She listened helplessly while Mallory asked her mother questions about medication and sleep, and received evasive or nonsense answers. When Mallory tried to insist that her mother eat some food, Mrs. Tolliver countered again with the statement that she was owed Skittles because she had let Mallory go to school.
Phoebe ducked her head. She chewed on the inside of her cheek. She got it now: Mallory’s lack of decent clothes had been the symptom of an even bigger maternal problem than she had imagined. Mallory was in serious trouble and she, Phoebe, was totally out of her depth.
But she knew someone who wouldn’t be. I’ll just bring Mrs. Tolliver and Mallory home, Phoebe thought. To my mother. Relief filled her. It was simple as pie; simpler by far than what she had done yesterday in dumping Colette and appealing to Mallory for friendship.
And there was no time like the present.
Phoebe moved briskly to the sofa and sat down on the other side of Mrs. Tolliver, intercepting Mallory’s astonished stare with an apologetic smile.
“Mrs. Tolliver? I’m Phoebe Rothschild. I’m a friend of Mallory’s from school, and I want to invite both of you to my family’s house for dinner tonight. You have to meet my parents. Their names are Catherine and Drew. Catherine Rothschild and Drew Vale.”
“Phoebe—” Mallory began.
“You have to come,” said Phoebe to Mrs. Tolliver.
“Not today,” said Mrs. Tolliver dismissively.
“Yes, today,” Phoebe said. “Because, um, Jay-Jay—that’s our cook—he does this dessert with Skittles that you will love and he’s going to make it tonight.”
Mrs. Tolliver paused. “Skittles?”
“Yes, Skittles. He, uh, tosses them on top of this, this bed of homemade whipped cream. With—um, with drizzles of warm chocolate. He also puts a little dish of extra Skittles out so you can just spoon more onto your whipped cream if you want.”
Phoebe felt pleased with her invention. Maybe she was destined for a future in the culinary arts. She could apprentice to Jay-Jay and never have to wonder again about her purpose in life. She would specialize in sugary desserts. Or even just in Skittles. She could invent a whole cookbook’s worth of Skittles recipes. It could happen.
She raced on. “Of course, we’re not allowed to eat dessert until after the entrée. That’s Jay-Jay’s rule. We’ll all eat our—our fish, I think he’s making tonight. Then the Skittles. But it’ll be worth it, don’t you think? Eating the fish to get to the Skittles?”
“Yes, it’s worth it,” said Mrs. Tolliver. She looked over at Mallory, like a child wanting guidance.
Phoebe also turned to Mallory and gave her a stare. “We’ll just bundle into the car and go to my house right now.”
Mallory’s mouth opened and then closed. “No—that is, Phoebe, you don’t understand.”
“I do understand,” Phoebe said intensely.
Mallory looked away.
“We will go,” announced Mrs. Tolliver. “I haven’t visited anyone for so long. It’s lovely to be asked for dinner. What was your name again?”
“I’m Phoebe.”
“Phoebe. Thank you for the invitation. We accept. I’ll have to change.” Mrs. Tolliver pushed herself upright. “It won’t take me long. Mallory, you should change too. That is not a dinner dress you have on. Why don’t you try the pink dress with the little Alice apron? You wore it when you were five. Remember?”
Mrs. Tolliver’s face went all tender and loving. She said to Phoebe, “That dress! Mallory used to twirl and twirl in it, because of how it puffed out around her legs. How we laughed, John and I. How we laughed at our pretty little Mallory. That was before John died, of course.” Walking steadily, she moved out of the room.
Phoebe’s heart was aching as she looked back at Mallory. Mallory had stiffened, as if she would rush after her mother, but then, indecisively, she looked at Phoebe. Phoebe couldn’t tell what she was feeling. Was she angry? Surprised? Confused? Embarrassed? Or just totally numb?
How long had Mallory been taking care of her mother all by herself?
She said, “Mallory. My mother will be able to help you. She’s excellent at figuring things out. She just needs to meet you and your mom and understand the problem. So come home with me today. Shopping can wait, obviously.”
