“I do not care what is the usual!” Mother shouted at him. “Do you think I care for that now? My sister—let me repeat, my sister—was never given what she should have been in life. Let her at least have it now, in death.”
Mother looked so guilty as she spoke her angry words. It occurred to me then that just as I felt guilty for being relieved it was Aunt Helen who had died instead, Mother felt guilty for having been the one who had survived. No doubt, in her mind, life had always dealt more kindly with her than it had with her twin, was doing it still in death. And so, if she could not erase the unfair past, she would at least grant her sister parity now.
It was my father’s turn to feel guilty; over what, I could not say. Perhaps he also felt bad about his relief that it was Aunt Helen who had died.
“Of course, dear,” my father said, his cheeks coloring. “I only meant—”
A servant entered.
“Chief Inspector Daniels is here to see you,” she said.
“Please,” my father said, “send him in.”
And then that man, with all his rolls of soft fat, was among us again.
After the briefest of preambles, stating that he hoped we had been able to sleep the night before, he announced:
“I’m afraid the medical examiner turned up some shocking evidence when he was examining Miss Smythe’s body.”
Shocking evidence? What could possible be more shocking than what had gone on already?
“Were any of you aware,” he asked, studying each of us in turn until his gaze finally rested upon Mother, “that Miss Smythe was pregnant?”
• Twenty-five •
“Herbert Dean?” my father said in shocked, scathing response to Mother’s suggestion after Chief Inspector Daniels had departed, after we had all recovered as best we could from this latest shocking revelation.
“Who else could it be?” Mother countered, eyeing my father coolly. “Who else could the father possibly be? He was the man she spent time with most frequently, was he not?”
My father considered this, yet another blush coloring his cheeks. It was so strange. I did not recall my father ever blushing over anything before Aunt Helen’s death. Now he did it all the time. “Who else, indeed?” he said at last. Then he shrugged. “I suppose it does not matter now, does it, who the father was? The child will never be born.”
I wondered at the coldness in his response.
“And you knew nothing of this?” my father asked Mother.
She looked surprised at his question, offended almost. “Of course I knew.”
“You … ?” He was stunned.
“We are, were sisters, after all.”
“And when were you planning on telling me?”
To this, Mother said nothing.
It occurred to me then: if Herbert Dean had been aware of Aunt Helen’s condition, perhaps he had arranged for her murder in order to avoid the scandal that would no doubt attach itself to an unmarried woman being with child?
But then, just as swiftly, I rejected that notion. Herbert Dean had loved Aunt Helen. Had he known, he would have married her.
. . . . .
That night I awoke to sounds coming from upstairs. I had heard similar sounds when I was younger, but much softer than this. I had not known what they were back then, and it had been a long time since they had disturbed the night, but I had since come to realize that they were caused by the act between a man and a woman that Aunt Helen had once described to me. These sounds, though—they were so loud, almost violent, like two people at war with each other, so different from anything I’d ever heard before.
My house was changing.
. . . . .
My grandparents, my father’s parents, were the first to arrive.
Mother and I were dressed in black merino wool, my father in a black suit, as we greeted them outside the ballroom. In a perverse re-creation of the night we had introduced Aunt Helen to the people of our world, we were all gathering again, only this time it was to begin the process of saying good-bye to her.
“I am sorry for your loss,” my grandmother said to Mother, but I saw no evidence that she understood the weight of the occasion.
“I suppose,” my grandfather said, “this would be more difficult if you had known her your whole life.”
“Please go inside,” my father said with an abrupt gesture of the hand, barely able to contain his outrage at their lack of sensitivity.
Aunt Martha came next.
“Aliese,” she said, stumbling up the stairs with her cane. I had no idea now if she really needed it, nor did I care. “I wanted to come as soon as I heard.”
Aunt Martha held her arms out to Mother.
“You never liked her,” Mother said, taking a step back.
“Oh, Aliese.” Were those tears I saw in Aunt Martha’s eyes? Whatever she was feeling, whatever she felt she had a right to feel, she swallowed it. Perhaps she recognized that now, of all times, she had no rights at all here. With a heavy sigh, she continued. “You are correct, of course,” she admitted. “I was worried about you. I was worried about my family.” The tears were back now. “But you cannot possibly believe that I ever wanted this!”
She held out her arms again.
This time Mother consented to the embrace, but as Aunt Martha’s arms closed around her I saw her recoil.
Mary Williams, Mrs. Carson.
The former’s brightness of spirit could not lighten that day for me. As for the latter, having returned without her husband for this sad occasion, well, as far as I was concerned, she might just as well have saved her condolences.
The Tylers.
John Tyler shook my father’s hand with great feeling, while Victoria Tyler embraced Mother as if they might be as close as sisters.
Kit stood before me, hands carefully clasped in front of him, as did I. I should have liked to grasp on to one of those hands for strength, but we among all those in our families could not touch, not here, not with everyone looking.
