A Family Affair. V. J. Banis

throughout the night, the call was not repeated. Jennifer slept on without further intrusion upon her dreams.

      * * * *

      Her mother was dead. Jennifer had known it when she first awakened in the morning. She knew it before she poured the medicine which was never taken, and she knew it without once touching the thin, wasted body. And when she called Doctor Blackstone to come at once, she did not say, “My mother is sick again,” but very simply, “My mother is dead.”

      Doctor Blackstone’s wife came with him.

      In fact there was little either of them could do. Certainly the Doctor could only verify what Jennifer already knew to be true, that her mother was dead, and make arrangements for the body to be taken from the house. Nor was Mrs. Blackstone, determinedly cheerful creature that she was, any more effectual.

      “You must let me take care of things for you,” she insisted, fairly thrusting a cup of bitter smelling coffee into Jennifer’s hands.

      “Yes, of course,” Jennifer agreed numbly, although for the life of her she could not imagine what there was to take care of.

      “Are there any relatives I can contact for you?” Mrs. Blackstone asked. Her husband appeared briefly in the doorway, and she shooed him away with a wordless gesture. Jennifer heard him leave and guessed that his work was finished. It gave her a sense of finality. Death had come, and gone, and now it was finished. She let out her breath, and felt as if she had been holding it since she had first awakened and looked in the direction of her mother’s bed.

      “No, there aren’t any relatives,” she answered, and became truly conscious of the conversation for the first time since it bad begun.

      There were no relatives. She had lived for as long as she could remember with her mother, the two of them alone. In the entire world, she knew of no one who should be notified, no one other than herself who cared if her mother was alive or dead.

      “But surely your mother’s family. There must be someone,” Mrs. Blackstone persisted.

      “I don’t know,” Jennifer admitted honestly and patiently. She was used to being patient, accustomed to hiding her resentments and private desires. Mrs. Blackstone was no match for her mother in trying the nerves. “There were relatives at one time. My mother’s sisters, I think.”

      “Sisters, of course. Were there more than one?”

      “I don’t know,” Jennifer said.

      Mrs. Blackstone was growing visibly short of good cheer, but she pushed on. “Where are they living now?”

      “I don’t know that they are.” Jennifer wished that she could help. She saw in Mrs. Blackstone’s face the dreadful sense of uselessness that weighed upon her, and wished that she could relieve her of it, but she had spoken the truth. She knew nothing of her mother’s family. At some time before she was old enough to remember clearly, they had lived with her mother’s sisters. That much she did know, but she knew it from a few vague references that her mother had made over the years, and not from memory.

      Why they had left, or why the ties had remained severed in the intervening years, she had never known. In all the years she had lived with her mother, Jennifer remembered no correspondence between the two branches of the family, nor communication of any kind, so that she could not even be certain now that she had not imagined it altogether, vague references and all.

      “Your father?”

      Jennifer shook her head without even bothering to answer. She was so tired. If only she could be alone, if only she could sleep. Her mother had told her she used sleep as an escape, the way other people used liquor or drugs. It was probably true. She would like to sleep right now, curled up into a ball; sleep, and have to think of nothing.

      Her father she did not remember at all, although she made an effort now for Mrs. Blackstone’s sake. “He is no longer with us,” her mother had explained when Jennifer, as a child, had raised that question, and that ended the discussion.

      “I don’t remember my father,” she said aloud. “He is no longer with us.”

      The task proved finally too much even for Mrs. Blackstone’s insistent sympathy. “Well, I suppose there’s not much I can do,” she said. “If you like I’ll stay with you for the day. It isn’t wise to be alone too much during these times, they say.”

      Jennifer lifted her face wearily, her eyes seeking the other woman’s, and she allowed her eyes to say the things she would never permit herself to express in words.

      “No, I’ll be all right,” she said aloud, but the rest was as clearly communicated.

      “I see,” Mrs. Blackstone said, meeting that chilling gaze, and backing down in the face of it. “I see.”

      When she had gone, Jennifer carried the coffee to the sink and poured it down the drain. She did not like coffee, and she’d had to force herself to sip it to satisfy Mrs. Blackstone. She was accustomed to doing as others expected of her, rather than what she herself would have liked to do. Now she could begin to do as she wished.

      She thought of the things Mrs. Blackstone had said, the questions she had asked, and with those questions weighing on her mind, she left the kitchen and made her way to the bedroom.

      The bed was empty now, and the sheets had been carefully smoothed. The sight of that smooth bed gave her an unexpected shock. Her mother might well have risen as she did in the past, and gone for a morning walk. At any moment she might come in the front door, with her firm, bold step. For the tiniest fraction of a second, Jennifer had an unpleasant sinking in the bottom of her stomach.

      But of course her mother had not gotten up and gone for walks in well over a year, nor would she ever do so again.

      Jennifer stood at the door, taking in the room. Her own small bed was still unmade, a fact for which her mother would certainly have scolded her. For the moment however she did not think it mattered much. Later she would move her bed back into her own bedroom, where it had been before her mother’s illness had necessitated an every night vigil.

      Her mother’s desk was locked, as it had always been. The key was in the dresser, in the top drawer on the right. Jennifer took it, scarcely able to suppress a sensation of guilt as she did so.

      The key was forbidden to her. Never had she been allowed to open the desk of her own accord, nor see its contents except at a glance. Snooping, her mother would have called it, and even now Jennifer stood with the key in her hand for several long minutes before she crossed the room to the desk and unlocked its drop front.

      The hinge creaked a warning as she lowered the wooden shelf, and feeling a renewed pang of guilt, she again hesitated, listening, perhaps for the sound of approaching footsteps, or a scolding voice. The house sat silently around her, and her guilt faded, pushed aside by another emotion; she had a sense of childish excitement, the thrill of forbidden pursuits. Even the musty scent of old papers, drifting upward, added to her anticipation, and she approached searching the desk with a new enthusiasm.

      Her enthusiasm soon faded. The desk held little of interest after all, certainly nothing to justify the privacy that Elenora Rand had maintained with such resoluteness over the years. Jennifer found a deed to the property, free and clear, and bank books which revealed a comfortable balance. There were no letters, no family albums, no pictures, and no names or addresses of friends or relatives; none.

      With a feeling of disappointment she closed the desk again. She held the key in her hand for a moment, studying it as if it might answer the questions she had. Then, from habit, she locked the desk and returned the key carefully to the precise same place it had held before in the dresser drawer. If her mother had happened to come back, and had looked in the drawer for the key, she would probably have never seen that it had been moved, and used.

      No one came to look for the key.

      * * * *

      The funeral was not, if the term could be applied, a successful one. The weather was unusually cold for so early in the fall.