimie might have stayed the honored servant in one home forever. She might’ve lived on long after the household children grew up and moved out. But she felt determined: learning to read by seeming to read. That and some restless curiosity kept her changing jobs every six years, minimum. Maimie’d considered asking one trusted employer to please help her learn her letters. Beech knew how avid, grand, and Old Testament her own mind was. She surely had the deepest will to know. But asking meant admitting, didn’t it? Doesn’t it always? Bosses would find: She’d been lying all along—they’d go and tell their children (hers). False-reading was Maimie L. Beech’s only lie. As a serious Christian woman—she suffered for it daily.
7
A GIFT Beech bought my momma led to both their downfalls. I often wondered who Momma might’ve been without this—and who, in turn, child, I might’ve managed becoming. Actress, scholar, teacher—anything! Beech lost her place of honor in the mansion and at table. Her Main Street dignity toppled, too. A child thrashed half dead upstairs. The mansion and its staff stayed unmusical and overlit in penance. Everything was said in harsh un-Psalmish English. Doctors refused to even let old Nurse go near the little victim. They idly blamed Beech without quite saying so. Twice they’d found her sleeping on the hall floor outside the sickroom—her head resting on the huge black book.
Next dawn, Mr. and Mrs. McCloud heard Maimie arrive for work that early. She had banished herself to the back yard. She’d asked to spend the night in the gazebo. She was denied permission. What first sounded like a mourning-dove reunion proved to be Miss Maimie’s endless scripture-quoting vigil. Angus rose, looked out. A fat Bible rested open across Beech’s long bone thighs. Her black finger speeded so, it tore one page’s precious tissue. She pressed it back, apologizing to the Book, mashing the tear like it might heal. Beech, her prim hat knocked off-center, sat hunched on a lawn bench whose cast iron made it look formed all of ferns—petrified ferns wanting more than anything to serve one person as group-effort fern furniture.
From the upstairs window, my grandpoppa, Angus, listened at chanted Old Testament lamentations—ones so suitable for awful troubles and, therefore, child, too often far too suitable for you and me. (Might be one reason the Book is the second best-seller of all time. Behind the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. A fact. Look it up.)
McCloud came lordly down the stairs. Cook still slept. In his tasseled robe, Angus personally made tea for Maimie. (A newly rich Jack-of-All-Trades, he loved mornings best—each one seemed born with a message printed on its lower left border: “Imagine your name in this space.” Angus’ pride was worldwide shop talk plus knowing how to do most everybody’s chore just a bit better.) Of his efficient household staff’s two dozen souls, he’d only felt awe at Maimie’s mischief-squashing talent. Now, she too had proved mortal, disappointing. Why was Angus always surprised when another minor wizard slipped? It hurt him every time.
Wearing just his robe, he carried out a tea tray, one warmed scone. Beech blurted what she’d had all night to prepare: That day it’d happened? She’d only blinked after reading the Good News too long in a row. Her baby slipped right off. “Now look what’s gone and grabbed her. Lord bound to punish Maimie. Unh-huh. ‘Eye for eye.’ Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, Deuteronomy 19:21, Matthew 5:38. ‘Eye for eye.’ You watch.”
“We must never talk like that,” Angus said. He explained he wanted Beech to eat and drink while h
e could see her. She’d lost weight she couldn’t spare. His indigo-blue robe’s hem was wet with dew. He pulled satin around his red-haired legs, settled beside Maimie. Both folks could hear the household waking. They could see three daughters’ heads peek out. Servants soon studied this odd pair resting side by side in a green back yard as green as greenbacks.
Angus said he remembered how, like him, Maimie was a orphan. He said he understood how this made such family as a person finally found (and founded) mean all the more to that person, did it not? “That person …” she began but nodded instead, “person … so sorry.” Her hands kept opening and closing her Bible, its cover flexed the way a perched butterfly will cure its wings in sunlight. Angus, watching, understood she hardly noticed. He reached over and—with a tender manly touch—stopped her. “Oh,” Beech said, ashamed.
Angus shifted more her way. In full daylight, she looked refined and yet—blinking—seemed mystified at where her power’d gone. McCloud regretted that her secret weapon must stay a secret now—unpatented. He onct imagined having Maimie dictate a short book’s worth of how-to’s at one of his secretaries. Since the accident, Miss Beech looked so stranded—something with its wings clipped, a poor buzzard forced to hobble forever along the ground. McCloud asked that Beech please go home today, just rest. He swore he’d send word if their wee child’s health changed, either way.
“Our wee child,” his ripe baritone allowed itself the sloppy luxury of repeating. In him, words’ sweetness released a wallop so dark and syrupy it became almost a poison. The big man let hisself again feel what losing poor Bianca’d mean. The last time Angus indulged this, he’d raged around the homeplace tearing down stifling drapes.