“I was sorry the other day,” Kit said simply, “and I am still sorry. I shall be sorry about all this for the rest of my life.”
In a universe turned vastly imperfect, it was the perfect thing to say.
“Thank you,” was all I could say in reply. As he passed into the ballroom with his parents, I saw for the first time that he was now taller than his tall father. When had that happened? I wondered dimly. Really, my Kit was practically a man.
. . . . .
The casket, black-painted oak with silver handles, was set up on its shallow platform in the center of the room, on a spot I imagined as being the very spot upon which I had seen Aunt Helen dancing, merrily spinning away the hot July night—how long ago was it now? Could it only have been a half a year?
Aunt Helen had been washed and dressed by hands that did not know her. The undertaker had measured her body, crafting the coffin by hand, returning to our home with it under cover of darkness. I wondered at the delicacy. If we did not see him arrive, would she be any less dead?
I approached the casket.
The upper portion was open, but a blanket had been placed over Aunt Helen’s body up to her chin—I supposed however great the undertaker’s artistry, he could do nothing about that grave wound.
I stole a glance at Aunt Helen’s face.
There was a book I had read once where a mother lost her child. Viewing his body, she’d exclaimed, “Ooh, look! He looks so peaceful! It is as though he is merely sleeping!” What a simpleton. A dead body, I now learned, did not look like it was sleeping. There was no mistaking Aunt Helen’s deadness now. Nor did she look peaceful.
Standing there, I could not shake the feeling that I was looking at Mother, that this is what she would look like dead. But I forced that grim imagining from my mind. Mother would not look like this dead. Mother would not die, pray God, for a very long time.
That night, when I retired to my bedroom early, sleep refused to come. All I could think through that long night and
the next was of that coffin with Aunt Helen in it, lying dead in the ballroom.
. . . . .
The day of the funeral dawned brittle as broken glass, the coldest day so far that year. It was as though the frozen fingers of Milton’s hell, where Satan had been encased in a block of ice so he could not move, were reaching up through the earth, seeking to drag us all downward.
Breakfast, as can be imagined, was a somber affair. None of us, I don’t think, had managed more than a few morsels since the unspeakable events of a few days before.
Mother looked at my father across the table, then she pushed the plate of toast toward him, the jam too.
“Eat, Frederick,” she said. “Just because I have completely lost my appetite, it does not mean you should not indulge yours.”
He was hesitant at first, but he was, in the end, a man. We women were used to subsisting on not very much, so that our stays might close around our waists, but my father could not continue on so little.
At last, he took a nibble of toast, and then another. Then some bacon. Then some eggs.
My father did not usually have seconds of anything—drink was more his habit. But when he had cleaned the first plate, Mother urged seconds upon him.
He ate them.
. . . . .
The bell tolled.
“I cannot believe my sister is dead,” Mother said as she entered the church, supported on either side by my father and myself.
Mother looked around the interior of the church, stunned, as though seeing it for the very first time.
I cannot say that her reaction surprised me. Given all that had changed in the world, it was continually surprising how much of it remained the same. Stone buildings? The post coming through the mail slot? Strangers making noise in the street? None of it stopped for death, no matter how much one might feel that it should.
We had followed on foot, walking between the tracks created by the hearse carriage, the vehicle itself drawn creakingly on by black-plumed horses. Our friends, walking behind us, carried flowers—not for their beauty but rather, as was the custom, to mask the odor of any unpleasant smells that might arise.
The vicar, Mr. Thomason, was still ancient, still gnarled. As he took his place at the altar, I could not help but think, Why should one so old get to go on living when my aunt—so young!—was dead?
“We are gathered here today,” Mr. Thomason intoned, “to bid farewell to a woman we knew all too briefly …”
You did not know her at all —I could not prevent the thought from forming. That day, I was so bitter, it was as though my mouth had been stuffed full of dandelion greens, my ears stopped up with almonds; despite the flowers all around me, horseradish dripped from my nose. You only met her that one time you came to the house, when you told her she should keep her name because it reminded you of Helen of Troy.
It was true.
Aunt Helen had never set foot in the church. After her introduction to our society, it seemed natural that she would then accompany us every Sunday. But she never had, despite Mother’s entreaties.
“God and I have always known exactly where we stand with each other,” she would say. I could never tell if her words truly scandalized Mother or if they filled her with the same giddy feeling at hearing the utterance of such blasphemy as they filled me. “I do not see that stepping inside a church will do anything to further clarify that relationship.”
The church was filled with our family, our friends. With the exception of us and the kindly Tylers, I thought bitterly, they were not Aunt Helen’s family, not her friends.
Directly behind me sat Kit. I did not turn to look at him. It was enough to know that he was there.
“I cannot believe my sister is dead,” Mother said again, this time in a hushed whisper.
