Tears and Smiles
Summary
A marmalade dusk bleeds across the tenement alleyways when six-year-old Marie, barefoot in a pinafore stiff with dried tears, witnesses her father’s fists drum a lullaby of bruises onto her mother’s cheekbones; the child’s scream ricochets off peeling wallpaper, escapes through the warped sash-window, and scampers into the city’s sodium night like a feral violin note. She wanders the gas-lamp park where marble cherubs vomit moss, and there a skittish terrier—its ribbon a slash of imperial purple against the soot—becomes her life-raft of fur. The dog’s governess, a maid whose face is a palimpsest of erased accents, cannot sever the magnetism between the girl and the animal; she ferries both to the Greer mansion, a mausoleum of chandeliers that tinkle like iced champagne in a heatwave. Inside, Mr. Greer—his moustache waxed into two suicidal daggers—paces the Persian rug as though measuring a grave; childless by vocation, he craves an heir the way a collector craves a final stamp. He signs adoption papers the way gamblers toss a last chip. Weeks later, Marie’s convalesced mother, scent of carbolic soap clinging to her hair, knocks at the servants’ entrance, bargains for a governess post, and silently bargains with her own conscience: proximity traded for pride. The mansion’s corridors become a clandestine opera: lullabies hummed behind oak doors, bedtime stories that taste of forbidden peaches, and glances between the industrialist and the governess that sizzle like sealing wax. Meanwhile, the biological father—now a tattooed Icarus—plunges from a prison roof, his blood mapping constellations on the courtyard stones. Mrs. Greer, her soul lacquered by cocktail chatter and empty charity balls, swallows laudanum in a boudoir the color of drowned roses, leaving behind a suicide note scented with migraine powder. The funeral lilies have barely wilted when Mr. Greer and the governess exchange vows under a canopy of migrating birds; Marie, clutching both her mother’s hand and the terrier’s frayed ribbon, steps into a sunbeam that smells of freshly ironed linen and the terrifying possibility of safety.
Synopsis
Little Marie, terrified after her drunken father beats her mother, flees from the house. Finding herself alone after her father is arrested for the assault and her mother rushed to the hospital, Marie becomes attached to a little dog that she finds in the park. The maid who is walking the dog is unable to part the two, and so she brings the little girl home to the Greer mansion where Mr. Greer, desperate for the child that his socialite wife is too busy to give him, insists upon adopting Marie. After Marie's mother recovers, she is reluctant to deprive her daughter of the riches she may inherit, and so obtains the position of governess in the Greer household in order to be near her own child. Gradually, a deep attachment develops between Mr. Greer and Marie's mother. After Marie's father is killed during a jailbreak, and Mrs. Greer, suffering from her superficial existence, commits suicide, Greer marries Marie's mother and the reconstituted family begins a new life.
