Such a little thing to start with -- the car registration.

"Ida, where is the car license"?
She asked.
"I can't find it in the glove compartment".

"Via must have it", I answered readily enough, recalling her last visit.

"Via", she was frowning.
"Why should Via have it"?

Had she forgotten she had signed the car away, that whatever they mutually owned had been divided among the children?

I was silent.
I didn't want to stir things up.

"I drive my own car by courtesy of Via"?

"I'm sure she'd turn it over to you, if you'd rather.
You know that".

She looked as if she were accusing me of some fraud.

"She must have taken the registration when she went to Walter's.
I'll call her".

"No, thank you.
I want nothing of Via's".

Why should this suddenly assail her?
Walter was giving me checks for my pay, the household bills.
Had she been in such a turmoil that this had slipped her mind?

"What a fool I've been", she said quietly.
"I knew all this, but I paid no attention.
I don't even own the house I'm standing in.
I was so sure it was all temporary that we would all embrace, and then the lawyer would tear up all those things

"It narrows down down down and finally there is no way out.
If I am not to be Mrs. Salter I am nothing".

I suppose I should have paid attention to that half-murmured remark, but it seemed one of those extreme statements women under stress indulge in.
I love you, I hate you, I feel like killing you and myself, and in the same sequence I love you I think you're the most wonderful the most noble and so on and on, meanwhile eating a good breakfast and dinner and enjoying living.
So I went about my business.
I made a lemon sponge, a light dessert, roasted a chicken, parboiled some frozen vegetables, so there would be something nice in the icebox for the weekend.
"Don't bother, Ida", she said.
"I have these appointments in town for Saturday, and I'll probably spend Sunday with Dolly or the Thaxters".

At last, I thought, she's recovering her spirits.
With this movie-to-be in London, and new faces about her there, she would soon be a more tranquil, a wiser person, all the better for her stay out here.
I felt more cheerful, as if I had had a part in bringing her through to a greater tolerance of herself.
And I went back to my own cottage to live my own little patch of life.

It was foggy that evening, but the path to my house was so well grooved that I could feel my way, accustomed as I was to the dense mists that rise from the sun-warmed palisades of the river and sometimes last for days.
In the morning the fog was still thick so that to go to the village I crept along with my headlights full on.

I did notice a twinkle of light from the big house through the woods but as I had left a light on in my own house because of the fog I assumed Mrs. Salter had done the same before she left for town.
I did my shopping, had my dentist appointment, and from there I went to the women's lunch at our parish church where we discussed plans for the annual Christmas bazaar, so that dusk was beginning to gather when I drove home in the late afternoon.

But the next day -- Sunday.
Why, when I drove down to church, didn't it speak to me, seeing the lights still on and the day crisp and clear?
Prisoners brought to the dock accused of murder or accident say they cannot remember, and reading the accounts of their testimony you cannot believe that the mind can remove, absent itself, unsee.
When I came back from church at noon Mrs. Thaxter was turning into the Salter driveway.
Even at a car's length I could sense that something was wrong, and so I followed her up to the turnaround in front of the house.

Dolly Engisch was waiting there on the steps and she came running toward us.

"She's nowhere, nowhere"!
She screamed, and both women ran up to the house, and I followed.

The search began, in all the rooms, running upstairs, down, opening closets, talking, exclaiming in rushes and gasps.

Everything was as I had left it the night before last -- her portfolio and bag for town, her lingerie and dress and shoes laid out only her mink coat was missing.
And she.

Then the telephoning began.
I, who until that day before had been Mrs. Salter's friend, her equal, was the servant now.
It was Dolly and Mrs. Thaxter who were calling Via, everybody.
And when they spoke they spoke to each other and not to me.
And after I brought them sandwiches and coffee I had to go back to my place in the kitchen and wait.

Sitting in the kitchen I recalled every word Mrs. Salter said that could have been a sign to me.
"If I am not to be Mrs. Salter then I am nothing".
Why didn't that alarm me then?
And when she returned from taking her guests back to New York she had said, "All they talked about was Harvie Harvie this, Harvie that When they know the truth will they drop away from me, will I become a nothing"?
And then I remembered a few years before after their return from a short trip to Rome I had heard her boast, over and over again, "On the boat people liked me for myself".