And I cannot believe she is here! I thought. How ironic she would find all this, I thought: Aunt Helen was at last attending church. How uncomfortable it all would make her. The dirgelike quality of the hymns, the pretentiousness of the liturgy—she would have hated it all.
At the very least, she would have laughed at it.
As for those stained-glass windows, depicting scenes of biblical agony with little redemption, they were the stuff of nightmares.
. . . . .
The earth was so cold, the gravedigger’s spade broke against its impenetrable hardness, and we had to wait for a replacement to be fetched. As we waited, I could not escape the feeling that the woman in that box did not want to be buried.
Don’t bury me, I imagined her whispering in my ear, using the crude accent that had characterized her speech when first she came to us.
I do not want to, I whispered back inside my mind.
Don’t forget me.
I never will.
We kept up our silent dialogue—her entreaties, my reassurances of faithfulness—until the hole in the ground was completed and the first clod of earth struck the top of the casket.
. . . . .
That night, deep in the night, again unable to sleep, I thought I heard a noise coming from downstairs. Making my way through the quiet house, I found Mother on the sofa before the front window. She was in the same position I had been once, very long ago, as Aunt Helen and I had kneeled on the cushions side by side, elbows propped up against the back of the sofa, watching my parents depart for an evening out.
On that night, I had asked her about her previous life in the workhouse. She had given the briefest of answers, referencing the obvious awfulness of the place. At the time I had not pressed for further answers—like how she had ever found us—and now I would never have them.
“What are you looking at, Mother?” I asked her, startling her into turning half around.
“The street,” she answered, looking back out at it. She had the look of a caged bird trying to peek out at the greater world. I supposed that made sense: the extended period of mourning we were about to embark on would curtail our normal life; not that, under the circumstances, we would mind.
Still, it was odd, I thought. What was there to see out there in the cold blackness?
“Come,” she said, turning fully around, patting the cushion beside her. “Sit with me. If neither of us can sleep, we might as well do it together.”
After all that had happened, I could no longer count myself a child, not in the sense I used to be. And yet, sitting close to her like that, I felt all the anger and bitterness leave my body as I sagged against her, as though I were a child half my age who had exhausted herself, playing too long at the park.
“Here,” she said, putting her arm around me, so that now my head rested between her neck and breast.
There was something I suddenly wanted desperately to know.
“Do you think she found any happiness here?” I asked Mother.
She brushed my hair with her fingers and soothed my brow. Then she waited until I looked up, until our eyes met.
“If I am certain of nothing else in this life, I am certain of this,” she said. “You made her happy.”
• Twenty-six •
Time had one more trick to play on us: it marched on.
We all began to eat again, to sleep.
The black crepe bunting was removed from the ballroom; the black sheets covering all the mirrors were taken down. People talked, sometimes not even trying to keep to whispered tones, although no one laughed, not yet. Some days, the sun even shone through from behind the gray white clouds of the late winter sky. The back parlor had not been reopened, but I now realized that, in time, it would be; we could not live in a house with one room eternally boarded up—it would be too big of a reminder, somehow worse than it already was. Unless we were to move to a new home, and no one was suggesting that, then we would need to remodel the room. One day, it would need to be opened again.
There was one thing that had changed, drastically: the relationship between Mother and me. Before, when Aunt Helen had first arrived, we had needed to expand to accommodate another; and now we needed to cont
ract again to fill in the vacancy she had left.
It was awkward.
One morning over breakfast, hoping to bridge that space between us, I suggested we go for a walk together in the park.
“I am not sure that it is yet—,” my father began.
“Is yet what, Frederick?” Mother demanded, pushing the serving plate toward him.
Mother still ate little, and yet I had noticed that she went on urging more food on my father at every mealtime and that he, after all she had been through and thus perhaps hoping to please her in at least this one small thing, accepted it. My father had been the same size for as long as I had known him, but already he had needed to call in the tailor to be measured for new trousers. At night now, he drank more too. It was as though something was troubling him—more than just the obvious—but what that something was, I could not say.
“I only meant—,” my father began.
“I think it is a fine idea.” Mother turned to me as if he had not spoken. “If I stay in this house another minute, I shall go mad.”
. . . . .
This was the first time either of us had been out of the house since the funeral, save to go to church, and it felt good. True, late winter’s icy fingers still sought to freeze us within her grasp, but it was bracing in a curiously pleasant way, as though so long as we could keep alive in the cold, the freedom was good.
This was also the first opportunity since the funeral that I had had to properly observe people outside of our own circle of acquaintance, and I jumped at the chance. All the way to the park, I swiveled my head to and fro, searching, searching.
And once we were at the park? I continued my searches.
That man slouched in the corner of that bench? Even with him sitting down, I could see he was too short.
That man over by the tree? Too skinny.
Those three men entering together just now? Blond, blond, and blond, and therefore wrong, wrong, and wrong—I was not looking for blonds.
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