HARLOW
A Novel
I M A J
HARLOW
By Imaj
Copyright © 2011 by Imaj
Published by Noble Hart Library at Smashwords
All rights reserved including the right to reproduce selections from this book in anyway whatsoever. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please write to Permissions: mail@harlownovel.com
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Harlow is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover Art © 2011 by Imaj, are self-portraits from the author’s private collection.
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To Mommy
In this life, there is love,
In tragedy and bliss.
Divinest is this game we play;
Cloaked soul for heaven’s kiss!
—HARLOW
1
Feline eyes, swollen with tears, brighten against gold-dusted brown limbs. Harlow’s all sharp knees and elbows tangled in the prettiest of skivvies, perching against the skirt of her Louis-style gilt bed. She reeks of flower’s flesh. Speaks of nothing. Stares into nothingness across her room.
Her toy carousel, a glitchy set of prancing steeds and winged cherubs, putter atop a clockwork music box. Trapped within this box a menagerie of pins pluck at the teeth of a steel comb. It composes endlessly, rife with torment and swelling like her own pulsing heart, breathing like the pampered flowers of the castle nursery, growing as if submerged with only their noses tipped out for air. Each breath rises as weights upon caged lungs or those lungs who caged them there.
A spangled Nymphalidae appears to be trapped in here with Harlow. Deep in its freckled infancy, each wing is spread as inverted constellations on either side of her wet nose. She sniffles and rubs at it, her freckles shirring warmed hues and rosy cheeks. One smarts of a mulatto’s discipline, making it strikingly clear: earlier, Harlow had not only escaped her bedchamber, she’d committed an insidious act of profanity.
After a fantastical sunbath tumbling down the slanted gardens—all delightfully slung in wild abandon and luxuriating in fleeting pleasures—Harlow spirited back into the castle. She descended as a tawny plume through a flight of numberless stairs and alighted into a standing room, with Faust at the head, christening him, “Father!”
For that thin fabric in time, she saw only him; “My darling father” “Daddy” regarded by his surname “Faust” and chairman of the board in public circumstance. Yes, at any other time, Faust was a svelte figure, debonair in manner and dress, yet at the suss of a tight corner his polish dwindled and flared into a lone glare from his temple—his once slicked hair flustered over infamy-gray eyes—meeting an 18-year-old reflection of his own darling smile as Harlow peered back at quiescent laugh lines freely structuring his face.
The pass of Harlow’s short sight, through blinders of excitement, felled her like a large red hand to the face as a flock of imperious old sods began to cluster all around him, scowling at Harlow through cigar-wielding suits over lofty arrow collars.
She was dragged to her room, her voice trembled inside, muffled by the slammed door. Her cry was reminiscent; perhaps as a deviant blossom weeps as it’s blotted out by the stench of English roses.
“But daddy...” Harlow cried. “I mean...I didn’t mean to say ‘f—”
The air cracked.
Silence.
Faust’s heavy footsteps trailed off and were met by her slamming door.
Now, he hunches outside of Harlow’s room vacillating with a crazed twist of the key. Each time he rubs his stubbled jaw. Each time he checks the golden knob.
American blue blood pervades his veins. The ancestral blood of which ascended the apex of Great Britain and acquired a private wealth of such raging, self-fanning fire that his enterprise to this day is as arcane to the world as his decaying mental health.
It’s been almost a year since he’d awakened. Screaming. Clutching at his chest; his wails scraping through the walls, smearing his tragic mouth along every scrubbed-raw surface, clawing helplessly for death. By morning his episodes would fade, his trade commencing as usual. And it was as if his fits were that of a capricious ghost as he’d orchestrate his board of directors with a stern brow and kernels of fear—a sporadic twitch, a rigid jaw—and occasionally fire a suspicious servant as he paced the castle of two minds.
Doctor’s orders are for him to keep two nurses to tend in shifts. One for the morning. One for the night. Though he can hardly distinguish the two as the hours of twilight reign where his always-drawn curtains are heavy and dark and capture ceaseless nights of ambivalence; seeking certainty at the end of Harlow.
Harlow’s milieu is confined to a bedchamber burrowed away on the second floor and jostled to the farthest wing of the castle, thrown at the end of an everlasting hall, queued with uninhabited rooms. In the confines of her bedchamber, a lump inside of her cuts the airways to her throat. She expects to finally suffocate here, at the hands of her own father, no doubt. The hands that deny her existence yet tightly hold her in secret. The hands that clasp those who force him to keep her hidden away. She expects to be mourned by these very same hands, trembling in prayer, just after admiring the moaning gasp of her last breath.
She hears him—just there. Twisting the key ceaselessly outside her door. Shoving. Wrenching. Listening. Each time he pulls the golden knob. Each time he rubs his matted brow. Each time he awaits the secure clink, keeping Harlow tucked away as a living skeleton.
*
As a slavish birthright of a sovereign’s youngest daughter, Harlow’s room is filled with the finest furniture and all the trimmings, her torture salvaged brilliantly in a cavity of driveling fortune. As elegant as it is complex, her cage is wallpapered. Plush. Accentuated with exotic rugs and always left a prodigious mess.
Vinyl trills. World maps straggle. Half-made clothes and silk underthings laze about unashamed and everywhere. Her dearest playmates, a precious troupe of books, climb an entire wall at the west of the room, piling on top of each other for lack of space. At the foot of this library there’s a low wide cart. It’s as crippled and tattered as any child’s favorite shoes, and filled with hardcovers from the market every month.
Cloudlike drapes sail down her windows, letting air and light spill over portraits loitering atop her vanity. Her mother and father pose here in separate Victorian frames. Faust, clad in a sports coat. And her mother, knotted to the chin in maid attire.
Harlow’s northern berth of slumber, to which she is also damned during wake, is always a cool summit of the whitest pillows. A billow of cashmere blankets and teddy-swallowing-down hugs her as warmly as a father’s absent arms. The bed frame, a hand-carved and gilt-finished work, bears matching crown and bedsides. Two steps east of her bed, three signs descend her bathroom door. ‘La Toilette’ ‘Duschraum’ and ‘Swimming Bath.’ For her, it is a place for all three.
Just south of here, untamed pointe shoes hang over a ballet barre where she fails heroically to make a lady out of new hips and boyish habits. She has a tendency of destroying her clothes by sculpting with soil after rain showers. The babbling laundresses must have squealed. For her window seat is tousled with torn gift-wrappings nestling a clay sculpting kit.
