Apprehensions and Other Delusions (17 page)

But Jessie had, of course. Over the nine years she tended to Marjorie, she pieced together the whole story: how Lysander had begun to keep company with chorus girls, squandering his money and ignoring his infant daughter as well as his wife in order to carouse with his cronies and their doxies. “He had kept a mistress for a time, an expensive piece of fluff called Vivian; she was rapacious and mercenary but pretty in the popular, and common, style. It was no worse than what most of his contemporaries were doing, men and women, myself included, although I had demanded marriage instead of lavish gifts, because that’s what girls of my class did. Lysander treated Vivian like a pet and me like a blood-stock brood-mare—which is what I was expected to be. He assumed I would stop complaining about Vivian in time, as most wives did, as soon as I had more children.” But of course Marjorie hadn’t been willing to accept his waywardness, and over the next year she grew increasingly vehement. All Marjorie’s efforts hadn’t been enough to reform him, not even her most desperate gamble: little Serena had wasted away and her father had paid no attention other than to buy her an expensive casket. He hadn’t mourned the loss of his child in any way beyond what was expected of him. So there were those who thought his death, a year to the day later, was a delayed act of grief rather than an accident, the only gesture the bereft father could make. And for the sake of the widow and her second child she miscarried two months after her husband’s death, they didn’t speak of it aloud, although the whispers continued for years.

On the settee in the restroom, Jessie felt laughter rise in her again. She could never tell anyone that Marjorie had killed her daughter to punish her husband, and when that failed to move him, had found him alone working on his automobiles and contrived to drug his beer, and once he was semi-conscious, sliced his arm with a metal-snip, then locked him in and left him. She couldn’t prove that Marjorie had killed her child, of course, it was only a guess based upon the ramblings of an old woman who was drugged and slowly dying. The family would dismiss anything Jessie reported as being the result of the painkillers and anti-spasmodics that Marjorie took. It was amazing to hear her devotion as a widow, her perseverance in the face of adversity praised so fulsomely, when she knew that Marjorie had seen herself in vastly different lights. It was like seeing a cartoon version of
Citizen Kane,
with humorous little talking animals instead of Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton. Jessie giggled, and clapped her hands over her mouth.

A noise from just beyond the door brought Jessie upright on the settee. She felt her face flush; her laughter stopped abruptly, and she turned as Evelyn Grant came in, her ancient face sorrowful in its mesh of wrinkles. Her black suit hung on her and the long rope of pearls around her neck swayed with her every movement, making it appear that she had borrowed all her clothes.

“Oh, God,” she said with disgust as she saw who was in the restroom. “I thought you’d gone home. Huh! I should have known better.”

Jessie regarded Marjorie’s oldest friend and did her best to smile. “Sorry about what happened.”

“I just bet you are,” said Evelyn, her face drawing down. She was eighty-eight, and as she saw it, dressed in her best Chanel black suit with her good pearls to set it off, no matter how unflattering it now was: it was what she wore to funerals, and for Marjorie, she had donned her ugliest, most expensive, pearl earrings. “Let them say what they want about the way you took care of Marjorie—you were always one to take advantage of her, that’s what you took. Huh! You and your obsequious service! I know. I saw how you encroached on her good nature.”

“I lived with her a long time,” said Jessie. Looking back now it seemed as if that was part of her distant past instead of something that ended four days ago. And everything that happened before Marjorie was lifetimes away.

“She paid you well enough, not that you appreciated it,” said Evelyn, disapproval in every lineament of her body. “Marjorie would never have let you stay with her if she hadn’t needed someone to fetch and carry.”

“Thanks,” said Jessie.

“You never did value her. Never,” said Evelyn, as she stomped through to a stall and slammed into it.

“Perhaps not,” said Jessie. “You’re probably right about that. Probably no one did.”

“She deserved better,” said Evelyn through the stall door.

Jessie bit her lower lip. “She deserved something else,” she said cautiously. She wanted to argue with Evelyn, to tell her about everything she had learned about Marjorie during her years of caring for her, but there was no point to trying, for Evelyn would not believe her, and the rancor she would create would be lasting.

