His aunt started the car. She did not answer. “Do you agree with them, Amelia?”
“Yes, Conrad is right. That needed saying, Edna, dear.” She patted her son’s shoulder.
“Well, I see I am outnumbered. We’ll all go back now.” Edna drove to her house in silence. No apology was ever received from her. They briefly murmured their goodbyes to each other with promises to keep in touch, and headed west in their own car to their home in Pennsylvania.
Some months after their visit, the family received a regretful note from Arthur informing them of the doctor’s confirmation of Edna’s premature descent into dementia, and the cancellation of her driving license, a nuisance to Arthur, who did not drive. A mere six months later, a tearful phone call came from him to let them know she had died peacefully in her sleep at the age of fifty-seven. “Her voyage through life was stormy,” her husband acknowledged, but he hoped she had found her “harbour” now. It was sad, he had added, that they had had no children together. A child was, he said, a “blessing,” one they had had to forgo reluctantly.
Reflecting on Arthur’s oddly apt choice of words later, Conrad was reminded of that last meeting with his aunt in Utica, and her combativeness in front of Cassie at Thomas Cole’s ‘Voyage of Life.’ Speak the truth in charity, he had been taught, for “the soft answer turneth away wrath.” He hoped he had done so in what had been his last words to her. Perhaps her soul had now found release from her torment, the origin of which he would never discover, but which he knew in his heart had always been beyond his own power to heal.
