The Clarrington Heritage

by Ardath Mayhar

  “You’re lucky, Ben. These past years have been relatively easy for her, compared with those when you were a boy. You’ve had her a lot longer than I ever would have dreamed back then.”

  His reassuring words did nothing to remove the lost look he wore. Marise remembered hearing that he had been a suitor of Elizabeth’s, long before she married Emanuel Clarrington.

  She took his arm. “Come downstairs, Dr. Pell. I’ll make coffee. I know you need it, and the rest of us could use the warmth and the stimulation. I’ll run ahead of you, if you don’t mind, for Hildy would never forgive me if I didn’t call her too. When Miss Edenson is ready, all of you come to the kitchen. We need something to steady us down.”

  She remembered that as a night of grief and cold. She had felt lightheaded from lack of sleep, but she had known no deeper worry, as she had with the deaths of Hanni and Father Clarrington. She had not seen Mother Clarrington lying dead in her room.

  No, the hospital suite had another dimension, for she had gone there to help Edenson list the medications and box them for burning. Now that Edenson had no further reason to fear her as a rival, she found both of them, as nurses, had a horror of strong prescriptions left unattended in a house where a small child lived.

  While they were in the suite, they sorted through Elizabeth Clarrington’s personal possessions. They took her robes and nightgowns from bureau and closet, packing them into boxes to give to charity. For the first time since they met, Marise felt a closeness to the stocky little nurse. Her hostility seemed to have evaporated.

  While she was taping the last box tightly, Edenson holding it together, Marise looked up to find the nurse’s gaze fixed on her. “Someone was in the room the night Mrs. Clarrington died,” Edenson said abruptly. “I heard someone talking, through my sleep. I almost woke up, but I didn’t quite make it fully awake.”

  She looked sheepish. “It’s been hard for me to wake, these past few years. I had to set the alarm to get me up to give the meds. But I didn’t dream this. I know as surely as I stand here that someone was in her room last night, talking.

  “I heard her say, ‘No! No!’ I recall that perfectly clearly, and I struggled to get up and see what was happening, but I couldn’t rouse myself enough. Later, when the clock woke me fully, I remembered at once as I went into the room.

  “But there was no sign of anything wrong, and Dr. Pell said the death was natural. I didn’t mention it to him, because there seemed no need to. With Penelope locked up, who could have been there? He’d have said I was dreaming.”

  Marise looked down at the box, cutting the tape. She set the roll aside and turned to the little nurse. “Perhaps Aunt Lina went in to check on her and found her awake. Lina told me she does that sometimes, when she can’t sleep. Mother Clarrington slept very badly, as you probably know all too well, and they used to talk, sometimes, in the night.”

  “I know that,” Edenson said. “But it didn’t sound like her voice. Yet I suppose it must have been...there’s nobody else, is there?” Her voice wasn’t nearly as assured as the words she spoke.

  For some reason, Marise had never asked Aunt Lina if she had been that late night visitor to Mother Clarrington, and Lina had never said anything about going there that night. If she had been the one, everything was fine. If not...Marise didn’t want to know it.

  For Edenson was right. There was nobody else, or if there had been, it was someone whose existence Marise did not suspect. She wanted to keep it so, if possible.

  Now she looked around the room, bare now, sterile. The hospital bed was given to charity, too, along with the wheelchair.

  The Matisse Mother Clarrington had loved so much had been placed in Marise’s own sitting room. Only the bureau and the dressing table stood against the wall, bare and forlorn looking.

  Marise sighed. There was no need to clean here. Nobody needed the space. She decided she would lock that room permanently. She didn’t need the memories it held or the question that was raised there and had never been answered.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Edenson’s Room

  In the decade since her death, Marise had felt guilty about her relationship with Edenson. From the first she had allowed the nurse’s defensive attitude to hold her at arm’s length, and the thought still bothered her.