“You always took advantage,” Evelyn repeated as she flushed the toilet. “You should be ashamed.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Jessie in the same tone she had used when she used to talk to Marjorie.

“Huh!” Evelyn scoffed as she emerged from the stall. “You’re ungrateful, just ungrateful.”

“I must seem that way,” Jessie said quietly, and put her hands to her mouth to stop the chuckle.

“Think about it,” Evelyn recommended as she slammed the stall door.

“I’ll do my best,” said Jessie. She looked toward the door and wondered if she dared to escape yet. The attendees were still straggling in from the graveside, the low buzz of their conversation droning on the other side of the bathroom door. In another ten minutes the mourners would begin the toasts and twenty minutes after that they would have mellowed to the point of forgetting her laughter or joining in it. By then, no one would mind if someone laughed occasionally, so long as it wasn’t Jessie.

As Evelyn checked her reflection, she looked over her shoulder. “What do you plan to do now that your meal ticket is gone?”

“I don’t think about that yet,” said Jessie, feeling demeaned. It was the truth, and she knew that she would have to make some arrangements soon. Her years of caring for Marjorie would receive only a minor bequest from the estate and then she would be on her own in the world at an age that would make finding new employment difficult; she knew her inheritance was small because Marjorie had delighted in telling her that, usually when she was gloating over some past achievement—such as the successful doing away with her third husband, Gardner Avery. All but one of her children by him had died with their father, and the sole survivor of that group, Michael, had kept away from his mother for many years. Marjorie had all but cut Michael out of her will, leaving him only a pittance. “He got that trust from Gardner’s parents. He has his own business and it’s made him very comfortable. He hardly needs much from me,” she had declared. “You don’t need much from me, either. You’ve been eating my food and living under my roof for almost a decade. That’s enough.”

“Well, you’ll have to, won’t you? All that time at Marjorie’s beck and call, what will you do now?” She powdered her forehead. “It is sultry.”

It took a moment to recall what she had been saying. “Well, better than cold and dank,” said Jessie, and sniggered. What was making this day so funny, she asked herself, and winced at the answer her mind supplied:
murder is
a joke in bad taste.
But was she certain it was murder? There was absolutely no proof of any wrongdoing, and at the time they had happened, no one had so much as whispered about Marjorie. If Jessie should say something now, would anyone believe her? She did her best to think about all she knew, and the more she tried the less certain she was that she really understood what Marjorie had told her. Surely the old woman had been pushing the limits of senility, and what she had said was nothing more than the muddled maundering of a fading mind. If perhaps she felt some measure of responsibility—no matter how unfounded—she might have blamed herself, making up tales to account for her sense of guilt. At least the family might very well think so. She stared into the mirror and did her best to focus on her reflection, hoping to read her real feelings, and perceived only the ambience: there was no escaping the weather, not even in this place, for Jessie’s hair had frizzed in the humidity. The heavy air and overcast skies made the August afternoon threatening, and promised the release of rain by nightfall.

“Don’t come out until you can behave properly,” said Evelyn as she left the restroom.

Jessie stopped the protest that mounted in her throat. It wasn’t as if she was unaware of her gaffe; she felt her lapse keenly, and wished she hadn’t succumbed to this most perplexing amusement. She told herself that she shouldn’t be surprised that Evelyn should reprimand her like a child, for she had been childish, laughing as she did, and Evelyn must be feeling ancient, now being the last woman alive in the group that had centered around Marjorie a decade ago. By comparison, Jessie was a youngster, and at the moment, she felt juvenile; even her good dark dress seemed designed for a younger woman than she, and she had to fight down an urge to stamp her feet in aggravation with herself.

