Spirit (5 page)

‘What do you mean, a snow-angel?' asked Elizabeth.

Laura pressed her hands together as if she were praying, and closed her eyes. ‘You know, a snow-angel. Like the angels in the graveyard, only snow.'

Elizabeth climbed out of bed and stood beside her. The snow was whirling down so furiously they could scarcely see the garden. ‘Yes, we could,' she said. ‘And we could make it look just like Peggy.'

Laura looked up at her, her eyes still sticky with sleep, her blonde curls tousled. ‘Do you think that Peggy will be an angel?'

‘Of course,' said Elizabeth, although she didn't feel completely certain about it. ‘She never did anything mean or nasty,
did she? And she was only five. You know what Jesus said about suffer the little children to come unto Me.'

‘Why did they have to suffer?' asked Laura. ‘I thought Jesus was supposed to be kind.'

‘Everybody has to suffer sometimes,' Elizabeth told her. ‘That's what Mrs Dunning said at Sunday school.'

‘Succotash has to suffer, too,' said Laura.

‘What?'

‘That's what they say in the funnies. “Suffering succotash!” '

They put on their slippers and their cuddly woollen robes, Elizabeth blue and Laura pink, and went downstairs to the kitchen. It was so gloomy that Mrs Patrick had switched on the lights. It wasn't a quiet breakfast. Fifty people were expected for lunch; and Mrs Patrick was punching seven kinds of hell out of a huge batch of bread-roll dough; while a brown cauldron of chicken chowder was quietly blabbering to itself on top of the range, next to a boiling stuffed ham sewn up in muslin, which rhythmically rose and fell in its seething pot like somebody's boiling head.

Mrs Patrick was listening to the radio, too. There was news from Europe, where the Russians were having horrendous difficulties invading Finland. Leland Stowe of the Chicago
Daily News
was recounting what he had seen. ‘In this sad solitude lie the dead . . . uncounted thousands of Russian dead. They lie as they fell – twisting, gesticulating and tortured . . . beneath a kindly mask of two inches of newly-fallen snow.'

Mrs Patrick suddenly realized that the girls were listening and switched the radio off.

‘What is it?' hissed Laura.

‘It's the war,' said Elizabeth. They knew that there was a war in Europe but Elizabeth found it difficult to imagine what Europe was like. At school they had learned that there were kings and queens in Europe, and palaces. They had also
learned that Europe was very much smaller than America, and much more densely populated. Elizabeth had a mental impression of a glittering ballroom crowded with thousands of people in golden crowns and ermine robes, angrily jostling and pushing each other. No wonder they had wars.

‘You shouldn't fuss your head thinking about the war,' said Mrs Patrick, dredging flour across the tabletop. ‘It doesn't concern us, not one whit. It's
their
quarrel, the British and the French and the Germans. If Mr Roosevelt has any sense at all, he'll keep us well out of it. Not that
any
politician has any sense.'

Father came into the kitchen. His glasses steamed up almost immediately, and he had to take them off.

‘Come on girls, hurry up now. You don't have all day.'

‘Where's mommy?' asked Laura. ‘I haven't said good morning yet.'

‘Mommy's okay, you can see her in a minute. Just finish your breakfast and get yourselves dressed.'

As they climbed back upstairs, they felt a chilly, unsettled atmosphere in the house. There was very little wind, and so the fires had taken a long time to draw. The whole house was hazy with acrid woodsmoke, which made them cough, and being nine and seven they really made a performance of their coughing, rolling around on their beds in their long woolly underwear, spluttering and hacking and wheezing like terminal tuberculosis patients, until father called out to them to shut UP, will you, and get yourselves ready.

‘But it's so
smoky.
'

Father was about to say something angry, he hated laying all those goddamned fires in any case, but stopped himself. Instead, he shielded his eyes with his hand in a very curious way; and then took his hand away again, and said, ‘Listen . . . this is going to be a difficult day. It's going to be a difficult day for mommy and it's going to be a difficult day for me. I know how
close you both were to Peggy, and that you can still talk to her. But when you're grown up like mommy and me, you can't do that any more, don't ask me why. So for us, Peggy has gone away, completely gone away. We've lost her.'

