Ghost Country Read Online Free PDF

nutritious meals waiting when he got home, and freshly ironed shirts morning and evening. For even at twenty-five, sweetly sick with love, Dr. Stonds liked an orderly schedule.
    In those days the doctor’s mother was still alive, but something about Selena drove her from her own home, Mrs. Ephers never did understand what exactly. Words were exchanged behind closed doors. Selena emerged with her secretive inward smile and old Mrs. Stonds, eyes still red from weeping, packed her things—includingthe Stonds family silver, a gift to her own husband’s mother from Princess Marguerite, grateful for the treatment to her epileptic son—and moved out to Palm Springs where her married sister lived.
    And then Mrs. Ephers had to put up with Selena for those two long years the doctor was overseas. Maybe Selena hoped to drive Mrs. Ephers away along with the doctor’s mother, but the housekeeper was not one to turn her back on her friends, or leave a poor man like the doctor in the lurch. Selena, dreaming, head always in a book when the doctor was around, certainly didn’t languish dreamily in the family temple during his war years. Mrs. Ephers could tell you a thing or two about Selena, if she weren’t too well brought up to gossip.
    No sooner did the doctor return, with his star for the Battle of the Bulge, and a suitcase full of Chanel No. 5 from his stint with the Army of Occupation, than Selena got herself pregnant. Mrs. Ephers well remembered his frustrated anger when Selena told him. She was in her fourth month and just beginning to show. He’d been furious, and who could blame him. I thought you used a diaphragm, he shouted. I lost it, Selena replied. When all the time it was in her dresser under the silk camisole she’d also stopped wearing when the doctor came home.
    Mrs. Ephers pulled out the diaphragm and handed it to her after Dr. Stonds left the next morning: I didn’t realize you were looking for this, Mrs. Stonds. And of course Selena hadn’t known what to say. She should have known by then not to tell fibs around Mrs. Ephers—this with a meaningful look at Mara, prone to fibbing, to dramatizing herself and her orphan situation.
    Well, Selena had a healthy girl, named her Beatrix—without consulting her husband, who planned on naming the baby for his own mother—nursed the infant for a time, and then, one day the poor doctor came home from the hospital, where he was already making a name for himself in neurosurgery despite his youth and two-year absence and whammo, there he was with a baby and no wife, just a note saying Selena had gone looking for something.
    Mara knew this much because Mrs, Ephers told her, oh, aboutonce a week, as a prelude to a lecture on getting off her lazy butt and helping out, doing her homework, practicing her ballet, after all, when Harriet was her age she was already—winning the Nobel prize in physics, dancing
Swan Lake
with Nureyev, winning Olympic medals for horseback riding—Mara would shout, to drown Mrs. Ephers’s litany of her sister’s accomplishments. But that wasn’t until she was thirteen or fourteen, by which time well aware that compared to her sister—there was no comparison.
    Where did Grannie Selena go? Mara used to ask Mrs. Ephers when she was little. Didn’t my mommy ever hear from her? Is that why I never hear from my mommy? Trying to get some assurance against her terror, that Beatrix left because Mara was in some inherent way evil, that even as a baby it was so obvious that Beatrix fled from her.
    Did I invite you to mind other people’s business? Mrs. Ephers would respond. Your grandmother’s life came to a fitting conclusion, and as for your mother, the less said, the better.
    Beatrix means “the voyager.” In her note Selena said she hoped her daughter would grow up to be a great adventurer, an explorer. And no, the note was no longer in existence: the doctor had chosen not to keep reminders of this painful episode.
    At first Beatrix looked as