Elizabeth Gilbert - Stern Men

From that time forward, Jane Smith-Ellis accompanied Vera Ellis everywhere. On the third Saturday of every June, the girls traveled to Fort Niles Island, and on the second Saturday of every September, Jane Smith-Ellis accompanied Vera Ellis back to the Ellis mansion in Concord.

There is no reason to imagine that Ruth Thomas’s grandmother was ever considered for a moment to be the actual sister of Miss Vera Ellis. Although adoption made the girls legal siblings, the thought that they deserved equal respect in the Ellis household would have been farcical. Vera Ellis did not love Jane Smith-Ellis as a sister, but she fully relied on her as a servant. Although Jane Smith-Ellis had the responsibilities of a handmaid, she was, by law, a member of the family, and consequently received no salary for her work.

“Your grandmother,” Ruth’s father had always said, “was a slave to that goddamn family.”

“Your grandmother,” Ruth’s mother had always said, “was fortunate to have been adopted by a family as generous as the Ellises.”

Miss Vera Ellis was not a great beauty, but she had the advantage of wealth, and she passed her days exquisitely dressed. There are photographs of Miss Vera Ellis perfectly outfitted for swimming, riding, skating, reading, and, as she grew older, for dancing, driving, and marrying. These turn-of-the-century costumes were intricate and heavy. It was Ruth Thomas’s grandmother who kept Miss Vera Ellis tight in her buttons, who sorted her kidskin gloves, who tended to the plumes of her hats, who rinsed her stockings and lace. It was Ruth Thomas’s grandmother who selected, arranged, and packed the corsets, slips, shoes, crinolines, parasols, dressing gowns, powders, brooches, capes, lawn dresses, and hand purses necessary for Miss Vera Ellis’s summer sojourn on Fort Niles Island every year. It was Ruth Thomas’s grandmother who packed Miss Vera’s accoutrements for her return to Concord every autumn, without misplacing a single item.

Of course, Miss Vera Ellis was likely to visit Boston for a weekend, or the Hudson Valley during October, or Paris, for the further refinement of her graces. And she needed to be attended to in these circumstances as well. Ruth Thomas’s grandmother, the orphan Jane Smith-Ellis, served well.

Jane Smith-Ellis was no beauty, either. Neither woman was excellent to behold. In photographs, Miss Vera Ellis at least bears a remotely interesting expression on her face-an expression of expensive haughtiness-but Ruth’s grandmother shows not even that. Standing behind the exquisitely bored Miss Vera Ellis, Jane Smith-Ellis shows nothing in her face. Not smarts, not a determined chin, not a sullen mouth. There is no spark in her, but there is no mildness, either. Merely deep and dull fatigue.

In the summer of 1905, Miss Vera Ellis married a boy, from Boston, by the name of Joseph Hanson. The marriage was of little significance, which is to say that Joseph Hanson’s family was good enough, but the Ellises were much better, so Miss Vera retained all power. She suffered no undue inconvenience from the marriage. She never referred to herself as Mrs. Joseph Hanson; she was forever known as Miss Vera Ellis. The couple lived in the bride’s childhood home, the Ellis mansion in Concord. On the third Saturday of every June, the couple followed the established pattern of moving to Fort Niles Island and, on the second Saturday of every September, moving back to Concord.

What’s more, the marriage between Miss Vera Ellis and Joe Hanson did not in the least change Ruth’s grandmother’s life. Jane Smith-Ellis’s duties were still clear. She was, naturally, of service to Miss Vera on the wedding day itself. (Not as a bridesmaid. Daughters of family friends and cousins filled those roles. Jane was the attendant who dressed Miss Vera, managed the dozens of pearl buttons down the back of the dress, hooked the high wedding boots, handled the French veil.) Ruth’s grandmother also accompanied Miss Vera on her honeymoon to Bermuda. (To collect umbrellas at the beach, to brush sand from Miss Vera’s hair, to arrange for the wool bathing suits to dry without fading.) And Ruth’s grandmother stayed on with Miss Vera after the wedding and honeymoon.

Miss Vera and Joseph Hanson had no children, but Vera had weighty social obligations. She had all those events to attend and appointments to keep and letters to write. Miss Vera used to lie in bed each morning, after picking at the breakfast Ruth’s grandmother had delivered on a tray, and dictate-in an indulgent imitation of a person with a real job dictating to a real employee-the responsibilities of the day.

“See if you can take care of that, Jane,” she would say.

Every day, for years and years.

The routine would surely have continued for many more years but for a particular event. Jane Smith-Ellis became pregnant. In late 1925, the quiet orphan whom the Ellises had adopted from the Bath Naval Orphans’ Hospital was pregnant. Jane was forty-one years old. It was unthinkable. Needless to say, she was unmarried, and no one had considered the possibility that she might take a suitor. Nobody in the Ellis family, of course, had thought of Jane Smith-Ellis for a moment as a woman for intimacy. They’d never expected her to acquire a friend, no less a lover. It was nothing they had ever given thought to. Other servants were constantly getting entangled in all manner of idiotic situations, but Jane was too practical and too necessary to get in trouble. Miss Vera could not spare Jane long enough for Jane to find trouble. And why would Jane look for trouble in the first place?

The Ellis family, indeed, had questions about the pregnancy. They had many questions. And demands. How had this come to pass? Who was responsible for this disaster? But Ruth Thomas’s grandmother, obedient though she generally was, told them nothing except one detail.

“He is Italian,” she said.

Italian? Italian? Outrageous! What were they to surmise? Obviously, the man responsible was one of the hundreds of Italian immigrant workers in the Ellis Granite Company’s quarries on Fort Niles. This was incomprehensible to the Ellis family. How had Jane Smith-Ellis found her way to the quarries? Even more bewildering, how had a worker found his way to her? Had Ruth’s grandmother visited the peanut houses, where the Italians lived, in the middle of the night? Or-horrors!-had an Italian worker visited the Ellis House? Unthinkable. Had there been other encounters? Perhaps years of encounters? Had there been other lovers? Was this a lapse, or had Jane been living a perverse double life? Was it a rape? A whim? A love affair?

The Italian quarry workers spoke no English. They were constantly being replaced, and, even to their immediate supervisors, they were nameless. As far as the quarry foremen were concerned, the Italians may as well have had interchangeable heads. Nobody thought of them as individuals. They were Catholic. They had no social commerce with the local island population, no less with anyone connected to the Ellis family. The Italians were largely ignored. They were noticed, really, only when they came under attack. The newspaper of Fort Niles Island, which folded soon after the granite industry left, had run occasional editorials fulminating against the Italians.

From The Fort Niles Bugle in February 1905: “These Garibaldians constitute the poorest, the most vile, creatures of Europe. Their children and wives are crippled and bent by the depravities of the Italian men.”

“These Neapolitans,” reads a later editorial, “give shocks to our children, who must pass them as they chatter and bark frightfully on our roads.”

It was unthinkable that an Italian, a Garibaldian, a Neapolitan, could have gained access to the Ellis household. Still, when interrogated by the Ellis family about the father of her child, Ruth Thomas’s grandmother would reply only, “He is Italian.”