Spirit (3 page)

The sound of their mother's pain had been more than they could bear, and they had started crying, too, while father stood outside the bedroom door ineffectually calling, ‘Margaret . . . Margaret . . . for goodness' sake, Margaret, let me in.'

On Tuesday night, without warning, their father came home
catastrophically drunk and started blundering around the house and slamming doors, screaming at mommy that she blamed him for everything, for giving up his job at Scribner's, for moving to Sherman, for buying the house, for failing to empty the goddamned pool. Why didn't she come right out with it, and say what she felt? Why didn't she simply accuse him of murdering his own daughter? Jesus Christ, he might just as well have plunged her head under the water with his own bare hands and held her down until she drowned.

After that, suddenly, the night went quiet. Elizabeth and Laura lay in their beds side by side and listened and listened, and didn't even dare to whisper. Eventually, they heard sobbing, and it went on for almost a half-hour. It might have been mommy's, it might have been daddy's. It could have been both.

They said a prayer to Peggy, although it was more like a conversation than a prayer. They found if difficult to believe that she had actually gone for ever.

‘Dearest Peggy, what's it like being dead? Do get in touch somehow, even if it's just a whisper or writing your name on the frosty window. We think about you all day every day and we still love you just as much. We won't let anybody throw Mr Bunzum away, we promise. We cry about you all the time but we know you must be happy.'

Lots of unfamiliar people came and went. Adults who murmured and blew their noses and avoided your eyes. Almost magically, the house began to fill with flowers, daffodils and irises and even roses. There were so many flowers that mommy had to borrow vases from the neighbours, and still the blossoms seemed to swell. In February, with the snow still blinding the windows, all of these bright and fragrant flowers made the week seem even stranger, like a Grimm's fairytale.

Mrs Patrick came in every day that week and brought them lunch, which they ate in the kitchen. They liked Mrs Patrick's
lunches because they were pot-roasted chicken and thick vegetable soup and Swedish meatballs, good farm food, fragrant and plain. Their mommy had always baked pretty little cookies and cakes, because granma had taught her when she was a girl. But when it came to stews and casseroles, she seemed to lose interest halfway through, and all her meals were odd-tasting and kind of unfinished, too salty or too herby or too floury, as if she had experimented with some new recipe and then grown bored. Her roasts were always grey and overcooked and sorry for themselves, and for a long time the girls thought that her greens were an intentional punishment, like losing your allowance, or having your leg slapped.

Once or twice, while they ate, mommy came into the kitchen and talked abstractedly to Mrs Patrick. ‘You lost your little Deborah, didn't you, Mrs Patrick? Oh God, I never understood what it was like to lose a child, not until now. It's like having your heart torn out by the roots.' Her cigarette smoke trailed endlessly across the room, towards the range, where the heat made it shudder for a moment and then suddenly snatched it away.

Mommy's presence made the girls uneasy, because they felt that they shouldn't show too much of a healthy appetite, what with Peggy having just drowned. Sometimes mommy said, ‘Don't make so much noise with your knives and forks.' Then they picked at their food, hungry but reluctant to eat, and Mrs Patrick looked at them ruefully, but didn't shout at them.

On Wednesday morning, emboldened by the need for affection, and by plain gratitude, Elizabeth said pardon but what was Mrs Patrick's real name? Mrs Patrick looked at her in bewilderment, and said, ‘Why, you goose, it's Mrs Patrick.'

Later Elizabeth wrote in her diary that – even in real life – some people are given major speaking parts, while others are only background characters. Even life has its extras; and Mrs Patrick was an extra, and knew it. ‘Perhaps God will pay her some overtime, for looking after us.'

Mommy was the prettiest woman that Elizabeth and Laura had ever known. It was only later in life that Elizabeth realized that half of her brain was missing.

Mommy was petite and eye-catchingly narrow-waisted, with a clear, fine-boned face and a slightly side-sloping smile that every man friend of the family seemed to take personally, and which every woman friend of the family seemed to take as a threat.

