Murder in Little Egypt by Darcy O'Brien Read Free Book Online Page B

out in life under more comfortable circumstances. Her parents, the Schotts, had been successful grocers and had left money to their daughter and her brother, who managed the inheritance. But the stock-market crash wiped out the investments, and for a time during the Depression Marian had to go to live with her uncle and aunt who, she believed, did not really want her. Her mother and brother shared a one-bedroom apartment that Mrs. Newberry considered too dingy for a young girl. Once reunited, however, in a small house for which Mrs. Newberry somehow managed the down payment, the three formed a happy band; and Marian began to absorb her mother’s steady emphasis on culture and education. Mrs. Newberry read aloud to her children every evening, drumming into them the importance of doing well in school, and saw that Marian got piano lessons. Every Sunday Marian and Bill traipsed off to services and to Sunday School at the Presbyterian church. Over her bed Marian hung the eight gold stars she received for being able to recite her beatitudes.
    Marian rarely saw her father, but she looked forward to his visits. He would hold her on his knee and sing to her. Her mother spoke of him as a well-meaning ne’er-do-well, and that was how Marian thought of him. He was simply incapable of responsibility, Marian believed, loving her brother and her from a distance.
    When Marian was thirteen, her mother suddenly died, and Marian went to live with family friends, Truman and Ella Yard. Her father continued to keep his distance, but Marian felt wanted and loved by the Yards, and her brother had become more of a father to her. When she was troubled, she confided in Bill, and she liked to remember the time when she had accidentally caught her sweater on fire and he had saved her, embracing her to smother the flames. When he joined the service in 1942, she dedicated a poem to her brother:
I can remember long ago
When we played with our wooden blocks;
I can remember my big red bow
And your little horse that rocked.
Remember the day you broke your arm,
And the dreadful day I cut my hair.
And remember how on Christmas morn
We’d hunt for Santa everywhere?
And remember the cave you fellows dug
You wouldn’t let us near?
You chased us away with a big fat bug
Then sent up a mighty cheer.
Our hearts were young & gay then,
The years went swiftly by.
We hadn’t a troubled day when
We were happy, you and I.
And then the impossible came,
God took Mother away.
Things will never be the same,
But perhaps it’s better that way.
For you went marching off to war—
Mother would worry so!
But yet, no matter how near or far,
She’s praying for you, I know.
And so amid the world’s dark maze
Of turmoil, war, and hate,
I keep remembering our childhood days,
And leave what may to Fate!
Some day we’ll be together—
You and I and Mother.
Come fair or stormy weather,
God bless you, my dear Brother.
    Marian also wrote poems in memory of her mother, asking God to lend her some of her mother’s loving devotion “and a bit of her heartening friendly cheer,” for her mother remained to her an example of selflessness worthy of emulation. She kept a notebook filled with quotations from her favorite poets—Shakespeare, Browning, Oscar Wilde, and A. E. Housman—copying out passages about love, hope, and the soul in a small, backward-slanting hand:
. . . call to thought, if now
you grieve a little,
The days when we had rest, oh Soul,
for they were long.
    She practiced the piano and attended the opera and the symphony in the city as often as she could. In October 1945, she went to a performance of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at Kiel Auditorium and was so entranced that she waited by the stage door afterward to get Alexandra Danilova, Maria Tallchief, and Frederic Franklin to sign her program. Balanchine’s choreography and Tchaikovsky’s music for the Ballet Imperial moved her to write a poem wishing that when she died, her ashes could be thrown to the air, so