The girls lay on their beds in their underwear watching him solemnly. He licked his lips quickly (mouth turned dry) and then he said, ‘Today mommy and I have to put our youngest little girl into the ground. That isn't going to be easy for us; and I hope you'll understand how we feel, and try to be patient and helpful.'

Laura said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me.'

‘Yes,' said father, with his eyes glistening.

‘And suffer the succotash to come unto Me.'

Father said, ‘What?'

‘It's all right,' Elizabeth interrupted. ‘We promise we'll be helpful.'

Elizabeth brushed Laura's hair, a procedure which was always accompanied by a monotonous chorus of ‘ow', ‘ow', ‘OW', ‘
ow
,' as she cleared out the tangles. Then they dressed in their mourning clothes and stood side by side and looked at themselves in the cheval-glass. Elizabeth thought that they looked as if
they
were dead, too. Their faces were waxy and their eyes were large, and the luminous snow-light surrounded them with a blurry, almost ghostly aura.

It was then that they glimpsed a shadowy movement in the mirror, which made them jump. They turned around and saw mommy standing in their bedroom doorway. She was dressed in a severe, boxy suit of black moiré silk, with a small upswept black hat and a dense black veil that completely masked her face.

For a split second, they were very frightened. Mommy was so black, so silent, so faceless. ‘Mommy?' said Laura, in alarm.

Mommy moved and when she moved she was just mommy. She came into the room and laid a black-gloved hand on each
of them. She smelled of cigarettes, and perfume and something else aromatic, which they weren't old enough to identify as gin. ‘Don't worry, Laura sweetheart, I'm quite all right. You both look
beautiful
. Are you ready to come downstairs now? Granpa and granma have just arrived; and so has Aunt Beverley.'

‘I haven't washed my teeth yet,' said Laura.

‘You're all dressed up in black and you haven't washed your teeth? You'll get toothpowder all over your collar.'

‘I have to wash my teeth, you can die from dental caries.'

Mommy didn't argue. Elizabeth couldn't see her face, because her veil was too dark, but she could guess what she was thinking. When mommy had gone downstairs, and Laura was industriously brushing her teeth with her Donald Duck toothbrush, Elizabeth came into the bathroom and hissed at her, ‘Don't talk about dying any more. Mommy doesn't like it. It'd bad enough Peggy being drowned.'

‘But they told us at school. And you can die from not washing your hands, after you've been to the bathroom.'

‘Oh, certainly. And you can die if somebody drops a cow on your head.'

They went downstairs. The front door was wide open and a few mischievous snowflake-fairies were flying over the threshold and dancing across the orange-and-yellow Shaker rug. An icy draft was streaming in, ruffling the fringes of the lampshades, and scattering black-edged condolence cards across the floor, but at least it was clearing away the woodsmoke and brightening up father's sulky fires.

Aunt Beverley was taking off her sleek brown mink and talking eight million to the dozen, as usual. Aunt Beverley was a very tall mannish woman in her late thirties, with a long neck, and a big, bloodless, bony head. Mommy always said that Aunt Beverley believed herself to be much more beautiful than she really was. She must have spent untold eye-watering
hours plucking her brows into geometrically-perfect arches, and pinning up her hair into a glossy black tidal wave.

But her ears were too big and lobular, and her nose was too complicated, and her funeral-dress might have been Pauline Trigere but it hung on her frame (in Elizabeth's opinion) like a photographer's black cape over a camera and tripod.

‘Well, the roads were
so
darned impossible that we nearly turned back at Cannondale. I can't tell you, Margaret, it was Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, all over. Humphrey was adamant that he didn't want to die in Connecticut. He said his grandparents died in their beds in Braggadocio, Missouri, and his parents died in their beds in Braggadocio, Missouri, and he certainly didn't intend to be frozen to death in the middle of winter in a rented automobile in some prissy Yankee dormitory in Connecticut. And, why! Look who's here! My dear little Lizzie; my dear little Laura!'