Her life consists of vivid dreams. A swinging gramophone. Smothering her face in novels and her ear to foreign radio. Their stories flash so brightly. Like moving pictures, too colorful to look away. Sometimes, she’s impelled to slap her hand over her eyes and listen through splayed fingers.
Harlow attests a spring day, such as this, as always beginning with rowdy little birds. They twitter and bathe in the only starlight, all fat with delight and weightless with care, jewelling the castle in their brilliant quills and filling up that withered tree just below. But her view isn’t of their ripe bellies like mango drops in uncombed twigs. Faust now mirrors her seated mien in her full-length looking glass as the woody shroud of churchills float up through her open window from the end of that board meeting.
And as voices tumble in—the snobbish chuckle of women in a game of croquet, the dense heat strangling breezes amongst soaring horses and raging chaps—with a ruddy ear to it all, Harlow breathes just to keep from crying and laughs just to breathe as the world goes on living and she’s forced to die trapped within her own.
2
Powdered bosoms laced with toilet water play croquet in the backyard. Luella Faust squints peevishly, preparing her mallet head. Her sable hair accentuates petroleum-lidded eyes protruding under her shaved and drawn-in brow. She’s a Chanel-heeled swan twisting and studying her surroundings suspiciously, moving each ebony eye together at the side of her face.
Luella picks at sequins rumpling her bias-cut dress, scrunches her gloves together along the mallet and knocks the ball. Ding. It bounces off the wicket.
One of the girls squeals, slapping a mosquito on her ankle. “What a fine time to play in Mortalis!”
“He’ll be on my hill tomorrow,” harps another.
“Oh, stop whingeing,” says Luella.
Remnants of the gardening staff litter the pastoral symphonies. Shooting herbs are tended by botanists. Harlequin fruits and vegetables are kept free of rabbits. Horses are groomed and braided in their stalls while deer and the head gardener gambol in orderly forests cut by broad pathways.
A soaring labyrinth garden is sculpted to a hare’s breath, giving way up stone steps pleached in vines to a full sized Olympic pool. A distance north are the laurel trees, scattering a wide black pond just south of the flower nursery panting with perfumes. And the landscaping crew carves away, soon migrating to Faust’s neighbors, set and girdled atop each rolling hill in the English countryside.
Luella stretches her pink elbows to the cloudless sky, her red mouth gaping about a stray fly.
“I’m quite parched,” she gripes to no one in particular. As she steals away from her flock, past the toadyish servants, a quiet scent of blood lifts from her flawless diamonds.
One of the girls prods, “Couldn’t she have had one of the servants bring her something?”
Evoked, they all join in, adding their two pence so as to speak candidly in Luella’s absence.
“It’s not as if she does anything else herself.”
“Except, John.”
“Ugh. Don’t get me started on that engagement.”
“Such a square that one.”
“She’s only with him ‘cos of her fetish for money.”
“And homes.”
“He’s got five in the states, you know.”
“Isn’t Faust’s enough?”
“Never enough for Luella.”
The first of them adjusts a clingy bracelet, drawing in a white residue from its secret pendant. “Honestly, though, she’s not the least bit interested in him. She’d just as soon screw the cook for filet mignon.”
They all fetch their cigarettes, lighting Cartiers held at jade ends of skinny tubes, uniting in snobbish laughter.
3
Polo overtime savages what’s left of a manicured field. Whips crack and hooves gallop, charging for a stagnant ball surrounded by divots. Herculean Number Three—fleet-footed, shrewd and heavily handicapped—canons through protesting players.
Harlow’s heart races, catching from her window an ear-full of familiar pomp on a high horse.
Earth rumbles. The victim tilts. Braided tails lash and ponies neigh as mounted player’s fly from their saddles. The ball hurls and is duly claimed by no one.
Henry, Faust butler knighted flagman, rules the play illegal.
“Foul!”
Harlow quails, becoming feverish at the call.
“Bryce. Penalty 6, Sir.”
Bryce Faust is a six-foot-four, towering figure of twenty-two. He has an ego the size of his athletic prowess and besides his dark hair, claims the face of an Aryan idol. Both Harlow and Bryce unmistakably share the same father yet are raised in two separate worlds: Harlow, to herself and Bryce, to the aristocracy.
Bryce stampedes.
John Rotschild, the square, check and turns in amazement. “Bryce! Flagman called foul!”
Bryce barrels through, reaches the ball and strikes in the cockiest offside forehand to win the game.
Henry settles it. “Score!”
Afterwards, the boys shove off the ponies to the caretaker and make their way towards the main residence, disrobing in the heat of the afternoon.
Bryce, a squalid sweaty mess, removes his headgear gloating, “Kicked ass as usual.”
“That was shit,” says John.
Robert, a stocky-looking brute, speaks up at Bryce’s impudence. “It’s as if your riding’s off so you crash into us constantly, but your aim’s ace.”
“That’s his point,” says Peter, a type of red- headed step-child.
Thomas, the strapping American intern, straddles a bench, scribbling the last of polo notes on a pad in the distance.
“You’re not still sore about what Luella said to that Catholic girl, are you Bryce?” asks Carl, a jock of greater intellect. “She was gonna find out some way or another.”
Bryce was the golden boy at campus, infamously known at Oxford for being void of any civility, with dreamy features, absent of any flaws. He took pleasure in the droves of silk-stockinged debs who willingly launched themselves at him. All to the not so quiet resentment of his ravenous sister, Luella.
Being a male, Bryce had overshadowed her as the favorite and most desired heir to control the Faust company, though he hadn’t a kernel of merit to show for it. So, the day a Catholic girl brought him to his knees, Luella was there to decapitate him. She spilled every detail to the debutant about his sinful past paving a deplorable future.
The next morning, Bryce suffered gloves to the face, a crucifix to the temple and stood shamelessly, mother-naked, shouting out the door of his dorm as the Catholic girl skidded away. Her fading trail of Frankincense left Bryce hell-bent on revenge.
But Bryce was rendered utterly defenseless. Luella’s extended clause: she was informed by way of a pity-confession of Bryce’s sub rosa dealings. She held onto these disclosures like stress toys. Leaving him lame over the edge of her ever- looming guillotine. For weeks now, Bryce has been the eye of his own storm. Waiting. Pondering. Seeking vengeance.
“Speaking of Luella, where is sh—?”
