Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [121]
Thursday afternoon Agatha and Daphne washed all the dishes, even those in the cupboards, and Thomas vacuumed downstairs while Ian tried to reduce the general disorder. Stuart, who turned out to be fairly useless around the house, watched a football game with Doug.
Thursday night at ten they had turkey sandwiches (in California it was seven) and then Agatha dusted the downstairs furniture, Daphne scrubbed the woodwork, and Thomas polished the silver.
Friday Daphne went back to Floral Fantasy, and by the time she got home the upstairs had been vacuumed and dusted as well and the washing machine repaired and all the laundry done. Bee’s little walnut desk in the living room stood bare, its cubbyholes dark as missing teeth; and when Daphne opened the drawers below she found only the essentials: a box of envelopes, a photo album whose six filled pages covered the past twenty-two years, and the document transforming those two strangers, Thomas and Agatha “Dulsimore,” into Bedloes and tucking them into Ian’s safekeeping along with Daphne herself. This last was so familiar she could have quoted it verbatim, but she scanned it yet again and so did Agatha, breathing audibly over Daphne’s left shoulder. “What’s disturbing,” Agatha told her (not for the first time), “is we don’t know a thing about our genetic heritage. What if we’re prone to diabetes? Or epilepsy?”
Diplomatically, Daphne refrained from pointing out that she herself did know her heritage, at least on her father’s side. She shook her head and put the document back in the drawer.
Saturday Ian went to Good Works, but Daphne stayed home to continue with the cleaning. “Grandpa,” Agatha said, “today we’re sorting through Grandma’s belongings. Anything you want to keep, you’d better let us know now.”
“Oh,” he said, and then he said, “Well, her lipstick, maybe. Her perfume bottles.”
“Lipstick? Perfume?”
“I like her bureau to have things on top of it. I don’t want to see it all blank.”
“Couldn’t we just put a vase on top?”
“No, we couldn’t,” her grandfather said firmly.
“Well, all right.”
“And I’d like her robe left hanging in her closet.”
“All right, Grandpa.”
“But you might ship her jewelry to Claudia. Or at least what jewelry is real.”
“Well, you’re going to have to tell us which is which,” Agatha said, for of course they wouldn’t know real from Woolworth’s.
But later, when they had packed all Bee’s limp, sad, powdery-smelling lingerie into the cartons Thomas brought up from the basement, they called for Doug to advise them on the jewelry and he didn’t answer. They’d assumed he was watching TV, but when they checked they found only Stuart, channel-hopping rapidly from golf to cartoons to cooking shows. Daphne said, “I bet he’s at the foreigners’.”
“Honestly,” Agatha said.
“The foreigners have a VCR now, did you know? They own every Rita Hayworth movie ever made.”
“Run get him, will you?” Agatha asked Thomas.
But Thomas said, “Maybe we should just let him stay there.”
“Well, what’ll we do about the jewelry?”
“Send Claudia the whole box, for heaven’s sake,” Daphne said. She told Thomas, “Wrap the whole box for mailing. You’ll find paper and string in the pantry.”
“But it isn’t just the jewelry,” Agatha said. “We need him here to answer other questions, too.”
“Agatha, will you drop it? He doesn’t want to be around for this.”
“Well. Sorry,” Agatha said stiffly.
They went back upstairs to their grandparents’ bedroom, and while Thomas bore the jewelry box off to the pantry Daphne and Agatha started on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. They had assumed this part would be easy—just sweaters, surely—but underneath lay stacks of moldering photo albums Daphne had never seen before. “Oh, those,” Agatha said. “They used to be downstairs in the desk.” She picked up a manila envelope and peered inside. Daphne, meanwhile, flipped through the topmost album and found rows of streaky, pale rectangles showing ghostlike