It was on a Saturday of particularly genteel promise in the merry month of May, in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-one, that The Hall prepared itself for the annual garden fête—a tradition as unavoidable as dust and twice as intent upon making its presence felt. The east lawn, lying between the house and the utterly preposterous folly (a pseudo-Greek temple which seemed forever on the verge of apologizing for its own existence), had been under preparation since dawn.
Within that folly stood Henrietta Liggett—housekeeper, confidante, and co-conspirator in all matters requiring wits sharper than Joseph Perkins’s character. Before her lay the refreshments, and chief among the offenders were the cucumber sandwiches.
Ah, the cucumber sandwiches.
Pale, anaemic triangles of suffering, arranged in solemn ranks like consumptive invalids at a seaside sanatorium. Their crusts—those last vestiges of vigor—had been ruthlessly excised with a severity that would have pleased the Elector of Hanover himself. Lacking substance, resolve, or the will to live, they seemed ready at any moment to collapse upon their lace doilies and expire of their own wan constitution. One could almost hear them coughing delicately into imaginary handkerchiefs.
Henrietta eyed them with the resentment of a woman who knew her mistress’s feelings on the matter and feared, rightly, that a cucumber-induced tirade was imminent.
Now, before proceeding, the reader must grasp an absolute fact of the universe:
Anna Upton Waters Perkins despised cucumber.
Not mildly. Not socially. Metaphysically.
Her disdain was woven into the very warp and weft of her being.
And so, moments later, Annie was indeed walking backwards across the lawn, white muslin gleaming in the sun, delivering a full-throated denunciation of cucumber sandwiches to Henrietta—loud enough, rumor claimed, to cause genteel palpitations in parlors as distant as Newport and New Bedford.
“Why must we always serve those pale, wheezing abominations?” Annie demanded. “They are not food; they are tragedies! They look as though one might touch them and be held responsible for their demise!”
So absorbed was she in her righteous fury that she failed to notice the croquet wicket lying in wait—perhaps innocent, perhaps malevolent, certainly insolent.
Her petticoats ensnared themselves in its metal loop; her right boot wedged itself there with the finality of a signed confession. She twisted to free herself, but the heel declined to cooperate.
Down she went.
The fall was spectacular not in violence but in audience. A semi-circle of society ladies gasped; a footman clutched his tray as though witnessing the fall of Rome; little Hyacinth Tinsley covered her eyes, then peeked through her fingers as children inevitably do.
Annie, for her part, refused to perform the fainting farce expected of women with twisted ankles and wounded pride. She simply sat herself upon the grass—white muslin, damp earth, and all—removed her boot and stocking, and hitched her skirts to the knee to examine the offended joint.
Thus her limbs, ordinarily confined to the lofty privacy of respectable skirt architecture, were revealed before God, man, three footmen, the butler, and a cucumber sandwich platter which seemed, in its consumptive weakness, on the verge of swooning in sympathy.
The scandal was instant, electric, and delicious.
Annie, recovering her composure with the elegance of a general rallying troops after a failed charge, attributed the display to delirium from pain and feminine nerves—the two excuses society recognizes as universal solvent for impropriety.
For propriety’s sake, she retired indoors for several days thereafter, affecting appropriate mortification until gossip dimmed to anecdote.
But beneath the outward comedy lay subtler truths:
Persephone, her beloved maid, would die of cholera only two years later; Henrietta, her steadfast conspirator, would be dismissed by Ethel before the decade’s close; Joseph’s infidelities continued their weary march; the household trembled with impending shifts of power.
Yet on that May afternoon, in that ridiculous collision of cucumber sandwiches and croquet wicket, Annie performed a rare and radiant act:
She behaved, openly and unrepentantly, like herself.
And society—aghast though it pretended to be—ultimately forgave her.
Eventually.
Be First to Comment