Photography by Arthur Witman, courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri
The driver took the servant to the variety store; she bought a tin washtub, crepe paper, five pounds of apples. The gardener filled the tub, carried it upstairs to the wood-paneled library for her; she plunked each apple in, minding the rug. She spent the afternoon pinning white satin over the steps of the grand staircase, anchoring it with glue and stitches. She draped more fabric on the banisters. Then, there went the doorbell, doorbell, doorbell: a dowager in folkloric German dress, he in just a tux. Annie Oakley, Pallas Athena, Groucho Marx, Salvador Dalí. A man’s face veiled under a mop head, looking like weird kin to the Veiled Prophet. The King of the Jungle, his belt dangling with plastic fish. Mr. and Mrs. Eyeball, both bright blue, sclera painted with carefully rendered veins. In the ballroom, where the servant had hung new drapes (green silk, with orange pumpkins and flocked black cats) there was a crystal punch bowl, a bar. I’ll have a Bee Stinger, a Trick Knee, a Double Rainbow. A man wearing a tiny roof for a hat chitchatted with a gold-lamé giraffe in red lipstick and a lady wearing a flour sifter as a fascinator. A woman in a rain barrel danced with a man with a powdered face, who wore nothing but a nightshirt. And on the stairs, hobos, cowboys, clowns, and ballerinas rode two or three to a plank down the newly slippery steps, landing in a heap on a mattress at the bottom (all pronounced it swell, though no Art Hill).
The last boozy holdouts stumbled out to their drivers at 3 a.m. The moon flashed in and out of a bank of fast-moving clouds, and the cold air stung with the smell of coal smoke. The servant pedaled home on her bicycle, past the river, past the flicker of campfires in Hooverville, kettles sputtering over open fires, boiling water for tree-bark tea. She pedaled past a crumpled figure curled over a sidewalk grate, his coat fanned out over him to catch the warmth in the cloud of steam. And back at the boardinghouse, she put on her own kettle, had some bread and butter. Home safe. Trick or treat. Now All Saints. Some soap and water. And then, despite the sunrise, sleep.
