Читать книгу A Family Affair - V. J. Banis - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

Her mother was dead. Panting with the exertion of what she had done, Jennifer Rand felt a perverse excitement. Slowly, with infinite caution, she removed the pillow that she had held so tightly against her mother’s face and stared wide-eyed at the figure sprawled ungraciously over the bed.

Yes, she was dead, there could be no doubt of it. Jennifer’s eyes filled with tears, her mouth worked wordlessly. She stood as though transfixed, the awesome warmth of the pillow clutched to her breast. Then, dropping it all at once, she turned full around and half-ran, half-danced from the room. She pirouetted through the living room, bursting through the kitchen and out into the moonlight that flooded the backyard. Her mother was dead. Dead. Dead.

“Jennifer?”

As a balloon bursts when punctured, so Jennifer’s spirits burst, the exhilaration that had filled her spilled from her in one horrible rush.

“Jennifer?”

Sleep was rushing away from her, carrying with it the dream. Jennifer reached for them, tried to hold them to her, but the voice was too strong, instinct was more powerful than desire. She lay huddled and wearied in her small bed, and accepted waking with grim resignation.

“I’m here, Mother.” She held her eyes closed, trying to recall the dream. It had been something pleasant, of that she was certain, although she could not remember what; but not altogether pleasant, for lingering with the sense of freedom and exhilaration was an eerie feeling of guilt. She concluded that she had been dreaming of something wicked, and wondered what on earth it might have been.

“I’ve been calling you.” Her mother’s voice was heavy with reproach and self-pity.

“I didn’t hear you,” Jennifer offered meekly. Then, as though to substantiate the claim, she added, “I was asleep.”

“I called and called. I thought you had gone somewhere. You know I want you close by me.”

The dream, where had it gone? If she closed her eyes and surrendered to her sleepiness, would it come back to her?

“Did you want something, Mother?” It was useless. She would have to begin all over the maddening ritual of begging sleep, coaxing her body and her mind into the realm of non-consciousness, gradually drifting and waiting for the dream to come for her again, in its own way and its own time. It would come. It had come before and gone, and although she could remember nothing about it, she knew that it was the same. Someday, she promised herself, I’ll remember.

Her mother had not answered. Jennifer focused her attention in that direction, listening carefully. Yes, her mother was asleep again. She had wanted nothing after all, only to determine that Jennifer was here.

She’ll want me to die with her, Jennifer thought bitterly, and at once flushed with guilt at the thought. What a dreadful thing to think, she scolded herself, and turned on her side, tugging the blanket up close about her chin.

She thought of her mother’s medicine, sitting on the nightstand. She should have given it to her while they were both awake; it might have meant an opportunity for both of them to sleep comfortably past the time for it. But it was too late now. She would only have to awaken her mother, which would certainly provoke a quarrel, and in the end neither of them would get the advantage of the additional sleep.

“If only I weren’t so tired,” Jennifer thought wearily. “If only I could sleep.”

But much sooner than she had expected, she fell asleep again.

“Jennifer?”

The voice was little more than a whisper as it penetrated the depth of Jennifer’s slumber. A part of her, the wary sentry self, heard, and sounded its warning.

“Jennifer?”

From far, far away, Jennifer heard the warning. I should wake up now, she told herself, but the thought went unheeded. Sleep was so close about her, holding her tight in an embrace that would not be broken. And although the sentry listened throughout the night, the call was not repeated. Jennifer slept on without further intrusion upon her dreams.

* * * *

Her mother was dead. Jennifer had known it when she first awakened in the morning. She knew it before she poured the medicine which was never taken, and she knew it without once touching the thin, wasted body. And when she called Doctor Blackstone to come at once, she did not say, “My mother is sick again,” but very simply, “My mother is dead.”

Doctor Blackstone’s wife came with him.

In fact there was little either of them could do. Certainly the Doctor could only verify what Jennifer already knew to be true, that her mother was dead, and make arrangements for the body to be taken from the house. Nor was Mrs. Blackstone, determinedly cheerful creature that she was, any more effectual.

“You must let me take care of things for you,” she insisted, fairly thrusting a cup of bitter smelling coffee into Jennifer’s hands.

“Yes, of course,” Jennifer agreed numbly, although for the life of her she could not imagine what there was to take care of.

“Are there any relatives I can contact for you?” Mrs. Blackstone asked. Her husband appeared briefly in the doorway, and she shooed him away with a wordless gesture. Jennifer heard him leave and guessed that his work was finished. It gave her a sense of finality. Death had come, and gone, and now it was finished. She let out her breath, and felt as if she had been holding it since she had first awakened and looked in the direction of her mother’s bed.

“No, there aren’t any relatives,” she answered, and became truly conscious of the conversation for the first time since it bad begun.

There were no relatives. She had lived for as long as she could remember with her mother, the two of them alone. In the entire world, she knew of no one who should be notified, no one other than herself who cared if her mother was alive or dead.

“But surely your mother’s family. There must be someone,” Mrs. Blackstone persisted.

“I don’t know,” Jennifer admitted honestly and patiently. She was used to being patient, accustomed to hiding her resentments and private desires. Mrs. Blackstone was no match for her mother in trying the nerves. “There were relatives at one time. My mother’s sisters, I think.”

“Sisters, of course. Were there more than one?”

“I don’t know,” Jennifer said.

Mrs. Blackstone was growing visibly short of good cheer, but she pushed on. “Where are they living now?”