“Hey, score boy!” John’s cut off by Peter with a deafening whistle. “Where the bloody hell are you going?”
Thomas flounders towards a bicycle just off the fence calling out in a whiney American accent. “Just remembered I’ve got a contract to finish by noon. Scores are on the bench!”
Carl squints, “Didn’t his ship just dock? Hasn’t he only been here a couple hours, I mean?”
Bryce sours his eyes to his neighbor across the way, just on the nearest hill. The stately home is teeming with servants. Maids, butlers and stewards corral with luggage. Trunks brim. Old cars are pushed by brutes.
“Five years and the Harts are back. Rather odd,” says Bryce.
“Don’t think it’s moving in as much as it’s finally moving house,” sneers Robert.
Peter jeers, “Apparently, William, Sr. happened upon another sparkler fest in Kimberley. While taking Little Miss Priss on a safari.”
“Kimberley, South Ape?”
“Africa, idiot,” says Carl.
“That’s what I said.”
“It’s more karats than Farben for him though,” Peter adds.
“Right, that’s John’s line isn’t it?” Robert grins.
“And his son?” asks Bryce.
“It’s William Al—hold on...” Peter scratches his chin.
“Willy Wanktonomus—”
“Shut it, Rob, I read it in the papers. It’s—”
“John, you’ve got some extras. Gives us a name or three, von is bound to be ze old chap’s.”
“Bugger off!”
“It’s William Alexander Louis Philip...something or another. Anyway, he’s known as the fourth William of Johannesburg. Only now though. He was born in old Hertfordshire and stole off to an American—”
“Got a bit of a leech then, don’t we, Rot?” Robert grips a fit arm around John’s neck and taunts Peter. “Find Luella can ya?”
“Oh, don’t start him, Robert!” Carl carps.
“Lue—”
Bryce waves John quiet. “The Fourth William?”
Peter nods, “Four hundred years of fortune and this one ends up some kind of recluse from Harvard.”
4
Harlow scarcely pries the key from her lock, when—Clunk! Something slams into her door. In a sad effort to keep quiet, it dribbles about in hoggish snickering.
“Shhh... Hey, watch it—you’ll ruin my frock!”
Luella!
She’s blozy, squealing and chafing up Harlow’s door.
“Oh!” Luella jumps with the hallmarks of Bordeaux’s melting tannins. “What’s this?” she finds the squirming key. “The little piggy’s trying to get out? Oops! Stay in there little piggy.” Luella blows like the Big Bad Wolf; growling and howling and twisting the key she manages to unlock the door.
Harlow waits for Luella’s sloppy steps to sneer away then breaks free, only to discover her staggering with someone into the music room.
Harlow dashes down the stairwell with curving instep. She tiptoes through the hall, towards the kitchen, in a cagey rush so as not to disturb any of the servants.
Harlow has a tendency of only speaking when she has something to say and often wonders of the sorcery the maids possess, managing to loiter irrelevantly and prattle on forever when they haven’t anything to say at all. She even scratched her throat once trying to squeeze her mellow voice into their gossipy fluctuations.
Growing up, Harlow would eye them as they cleaned the galleries, appearing to sleepwalk from empty room to room. It was curious to her that they swept phantom messes. She’d imagine she was lucid in their dreams as they harped about her occupancy and spit and shined spotless furniture. Sometimes, they’d lift their eyes to hers as a bulging owl’s blink then capsize with their mops and dusters and go on with their active asleep.
Harlow’s greatest disease was a longing to clothe and bathe herself but was repeatedly denied that luxury. She had dreadful memories of their calloused hands scrubbing at her slippery back, knotting up her curls with purple soaps. A few years torture and some creative tinkering led to a lock on the inside of her room and Harlow’s goods being thrust by the maids, with a great thud at the base of her door.
“Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf,” a burring voice startles Harlow just as she’s on her way past the duster’s dens.
“Der Vater hüt’t die Schaf ” the strange voice carols from those very quarters.
A break in the song prompts Harlow two steps forward towards the kitchen.
“Die Sternlein sind die Lämmerlein,” Now, three steps back. Harlow bends her ear around the corner, pressing her whole face into the air. A German lullaby trills off the native-tongue of a tidying-and-unpacking black-skinned girl.
“Der Mond, der ist das Schäferlein,” Harlow whispers with the girl.
“Hallo,” Harlow lilts, startling the girl as she jumps at her jump. “Why do you sing about sheep? Was your father a shepherd?”
The girl gasps at Harlow’s clear reply to her Rheinfränkisch dialect.
Harlow enters the humble maid’s room, striking up a conversation with the girl who bows and calls herself Marie. She claims, amongst other things, that she’s Faust’s new gift to Harlow. Judith, the castle’s seamstress, previously translated that Faust grew tired of the rifts between Harlow and the maidservants which was in conflict with her growth, if she was to be serious about being “ladylike” and “genteel” were Marie’s choice of words.
Marie is expected to be a friend, if it pleases, but it is of greater import that her duties as a domestic are in accordance. She is to assume the role of chambermaid and laundress for “that chaotic room” and “all those stubborn clothes.” As a lady’s maid, Marie will draw her bath, and bring her appropriate meals—Faust became well-aware of Harlow’s habit of disfiguring the cook’s dishes. As playmate, she bows with an ictus of “if it pleases” Marie is encouraged to share books and magazines and listen to radio, yet is especially ordered as a groomer “to deal with that riot of a mane.” Harlow throws her arms around her and squeezes, requesting that she’s permitted to play with Marie’s hair as well.
Harlow was known to disappear when instructed to fix her hair. It’s a spiraling chestnut forest which she insists on inexpertly taming herself as she refuses to be pressed by the uniformed back- scrapers. Upon the rare occasion that Faust gives Harlow freedom, she is, without excuse, expected to have it pressed and presentable in a pin-curled fashion.
This keeps a stubborn Harlow from leaving her room; adding empty puffs to the maid’s hostility and curiosity to anyone that happens upon her. For whether she appears with a perfect bob or tousled and wresting mouthfuls from the kitchen, there’s always a gasp in the glimpser’s jowls and a leap in their chest or a tidying of a twirling mutton chop as she surfaces rarely among the people, like catching a cryptid in its natural state on a hunt for wild game.
“Do you speak any English at all?”
Marie searches for the words but Harlow quickly interjects, suppressing her excitement. “It’s okay,” she says. “My German’s decent, I suppose.”
