When her husband, Dudley, called us with the news, we were at our vacation cottage on Ipswich Bay. We were all worried sick about Dorothea, but Dudley reassured us she was in the hospital getting the best of care. She had no fever, and the doctors believed she would recover fully. The next day, she delivered a stillborn baby girl. Dorothea and Dudley were both devastated, but the doctors were still saying she’d live. They kept saying that until she died, eight days after the fire. Mother got on a train for the funeral, but the rest of us stayed in Ipswich, heartbroken and numb.
I remember feeling that I might not survive Dorothea’s loss, and maybe that I didn’t want to. Mother came back from St. Louis, bringing Dudley and the boys with her. They stepped off the train looking wretched, and what comfort could I offer?
One afternoon shortly after the funeral there was a terrible storm in Ipswich Bay, and I talked one of the boys from a neighboring cottage into taking me out in it, in a rowboat. Waves slashed at the bow and came stinging over the sides and into our faces. I couldn’t even swim, but he didn’t turn back, even when the lighthouse captain signaled us to come in. The clouds were low and terrible and the air was drenched and salty. I felt as I if was drowning the whole time, over and over again. And even when we made it back to shore that day, the feeling that I was still out in the bay, sinking deeper and deeper, stayed with me through the rest of that summer and long afterward.
In September I boarded the train and went off to Bryn Mawr as planned, but my classmates seemed to be running on a different frequency. The girls in my dorm spent their afternoons in the salon drinking tea and frothy hot chocolate, talking about dance mixers and potential conquests. I felt well removed. As a girl I knew I was pretty, with bright red hair, nice eyes, and fair skin-but now I couldn’t seem to care whether boys noticed me or not. I stopped taking an interest in my clothes and my coursework, too. I began to fail exams, which was difficult and surprising to me, since, aside from my appalling pile of absences, I’d been a good student all of my life. Now I found I couldn’t summon any focus or attention or even interest.
The next fall, I let Fonnie and my mother persuade me to stay home. I can’t say it was any better for me there than at school. There was nowhere to go in the house to escape my dark thoughts. I couldn’t sleep, and when I could, I had terrible, obsessive dreams about Dorothea and my father, replaying the last awful moments of their lives. I’d wake to a panicked feeling and the promise of more joyless days and nights. And if I said that I remained in this kind of coma for eight more years, then you’d understand how ready I was to live just as my mother began to die.
My mother was sick with Bright’s disease for years, but things got quickly worse in the summer of 1920. Throughout the hottest weeks of July and August, I hardly ever left the upstairs apartment, and when I did leave, she worried endlessly.
“Elizabeth? Is that you?” she called out weakly as soon as she heard me on the stairs. I wasn’t sure why she was using my given name after all these years, but much about her baffled me just then. She didn’t resemble the steel-spined and difficult woman who had always been able to dissolve me with a single word. She was frail and anxious, calling out again as I hurried up the stairs: “
“I’m here, Mother.” I came into the main room where she rested on the worn pink velvet settee. I put down my shopping bags and unpinned my hat. “Are you too warm? Can I open a window?”
“Is it warm?” Her hands kneaded the afghan in her lap. “I’m chilled to the bone.”
I pulled a chair over to the settee and took up her hands, rubbing them to bring blood to the surface, but wherever I touched, the impressions of my fingertips became set, as if her skin had become bread dough. I let her go and she started to whimper.
“What can I do?”
“Bring your sister. I need Fonnie with me now.”
I nodded and stood to leave, but her eyes opened wider. “Don’t go, please don’t leave me.” So I sat again, and this is how it went, all that long night. She took a little broth and slept lightly for a few hours. Then, near midnight, she became suddenly calm.
“I worry greatly for you, Elizabeth,” she said. “What will become of you when I’m gone?”
“I’m a grown woman, Mother. I’ll be fine. I promise.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Years ago Mrs. Curran and I spoke to Dorothea about you.” Her breath was labored, and I didn’t want to see her struggle this way.
“Shh. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. We asked her about you several times and she rebuffed us. She had nothing to say.”
I’d always been skeptical of the occult-the board, the hushed, candlelit seances and automatic writing sessions with red scarves on the lamps-but now I felt a rush of cold through me. Was it possible that Mother
All that August night I stayed in the straight-backed chair next to the settee. I swabbed Mother’s forehead and neck with a damp cloth and looked out at the warm summer night, the dark sky and darker trees, everything as remote as exhibits in a museum. And I knew that I too could die in this room. This was one way my life’s wheel could turn.
Hours later, near dawn, my mother died without a sigh or rattle or ragged breath. How very different from the way my father had gone-the crack of his revolver shaking the doors in their jambs-but no less final. While everyone else was downstairs sleeping, I looked at the face I’d hated sometimes and felt sorry for at other times. Her hands were curled to each side of her thin body, and I traced one with my fingertips, feeling a terrible and complex love for her. Then I went downstairs to wake Fonnie and Roland and call the doctor. I made breakfast and had a bath, and then sat with Fonnie in the parlor to see about the funeral arrangements. Mother’s body was still upstairs waiting for the coroner, and I could feel her there, still pressing on me. She’d always seemed to take pleasure in the quietness of my life, as if I’d become what she thought I would, which was not much of anything at all. This tugging was very old and powerful, and I knew I could easily give in to it, in to nothingness. Or I could push with everything I had the other way.
FIVE
Everything all right, miss?” the cabdriver asked.
“It will have to be,” I said, and opened the door.
I was back in St. Louis after a long day on the train, a day that had been stretched further by the feeling that I’d failed at something in Chicago. Now here I was again, back at Fonnie and Roland’s house on Cates Avenue. It was all I could do to pay the man and get out of the car.
Outside, the air was crisp and chill. The driver walked behind me, delivering my bags to the porch; our footfalls rang hollowly on the flagstones. Inside, I dropped my luggage at the bottom of the steps and went up to my apartment, which had a cold, unlived-in feel. Though it was late and I was exhausted, I lit the lamps and built a fire to warm myself. I sat on the pink settee and wrapped my own arms around my shoulders and wondered if some part of my mother was still there in the room, swaddled in an afghan, maybe, and looking at me pitifully:
The next morning I slept later than usual, and when I came downstairs, Fonnie was waiting for me in the dining room. “Well? I want to hear everything. What did you do? What kind of people did you meet?”
I told her all about the parties and games and the interesting people who moved through Kenley’s apartment in swells-but I didn’t tell her about Ernest. What was there to tell? I wasn’t sure where we stood at all, even as friends.
As Fonnie and I talked, Roland came into the room, fastening his cuffs, moving in a cloud of soap and piney hair tonic. He sat down and Fonnie eased her chair ever so subtly away from his so that she didn’t have to see him eat. That’s how they were at this point. Their marriage was a disaster and always had been and it made me feel badly for them both.
