Katharine was still sitting thoughtfully over her tea.
“Goodnight, lovey,” she said. “And Happy Christmas again.”
On the second landing, drowsy as she was, something caught her attention and she stopped. The crackle of a fire, surely. She considered a moment and then opened the door to her father’s room. There was the fire burning brightly, flickering over his books, his writing desk, his high bed. He might have been lying there watching the flames as she had often seen him, after a little illness, a sore throat, a cold. Or he might have gone down the hall a minute, or be on his way up from downstairs. Then the mother would come in later, soft-footed, with her quick concerned eyes and kind hands, and go swiftly round the bed and stand to survey him. She would say “What can I get you now?” or “How’s the chest?” He would lay his book face downward on the bed beside him, and complain with joyful bitterness about the treatment he was getting, and he would look to the door, to Anastasia, for a smile.
How did the fire happen to be there? She went across the room and sat down by the hearth, close to the wall. She leaned her face against the papered wall. The thought of her grandmother’s new friendliness came joyfully to her mind. Then again she felt doubt. It might only be my imagination, she thought.
All of a sudden something moved in the dark doorway. Down the hall it had come and stood looking in with a white face. Her grandmother stood there, supporting herself against the door jamb with one hand, her long white nightgown touching the floor, a dark shawl around her shoulders.
“Anastasia, here?”
“Yes.” Shivering a little, she got to her knees.
“What are you doing in this room? I thought you were in bed hours ago.”
“I heard the fire. I came in a minute. Nothing at all, I just came in, you know.”
“Now, child, get along to your bed. It’s very late. You’ll be dead tired in the morning.”
Anastasia sat back on her heels and smiled.
“I forgot, Grandma. A Happy Christmas to you. I had breakfast with Katharine after I got in from mass, and took her presents down to her. She was simply delighted. She was really very pleased.”
“Was she?”
Mrs King gathered her shawl about her and stood waiting. She looked impatient. Her hair was plaited and hanging down her back.
“Look, Anastasia, run along off to bed now. It’s too late for you to be up like this. You might catch a cold, and then where would we be?”
Her voice was sharp and cross. Anastasia looked quickly at her and the gaiety fell away from her. Where is the unforced smile now, and the ease? Get up off your knees.
“Do get up off your knees, your stockings will be ruined.”
She came hesitantly into the room.
“I’ve lighted this fire every Christmas since your father died. It brings the room to life, and I sit here a while. That’s all.”
After her voice ceased there was an end to the conversation and nothing more to be said. Anastasia slipped awkwardly past her and up to her own room.
There, in the yellow light, was the little table of presents.
She switched out the light and undressed hurriedly in the dark. Her mind was full of wry, distressed thoughts. The thought of her grandmother’s unfriendliness gave her deep shame, and she strove to forget it. I am a visitor here, she thought in despair and anger, and fell into a frightened sleep, filled with dreams.
The Christmas season passed. The days came and went, bringing nothing. There was a listlessness about the house that had seemed absent in the days before Christmas. The grandmother sat daily by the fire and Anastasia seldom joined her. With the growing of the year their separate lives seemed to dwindle away in shyness, and the house enclosed them aloofly, like a strange house that had not known them when they were happier.
One day, early in the new year, Anastasia stood outside Miss Kilbride’s house, looking in. The house had always been in her memory as any far-off thing is, and now she looked at it intently and even anxiously. She had come here very seldom in the time before, and yet the place was dear to her because she had first come as a child, being led by the hand and walking with some awe. She remembered her mother’s hand, strong and careful then, and her mother’s pale veiled face.
She opened the gate with an impatient sigh. This was the house where Miss Kilbride had lived in her youth, and she still cultivated flowers in the same round-and-round stepping patterns that had been laid out when she was young. The small gate opened with a squeak into the frozen desolate garden and Anastasia closed it gently behind her and went to knock on the front door. A young maid wearing a neat white apron opened the door. She left Anastasia in the little front parlour.
Miss Kilbride hurried in almost immediately.
“I’m glad you thought of coming,” she said excitedly. “I was sitting up there dying for someone to talk to. The weather has been so bad, you know, I can’t go out.”
She put a match to the fire and sat down, and at once scrambled to her feet and peered around the room for ashtrays. Under a stiff, high-belted skirt her hips were high and narrow and bony. As she talked her hands clung nervously together, even while they held a cigarette; they separated only to smooth her blouse, or pull the front of her skirt, or touch the great brooch at her chicken throat. She watched Anastasia, covertly and openly, and met her smiles with a quick smile, and her remarks with a serious, edgy attention.
Her room was small and tidy, a parlour, not formal, but stiff in a gentle unconscious way. There were two upright upholstered chairs, and a small settee with curved arms that had a small sausage-shaped bolster at either end. And there were a patterned carpet, and patterned wallpaper, and a tall many-sided screen, and a great many china knickknacks. The window hangings were looped back with tasseled cords. Over the mantelpiece hung a large oil painting, a portrait of Miss Kilbride’s mother, who had been a straight-haired blonde woman with a long mouth and large suspicious blue eyes.
“Do you remember that picture of my mother from when you were last here, Anastasia?”
“Oh, yes. I remember it very well.”
She glanced up at it, at the stare, and the carefully painted, useless hands, grasping a small white fan.
“You know she was bedridden for many years before she died. She lay in her room upstairs for so many years that sometimes I think she’s up there still. But of course that’s very silly. And I rarely sit here. My books are all up in my room.”
She was self-conscious. She chattered with animation, and smoked.
Anastasia said, “You must have been very lonely after she died.”
“I was. I missed her voice and her concern for me. And the little demands that her life made on me. All the little demands that one usually makes on oneself, she made on me. That was very natural. Sometimes I thought it must seem touching to others, to see such a strong-minded, beautiful woman so dependent. The window in her room, for instance. She liked it open at a certain time. I used to go in at the time and open it, and go out again, back to whatever I was doing. Then there it was open, you see, just as though she had done it herself. Then the door to her room. She liked me to leave it open from breakfast till noon, when the household work was being done. So that she might feel that she was overseeing her home as she always had. During that time she wrote letters and did her accounts and things like that. Then from twelve to one-thirty her door was closed and she rested, and at one-thirty I opened it again, and she had lunch. And so on. She used to joke and say I was her other self. Sometimes she would call me that. She would say ‘Other Self, I think the window has to be closed a littler earlier today’; or something like that. Then we would laugh.
“She used to say that we were very much alike. I was delicate as a child, a weak little thing. She almost died when I was born, and so did I. She became bedridden when I was seventeen. Nowadays they might have cured her, who can tell. But why should I depress you with all this?”