The Late Clara Beame Read Free Page A

when we were young. She was always so assured. I used to try to imitate her. I couldn’t. The real reason why Aunt Clara sent us to different schools was because Alice didn’t want me around. But then, I was never as intelligent as she was, and didn’t make friends easily. I suppose she was ashamed of me.”
    “Ashamed of you!” Henry said incredulously.
    “I don’t know why I even told you,” Laura replied. “But Christmas seems to bring back memories, doesn’t it? I can remember the three of us here around the fire, Aunt Clara, Alice and I. We opened our presents on Christmas Eve. Even Alice laughed then, and she didn’t laugh often.”
    “She doesn’t love you much more now,” Henry reminded her, “since she was practically disinherited.”
    “I do wish you liked her more,” Laura said, her voice subdued.
    “Well,” Henry stated matter of factly, “I can see how she begrudges you everything.”
    To his surprise Laura shook her head. “But she doesn’t really, darling! I know. Aunt Clara died when we were nineteen, and Alice had already been working in New York for two months. Neither of us wanted to go on with college.” She stopped, but her dark eyes fixed themselves earnestly on her husband. “I was the ward of Aunt Clara’s bank and lawyers, and they persuaded me to continue my education, though I was an awful student, honestly. Then when I was twenty-one, and just a junior, I stopped.” She hesitated, but her eyes still remained on Henry. “And on the very day I was twenty-one I went to Alice and told her I was going to divide Aunt Clara’s money with her, equally.”
    Henry sat up, his face flushed with interest. “Well?” he said, when his wife showed no signs of continuing.
    “She absolutely refused,” Laura said in a small voice. “She was very bitter about Aunt Clara, because of the will. ‘If that’s the way she wanted it, that’s the way it’s going to be,’ she told me.”
    “But that would have been a million and a half dollars!”
    Henry was incredulous. “You actually mean the stupid girl rejected it?”
    “Yes. But Alice wasn’t stupid, Henry. She’s just proud.”
    Henry shook his head, marveling.
    “And then I didn’t know what to do,” Laura went on. “So later I deposited one hundred thousand dollars in Alice’s name, in a bank, and let the bank notify her. She wouldn’t accept that, either. Somehow I thought she’d take the smaller amount. She wrote me a very cold letter, thanking me, and that’s all.”
    Henry slapped his knee. “Think of what poor Sam could have done with that money! He’d have bought out that concern, and Alice would be rich now.”
    “I don’t think Alice cares a thing about money,” Laura said.
    Henry burst out laughing. “Everybody cares about money, Laura.”
    “You don’t,” Laura replied tenderly. “You won’t even take any of mine. You let me pay Mrs. Daley and Edith, and buy myself extra clothes, that’s all.”
    “I told you, before we were married, that we’d have to live on my salary.” He walked across the room to his wife and ruffled her hair.
    Laura buried her face in his sleeve. “Oh, Henry, I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would have been, this Christmas, with the baby in his crib upstairs!” He held her tightly to him. “Now, now. There’s nothing we can do about it. Perhaps next Christmas it’ll be another story. Besides, you’re drawing the line pretty fine. If — if it hadn’t happened, the baby wouldn’t have been born until January or early February. It was bad enough, God knows, but there’s no use pretending that the baby would be upstairs in his crib.”
    But Laura still mourned her dead child. “I hadn’t even told you,” she murmured. “I wanted to be absolutely sure. And then I had to play Peter Pan on that swing!”
    “You were always swinging in the orchard,” Henry reminded her. “Who could know that the ropes were about to fall apart?”
    “I was so excited,