“What’s this?” Marie holds up Harlow’s hand. A gold band glistens over her right ring finger.
“It was my mother’s. I wear it for her now.”
Marie’s quiet. There’s a faint reservation about her silence.
“So, did you flee during the Versailles contravention?”
“The what?”
“How long ago did you leave Germany?”
“It’s been about a year now.”
“Right. The German military was all over the news last spring. I only recall it because Luella thought it fashionable to spend the holiday with her French and American mates at the beach, with all the rest of Britain. How did you become German anyway?”
“My father was a French Senegalese soldier who settled in Rhineland after the war.”
“And your skin is black...” Harlow feels her face. “So fair. What do they call you in Germany, then?”
“They call my kind Afrodeutsche. Besatzungskinder.”
“Afro-German? Occupation children? Und ich?” she points to herself.
“Ich weiß nicht,” Marie shrugs.
Harlow leans back onto her palm, wiggling her bottom lip from side to side with her pointer and middle finger.
“I’ve had to have read almost every book in the world by now. Why haven’t I heard of Black—wait, yes I have,” she waves her index. “Hitler mentions you in Mein Kampf. I really think that book was tossed into my cart as some joke,” she huffs. “It wasn’t a storybook at all. I felt like I was skimming through some stodgy lecture. It was folded on this one chapter on nation and race where he went on this great tangent about how different colors of humans should be segregated. He uses species mating within the same species as evidence as well. And I thought, well that’s a bit queer. I don’t think he realizes the human race is a species.” Harlow ponders a bit. “He also speaks of ‘Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe.’ Is that the only place to find your history? In a sentence from Hitler’s memoir?”
Marie studies Harlow sideways with folded fingers and cocked brow. “I don’t know. But I must inform you, your German is pretty good.”
“Yours too,” Harlow smiles. “You should write it.”
“A book?”
“Naturally. You’ve seen so much already. And for him to save you like that, your father must have really loved you. Your story will be talked about for centuries.”
“You really think so?”
“Of course. The world will be clawing at it like something from a sci-fi comic. Anyway, it’s essential to our zeitgeist, you know. How about calling it, Mein Leben, The Life of a German Wildflower?”
Marie laughs, “You are very strange.”
“I’d read it.”
“It seems, with all you know, you’d read anything...”
Marie’s voice begins to muddle in Harlow’s mind as a primitive roaring in the kitchen grows clearer. The timbres of men conversing excites her in the most absurd way. Their voices rumble like thunderclouds crashing into one another. She breaks away from Marie with a simple, “I’ll see you...” and dashes out the door.
5
Just outside the kitchen, Harlow listens to the boys’ clamors climb and keel. She tilts her head like that polo ball, ever so slightly, as waves of howling become a rally of slamming doors and cabinets.
“Really, Bryce, I need to speak with Luella,” John snatches a cool towel from Henry who makes his rounds in the kitchen with a frosty gold tray of wet cloths.
“Thanks,” Carl grabs a towel, his voice muffling through fibers. “Oh, get off it, John. She’s your fiancé. It’s not as if she’s leaving for the states anytime soon.”
“Tit over arse already and you haven’t even known her a month?” Peter grabs a towel on Henry’s way out. “I’d hate to see myself in that dog collar you’re wearing.”
Harlow pivots into the kitchen in her own sort of silent ballet. But the boys are too busy hoarding anything to quench their barbaric man-thirsts to notice her. Quite perfect, as she leans onto the island ever so invisible and listening, intrigued by their jagged nature, their irreproachable strength. Peter’s messy mop top becomes one of the loveliest forms of helmet hair known to man. Even John’s sprinkled so precisely as to make his very perspiration an art.
John plows by her in a drenched mess, half soaking her in his greasy stew and slamming her into Bryce.
“I happen to love that woman!” John punches down on the island.
The boys roil over in laughter.
Harlow brushes off her blouse and finds Bryce surveying something out on the horizon. He’s unwavering. Looming. Glittering in all of his lurid beauty. Yet his eyes are very strange to her. The blue appears almost colorless. He seems to be neither here nor there in spirit, his skin a shade too white. In fact the only color left in his body, besides his jet-black hair, is his full coral lips. She studies that he bites them ever so often, as if they feel a pain which his whole facial expression fails to register.
Bryce made no attempt to flower his visits to Harlow with anything more than his prerogative for aid with his foreign language requirement. And even as she was aware being an abrasive douche on almost all occasions was his nature, Harlow’s admiration of him never faltered. It filled something within her to have him by her side. The familiar rise and fall in his voice when he laughed provided her a sense of warmth, a sense of home. Just like the rips and folds in her books left from his frustration, his demeaning smirk as his way of saying ‘Thank you’ even his lecturing about her plucking from the vegetable patch too often made her smile. Bryce could go out of his mind and she’d still see a light in him that was esoteric to all others.
Harlow follows his eyes to that home again across the way. She doesn’t think anything of it. Another hill. Another castle. A lone lorry and Bugatti are all that’s left and the last of whatever ruckus was there looks to be on their way.
A tall, ambiguous figure in a half-buttoned up shirt and trousers, carries a moleskine beneath one arm and appears to deliberately advance in the opposite direction of a quarreling couple. One is a salt and peppered fellow, beckoning violently. He has a dubiously high collar, Stalin mustache and expendable cane. The other is a woman. She comes across a few centuries his senior. Her nose reaches for her forehead and she stands with her bum towards her shoulder blades as if balancing a shilling on her rear.
The figure, assumed to be heartlessly indifferent or completely deaf to—or from—the roaring beet- faced man, takes refuge at the edge of a dip in a garden. The old gentleman with gathered brow and dampened eye, soon ends his fit, marches back to his grumbling car and skids off, nearly taking the last standing butler with him.
“And if you’re all gonna be arses about it you can just piss off!” John breaks Harlow’s reverie.
Harlow’s sight wanders to Bryce. He hasn’t blinked, much less heard any of John’s relentless carping.
“Luella’s here,” Harlow nimbles towards the gathered boys. “Last time I saw her—” She stops mid-sentence. All eyeballs and drenched bodies have suddenly congregated towards her. Somewhat beset with self-doubt, she holds onto her voice and is met with the crisp, juicy crunch of Peter biting into a lime-hued apple. She turns to Bryce, not even a gentle gander her way. All at once reminded of how callous Bryce can be towards her point of view, presence and even existence for that matter, she reacts. “Last time I saw her... she was upstairs teaching that American intern French.”