Aunt Beverley bent down and kissed them both with her sticky scarlet lips. She smelled of cigarettes and freckle cream. She wore four rows of sparkling jet beads, and a ruby-and-emerald brooch in the shape of an apple tree. Mommy had known Aunt Beverley for ever and ever – since
Fifty Thousand Frenchmen
, when Aunt Beverley had been wardrobe mistress. Elizabeth knew that there was something different about Aunt Beverley. She wasn't at all like mommy, or like any of the women who lived in Sherman. She was bossy, and wickedly gossipy, and drank whiskey. Even the men seemed to be afraid of her. She wasn't their
real
aunt, of course, she just liked them to call her aunt. She had never married: she was still ‘Miss Lowenstein', although she never seemd to be wanting for male escorts. Humphrey was the latest: a bulbous-eyed man in his early forties with thinning hair and a little clipped moustache.

‘I'm very sorry for your loss,' he told mommy. Then he said, ‘Wonderful house.'

‘Thank you,' said mommy.

Father came up and said, ‘Glad you could make it.'

‘Wonderful house,' Humphrey repeated.

‘Seventeen-sixty-one,' said father.

‘As much as that? I thought Connecticut prices were coming down.'

‘Excuse me?' said father.

Outside, in the snow, more cars were silently arriving, in plumes of exhaust. Big black Buick Eights and Chrysler Imperials and Packard sedans, nose to tail. There was a sporadic slamming of doors, and then the funeral guests began to make their way towards the house. Elizabeth and Laura had to stay in the hallway to greet them, while Seamus collected their coats and hung them up. Seamus was seventeen with carroty hair and a face like one of his mother's rising loaves. Mommy said that Seamus had been stricken with meningitis when he was six, which had left him fanciful and odd; but Mrs Patrick said that he had been kidnapped by leprechauns for a month or two, that was all, and that when the leprechauns had brought him back he had seen sights and danced dances that no human being had ever seen or danced before, and that was what made him the way he was.

Elizabeth liked him and didn't mind it when he sat in the corner listening intently while she read
The Snow Queen
, but she was always a little afraid of him. He would say things like, ‘Brilliant umbrella, sir,' over and over again. Or, ‘Forward with fences, that's what I say, forward with fences.' Or else he would quote whole pages of
The Snow Queen
, with extraordinary emphasis, like somebody speaking in Finnish. Laura adored him and thought that he spoke just as much sense as anybody else.

At a quarter to eleven, father told Elizabeth to close the door, because everybody was feeling the draught. The living-room was crowded with guests, and the fires were crackling, and Seamus was taking round trays of sherry and cheese straws.

Just as she was about to close the door, Elizabeth saw a whale of a Cadillac arriving through the snow. It parked a little way away from the rest of the cars, and for two or three minutes there was no sign of anybody climbing out. ‘Lizzie!' her father called her. ‘Close the door now, will you, for goodness' sake?'

‘Somebody's coming,' said Elizabeth.

Her father came up behind her and peered through the crack in the door. The snow was falling so furiously that it was almost impossible to see anything at all. The door of the Cadillac opened and a stocky wide-shouldered man in a wide-brimmed hat climbed out, and started to trudge to the house.

‘Well, I'll be damned,' said her father, and he never, ever said ‘I'll be damned', at least not in front of her. ‘It's Johnson Ward.'

‘Who's Johnson Ward?' asked Elizabeth.

Her father laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘A writer, sweetheart. You've met him before but you probably don't remember. He's one of the greatest writers that ever was, in my opinion. He wrote a very famous book called
Bitter Fruit.
'

Elizabeth didn't know what to say about that. She had met a few writers – a nervous, chainsmoking young man called Ashley Tibbett, who had written some essays about rural life in the Litchfield Hills, books so skinny that they looked as if they didn't have any pages between their covers. And Mary Kenneth Randall, a serious, harsh-voiced woman with thick ankles and thick sombre clothes and hair like a scouring-pad, who had written two huge novels about objectivism, whatever that was.

But as far as Elizabeth had been able to tell, writers didn't care for children very much. Writers talked about nothing except themselves, and they seemed to regard children as competition. Ashley Tibbett hadn't even been able to look at them, and Mary Kenneth Randall had given them a particularly vile cough-candy and patted them so hard on the top of
the head that her wedding ring had clonked against their skulls.

Johnson Ward reached the porch and he was big and smiling and twinkly-eyed and he stamped his feet and banged his leather gloves together.