Chapter Text
(From the desk of Jimmy May. Recorded 22:00 18 March 2024. Lulee Sargent has the appearance of a 20-year-old white woman with short, curled red hair. She is wearing pearl earrings and a pearl necklace, a black pillbox hat, and a mint green dress with stockings and black pumps.)
Is your mobile telephone running? We'll start now? Alright.
My name is Lucille Carolee Sargent, and I was born in Fredericksburg, Texas on May 12th, 1932. My friends call me Lulee, always have.
My mother was Anna Elisabeth Herrmann Sargent, and my father was Marie Philippe Sargent. They died in a house fire when I was very young, and I was raised by my mother's father, Friedrich Karl Herrmann, my Opa. He had very set ideas of what made a proper little girl and I grew up with those ideas: to be obedient, loving, and beautiful. Opa ran a German bakery called simply The German Bakery and he taught me how to bake and cook many wonderful things, and when he saw I had a knack for it, he encouraged me. I remember one winter when I was thirteen years old, and this was just after the war, he found for me a cookbook from the old country and he gave me it for Christmas. What a treasure. I’ve lost the original, but many recipes from that book have been committed to my memory.
When I was 19, I decided I would to go to college, a move that was becoming popular with many girls of my age. I went over to the big city to get a small taste of independent life and I took a government secretarial course. We weren't really there to learn much, myself and the girls, but to make friends with each other and find husbands. It was exciting to be out of the bakery. I learned to use a typewriter, to handle paperwork, and to write in shorthand. I lived in an apartment with four other girls, and every Saturday I made us a batch of a different pastry, and every Friday we had a little party. We each made a dish to share, brought some other friends over. I liked that we had the parties at the apartment. I think if we'd gone to… evening establishments, we would have run into undesirable types, and we were such young, delicate things. But in our own little living room we could dance the night away as much as we wanted.
It was one of those nights I met my Sire, Stewart Spencer. He was different, I could tell right off. He wasn't handsy with the girls. He stood off to the side and watched us, one by one, toe to tip, as if he were painting portraits of us in his head. He was a pretty picture himself, tall and pale and immaculately groomed. He reminded me of my Opa, how refined and ancient he was in his manners and his grooming. A real gentleman from a bygone age, even then.
Stu Spencer came over every Friday and danced with almost every girl. I say almost every girl because, well, he stopped at me.
We got married the next year. It's all a beautiful blur to me, that last year of my mortal life. I remember it in flashes — saying goodbye to all my girls, and how tightly they held onto me. How warm. My last batch of cookies for them was a whole jar of peanut butter thumbprints. A great glass jar, you had to hug it to carry it. I remember going down to Fredericksburg to get my things, and to see about Opa. I remember Stu and he talked a long, long time. I don't remember how my Opa looked when I left. Sometimes when I look back, he looks worried — he looks hopeful — he looks proud. I wish I could remember, for I never saw him again.
I was going to my new family now. A woman leaves her father's house to join her husband’s, and they become one flesh. Of course, I still think of myself as a Fredericksburg bakery girl, in my heart, but that heart I had placed entirely in the hands of Stu Spencer.
(She sighs, and puts a hand over her heart.)
You know what the greatest blessing the Embrace has given me is? That I'll always look as lovely as I did on my wedding night.
I was a real blushing bird of a bride. We had a small wedding, not a church wedding, with all his family there, and what a funny bunch they were, I remember thinking. Some of them were dressed like flappers, all in costumes, and all in black. The girls were so fussy about my hair and my dress and my flowers. Black roses. Everything had to be perfectly beautiful, which is different from just plain perfect, I soon learned. I'm not a vain woman, and I don't think of myself as perfect. But somehow a bride is — She is the most beautiful that she will ever be in her entire life. And so when some of the Kindred talk of the Embrace like it's a curse, I must disagree. I feel blessed to have been kept in that perfect state by the Embrace.
Oh, my wedding night. It almost makes me blush to recall it. I will simply say that was the most beautiful I ever felt in my mortal life, and it was at the end of it. I didn't understand, at the time, how much it would change me. I'd never been with a man before, of course. The other girls had told me about it, but I'm sure none of them went through what I'd gone through.
Stu taught me everything about being one of the Kindred. In my first nights when I was just a little hungry thing, he fed me, as often as he could, and I felt such a deep safety and affection and gratitude for him. (Editor's note: Lulee may be talking about Blood Bonds, a practice which makes the victim infatuated with their master against their will. In fact it seems like this happened with all of her husbands. Should I have told her?)
I was part of this lovely new world now. It's like all my mortal life I'd only been listening to the record player, and now I was right in front of the orchestra, seeing the sheet music, even. You're a mortal, and you don't know how many shades of black there are. How clear and sharp the night is even without electric lights, without the moon. I can run across half the city in an hour if I felt like it, and see everything as fine as if I were just strolling down on a summer's day. I can whip up a buttercream frosting by hand before it comes to room temperature. I cut and sewed this dress by hand in less than a day, and I bet you thought it was machined.
But the food wasn't the same as it used to be. Maybe it's because we don't get hungry anymore. You can taste it all, but it just sits in you, and it doesn't satisfy, it just comes right back up. But, you know, we eat with our eyes just as much as with our mouths. That's why I love to ice cakes and make my aspics and my flowers of sugar dough or in gelatin. They always got such nice compliments at house parties. You know how people say, "Oh, I couldn't possibly cut into this, it looks so beautiful, and I would ruin it!" Well, we didn't ever need to cut into them! So they were beautiful the whole time, and that was all they had to be.
It was so easy to be a good wife to Stu. I loved him with my whole heart. When I heard him coming in, I would drop everything I was doing to fix him a drink and open the door for him, and greet him with a kiss. And he'd hold me and call me his little bowerbird, and we'd dance, and we wouldn't get tired. That's what Heaven is.