“There is no problem,” said Mallory.
“Oh, Mallory.”
“I don’t even know what you mean by problem.”
Phoebe reached out in frustration and grabbed Mallory’s hands. They were fists in hers. She gripped them anyway.
“Mallory. You’re thirteen. You just can’t be solely responsible for your mother and her troubles. You need to be a kid now. You need to be an ordinary teenage girl, with only regular teenage girl problems to worry about. You deserve that.”
“Ordinary?” Mallory stared at Phoebe, repeating the word as if she had never heard it before. “Did you say that I need to be ordinary?”
“Yes. Wouldn’t it be a relief?”
“I—I—no! I mean, yes! I mean—I’m not an ordinary teenage girl. You are, yes. You are. But I’m not.”
Phoebe sighed. “Oh, Mallory. I understand you don’t feel regular. How could you, with your mother to take care of? But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
“I have to take care of my people. I agreed to the responsibility.” Mallory pulled her hands forcefully away from Phoebe and buried her face in them.
That was an odd way for Mallory to refer to her mother, Phoebe thought. But whatever. “Whether you agreed or not, you’re too young for the responsibility,” she said. “We’ll—we’ll arrange things. My mother is good at that. She’s so good at it, you won’t even believe it.” And money helps, Phoebe thought practically.
She continued, “I’m your friend now, right? Friends help each other, and they accept help from each other.”
Mallory looked up. Phoebe couldn’t interpret her expression. Uncertainty? Longing? And something else too: the concentrating, calculating look of someone doing a math problem in her head.
She waited.
Mallory spoke at last, slowly, as if amazed by the words coming from her own throat. “It’s all true. I would like to be a teenage girl for a while. To be without other responsibility.” She shook her head as if in disbelief. “But also, I really want—it’s strange—but I really want—just for a while—I want—” Her voice trailed off.
“What?” Phoebe asked. “What do you want?”
Mallory’s fingers reached for Phoebe’s hands now, clasping. Her voice held a mix of anger and wonder. “I want to be your friend.”
Phoebe squeezed Mallory’s hands back. And then—she couldn’t help it—she reached out exuberantly to give Mallory a long, warm hug. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “You’re not alone, you know. I won’t let you be alone and in trouble.”
It was like hugging someone who didn’t even know what a hug was. Awkwardly, Mallory patted Phoebe’s shoulder. Then, when the girls stepped away and looked at each other, and Phoebe smiled encouragingly, Phoebe saw Mallory turn sharply away.
Was she crying?
“It’ll be okay,” Phoebe said again, not knowing what else to say.
Mallory’s reply was low and choked. “No. It is so very much not okay. You have no idea.”
But after a couple of minutes, she straightened her shoulders and met Phoebe’s gaze openly, clearly, and with determination, though her cheeks were still wet. “I’ll get changed,” she said. She even smiled. “We’ll go to your house and do what you say, Phoebe. My friend. I’ll figure out the rest later.”
“With my help,” Phoebe said.
Mallory turned away.
chapter 4
Within a few hours, after dinner, Phoebe was showing Mallory around her house. Things had gone just exactly as Phoebe had hoped and known they would, once her mother met Mrs. Tolliver and absorbed the story that Phoebe had told her first, privately.
“Phoebe,” Catherine Rothschild had just said, “your father
and I would like to sit with Mrs. Tolliver for a while and talk. Why don’t you show Mallory around? You don’t mind my sending the girls off, do you, Annemarie? We should discuss those ideas I have, to make your life easier.”
“All right.” Mrs. Tolliver was sitting upright in her chair with her hands laced in her lap, although she kept stealing glances at the little candy dish of Skittles nearby. “I’m very interested. Thank you, Catherine.”
“My secretary’s on her way too. You won’t mind? She’s so good at brainstorming and we’ll want her to make the phone calls and appointments for us tomorrow. I might actually assign her to you for a while, if you don’t mind that.”
“Not at all,” said Mrs. Tolliver faintly.
“Run along, girls,” said Catherine. “Come back in, oh, an hour, perhaps.”
