I could not grieve my mother as I should have done. She had been always kind and gentle, if somewhat remote. I could say she’d been sick for so long that I’d exhausted my sorrow well before she died. That her character, always reserved, had become so abstracted and otherworldly in her decline that I could not grasp her well enough to miss her. But if these claims are true enough, Anna and my brothers nonetheless howled and sobbed with abandon and clung to her cooling breast. Plainly her remoteness had not damped their love for her.
I, though, curled with my hands over my face, to hide from them the fact that I had barely eked out a single tear. Even when I helped to wash and prepare her body I felt her chill and stiffening as if it were my own. I didn’t understand, and I berated myself as hard and unfeeling.
Now I would say that I was too afraid to cry for her, in case my tears revealed to me a grief I could not bear.
Margo came twice to join in the wake—rather to my father’s surprise, though he tried to hide it. I watched the old lady sidelong in the candles’ restless light, wondering what grounds she had for believing my mother’s spirit might endure. I often caught her watching me as well, though what her wonderings were I could only guess.
“Angus wanted very much to come,” she whispered to me once. “He wasn’t allowed. When he tried to slip out his father locked him up, the old tyrant! Well, they’ll see someday how the two of you are united; they can’t deny the obvious forever.”
Gus was my dearest friend then—but still the word united struck me as somewhat too strong for the case. The side of my mother’s corpse hardly seemed like the place to dispute terms, though, and so I let it go.
I can only hope that my regret over this omission will be less than literally eternal.
We waited the customary three days before my mother’s burial, but that brief interval felt endless. I was caught in a murky, flickering suspense where I longed for sorrow, missed it, pined for it, as if it were my own capacity for deep feeling that had died and left me desolate. So it was with unfathomable relief that I approached the grave, hand in hand with Anna, who shuddered and swayed with sobs; I could only hope that the onlookers would think I was being stoical for my little sister’s sake.
Margo came and stood next to me, quite near, and from a certain blade-edged eagerness in her manner I began to understand that her presence was motivated by something more than sympathy. She kept a respectful silence, but with palpable difficulty.
Even Margo, ever tactless, managed to wait a full day after my mother was buried before she broached the subject of her séance again. It was a hot afternoon, and I was out in our yard distractedly scrubbing my brothers’ clothes.
“Reverend Skelley says the recently bereaved make the most unreliable seekers, and that it’s unwise to invite you under the circumstances. You’ll be too desperate to believe and that won’t be properly scientific, don’t you know. But Mrs. Hobson won’t be in town much longer, so I think we’d better strike while the iron is hot, hadn’t we?” She fired off this baffling speech without preamble from a location over my right shoulder. My thoughts were so far away that there was a delay while I took in the salient facts—Margo, importuning, who?—and scratched up a response.
“Reverend Skelley?” I knew, of course, that a Universalist minister had lately moved to town with his son—the fact provoked my father to such an extent that he actually vocalized his displeasure—but I had trouble sorting that name with the rest of Margo’s sentence. “But a minister wouldn’t—he couldn’t be—”
“A spiritual investigator? I assure you he is, and a very serious one. And Mrs. Hobson is an extraordinarily gifted medium, here all the way from Boston! So you see, you absolutely must join us tomorrow evening.” She moved to where I could see her better and stood over me while I shoved back my sweat-smeared hair.
“At your house, you mean? Gus’s mother will have me turned away at the door!”
“She won’t. She passionately wants you to come, even if she’s too much of a snob to ask you herself. But she’s been barraging me with hints till I’m simply terrified to show my face downstairs, in case there’s another volley.”
I never doubted that both Gus’s parents hated me, and Gertrude Farrow in particular. I even knew why, though no power on earth would have forced me to admit it.
“Why?” I said at last. “Why would she want me there?”
“It’s not as if it’s a dinner party,” Margo said, which answered nothing. “You don’t need to worry about the impropriety of being seen out while you’re in mourning. Just come by at eight, won’t you? Angus doesn’t at all approve, but I’m sure he’ll sit with us if you’re there.”
I will admit that I was curious if there was anything to the Spiritualists’ claims. I sometimes imagined that my mother was watching me, gazing at my dry eyes and set mouth, and wondering why she had wasted her tenderness on me in my infancy. I wanted to attend, to see their effort to contact the dead fail decisively—and then, I thought, then I might be free to cry.
“What do I tell my father, though?”
Margo straightened, smiled; brushed down her silver-gray dress.
“Tell him the Farrows expect you. That ought to do the trick!”
You’ve been spat out in a later age, my once-pitied reader, and so you can’t conceive of what graveyards women were then. Once a woman began having children, she also began burying them, until she was pocked all over with the memory of soft-cheeked faces. Even in my family, luckier than most in that respect, both my older brothers had died before I could speak.
Margo told the truth when she said Gertrude Farrow wanted me to come, and her reasons had names: Evelina. Sylvia. Viviana. Gus rarely mentioned his dead sisters, but in fact their absence was so close, so consuming, that his mother was nearly hollowed out by it.
If I didn’t yet understand as I watched Margo walk away, I would very soon.