A Death in the Family

  There was a noise on the porch; Andrew got from his knees and kissed his sister on the forehead. “Don’t be sorry,” she said. He looked at her, tightened his lips, and hurried to the door.

  “Papa,” he said, and stood aside to let him past. His mother fumbled for his arm, and gripped it hard. He put his hand gently across her shoulders and said, next her ear, “They’re back in the kitchen”; she followed her husband. “Come in, Walter.”

  “Oh no. Thank you,” Walter Starr said. “These are family matters. But if there’s …”

  Andrew took him by the arm. “Come in a minute, anyway,” he said. “I know Mary’ll want to thank you.”

  “Well now …” Andrew led him in.

  “Papa,” Mary said, and got up and kissed him. He turned with her towards her mother. “Mama?” she said in a pinched, almost crying voice, and they embraced. “There, there, there,” her mother said in a somewhat cracked voice, clapping her loudly on the back. “Mary, dear. There, there, there!”

  She saw Walter Starr, looking as if he were sure he was unwelcome. “Why, Walter!” she whispered, and hurried to meet him. He put out his hand, looking frightened, and said, “Mrs. Follet, I just couldn’t ever …”

  She threw her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. “Bless you,” she whispered, crying softly.

  “There now,” he said, blushing deeply and trying to embrace and to sustain her without touching her too closely. “There now,” he said again.

  “I must stop this,” she said, drawing away from him and looking about wildly for something.

  “Here,” said Andrew and her father and Walter Starr, each offering a handkerchief. She took her brother’s, blew her nose, dried her eyes, and sat down. “Sit down, Walter.”

  “Oh thank you, no. I don’t think,” Walter said. “Only dropped in a moment; really must be off.”

  “Why Walter, what nonsense, you’re one of the family,” Mary said, and those who could hear nodded and murmured “Of course,” although they knew this was embarrassing for. him, and hoped he would go home.

  “Now that’s ever so kind,” Walter said, “but I can’t stay. Really must be off. Now if …”

  “Walter, I want to thank you,” she said; for now she too had reconsidered.

  “So do we all,” Andrew said.

  “More than I can say,” Mary finished.

  He shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing,” he said. “Now I just want you to know, if there’s anything in the world I can do, be of help in any way, let me please, don’t hesitate to tell me.

  “Thank you, Walter. And if there is, we certainly will. Gratefully.”

  “Good night then.”

  Andrew walked with him to the front door. “Just let me know, Andrew. Anything,” Walter said.

  “I will and thank you,” Andrew replied. Their eyes met, and for a moment both were caught in astonishment. He wishes it was me! Andrew thought. He wishes it was himself! Walter thought. Perhaps I do, too, Andrew thought, and once again, as he had felt when he first saw the dead body, he felt absurd, ashamed, guilty almost of cheating, even of murder, in being alive.

  “Why Jay, of all people?” Andrew said, in a low voice.

  Still watching his splintered eyes, Walter heavily shook his head.

  “Good night, Andrew.”

  “Good night, Walter.”

  He shut the door.

  Mary’s father caught her eye; with his chin he beckoned her to a corner of the kitchen. “I want to talk to you alone a minute.” he said in a low voice.

  She looked at him thoughtfully, then took her glass from the table, said, “Excuse us a minute,” over her shoulder, and ushered him into the room she had prepared for her husband. She turned on the bedside lamp, quietly closed both doors, and stood looking at him, waiting.

  “Sit down, Poll,” he said.

  She looked about. One of them would have to sit on the bed. It was neatly laid open, cool and pleasant below the plumped pillows.

  “I had it all ready,” she said, “but he never came back.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing, Papa.”

  “Don’t stay on your feet,” he said. “Let’s sit down.”

  “I don’t care to.”

  He came over to her and took her hand and looked at her searchingly. Why he’s just my height, she realized again. She saw how much his eyes, in sympathy and pain, were like his sister’s, tired, tender and resolute beneath the tired, frail eyelids. He could not speak at first.

  You’re a good man, she said to herself, and her lips moved. A good, good man. My father. In an instant she experienced afresh the whole of their friendship and estrangement. Her eyes filled with tears and her mouth began to tremble. “Papa,” she said. He took her close to him and she cried quietly.

  “It’s hell, Poll,” she heard him say. “Just hell. It’s just plain bell.” For a few moments she sobbed so deeply that he said nothing more, but only stroked the edge of her back, over and over, from her shoulder to her waist, and cried out within himself in fury and disgust, Goddamn it! God damn such a life! She’s too young for this. And thinking of that, it occurred to him that it was at just her age that his own life had had its throat twisted, and not by death, but by her own birth and her brother’s.

  “But you gotta go through with it,” he said.

  Against his shoulder he could feel her vigorous nodding. You will, he thought; you’ve got spunk.

  “No way out of it,” he said.

  “I think I will sit down.” She broke from him and with an almost vindictive sense of violation sat heavily at the edge of the bed, just where it was turned down, next the plumped pillows. He turned the chair and sat with her knee to knee.

