The New Yorker:

Although she told me often how much she liked and admired me, I was unmistakably a servant.

By Jennifer Egan 

One February day in 1988, I emerged from the subway on Lexington Avenue to find that East Sixty-eighth Street, where I’d recently begun working as a private secretary to a countess, was overrun by fire trucks and acrid with the stench of smoke. “The street is closed,” a fireman told me, as I tried to enter the block. Then, among the retracting ladders and dripping cornices, I noticed a head thrust from the window of a grand prewar apartment house. A guttural voice reached the fireman and me: “Let her through! That’s my secretary!”

I was twenty-five, and had moved to New York the previous fall in the hope of becoming a writer. By the time I found my way to the countess, I had already cycled through enough temporary jobs to know how lucky I was to land part-time work that kept me in frozen yogurt and paid the rent on my fifth-floor studio walkup.

Being a private secretary to the countess meant, in some sense, becoming her. At 1 p.m. each weekday, I lost track of my own life when I stepped into her tiny marble foyer, its table laden with embossed invitations from displaced European royalty. The foyer opened onto a living room, a dining room, and a parlor with sponge-marbled walls and tables smothered with brocade and studded with curios. Through a narrow door, the finery gave way abruptly to a rudimentary kitchen and a wisp of a bedroom, hardly large enough to hold the twin bed where the countess slept. She was newly widowed, an American-born writer of what she charmingly called “faction”: 

Go to link