  After all, she had possessed everything any woman could want. She was young and strong, well loved, if not beautiful, and she was busy with an absorbing profession, in addition to her husband and son. At the time Edenson had seemed simply a part of the furnishings, and once the woman made it clear she wanted no personal relationship with Marise she had left it at that.

  Yet even before Elizabeth Clarrington’s death, Marise had begun feeling somewhat unhappy about her relationship with the other nurse who had only her patient to fill her days. Edenson had worked faithfully for twenty years, putting everything she had into her patient’s comfort and wellbeing.

  Marise had worked with many nurses in her professional career in medicine, and she knew that others would never consent to work seven days a week, without even a day off for themselves. They had lives of their own, and the fact that Edenson never consented to take a single day’s holiday from her duties betrayed her lack of family and friends outside the Clarrington house.

  By the time Marise came to live there, the nurse had been there for so long and her refusal to leave her patient was accepted so completely, those in the family thought nothing about this unusual situation. During the eleven years Marise knew her Edenson seemed totally intent upon her work.

  That had made Marise a bit uneasy. So much so she once took it up with Dr. Pell. “I know she is completely dedicated, Doctor, but this seems unhealthy to me. It is like something you find in an English novel—the devoted Nanny syndrome. Such selfless service doesn’t exist in the world we know now. No nurse I ever knew, including myself, could or would have given up any semblance of a personal life in this way.”

  The gray little doctor, a bit mussed as usual, had turned those alert eyes on her. He smiled rather sadly and said, “I’ve thought that myself, to tell the truth. But Edenson’s is a most unusual situation, and her relationship with Mrs. Clarrington is not the normal nurse-patient one.”

  He leaned against the table in the library, where she had caught him after a conference with Father Clarrington, and said, “I have known Edenson all her life. Her mother, Hester, went to school with Elizabeth and me. She was no beauty, but she was a highly determined young woman.

  “She was, of course, unpopular in school. Single, focused young women tend to frighten young men witless. Her people were dirt farmers, well fed but without money. However, she intended to make something of herself or die in the attempt. She worked her way through nursing school and became a damn good nurse.”

  He looked about, found a chair and sat at the long library table. “Here, sit down, for this is a long tale.”

  Marise perched across the table and waited, and he went on, “She was so good that when she went to New York she became a charge nurse at Bellevue. You know how much grit and take-charge ability that must have taken.

  “She never intended to marry, which she made perfectly clear to everyone who knew her as a young woman. Yet when she was twenty-seven she met Arthur Edenson and married him. I never met Arthur, for he was killed three years after their marriage, and they had never come back here to visit. The wreck that killed him crippled Hester and injured their daughter, Edith, our Miss Edenson.”

  “So Hester brought her daughter and came home again at last,” Marise observed. “A natural thing to do, I should think.”

  “Exactly. Though her parents were dead by then, they left their farm to her. She leased out the land at that time, but she left the house empty for some reason, though several people wanted to rent it. But it turned out for the best, for when they returned she had someplace to live without paying rent.

&nb
sp; “She came back determined to be as independent as possible. The rent on the farm brought in a certain amount, mighty little, I can tell you, for it was hard times then for farmers. But the man who worked the place knew what he was about, and he supplied them with all the vegetables they could eat; Hester kept chickens and a couple of pigs, so they didn’t go hungry.”

  He stared down at the polished wood of the table and idly rubbed it with a forefinger. “As long as Edith was small they didn’t need much. Hester was well enough at times to take special nursing cases for me too. By that time I was established well enough in my practice to throw a good many cases her way, when she was able to handle them.

  “But Edith wanted to be a nurse too. I managed to help her get a scholarship to a good school, but it provided only tuition and books. She needed more than that to make it, for the work was too hard to allow outside jobs for living expenses. I went to Elizabeth, who was always generous and who had liked and respected Hester. She gladly made up the lack for the child of her old schoolmate.

