“Well, open it.”
Now she remembered. She had been a little surprised to see Mr. Jungmann there, because she hadn’t noticed him among the congregation before. He had been friendly and red-faced and had greeted her mother with the reverence of an acolyte before the Virgin Mary. He had said many complimentary things about Olive and parted from them with a quaint and formal little bow. And then Olive had returned to her duties at the Pratt mansion and forgotten all about it.
But Mr. Jungmann, apparently, had not.
Olive slid the string free and loosened the paper, which had been folded in crisp brown angles around an oblong box.
“Ooh, look at that,” said Mrs. Van Alan.
“It’s a box, Mother.”
“Dearest, the best things come in boxes. Go on, go on.”
Olive opened the box and unfolded the tissue to reveal an ornate silver hairbrush, beautifully made, its bristles so white they disappeared against the wrapping. “I can’t accept this!” she gasped.
“Gracious, Olive.” Her mother’s voice was slow with awe. “How beautiful!”
“It’s too much! It’s—it’s far too intimate.” She set down the box as if it were scalding her. “Far too expensive. It’s improper.”
Mrs. Van Alan snatched the box right back up and plucked the hairbrush from its nest of tissue. She laid it lovingly on her palm, turning it over, tracing the scrollwork with an admiring finger. “Don’t be a fool, Olive. He’s in love with you.”
“But I don’t want him to be in love with me! I certainly never encouraged him. And I can’t possibly return his affection.”
Mrs. Van Alan turned sharply. “And why not? Too good for him, are you?”
“It’s not that—”
“You do realize we are destitute, Olive? Destitute. Your father’s debts . . .” She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “The money from the boarders hardly covers the housekeeping. Every month I scrape and mend and make do. I’ve run out of credit at the butcher. I’ve had to sell off all my good clothes, all the silver, all the jewelry except my earbobs. The last thing I own from your father.” Her eyes glimmered. “I shall have to sell the house next, and live in some dirty tenement—”
But Olive had stopped listening, because she had just taken notice of those earbobs in her mother’s ears, hanging from the tiny lobes as they always did on special occasions, at holidays and at church. They were made of rubies, a small round one at the top and a larger, teardrop-shaped stone dangling below, in a delicate and distinctive gold filigree setting.
A stone exactly the same shape, inside exactly the same setting, as the ruby that now dangled between Olive’s breasts.
Mrs. Van Alan produced tea and brandy cake, which Olive chewed dutifully in a mouth that seemed to have lost all sensation. She replied like an automaton to her mother’s questions, though she couldn’t remember, later, a single word they had exchanged. At half past three she glanced at the clock and said she had better be going. She needed to return to Sixty-ninth Street by four in order to start preparing the house for Christmas dinner.
“Can’t you wait a few more minutes?” said Mrs. Van Alan. “Mr. Jungmann promised to stop by this afternoon.”
“Then I should leave immediately.”
Her mother’s soft and longing face turned hard. “Don’t be stupid, Olive. Just listen to you! You’re running off to serve Christmas dinner to the people who murdered your father, when—”
“They did not murder Papa!” Olive shot back, and then, shocked by her own words: “Not all of them, anyway.”
“Oh.” Mrs. Van Alan fingered the edge of her plate—the second-best china, because the first had been sold off last spring. “Oh, I see. I see it now. You’re being drawn in, aren’t you? Seduced by their riches and glamour, just like your father was. So they can swallow you inside and digest you and spit you out again—”
Olive rose from the table. “That’s not true!”
“We have nothing, Olive. We are nothing, thanks to those—those evil people. You have this chance, this one chance, a kind and respectable man with a nice prosperous business—”
“Where did you get those earbobs, Mother?”
Mrs. Van Alan blinked and touched a finger to her right ear. “These? From your father, of course.”
“I know, but when? When did you get them?”
“Last Christmas.” The tears began to glisten again at the inner corners of her dark eyes. “He used the first installment from the Pratts to pay for them. Nothing left over for housekeeping, of course, oh, no. Your father never thought about the price of coal. Why buy coal when you could buy a beautiful—a thing of beauty—” Her voice faltered. She laid her hands in her lap and stared at the small and sizzling fire in the grate, a pitifully tiny pile of cheap bituminous lumps.