But “why are you crying” was Mama and little Hartley, it was not Hilda and little Harold. Hilda and little Harold did not creep under the clock and cry, but it was the same clock.
“Why are you crying?”
Mama, who was older, said, “We are crying because Fanny died.” Mamalie laughed and told us the story of Mama and Uncle Hartley crouching under the clock, which was our clock in our house now and our great-grandfather had made it and kept bees and been asked to Philadelphia to sing, even at a theater or an opera house.
“They were crying,” Mamalie explained, when we wondered why she laughed about it, “because Fanny died.”
“But why is it funny?”
“Well, you see they couldn’t possibly remember Fanny. Fanny died before Hartley was born, and your own mama was just a baby, how could she remember Fanny?”
I wondered about that. Mama was crying about Fanny. Why did Mamalie think it funny? Mamalie did not seem to think of Fanny, Mama did not speak often of little Edith, and the other little girl was not mentioned. Ida said it was better for us not to share Edith’s flowers on her April birthday with the other graves, with the Lady, and with Alice. We felt somehow that this was not right, but there were things we did not understand.
We had spread Edith’s pansies equally on Alice’s twin grave and then borrowed from both of them for the Lady who was not our mother but the mother of the two (to us) grown men, our brothers, who were finishing their work at the university across the river; their names were Eric and Alfred. But Ida said the flowers were meant for Edith and “your mama would feel hurt.” We did not follow this, but had been sent with the basket of pansies and pink-and-white button-daisies for Edith’s grave, so we collected the pansies and daisies from the flat tops of the other graves and gave them back to Edith. And then there was Fanny, difficult to find in the crowded plot where Mamalie’s and Aunt Agnes’ other children were. There was Elizabeth Caroline for instance, who had been Aunt Agnes’ and Uncle Will’s first baby. But Fanny, among them all, had become a myth; she was a family by-word. “Why so sad, Helen?” Mamalie might say. Then Mama would answer, perhaps too suddenly, too swiftly, forcing the expected “Mimmie, of course, you know why. I’m crying because Fanny died.” And they would both laugh.
I seemed to have inherited that. I was the inheritor. The boys, of whom there were so many — the two brothers and later the baby-brother, the two half-brothers, the five grown Howard cousins, not to mention the small-fry, Tootie, Dick and Laddie (who lived with their parents, our Uncle Hartley and Aunt Belle in the house next to ours, on Church Street) — could not really care about Fanny; little Hartley had cried only because his tiny older sister was crying. I cared about Fanny. And she died. I inherited Fanny from Mama, from Mamalie, if you will, but I inherited Fanny. Was I indeed, Frances come back? Then I would be Papalie’s own child, for Papalie’s name was Francis; I would be like Mama; in a sense, I would be Mama, I would have important sisters, and brothers only as seemly ballast. Why was it always a girl who had died? Why did Alice die and not Alfred? Why did Edith die and not Gilbert? I did not cry because Fanny died, but I had inherited Fanny. Mama cried (although I had seldom seen her cry) because Fanny died, so Mama had cried. I did not cry. The crying was frozen in me, but it was my own, it was my own crying. There was Alice — my own half-sister, Edith — my own sister, and I was the third of this trio, these three Fates, or maybe Fanny was the third. The gift was there, but the expression of the gift was somewhere else.
It lay buried in the ground; in older countries, fragments of marble were brought to life again after long years. On these altars, flowers had lain, wild pansies, mountain laurel, roses. So we placed, in their season, daisies, roses, and peonies on those altars in the old graveyard where the stones lay flat, or in the new graveyard where the more worldly-minded newcomers to our town erected columns, artificially broken, around which carved ivy clung. They walled off their own personal little plots with white stones or low iron railings with chains, for to those newcomers to our town, death was a personal and private matter, not like the first Moravians who rested, more or less in the order of their going, under small stones that lay, even and symmetrical, like dominoes on a green baize cloth.
There was Miss Helen at school. There was the Beaver Lesson; the chart of the Beaver was hung on the wall beside the black and white drawing of the Eskimo and the Eskimo snowhouse. The Eskimo lived in a snowhouse, rather like the ones we tried to build, though we never succeeded in rounding them off neatly or, if they were any size, getting the roof to stay on. There was Miss Helen. There was the map she cut out of brown paper and the offering of a camel of mine pasted on. We brought pictures, cut out from the advertisements at the backs of magazines; Miss Helen chose those suitable for her brown-paper map of Africa; she pasted the animal or the palm tree where it belonged on the map. There was an oasis which was, she said, an island in the desert.
There were the Egyptians who lived along the river. They built little houses to live in when they were dead. In these underground houses they piled up furniture, chairs, tables, boxes, jars, food even. Some wheat taken out of a tomb (it had been buried thousands of years) grew when it was planted. The grain grew like the kernels of yellow corn we laid on a piece of mosquito-netting tied over a kitchen tumbler. We broke off the bare twigs of the chestnut trees, and the leaves came out, long before any green showed on the branches. The trees outside lined the brick walk that led up the slope from Church Street past the church and the dead-house (as we called the mortuary) to the school.
Florence said one of the Sisters was lying in the dead-house, but we could not see her. The dead-house had little windows, too high up, but Florence said Melinda had said that Nettie had said there was a Sister in the dead-house. She would lie there until they carried her to the old graveyard or more likely to Nisky Hill, as the old graveyard was very crowded. Along the fence of the old graveyard, there were mounds without stones, which were the soldiers, grey and blue, who had died in the old seminary when Papalie was there, during the Civil War. They were being taken in wagons to Philadelphia to the hospitals, but if they were too weak or going to die, they were left in the seminary on Church Street where they lay in rows in the beds where the girls had been, before they broke up the school to make a hospital of it for the soldiers from Gettysburg. There had been wounded soldiers there too, during the War of Independence.
Papa had been a soldier and Florence’s father, too. Papa was only seventeen; he told them he was eighteen. He and his brother Alvin had gone off, and Alvin had died of typhoid fever. Papa had had typhoid, too. He said his mother cried when she saw him come back; she said, “Oh, I thought it was Alvin, coming back.” Papa never told us much about himself except that his mother had been disappointed when she found it was Charles and not Alvin who had come back from the Civil War.
Papa went out to look at the stars at night. He measured them or measured something, we didn’t know quite what. We could see what Papalie was doing with his microscope on his study table. But when Papa took us into his little domed house — with a dome like the Eskimo made of ice over their snow huts — and we asked to look into his telescope, he said that we would see nothing; you could not see what he was looking at, or looking for, in the daytime. Papa looked at a thermometer and opened or closed a shutter (that opened with ropes that pulled) in the curved roof or dome of his little house, which was built higher up the mountains, above the university buildings, the other side of the river. When we kept on asking him to let us see, he did let us see, but it was as he had told us; there was only a white glare and nothing to be seen and it hurt your eyes. It would be too late to go over there at night, he said, and anyhow, at night he was busy.