I hadn’t spent much time in Olivia’s room when she was alive, and now, when all her things belonged to me, I felt like an intruder. Beginning a few days after her death, I’d told Marlene and Terrance to keep the door to her bedroom closed. Seeing the door open had chilled me every time I came out of my own bedroom and looked across the gallery.
Olivia’s was an oddly Victorian room, cluttered and crowded compared to the rest of the house, which was full of antiques and precious things but had more of a sense of air and light to it.
Even the wallpaper was dense with cherry blossoms, and for the first time I made the connection between it and the hand-painted cherry trees on the wallpaper of the ballroom on the third floor. That motif was Oriental, with repeated images of an old man and a beautiful Japanese girl. But like the theater, the ballroom was rarely used—not even for Olivia’s annual New Year’s Eve party. “Wasted space,” was how she had referred to it. “And the devil to heat in the winter.” (I envisioned it as something more than wasted space. I imagined transforming it into a big, friendly winter playroom where the children could run around on snowy days; but that idea, of course, had been put on hold. I hadn’t even mentioned it to Press.)
The last time I’d been in the bedroom was with Marlene, to retrieve the brooch and necklace that Olivia had left to her.
I found that I couldn’t look directly at Olivia’s massive four-poster, canopied bed—the bed she had died in—though it stayed in my field of vision wherever I went in the room. Press had asked a few weeks earlier if I wanted Olivia’s room for myself; or if not, did I think Eva would like it. It was the largest bedroom in the house, with a beautiful view of the rose garden and the hills beyond. Perhaps I was superstitious, but I told him I would never sleep in it, and that it was too big a room for a little girl. No matter how we changed it, it would always be Olivia’s room to me.
But that morning I was glad to be surrounded by Olivia’s things. I got to work—well, not really work, though I was pretending even to myself that I was there to start cleaning things out. What I wanted was to be close to Olivia, to let her know I was listening, even though the idea of actually communicating with her frightened me, and the sense of her presence I’d had on the day of the funeral had faded. If it hadn’t been for the broken glass in the dining room, I wondered if I would have continued to imagine that she might help me at all.
Because of our difference in size (and also because the idea of wearing her things seemed macabre and strange to me), I had no use for the rows of shoes and clothes in the tall French armoire and closet. Olivia’s tweed luncheon suits, day dresses, and cocktail dresses were plentiful and expensive, but not gaudy. At least ten evening gowns had been hung in the closet, carefully shrouded in linen bags, along with a mink coat and a number of fox, ocelot, and mink pieces. There were several pairs of wool pants I’d seen her in on the coldest days if she was staying home, and a single pair of worn dungarees. Olivia administered the orchards, and knew plenty about cultivation and horticulture, but she managed to run the farm in sensible shoes and slacks or tweed skirts. Unlike Press and me, she didn’t ride. I’d always wondered about that, but she appeared not to care about horses at all.
Her bathroom was neat as a pin. For a woman in her fifties, she had remarkably few unguents and perfumes. It might have been the bathroom of a particularly tidy guest. In all the years I’d lived with Olivia, I had only been in her bathroom twice, to get aspirin. In fact, I’d never really known Olivia to have a bodily function beyond a sneeze or cough until just before she died. Press had told me he’d never once heard her break wind, or seen her rinse her mouth when she brushed her teeth. Everything was done in the privacy of her room or bathroom. Olivia once overheard him joke that moments after he’d shot out of her fully clothed body, she’d bathed, changed, and had Terrance bring her a cocktail before the doctor even arrived for his delivery. Instead of getting angry or embarrassed, Olivia had just shaken her head and told him that, no, he’d been born at eight in the morning, and she never had cocktails before five in the afternoon.
I almost tripped on a framed photograph that had fallen, face down, onto the carpet in front of the commode table that held Olivia’s two mahogany jewelry caskets.