The Christmas Pearl Read Free Page B

handmade gifts are almost unheard of in today’s world. Knit someone a sweater or crochet an afghan? Not anymore! They would be especially horrified that people give gift certificates via the Internet—whatever that is—that they think the fact that they spend a few dollars with a couple of clicks is an actual exertion. A great personal sacrifice! Priorities are hugely different in today’s world. I imagine all this technology is useful in many endeavors. But like private educationand small business, as you might have guessed I would have greatly preferred a handmade bookmark to a free meal at some chain establishment posing as a restaurant.
    This is just me. Even though I feel as spry as I did, oh, thirty years ago, the fact is that I am an elderly lady. It was Christmastime again, everyone was here, and as I have pointed out, our crazy old house was giving us a dose of continuous holiday live theater, a protest from beyond the grave.
    The walls were moaning, the pictures were askew, the lights were switching from dim to bright for no good reason at all except that the house itself or the ghosts in it didn’t like the way my daughter, her husband, my grandchildren and great-grandchildren were running their cockeyed show. I was just trying to stay out of their way.
    Lying in bed at night, I privately admitted that a lot of the blame was mine. I was plenty vexed with myself for not encouraging Barbara the way Pearl pushed us to create holiday thrills. Here was something else I had been thinking about lately: I missed Pearl more than I missed my mother.
    My mother loved the holidays, but she had Pearl to do everything while she saw to her social commitments. Yes, she would begin the season with us and liked to decorate, but as the parties rolled around, weseldom saw her. Sometimes I thought I hardly knew my mother at all. Losing her at thirteen was so traumatic that I struggled for years to remember the details of her face in my mind, and so photographs of her were that much more precious to me. I took an oath that I would always be available to my children.
    Later on, when I married and took over the house, I never had someone like Pearl to work for me. I only had Barbara. I made my share of cupcakes, but I wasn’t involved in activities outside the home. Barbara and Fred were easy enough to care for, and my father, who lived with us until his call to heaven, helped, too. Barbara was a quiet, understanding child who always seemed to find ways to amuse herself.
    Now, don’t go telling this, but there was a time when Fred and I worried that Barbara would never marry. It was around that time that the house started to moan. The house and its spirits wanted a guarantee that another family would take my place and Fred’s when Saint Peter knocked on our door.
    Poor Barbara! She had unfortunately inherited my grandmother Dora’s pronounced nose and some other quirks and personality traits that would never make her the belle of the ball. Thank all the stars in the sky that there truly is a lid for every pot because when Barbara was about twenty, Cleland Taylor appeared on the scene with his boyish but patrician looks. Cleland was from a nice family, but was an unspectacular scholar who demonstrated a startling lack of ambition. However, he held a degree in political science from the University of Virginia and a job in a bank here in Charleston, rising to the position of manager—which in those days meant something more than it does today.
    Privately, I would worry with Fred that Cleland’s proposal of marriage to Barbara was based on financial security. Not love. He said I was a skeptic. My Fred, ever the diplomat, never missed an opportunity to point out any evidence of affection on Cleland’s part. They finally made it down the aisle with our blessings. After a short honeymoon in San Francisco, they moved in with us, in the time-honored tradition of my family’s history.
    On the surface, Barbara’s early years of