My mother began to cry softly. “I tried!”

I did not ponder then what she meant. I leaned against Mrs. Henderson and breathed in, with the sweet, herbal odor of the benzoin, still bubbling futilely, the smell of her freshly ironed cotton dress.

“You run along, Sonie. Get Sarah to make you some lemon verbena. It’ll rest you.”

I did not want to leave her, for I was protected by her kindly, corseted body in its pale blue dress printed with little white flowers. The moment I released myself, I would see Ivan and know that he was dead. I was broken suddenly and I sobbed against the cotton, “Oh, Mrs. Henderson, my wrist hurts where I burned it!”

FIVE

1

Over the place where Ivan’s cot had been and where now there was nothing but a rag rug with four square indentations, the smell of benzoin still hovered faintly. The snow from the storm had melted and a dense fog enveloped Chichester. All day, from early morning, we had heard the solemn foghorns. My mother and I sat silent before the stove in the afternoon. Her face was overcast and I believed that when she had wailed to Dr. Galbraith, “I tried!” she had meant, “I tried to love him.” For in the night, sleepless for both of us, she had murmured, “My tears are all gone, Sonie,” as though all the springs of her being, save her love for me, had been drained, perhaps long before his birth.

Mr. Greeley, the undertaker, had come to take my brother’s body away when I was still at the Hendersons’ house. He was a man of dreadful stature and horrifying countenance which consisted of a pair of lifeless eyes set in deep, dark pits, a long nose which had deviated markedly to the left, and a set of long and murky teeth behind a walrus mustache. He relished his profession. His parlors were situated in isolation on the road towards the hospital. The yard behind his sprawling, tacky yellow house was planted with tombstones, for he was a merchant as well as an undertaker and a licensed embalmer. When Mr. Greeley learned that we had no money and that Ivan was to be buried as a pauper, he could not conceal his disapproval from my mother and Mrs. Henderson. “For a child,” he reproached them, “I have such a nice choice: one sandstone group of angel, lamb, two doves, another along classical lines in which the lily motif is used. My real prize is waiting for a little child, a granite headstone with an all-over design of cast-iron roses.” He went on to complain that a child should not be sealed into the ground without the services of either Father Mulcahy or Pastor Ferguson. The grave would be unmarked, he said, and we would never know where my brother lay.