Snickers fill the room.
John’s jaw hangs. “Are you daft?” he snaps.
Bryce stirs just enough to bring a bottle of water to his lips. Behind cavernous chugs he glares down at Harlow, blushing in dismay at her lack of seemliness. He manages to show a glint of amusement towards her, with no less than using the back of his hand to smear sweat from his mouth, curling up to a dimple-less cheek.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in your dungeon, little one?” he asks, sniffing her and plucking a tepal from her pressed hair.
Prickles rush all over her as she stubbornly turns her back to him.
“I’ll be up,” he says.
“I’m going to get her this instant!” John darts for the door.
Bryce cuts him off, “I said I’ve got it.”
6
Bryce strides through the upstairs corridor as hubris on foot. He’s miles away in thought, sipping his water, dragging out the viscera of time. He finds the sounds coming from the music room to be quite amusing and entertains himself there for some time. Leaning back against the door. Taking gulps from his water bottle. Having a laugh with the flighty laughter and American whine. Picking and flicking some left over sausage out of his teeth from lunch. He finally grows lethargic and overrun with disgust. The dull monotony of the matter propels him to kick the door open.
“Ah ha!”
Luella is caught in a fright. She’s set up on a baby grand with her skirt in the air and her lips locked with Thomas. Luella moves swiftly, half adjusting herself until—“Bryce!”
“Having a bit of a slap and tickle? He just washed up today, dear sister.”
“What do you want?” she sqwuaks, Thomas scurring behind her, hunting for his other shoe.
Bryce reclaims his pose, apathetic against a wall, getting that pesky fennel he was after earlier from his front fang. “John Pierrot Winston Alfred Rotschild the third...” he takes a melodramatic breath to begin his next sentence. “...is downstairs knitting baby clothes as we speak and you,” he chuckles. “Well... you’re up here making someone else’s baby.”
Luella peers up at him through dark beady eyes above fiery freckles and curdled lip.
“Tsk, tsk, Luella. Can’t imagine how this will end,” Bryce whistles and roars the sound of a plane falling and crashing.
“Get out of here, Bryce! I’ve got you by the balls, you wouldn’t dare cross me!”
“Yes, well, I appreciate you holding them for me ever so faithfully. Yet, I find it odd that one who would take on such a delicate job, would be malevolent enough to tarnish ones reputation, in the eyes of the only person they cared about it being tarnished to.”
“And it wasn’t Chinese whispers was it? She thought it was just about Rosie Palm and her five sisters,” Luella cackles. “Didn’t even reach the surface.”
Bryce yawns halfheartedly. “Oh, Luella, you are pathetic.”
Luella becomes a mouser with the leniency of a puritan to the charlatan Thomas. He finds himself a barred animal flapping fervently to fly away. Thomas grabs his pants with one hand, scratching through claw marks and hissing and stumbles out the door. Luella hurls her anger, spinning into a chuckling Bryce like twenty darts to a sneering board. “I’d tell that girl how disgusting you are all over again given the chance! Only this time, I’d show her what was really under that crooked smile of yours!”
Bryce portrays fatigue or irritation at best, countering in the stalest of tones. “You, sister, are quite plain and otherwise witch-like without your lipstick and jewels. My jewels, however, grow au natural and out weight your karats ten to one—”
“Get out!” Luella screams, hurling a vase across the room.
Bryce dodges in his escape, smashing the china with the door behind him.
7
Marie struggles with a wheelbarrow. It waddles down the drive, smoldering with piles of bagged garbage. She peers at the distance ahead. With her hand up for measure, her pinky blots out the entrance and after a long bout of doddering, she revels in the pinnacle of excess: the golden Faust gateway, now warped between two abandoned security houses.
She drags the gate open and gathers the trash to queue it for the garbage-eating rig. Animal noises grow near. A livestock lorry passes, rolls back, stops and out leans a farmer. His carrier must have been completely drenched coming from whatever rainstorm he travelled through as he stinks of wet animals capering on damp wood.
“Oi! Do you know the cook?” he warbles out beneath a flat cap.
Marie stares up at him.
The Farmer exits, pats down his dungarees and heads out to the lorry bed. “This lamb ‘ere is defective,” he digs into his spritely pile of living assets. “Its mother was a, pardon the pun, black sheep. Won’t break one stone.”
The farmer wedges out a tiny lamb, white as snow and plops it down at Marie’s feet.
“Was house broken. Rugrats had a time with it but the depression’s kicked in. Can’t afford to keep it no more. I’m sure the meat will be worth a meal if Faust wants it. I’ve got some other stock as well, if he’s interested. Don’t tell him ‘bout it being defective,” he scrunches his cherry face and sticks a fat thumb under his suspenders. “You won’t say nothin’ anyway, will ya?”
Marie peers down at the lamb then gapes up at the Farmer.
“‘Course. Give him my best.”
The Farmer rocks away and disappears in exhaust.
The dwarf-like lamb, the size of a domestic house cat, balances on all fours watching Marie’s every move. She pushes the cart, heavy with barely- eaten leftovers and fuming slops. Last night’s ignored cakes and scones sweeten the putrid air as she steadies the trash up to the pickup line and wipes her hands on her apron.
At the gardening house, Marie finds a machete. She ties the lamb to a post and swings the blade high above her head. She sneezes, plunging down. The lamb gawks up at her, chewing on bits of grass.
8
“He wanted you to eat it?” Harlow laughs, mashing mixed berries in a large bowl in the kitchen. She strains the gushy mixture and pours what’s left of pure juice into two flasks as Marie feeds the lamb beside her on the island. “I do this every summer by the way. After a few weeks it’s like liquid heaven.” Harlow kisses the lamb as she stretches stained fingers towards the sugar bowl. “You’re sweet as sugar, too, but I would never eat you, love,” she adds a few squares to her concoction and annihilates them in the solution. “Have you named it?”
“Ich weiß nicht... Ich...Ic...Ah!”
“Gesundheit.”
Marie holds her sneeze with a high-pitched squeal.
Harlow makes her way to the pond and shovels and digs at the soil’s edge. Marie follows suit, cradling the lamb and a bucket of water. Her white dress balloons up and down in a spiral as she settles beside Harlow.
Harlow buries the flasks into the earth. She mixes it with some water to pat the dirt solid and rinses her hands with what’s left.
Marie squeal-sneezes. “I think I’ve grown allergic to it.”
