Belle Cora: A Novel by Phillip Margulies

“We’re awake, come in,” and Robert entered, holding an astral lamp and followed by Edward. “Sleep in our room tonight,” said Edward. I held the lamp while they dragged our mattresses down the hall and into their room.
    We all lay there, quietly awake, until Robert suddenly spoke, saying, “We have to be faithful. We’ve got to stick together now,” and we all murmured our assent and pledged our loyalty to one another, making childish promises never again to quarrel.
    I had begun to doze when I was startled awake by the following idea: It could not be an accident that my father had taken ill so quickly after my mother died. My father and mother could not bear to be apart, and God had taken pity on them both by sending him a quick, easy death. If in His kindness to our parents God had treated us harshly, it was because he knew we could bear it. He was trying us, toughening us. He had some great purpose for us.
    In the sky, they were watching us, Mama and Papa, together and glad to see that their children were being kind to each other. I pictured them. They had beautiful white wings. The stars behind their heads seemed larger because they were so near.

VII
    IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON, WE WENT UPTOWN in a wagon from my grandfather’s store. The driver was a clerk in his employ—Horace—ayoung man so naturally cheerful that he could not help being wrong for the occasion: with tight, garish clothes, and a short-brimmed hat at a rakish angle.
    Horace helped us load our trunks and bags. With self-conscious gallantry, he gave his hand to help Christina into the wagon.
    Mrs. Fitch embraced each of us in turn, making us promise to visit and to write. She said that she was confident—knowing how well our mother had raised us—that we would try to be light burdens to our grandfather and grandmother. We would remember that they, too, had just suffered a grievous blow in the death of our parents, and we should not wear them down with anxious questions. She said, finally, eyes brimming, “We are all pilgrims and wayfarers on this earth.”
    And we were off. From the back of the wagon, I saw Mrs. Fitch with her fist in her mouth, and then, for the last time, the house and this familiar tree and that familiar lamp, and Bowling Green Park, getting smaller until, with a turn of the wagon, it all disappeared. We came to the corner where Rebecca and I always used to separate on our walk home, and then we passed the hotel her father owned, where she lived and conversed with travelers from all over the world; I wondered if she had heard of what had happened since we last met, and the thought of her learning of it made my throat hurt. With a collective twist, like a great ribbon, a flock of pigeons simultaneously left the roof of a building nearby and reassembled on a ledge on the other side. We went by a long, dripping ice wagon, and men with pushcarts, Jews and Negroes and Irishmen chanting little rhymes about the freshness of their fish or their skill at sharpening knives. We were being swallowed up by the vast world. Our parents in heaven watched us and approved.
    Horace, perhaps nervous to be around people who had suffered a double bereavement, talked a great deal, not always appropriately; he flirted with Christina and praised our grandfather’s house and congratulated us on moving there (and Robert said quietly, “Only slaves and horses should be given classical names”). We went no great distance, but it took almost an hour, because the streets were crowded with carriages and horsecars and there were many delays. At last we came to the house I had visited usually on holidays, and I savored the sweet, fleeting impression that this was another, and that later that night I would return hometo my parents; and instantly, in what was not my first experience of this age-old rhythm of bereavement, I paid for that pleasant instant of forgetfulness with the reminder of the truth:
No, you won’t, never, never
. My grandfather and