“Thanks, Mom,” said Phoebe. She smiled at Mallory—a little sheepishly—and led her from the room.
Mallory was silent as Phoebe conducted her through the house, room after room after room. After room. Of course the Rothschild house was nothing like the ranch house that the Tollivers were living in, and Mallory’s silence made Phoebe squirm inside with a familiar feeling of helplessness. When they reached the library, Phoebe was swept with a very particular déjà vu.
Fifth grade. The first time she’d brought Colette Williams-White home. They’d been in this same enormous bookshelf-lined room, with its wood-beamed ceiling and twin reading nooks and leaded glass windows and the stone fireplace that a large man could stand up in. And Colette had suddenly spun on Phoebe. “Talk about spoiled rotten Jewish American princesses!” Colette had said, her cheeks pink with fury—and then Colette had burst into tears. Which had forced Phoebe to tend to her.
“Whoa,” Phoebe said now. She sat down abruptly on one of the leather chairs that surrounded the library’s central table.
“What is it?” asked Mallory.
Phoebe hesitated. Mallory had been so quiet during the tour, looking around the house with interest, but with little to say. Maybe she, like Colette, had been burning up inside with envy? But if Mallory was really going to be her friend . . .
Phoebe said, “I just remembered something from a few years ago. When Colette and I were first—well, friends. If you can call it that.” She related the incident.
“So you took care of Colette? Dried her tears and said there, there?” said Mallory. She had sat down on the chair next to Phoebe’s. “You took care of her, even though she’d just insulted you?”
“I did. Yes.”
“Why?”
Phoebe knew the answer. She had thought about it. She had talked about it with her friend Benjamin. “She made me feel ashamed. Of—” Phoebe waved a hand at the room.
“Of having so much,” said Mallory.
“Yes.”
“Colette doesn’t seem to me to be in any need,” observed Mallory. “Am I wrong?” She smiled a twisted smile. “Did you go home with her and find that her mother was a wreck and she was the only one taking care of things?”
Phoebe met Mallory’s gaze and smiled back awkwardly. “No. Colette’s home is fine. Her parents are lawyers. She has everything she wants. Including two adorable little twin sisters, by the way. But her life isn’t, well, you know.” She waved a hand again.
“It’s not like this.”
“Right. And, like I said, it made me ashamed.”
Mallory tilted her head to the side. “Did she make you feel like you’d rather be more like her? Not be a Rothschild, not have everything else that goes with it?” She leaned toward Phoebe. “Would you rather be regular and ordinary?”
“At that moment I felt that way.”
“But you don’t feel that way now? You’re over it?”
Phoebe nibbled thoughtfully on the inside of her cheek. “It’s complicated. I’m not a princess type. At all! You don’t know me yet, but believe me. And my dad is a regular person. But when your family is like mine, I guess nobody in it can be regular in the, uh, regular way.” She paused. “Also, my mother is amazing. She’d be amazing even without being a Rothschild. She’s just so brilliant. You’ve only just met her, but—”
“I have an idea. Just from tonight.”
“Yes. I wanted to fit in with Colette and the others, for a while there. But now you’re my friend, right? I don’t have to care about them anymore.” She was suddenly aware that she sounded a little . . . well, needy.
Was she buying friendship, again? Was that what had happened with Colette? Was that what was happening here too? Phoebe wasn’t sure. She hunched her shoulders. Maybe she would call Benjamin tonight . . .
She looked warily at Mallory. Mallory was smiling, but her eyes were sad.
“I am your friend,” Mallory said. “I want to be, and I am. And so, as your friend, let me tell you something important. It’s that you decided to get out of that bad friendship with Colette by yourself. I just happened to come along to make it easier. But you could have done it alone if you had to. And you would have. Right?”
“I wanted to. I—I’m not sure I would have actually gone through with it.”
“You would have.”
“Maybe.”
An awkward silence came over the girls. Mallory got up and wandered around the room, finally coming to a stop at the wall next to the stone fireplace, where a portrait from the nineteenth century hung. It showed the upper torso of a man in a white shirt and black coat. He was bald with fluffy tufts of gray hair sticking out on either side of his head and had the kind of expression that was impossible to read. “Who’s this?” Mallory asked.
