Good Family by Terry Gamble Read Free Book Online Page A

though the weight is still heavy in my chest, I have taken your words of comfort to heart. Indeed, as you say, God sends children to cleave us to the world while teaching us not to love too much. In my weaker moments, I wonder why He would expect us to strike so precarious a balance. Perhaps the measure of our lives rests on such a fulcrum. That He loves her as we do, I have no doubt, and possibly she was spared a greater unhappiness by avoiding the burdens of adulthood. Yet I shall always wonder who she would have been. So, too, shall I miss those dear brown eyes that reflected the world in innocence .
    You may tell me not to dwell on these things—that my duty now is to my sons. But please indulge me my despair, for her short life was the bitterest sweetness, longer in my womb than under this too bright sky. I takecare not to expose my weakness to my husband, but hopelessness contaminates this house as surely as the fever that went before .
    Please keep us in your prayers because, at this moment, I cannot offer mine.
    One might think that, with a thirty percent mortality rate, parents of the time would be better braced for the loss of a child. Who would risk becoming fond? The photos I’ve seen of Elizabeth show a fat-cheeked infant with brown eyes drowning in cascades of ruffles and lace. The tintype in the oval frame on the dining-room wall displays her seated in the lap of my grandfather, my great-uncle looking on. T wo weeks later, she started crying, exhibited a rash and a fever and, within three days, was gone. Scarlet fever wasn’t an epidemic in 1890, but there were outbreaks. In 1887, each and every one of the children in the village of Harrison, Ohio, perished. Perhaps one of the maids in Cincinnati brought it to Sand Isle. Perhaps another child.
    I can imagine my forebear kneeling by nine-month-old Elizabeth’s crib—the same crib, perhaps, in which my daughter, Sadie, died. The original Sadie Addison, in her cotton skirts and silk blouse, prayed in the confines of her summerhouse, where she and her husband have planned their Elysium far from the shores of the Ohio River. Surely, the vicissitudes of life—the dank pollution, the rotting, sulfurous air—can’t reach them here. The child’s cheeks are flushed—not with health, but fever. Elizabeth’s eyes glisten, the brown eyes of the child’s matching those of my great-grandmother.
    There is no poetry left in my hand, she writes. I am bereaved beyond words.
    Reeling, I return again and again to my great-grandmother’s letters until my mind is suddenly on gardens. I start thinking about gathering flowers to put in vases in the cousins’ rooms. Surely something can be resurrected from the weeds below the porch. Cornflowers for my niece Jessica. Sunflowers for Sedgie. Black-eyed Susans for Adele. Roses or cosmos for Derek.I will hack away and excavate them from the overgrowth, the grasses and brambles that have smothered them. From beneath the campanula gone to seed, the opportunistic tendrils of myrtle, I will ferret out the leafy remnants of my great-grandmother’s garden, breathe new life into them, finger them for a pulse.

FOUR
    R eady about!” I say as I come around a corner.
    My father bought the Malibu station wagon new in 1964, and at one time, its lines must have appeared sleek and modern. Even so, it has less than ten thousand miles on it because it only gets driven in summer—airport runs, the IGA, and, when we were teenagers, long, winding drives out the shore. After I turn the wheel, seconds seem to pass before the rest of the car decides to follow. Like a cartoon limousine, it snakes around curves.
    Jessica’s plane was due in at 3 P.M ., but planes seldom land on time this far north. Some flights are canceled for days. But the Baileys’ cocktail party! Dana groaned when she heard that Jessica would be delayed for hours. At which point I offered to pick up my niece, relieved for the excuse to dodge my parents’ friends whom I