“Oh? What a martyr you’ve turned out to be, to risk yourself for this animal. One day you’ll have to show me Germany. I’d like to know other saints from your country.”
Marie smiles and wiggles her nose.
Harlow lifts the lamb by its waist. It’s so small both her hands touch. “Well, naturally you have to claim what’s yours.”
“I can’t have it now. You name it.”
“How about this. You name it and it’ll be yours. But I’ll take care of it for you. I’ll be its amme and you’ll be its true mutter.”
“Gut,” Marie smiles. “I’ll call it...Duchess!”
“Schön gut, we’ll finish it off with a bow for good luck.” Harlow slips a blue ribbon from her hair and wraps it around Duchess’s neck.
9
“All of this deals with armament!” Faust flings a slush of documents across his desk.
Three men from his board circle him in his private study, abiding in their unnatural decorum with flicking wrists and oblique foreheads.
“If armament is crucial I want a full report before we come to that resolve. Phone Von. Draw up the loans and have them back to me straight away.”
The men tip their hats, nod “Yes, Sir” and shuffle out past an observant Bryce.
“Father,” Bryce strolls in with goading airs.
“Yes, what is it, Bryce?” he mutters, looking up from rubbing his fingers together.
“I’m afraid the new intern’s been causing a bit of a problem with Luella. He tried to take advantage of her virginal integrity.”
Faust mentally vanishes before Bryce’s eyes. He loses himself in woolgathering as Bryce awaits his response, digging sand from his left eye.
“What?” Faust seems to re-appear. “Oh, yes. Just the same. Have Henry dismiss him immediately. And for godsakes, see that it doesn’t happen again.”
“Sure,” Bryce scans his fingernails. “And what are you going to do about a replacement? The universities are ever beholden to you for supporting their students. If I may suggest, William Hart is—” “Inform Henry,” Faust waves. “You’ll take care of that for me, won’t you son?” Bryce nods and takes his leave.
10
Dinner kicks at the edge of Harlow’s door. She winces, always reluctant to receive the cook’s meals. Once, after peeking in on him at work, she caught a latticed view of the undercook just on the steps outside of the kitchen, wringing the neck of a chicken. Cowering away, her leaping sight fell upon the horror of the cook stuffing cherries into the stinking eye-holes of a boar’s head. After this, she rejected meat completely.
Yet the cook himself is a gay, pot-bellied fellow, with celery for legs and apples for cheeks. He wears a blanc double breasted jacket with knotted buttons and impeccable creases, topping it with a a 100 fold snowy toque that’s polished by colorful quarrels with the laundresses.
He has a serious mental complex for tea which he rustles up morning, noon and at five o’clock. Faust despises tea. He’s as stubborn as the cook’s tradition-rooted will, yet takes great humor in the art and allows him all the glut, his caveat: tea must be tossed the next morning, had he not indulged the day before.
Suppers are twisted with Faust’s lack of time management and eagerness to sleep. As of late he’s been known to demand a three o’clock meal before ushering to bed. This drives the cook to wipe the sweat and tears from his apron and assemble a thorough dinner, embellished to Faust’s tastes, all whilst the last ornaments to his precious high tea are ushering to completion in vain.
Still, the cook concocts medieval feasts with the precision of a surgeon and the personified art of dementia. He flips knives in the air, as if to slice tension in half and peel it back in its suspension, only to land flapping wildly about the floor and be swept by the maids come each afternoon. He sends his prized dishes parading the island: wild fowl, geese, larks and the like or lamb, venison, salmon and such, all salted and smoked or boiled or baked and duly trimmed of excess to be made lean. Each mess is heart smart, high in fiber, low in fat and personally served to Faust by the chef himself. He delights in his hearty appearance every evening, to the table of thirty he skips, serving Faust at the head and seats of cowhide stretched along the others.
Harlow opens her door to find the basic order of Mortalis fare: potato pottage, slow-cooked pigeon with morels and roasted leg. Her dish is part of a shared mess, likely rationed with the other maids, all held neatly in Bryce’s large right hand. She grimaces at the slop but just as soon clings to his geometric abdomen.
Harlow nestles into her fluffy bed, turning the pages in Bryce’s French book. She comes upon a tabbed Marie Antoinette poem and recites as Bryce has at an opening repertoire.
“Charming portrait, portrait of my friend.”
Duchess just as soon bites a mouth full of cloth, tugging at the skirt of Harlow’s bed.
Bryce replies from memory as he lies on his flattened belly, moving his chess piece across from Harlow. “Token of love by love obtained. Come and give me back the good I have lost.”
“To see you again brings me back to life. Yes, here they are, her features that I love,” Harlow eyes Duchess bleating by her side.
Bryce yawns, “Her sweet looks, her bearing. Her ingenuousness. When I press you to my heart, I think I still embrace her—Okay, what’s with the lamb? And why wasn’t he on my plate for dinner?”
Harlow lifts Duchess onto her lap. “I’ve already fed her three times tonight. But I think she may be hungry again.”
“Well, give him your tit so we can get on with it.”
Harlow reaches for the bottle on her nightstand. Duchess chomps eagerly.
“Since when did you learn how to care for farm animals, anyway? Right. One of your millions of books.”
“Actually...”
“Who dropped him off? Was it that mental farmer who gave us those defected turkeys last Christmas?” Bryce has a casual glance at Harlow’s dinner, sitting untouched on her nightstand. “And aren’t you going to eat your meat, Harlow?” he bares his usual canines as he sneers and lifts his chin to Harlow’s fixed meal. “Mind if I break neck, I mean, break bread with you?”
“In any case, Marie saved its life and gave it to me. So now I take care of her.”
Bryce swirls and stuffs a piece of the gourmet pigeon into his mouth. He licks his fingers and lifts Duchess’s legs only to find that Duchess is a boy. “Harlow, the lamb’s got a nut sack. Stop calling him a her and an it when the beast is clearly a he.”
“Uh oh...” Harlow dives for Duchess whose falling off the bed. “Come here Duch—”
Bryce shoots her a glare.
“Duke.” Harlow’s move. “Can I ask you something?”
“Why’d he hit you this time?” Bryce lowers at the chessboard. “Doesn’t really matter, does it? You know the man’s getting too old to be bothered with your childish questioning yet you still badger him all the time.” Bryce takes her pawn without even a brief gander her way. In the silence he discovers a slight flush upon her face.