“Oh. He’s a Rothschild ancestor. That’s a copy, actually, not an original painting.”
Mallory came to attention. “Which ancestor? Is it—is it Mayer Rothschild?”
“You know about him?” Phoebe asked, surprised.
“Well, I read a little online. After I met you yesterday. I was interested in the family founder and the story and all.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not jealous like Colette,” Mallory said. “I promise. I wanted to know more, that’s all. Your ancestor Mayer Rothschild sounded like a fascinating man. You should be proud of him, by the way. Not ashamed.”
“I am,” said Phoebe, stung.
“Good,” said Mallory smoothly. “So, who is this, then, if it’s not Mayer?” She indicated the portrait again.
“That’s Nathan Rothschild,” said Phoebe, glad to move on to talking about something factual. “He was Mayer’s third son. The third of five sons, did you read about that? There were five daughters too, by the way, though they hardly ever get mentioned. My mother is descended from Nathan’s branch, which is the English one.”
“Is there a portrait of Mayer himself?”
“No. There are a couple of historical paintings, scenes that include him, that were done many years after his death. My cousins in Paris have them—or copies of them, I’m not sure which. Anyway, Mayer is represented in them, but it’s really the artist’s imagination at work.”
“Oh. I was hoping for something that would show what he really looked like.”
“There’s nothing like that,” said Phoebe. “There was no photography then. The five sons all sat for portraits, but not Mayer. He was supposedly a very modest and humble man, so it wouldn’t have been like him to commission a portrait, I guess.
“I don’t know how much you read about him, Mallory. It was his sons who, well, who rose in the world. And that was how he wanted it. He stayed in Frankfurt in a small house, with his wife—I’m named for her, my middle name, Gutle. Anyway, he stayed there his whole life, even after becoming rich and powerful.”
“In the Jewish ghetto?”
“Yes. It was a terrible place. There are pictures of that, if you want to see them.”
“I would,” said Mallory. She looked again at the portrait of Nathan Rothschild. “Do you ever wish you could go back in time and meet Mayer?”
Phoebe had never thought about that before. But after
only a second, she shook her head. “Only if I could be really certain of coming back here afterward. Mayer’s time was not a good time to be a Jew in Europe.”
“Even if you were a Rothschild?”
“Well,” Phoebe said awkwardly, shyly, “the name meant nothing until Mayer and his five sons made it mean something. And it wasn’t about building power and money. Those were just the tools. Underneath that, it was all about safety and survival.
“I guess . . .” Phoebe paused. “I guess that’s why what Colette said—about my being a spoiled princess—that’s why it really hurt. She just didn’t understand. But it’s my fault, in a way. I couldn’t explain. I barely can now.” She shrugged. “Well. Anyway. Let’s go see the rest of the house.”
“Okay,” said Mallory. “But Phoebe?”
“Yes?”
“I understand what you’re saying. About survival.”
“Well, it was a long time ago. I don’t mean to be so dramatic. It’s not like I’m personally in any danger. It’s the history, that’s all. Family history and world history and, well, Jewish history.”
“History affects the present.” Mallory caught Phoebe’s gaze and held it. “The history of our family and our people affects who we are in the present.”
“Yes,” said Phoebe. “It does! Even if you really wish it didn’t.”
“Even if you really wish it didn’t,” echoed Mallory.
CONVERSATION WITH THE FAERIE QUEEN, 3
“This is a risky path that you recommend, child, and requires so much time that it frightens me. Only yesterday you said you would be done in a few weeks. And now you say it will take years?”
“Yes, Your Majesty. I am sorry. I did not fully understand the girl when I made that first rash estimate. But you told me it was safe for a few more years?”
“Yes. I did. And it is. But—”
“She is our best option. She and no other. She is the one we need. She is! Just not yet.”
“I see. I should have expected it would not all go exactly as we had planned. I should even have expected she would not be so easily led; she is a daughter of Mayer, after all.”