  “Something I’ve got to tell you,” he said.

  She looked at him and waited.

  “You remember what Cousin Patty was like? When she lost George?”

  “Not very well. I wasn’t more than five or six.”

  “Well, I do. She ran around like a chicken with its head off. ‘Oh, why does it have to be me? What did I ever do that it happened to me?’ Banging her head against the furniture, trying to stab herself with her scissors, yelling like a stuck pig: you could hear her in the next block.”

  Her eyes became cold. “You needn’t worry,” she said.

  “I don’t, because you’re not a fool. But you’d better, and that’s what I want to warn you about.”

  She kept looking at him.

  “See here, Poll,” he said. “It’s bad enough right now, but it’s going to take a while to sink in. When it really sinks in it’s going to be any amount worse. It’ll be so much worse you’ll think it’s more than you can bear. Or any other human being. And worse than that, you’ll have to go through it alone, because there isn’t a thing on earth any of us can do to help, beyond blind animal sympathy.”

  She was gazing slantwise towards the floor in some kind of coldly patient irony; he felt sick to death of himself.

  “Look at me, Poll,” he said. She looked at him. “That’s when you’re going to need every ounce of common sense you’ve got,” he said. “Just spunk won’t be enough; you’ve got to have gumption. You’ve got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You’ve got to keep your mind off pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of a howl about it. You’ve got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they’ve come through it and that you will too. You’ll bear it because there isn’t any choice—except to go to pieces. You’ve got two children to take care of. And regardless of that you owe it to yourself and you owe it to him. You understand me.”

  “Of course.”

  “I know it’s just unmitigated tommyrot to try to say a word about it. To say nothing of brass. All I want is to warn you that a lot worse is yet to come than you can imagine y
et, so for God’s sake brace yourself for it and try to hold yourself together.” He said, with sudden eagerness, “It’s a kind of test, Mary. and it’s the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens. Then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That’s all.” Watching her eyes, he felt fear for her and said, “I imagine you’re thinking about your religion.”

  “I am.” she said, with a certain cool pride.

  “Well, more power to you,” he said. “I know you’ve got a kind of help I could never have. Only one thing: take the greatest kind of care you don’t just—crawl into it like a hole and hide in it.”

  “I’ll take care,” she said.

  She means there is nothing I can tell her about that, he thought; and she is right.

  “Talk to Hannah about it,” he said.

  “I will, Papa.”

  “One other thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “There are going to be financial difficulties. We’ll see just what, and just how to settle them, course of time. I just want to take that worry off your hands. Don’t worry. We’ll work that out.”

  “Bless you, Papa.”

  “Rats. Drink your drink.”

  She drank deeply and shuddered.

  “Take all you can without getting drunk,” he said. “I wouldn’t give a whoop if you got blind drunk, best thing you could do. But you’ve got tomorrow to reckon with.” And tomorrow and tomorrow.

  “It doesn’t seem to have any effect,” she said, her voice still liquid. “The only times I drank before I had a terribly weak head, just one drink was enough to make me absolutely squiffy. But now it doesn’t seem to have any effect in the slightest.” She drank some more.

  “Good,” he said. “That can happen. Shock, or strain. I know once when your mother was very sick I …” They both remembered her sickness. “No matter. Take all you want and I’ve more if you want it, but keep an eye on yourself. It can hit you like a ton of bricks.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “Time we went back to the others.” He helped her to her feet, and put a hand on her shoulder. “Just bear in mind what I said. It’s just a test, and it’s one that good people come through.”

  “I will, Papa, and thank you.”

  “I’ve got absolute confidence in you,” he said, wishing that this was entirely true, and that she could entirely care.

  “Thank you, Papa,” she said. “That’s going to be a great help to know.”

  Her hand on the doorknob, she turned off the light and preceded him into the kitchen.

  Chapter 11

  “Why where …” Mary began, for there was nobody in the kitchen.

  “Must be in the living room,” her father said, and took her arm.

  “There’s more room here,” Andrew told her, as they came in. Although the night was warm, he was nursing a small fire. All the shades, Mary noticed, were drawn to the window sills.

  “Mary,” her mother said loudly, patting a place beside her on the sofa. Mary sat beside her and took her hand. Her mother took Mary’s left hand in both of her hands, drew it into her lap, and pressed it against her thin thighs with all her strength.

  Her aunt sat to one side of the fireplace and now her father took a chair at the other side. The Morris chair just stood there empty beside its reading lamp. Even after the fire was going nicely, Andrew squatted before it, making small adjustments. Nobody spoke, and nobody looked at the Morris chair or at another person. The footsteps of a man, walking slowly, became gradually louder along the sidewalk, and passed the house, and diminished into silence; and in the silence of the universe they listened to their little fire.

  Finally Andrew stood up straight from the fire and they all looked at his despairing face, and tried not to demand too much of him with their eyes. He looked at each of them in turn, and went over and bent deeply towards his mother.

  “Let me tell you, Mama,” he said. “That way, we can all hear. I’m sorry, Mary.”

