Dance of the Happy Shades

was already moving towards the closet. “I just got a new coat. I have several coats. Aunt Annie!”
    “But why should you go and buy,” Aunt Annie went on in her mild stubborn way, “when there are things here as good as new.”
    “I would rather buy,” I said, and was immediately sorry for the coldness in my voice. Nevertheless I continued, “When I need something, I do go and buy it.” This suggestion that I was not poor any more brought a look of reproach and aloofness into my aunt’s face. She said nothing. I went and looked at a picture of Aunt Annie and Auntie Lou and their older brothers and their mother and father which hung over the bureau. They stared back at me with grave accusing Protestant faces, for I had run up against the simple unprepossessing materialism which was the rock of their lives. Things must be used; everything must be used up, saved and mended and made into something else and used again; clothes were to be worn. I felt that I had hurt Aunt Annie’s feelings and that furthermore I had probably borne out a prediction of Auntie Lou’s, for she was sensitive to certain attitudes in the world that were too sophisticated for Aunt Annie to bother about, and she had very likely said that I would not want my mother’s clothes.
    “She was gone sooner than anybody would have expected,” Aunt Annie said. I turned around surprised and she said, “Your mother.” Then I wondered if the clothes had been the main thing after all; perhaps they were only to serve as the introduction to a conversation about my mother’s death, which Aunt Annie might feel to be a necessary part of our visit. Auntie Lou would feel differently; she had an almost superstitious dislike of certain rituals of emotionalism; such a conversation could never take place with her about.
    “Two months after she went into the hospital,” Aunt Annie said. “She was gone in two months.” I saw that she was crying distractedly, as old people do, with miserable scanty tears. She pulled a handkerchief out of her dress and rubbed at her face.
    “Maddy told her it was nothing but a check-up,” she said. “Maddy told her it would be about three weeks. Your mother went in there and she thought she was coming out in three weeks.” She was whispering as if she was afraid of us being overheard. “Do you think she wanted to stay in there where nobody could make out what she was saying and they wouldn’t let her out of her bed? She wanted to come home!”
    “But she was too sick,” I said.
    “No, she wasn’t, she was just the way she’d always been, just getting a little worse and a little worse as time went on. But after she went in there she felt she would die, everything kind of closed in around her, and she went down so fast.”
    “Maybe it would have happened anyway,” I said. “Maybe it was just the time.”
    Aunt Annie paid no attention to me. “I went up to see her,” she said. “She was so glad to see me because I could tell what she was saying. She said Aunt Annie, they won’t keep me in here for good, will they? And I said to her, No. I said, No.
    “And she said, Aunt Annie ask Maddy to take me home again or I’m going to die. She didn’t want to die. Don’t you ever think a person wants to die, just because it seems to everybody else they have got no reason to go on living. So I told Maddy. But she didn’t say anything. She went to the hospital every day and saw your mother and she wouldn’t take her home. Your mother told me Maddy said to her, I won’t take you home.”
    “Mother didn’t always tell the truth,” I said. “Aunt Annie, you know that.”
    “
Did you know your mother got out of the hospital?
”
    “No,” I said. But strangely I felt no surprise, only a vaguephysical sense of terror, a longing not to be told—and beyond this a feeling that what I would be told I already knew, I had always known.
    “Maddy, didn’t she tell you?”
    “No.”
    “Well she got
out
. She got out the side door where the ambulance comes in, it’s the only door that isn’t locked. It was at night when they haven’t so many nurses to watch them. She got her dressing gown and her slippers on, the first time she ever got anything on herself in years, and she went out and there it was January, snowing, but she didn’t go back in. She was away down the street when they caught her. After that they put the board across her bed.”
    The snow, the dressing gown and slippers, the board across the bed
.