A Family Affair. V. J. Banis

few people from the town in attendance, if not for the sake of respect, then at least out of curiosity.

      As it was, the undertaker had to hire pallbearers, although Elenora Rand had lived in the town for nearly thirty years before her death. The only non-official person present, in fact, was Jennifer herself. Mr. Peabody, the undertaker, took note of the fact that Jennifer shed not one tear when her mother’s body was lowered into the ground, although he told his wife afterward that she had certainly looked sad enough.

      When it was all over, Mr. Peabody offered to drive Jennifer home rather than back to the funeral parlor, as was his custom.

      “Thank you,” she said, “but I think I’ll walk.”

      Since it was less than a mile from the cemetery to town, he left her without arguing the point, not a little relieved to be finished with this particular interment. As a general rule, he liked his work. He got to meet people. His customers, neither the living nor the dead, rarely argued with him. He saw himself as playing one of the fundamental roles in the scheme of things, in which he attended to the rounding off of the cycle, so to speak. He did not think of his bodies as dead people, because that to him was a contradiction in terms. People were alive, and these figures that he arranged so artfully in the coffins were only symbols, symbols of the completeness of life. And the burial was its final step, one which generally gave him a sense of satisfaction.

      This burial gave him little satisfaction, and he resented Jennifer for it. “Peculiar,” he described it to his wife afterward.

      “They always were,” she said.

      Alone at the grave of her mother, Jennifer stared at the ground and at the coffin suspended just below ground level. Then, when the men arrived to complete the burial, she left and walked slowly across the cemetery, passing through the massive iron gates that opened onto the road.

      She walked automatically, giving little thought to the town that approached and quickly surrounded her. It was a pretty town, as towns go, but she had long ago shut most aspects of the town out of her mind, the prettiness with the rest. She could pass through it now a hundred times without really seeing any of it.

      The few people who saw her passing experienced very fleetingly a twinge of grief, which was forgotten almost by the time she had drifted by. It was not that the local people felt no sympathy for death; indeed, they did, and for the people left behind. But after all, the Rands had never been what you could call friendly. Everyone in town knew them by sight, but not more than a handful of people could honestly claim to have carried on any sort of conversation with Jennifer or her mother. And the reports of Doctor Blackstone and his wife had not helped further any sympathy for Jennifer.

      “It’s unnatural,” Mrs. Blackstone had said to any available ear. She had, although she would not say this, never forgiven Jennifer for that one glance across the kitchen table, nor was she likely ever to do so. “The way that girl is taking it. Not a sign of grief, not the first human emotion to anything.”

      And the women to whom she spoke, as well as the men to whom the Doctor spoke, clucked their tongues and stayed their distance as Jennifer went by.

      She was alone. It was this fact, more than the death of her mother, that saddened Jennifer. She was twenty-six, a slim pale girl who had already begun to think of herself as a spinster. She was pretty, in a frail sort of way, but she did not know it, because no one had ever told her. She had no suitors, nor friends of any kind—no one to whom she could turn now for consolation or companionship.

      She knew that people regarded her as peculiar. Always, she had been kept at a distance from other people. As a little girl she had not been permitted to have friends. They had lived, she and her mother, very nearly as hermits, and by the time her first year at school had ended, Jennifer already knew that the other children thought her “funny,” and made up little rhymes about her: “Jenny, Jenny, eat a daisy, Jenny, Jenny, you are crazy.” It had made her withdraw, and cooperate in her mother’s efforts to isolate them.

      For twenty-six years her life had centered around her mother, that strong, demanding creature whose demands had finally ceased so abruptly. For years Jennifer had been not so much a daughter as a combination of companion and house servant, and later, of course, nurse. Her time and her energies had belonged not to herself but to Elenora Rand exclusively. Every mood, every notion, every whim had been at the request of, or merely a reflection of, the older woman. She had resented her role, and yet she had hidden her resentment and played it without complaint, because she had been trained to do just that.

      She reached home, the simple white cottage she had lived in for as long as she could remember. It was neat and clean and thoroughly respectable. The shutters were closed over the windows, as they always had been.

      Once again the sensation of aloneness came over her and Jennifer stopped, half frightened of entering the house. It held no welcome for her. It was where she had lived, it was now all she had or was in life; but it was not home to her uneasy spirit.

      There was no place else for her to go. She climbed the three steps that led to the front door and entered the hall, with a quick furtive manner as if afraid someone might try to follow.

      It was not until she had dutifully put her coat away in the closet and had gone into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea that she remembered the letter. It had come the day before and, puzzled by it, she had put it aside to read it later when the bother and distraction of the funeral was over.

      She went to her bedroom—not to her mother’s room, where she had been sleeping on the little bed, but to her own bedroom, that she had returned to. The letter was in the drawer of her dresser, next to a strand of cultured pearls. She had ordered the pearls from a mail order catalog, and her mother had been angry when they came; but she had relented, and allowed Jennifer to keep them, “for special occasions.” They had never been worn. Jennifer had considered wearing them to the funeral, but had not been able to decide on her own whether that was the right sort of special occasion, and in the end she had gone without them.

      Jennifer took the letter back to the kitchen, but she did not read it until her tea was ready and she was seated at the small kitchen table. Then she opened it carefully and unfolded the single sheet of paper.

      It was the opening line that most puzzled her: “Your mother asked us to write and....”

      It was from someone who signed her name Aunt Christine. Strange, although Jennifer had searched her mother’s personal papers more than once since the death, carefully examining every item in the small desk, she had found no trace of any relatives. And now here was this letter, signed Aunt Christine, and saying, “Your mother asked us to write and invite you to visit with us at Kelsey House.”

      Of course her mother had known for a year or more that she was dying; no doctor would have dared to conceal the fact from her. It was entirely possible that, in a flash of foresight, she had written to her sisters, those long neglected relatives, explaining that her daughter would soon be in need of family ties. And they of course had seen the obituary notice in the newspapers.

      What was odd, though, was that they had made no attempt to attend the services, nor even to send flowers. Had they done even the latter, the single wreath that Jennifer had herself provided might not have looked so forlorn. There was not even an expression of sympathy in the letter, although perhaps that might be attributable to tact.

      Jennifer tasted her tea, found it cool, and sipped it slowly. Since her mother’s death she had been busy with funeral arrangements and putting affairs in order. The house was hers, with no entanglements, and the money in the bank was sufficient to provide for her modest needs. Her time was her own. For someone who had never known time of her own, that should have been a source of joy.

      The fact was that it was not, though. Not until this very morning, with the funeral actually at hand, had she realized the absolute emptiness of her life. She had nothing at all to do with this sudden excess of time—no interests, no hobbies, no one to call upon, no job.

      And now here suddenly was this latter, informing her that she did at least have a family. They were people she did not know, to be sure, and their behavior regarding