Father always said that mommy looked like Paulette Goddard in a curly blonde wig, only prettier. Her eyes were as blue as that first piece of sky that shows when a rainstorm clears, and she always dressed in crisply-starched cottons or pastel silk sweaters. She had a snappy, flirty way about her – even with Duncan Purves, the doleful owner of the local auto shop, and with the Reverend Earwaker, the pastor of Sherman's Methodist Episcopal church, who believed that the radio was the very larynx of Satan, and who had once spoken the ritual of exorcism throughout the Jell-O programme (much to the fury of his wife, who was a Jack Benny fan).

The girls always loved to hear the story of how father and mommy first met. He had been working at Charles Scribner's Sons, the publishers, as a fiction editor: and she had been working as a cigarette girl at El Morocco – temporarily, of course, while auditioning for parts in Broadway musicals. Father was having dinner with Louis Sobol of the
New York Journal
, who was supposed to be writing the ultimate Cafe Society novel – a
roman-à-clef
that would out-Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
. In spite of the fact that Louis Sobol was capable of turning in five 2000-word gossip columns every single week, he had written only two paragraphs of his novel in seven months, and he was pleading for more time. ‘I've got the
clef
licked; I just don't have the
roman a
sorted out.'

Father had called mommy over for a pack of cigarettes;
which she had opened for him, so that he could take the first one, and then struck a match. Unfortunately, she had dropped the lighted match into her cigarette tray, and before she could retrieve it, the whole tray had burst into flames. The girls loved this bit, because father and mommy always acted it out together, rushing around the living-room to show how father had snatched a magnum of Krug ‘21 from a neighbouring table, violently shaken it up, and hosed mommy's blazing tray with foaming champagne. Louis Sobol had written about it in his column the following day, calling it ‘the costliest fire-fighting exercise in Manhattan's history'.

Mommy's picture had appeared in the paper; and she had caught the eye of Monty Woolley, the famous theatrical producer, who had signed her up for the tiniest of parts in
Fifty Million Frenchmen
. If you happened to sneeze when mommy came on, you would have missed her appearance altogether. But the next day, mommy had called into father's office with a bottle of champagne to thank him. Touched,
enchanted
almost, father had invited her out for cocktails, then for lunch. The rest was all piano-music-and-roses.

Puffing at her cigarette for punctuation, mommy would say, ‘That was my only Broadway role but of course
(puff)
if I hadn't fallen in love with your father
(puff)
I could have had many, many other roles
(puff)
. Monty Woolley several times said that I had all the potential of a great screen actress. He said my face always lit so well
(puff)
. But I made my choice and my choice was to marry and have children,'
(puff
, followed by an emphatic crushing-out).

Mommy would repeat this explanation in a light, gushing, well-rehearsed lilt which Elizabeth at first found romantic but later found unsettling, as if she and Laura and Peggy were directly to blame for the fact that she had given up her acting career. As if she and Laura and Peggy had deliberately plotted together to isolate her for the rest of her life in Sherman,
Connecticut, baking cookies and listening to the radio and reducing rib-roasts to bundles of rags.

Laura, however, never tired of hearing mommy's ‘screen actress' story, and would lie for hours in front of the fire swinging her legs and leafing through mommy's newspaper cuttings and agency photographs. ‘Miss Eloise Foster, the former cigarette girl who gained notoriety by setting El Morocco alight, was one of the chorus line's brightest sparks.'

Elizabeth often caught Laura posing in front of the cheval-glass in their bedroom, with a table lamp in her hand. ‘I think my face lights well, don't you?' she used to ask.

Elizabeth never answered, but sat on her patchwork quilt and opened her diary, or
Loma Doone
, or a book of Hans Christian Andersen stories.

Her favourite Hans Christian Andersen story had always been
The Snow Queen
. Just like Kay and Gerda, the children in the story, she would warm pennies in front of the fire on winter mornings, and press them against the windows, to make peepholes through the frost. And she always imagined herself as the Snow Queen herself: ‘Exquisitively fair and delicate, but entirely of ice, glittering, dazzling ice; her eyes gleamed like two bright stars, but there was no rest or repose in them.'

That Thursday evening, after they had gone to Macy's for their funeral clothes, Laura sat in front of the mirror making faces at herself, while Elizabeth read
The Snow Queen
yet again.

