Chapter 8
JANEY didn't come back last time, and Sissy's new lease on life after her "tantrum,"
"It's time you thought of yourself for a change," the doctor had said, and Sissy thought maybe he was right, didn't last long. At first she was angry; "Just when I was feeling so much better," she said to herself and then, as if Willie's metamorphosis posed the possibility, even probability, that a second transfiguration might take place under the same circumstances (when she wasn't looking), she knew.
She did not have to wait long for proof of her shocking vision. They did carry Janey in, wet and limp and quite dead, a sweet dreamy look on her face, a mysterious withdrawal in her wide-open eyes. Sissy, strengthened by her previous emotional beating, did not break down again. Alone she went through the motions and pantomime necessary to the heartbreaking occasion. Alone she accepted the abnormal mutation, one might call it, of Janey. Janey, the one who wouldn't do it, not one of the others who might (Maggie!), did it. Too young to give herself a second chance, perhaps, too normal to separate herself into two people (Janey a schizophrenic!), she had gone to join that Lisa. It had been a love affair that Janey did not know how to satisfy, was that it? The physical urgency of her fantasies had been manifest in her straddling the well in her momentary desire for a quick change of sex symbolized, by a gesture, and her strange fear, her guilty anxiety after her long daydreams, herself the central figure, a kind of cerebral self-abuse with a built-in reflex: guilt. It is hardly fair (certainly no one real was there, there is no evidence that would hold up in court) to evaluate like this the sweet and foolish Janey that we have got to know in these pages, and rack our brains and break our hearts looking for the answer to an enigma. And it is unfortunate that Sissy blamed herself for taking off a couple of weeks after Willie's ridiculous performance to have hysterics, so that, self-centered in the guise of "the mother," she believed that it was surely in just those two weeks when she wasn't "paying attention" when she was having cold baths and hot tea, and a quarter of a grain of Phenobarbital every hour on the hour-it was just in that special unit of time that Janey, separated from her, had formulated the atrocious scheme and carried out the desperate deed. In other words, all of Janey's ancestral traits and acquired characteristics and genes, aided or not aided, as the case might be, by her pituitary gland, her metabolic rate at that time of day, her blood sugar count, the weather too-all these things could have had no effect on Janey-if Sissy had been watching. Once more, silly Sissy. Janey left no notes and there was no evidence of premeditation, there was no motive, but the body, the corpus delicti had been found. The hardest part had been solved and little Janey's cadaver was The Evidence. The Law seemed satisfied, almost tired, and there was no man hunt. A little girl had f alien in a well. Yes, and poor Sissy, with proof in her own mind of her premonition, knew that she had done it.
If only Janey would bounce in and say, "Look at the millennium!"
Sissy, usually so practical and wise, did not know, could not decide, whether to tell Ma-Ma. It was certainly the conventional thing to do, but no one wanted to disinter that Lisa whom Ma-Ma seemed to have completely forgot; and, at this time, Lisa, whom Sissy had never known, seemed almost as real as Janey persisted in being, in Sissy's mind: a disquieting little ghost, two disquieting little ghosts; hand in hand they had done the same thing, a naughty sorority. Sissy wanted to do the right, the correct thing, but hoped that Ma-Ma, listening intently to one of Ian's stories, would simply dismiss her irritably, at the interruption.
She told her; quickly, gently, there were tears in her eyes.
"Shucks, it'll all come out in the wash," said the old lady.
Sissy flared up. "She's dead!" she said angrily. "Think no more of it," the old lady said kindly, "she'll be back."
As Sissy left the room, the ordeal over, and still in good enough shape emotionally to be angry, Maisie said to Ian, "Always room for one more." Sissy heard her, she meant the hill!
The old lady had certainly sounded lucid enough and Ian, even Ian, who understood her so well and loved her, was shocked. "If she isn't crazy, she's as hard as nails," he thought.
"Ian," said the old lady, uneasily, "do run after your Cousin Sissy and ask her if she's tried St.-John's-wort."
"I will," said Ian. He leaned forward and stroked her hand. "Don't worry," he said. The old lady's eyes were clouded and her lips twitched.
"What was that!" she said. "Bunce, who's there! Hark!"
"No one," said Ian.
The old lady glanced at the cat but she was sleeping, like a fur piece stretched at full length on the rug. Bunce didn't look up. As if she had checked two barometers that she trusted, the old lady calmed down and smiled, "You were saying, dear boy...?"