Free The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine Page A

clacking repose; then, ten hours later, the weary, wrinkled, communal escape from the long day of responsibility, the comfortable office dishabille of loosened ties and crumpled white shirts--Annie felt herself part of something, a cell in a great breathing bourgeois creature.
    As for Betty, she read books with advice for grieving widows, one of which suggested she decorate a jar and then, with her children, write down happy memories of the deceased on slips of paper and place them inside. To facilitate the decoration of the Memory Jar, she immediately headed to Barnes & Noble to buy a book about decoupage. While there, she saw a book for golf widows and came home to declare that she must take up the game immediately.
    "But, Mother, a golf widow is someone whose husband plays a lot of golf," Annie pointed out.
    "Well, Josie plays golf," Miranda said. "On vacation. It's harder in the city, of course."
    "Exactly," said Betty. "May he rest in peace."
    Annie gave a defeated sigh, but the truth was, she enjoyed their company now as she never had before; more, certainly, than she had while growing up. As a little girl, she had not been unhappy, just cautious, adopting a quiet, personal camouflage to protect herself from her more flamboyant mother and sister. It was something she had always felt she'd shared with Josie: they were the ones who created the drab leafy background against which the other two blazed with gaudy color like tropical birds. Annie and Josie were the practical ones, too, the ones who remembered the napkins when Miranda and Betty decided on an impromptu picnic in the park, who thought to bring the umbrella when Miranda and Betty decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on a cloudy day, who packed the map when Miranda and Betty had a sudden yen to see autumn leaves or spring flowers or Hyde Park or the waves crashing onto the beach at Montauk Point. Annie thought fondly of her stepfather for a moment. She almost wished he had died, she realized with shame, for then she would have been able to remember him as he had been, distant but in a quiet, patient, and reassuring way, someone she admired and looked up to and relied on. Instead, he was a living, unreliable, despicable deserter.
    "I found the most wonderful jet bracelet at the consignment store on the Post Road," Betty was saying, holding out her wrist to her daughters.
    Miranda peered at the bracelet. "Very Goth, Mom."
    "Queen Victoria wore jet when she was in mourning for Prince Albert," Annie said. "Which was the rest of her life."
    Betty nodded her approval.
    "Of course, he was actually dead, unlike other widows' husbands I could name. She started a whole fashion."
    "Well, now everyone wears black already," Betty said. "So I don't see what difference I could make. Nevertheless, the bracelet was only two hundred dollars. See how much I'm economizing?"
    Annie wanted to shake her mother until her pretty little head wobbled on its aged neck. We are broke , she wanted to cry out. We do not have two hundred dollars to spend on baubles. But her mother was so wounded, and she was trying, in her odd and spendthrift way, to be brave. Annie took a deep breath. She put out the white linen napkins bought years ago in France, if she remembered correctly. "When the Mitfords' mother needed to economize," she said, "she found out how much the laundering of their napkins cost per week."
    Normally Miranda would have commented on two pedantic outbursts in such a short period of time, but she was more indulgent of the Mitford family, awed by the number of memoirs, biographies, and scandals the sisters had generated.
    "She thought it was too expensive," Annie continued, "so they just stopped using napkins."
    "But think of the cleaning bills for their clothes," Betty said, clucking. "Although they could have used paper towels, I suppose . . ."
    Betty and Joseph's housekeeper, a Brazilian woman named Jocasta who had retired last year, had always gotten the napkins snowy white