“You’re safe here in your sanctuary. You’ve got yourself a living toy to play with now. You don’t have to deal with real life problems, just fabricated ones,” Bryce explains her away, watching for her next move. “He’s got no right taking me out of his will. It’s a constant struggle to prove anything to him. I’m here, reciting lines with you, to make up ‘horrific grades and hapless behavior’ and get a credit that’ll amount to shite after the inheritance that I am legally owed. All at the same time, I’ve got to watch out for Luella and her goddamn...”
Harlow’s Knight takes Bishop.
“Shit, should’ve seen that. Anyway, little nobodies like that ‘merkin will never cause a stir in her engagement. I need a big whig for the scandal.”
“Is this about revenge of the Catholic?”
“For fuck’s sake! She didn’t have to give her a list of my past relationships in disgusting, illicit detail.”
Harlow exhales, taking a sip from a glass of milk on her nightstand.
“Do you know she ran off with some Cambridge prick after what Luella did?” Bryce moves his pawn muttering, “Really, am I that barbaric?” He darts up, finding a frothy white mustache on Harlow’s upper lip. He savagely smears it away. “Anyway, William Hart’s in town ten Rockefeller’s filthy. Maybe he’ll take the bait.”
Harlow rubs away the sticky mixture of milk and Bryce’s salty taste and goes on feeding Duchess.
“Or...” he muses over her. “The only other option would be to use you to do something to her. Yes, because we all know how she envies, pure little Harlow,” he thumbs her face, stroking the ruddiest cheek. “No, I couldn’t do that to you. You’re much too sweet. She’d turn you rancid.”
“She envies me? Why?”
“I’ve made up my mind,” Bryce wags his white king above the chessboard, placing it on a black square. “Take the Hart lad under my wing. Place him accordingly,” he moves two of Harlow’s dead pawns together on the fluff and slams his fist into them. “Destroy her engagement. We’ll have a little Hart to harlot at the corporate affair. Hmm, but how to go about it...”
“Then you’re inviting him?”
“Not so fast, Harlow. He’s a Harvard twat. Not to be trusted. And this party will be a lot of alcohol and back stabbing and a whirlwind of my audacity,” he roughly tugs down the hiked hem of her nightie. “No, it’s not for you. Not for your virgin eyes or ears, love. When it comes to Luella and revenge, revenge will be the ultimate bitch. Anyway, you’ve been locked up until hell freezes over. I’d be surprised if you even had a swimsuit to wear.”
“I’m not a child, you know,” Harlow takes Bryce’s white knight and strikes her bishop in its place.
“There’s gotta be some way to figure out if... Faust speaks to you sometimes. Has he mentioned anything about a testament?”
Harlow’s unresponsive.
Bryce analyzes the board without meeting her hinting eye. “Mmmm... yes... that’s right,” he tips her pawn and places it on its bottom. “You’re eighteen now, aren’t you?”
“I’ll be nineteen in August, Bryce.”
“There’s no point you’ve checked me.”
Harlow moves his King horizontally on the file and captures it with her rook. “As far as his will, he’s got all the time in the world to write it.”
“Boo! Hiss!” Bryce taunts a suckling Duchess, eyeing him over his little woolen shoulder.
“Well, let’s get on with it,” Bryce stretches. “I’ve got to at least seem like I’m making progress if I bet on getting a decent half.”
Harlow refers back to the French book, opening to where she left off.
“No you don’t have the same charms to me. Silent witness of—”
“Yes, yes... I know this part.” Bryce opens his colorless eyes to the glare of her ceiling light. “Silent witness of our tender sighs. By recounting our fleeting pleasures, cruel portrait, you make my tears fall.”
11
Faust shivers his legs, wrapped in a bundled lair of covers on his bed. The hollow of his palm, bares a portrait in an open locket, staring back from the past. Harlow wakes from a catnap just beneath him, lying in a shroud of blankets. She ponders the light trapped within a lamp moving about his face. How free it must feel to be that age, she thinks. Happy lines all over from lovely memories. She fears she’ll never reach those lines. Most of her memories are dreams.
Portrait Charmant swims into her sleepy whisper, “Forgive the cries of my bitter woe. Charming portrait, you are not happiness. But so often you give me the image of it.”
“I shouldn’t have hurt you,” Faust speaks to Harlow as if to be talking with the portrait. “I can’t risk this, Harlow. You may be fair but I’m afraid the world is not.”
Harlow whispers, careful not to wake the nurse. “But, father—”
“This world is hideous!” Faust glowers. “It’s drowning, all of it drowning in the sands of time. And I wake to find it falling all around me,” he dramatizes his words with superstitious hands, falling as if cringing from the weight of time itself, the dread and fear and sacrifice, sluicing through each fingertip. “Time is my enemy but it will be your most beloved friend. You must never act, never say a word to anyone, for it is time that will heal everything.”
Harlow’s elbow holds up her torso. A faint sparkle in his eye holds her heart. Faust rubs at the portrait, appearing to wish for a vapor of life. She slips it from between his fingers and studies it under the oil light.
“You were passionate about her weren’t you?”
Harlow’s words register as a wraith’s whisper, trembling his thoughts.
He has grown blind to me, hasn’t he? she strokes the hand-colored photograph. The glass reflects back at her, revealing herself as the flesh image of her mother. She finds a braid of hair encased on the other side and begins to undo the latch.
“Give that to me!” Faust jerks it away like a hawser to a hangman’s neck.
12
The sweaty Faust footman travels by bicycle lugging hill-topped invitations to the Hart estate. Godfrey, the penguin-straight nose-in-the-air Hart butler, receives him at their entryway.
“Invitation for Sir William Hart, courtesy of the Faust residence.”
Godfrey retrieves the pearl envelope betwixt thumb and forefinger, nods to the footman and closes the door.
Inside, Godfrey prepares his presentation platter at the butler’s pantry then stalks through the foyer where echoes feast upon vaulted ceilings and tracery. He clambers up the winding red stairs and down the long gallery, carpeted in royal blue. At the end of this hall a single door opens to a writing-room-turned-bedchamber. It’s chockfull of handwritten volumes filling a seemingly endless œuver also occupied by a tousled bed and desk but is nevertheless empty. Still, an eddy curtain beckons him. He sticks his head out of a ladder- framed window where an abandoned pasture awaits, over which a telescopic sight of the Faust estate can be observed. He turns his face skyward shouting, “Master William!” Nothing but the wind cries back through his three slicked strands of hair.