Finally she felt composed enough to go into the reception room. She smoothed the front of her clothes and patted her hair as if to assure herself she was wholly composed. It was nerve-wracking to go out into the hallway, and from there down the hall to the handsome room beyond where mourners stood around two long tables laid with breads, cheeses, cold meats, veggies, and dips. At the far end was a small portable bar where a man in a black jacket poured out drinks. Jessie lingered in the doorway, taking stock of the people who had come in for the reception: Willard Fisher was already showing the effects of three stiff bourbons, his face flushed and his voice a bit too loud; his wife Emily wasn’t far behind him, smiling inanely and beginning to slur her speech. They had been Marjorie’s long-time neighbors, inclined to visit when there was gossip, but otherwise confining their contact to phone calls about trash pick-up day. Next to them, Marjorie’s youngest brother Desmond Lealand sipped morosely at a vodka-and-tonic. He looked fragile and faded, every one of his eighty-two years; he occasionally glanced at Annis, his second wife, who was listening attentively to his cousin George discoursing on the state of the stock market.

From her vantage-point, Jessie did her best to maintain her decorum, so that she could join the company. But the absurdity of it all got hold of her and she had to battle a renewed eruption of chuckles. She broke out in a burst of tactical coughing, and muttered, “Mis-swallowed,” to the air.

Albert Noyes came up behind her and patted her on the shoulder. “I know how hard this must be for you. Don’t let those vipers get you down. It’s the shock and grief that makes them ungrateful. I know they’re all very much obligated to you for all you did for Mother. She would have been a burden on anyone, no matter what they like to think just now. In time they’ll acknowledge it.” He offered Jessie an encouraging smile. “You were a real trouper, taking such good care of her, with so little support from most of the family. No matter what they say, most of them couldn’t have done it if they wanted to. You know, Mother always had a soft spot for your father—he was her favorite nephew. She told me that many times.”

That wasn’t what Marjorie had told Jessie, but she said, “Thanks, Uncle Albert.”

“I don’t suppose the rest of them will say anything, but I want you to know how indebted I am to you for all you did for Mother. If it weren’t for you, she’d have had to be put in a home, and that wasn’t any kind of life for a woman like her. It was hard enough, being cooped up in the house for years on end.” He held up his drink—brandy and soda, Jessie knew from long experience—saying, “Go along now, and get a drink. Daniel’s about to offer the first toast.”

“Thanks, Uncle Albert; I’ll be in in a moment, just as soon as I can be sure I won’t do anything—” Jessie said again, thinking how of all her relatives she liked this kindly, ineffectual man best; although he had lived off his mother’s generosity for more than two decades, he had always been pleasant and concerned for her welfare. Albert had been loyal in a way his father never was, and Jessie had always suspected that some of his devotion was in compensation for his father’s lack of concern. Jessie also knew that Marjorie had been most distressed about killing Albert’s father, and had looked after Albert more devotedly than she had her other children because of it.

“But it had to be done,” she had explained during one of her long, late-night discourses. “He was running through all Lysander’s money, and the Depression was on, so what could I do? He had insurance, a lot of it, and his trust fund that would pass to Albert, so there was nothing left for me to do. I did try to make it as easy on him as I could—without making it seem I had done anything, of course.” Marjorie had told Jessie how she had learned how to disable the brakes in Ernest’s sedan, that she had stepped out one evening when she knew Ernest would be going to the country club and made sure he would not make it home. Ernest always drove fast, and it was only to be expected that he would do the same this night. His Ford went off the road and down the steep side of Stewart’s Bluff, and the insurance money had put Marjorie and her three surviving children back on easy street: Albert, Melanie, and Edmund had been able to prosper when others were struggling to get by. It had been a pity about Edmund, the youngest of Ernest Noyes’s children: Edmund had died in Korea, his plane shot down on an early morning reconnaissance run.

From the table with the cheeses came a sudden eruption of weeping, and the various people standing nearby hurried to comfort or escape the outburst of Louisa, Marjorie’s youngest child, a thin woman of fifty-seven who had been born when Marjorie was thirty-nine, three years after her last marriage, to Theodore Bateman. She had given him William within a year of their nuptials and considered him a late child; but Louisa came later. Everyone in the family believed Louisa to be high-strung and usually said her long-delayed arrival in her mother’s life accounted for it. Her half-brother Albert hurried over to offer his shoulder for Louisa to cry on, much to the annoyance of her husband Jim, who stared at his wife as if he couldn’t bear one more outburst.