While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [34]
“Ted was all I had,” said Mrs. Faulkner. She said it as though it were a reproach.
“He was a fine man,” said Ruth uneasily.
“My little boy,” said Mrs. Faulkner. It was an aside to an unseen, sympathetic audience. She shrugged. “You must be cold. Do come in, Miss Hurley.” Hurley was Ruth’s maiden name.
“I could just as easily stay at a hotel,” said Ruth. The woman’s gaze made her feel foreign, self-conscious about her drawling speech, about her clothes, which were insubstantial, better suited to a warmer climate.
“I wouldn’t hear of your staying anywhere but here. We have so much to talk about. When is Ted’s child to be born?”
“In four months.” Ruth slid her suitcase just inside the door, and sat, with an air of temporariness, on the edge of a sofa covered with slippery chintz. The only illumination in the overheated room came from a lamp on the mantel, its frail light muddled by a tortoiseshell shade. “Ted told me so much about you, I’ve been dying to meet you,” said Ruth.
On the long train ride, Ruth had pretended for hours at a time that she was talking to Mrs. Faulkner, winning her affection from the first. She had rehearsed and polished her biography a dozen times in anticipation of Mrs. Faulkner’s saying, “Now tell me something about yourself.” She was ready with her opening line: “Well, I have no relatives, I’m afraid—no close ones, anyway. My father was a colonel in the cavalry, and …” But Ted’s mother didn’t put the opening question.
Silent and thoughtful, Mrs. Faulkner poured two tiny glasses of sherry from an expensive-looking decanter. “The personal effects—” she said at last, “they told me they were sent to you.”
Ruth was puzzled for a moment. “Oh, the things he had with him overseas? Yes, I have them. It’s customary, I think—I mean, it’s a matter of routine to send them to the wife.”
“I suppose it’s all done automatically by machines in Washington,” said Mrs. Faulkner ironically. “A general just pushes a button, and—” She left the sentence unfinished. “Could I have the things, please?”
“They’re mine,” said Ruth, and thought how childish that must sound. “I think he wanted me to have them.” She looked down at the absurdly small glass of sherry, and wished for twenty more to take the edge off the ordeal.
“If it comforts you to think so, go right on thinking of them as yours,” said Mrs. Faulkner patiently. “I simply want to have everything in one place—what little is left.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
Mrs. Faulkner turned her back, and spoke softly, piously. “Having it all together makes him just a little nearer.” She turned a switch on a floor lamp, suddenly filling the room with white brilliance. “These things will mean nothing to you,” she said. “If you were a mother, you might understand how utterly priceless they are to me.” She dabbed at a speck of dust on the ornate, glass-faced cabinet that squatted on lions’ paws against the wall. “You see? I’ve left room in the cabinet for the things I knew you had.”
“It’s very sweet,” said Ruth. She wondered what Ted might have thought of the cabinet—with its baby shoes, the book of nursery rhymes, the penknife, the Boy Scout badge … Apart from its cheap sentimentality, Ted, too, would have sensed something unwholesome, sick about it. Mrs. Faulkner stared at the trinkets wide-eyed, unblinking, bewitched.
Ruth spoke to break the spell. “Ted told me you were doing awfully well at your shop. Is business as good as ever?”
“I’ve given it up,” said Mrs. Faulkner absently.
“Oh? Then you’re giving all your time to your club activities?”
“I’ve resigned.”
“I see.” Ruth fidgeted, taking off her gloves and putting them