Housekeeping: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

children.”
    “She was young to pass away.”
    “Seventy-six?”
    “Was she seventy-six?”
    “That’s not old.”
    “No.”
    “Not old for her family.”
    “I remember her mother.”
    “Spry as a girl at eighty-eight.”
    “But Sylvia had a harder life.”
    “Much harder.”
    “Much harder.”
    “Those daughters.”
    “How could things have gone so badly?”
    “She wondered herself.”
    “Anyone would wonder.”
    “I know
I
would.”
    “That Helen!”
    “Well, what about the little one, Sylvie?”
    There was a clucking of tongues.
    “At least she doesn’t have children.”
    “So far as we know, at least.”
    “An itinerant.”
    “A migrant worker.”
    “A drifter.”
    There was a silence.
    “She ought to be told about her mother.”
    “She should.”
    “If we could figure out where to find her.”
    “The ads in the papers might help.”
    “But I doubt it.”
    “I doubt it.”
    There was another silence.
    “These two little girls.”
    “How could their mother have left them like that?”
    “No note.”
    “No note was ever found.”
    “It couldn’t have been an accident.”
    “It wasn’t.”
    “That poor lady who lent her the car.”
    “I felt sorry for her.”
    “She blamed herself.”
    Someone got up from the table and put wood in the fire.
    “They seem to be nice children.”
    “Very quiet.”
    “Not as pretty as Helen was.”
    “The one has pretty hair.”
    “They’re not unattractive.”
    “Appearance isn’t so important.”
    “More important for girls, of course.”
    “And they’ll have to get along on their own.”
    “Poor things.”
    “Poor things.”
    “I’m glad they’re quiet.”
    “The Hartwick was always so quiet.”
    “It was.”
    “It certainly was.”
    When they had gone to bed Lucille and I got up and sat by the window wrapped in a quilt and watched the few clouds fly. There was a bright moon in a storm ring, and Lucille made plans to build a moon dial out of snow under our window. The light at the window was strong enough to play cards by, but we could not read. We stayed awake the whole night because Lucille was afraid of her dreams.
    Lily and Nona stayed with us during the depth of that winter. They were not in the habit of cooking. They complained of arthritis. My grandmother’s friends invited them for pinochle, but they had never learned to play. They would not sing in a church choir because their voices had cracked. Lily and Nona, I think, enjoyed nothing except habit and familiarity, the precise replication of one day in the next. This was not to be achieved in Fingerbone, where any acquaintance was perforce new and therefore more objectionable than solitude, and where Lucille and I perpetually threatened to cough or outgrow our shoes.
    It was a hard winter, too. The snow crested, finally,far above our heads. It drifted up our eaves on one side of the house. Some houses in Fingerbone simply fell from the weight of snow on their roofs, a source of grave and perpetual anxiety to my great-aunts, who were accustomed to a brick building, and to living below ground. Sometimes the sun would be warm enough to send a thick sheet of snow sliding off the roof, and sometimes the fir trees would shrug, and the snow would fall with surprisingly loud and earthy thuds, which would terrify my great-aunts. It was by grace of this dark and devastating weather that we were able to go very often to the lake to skate, for Lily and Nona knew that our house would fall, and hoped that we at least might be spared when it did, if only to die of pneumonia.
    For some reason the lake was a source of particular pleasure to Fingerbone that year. It was frozen solid early and long. Several acres of it were swept, for people brought brooms to tend and expand it, till the cleared ice spread far across the lake. Sledders heaped snow on the shore into a precipitous chute that sent them sailing far across the ice. There were barrels on the shore for fires to be built in, and