Godfrey retreats. He moves carefully over the papers, through the gallery, down the cardinal steps, past the reverb of his outsoles ricocheting off heaven’s vault and arrives scuffling through a broad carport.
Godfrey regains his composure through a dry cough at the end of a scrunched fist. “Master William,” he straightens towards a shadowy figure and serves the pearl envelope on the silver platter. “Sir, you’ve received an invitation from the Faust estate.”
William toils away at a dusty worktable, his face made latent by a dormant nest of wind-blown hair. He wipes away a flaxen lock from his forehead and screws in one of a dozen rivets. “Fine, you’ll phone the parents then.”
William’s voice is pristine, cultured and smooth with accents of exotic odysseys. It’s at striking odds with the dubious engine he slogs upon.
“I’m afraid your father is obtaining mineral concessions. They won’t be returning for some time.”
William tightens his grip.
“I believe, another diamond mine has been discovered, Sir.”
The screwdriver drops from William’s clumsy fist. His hand tightens again as the driver rolls over the concrete floor, checking on its side, just against his worn-in outsole.
Godfrey skims over the elaborate typography.
“Master William, this invitation is particularly addressed to you.”
William scatters silver dust particles from his device. With a slow, cool blow he carries on with his work.
Godfrey opens the envelope, proceeding to read aloud. “You are cordially invited to a spring gathering at the Faust estate to savor the delights of—”
“I don’t drink.”
Godfrey wiggles his ears and clears his throat.
William softens at Godfrey’s silence, extending with a mild, “You’re very kind to inform me, Godfrey. Thank you.”
Godfrey returns the card to the platter and pats his sweat-beaded cranium with his cotton handkerchief. In the course of returning the cloth to his inner pocket, his knuckles rumple against notepaper. “There is one other thing, Sir, forgive me.” Godfrey unfolds the note.
“Your father has requested me to inform you of the seriousness of obtaining a publisher for your work. Your writing is of the utmost priority, as, in your father’s words verbatim, ‘your poetic treatise with its explicit portrait of young ardor delineates an unforgiving honesty and peerless compassion, oft consigned to oblivion by its very predecessors.’ You are very much encouraged to use your work to your advantage, Master William. Your literary masterpiece, notwithstanding the ‘accents of vulgarity which can be assuaged and refined’ can harvest a respectable fortune. As you possess a great supply for the growing demand of young interest in poetry, you chance to yield a proper living.”
“Then I’m afraid, for him, my work still proves to be a conundrum.”
“Pardon me, Sir. But I’ve noticed you’ve spent a large portion of your...occupation, on the dock and in the workrooms building and writing.” Godfrey emphasizes building and writing, repeating himself three-fold, monotonously, as William swiftly strikes an ink pen to his open journal. “Seeing as your father’s left you all you need, it would do you a bit of good to make use of it. Rub a few purple elbows. Mingle with the peers. Possibly, get to know some of the opposite sex?”
William carries on composing unfazed.
“Also, Faust has recently had an opening in finance. He’s known to support willing students with paying internships.”
William frees his pen and reaches for another tool to tinker with.
“The practice gives way to your mathematics forte, Sir, and it’ll allow you a bit of air from the outside.” Godfrey advances, placing the opened card on the worktable next to William. “I’ll leave this here to marinate. Good day, Sir.” Godfrey floats away.
William runs a sun-tanned finger over the Faust crest then blends a lone wire, returning to his toils.
13
Harlow and Marie laze in the upstairs gallery, swarmed by the latest records. Fresh air from Harlow’s open door livens the hall. Cleaning out doddering odor. Lifting pages of scattered books.
Harlow fastens her belly to the floor. She chews on a hulking wad of gum and spreads her fingers over a Deutschland magazine. In her other hand, she bounces a red ball.
Marie looks into her pocket mirror and teases her hot-combed tresses with a red, half-moon manicure then toys with Harlow’s gramophone, tugging at her spread of Beauté Magazine.
“We all had dinner,” says Marie.
“What’d you eat?”
“The seamstress wears a star of David. I had no idea Judith was Deutsch-Judisch, a German Jew.”
“Yes, she was an English teacher in Germany. She told me how she used to play in the winter snow where they had Windbuchen. Those are trees that bend so low you can lick the ice right off the tops. Her ancestors were fathers of the Scythians as well, you know. Queer isn’t it?” Harlow pops her gum, flips a glossy page. “Those are Aryan people.”
“Then why does she have such a shameful job, sewing holes in Luella’s clothes?”
“That law, you know. Nürnberger Gesezte? Stripped her of everything. So, she fled here. It was Luella’s début and Judith was seemly. Faust took her in.”
Marie lolls her head in realization.
Harlow squints at an ad of a blonde woman with a braid on her crown and her hand slicing up in front of a mob.
“Will you braid my hair like they do in Germany?”
“Sure.”
Harlow hurries after a hairbrush, comb and bobby-pins from her room then retreats back to the hall, wedging her back between Marie’s legs on the floor. Marie brushes out Harlow’s, now, silky hair, which she’d straightened the night before.
“I’ve had the same dream for the third time since last week.” Harlow chews.
“The same one?”
“Yes, it’s always the same. I see this boy. Then I have this falling feeling. Does that ever happen to you?”
“Sure, every once in a while. Then what? Who is it?”
“Well, I can barely see him and he just disappears. Out to sea.”
“Oh,” Marie mutters. “Mine’s always Bryce.”
“Bryce?” Harlow bubbles with laughter. “But why?”
Marie goes on braiding without a twit.
“It’s okay. I do a strange thing as well,” Harlow bounces the red ball as her fringe bobs about her face. “Sometimes, when I’m inspired to dance, I wrap my arms around myself like this,” she throws her hands over each shoulder as Marie holds tight onto her last plait. “And I feel as though I’m really, actually, dancing with him. Like the golden sun and pale blue moon at dawn...” Harlow wrests Marie’s hands, spinning her along in a waltz. “..singing, ‘after you’ ‘no, after you’ then deciding we’ll go together.” Harlow dips and swings a giggling Marie. “The maids think us mad for our embrace but I wonder if they’re deaf to our song.”
Harlow releases Marie in an elegant twirl. She bends her left hand behind her tailbone, sliding her right foot in front and bringing her left foot behind at a right angle, regally, finally, bowing forward. Marie holds her dress out on both sides and curtsies Harlow’s way. They both brim with laughter.