'Really,' I said.
'Like her father,' Sherry said. 'I'm the imaginative one. The artistic one. I'm the one whose soul has wings. Penny is very… earthbound. Since she was a small child. She has always known what she wanted and has always done what was necessary to get what she wanted.'
'She's practical,' Susan said.
'Oh, hideously,' Sherry said. 'So practical. So material. So… masculine.'
Susan nodded thoughtfully. I knew Sherry was annoying Susan. But I was the only one who knew her well enough to tell.
'You get along with Penny?' I said.
'Of course-she's my daughter.'
Susan blinked once. I knew this meant more than it seemed to.
'But she's not sympathetic to your needs in this case,' I said.
'Oh God no,' Sherry said. 'Penny is not the sympathetic sort.'
'How about the other girls?'
'Stonie and SueSue are much more like their mother.'
'Sensitive, artistic, free-spirited?' I said.
'Exactly.'
'Did you know that they have separated from their husbands?'
'Both of them?'
'Yes.'
Sherry chewed her last bite of waffle for a time, and swallowed, and turned her attention to the herbal tea.
'Well,' she said finally, 'they weren't much as husbands go, either one of them.'
'All three of your daughters seem to have withdrawn,' I said. 'They don't go out, and people are prevented from visiting.'
'Solitude can be very healing,' she said.
'You think it's grief?'
'Their father provided for them very well.'
'Do you have any theories why both Stonie and SueSue separated from their husbands at this time?'
'As I said, they weren't first-rate husbands.'
'They never were,' I said. 'Why now?'
'Perhaps Walter's death.'
'How so?'
'Well, now that Walter's gone, Penny is in charge.'
'And?'
'And she's always been a puritan.'
'You think she forced the separation?'
'Even as a little girl she was full of disapproval.'
I nodded.
'I was supposed to clean and cook and sew dresses,' Sherry said. 'As if I could reshape my soul to her childish materialism.'
'You think she could have forced her sisters to give up their husbands?'
'I don't think her sisters would have fought very hard,' Sherry said.
She signaled the waitress, and ordered two Danish pastries.
'They didn't love their husbands?'
'They married to please their father,' she said, and took a large bite from one of her Danish. 'They married men their father approved of, men he could control.'
'How come Penny hasn't married?'
'She's young. And frankly, I think she frightens men. Men like pliant women. I find men are often frightened of me.'
'You're not pliant,' I said.
'No. I am fiercely committed to beauty, to poetry, to painting, to a kind of spiritual commingling that often threatens men.'
'If Susan weren't here, I'd be a little edgy,' I said.
