1
Chicago 1925
The mirror showed only half her face, and that was how she preferred it.
Fern propped her elbow on the vanity top to steady her hand as the mascara wand darkened the tips of her lashes. Bothering with more makeup than that would be a wasted effort. It was just another Saturday night dinner. Anyhow, the guests didn’t come to see how pretty she was.
They didn’t come for the food either, though her mother obsessed over every dish. Six courses of what she insisted were on par with the finest restaurants in the city. It didn’t matter what Mrs. Dorothy Adair chose for the menu, or how delicious it all looked and smelled, Fern could barely stomach taking her seat at the dining room table most Saturday nights, let alone eat. It would be no different tonight.
She’d have something sent up to her room later, afterthe obligatory after-dinner drinks and music in the White Room—her mother’s show room, where everything, as one might suspect, was white. White wallpaper, white carpet, white upholstery, white pillows for the evening’s guests to lounge upon, drinks in hand. The sculptures atop ivory columns were chiseled from either alabaster or Carrara marble. And the long drapes, thwarting passersby from peeking inside the large, Second Empire style home, reminded Fern of white frosting, ribboned into waves along the side of a layer cake.
The blasted dinners took all week to prepare. Over the last three months, ever since they’d started, it had seemed as if every day, every hour beforehand, was all in preparation for Saturday evening’s event. Fern’s life had begun to revolve around these dinners, which was something she’d sworn would not happen. She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t give her mother the satisfaction of caring—or of even acknowledging—the blatant and humiliating reason behind them.
“It is high time, my darling,” Mrs. Adair had said one sunny morning in late March. Icicles trimming the breakfast room windows had been dripping, transforming into spikes. “You may be happy all alone in your room right now, but you won’t be forever, not as you start to truly age. Youwillage, Fern. Your father and I are getting on, and what will become of you when we’re no longer here? You can’t expect Buchanan and whomever he marries to take you in under their roof.”
Her parents were in their early fifties and nowhere near death’s door. She’d replied that her mother didn’t look a day over forty, for which she was scolded for beingimpertinent. “You may have lived a sheltered life, but even you know never to mention a lady’s age, Fern.”
“But isn’t this conversation aboutmyage?”
Her mother hadn’t replied, and though she also hadn’t uttered the words outright, Fern heard them just the same:You’re a burden,soI’m going to find you a husband.
Fern capped the tube of mascara. Maybe she simply wouldn’t go down to dinner tonight. Or maybe she would go and make some spectacle. She could belch. Or pretend to be drunk. She pressed her lips together against a treacherous laugh. If she behaved in any way other than perfectly, her mother would expire of humiliation. She’d then come back from the dead and murder Fern, so she put it out of her mind.
At least the gown she wore that evening was striking. The blue and silver metallic lamé shimmered in the light from the frosted wall sconces. Sleeveless dresses were all the rage, but Fern needed her left arm covered, so all her dresses were long-sleeved. An attached cape draped each shoulder and fell to the middle of her back. The fabric fluttered whenever she moved, like the wings of some exotic bird, caged for show, one that might eventually work up the courage to fly away.
Fern, however, would fly nowhere. This room was her cage, and nested in the mansion’s fourth-floor turret, it was obligingly circular. Her mother’s dinners would never capture her a husband. In the end, she’d stay perched up here in solitude.
All because of her left side. The side she liked to keep hidden from reflection in the vanity mirror.
Thecircumstances could have been worse. The fire that had broken out in the third-floor bedroom of the Adairs’ previous home in Kenwood, consuming that floor and the nursery above it, could have melted Fern’s ears or nose. It could have burned off the flaxen-colored baby hair and rendered her bald forever. It could have killed her, as it had her nanny, before the fire brigade arrived to douse the flames and search the smoky rooms.
Buchanan, her older brother, remembered their nanny. He’d been six at the time and at a birthday party for one of his friends. Miss Gladys had shielded most of baby Fern from the flames with her body, but the Adairs never spoke of her. They never spoke of the fire either. Almost everything Fern had learned about it, which really wasn’t a lot, had come from Buchanan or their longtime cook, Mrs. Jennaway.
