The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [135]
The next morning, Beulah Bradford had arrived and taken charge of them all. Beulah was a blessing in the guise of a middle-aged widowed lady who had already brought up six children of her own and had ten grandchildren living in Georgia. She wore a clean starched white overall and enormous white lace-up shoes and she moved about the small apartment like a battleship at full speed.
“Ah’m used to doin’ for my own children,” she told Missie. “Ah’ve been working for show-business ladies for more’n twenty years now. Ah knows all their ways, and the funny hours they keep, and no stories never get into the papers from mah mouth. Ah’m the soul of discretion, Miss Verity, and ah’m real thrilled to be lookin’ after little Azaylee here. Takes me back to when my own were that age,” she had added with a reminiscent sigh, “before they grew big and obstreperous.”
Within a week Beulah was part of the family and had taken Rosa’s place as “aunt in residence.” She cooked Azaylee’s meals and made sure she ate them, she bathed her, she washed and ironed her little dresses; she braided her hair and took her and Viktor for long walks in the park every afternoon where they met other children. Azaylee loved her and had a great time.
There were just two problems in Missie’s life right now. One was that there simply had not been a free few hours to see Rosa, and the other was that money seemed to slip through her fingers like water.
Ziegfeld had given her a month’s salary in advance so she could pay the deposit and the rent on her new apartment; she had paid back Zev and paid Glanz’s for her coat; she had given Rosa back her five dollars and tucked another twenty into her pocket when she wasn’t looking. And remembering working for poverty wages herself, she had insisted on paying Beulah a hundred dollars a month plus her uniforms and room and board, and even at that price she considered her a bargain. “When my salary goes up, so does yours, Beulah,” she had told her frankly, “and that’s a promise.”
Of course there was enough money to live on, but it puzzled her that somehow the two hundred dollars didn’t look like the fortune it had a few weeks ago. Especially when she had found out the fees demanded by New York’s smart schools, not that they were exactly keen on having her custom. The genteelly snobbish spinster ladies who ran them had dropped Astors and Vanderbilts, Biddies and Bradleys, into the conversation like social confetti, looking askance at her when she explained that she was appearing in Ziegfeld’s new Follies and looking skeptical when she introduced Azaylee as her little sister. If only you knew who this child really is, she had thought furiously, you would be swooning to have her!
Only one school, Beadles, had agreed to accept her, and Missie knew it was the best of all. The two Misses Beadle who ran it were down-to-earth smiling women from Boston, and their own background was socially impeccable enough not to have to boast of their pupils. On the contrary, all their girls wore the same smart little gray coats and skirts with wide-brimmed felt hats in winter and straw hats in summer and everyone was treated equally. The only trouble was the exorbitant fees, five hundred a term, payable in advance. She just did not have the money. She could not ask Mr. Ziegfeld for another advance, and anyway the thought of getting into debt again terrified her. She had vowed never again in all her life