Edith’s Diary Read Free Page A

the rest of her brindle with a patch or two of black. A hearth-loving cat, Edith thought, and in Brunswick Corner she’d have a real hearth.
    Cliffie at that moment was gazing out the window of his parents’ bedroom. He realized that his heart was beating faster. The move was real, not something he had imagined, otherwise the carpets wouldn’t be up, the refrigerator wouldn’t be nearly empty. Cliffie often imagined much more violent things, like a bomb going off under their apartment building, even under all of New York, the whole city going up sky-high with no survivors. But suddenly this, their moving to another state, was somehow like a real bomb going off under his own feet. He looked around the neatly stripped bedroom, noticed the small leatherbound travel clock on his parents’ night-table, and at once thought of hurling it out the window. Cliffie imagined it hitting the pavement, maybe not breaking because of its leather cover, and imagined a stranger – delighted at having found something valuable – picking it up and pocketing it quickly, before anyone could notice him. Cliffie felt like breaking something, felt like hitting back at his parents.
    Edith’s big diary finally went between the second and third folded sheets in one of the crates. She must record this day, and tomorrow, right away in Pennsylvania, she thought, no matter how busy she was in the new house. She was rather glad she hadn’t filled the diary with trivia all these years, because it meant that more than half the diary was still empty. The diary had been a present when she was twenty, still at Bryn Mawr, given her by a man called Rudolf Mallikin, who’d been about thirty (to her an older man), and she remembered with a slight embarrassment that she’d asked him for a Bible – when he’d said, around Christmas time, that he wanted to give her something nice, something she really wanted. That had been Edith’s metaphysical period, Jakob Boehme, Swedenborg, Mary Baker Eddy and all that. Not that she hadn’t a Bible, in a way, in her family’s bookshelf, but she had wanted a nice leatherbound one all her own. But since Rudolf’s objective had been to get her to go to bed with him, he had declared with a laugh that he simply couldn’t give her a Bible, anything else but that, a fact which Edith later understood. So he had found a beautiful blank book, not even lines in it, so that she could make little sketches or draw maps, if she wished. Its brown leather was grainy and tooled with a gold Florentine design. The gold had flaked off to a great extent, but Edith had kept the leather oiled, and considering it was fifteen years old, the book showed only moderate signs of wear. To Edith it looked more handsome now than when it was new. She kept the diary always among her own things, her typewriter paper, dictionary, World Almanac, if she had a spare room to work in, as she had had here in Grove Street, or at least among her own things if she had to work in a corner of the living room. But Brett wasn’t the type to pry, that was one of the nice things about him, and as for Cliff, Edith simply couldn’t imagine him being interested in her diary.
    And – Edith smiled to herself as she tackled more of Cliffie’s possessions – she seldom looked back at what she’d written in her diary. It was simply
there
,
and an entry helped her sometimes to organize and analyse her life-in-progress. She remembered she had opened the diary at random about a year ago, and had winced at something written when she was twenty-two. The more recent entries were apt to be about moods and thoughts. Such as one she remembered quite well written at least eight years ago:
    ‘Isn’t it safer, even wiser, to believe that life has no meaning at all?’
    She’d felt better after getting that down on paper. Such an attitude wasn’t phony armor, she thought, it was a fact that life had no meaning. One simply went on and on, worked on, and did one’s best. The joy