I don't claim to understand what his business was, but he was lucky at it, and he ran his luck until he ran into trouble. And that was when he needed my love all the more. He got nervous, and he wouldn't go out for days, saying it wasn't safe. Eventually he even stopped having parties, and that truly broke his heart and mine, not having anyone come over. We used to dance in the living room then, just the two of us, humming the music that we couldn't play on the record player. It calmed him down. I told him, I don't need fancy dresses, I don't need shiny tools, as long as we were together. And he'd look at me all sad, saying nothing.
My poor, sweet Stu. He was going to take me away somewhere, with the last of his luck. We were packing, and they (Editor's note: The Camarilla?) beat the door down and they found him and they took him. Just like that. They couldn't find me at first, because I was hiding, but one of them had the Sight and he did find me. I begged and said I didn't know anything, and they believed me, because it was true. A woman does not mix herself into her husband's business. So the Good Prince had mercy on me and I was spared.
They had to do something about me, so they gave me to my Cal. Caligula Butler was a proud man, and very anxious to have a well-trained wife. He wanted to make an example of me among the Camarilla wives, the Ventrue wives, so I could be a reflection of his good character and increase his dignitas. He worked at Texas Instruments, the computing company; I don’t really know what on, but he was also anxious to advance himself professionally. It was very important that the other wives think well of me, so their husbands would think well of him.
Cal was... small, but not in ambition. Not for nothing was he named after an emperor. He said dancing was a sin, so I didn't dance, and cakes were a frivolity, so I didn't bake. He set himself out to tame what little passions I had left from my wild days, to empty me and fill me back again with himself. I read his books and I listened to his music, and I made pleasant conversation with the other wives. I was such a trial to him at first, but I learned, because I loved him.
You're making a face. I did love him. I don't expect you to understand. My Cal was my shield, my rock and my lord. The Good Prince put it upon him to have me in his keeping and he did it because it was right. My Cal never hurt me without reason. He even let me bake again eventually, just to make me happy, and it was so wise of him to do that, because the other wives became fascinated with my work. I must admit I'm a better baker than I am a socialite. He started doing well at the company, taking on more responsibility, taking us out on more trips. That's actually how I met our mutual friend, (Editor's note: Madame Eletria) at a company party for the New Year's, in 1974, and she introduced my Cal to our Good Prince here in Chicago. (Editor's note: Prince Jackson)
When my Cal died, it was through no fault of his own. It was when the Good Prince of Dallas fell, and the Anarchs stormed our homes and took everyone they saw. (Editor's note: This is the Dallas Anarch Revolt of 1979.)
I knew the exact moment Cal passed, because suddenly I was angry. I'd never had space in my heart to be angry at him before. Suddenly all I could think about was how I’d made him a cake with frosting and sugar dough flowers. A cake that would have won the county fair blue ribbon in any state in the union. And he never even looked at it. I thought of the other wives and how they cooed over it, complimenting my work but never my self, because I was never going to be a sister to them. I would never be, no matter how hard I tried. But that's why I lived, and they're all gone now.
(She smiles to herself and looks away pensively.)
I hid, and I'm good at hiding. I stood still with those curtains until I had committed to memory every crack in the wallpaper and mote of dust in that room. I hid as long as I could, until I was grateful that Topher found me and fed me.
Now, you must understand. You say this interview is for your archive, for the people of the future. It cannot be discovered now. They can't know about my Topher. He worked so hard to keep himself out of their sight, and for my husband's memory I have to honor what he wanted. I can't tell you everything.
Topher’s Christian name was Christopher Porter, but after his Embrace he felt that God had abandoned him, so he left God’s name out of his. He left himself out of a lot of things, out of an abundance of caution. He believed that the End was coming, and his dream was to build a new and eternal Eden, and I was blessed to become part of that dream. He took me out to his homestead, quite out in the sticks, and I kept house for him for forty years.
He was a good man. He stood by his beliefs and he lived an honest, harmless life. I loved our New Eden, all our cows and chickens and rabbits. It reminded me of home, in a way. I could have stayed there forever. There was always something to do to improve New Eden. Topher and I would sit together for hours, making cordage, beating willow bark, weeding the fields together under the moonlight. He was a gentle, scared man. He was just doing what he had to, to survive the End.
I miss my Topher. I would have followed him to the ends of the Earth. But now he's gone somewhere I cannot follow. I couldn't stay in Texas any longer, it wasn't safe. Luckily my Cal left me one gift — our mutual friend wrote me a letter of introduction. It was at the party. She took me aside and said, "You're a real artist, and it would be a waste to lose you. You're fine right now, but one day you're going to need an out. And when that day comes, you go to Chicago, and you show this to the Good Prince, and he'll take care of you for me."
So I packed up with Vivian and we got in her van and made it up here. (Editor's note: According to Vivian Hartley, this part of the account is false. Lulee went to Chicago by herself first, and then invited Vivian to move in after securing a house.) I'm working at the hotel, so I'm still cooking and inventing and baking. We do a monthly ice cream ball for our mortal guests; you should come! Next one is this Friday and there'll be goat cheese caramel cashew ice cream, and lasagna ice, which is just spaghetti ice (Editor's note: Spaghettieis?) but the strawberry ice cream is in between layers of crepes and served in slices. It's a real hit.
Oh, what else. I'm taking my night classes, and I've made a few friends there. I think I like it here, it's so alive, so new. There's so many electric lights and radio programs and bookstores. And I've got my own money to spend now. Maybe one night I'll go to a comedy club!
(She laughs.)
I'd love to be married again, that's all. It'll be nice to have a proper family. That's the next thing, and then I think I'll be rightly settled down.