Not a romantic figure, Sarah, or a mysterious one. All of us thought of
her as a fixture, growing older but more or less always to be with us. I
remember Howard Somers, Katherine’s husband, telling her one day that he
had remembered her in his will.
“Not a lot, Sarah,” he said. “But you’ll never have to go to the Old
Ladies’ Home!”
I don’t know why we were so astonished to see her burst into tears. I
dare say she had been worried about the future; about getting old, and
the children growing up and forgetting her. Anyhow she cried, and Howard
was greatly embarrassed.
She had her peculiarities, of course. In Katherine’s house, what with
guests in and out all the time, she had developed the habit of taking
her meals in her room on a tray, and this habit persisted.
“I like to read while I eat,” she said. “And I’m up early, and I don’t
like late dinners.”
She had some sort of stomach trouble, poor thing.
But in my simpler household she ate with me unless there was some one
there. Then, to Joseph’s secret fury, she retired to her room and had
her tray there.
She had come down from Katherine’s a month or so before, not so much
because I needed her as that Katherine thought she needed a change.
Howard had had a bad heart for some time, and Sarah had been nursing
him.
“Just let her putter around,” Katherine wrote. “She’ll want to work,
being Sarah, so if you can stand a daily massage——”
And of course I could, and did.
I have drawn Sarah as well as I can, and the family rather sketchily;
Howard and Katherine in their handsome duplex apartment in New York on
Park Avenue, bringing out Judy at nineteen; Laura in Kansas City,
raising a noisy young family; and myself in my old-fashioned house with
its grounds and shrubbery, its loneliness and its memories. Dependent on
a few friends, a small dinner party now and then, a little bridge; and
on my servants, on Joseph and Norah and Clara and Robert, and on the
Mary Martins who came and went, intelligent young women who used me as a
stop-gap in their progress toward marriage or a career. A staid
household, dependent for its youth on Judy’s occasional visits, on
secretaries whose minds were elsewhere, and on Wallie Somers, Howard’s
son by his first wife, whose ostensible business was bonds and whose
relaxation, when he could not find some one to play with, was old
furniture. Than which, as Judy once said, I have nothing else but.
As it happened, Judy was with me when Sarah disappeared that night in
April of last year. She was staging her annual revolt.
“I get a trifle fed up with Katherine now and then,” she would say,
arriving without notice. “She’s too intense. Now you are restful. You’re
really a frivolous person, you know, Elizabeth Jane, for all your
clothes and airs.”
“Frivolity is all I have left,” I would say meekly. Judy has a habit of
first names. Katherine had carefully taught her to call me Cousin
Elizabeth, but Judy had discarded that with her stockings, which now she
wore as seldom as possible and under protest. Although I doubt if she
ever called her mother Katherine to her face.
Katherine was a good mother but a repressed one. Also she was still
passionately in love with Howard; one of those profound absorbing loves
which one finds sometimes in women who are apparently cold, and which
makes them better wives than mothers. I rather think that she was even a
little jealous of Judy, and that Judy knew it.
Judy would arrive, and as if by a miracle the telephone would commence
to ring and shining sports cars would be parked for hours in front of
the house. Joseph would assume a resigned expression, empty cigarette
trays by the dozen, and report to me in his melancholy voice.
“Some one has burned a hole on the top of your Queen Anne desk, madam.”
I was never anything to him but “madam.” It got on my nerves sometimes.
“Never mind, Joseph. We have to pay a price for youth.”
He would go out again, depressed but dignified. In his own way he was as
unsocial as Sarah, as mysterious and self-obliterating as are all good
servants.
So on that last night of Sarah Judy was with me. She had just arrived,
looking a trifle defiant, and at dinner she stated her grievance. Mary
Martin was out for the evening, and the two of us were alone at the
table.
“Really, Katherine is _too_ outrageous,” she said.
“She’s probably saying the same thing about you.”
“But it is silly. Truly. She wants me not to see Wallie. I don’t think
Wallie is anything to lie awake at night about, but after all he’s my
half-brother.”
I said nothing. It was an old difficulty in the family, Katherine’s
dislike of Howard’s son by his first marriage. It was a part of her
jealousy of Howard, her resentment of that early unfortunate marriage of
his. She loathed Wallie and all he stood for; not that he stood for a
great deal. He was the usual rich man’s son, rather charming in his own
way but neurotic since the war. But he looked like Margaret, the first
wife, and Katherine could not forgive him that.
“You like Wallie,” Judy accused me.
“Of course I do.”
“And he had a wonderful war record.”
“Certainly he had. What are you trying to do, Judy? Justify yourself?”
“I think he’s had a rotten deal,” she said. “From all of us. A bit of
allowance from father, and now I’m not to see him!”
“But you are going to see him,” I told her. “You’re going to see him
tonight. He wants to look over an old ormolu cabinet Laura has sent me.”
She forgot her irritation in her delight.
“Lovely! Has it got any secret drawers? I adore looking for secret
drawers,” she said, and went on eating a substantial meal. These young
things, with their slender waists and healthy appetites!
She had already rushed up to the third floor to greet Sarah, and while
we were eating I heard Sarah on the way down. This was nothing unusual.
She would go out sometimes at night, either to the movies or to take
Jock and Isabel for a walk, and I could sit at my place at the table and
watch her coming down the stairs. The fireplace in the music room is set
at an angle, and in the mirror over it I would see Sarah; first her
soft-soled low-heeled shoes, then the bottom of her white skirt, and
then her gray coat, until finally all of Sarah emerged into view.
This evening however I saw that she had taken off her uniform, and I
called to her.
“Going to the movies, Sarah?”
“No.” She had no small amenities of speech.
“Don’t you want the dogs? They haven’t been out today.”
She seemed to hesitate. I could see her in the mirror, and I surprised
an odd expression on her face. Then the dogs themselves discovered her
and began to leap about her.
“Do take them, Sarah,” Judy called.
“I suppose I can,” she agreed rather grudgingly “What time is it?”
Judy looked at her wrist watch and told her.
“And do behave yourself, Sarah!” she called.
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