A Family Affair. V. J. Banis

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СКАЧАТЬ For the moment however she did not think it mattered much. Later she would move her bed back into her own bedroom, where it had been before her mother’s illness had necessitated an every night vigil.

      Her mother’s desk was locked, as it had always been. The key was in the dresser, in the top drawer on the right. Jennifer took it, scarcely able to suppress a sensation of guilt as she did so.

      The key was forbidden to her. Never had she been allowed to open the desk of her own accord, nor see its contents except at a glance. Snooping, her mother would have called it, and even now Jennifer stood with the key in her hand for several long minutes before she crossed the room to the desk and unlocked its drop front.

      The hinge creaked a warning as she lowered the wooden shelf, and feeling a renewed pang of guilt, she again hesitated, listening, perhaps for the sound of approaching footsteps, or a scolding voice. The house sat silently around her, and her guilt faded, pushed aside by another emotion; she had a sense of childish excitement, the thrill of forbidden pursuits. Even the musty scent of old papers, drifting upward, added to her anticipation, and she approached searching the desk with a new enthusiasm.

      Her enthusiasm soon faded. The desk held little of interest after all, certainly nothing to justify the privacy that Elenora Rand had maintained with such resoluteness over the years. Jennifer found a deed to the property, free and clear, and bank books which revealed a comfortable balance. There were no letters, no family albums, no pictures, and no names or addresses of friends or relatives; none.

      With a feeling of disappointment she closed the desk again. She held the key in her hand for a moment, studying it as if it might answer the questions she had. Then, from habit, she locked the desk and returned the key carefully to the precise same place it had held before in the dresser drawer. If her mother had happened to come back, and had looked in the drawer for the key, she would probably have never seen that it had been moved, and used.

      No one came to look for the key.

      * * * *

      The funeral was not, if the term could be applied, a successful one. The weather was unusually cold for so early in the fall. Had it not been for the cold weather, there might have been a few people from the town in attendance, if not for the sake of respect, then at least out of curiosity.

      As it was, the undertaker had to hire pallbearers, although Elenora Rand had lived in the town for nearly thirty years before her death. The only non-official person present, in fact, was Jennifer herself. Mr. Peabody, the undertaker, took note of the fact that Jennifer shed not one tear when her mother’s body was lowered into the ground, although he told his wife afterward that she had certainly looked sad enough.

      When it was all over, Mr. Peabody offered to drive Jennifer home rather than back to the funeral parlor, as was his custom.

      “Thank you,” she said, “but I think I’ll walk.”

      Since it was less than a mile from the cemetery to town, he left her without arguing the point, not a little relieved to be finished with this particular interment. As a general rule, he liked his work. He got to meet people. His customers, neither the living nor the dead, rarely argued with him. He saw himself as playing one of the fundamental roles in the scheme of things, in which he attended to the rounding off of the cycle, so to speak. He did not think of his bodies as dead people, because that to him was a contradiction in terms. People were alive, and these figures that he arranged so artfully in the coffins were only symbols, symbols of the completeness of life. And the burial was its final step, one which generally gave him a sense of satisfaction.

      This burial gave him little satisfaction, and he resented Jennifer for it. “Peculiar,” he described it to his wife afterward.

      “They always were,” she said.

      Alone at the grave of her mother, Jennifer stared at the ground and at the coffin suspended just below ground level. Then, when the men arrived to complete the burial, she left and walked slowly across the cemetery, passing through the massive iron gates that opened onto the road.

      She walked automatically, giving little thought to the town that approached and quickly surrounded her. It was a pretty town, as towns go, but she had long ago shut most aspects of the town out of her mind, the prettiness with the rest. She could pass through it now a hundred times without really seeing any of it.

      The few people who saw her passing experienced very fleetingly a twinge of grief, which was forgotten almost by the time she had drifted by. It was not that the local people felt no sympathy for death; indeed, they did, and for the people left behind. But after all, the Rands had never been what you could call friendly. Everyone in town knew them by sight, but not more than a handful of people could honestly claim to have carried on any sort of conversation with Jennifer or her mother. And the reports of Doctor Blackstone and his wife had not helped further any sympathy for Jennifer.

      “It’s unnatural,” Mrs. Blackstone had said to any available ear. She had, although she would not say this, never forgiven Jennifer for that one glance across the kitchen table, nor was she likely ever to do so. “The way that girl is taking it. Not a sign of grief, not the first human emotion to anything.”

      And the women to whom she spoke, as well as the men to whom the Doctor spoke, clucked their tongues and stayed their distance as Jennifer went by.

      She was alone. It was this fact, more than the death of her mother, that saddened Jennifer. She was twenty-six, a slim pale girl who had already begun to think of herself as a spinster. She was pretty, in a frail sort of way, but she did not know it, because no one had ever told her. She had no suitors, nor friends of any kind—no one to whom she could turn now for consolation or companionship.

      She knew that people regarded her as peculiar. Always, she had been kept at a distance from other people. As a little girl she had not been permitted to have friends. They had lived, she and her mother, very nearly as hermits, and by the time her first year at school had ended, Jennifer already knew that the other children thought her “funny,” and made up little rhymes about her: “Jenny, Jenny, eat a daisy, Jenny, Jenny, you are crazy.” It had made her withdraw, and cooperate in her mother’s efforts to isolate them.

      For twenty-six years her life had centered around her mother, that strong, demanding creature whose demands had finally ceased so abruptly. For years Jennifer had been not so much a daughter as a combination of companion and house servant, and later, of course, nurse. Her time and her energies had belonged not to herself but to Elenora Rand exclusively. Every mood, every notion, every whim had been at the request of, or merely a reflection of, the older woman. She had resented her role, and yet she had hidden her resentment and played it without complaint, because she had been trained to do just that.

      She reached home, the simple white cottage she had lived in for as long as she could remember. It was neat and clean and thoroughly respectable. The shutters were closed over the windows, as they always had been.

      Once again the sensation of aloneness came over her and Jennifer stopped, half frightened of entering the house. It held no welcome for her. It was where she had lived, it was now all she had or was in life; but it was not home to her uneasy spirit.

      There was no place else for her to go. She climbed the three steps that led to the front door and entered the hall, with a quick furtive manner as if afraid someone might try to follow.

      It was not until she had dutifully put her coat away in the closet and had gone into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea that she remembered the letter. It had come the day before and, puzzled by it, she had put it aside to read it later when the bother and distraction of the funeral was over.

      She СКАЧАТЬ