“Of course, I know that.” Did Rose really think she thought it was a game? Is that what she thought of her? “I don’t think that; I never have. And I know our histories are different. What I went through was nothing compared to you—”
“I do not want to talk about this.” Rose tore off each word.
“I’m so sorry.” Why had she ever spoken up? If she were Rose, she would despise her too. Maybe she should leave. “I didn’t mean to be presumptuous. I’m so sorry,” Lizzie said. “I just wish there were something more I could do.”
“Do you? Do you really?” Rose said, and dropped her cup back on the coffee table with a clatter. “You say that, but sometimes I wonder. Because there is more you could find out. But you have to want to know.”
12
Los Angeles, 1958
Eastlake School was housed in the sprawling Spanish-style former residence of a silent movie star. It was a warm midafternoon in February, the sky cloudless and bright. Rose was walking toward the administrative offices to take a call from Thomas when she heard the rise of giggles, a braiding of voices. “Tennyson,” she thought she heard a female voice say.
Then she spotted them. Gathered on the administration steps, a knot of long-limbed girls in uniforms of pale blue pleated skirts and white collared shirts. They were thirteen, fourteen, on the cusp. The burnished coins in their loafers glinted in the sunlight. “Tennyson,” she heard again. The speaker was Helen Peale. “You must admire him.” Helen dropped her usually tentative voice low and guttural. “You have altogether no choice in the matta.” Her friends giggled again as she turned matter into a hammer of a word, losing the r entirely.
That was her, Rose thought, stock-still. Helen was imitating her. She stood on the path and watched Helen laugh. She needed a haircut, Rose thought. Her limp brown hair was too thin and those bangs altogether unflattering.
It was then that Helen noticed Rose. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Downes,” she stammered.
Rose gave her a curt nod. She continued up the steps of the administration building with deliberation. So Helen Peale was a mimic. Rose could be teased for far worse. Most teachers were. Helen was one of the few boarding students here at Eastgate, an only child whose father traveled constantly for work and whose mother chose to accompany him. She had few friends—even Rose knew this. She was doing what she could to fit in.
And yet Rose still felt a tightening within her chest as surely as if Helen had followed her home and spied on her and Thomas alone in their bedroom.
Nearly three years earlier, they had moved to Los Angeles. Thomas landed a job at Douglas. The aircraft industry was booming, everyone focused on Boeing up north. It was no longer a question of if, but when, and which company would first succeed with a commercial jet. Rose didn’t have such employment luck. But one night about two years ago Thomas came home late and said, “I’ve found you a job, a teaching position.”
They stood shoulder to shoulder in their tiny aqua-tiled bathroom. He was brushing his teeth. “A teaching position?” she repeated incredulously.
He spit in the sink, looked at her reflection in the mirror. “Potentially,” he amended. “At a very posh school. Someone quit midyear and they’re looking to hire immediately.”
“How in the world did you hear of it?” Rose had long given up on teaching. In England, there were no positions, nor had she seen any here. She had been circling ads in the paper for secretarial work—had been on a few interviews so far, two for real estate companies, one for advertising—but nothing.
“From Reynolds, who heard it from Douglas’s secretary. His daughter goes there. Eastgate. A girls’ school near Beverly Hills. It’s been there for years. And it’s quite the place, apparently: horses, tennis courts, an outdoor and indoor swimming pool.”
It sounded like a resort, not a school, Rose was tempted to say, but the possibility of teaching here, in America, even the slight possibility, gave her a thrill. “Are there classrooms too?”
He regarded her image in the mirror. “I believe there are, yes.”
“With one or two Jewish teachers at the helm?” She tried to ask this with a lightness that she did not feel.
“That I do not know.” He picked an errant hair from the wet sink, dried his hands thoroughly on the towel. “Believe it or not, the faith of the instructors did not come up.”
She fixed him with a look. “You know what I mean.”
“I do,” he said. “I did not ask. Best to simply apply.”
There weren’t many Jewish teachers on staff among the L.A. private schools, she had heard. (It wasn’t that they refused to hire Jews, the well-meaning wife of a colleague of Thomas’s had told Rose soon after they moved, it was just that they didn’t hire them.) But the world was changing, Thomas liked to say. Not fast enough, Rose thought. Her religious beliefs had not shifted since she had been that unhappy child made more unhappy when the Cohens tried to take her to synagogue and required her to keep the laws of kashrut. But she was all too aware that wasn’t the way the world saw her.
“They should seek out Jews. In the nineteenth century, every truly educated soul knew Hebrew,” Thomas was saying now.
“Ah, yes, the halcyon days of the nineteenth century,” Rose said.
Thomas laughed. “So you’ll write Eastgate tomorrow. Tell them that you know Mr. Douglas.”
“But I don’t know Mr. Douglas.”
“Ah, but your husband does. And he told me to tell you to do so.” He tapped her backside with affection. “Silly Rosie. Why must you make everything harder on yourself?”
She made a face at Thomas, asserted it wasn’t so, but a week later, behind the wheel of her neighbor’s Buick (they had barely scraped together the funds for Thomas’s clunker of a Chevy, let alone a car for her), Rose wondered if Thomas was right. Did she make everything harder on herself? Her anxiety was mounting: What made her believe she could get a teaching job? She had spent eight months student-teaching at a second-rate vocational school in Croydon six years ago. Her students were sixteen-year-old boys who would have rather eaten their fingernails for supper than recite a sonnet. Why did she ever think she could land a job teaching at an illustrious school in Los Angeles? (“Mr. Douglas told me that Shirley Temple went to Eastgate,” Thomas said last night. “You are not helping,” she barked at him.)
She took Beverly Glen past Sunset, maneuvering the unfamiliar car up the curving, darkly paved road, past the high hedges that obscured the homes behind them. The lots were big, the houses had to be grand. She was glad in her agitated state not to see them.