“I don’t know that they are.” Jennifer wished that she could help. She saw in Mrs. Blackstone’s face the dreadful sense of uselessness that weighed upon her, and wished that she could relieve her of it, but she had spoken the truth. She knew nothing of her mother’s family. At some time before she was old enough to remember clearly, they had lived with her mother’s sisters. That much she did know, but she knew it from a few vague references that her mother had made over the years, and not from memory.

Why they had left, or why the ties had remained severed in the intervening years, she had never known. In all the years she had lived with her mother, Jennifer remembered no correspondence between the two branches of the family, nor communication of any kind, so that she could not even be certain now that she had not imagined it altogether, vague references and all.

“Your father?”

Jennifer shook her head without even bothering to answer. She was so tired. If only she could be alone, if only she could sleep. Her mother had told her she used sleep as an escape, the way other people used liquor or drugs. It was probably true. She would like to sleep right now, curled up into a ball; sleep, and have to think of nothing.

Her father she did not remember at all, although she made an effort now for Mrs. Blackstone’s sake. “He is no longer with us,” her mother had explained when Jennifer, as a child, had raised that question, and that ended the discussion.

“I don’t remember my father,” she said aloud. “He is no longer with us.”

The task proved finally too much even for Mrs. Blackstone’s insistent sympathy. “Well, I suppose there’s not much I can do,” she said. “If you like I’ll stay with you for the day. It isn’t wise to be alone too much during these times, they say.”

Jennifer lifted her face wearily, her eyes seeking the other woman’s, and she allowed her eyes to say the things she would never permit herself to express in words.

“No, I’ll be all right,” she said aloud, but the rest was as clearly communicated.

“I see,” Mrs. Blackstone said, meeting that chilling gaze, and backing down in the face of it. “I see.”

When she had gone, Jennifer carried the coffee to the sink and poured it down the drain. She did not like coffee, and she’d had to force herself to sip it to satisfy Mrs. Blackstone. She was accustomed to doing as others expected of her, rather than what she herself would have liked to do. Now she could begin to do as she wished.

She thought of the things Mrs. Blackstone had said, the questions she had asked, and with those questions weighing on her mind, she left the kitchen and made her way to the bedroom.

The bed was empty now, and the sheets had been carefully smoothed. The sight of that smooth bed gave her an unexpected shock. Her mother might well have risen as she did in the past, and gone for a morning walk. At any moment she might come in the front door, with her firm, bold step. For the tiniest fraction of a second, Jennifer had an unpleasant sinking in the bottom of her stomach.

But of course her mother had not gotten up and gone for walks in well over a year, nor would she ever do so again.

Jennifer stood at the door, taking in the room. Her own small bed was still unmade, a fact for which her mother would certainly have scolded her. 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 went to her bedroom—not to her mother’s room, where she had been sleeping on the little bed, but to her own bedroom, that she had returned to. The letter was in the drawer of her dresser, next to a strand of cultured pearls. She had ordered the pearls from a mail order catalog, and her mother had been angry when they came; but she had relented, and allowed Jennifer to keep them, “for special occasions.” They had never been worn. Jennifer had considered wearing them to the funeral, but had not been able to decide on her own whether that was the right sort of special occasion, and in the end she had gone without them.

Jennifer took the letter back to the kitchen, but she did not read it until her tea was ready and she was seated at the small kitchen table. Then she opened it carefully and unfolded the single sheet of paper.

It was the opening line that most puzzled her: “Your mother asked us to write and....”

It was from someone who signed her name Aunt Christine. Strange, although Jennifer had searched her mother’s personal papers more than once since the death, carefully examining every item in the small desk, she had found no trace of any relatives. And now here was this letter, signed Aunt Christine, and saying, “Your mother asked us to write and invite you to visit with us at Kelsey House.”

Of course her mother had known for a year or more that she was dying; no doctor would have dared to conceal the fact from her. It was entirely possible that, in a flash of foresight, she had written to her sisters, those long neglected relatives, explaining that her daughter would soon be in need of family ties. And they of course had seen the obituary notice in the newspapers.

What was odd, though, was that they had made no attempt to attend the services, nor even to send flowers. Had they done even the latter, the single wreath that Jennifer had herself provided might not have looked so forlorn. There was not even an expression of sympathy in the letter, although perhaps that might be attributable to tact.

Jennifer tasted her tea, found it cool, and sipped it slowly. Since her mother’s death she had been busy with funeral arrangements and putting affairs in order. The house was hers, with no entanglements, and the money in the bank was sufficient to provide for her modest needs. Her time was her own. For someone who had never known time of her own, that should have been a source of joy.

The fact was that it was not, though. Not until this very morning, with the funeral actually at hand, had she realized the absolute emptiness of her life. She had nothing at all to do with this sudden excess of time—no interests, no hobbies, no one to call upon, no job.

And now here suddenly was this latter, informing her that she did at least have a family. They were people she did not know, to be sure, and their behavior regarding her mother’s death was peculiar to the point of bordering upon rudeness; but they were family nonetheless. What was even more important, they wanted her with them.

In the same moment, Jennifer realized what was an astonishing, even frightening fact. She missed her mother. After years of coolness, silence, even resentment, she suddenly wished that the house were again filled with that strong presence. For the first time she saw that it took two people to make any kind of relationship, even that of mistress and slave. Now she wanted someone to order her about, tell her what to do, occupy her time.

Her tea had grown cold. She carried it with her as she returned to the living room and seated herself at the desk there. She took a note, paper, and a pen from the drawer, and began to write in a neat, precise style.

“...I will very much enjoy an opportunity to visit with you at Kelsey. I will expect to arrive Thursday next, probably in the evening....”

She finished the note, reading it over several times before putting it in its envelope, and took it directly to the post office for mailing.