  “Dear,” his mother said gratefully, and fumbled for his hand and patted it. “Of course,” Mary said, and gave him her place beside the “good” ear. They shifted to make room, and she sat at her mother’s deaf side. Again her mother caught her hand into her lap; with the other, she tilted her ear trumpet. Joel leaned toward them, his hand behind his ear; Hannah stared into the wavering hearth.

  “He was all alone,” Andrew said, not very loudly but with the most scrupulous distinctness. “Nobody else was hurt, or even in the accident.”

  “That’s a mercy,” his mother said. It was, they all realized; yet each of them was shocked. Andrew nodded sharply to silence her.

  “So we’ll never know exactly how it happened,” he went on. “But we know enough,” he said, speaking the last word with a terrible and brutal bitterness.

  “Mmh,” his father grunted, nodding sharply; Hannah drew in and let out a long breath.

  “I talked with the man who found him. He was the man who phoned you, Mary. He waited there for me all that time because he thought it would help if—if the man who first saw Jay was there to tell one of us all he could. He told me all he knew of course,” he said, remembering, with the feeling that he would never forget it, the awed, calm, kind, rural face and the slow, careful, half-literate voice. “He was just as fine as a human being can be.” He felt a kind of angry gratitude that such a man had been there, and had been there first. Jay couldn’t have asked for anyone better, he said to himself. Nobody could.

  “He said he was on his way home, about nine o’clock, coming in towards town, and he heard an auto coming up from behind, terrifically fast, and coming nearer and nearer, and he thought. There’s somebody that’s sure got to get some place in a bad hurry” (“He was hurrying home,” Mary said) “or else he’s crazy” (he had said “crazy drunk”).

  “He wasn’t crazy,” Mary said. “He was just trying to get home (bless his heart), he was so much later than he’d said.”

  Andrew, looked at her with dry, brilliant eyes and nodded.

  “He’d told me not to wait supper,” she said, “but he wanted to get home before the children were asleep.”

  “What is it?” her mother asked, with nervous politeness.

  “Nothing important, Mama,” Andrew said gently. “I’ll explain later.” He drew a deep breath in very sharply, and felt less close to tears.

  “All of a sudden, he said, he heard a perfectly terrifying noise, just a second or two, and then dead silence. He knew it must be whoever was in that auto and that they must be in bad trouble, so he turned around and drove back, about a quarter of a mile, he thinks, just the other side of Bell’s Bridge. He told me he almost missed it altogether because there was nothing on the road and even though he’d kind of been expecting that and driving pretty slowly, looking off both sides of the road, he almost missed it because just next the bridge on that side, the side of the road is quite a steep bank.”

  “I know,” Mary whispered.

  “But just as he came off the far end of the bridge—you come down at a sort of angle, you know …”

  “I know,” Mary whispered.

  “Something caught in his lights and it was one of the wheels of the automobile.” He looked across his mother and said, “Mary, it was still turning.”

  “Beg pardon?” his mother said.

  “It was still turning,” he told her. “The wheel he saw.”

  “Mercy, Andrew,” she whispered.

  “Hahh!” her husband exclaimed, almost inaudibly.

  “He got out right away and hurried down there. The auto was upside down and Jay …”

  Although he did not feel that he was near weeping he found that for a moment he could not speak. Finally he said, “He was just lying there on the ground beside it, on his back, about a foot away from it. His clothes were hardly even rumpled.”

  Again he found that he could not speak. After a moment he managed to force himself to.

  “The man s
aid somehow he was sure he was—dead—the minute he saw him. He doesn’t know how. Just some special kind of stillness. He lighted matches though, of course, to try and make sure. Listened for his heartbeat and tried to feel for his pulse. He moved his auto around so he could see by the headlights. He couldn’t find anything wrong except a little cut, exactly on the point of his chin. The windshield of Jay’s car was broken and he even took a piece of it and used it like a mirror, to see if there was any breath. After that he just waited a few minutes until he heard an auto coming and stopped them and told them to get help as soon as possible.”

  “Did they get a doctor?” Mary asked.

  “Mary says, ‘Did they get a doctor.’ ” Andrew said to his mother. “Yes, he told them to and they did. And other people. Including—Brannick, Papa,” he said; “that blacksmith you know. It turns out he lives quite near there.”

  “Huh!” said Joel.

  “The doctor said the man was right,” Andrew said. “He said he must have been killed instantly. They found who he was, by papers in his pocket, and that was when he phoned you, Mary.

  “He asked me if I’d please tell you how dreadful he felt to give you such a message, leaving you uncertain all this time. He just couldn’t stand to be the one to tell you the whole thing—least of all just bang like that, over a phone. He thought it ought to be somebody in the family.”

  “That’s what I imagined,” Mary said.

  “He was right,” Hannah said; and Joel and Mary nodded and said, “Yes.”

  “By the time Walter and I got there, they’d moved him,” Andrew said. “He was at the blacksmith shop. They’d even brought in the auto. You know, they say it ran perfectly. Except for the top, and the windshield, it was hardly even damaged.”