Estates and Trust

The memorial service was a mistake. Her sister Frances had made the arrangements before Kate arrived. Heinz Chapel was too large for the handful of her father’s elderly friends and former colleagues. Afterward, at the Faculty Club, the gray- haired guests nibbled dry sandwiches and sipped lukewarm tea. Kate looked around the room and realized this was the last time she would see these people. She would never be a child in anyone’s eyes again.

The sisters dismantled his apartment in the retirement home the next day. There was so little, it felt more like a hotel suite than a home. Kate wept unexpected tears over the drawer of undershirts, worn and washed often, frayed souvenirs of his thrift. Turn the light out if you are leaving the room, had been the refrain of her childhood. Now, she switched on every light in the apartment but it did not dispel the chill gloom. In the kitchen the nondescript white dishes went in a box for Goodwill. The cookie jar, a squat ceramic cottage, sat beside the refrigerator, as it had in their old house. She lifted the blue roof, cracked and mended since she dropped it years ago reaching in for a cookie after school, and pulled out a handful of stale animal crackers. The refrigerator was empty, except for a styrofoam box of leftovers from the dining room downstairs and his usual bottle of dry sherry.

Kate filled two tumblers with sherry and brought one to Frances who knelt in a pool of papers beside the desk. Standing above her, Kate noticed the gray roots of her sister’s hair. She must have stopped coloring it. Frances was forty-six, just a year older than Kate. Yesterday at the memorial service when someone said, “Kate, you look so young, just like your mother always did,” she had felt Frances stiffen beside her. Her sister resented Kate’s resemblance to their fair, delicate mother. Frances had been adopted after their parents had tried and failed for years to have a child. Then at last the couple conceived and when Frances turned one, Kate was born. Frances had been keeping track of injustices ever since. Life isn’t fair, sweetie, their mother used to say, coaxing Frances out of a mood. Kate missed her mother, though she had been gone ten years.

“What should we do with all these letters?” Frances asked, rocking back on her haunches and taking a deep sip of sherry.

“Didn’t he give all his papers to the University when he moved here?”

“These are personal. To Mother during the war, it looks like.”

“Keep them in your attic,” Kate said.

Frances had a big attic. She and her then husband had bought the solid, spacious family house after the sisters’ mother died. Kate had not expected her father to sell and move farther away from Schenley Park and the University. But his last years in the house had been sad as her mother’s mind dimmed; her father seemed eager to leave the house as though he could leave those hard memories behind. He sold it to Frances for much less than it was worth, pleased to keep the house from going to strangers. During her recent divorce Frances had successfully fought to hold onto it.

“I may not be able to keep the house. I can’t fill it up with letters and castoffs.”

“I’ll take the cookie jar then,” Kate said.

“You don’t eat cookies, I want it for the girls.” Frances glared. There were deep, pouched circles beneath her black eyes.

“But you have Mother’s dishes.” Don’t squabble, she heard her mother’s voice.

Frances’s household had been full of the noise and combustion of family life until last year when her daughters went to college and her husband to his graduate student. The house was still full of things Kate coveted – their mother’s photograph albums and her cedar chest, the Chippendale dining table, the Haviland china. Kate did not have space for things in Chicago , in the one-bedroom Hyde Park apartment she had intended to be temporary when she started working at the University library twenty years earlier.

“Take his letters to the attic at the farm then,” Kate said.

“The farm? I can’t look after it, too. You’ve barely been there in years. We’re not keeping a vacation place as a museum, or to use as a storage locker. We’ll sell it.”

Kate felt everything shake loose inside her, the way it had last week when she heard Frances ’s voice on her answering machine, He died this morning. Call me.

She had played the tape over and over, and wept that she could not retrieve her father’s last message to her, left days before on the same machine.

“Sell it?”

“I have my hands full taking care of one old house. I’m done with taking care of everything for everyone.” Frances ’s nose turned pink. She went into the bathroom and shut the door. Kate heard the water running to cover crying.

She put the cookie jar in a carton, packed the letters around it, sealed the top, and marked it Kate/Letters. Father would not approve; integrity, in matters big and small, had been his hallmark. But she was tired and there was not time to negotiate over everything. They had to vacate the apartment by the end of the day. At least they agreed the shabby furniture would be donated; anything good or comfortable was already at Frances’s or the farm.

At last, they shut the door to the apartment for the final time. Kate drove her father’s car to Frances ’s house. She wanted to drive straight on two hours to the farm and barricade the place against her sister the way she used to slam her door and lock it during their fights. One time the key jammed in the lock and she was trapped inside, sweaty and crying. She heard rapping and looked up to see her father’s square-jawed, freckled face at her window. The slender, unathletic man had climbed a tall ladder like a fireman to the rescue. She had been startled by his unexpected bravery. Both girls’ keys disappeared after that. If a door is closed, respect each other’s privacy, said their mother....

Painting by Kevin Kutz

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