(There’s a scientific explanation for that, Emma. It’s the kind of thing you were supposed to learn in school.)
Emma threw the covers off and hopped to the floor, feeling a little silly in her oversize sleep shirt. The hall outside her door was quiet, but she opened the door a crack and peered out anyway, just to check. The sleep shirt came down only to her knees and was made of a very thin material. She didn’t like the idea of being caught in it while she wandered around the house. She’d been living alone so long—and in girls’ dormitories for so long before that—she didn’t own a robe. Even Bennington, coed and “progressive” as it was, hadn’t been able to drag her out of this particular kind of isolation.
She let herself into the hall and headed for the center section of the house. There was a serious library downstairs, full of hardcover editions of Plato and Thomas Aquinas, but there was a smaller one up here, full of what her mother called “diversionary books.” Her father had standing accounts at half a dozen book-stores in Philadelphia and New York, and every week a little rainfall of current best-sellers arrived at Engine House, to be unwrapped by Marshall and put up here by whatever maid was available. Emma thought she would get one of these books, bring it back to her room, and read until she could decently go down to breakfast.
She was just edging out of the west wing into the upstairs center hall when she heard the noise. At first, she thought it was birds. It was that kind of noise, faint and fluttery, mutely quarrelsome. Then she realized there couldn’t be any birds—Mrs. Washington kept a much cleaner house than that—and she began to wonder what someone was doing up here, trying to get away with something in secret.
Aside from the little library, the upstairs center hall held two other small rooms. Emma looked into the tea room first, registering dust-cover covered love seats and shrouded candelabra. She crossed the carpet to the writing room and stood in the door. She saw Anne Marie. She saw the Sargent portrait of Great-Grandmother Eleanor Devereaux Hannaford standing away from the wall and the wall safe open. She stood silent for at least a full minute before she realized what was wrong. There was no reason on earth why Anne Marie should be doing what she was doing in the dark.
Emma wrapped her arms around her body—for some reason, every time Emma had to talk to Anne Marie she had an uncontrollable desire to protect herself—and said,
“Anne Marie? Are you all right? What are you doing?”
Anne Marie’s shoulders stiffened—even through the dark, and under all that fat, Emma noticed—but they relaxed almost immediately. She put the papers she was holding into a pile on the mantel under the safe and turned.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Mother’s up. I’m just getting her some things she asked for.”
“In the dark.”
“I didn’t notice it was dark.”
“If Mother’s up, can I go in to see her?”
Anne Marie turned around, closed the wall safe, put the picture back into position. Then she folded the papers into a square and put them in her pocket.
“Mother’s not in very good shape first thing in the morning,” she said. “Why don’t you give her about half an hour? She doesn’t like to see people when she’s—not well.”
“What does that mean, not well?”
“I thought Myra told you all about it. Mother has lateral multiple sclerosis.” Anne Marie came to the door of the writing room and stepped into the hall, ushering Emma out with her. “Lateral multiple sclerosis is a degenerative disease that results in the loss of control of—”
“She’s our mother, for God’s sake,” Emma said. “Stop sounding like a medical textbook.”
“You wanted to know what I meant by ‘not well.’”
“I still want to know.”
Anne Marie made a face. “Mother sometimes has difficulty lifting objects. Forks, for instance.”
“Forks?”
“Forks, knives, spoons. Pens, if they’re the metal kind. Glasses.”
“Mother has trouble lifting forks?”
“The doctor will be here the day after Christmas, Emma. He’ll give you all the information you want.”
The hall was drafty and too well lit. All around her, Emma saw globe lamps reflected in the polished surfaces of silvered-shined Christmas bells, balls, angels, and cherubs. She ran a hand through her hair, wondering if she was going crazy. Anne Marie sounded as if she were talking about something else—a cat, maybe, or a case that had come up in a volunteer nursing course.
Anne Marie brushed past her, on her way to the west wing, and Emma put out a hand to stop her.