Letter of Intent by Ursula Curtiss

Author:Ursula Curtiss [Curtiss, Ursula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 039606356X
Published: 2019-06-17T14:00:00+00:00

Celia spent Christmas morning in a quiet, concentrated absorption of a background which she would one day appropriate, with a few necessary emendations, as her own. Very little escaped her. She kept an almost photographic memory of refracted sunlight catching tiny tongued reflections in the Christmas-tree bulbs, the leisurely breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausages and English muffins, the milk punch that arrived at eleven thirty, the ceremonial bones for the dogs, sensibly not gift-wrapped.

Celia had already exchanged presents with Mary Ellen at the apartment, but was not taken aback at a pair of short white pigskin gloves from Susan; she had prepared for such an emergency. “Now where did I—?” she began, looking about her with an air of perplexity, and went up to her room, returning with a small box for Susan and a glimmering object which she placed reverentially in Mrs. Vestry’s startled hands. “It was our Christmas candle, and I’d be so pleased if you’d have it, Mrs. Vestry, and give it a happy home.”

The clerk in the secondhand store where Celia supplied herself with instant ancestors had used the last phrase with a cynicism which missed her completely. The candlestick, of carved silver-gilt wood, did have a surprisingly nostalgic appearance; out of either carelessness or cunning, traces of colored wax had been allowed to remain in the trailing garments of trumpet-blowing angels, suggesting a festive overflow. It had cost Celia three dollars.

Mrs. Vestry was looking as touched and embarrassed as her craggy features would permit. “It’s charming, Celia, but I couldn’t let you—”

“You’d be doing me a great favor, really you would. Storage,” said Celia firmly, as though determined to restore lightness to a sorrowful occasion, “is no place for a Christmas candle”

Mrs. Vestry was finally persuaded to accept, and the ornament was given a place of honor on the mantelpiece. During the small fluster caused by all this, Celia, well-pleased with herself, moved modestly off to a window and stood gazing out at a curve of snowy lawn, white-freighted rhododendrons, a row of low thorny-looking bushes with red berries fining one side of the drive. The sun had gone, and under a gray sky the scene had an almost traditional Christmas-card flavor . . . and Celia was suddenly as cold as though an actual door had yawned open behind her.

The card to her parents, containing ten dollars: had she mailed that herself? She had always been extremely careful in the monthly dispatching of those envelopes; her dread of any possible fink to the Bridgeport tenement was such that not even in her anonymity at the Hotel Alexandra had she left them at the desk. But this last one, with the card picked indifferently from a drugstore rack . . .

Her mind’s eye followed it as far as the small table just inside the living room doorway where she and Mary Ellen were in the habit of leaving mail, but followed it no farther, no matter how she tried. She hadn’t had a stamp,

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