Free Family Matters by Kitty Burns Florey Page B

letters, as it wouldn’t have seemed wrong to read Aunt Marion’s.
    But she opened it. The paper was expensive and had endured. Was this the time of Marion’s prosperity? Her Pride of Passion period? No, the triumph of her muse hadn’t occurred until 1927. The paper was either an extravagance or a gift; both had figured largely in her early, unfettered life.
    Dear Helen, I will come to you at Thanksgiving. You must stop giving way to these morbid streaks, and to call it the unspeakable thing is no way to begin to cope with it and accept it. Helen, your religion should teach you this. Have you talked to anyone? (I mean clergy.) You worry me, that you don’t get over this sorrow, when you were, I always believed, the strong sister, and the churchgoer. Dear, don’t speak of punishment, not for you or for him. Leave it to God. I must see you, just carry on til I come. Your loving sister, Mamie.
    Betsy looked up blankly. Across the room her mother slept and smiled, oblivious. Betsy glanced at the envelope again. Sure enough, her grandmother’s name and address and, inside, the signature was the nickname no one had used in years but that she still identified as her great-aunt’s. And yet it all seemed to concern strangers. What sorrow? Was it the death of Helen’s baby? And why punishment?
    She flipped through the letters. There were eight of them, the envelopes all alike, and the stamps. The dates ranged from October 1921 to March 1923. Betsy began slowly to read them. It took some time to decipher the florid, faded script. She could understand why the young Violet, inquisitive though she was, had given up on them, and the more she read the more she thought it was a good thing she hadn’t gotten all the way through. What would an impressionable teenager have made of them?
    By the third letter Betsy was fully awake and relishing the slow pace. It was four-thirty, and she didn’t want to go home. The curses, the slammed door, the light going on like a slap in the face awaited her there. It was another world from the world of her grandfather’s house, a world of quiet, peace, safety, with her mother deep in calm and blessed sleep. Even the letters: Odd and wretched though they might be, the love between the sisters was unmistakable, like something in a book—but her great-aunt was real, her grandmother had been real, and the love was real, too. It was what was missing back at her apartment, that kind of secure and comfortable love. But she needn’t go home while the letters lasted. She finished her coffee and read.
    They continued to make no sense, or, rather, they had their own logic but it bore no relation to anything else, so far as Betsy could see. The first four letters were similar: attempts by Marion to calm Helen in her sorrow. They were all from late 1921 and early 1922. Betsy frowned over the inspirational tone. This was Aunt Marion, then, back when she was Mamie, and wasn’t so far removed from the prose of her family’s religion, and wasn’t so outspoken that she couldn’t adjust her responses to the feelings of her audience. An ardent young woman full of affection for her grieving sister. But why grieving? Nothing specific was said about the baby. And though it was never mentioned, Betsy sensed that Helen might have been suicidal—certainly badly depressed. But why?
    Betsy thought about her grandmother. Helen had been old even when Frank still seemed young. She was little and hard, with a brown face, and tiny hands with blunt fingers. She was a devout Catholic. She kept a sampler on the kitchen wall on which she had stitched, as a girl, the awesome injunction, “Pray Without Ceasing,” and what she prayed for was the conversion of her husband and the reconversion of her daughter, who had bolted the Church after her marriage. She took Betsy to Mass every Sunday while Violet slept late. Helen was not patient with little girls; she seemed to