  “Edith, being just as proud and independent as her mother, felt it as an obligation, though we both tried to convince her that the opportunity to help her made Elizabeth very happy.”

  The doctor scratched his ear absently, his expression withdrawn. “So Edith Edenson finished her course and got a degree afterward, a B.S. in nursing. She went to work in a big hospital in Charlottesville, worked like a Trojan, and kept on with her education. She took a special degree in psychiatric nursing, and that helped her make enough to pay back every cent the Clarringtons had put into her education.

  “She donated a scholarship to the nursing school that had provided her scholarship in the beginning. The girl saved like a miser, otherwise, never had any fun, and looked likely to become a psychiatric case herself, once her mother was gone.

  “Then the twins were born and Elizabeth needed a nurse about as badly as anyone I ever knew. Edenson dropped her own career like a shot and came to care for her. Once we knew, without any doubt, that poor little Pen was mentally disturbed, she did the best she could to help deal with her too, for she knew a lot about mental illness. But nothing she tried seemed to penetrate the child’s mind.

  “Penelope was a lost cause, and we all knew it by that time. She needed close watching, if not institutionalizing. Her mother needed even more care than before, for her condition was deteriorating badly at the time. You might not believe it, but she has been relatively well the past few years, compared to what went before.

  “Edith was invaluable. She shut away her past. I wondered if there had been an unhappy love affair to make her shut it off so completely, and devoted herself to making life bearable for Elizabeth. I agree with you. It isn’t healthy. But when you know Edith’s story, perhaps for her it is about as healthy as she can get.”

  He sighed and rose. “I don’t know what happened to her as a girl, but I do know fear when I see it. That is what I see in her eyes every time I mention her going about finding a life of her own.”

  After that, Marise left Edenson to her own secondhand life. She’d been as friendly as the nurse would allow her to be, but she never really pushed to try making a friend of her. That time, after Mother Clarrington died, when the two of them were in her room packing up her things, had given Marise the chink in Edenson’s armor for which she had waited so long.

  “I talked with Ben last night,” she’d said to the nurse. “You’ve been a part of this family for so long we can’t get along without you, you know. You probably have plans of your own, but if they’re not pressing, would you consider staying on? At least for a while?” She studiously avoided looking at Edenson, concentrating on folding a set of underwear neatly.

  “I am beginning to need someone to look out for Benjie, now that he’s old enough to go to school functions and baseball games, and the farm keeps me hopping. And then there’s Penelope. We never know when we’ll need help with her. Aunt Lina hasn’t been too well either. We do need you, you know.” She tucked the neat bundle into the box for Good Will.

  Those flinty eyes had surveyed her sharply. But Edenson’s mouth had actually curved slightly as she said, “I haven’t made any firm plans yet. I’ve known this had to happen for a long while now, but somehow I never really expected it, if you see what I mean.” She put her own folded pile into the box, keeping her face turned away now.

  “I really haven’t anything much to do now Mother’s gone. The farm gets along fine, and my renter is buying the place on installments, anyway. I still own the house, but it’s old and needs a lot of repair before I could live in it.” There was the faintest suspicion of a sniff.

  “I don’t seem to make friends. I never did know why. Maybe it’s because I’m...shy.”

  Then she turned and attempted a real smile. “I’ll stay if you want me to. At least for the time being. We can see how things turn out, and I can always try to get another nursing position if it comes to that. It seems a shame to waste all my training. But you ought to know I’m not as strong as I was. Thank you.”

  Marise had felt a surge of triumph. “Then it’s settled. At least for now.” She was relieved, for she had felt they would be turning out a waif into the world. In her own sphere, Edenson was a tower of strength. Elsewhere, Marise felt she was terribly vulnerable.

  Marise shivered in the chill of the corridor before opening Edenson’s old room. If she was to close off the hospital suite, she must check the rooms for damp and mice. Then she would lock both doors and forget it existed. For Edenson’s was another door she hated to open.

