Good-bye and Amen by Beth Gutcheon

did.
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    Edith Faithful I got the topaz ring. But Annie got the mink coat that Sylvie wanted. It was the only thing Sylvie really did want. She’d never buy new fur, but she gets cold in New York in winter. I felt bad for her. Mother had to choose between taking the coat for her or the ring for me.
    Meanwhile Nora found rooms in the cellar we hadn’t even known were there. In the furnace room she found a crate with business records from the 1880s, which I guess will explain where the Brant money came from. Now thatit’s mostly gone. She found a couple of trunks that belonged to Granny Candace’s strange mountain-man brother, who has a peak in the Rockies named for him. And Annabelle Brant’s Line a Days, and her scrapbooks. And then across from the furnace room, she found a bomb shelter.
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    Bobby Applegate Nora came running to get me. She had the ring of keys from the kitchen, and had opened a door I’d never even noticed. What was in there must have been some good idea from the fifties. There were big glass jugs of water, turned quite a nasty color, and a gallon of Scotch, and a carton of Kent cigarettes. A shelf of canned goods, some folded cots, and a card table and folding chairs. A transistor radio, all corroded. A first-aid kit. A couple of decks of cards and a set of dominoes. Can you imagine?
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    Eleanor Applegate And what were we supposed to do with fifty-year-old canned goods? We’re always prepared for the wrong disaster.
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    Bobby Applegate I kept the Scotch.
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    Annie Applegate I spent an hour or two with the scrapbooks Annabelle Brant had made. Nora was trying to sort the family pictures in some way that made sense, the Mosses and Bings in their boxes and the Brants and Lees in others. We got pretty good at spotting great-aunts and -uncles, even in childhood. James Brant was easy; he was amazingly handsome, with a square jaw, and thick dark hair with a curl at the peak. There was a big picture of him in a silver frame on the piano, and also an oil of him and his sisterLouisa, who was retarded or demented or something, when they were about eight and ten. Uncle Jimmy took the painting, which surprised Mom, who had a place all picked out for it.
    Annabelle’s scrapbook had all the clippings about her wedding in Cleveland, and pictures of people we can’t identify and lots of memorabilia from when James and Poor Auntie Louisa were small. Certificates of merit from Sunday school, invitations to parties. Pictures of The Elms in Dundee, not The Plywoods but the original house, when it was new. Pictures of Annabelle and James on some enormous yacht with the crew all in uniforms—I think it was the Maitlands’. Programs from concerts eighty years ago at Ischl Hall. Then a picture of James with a woman I didn’t recognize. They’re sitting under a tree in summer. Nora went burrowing through the laundry basket of pictures she either hadn’t sorted yet or didn’t know what to do with.
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    Nora Applegate Bingo—the woman with James Brant was the girl from the mystery family on a porch in Maine. The mother in that picture is wearing the topaz ring.
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    Annie Applegate Daddy said our great-grandfather was married before he married the Dreaded Candace. (And no one ever told us this?) The first wife’s name was Berthe Hanenburger and the family were famous musicians who went to Dundee in the summer. Berthe died young. And apparently we kept the ring. Later I found a scrapbook all about her singing career, with lots of pictures of her from Cleveland and New York newspapers but nothing about her death. Dad thinks that poor Berthe died because shelaced her corsets too tight while she was pregnant. But Aunt Monica said she had TB and lost her voice and shot herself.
    Once I understood where the ring came from, I wanted it. It’s hard, dividing this stuff. It isn’t really bits of stone and metal and wood. It’s the history of our