They are the sort of women whose flesh melts or mysteriously falls away as they get older. Auntie Lou’s hair is still black, but it looks stiff and dry in its net as the dead end of hair on a ripe ear of corn. She sits straight and moves her bone-thin arms in very fine, slow movements; she looks like an Egyptian, with her long neck and small sharp face and greatly wrinkled, greatly darkened skin. Aunt Annie, perhaps because of her gentler, even coquettish manner, seems more humanly fragile and worn. Her hair is nearly all gone, and she keeps on her head one of those pretty caps designed for young wives who wear curlers to bed. She calls my attention to this and asks if I do not think it is becoming. They are both adept at these little ironies, and take a mild delight in pointing out whatever is grotesque about themselves. Their company manners are exceedingly lighthearted and their conversation with each other falls into an accomplished pattern of teasing and protest. I have a fascinated glimpse of Maddy and myself, grown old, caught back in the web of sisterhood after everything else has disappeared, making tea for some young, loved, and essentially unimportant relative—and exhibiting just such a polished relationship; what will anyone ever know of us? As I watch my entertaining old aunts I wonder if old people play such stylized and simplified roles with us because they are afraid that anything more honest might try our patience; or if they do it out of delicacy—to fill the social time—when in reality they feel so far away from us that there is no possibility of communicating with us at all.
At any rate I felt held at a distance by them, at least until this third afternoon when they showed in front of me some signs of disagreement with each other. I believe this is the first time that has happened. Certainly I never saw them argue in all the years when Maddy and I used to visit them, and we used to visit them often—not only out of duty but because we found the atmosphere of sense and bustle reassuring after the comparative anarchy, the threatened melodrama, of our house at home.
Aunt Annie wanted to take me upstairs to show me something. Auntie Lou objected, looking remote and offended, as if the whole subject embarrassed her. And such is the feeling for discretion, the tradition of circumlocution in that house, that it was unthinkable for me to ask them what they were talking about.
“Oh, let her have her tea,” Auntie Lou said, and Aunt Annie said, “Well. When she’s had her tea.”
“Do as you like then. That upstairs is hot.”
“Will you come up, Lou?”
“Then who’s going to watch the children?”
“Oh, the children. I forgot.”
So Aunt Annie and I withdrew into the darker parts of the house. It occurred to me, absurdly, that she was going to give me a five-dollar bill. I remembered that sometimes she used to draw me into the front hall in this mysterious way and open her purse. I do not think that Auntie Lou was included in that secret either. But we went on upstairs, and into Aunt Annie’s own bedroom, which looked so neat and virginal, papered with timid flowery wallpaper, the dressers spread with white scarves. It was really very hot, as Auntie Lou had said.
“Now,” Aunt Annie said, a little breathless. “Get me down that box on the top shelf of the closet.”
I did, and she opened it and said with her wistful conspirator’s gaiety, “Now I guess you wondered what became of all your mother’s clothes?”
I had not thought of it. I sat down on the bed, forgetting that in this house the beds were not to be sat on; the bedrooms had one straight chair apiece, for that. Aunt Annie did not check me. She began to lift things out, saying, “Maddy never mentioned them, did she?”
“I never asked her,” I said.
“No. Nor I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t say a word about it to Maddy. But I thought I might as well show you. Why not? Look,” she said. “We washed and ironed what we could and what we couldn’t we sent to the cleaners. I paid the cleaning myself. Then we mended anything needed mending. It’s all in good condition, see?”
I watched helplessly while she held up for my inspection the underwear which was on top. She showed me where things had been expertly darned and mended and where the elastic had been renewed. She showed me a slip which had been worn, she said, only once. She took out nightgowns, a dressing gown, knitted bed-jackets. “This was what she had on the last time I saw her,” she said. “I think it was. Yes.” I recognized with alarm the peach-coloured bed-jacket I had sent for Christmas.
“You can see it’s hardly used. Why, it’s hardly used at all.”
“No,” I said.
“Underneath is her dresses.” Her hands rummaged down through those brocades and flowered silks, growing yearly more exotic, in which my mother had wished to costume herself. Thinking of her in these peacock colours, even Aunt Annie seemed to hesitate. She drew up a blouse. “I washed this by hand, it looks like new. There’s a coat hanging up in the closet. Perfectly good. She never wore a coat. She wore it when she went into the hospital, that was all. Wouldn’t it fit you?”
“No,” I said. “No.” For Aunt Annie was already moving towards the closet. “I just got a new coat. I have several coats. Aunt Annie!”
“But why should you go and buy,” Aunt Annie went on in her mild stubborn way, “when there are things here as good as new.”
“I would rather buy,” I said, and was immediately sorry for the coldness in my voice. Nevertheless I continued, “When I need something, I do go and buy it.” This suggestion that I was not poor any more brought a look of reproach and aloofness into my aunt’s face. She said nothing. I went and looked at a picture of Aunt Annie and Auntie Lou and their older brothers and their mother and father which hung over the bureau. They stared back at me with grave accusing Protestant faces, for I had run up against the simple unprepossessing materialism which was the rock of their lives. Things must be used; everything must be used up, saved and mended and made into something else and used again; clothes were to be worn. I felt that I had hurt Aunt Annie’s feelings and that furthermore I had probably borne out a prediction of Auntie Lou’s, for she was sensitive to certain attitudes in the world that were too sophisticated for Aunt Annie to bother about, and she had very likely said that I would not want my mother’s clothes.
“She was gone sooner than anybody would have expected,” Aunt Annie said. I turned around surprised and she said, “Your mother.” Then I wondered if the clothes had been the main thing after all; perhaps they were only to serve as the introduction to a conversation about my mother’s death, which Aunt Annie might feel to be a necessary part of our visit. Auntie Lou would feel differently; she had an almost superstitious dislike of certain rituals of emotionalism; such a conversation could never take place with her about.
“Two months after she went into the hospital,” Aunt Annie said. “She was gone in two months.” I saw that she was crying distractedly, as old people do, with miserable scanty tears. She pulled a handkerchief out of her dress and rubbed at her face.
“Maddy told her it was nothing but a check-up,” she said. “Maddy told her it would be about three weeks. Your mother went in there and she thought she was coming out in three weeks.” She was whispering as if she was afraid of us being overheard. “Do you think she wanted to stay in there where nobody could make out what she was saying and they wouldn’t let her out of her bed? She wanted to come home!”
“But she was too sick,” I said.
“No, she wasn’t, she was just the way she’d always been, just getting a little worse and a little worse as time went on. But after she went in there she felt she would die, everything kind of closed in around her, and she went down so fast.”