She had read the story aloud to Peggy and Laura, and sometimes to Mrs Patrick's son Seamus, too, over and over, until it had magically transformed itself from a fairy story into a strange kind of reality – into the vivid memory of a parallel life, which they had all secretly been leading, as well as their lives in Sherman, Connecticut.

When Elizabeth read
The Snow Queen
, her sisters listened like children in a dream, because they knew it off by heart. They
knew that a magician! a wicked magician!! a most wicked magician!!! had once made a mirror that made everything beautiful look ugly. The loveliest landscapes looked like boiled spinach. The handsomest persons appeared as if standing upon their heads. But the mirror shattered, and broke into trillions of splinters, each of which retained the peculiar properties of the entire mirror. One of these splinters fell into the eye of a boy called Kay, and another pierced his heart.

Up until that moment, Kay had been living an idyllic life with his sister Gerda and his grandmother, but now he became cynical and rude and rash. One winter's day, when the snow was flying pell-mell through the streets, he hitched his toboggan to the back of a large white sledge, in which rode a tall, strange woman, dressed apparently in rough white furs. But her furs were snow, and she was the Snow Queen, and she kissed him with her icy lips and wrapped him in snow until he was only a heartbeat away from extinction. The Snow Queen took Kay to her palace in Finland, where she burned blue lights every evening; and there she made him sit on a frozen lake, which was broken into thousands of near-identical pieces. There she told him that if he could form the word Eternity out of ice, she would give him the whole world, and a new pair of skates besides. But he could never do it.

Gerda, meanwhile, went searching for her brother, seeking help from birds and flowers. Peggy and Laura's favourite was the story that was told to Gerda by the hyacinths, about three fair sisters, and they liked to imagine that
they
were the three fair sisters, and played endless games in which they dressed up in their mother's evening gowns and incessantly combed their hair.

Gerda sought the help of a little robber-maiden, and the wise advice of the Lapland woman and the Finland woman. She fought an army of vicious snowflakes, the Snow Queen's guards; and eventually she found the Snow Queen's palace,
with walls that were formed of the driven snow, and its windows of the cutting wind. She sang a hymn to Kay, who wept, and when he wept, the splinter of mirror was washed out of his eye. Together, they returned home. The clock said ‘tick-tock!' and the hands moved as before. The grandmother meanwhile sat in God's good sunshine and read from the Bible these words, ‘Unless ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven'.

Elizabeth was re-reading
The Snow Queen
because it reminded her so much of Peggy. It made her feel as if Peggy might still be alive, somewhere, in that parallel world of driven snow and chilling winds. But she was worried about the hyacinth story. It had been worrying her all week. In fact, it had worried her so much that she hadn't dared to look at it, until today. She read it again, and as she read it she felt guiltier and guiltier and when she had finished she closed the book tight, and held it close to her chest, her cheeks flushed with unhappiness.

‘There were three fair sisters, transparent and delicate they were; the kirtle of one was red, that of the second blue, of the third pure white; hand in hand they danced in the moonlight beside the quiet lake; they were not fairies, but daughters of men. Sweet was the fragrance when the maidens vanished into the wood; the fragrance grew stronger; three biers, whereon lay the three sisters, glided out from the depths of the wood, and floated upon the lake; the glow-worms flew shining around like little hovering lamps. Sleep the dancing maidens, or are they dead?'

What if Peggy had remembered that part of the story, when she was out in the garden, in the whirling snow? What if she had tried to dance on the surface of the swimming-pool, like the three fair sisters dancing by the lake?

Worst of all, what if it were all
her
fault that Peggy had drowned?

She glanced up at Laura; just to make sure that Laura didn't suspect anything; but Laura was too busy practising her movie-star pout in the mirror.

Elizabeth lay awake for hours that night and heard the clock in the hallway strike midnight. From father and mommy's room she could hear murmuring conversation, quiet and sad. There had been no sobbing today, thank goodness, and no shouting, and no slamming of doors. Father and mommy were both too tired. Mrs Patrick said they looked like ghosts; although she wouldn't tell them whether she'd ever seen any real ghosts to compare them to.