She thanks them for breakfast and offers to help clear the long table covered in mustard-yellow plastic, but Elspeth hisses for her to stop.
“Please! We wouldn’t hear of it, Clare. You are a guest in Maude Donegal’s house.”
Morag agrees vehemently. “Indeed, yes. I will clear the table. I believe it’s my shift.” She heaves herself onto her foreshortened legs, snorting with laughter as at an obscure joke.
The great-aunts are taking turns at housekeeping, it seems. They tell Clare that until probate court and the settling of their sister’s estate, they are obliged to downsize the household staff.
“‘Taking turns’—listen to her! I do most of the housework.” Morag laughs genially.
“You do not! That is a slander.”
“Slander, is it?”
“I do all of the finances and mental work, which is a far worse strain . . .”
As the sisters bicker, Clare drifts to a window to glance outside. Where has Gerard gone? She can see only a slovenly privet hedge trailing across a cracked flagstone path, dripping rain. It seemed that Gerard had departed in that direction, but there is no sign of him.
“Gerard lives in this house with you?” Clare asks.
“Gerard lives in his mother’s house, as we do,” Elspeth says. “We are not Donegals, you know—Morag and me. Our family name is Lacey.”
Elspeth speaks with an air of pride, as if the name Lacey might impress Clare. Morag amends, “Our maiden name, it is—Lacey.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! Lacey is our family name, not our maiden name—since we are not married.”
“Of course we are not married! I certainly am not.” Morag laughs again, heartily.
“And so, we can’t have a ‘maiden’ name if we are not married. We have only our own surnames. Sometimes I feel that I’m speaking to an obstinate idiot who will not understand the simplest facts.” Elspeth laughs in exasperation, rolling her eyes at Clare.
But Morag is determined to claim Clare’s attention. “Maude was the Lacey sister who dared to marry. She had the courage others lacked. To ‘reproduce the species’—for some, this challenge is too much.”
“And she married very well. An older gentleman—”
“—Le-land—”
“But she never turned her back on us—not for long.”
“What d’you mean by that—not for long? Maude was generous to her family, always—”
“—almost always—”
“—and once tragedy struck her life, she needed her sisters close beside her.”
Tragedy?—this must mean the automobile accident, Clare thinks. But she doesn’t dare ask the great-aunts about this sensitive subject.
The great-aunts tell Clare of how Gerard had to drop out of the seminary just a few months before he was to be ordained. A terrible tragedy for the young man, he’d worked very hard for five, six years. “However long it takes to become a Jesuit. A very long time. He’d been so devout—spiritual—nothing like the way he is now. In fact, Gerard had been the one to discover—the accident.”
Clare stands very still, listening. The accident?
“Seeing such a sight was traumatic for Gerard. He never recovered. He had what is called a nervous breakdown—never recovered from that.”
“And what a tragedy for the Church, losing such a devout priest! Everyone who knew him said how it was Gerard’s destiny to be a priest—you could see holiness in his face when he’d been just a young boy.”
“He sang in the choir—the purest boy-soprano . . .”
“Not like Conor—he wasn’t the type to give up the world for God, as Gerard was . . .”
“Oh, Conor! He paid a terrible price, too—for loving the world too well.”
“For loving her too well.”
“Ah! God bless his soul.”
“God bless all their souls.”
Clare listens avidly, gratefully. Her? Was this her mother, Kathryn? She believes that in their maddeningly oblique way, the great-aunts are telling her crucial information. “The accident—do you mean the accident my parents died in? A car crash?”
Elspeth catches Morag’s eye as if to warn her—Don’t say a word.
But this is so overt. Clare surmises that she is expected to notice, and to inquire.
“You said that Gerard ‘discovered’ the accident? Do you mean—on the road? On a highway? Did he drive out to see where they were? Is that what you mean?” Clare feels herself flailing like a drowning swimmer. But the great-aunts merely gaze at her like observers onshore, curious, not so very kindly.
Elspeth sighs again, vexed. Morag’s slit of a mouth puckers with the effort not to laugh.
“Whoever said that Gerard discovered anyone on a highway? Certainly not. Gerard was the one who—(we never knew the details, the details were kept from us)—discovered the—”
“—the bodies . . .”
“—the remains, I was going to say. Remains is the proper term, I believe.”
“Remains is a terrible term! You just stop.”
“You stop. You are being ridiculous.”
Clare is feeling light-headed, disoriented. It’s an effort to continue to smile sweetly at the elderly women who glare at each other and not at her, as if she isn’t their intended audience.
They have sent a volley of small arrows into her heart. She has no idea how badly she has been wounded, just yet.
“Excuse me! Enough,” she says before she retreats upstairs to her room. There, in the antiquated bathroom, she succumbs to a fit of gagging, squatting over the ancient toilet, sweating and miserable; she succeeds in vomiting up only a thin, rancid-smelling liquid. But whatever is making her ill has hardened into a gluey little ball in her stomach, not easily dislodged.
Do they hate me because I am a beneficiary of their sister’s estate?
Because I am not one of them, I have no right to be here?
And have they poisoned me—again?
8.
Resolutely, throughout her life she has not thought of them—her (birth) parents.
Now she thinks of them obsessively. Thoughts like ticks that have burrowed into her very flesh.
Tiny, loathsome insects you dare not try to remove with tweezers, lest their black bodies break into pieces, irretrievable.
Desperate to know whether her parents are alive or dead. If dead, how? Why? And why was she given up for adoption when the Donegals were well-to-do?