We passed her around.
My sister Laura would wire from Kansas City,
“Children have measles.
Please send Sarah if possible.” And Sarah would pack her bag, cash one of her neat small checks and slip off.
A good bit of her time was spent with my cousin Katherine Somers in New York.
Katherine was devoted to her, although just why it is difficult to say.
She was a taciturn woman, giving no confidences but probably receiving a great many.
Poor Sarah!
I can still see her in her starched white uniform, with its skirts which just cleared the ground, moving among our various households, with us but not entirely of us; watching nervously over the stair rail while Judy, Katherine’s daughter, made her debut; slapping Laura’s newest baby between the shoulders to make it breathe, or bending over me to give me a daily massage, her heavy body clumsy enough but her hands light and gentle.
She was not a clever woman. Or maybe I am wrong.
Perhaps in a family which prides itself on a sort of superficial cleverness, she was merely silenced. It was Wallie Somers, Katherine’s stepson, who claimed that when he told her Hoover was nominated, she said: “Really! That ought to be good business for the vacuum cleaner.”
Not a romantic figure, Sarah, or a mysterious one.
All of us thought of her as a fixture, growing older but more or less always to be with us.
I remember Howard Somers, Katherine’s husband, telling her one day that he had remembered her in his will.
“Not a lot, Sarah,” he said. “But you’ll never have to go to the Old Ladies’ Home!”
I don’t know why we were so astonished to see her burst into tears.
I dare say she had been worried about the future; about getting old, and the children growing up and forgetting her.
Anyhow she cried, and Howard was greatly embarrassed.
She had her peculiarities, of course.
In Katherine’s house, what with guests in and out all the time, she had developed the habit of taking her meals in her room on a tray, and this habit persisted.
“I like to read while I eat,” she said.
“And I’m up early, and I don’t like late dinners.”
She had some sort of stomach trouble, poor thing.
But in my simpler household she ate with me unless there was some one there.
Then, to Joseph’s secret fury, she retired to her room and had her tray there.
She had come down from Katherine’s a month or so before, not so much because I needed her as that Katherine thought she needed a change.
Howard had had a bad heart for some time, and Sarah had been nursing him.
“Just let her putter around,” Katherine wrote.
“She’ll want to work, being Sarah, so if you can stand a daily massage—”
And of course I could, and did.
I have drawn Sarah as well as I can, and the family rather sketchily; Howard and Katherine in their handsome duplex apartment in New York on Park Avenue, bringing out Judy at nineteen; Laura in Kansas City, raising a noisy young family; and myself in my old-fashioned house with its grounds and shrubbery, its loneliness and its memories.
Dependent on a few friends, a small dinner party now and then, a little bridge; and on my servants, on Joseph and Norah and Clara and Robert, and on the Mary Martins who came and went, intelligent young women who used me as a stop-gap in their progress toward marriage or a career.
A staid household, dependent for its youth on Judy’s occasional visits, on secretaries whose minds were elsewhere, and on Wallie Somers, Howard’s son by his first wife, whose ostensible business was bonds and whose relaxation, when he could not find some one to play with, was old furniture. Than which, as Judy once said, I have nothing else but.
As it happened, Judy was with me when Sarah disappeared that night in April of last year.
She was staging her annual revolt.
“I get a trifle fed up with Katherine now and then,” she would say, arriving without notice.
“She’s too intense.
Now you are restful.
You’re really a frivolous person, you know, Elizabeth Jane, for all your clothes and airs.”
“Frivolity is all I have left,” I would say meekly.
Judy has a habit of first names.
Katherine had carefully taught her to call me Cousin Elizabeth, but Judy had discarded that with her stockings, which now she wore as seldom as possible and under protest.
Although I doubt if she ever called her mother Katherine to her face.
Katherine was a good mother but a repressed one.
Also she was still passionately in love with Howard; one of those profound absorbing loves which one finds sometimes in women who are apparently cold, and which makes them better wives than mothers.
I rather think that she was even a little jealous of Judy, and that Judy knew it.
Judy would arrive, and as if by a miracle the telephone would commence to ring and shining sports cars would be parked for hours in front of the house.
Joseph would assume a resigned expression, empty cigarette trays by the dozen, and report to me in his melancholy voice.
“Some one has burned a hole on the top of your Queen Anne desk, madam.”
I was never anything to him but “madam.” It got on my nerves sometimes.