It could happen. In the years that I have lived under the Pritchett roof, I’ve witnessed Aunt’s sulks and tantrums, her mood shifts from shrieking laughter to boiling rage, followed by withdrawal. Yet her resentment of me is a constant foul weather. It is little help that I resent her right back. In my scrapbook I’ve taken out my anger on her picture, knowing she’d never pull her bulk up the stairs to snoop through my possessions.
In the baleful silence, I watch her chew her toast, taking her time. Deliberate, controlled, delaying what waits for her upstairs. No, she would never indulge herself even the briefest lapse of real sanity. Not while I am under this roof.
If anyone is in danger of being packed off, it is I.
5.
Will is dead. The days are interminable. Uncle Henry uses business as his escape, and he takes the carriage to Boston nearly every morning. Aunt refuses to leave her room. She won’t see visitors and accepts only tea and holiday fruitcake brought to her door by a twice-outraged Mrs. Sullivan, who thinks liquor in cakes is a sin and that food in bed brings mice.
Quinn may be his mother’s favorite, but she is far too lazy to commit herself to the daily duties of his care. I move in quickly. Bustling about him, serving or clearing or tidying up, my hands are never idle.
I yearn to ask him more about Will, but Quinn makes conversation nearly impossible. Clearly he prefers his books and privacy to anyone’s company, and when I arrive with fresh pitchers of water or bowls of soup or clutches of firewood, he exchanges only the barest pleasantries, and always in a voice that suggests he’d prefer our chats to be as brief as possible. But this is how he’s always been save last winter, when he’d stolen a kiss behind the pantry door, his breath sweet with mulled wine, his silver eyes sparkling with mischief as his hands made a vice round my waist.
“Twenty-one inches, I wager.” His words wet in my ear, and I was sure he’d have moved for a handful of my bottom next if I hadn’t wrenched away, too shocked to speak. I’d never mentioned the incident, neither to his brother nor mine, and I was sure he’d long forgotten it.
“He is still so arrogant,” I whisper to Toby’s sympathetic silence.
But that’s not quite true. Quinn is different. His sleeping is fitful, and more than a few times I’ve entered his bedroom presuming he was deep in conversation with Uncle Henry, only to find him quite alone and talking to himself. When he does leave his room, it’s always without warning, and always many hours after the house has retired, to roam outside. Empty bottles of morphine are strewn on the floor beneath his bed. His strange behavior isn’t lost on the others.
“I do think Quinn’s gone off his head a bit, Miss,” Mavis confesses.
“He’s in mourning. We all are.”
She curls her lip, unconvinced. “He’s reliving his battles in his head. Many’s the night I spied him through my window wandering the garden, cursing and shouting. The day girl’s seen him, too.”
“He’s in pain. When the morphine subsides, it makes him wakeful.” Outwardly I shrug it off, though I, too, have stood in moonlight at my dormer, watching Quinn pace the garden border.
“Missus Sullivan says she’s got a mind to give him a talking-to, what with all the cursing. Not to mention the mud he tracks through the house,” Mavis continues. “But she doesn’t know the half of it. At night, when he’s up and about, he goes and hangs blankets over the mirrors not just in his room, but in the hallway, the parlor. I yank ’em off in the mornings when I’m lighting the grates. It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?”
I nod. “It is. And you mustn’t speak of it either, Mavis. Quinn’s health is nobody’s business but our own.”
In her too-hasty nod, I sense Mavis has told her sister, Betsey, who is the Wortley family’s cook. “Why’d he cover the mirror, d’you think, Miss?”
“He doesn’t like to see his face, with his eye so badly wounded,” I guess. “We’ll have to be patient. It will take a while for his eye to heal.” I can tell that my answer leaves Mavis unsatisfied.
My old friends at Putterham School would look down their noses at my intimacy with Mavis, but I take comfort in her company the same way I take warmth by the kitchen hearth, where I’m rescued by practical tasks. There is no place in wartime for a lady of leisure, and the kitchen is Pritchett House’s hub of information.
The kitchen is no place for a lady, but surely I am better off here than upstairs scribbling in my diary, pacing the halls, staring into mirrors or out windows and half listening to ghosts, and waiting all the while with a worried heart for Quinn to rouse and turn his cold stare on me.
“You ought to go comfort Missus Pritchett,” Mavis had implored one afternoon, passing me on the scullery steps. I’d looked up from my task, scaling cod for a chowder, the fish lumped in my apron and the scraps pail wedged between my ankles. “You both loved Mister William. Let it draw you together instead of apart.” Her bony hand had briefly squeezed my shoulder. “You got no business down here. You go remind those Pritchetts that you’re still
She was warning me. Yet I couldn’t muster the energy to tend to my aunt. The few times I had, I’d hated every moment.
“You’re lucky, you know,” she’d decreed bitterly as I arranged the silver service to her liking and poured her first cup of peppermint tea.
“How is that, Aunt?”
“You don’t know the intensity of a mother’s love.” Her eyes were baleful, her pudgy finger crooked.
“I loved him, too, Aunt Clara.” I moved away to re-swaddle the bed iron so that I wouldn’t have to look at her.
“Yes, in your own, childlike way. But not profoundly.”
It would be so easy to agree. But I despised her for discounting my grief, and it surely showed in my face. How could it not?
Next time, I let Mavis take care of the tea service, stopping in just long enough for an obsequious curtsy and to slip a brooch from the top of her dresser into my pocket. I didn’t trust myself not to hold the iron too close to her toes, or to upend her tea in her lap.
On Christmas Day, however, Mavis’s warning comes back to sting. We’ve left Quinn behind to attend church. It is my first outing since his return.
At least it’s a diversion. I feel unfamiliar to myself a secret widow in a starched black dress. I stare out the rocking carriage, with its passing convergent view of Jamaica Pond now in steely winter freeze.
Uncle Henry and Aunt Clara sit side by side and in hushed voices decide on a service for Will. It will be a sort of funeral, body or none, with selected hymns and readings. All planned for sometime after the spring thaw.
As I try to catch bits of talk, it dawns on me that Aunt Clara hasn’t once consulted my opinion on these arrangements.
As if to emphasize this point, as we turn up the churchyard gates, Aunt jerks forward, her palm outstretched. “Why, Jennie, you are still wearing your engagement ring!” she exclaims. “Of all preposterous sights. Give it here at once, before anyone in the congregation sees it on your finger.”
“Clara, dear,” says Uncle Henry. “Now is hardly the time.”
“That ring is no longer hers to wear. It is a Pritchett heirloom. Unless one is a nun, one cannot be engaged to…a spirit.”
“Yes, of course, but…” Uncle Henry lapses off, astonished, as always, by Aunt’s vile outburst but unable to find the words to refute her. He rubs the back of his head.
