Not a Creature Was Stirring(104)

“Well, it certainly wasn’t mine. I used to hate it. So did Anne Marie. I think Myra enjoyed it after a while. And Emma, of course, was usually too young to know what was going on.”

“In the picture you’re holding, she’s almost an infant.”

“About two. I think. I think I was twelve. She was a very sweet looking baby, wasn’t she? She was a very sweet person, all her life. I wonder why Daddy had this. It wasn’t as if he ever cared.”

“I looked through all the photographs in that folder,” Gregor said, “and one thing struck me. They’re all pictures of your mother and her daughters. There are never any pictures of the boys.”

“But there wouldn’t be,” Bennis said. “There’s nothing strange about that. The society pages and the magazines are always doing mother-daughter stories. It’s a kind of cliché.”

“And that was the only reason? Your mother had nothing—against the boys?”

“The way Daddy had something against his daughters?” Bennis smiled. “No. Mother liked having daughters. Some women get more involved with their sons, but Mother always enjoyed girls. She liked clothes, and she could dress us up. The boys wouldn’t have stood for that, and she wouldn’t have wanted to—to feminize them, anyway. She paid a little more attention to us than she did to them, mostly to counteract Daddy, I think. He didn’t pay any attention to us at all. Unless he was being cruel. I think Mother felt she had to make up to us for the way he was.”

“She seems to have a great sense of obligation, your mother.”

“Oh,” Bennis said. “Yes. An incredible sense of obligation. I don’t think she could have been a modern mother, the kind that works. She would have felt she was depriving us of something. And a lot of women in her position just hire nannies and never see their children at all.”

“Your mother brought you up herself?”

“Very much herself. But she’s the same with people outside the family. Servants, you know, and people who work under her on committees. She’s got a very highly developed sense of the relative importance of things.”

“But not much faith in the relativity of other things?”

“I don’t understand,” Bennis said.

Gregor leaned forward, intent. So intent, Bennis found herself wanting to back away. “You said just now your mother wouldn’t have been the kind who worked, because she thought she would be depriving you of something. Is she also the kind who believes something like that is binding on her, no matter what else is going on in her life? She wouldn’t, for instance, think it all through and try to balance what she wanted with what you wanted? She’d think there were things she should do, whether she wanted to do them or not?”

Light dawned. “I see what you mean,” Bennis said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think ‘I want’ is a big factor in my mother’s life. ‘I should’ is much more important. And she’s the kind of woman who always knows what she should do.”

“Always?”

“Yes. I think I could say always. I don’t know what her marriage was like, Mr. Demarkian. Living with Daddy might have caused a few moral dilemmas. But on the whole, I’d say always.”

Gregor nodded. “She’s a remarkable personality, your mother. One of the strongest I have ever known.”

“You wouldn’t be able to say that if you’d met Daddy. It always looked to me like she was scrambling around, trying to repair the damage right after Daddy did it. Like all that business with Teddy and his leg.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well,” Bennis said, “Teddy’s leg was ruined in an automobile accident. You know that. And Daddy was driving. And Daddy was not sympathetic or supportive or any of the rest of that seventies nonsense when it was over. He just turned on Teddy. And Mother has been making it up to Teddy ever since.”

“Teddy,” Gregor said. He frowned and seemed to sink into thought. Bennis stared at him curiously. He was—different, now that Myra was dead. She couldn’t put her finger on how, or why, but there it was. She looked around the hall again and wondered if she should be doing something polite. No matter how hard Mother had tried, she’d never managed to turn Bennis into a natural hostess.

She got out another cigarette, lit up again, and then stared at the burning tip. At the rate she was smoking on this trip, she was going to have to quit for at least three months when she got back to Boston, just to be able to go on breathing.

“Maybe we should go someplace else,” she said. “Out of the hall. We could go into the living room and have some coffee.”