Summer Complaints

Summer Complaint deeply engaged in the freezer; Deb Marshall art

Back in the dark ages, when I was still a student, June meant getting a summer job. Getting a job usually meant doing something that would bring us into close contact with the Summer Complaints, the demanding folk who migrated to their summer homes, creating seasonal jobs and leaving behind, when they left for their off-season domains, exhausted and irritated natives.

One summer I worked at the local grocery store. The breakroom was out back, and the fastest route from there to my cash register was via the swinging door in the meat room. In high spirits one day, I quickly peeked through the small window before giving the door a mighty kick. As it swung open I saw a Summer Complaint - head down, on tippy-toes, deeply engaged in the freezer placed just where the swinging door was about to firmly smack her shorts-garbed derriere.  So I lunged for the door – and missed it entirely – and instead, gave a mighty yank on the handful of posterior I’d grabbed instead.

Oopsie! Gotcha!  Deb Marshall art

I know it was a Summer Complaint I’d groped because she flew out of that freezer wicked fast. And the butcher, who had been happily watching the series of unfortunate events, came to tell me so, once he could speak again – last thing I saw as I snuck quietly away was the butcher down on one knee, bent over, laughing so hard he was gasping.

Back in the day, the summer gentry were often very old, very rich, and certain that we locals were no smarter than we needed to be. Locals were employed as experts about country problems, and as servants. Experts were summoned to get bats out of attics, tune up over-wintered cars, paint ballrooms that hadn’t been used in decades, air linens and uncover furniture, and dust off ancient guest books that contained signatures of visitors from even darker ages – politicians, writers, poets, foreign entities. Servants staffed local restaurants or took over summer child-care or worked as maids, cooks, and gardeners.

                                                                        

One summer two friends and I worked as maids and cook on an historic estate. One friend and I lived there seven days a week, sleeping in the servant’s quarters; the other was the day maid, who helped with the daily house-cleaning. Before we and the aged Summer Complaint we worked for moved in, an army of experts opened up the estate, cleaned the silver, waxed the floors, aired the rooms, put fresh flowers in the reception rooms and library, and made the beds. A gardener and his helper whipped the flower borders into shape, mowed the lawns, pruned the fruit trees, edged the driveway and raked the gravel, turned on the fountains, tidied the walled rose garden, and brought the lawn and porch furniture out of storage. 

In Our Servant Duds; Deb Marshall art

Madame was ancient.  I was summoned to the “cottage,” before the main house was ready, for an interview; and my employer greeted me dressed in an old baggy sweater and pants held shut with a safety pin. She looked and sounded just like folks. The pay was low, but the surroundings were intriguing, the situation unusual, and I thought, “This could be fun.”

We moved in the day before Madame arrived. I was up to my elbows in bread dough when she and her entourage pulled into the courtyard, and everyone except me rushed to greet her and haul in suitcases. After a bit, I heard for the first time the sound of my faux pas: one doesn’t require the gentry to come to the kitchen to discover what you’re doing. Down the long hall came the tap, tap, tappity tap of her cane, dog paws pattering alongside. Second faux pas: one doesn’t offer to shake hands with dough-covered fingers.

Madame bent over my bowl to peer closely at what I was making. “What on earth is that?” she wondered aloud, then caught sight of the home-made pizza I’d just slid out of the oven. “And what is that thing?” she asked, looking alarmed.

“It’s a pizza I made for the servant's lunch,” I answered, brightly. “Would you like a piece?” Very clever of me, I thought, including her in new activities. She reared back in surprise and bellowed, “Good Heavens, no, I don’t want a bit of it!” then marched out of the kitchen, cane pumping, dog following. “Hmm,” I thought, “that went well. I’ll have her happily eating pizza with us at the kitchen table within days.”

Yeah, well. That didn’t happen. Madame ate all her meals alone, dog at her side, except when other gentry were visiting. Breakfast was served in bed; luncheon was served in the dining room, with a full regalia of dishes, spoons, forks, knives, serving utensils. Dinner, by candlelight, in relaxed evening dress, followed a cocktail hour in the library. My friend and I ate our own meals standing in the butler’s pantry so we could hear the bell summons to remove dishes and bring in the next course.

We learned a lot that summer. I discovered that unskinned tomatoes, pound cake, and chives are inedible, and that one can’t whip modern cream. My friend discovered that the lovely, small cut-glass bowls in the butler’s pantry were finger bowls, and rendered applesauce inedible when served in them. We discovered we couldn’t tell the dog’s monogrammed bath towel from Madame’s monogrammed bath towels (same initials), a weekly disaster. Many modern conveniences – like refrigeration – apparently didn’t actually work, except to store the help’s food. Madame’s food was purchased daily. 

Madame’s dog, a big, handsome black Lab, wasn’t allowed to associate with the help, but as soon as Madame let him out in the morning, he’d come dancing to the servant’s entrance hoping for a hand-out, which he usually got. We missed our own dogs, so we were happy to see him and fed him leftovers from Madame’s meals. The dog was fickle, however, and somehow Madame knew exactly what and when I’d fed him. A summons to The Bedroom would soon arrive, and down the long halls I’d go, preparing for a cane-waving lecture.

There were moments of drama: our need for a few hours off evoked tearful doubts that we truly loved Madame; we picked up endless wobbed-up wet bath towels from bathroom floors when other gentry spent the night; I cooked innumerable roasted chickens and gingerbread and didn’t whip – but merely thickened - many quarts of cream; and we picked many pints of berries just before serving them. We listened to Madame discuss us with her guests in detail: our shortcomings, our need for income, what we were studying in college, how we dressed when not in our servant uniforms – in French, forgetting, or perhaps unaware, that many NH  folks are of French extraction. We didn’t let on until our last week, when we gleefully answered her en francais. 

We also had the rare experience of soaking up the atmosphere of an historic house and a nearly dead system of service: servant’s quarters! Bells to summon us! Who would have guessed we’d live Upstairs, Downstairs in miniature? And when Madame was napping or away, we had the pleasure of picnicking on her veranda, or in her rose garden, and examining all the old books in her library and the fascinating old items stashed in closets and cupboards and desks and rarely-used bedrooms, as well as the formal and mazed gardens with their heather, Pan statue, and rill.

Bedroom in the Servant's Quarters; Deb Marshall art

I never managed to lure her into sharing a meal with us, even when Madame was without guests and terribly lonely and she was obviously longing for the end of the summer when she could pack up and return to the city and her aging Irish maids, “…who have been with me since we were all children,” she told me during one tearful scene. “They love me and take care of me for pocket money, and I don’t understand why you young girls need a regular paycheck. I share my lovely house with you, isn’t that enough?”

I delivered a lecture on serf economics and the cost of attending college, and when I was finished she sniffed loudly and dismissed me with a wave of her cane.

But she got me: as she handed me my last paycheck on the day she left for the city and I returned to college, she noted that she’d added a little something extra to it. I could hardly wait to see what she’d decided my superb cooking and care had been worth.

Madame had added a princely bonus of $1.75.

Written from the Madame’s quarters for the blog, June 15, 2017