Fern used to think her parents avoided the subject of the house fire because they didn’t want to draw attention to the scars on her face, neck, chest, and left arm. The tight, crinkled skin in those places was much like wet paper that had been dried out in the sun. Her legs, funnily enough, had come out of that flaming third story almost entirely unscathed. Miss Gladys’s arms must have fully covered them. Now, however, she believed her parents never spoke of the fire, or of her dead nanny, because nothing could be changed. Nothing the fire had touched could be mended.
A brisk knock upon her bedroom door signaled the time. Fern sat a moment longer, waiting for Margie’s second knock. She was a polite girl and would wait. She’d been hired as a companion for Fern, though it soonbecame clear that they had nothing in common and nothing at all to talk about. So, Margie had quietly been transitioned to Mrs. Adair’s personal assistant.
Fern’s father, a Cook County circuit court judge, had an assistant as well, and there was of course their cook, Mrs. Jennaway, their butler, Ulysses, and driver, Mr. Carlson. A full-time gardener kept up their lawn during the summer and fall, his duties reduced by half during the winter and spring, but Fern didn’t go outside often enough to know his name.
A second knock on the door was followed by Margie’s timid call: “Miss Fern? Mrs. Adair has announced cocktails in the Gold Room.”
There were always pre-dinner cocktails in the Gold Room. And wine and champagne would be served during dinner. As with most stately homes in Chicago, Prohibition had not reached inside the Adair household, and probably never would.
She squeezed the netted atomizer on her bottle of perfume and let her wrists drift through the notes of rose, jasmine, and camellia.
“I’m rushing to the door, Margie,” she called, then slipped on a pair of matching metallic-blue silk heels.
When Fern at last opened her door, Margie was wearing a bright smile.
“You look stunning,” she said in her candy-sweet voice, her pointer finger pushing her glasses higher onto the bridge of her nose.
Margie was careful to keep her eyes on Fern’s dress and hair—anything other than her face. All the staff did the same; they didn’t want to appear to be staring at thescars on her face and neck, so they avoided looking at them altogether. She murmured her thanks and started down the hallway, toward the circular stairwell. The dark mahogany banister curled in glossy spirals down to the foyer three stories below and had the dizzying effect of a nautilus shell, bisected to show its inner chambers.
When she was younger and her parents would host company, Fern would seat herself on the carpet in the upstairs hallway, lean against the hourglass balusters, and peer down the spiraling shaft. Their voices would climb, carried in little bubbles of conversation. Some bubbles would pop, and she’d be able to understand a word or two. Others would float past, the words bound and muffled. There would always be laughter, though, and the singing of silver cutlery, fine china, and champagne flutes. Those had been true dinner parties, designed for pure entertainment. For comfort. Nothing like these dinners. Fern was certain everyone in the household sensed the difference as acutely as she did.
Margie disappeared down the hallway, toward the servant’s stairwell, as Fern descended. Her mother’s assistant had the bobbed hair of a flapper, but while on duty she wore trim, drop-waist suit dresses and practical heels. Margie would remain hovering nearby in the kitchens should Mrs. Adair require her. Judge Adair’s assistant, a bespectacled young man named Mr. Tate, would wait out the dinner party with Margie. While he was as square as an aspiring court clerk should be, and although there was nothing to substantiate her theory, Fern had taken to imagining them as secret lovers. She enjoyed picturing them seated at the kitchen table, a potof tea between them, gazing into each other’s eyes. Their eyeglasses would reflect their smitten expressions, and perhaps some longing for a little privacy, away from the curious glances of Mrs. Jennaway and the hired waitstaff.
And that, Fern acknowledged as she reached the foyer, was the very reason she would fail as a contented spinster. The romantic novels she’d devoured since first reading Jane Austen’sPersuasionat age fifteen had done something irrevocable to her heart: They had made ityearn.
