Eden Close by Shreve Anita

Author:Shreve, Anita [Shreve, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780451167859
Publisher: New Amer Library (Mm)
Published: 1989-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

FOUR

IT IS RAINING, A HOT FAT RAIN THAT WILL END SOON AND BRING the worms to the surface, so that when he emerges from the house later and stands on the grass or the gravel, the earth will smell of them. Last night, he went finally to the A & P near the mall, and this morning he had his first decent breakfast in nearly a week—cereal, toast, juice, coffee—the meal reminding him of his normal routines, his regular life. The rain drums and splashes against the panes in his mother's room, and too late he sees that he has left a window open during the night. He wipes the wet sill dry with a towel from the bathroom. His mother's papers are on the bed, a random, chaotic spill of papers found finally, after supper last night, under the bed, in a box meant usually for storing winter woolens. She had not known or even guessed she might die, he's sure, for there is no order to the papers, no series of little notes explaining about the insurance or the mortgage or where the key to the safety-deposit box is.

He stands in front of her bureau, with his hands on the brass pulls of the top drawer. It is an oak piece, heavy and Victorian. He has never looked in this drawer, and it has about it, for him, a sense of the forbidden, a sense of the child stealing into the secrets of the adult. His father had a similar drawer—has it still, Andrew supposes, having not yet tackled his father's bureau—which Andrew, as a boy, did investigate one night when his parents were at the movies. He must have been young, no more than nine or ten, for he remembers the thrill of discovering a package of Trojans and knowing they were, in some way, connected with sex, but not understanding (not allowing his mind to compose the picture) precisely how. And certain—he laughs now to think of it—that his father was merely keeping them for someone else.

The drawer slides noiselessly open as if it had been waxed only yesterday. The contents are precise and neat, rectangles and squares of differing sizes, arranged to fit in an intimate puzzle. Her spirit was not, he knows now, in her papers, which bear the mark of carelessness and neglect, but here in her top drawer—her treasures laid out as if she were saying to herself or to anyone who might open the drawer: This is me. There is an aging, ivory-colored satin nightgown, deftly folded in the left-hand corner, and on it a string of pearls with a diamond clasp, a gift from his father to her on their wedding night. There is a small pink quilted jewelry case behind the nightgown, and to its right a thin packet of letters, postmarked 1943 and 1944: letters from his father in France during World War II. In the right-hand corner are his own baby things: an infant's hand-embroidered playsuit, a pair of tiny brown leather shoes, a baby book with notes and photographs sticking out of it.

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