The swing of the pendulum

by Adriana Spadoni

The mechanism of her brain had stopped, back there ages ago, on the threshold. Her will, her power to feel, had dropped into an abyss of nothingness. Jean knelt, knowing that her mother was dead, that she had died in the act of getting ready for service, that she must have died about three hours ago, while she was trying to write to Mary, that there were many things to do and she would have to begin doing them. But she could neither move nor think of what they were.

All her life came to this point and stopped. Tiny incidents, forgotten to consciousness, rose from the mass of memories piled upon them. They had neither relation nor sequence, but tumbled chaotically in the void. Martha making a dress for her doll; Martha on graduation day; Herrick and their Sunday dinners with Martha; Tom and Elsie; the months with Gregory in which Martha had no part and the night she had come home to find Martha mending and had been glad. The two terrible weeks she had passed alone by the sea, after Gregory's letter. The return—Mary gone West and Martha happy again in the solitude with Jean. And the long months since, when her mother was the realest thing in the world and Jean had felt the narrow binding bands of Martha's love and been a little comforted.

Now the band had snapped and she was alone.

Across the light-well, a woman put a child to bed. It knelt and said its prayers, just as she had used to do, and afterwards the woman tucked it up, opened the window and turned off the light. The elevator clanked from floor to floor. Children scampered across the apartment above. Dishes rattled in the kitchens. Men were coming home to dinner. The great building was vibrant with the sounds that mark the definite closing of a day. That small period of finite time, man's working day, was ended. But here, there was no light, no sound in the still rooms. The small, intimate ending of the hours was lost, engulfed in this tremendous ending of all things.

A sputtering noise broke on Jean's consciousness. It had been going on a long while. She laid the little head gently against the chair back and rose. A strange odor filled the apartment. She went out into the kitchen. The water had completely boiled away and the solder had melted from the kettle. Jean turned off the gas and went back.

There were so many things to do, and now she would have to begin doing them. Death, the most silent, private thing in the world, necessitated many outward offices, the presence of strangers, an official routine. Jean lifted her mother's body and laid it on the bed. She closed the parted lips and bound them. Then she began to undress her. Never, in her whole life, had Jean done such service for Martha, and now it seemed as if, from some vast distance, her mother was watching, embarrassed and reluctant, so that Jean felt awkward and ashamed. One by one she took off the garments, noticing with detached numbness the beautiful mending in Martha's stockings, the neat tying of the corset laces. Jean had never seen her mother undressed, and the youthful quality of the skin astonished her. She felt inhuman, perverted, to notice this, but the feeling ran only on the surface of her brain, as if she had taken an anæsthetic, strong enough to deaden sensation, but not strong enough to kill consciousness. Suddenly she recalled Herrick passing his fingers over the smooth satin of the painted canvas and she covered the little body hastily in a white night dress, as if shielding it from stranger eyes.

How small and still she looked like that, and, at the same time, so terrible! A little while before and she had been Martha, her mother, narrow in her beliefs, jealous in her love, full of obstinate faith and human weakness. Now she was part of the universe, of the terrible law of life and death. What tremendous finality to be centered in that small body! And how young she looked! Only the white hair seemed to have marked the years. A few short hours before and Jean had felt her throat tighten at the frail body and the thin white hair. And now, in a moment, Martha had outlived time, defied human laws. Age was a cloak imposed by Time and removed by Death. At some distant spot, Martha, young and happy, was talking to her God.

The mechanical movement of lifting and undressing her mother stirred Jean's consciousness, and she realized now that the window was still open and the freezing wind blowing in. She reached for the comforter at the foot of the bed and drew it up. This covering the small body was one of the useless, sentimental things people did with their dead. But she had no power over her actions. Years of association with the flesh had created habits that fulfilled themselves mechanically. A lifetime with the shell of the body had given it an existence of its own, and although the closed eyes and bound lips proved Martha beyond the need, the very flesh and shape had created demands of their own.

Jean covered the body snugly and stood looking down. With this, her work was done. Never again would she do anything for her mother.

Jean shivered and then something beat its way through the numbness of the last hours and she dropped to her knees. With her face on the small, still breast she sobbed, dry, tearing sobs that ripped the last eighteen months to shreds and buried her beneath them.