  She had felt certain she had convinced the woman that they needed and wanted her. In the weeks following Mother Clarrington’s death there had been work for everyone, and Edenson had proven her worth many times over.

  That allowed Marise to go back to running the farms with her full attention, for she knew that Benjie would be supervised well when he was out of school. Otherwise, Edenson took over the surveillance and management of Penelope, to Andy’s vocal relief. All in all, the diminished household ran smoothly and well.

  It had been this, perhaps, more than anything else that made the ensuing shock even greater. One Sunday morning Edenson was late for breakfast. It had never happened before, and the family ate the meal while wondering whether she might be ill. But she had been working so hard and seemed so weary that Marise decided to let her sleep for a while.

  She hadn’t appeared by noon, however, and Marise was shaken. She prepared a tray with tea and toast and took it upstairs. She tapped at the door, but there was no answer. No sound could be heard, though everyone in the family knew Edenson snored like a grampus.

  Marise remembered sorting through the keys to find the one that fitted this door. She opened it and knew at once the familiar odor that greeted her. She set down the tray and approached the bed to look down at what remained of Edith Edenson, R.N.

  The nurse looked quite peaceful, seeming to sleep, for her eyes were closed. Beside the bed on the night stand there was an open packet, empty. Her nightly glass of milk had been drained, but she had not rinsed it in the bathroom adjoining her room, as she usually had done. A film of milk still coated the glass.

  Marise touched nothing, though she leaned close to inspect the packet. Her heart began to thud sickly, for she recognized the container. The two of them had disposed of all the drugs left over from Elizabeth Clarrington’s long illness, and they had done it together, bearing witness for each other. Yet this was one of the prescription sleeping drugs that should have been destroyed.

  Had Edenson managed to secrete it before they went through the rooms? It would have been easy enough, Marise knew. Evidently she had done just that and at last had used the medication.

  Had it been a sudden fit of depression? She had seemed quite cheerful in the past weeks, or at least as cheerful as her morose disposition would allow. Marise found herself puzzled, despite the obvious conclusion
to be drawn at the pitiful bedside.

  Dr. Pell came at once, and they stood on either side of the bed, looking down at the slight shape beneath the covers. “Did she have any physical problems?” Marise had asked the doctor. “She had seemed very sleepy for a long while. She complained once that it took the alarm going off to wake her to give medications in the night.” She thought back, wondering if she had missed some important sign or symptom.

  “She didn’t look quite well these past weeks, but I felt certain she was grieving for Mother Clarrington. I caught her crying once, in the library. But other than that?”

  “She was anemic. Came to see me before Elizabeth died,” the doctor said. “I gave her a tonic for it. She certainly didn’t need sleeping medicine. She told me the same thing. Said she could hardly keep awake sometimes. She found it hard to rouse herself in the mornings, and she said she fell asleep when she was still for more than just a moment or two.

  “As far as I can tell, however, she had no serious health problem.” He glanced up and their eyes met. “I think she just couldn’t take it. Elizabeth was her life for so long that it left too large a gap in her existence. She must have kept this back; it’s what I prescribed for Elizabeth’s really bad nights. Three would have done the job, but she took the entire packet. She never knew what hit her. Poor girl!” He drew the sheet over the peaceful face.

  “It’s still an unattended death.” Marise said. “What about all the official matters?”

  “Oh, the coroner will want a statement from all of us, particularly you and me. They may want an autopsy, though I am altogether certain this is a suicide. But that’s the procedure, quite often in cases of this kind. I’ll call the authorities for you, but I don’t know about funeral arrangements. Hester had no other kin, I think.”

  Marise had shaken her head. “Don’t worry about that. She’s been a member of this family for twenty years, and we’ll see to everything when all is settled. If Ben agrees, and Aunt Lina too, I think we should put her on the other side of Mother Clarrington. I think they’d both have liked that.”