A Season in Purgatory Read Free

framed on the walls. Here also was the piano that Grace liked to play after dinner, when she gathered her children around her to sing Irish songs.
    On a bench in the curve of the stairway Constant noticed two coats, tossed there casually, as if the owners were in a hurry. One was a man’s coat and the other a fur coat, either mink or sable. I did not know the difference then. Constant picked up the fur coat and looked at the satin lining. There was a label from Revillon Frères, and the initials
STS
intertwined.A strange, distant look came into his face as he dropped it back on the bench.
    “Did your parents come back?” I asked.
    He signaled me first not to talk and then to follow him. We went through a doorway into a back hallway. He peered into the kitchen to check on Bridey, but she wasn’t there. I followed him up a back stairway. Opening a door to the second-floor hallway, he peered out and then walked down to the sewing room, where he found the envelope beneath Bridey’s darning basket. Then we retraced our steps to the first floor.
    “I don’t think we should leave by the front door,” he said. He spoke quietly, as if he were afraid of being overheard upstairs. “We’ll go out through the kitchen.”
    “I actually was never in a house this large before. I would be keen to see something more than the back halls and the maids’ stairway,” I said.
    “Some other time,” he replied. While the older siblings were still a bit in awe of the enormous house in which they lived, Constant and Kitt, the youngest two, accepted it completely. It was a casual thing for them, all they had ever known.
    Later, back at school, when I asked him what had happened at his house, he said, “That mink coat wasn’t my mother’s.”
    “Was the other coat your father’s?”
    “Yes,” he answered.
    “But—?” I wanted it to be spelled out to me, what I thought he meant.
    A slight scowl appeared on his face, clouding the clearness of his forehead. I had seen that look before. It appeared whenever there was what he perceived to be a criticism of anyone in his family. It meant, I knew, not to pursue the subject at hand. I didn’t.
    * * *
    The next morning on the tennis court, Constant and I waited for Kitt and Mary Pat to finish their match with the tennis teacher before we played. “Hi, kid,” said Kitt, when she walked off the court. Kitt called everyone kid. They all called everyone kid, but mostly Kitt. When she said it to you, you knew that you had been accepted, that you were not exactly one of them, but one of the people who orbited around their magnificence.
    Constant was everyone’s favorite in the family. He was flattered out of his senses from earliest childhood. Kitt was Constant’s favorite. She had the puzzling kind of good looks that are unconnected with beauty yet are more arresting, and a flippant outspoken manner that delighted her siblings but disturbed her mother.
    “Where is she?” asked Kitt, walking past a new maid with a frightened expression who opened the door of her mother’s house. Kitt often referred to her mother as she and her.
    “In the pantry.”
    “
Mother
in the
pantry
? Doing what? Firing the cook?”
    “Doing the flowers.”
    “Oh, yes, the flowers.”
    She was then, when I first met her, a student at the Sacred Heart Convent in another small Connecticut town. No Farmington, no Foxcroft, for the Bradley ladies. They went to the Madams, as the Sacred Heart sisters were called. The Madams were the aristocrats of nuns, from good families themselves, and rich ones. Agnes Bradley, the eldest sister in the family, I later discovered, was said to have longed for the veil, longed to have become a Madam herself, but madness intervened. Her madness. The thing the family never talked about. She might have been dead, as dead as the dead brother whose plane went down in Vietnam. She was away,in an institution in Maine, tended by hardworking nuns, not Madams, who might have been nurses or