The night was wrapped in warmth, the nearby saltwater and humid air clinging to my skin, but now I felt a mist of perspiration begin to form as well—my body’s bracing reaction to yet another quarrel with my husband. “What makes you say that?” I asked, shifting in my chair.
Eddie shrugged, already fatigued by the conversation. “It’s a jungle outpost.” He said it dismissively, and yet that was a large part of why I liked it. Eddie went on: “Have you seen the size of the mosquitoes?”
I could hear the resolve in his voice, just as I’d heard it when he’d ruled out Texas and then Battle Creek. But I didn’t understand my husband’s stubborn resistance this time around; to be sure, Palm Beach was not Greenwich, but it had the promise of adventure and variety, while also being part of the world of the Astors and Vanderbilts. It seemed like a place where both Eddie and I could get what we so desperately craved.
I was not ready to give up. “Just think,” I ventured. “We could make a family home here. Do it entirely our way.” But I knew as soon as it was out that such an argument would not fall on receptive ears with my husband. He did not wish to make his own way; nothing could have been less appealing to Ed Close.
He took a slow sip, sighing as he answered with a refrain I’d come to know so well: “It’s just not done that way, Marjorie.”
Chapter 15
Greenwich, Connecticut
Fall 1912
The footman knocked with a timid, gloved hand. I looked up, my attention pulled from the guest list for a hospital luncheon that I was helping some of my Greenwich neighbors to put on. “Yes, come in.”
The man entered and lowered his eyes to the carpet. My gaze went to the silver dish in his hands. “What is it?”
“A telegram for you, Mrs. Close.”
“From where?”
“It’s from Washington, ma’am.”
Mother. I knew in an instant—Washington meant Mother. But news in the form of a telegram was not likely to be good. I accepted the paper from the servant and turned to read it with trembling hands.
Eddie was sitting opposite me with his newspaper. He looked on as I scanned the message. “What is it?” he asked. I met his gaze, feeling as if the blood had stilled in my veins. “Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Mother…” I shook my head. “She’s…she’s gone.”
Ed’s face drained of color, and I could see my shock reflected in his expression. “Gone?” he repeated.
I handed Ed the telegram, unable to offer any more words. As he read, I folded my arms around myself and began to rock. A faint mewling was the only sound I could give to my shock as my mind reeled: Mother dead? But she had only just turned sixty. She’d suffered from migraines for years, yes, but nothing that would have taken the life from her. Her only other chronic condition had been her flattening melancholy, made far worse in recent years by my father’s departure for another marriage. But dead? Gone forever? How could that possibly be true?
“How?” Ed asked, voicing my own bewilderment back to me.
There was only one explanation that I could offer in return. “Died of a broken heart,” I said aloud, knowing it to be something that no doctor would ever declare, and yet knowing it to be the truth.
* * *
I did not want the girls to be at the funeral, so Eddie remained with them in Greenwich as I went alone to Mother’s home on M Street. There, facing the task of packing up the remnants of her life, I spent a few stunned days, aching, driven only by a feeling that work, however tedious, would be my best sustaining force. So I rolled back the sleeves of my black mourning dress and I got to work, sifting through drawers and boxes, through closets and trunks, through journal clippings and jewels. Faded photographs from my childhood. Articles detailing my wedding announcement, and notes I’d sent her from Hot Springs, Fort Worth, Palm Beach, and The Boulders. And then the earliest photographs of my Adelaide and Eleanor—with Mother’s slanted handwriting naming each girl, detailing their birth dates and weights. From a few years later, a drawing of a pony that Adelaide had made for Grandmother and mailed to her. Through tear-streaked eyes I read Mother’s faded journal entries from Battle Creek, written in Mrs. Gregory’s upstairs bedroom, the one we’d shared on so many cold nights while Papa had lain, groaning, in the next room.
Papa joined me in Washington after a week. I didn’t speak to him much; I didn’t have much to say. Or perhaps I had too much to say, but lacked the strength to voice it. He seemed to understand, and he didn’t force it. Together, dressed in our somber black, we set about planning Mother’s final trip, a train ride back to her birthplace in Springfield, Illinois. The place where Ella Letitia Merriweather had grown up loved, raised by affluent and upright parents. Where she had been courted by and wed to her childhood friend, C. W. Post. How, I wondered, had her life turned so very sad?