The smell of toasted bread filled the room. Perhaps the most comforting smell in the world, Vivien believed. It soothed the sick and the grieving equally, this simple nourishment. Vivien removed the toast from the small slot beside the oven, and spread it thickly with sweet butter. She cut each slice into four triangles, and arranged them all on a pale blue plate. She considered adding a ramekin of marmalade. Lotte had sent her home on Sunday with jars of Meyer lemon and orange marmalade. More than one person could ever eat. Vivien took a jar from the shelf, the pale orange jelly thick with rinds.
But then she changed her mind. Simple toast with butter. A cup of tea. That was what was needed here. She returned the marmalade to the shelf, placed the cup and the plate on a tray, and went back into the parlor.
Benjamin sat on the sofa, hunched forward, his face buried in his hands. She saw that he had scrubbed most of the blood from them. Even so, some remained beneath the fingernails.
“Here,” Vivien said.
Slowly, he lifted his face and looked at her with an expression of utter disbelief.
“Tell me about Jane,” Vivien said, holding the tea out to him.
He took the cup, but put it right back down.
“She’s beautiful,” he said. “You’ve never seen a more beautiful girl.”
Vivien waited.
“And healthy,” he said, his eyes growing wild with disbelief again. “Never sick! During the Spanish influenza, she nursed me and her parents and never got sick herself.”
“There’s no explanation for what happens,” Vivien said. “Or why.”
Benjamin picked up a piece of toast and carefully tore it into tiny bits.
“Nine months,” he said. “And fine. Just fine. Never even had morning sickness.”
He picked up another piece and tore that one too.
“I’ve never seen so much blood,” he said. “I was in France, at Somme, and I’ve never seen so much blood.”
Vivien watched him start on a third piece.
“I saw the life go out of her eyes. One minute she was looking at me, scared, you know? Puzzled. And then she was gone. I saw her go.” He said this last with something like amazement.
Was there ultimately some relief in witnessing death? Vivien wondered. If she had been with David that day, if she had watched him die, today her life would be different. Wouldn’t it?
“The baby,” he was saying, “came out with the cord around her neck. She never took one breath. Not one. The midwife whisked her away so Jane didn’t see. And then the bleeding wouldn’t stop. We couldn’t stop it,” he said. “How can that be? We win wars and we stop flooding and . . . and we can’t stop a twenty-two-year-old girl from bleeding to death? We can’t save her baby?”
All but Death, can be Adjusted, Vivien thought. The perfect Dickinson poem for Jane and Hazel’s obituary.
Dynasties repaired — Systems — settled in their Sockets — Citadels — dissolved . . .
“Don’t worry, Benjamin. I will write them a beautiful obituary,” Vivien said.
After Benjamin Harwood left, Vivien sat at the small cherrywood desk looking out over the street. She filled her pen with ink, and took a sheet of heavy vellum paper from the single drawer. Lotte teased her about her reluctance to invest in a typewriter. But Vivien had tried to use one and only grew frustrated by the way the keys kept sticking.
A few months ago, Lotte had shown Vivien the new one she’d bought. “Look, darling,” Lotte had said, demonstrating, “This shift key makes it all so easy.”
“But why go to all the trouble of learning this when I can simply write on a piece of paper?”
Lotte shook her head. “You are stuck in the nineteenth century, Viv.”
“I’m not,” Vivien insisted, knowing that perhaps Lotte was right.
Sighing, Vivien stared at the blank paper in front of her now. How to capture a life that never had a chance to blossom? Or one cut so abruptly short? Benjamin Harwood had sat in her parlor for most of the afternoon, talking about his Jane. Vivien resisted the urge to take him into her arms and comfort him. His grief was palpable, like a living thing in the room with them. Listening to him, Vivien felt in some way he was articulating her loss too.
She put the pen down.
The telegram. What had she done with the telegram?
Benjamin’s appearance at her door had completely undone her. She’d had the telegram in her hand when he arrived. Vivien began to search for it, carefully at first, but then more frantically. How could she have been so careless with something so important?
It wasn’t in the kitchen or the bathroom. She looked under the sofa and the chair and the table in the parlor. She went outside to see if it was on the doorstep, or if it had blown into the street. But it seemed to have vanished completely.
Back inside, Vivien opened drawers, knowing that of course she wouldn’t find the telegram there. She turned her pockets inside out, and lifted the corners of the rug.