Constance Read Free

hated being looked after. When she was in the hospital she seemed smaller and sicker than she ever did at home because at home she had some influence over the household. Mildred Knapp was coming in every day and the pair of them would consult on domestic matters.
    The funeral was dreadful. I had charge of Iris or I’d have fallen apart. Daddy fell apart. Back at the house people were milling about. Mildred had made sandwiches. There were drinks. I was very distraught. But the adults seemed to think it was some kind of a cocktail party. At one point I heard one of our neighbors say to another that the poor doctor “didn’t know what hit him.” I had an extreme reaction to those words. I had to leave the room. There was a bathroom under the front stairs, a dank little lavatory with noisy pipes where I often went to read or just think, with the door locked. I threw up in the toilet. I heard it again:
He didn’t know what hit him.
I’d heard it before, perhaps in a dream. I sat there for a long time with my head in my hands.
    It passed off soon enough. I recovered, more or less, and life went on. The next time it happened I thought somebody was talking to me but there was nobody in the room. It came as a shock to realize it was in my head. I didn’t tell anybody else about it. But I never thought I was going mad. It was just a bad memory.
    One night in New York Iris asked me if I remembered the day Harriet died. It wasn’t an easy question. I’d boxed up my memories of those last weeks and secured them in a room in my mind I tried never to enter if I could help it. I knew I was watching her die and one time I asked Daddy when it was going to happen. I remember how clinical he was, how very cold.
    —A few more days, he said. A very few.
    I hadn’t realized it would be so soon. It was heartbreaking. You didn’t have to be an impressionable young girl of strong imaginative tendency to quaff the brimming cup of pathos in those words! I began to want her suffering to end. I wanted her to die and I felt guilty for wanting it. But how merciful it would be if she slipped away, or if I quietly ended her life for her, just covered her face with a pillow and pressed down hard for five minutes. I was sure that was what she wanted. I hated how thin she’d become, nothing but bones, and her dim, drugged eyes gazing out at me, and always that horrid sweet smell of decay in the room. Her hand like a claw rising from the counterpane, clutching at me when I drew near—
    I couldn’t say this to Iris. She was like Harriet, she had a big heart. She was an open book. Nobody said she wasn’t a proper person. I remember telling her about the sadness of those days, and Daddy saying that death was a good thing if it brought an end to suffering. Just a sort of sleep, he said. Nothing about an afterlife. He was always a godless man.
    —You know we all thought she was by herself when she died? said Iris.
    I did. There were times when nobody was in the room with her and that was when it happened. Daddy went in a few minutes later and discovered the body. I remember Mildred Knapp telling us in the kitchen later that day as we sat staring into our teacups that she chose to go when she was alone. She said her husband, Walter, went that way. Then she clapped her hand to her mouth.
    I never forgot how Mildred’s hand flew to her mouth when she said the name of her late husband. Walter. Walter Knapp. She’d never mentioned him before. We hadn’t thought of Mildred having a
husband
, sour old Mildred. It made a strong impression on Iris too.
    —You get to choose? she whispered.
    —Sometimes, said Mildred. If you’re lucky.
    Harriet’s death was in the end a relief but it took Daddy a long time to get over it. I realized later he felt bad that he wasn’t with her at the end, to ease the pain of her departure. All this was in my mind as Iris told me she wasn’t alone.
    —What are you saying?
    —I was with her.
    I was shocked. She told me