Free Family Matters by Kitty Burns Florey Page A

so remote from death. What did jar her briefly was the sudden bereaving realization that she alone was awake in a house full of old people sleeping. She wished Judd were with her, and then acknowledged the ridiculousness of the idea: Judd coming with her on these nocturnal visits, poring patiently over faded letters for clues to the past! Judd was pastless; the present was his natural element.
    Betsy turned on the light by the easy chair and sat down with the letters. She untied the brown twine that bound them and flipped through the envelopes—all alike, each with its flowery script and faded carmine stamp—half-thinking that, in spite of her curiosity, she might doze off herself. She was tired, as much from the tension of leaving Judd as from the hour, and it showed in her face. Even in the flattering lamplight, she wasn’t a pretty woman, no matter what her mother said. Her resemblance to Violet was strong but generalized; in details she was sharper and plainer. She had too much nose, and a secretive, scared look that thick, arched brows and wide, hooded eyes—not unattractive in themselves—only accentuated. She could look like a bird at bay, and she had the figure of a bird, too—stout through the middle, bosomy, hippy, with slender legs. At best, she looked interesting, with the paradoxical contrast between bony features and generous body; at worst, she resembled a pigeon.
    She dozed briefly, and dreamt the letters were simply tedious, full of shopping lists. She rubbed hard at her eyes and then got up, making no noise, and crept downstairs to get herself a cup of coffee.
    She knew every inch of the house, from the missing stair post to the location of the coffee jar. It had been her home from the time she was seven until she went to college, the big brick house with the casement windows and the odd mix of furniture—Helen’s mother’s late-Victorian relics, pieces from Helen and Frank’s early married days, massive mahogany monuments to their later affluence, a few modern things Violet had picked up. In her own old room, there was a white iron bed, an oak washstand complete with towel rack (on which she had hung hair ribbons), a rickety upholstered rocker, a threadbare Oriental rug, two new dressers in heavy maple. There was also a picture of the Virgin Mary crowned with thorns and framed in bamboo; Betsy hated the thorns but loved the pretty, impervious face of the Virgin, which, bedewed with blood drops though it was, gazed upward with a look of unutterable calm and sweetness. Betsy never wished for the picture to be removed, any more than she would have suggested replacing the rocker, on which you couldn’t rock without some part of it coming loose and falling off; she merely sat still on the rocker and ignored the thorns and the blood, a stoic and reasonable child who learned early to accommodate herself to inconvenience (as the Virgin, apparently, did). It would have done no good to complain to Helen, anyway, any more than it helped to complain to God. Violet and Frank could usually be won over without trying, but Helen had little indulgence for the whims of childhood, and in the end it was Helen who ruled, in a monarchy that was absolute.
    While the water boiled, Betsy ate some cold asparagus out of the refrigerator, and then she made a cup of coffee and carried it upstairs. Violet was still asleep, curled comfortably into her pillow and breathing regularly. Betsy knew her mother could sleep like that for hours once she went off. She settled herself in the chair again and picked up the letters.
    The top one was postmarked October 13, 1921, a year and two months before her mother was born. She paused before she removed the letter from its envelope. The handwriting, unmistakably her great-aunt’s, had faded with time, and the fading distanced it from the loud woman in the upsweep who disapproved of Betsy’s sex life. It seemed wrong to read this woman’s