I had made a habit of calling her at night from my cottage, just to check.
The last night I had called, but the line was always busy and it reassured me.
I assumed it was one of those hour-long conversations with Dolly or Constance, she comfortable in bed.
But it seemed not from what they were saying.
Then was it a final desperate plea from her, to whom?
Hanging on and on past any man's patience some final stab of conclusion?

She was found the day after at the bottom of the cliff.
I tried to believe that what must have happened was that, restless, disturbed by this telephone call or whatever, she walked out in the night, as she had a habit of doing.
Sometimes she took the path that winds up around my cottage to the walk at the edge of the cliff.
It's so romantic up there, she used to say, with the broad river gleaming in its moontrack like an enormous dark mirror and all the sounds of the night, so poetic.
With all that warm rain and the fog it might have been as simple as a loosened rock, a misstep.

But I didn't really think it was as simple as that, nor did anyone else.
When a fisherman brought her up in his arms, still, small, as if she were a child asleep, I began to shudder with a terrible excitement, almost triumphant, that I still cannot account for.
Was it a hysterical release from the long strain of vigilance of those weeks?
That at last the vigilance, the will gives way?
Or what was it that, before Via, Sonny, Walter and all, I began almost to dance with shuddering and cry out, "I knew she'd do it!
I knew"!

Everyone stared at me and drew back.
Their eyes turned cold and accusing, even Via's.
And they have never changed.

At the same time that I thought I understood her at long last and pitied her, underneath this knowing had there burned unquenched by my pity a fire of hate, an enduring envy that burst out in that ghastly outcry?
Was that what had given way in me?
Even now I am appalled at how little anyone knows of what they really are.
It is absurd of course to say that that one exclamation estranged me from the family I considered my very own, but there it hangs, a cooling void that broke our close connection with each other.
At the time I was filled with self-pity at this separation, but in the years since I have come to understand that the sight of me was painful to them after that outcry.
In my person they would always remember that last long time of me alone with her, so if they told themselves that I could have prevented it, I can understand that by now and love them still, because everyone must justify, have a scapegoat for what is not to be borne.

It is not their avoidance that rankles;
it is when I meet someone who was a close friend of the family, and therefore of mine, and they nod to me so coolly and walk away, that it hurts.
I could tell them, but no one ever asked, why I had cried out so triumphantly at the sight of her body.
No, I forget Mrs. Mathias, who had been away visiting a married daughter when it happened.
She haunted me;
she persisted in explaining how and why she had advised Mrs. Salter to return to the country.

"We all feel guilty", I turned away from her coldly.
"It was nobody's fault.
She overplayed her hand".

"What do you mean"?
She frowned.

"Why put such a high value on being top dog"?
I added.
It was coarse, almost insulting, this harsh appraisal, and she has never come to see me since.

But suppose she had not taken Mrs. Mathias' advice and lived on like thousands of women in towns, dispossessed of love, hanging on to makeshifts, and altogether and finally arid.
If she chose, and in that final decision discarded, what, above all, all of us value, life itself, must she not have risen to her fullest height, and transcending her murky self, felt at last the passion of a great moral decision?
If they say I could have stopped her it is because they are ignorant of her last weeks of self-examination, her search into herself and its conclusions.

Yes, I had cried out that I knew she'd do it, but without my fully realizing it at the time, it was a cry of triumph for her, praise at her deliverance from pettiness and greed -- and guilt.
She was finally at rest in truth, of her own proud free choice.
At rest with my darling Ellen, the first Mrs. Salter.

Mr. Salter came home.
The funeral service was in the house, the Methodist minister, how clean and glistening his eyeglasses and his neat body standing beside that coffin with that doll inside, a stranger speaking to strangers the old sacred words, and the rain drumming incessantly in accompaniment, seven days of relentless rain that turned the ground to mud so the burial had to be postponed.
I waited.
Then Via called to say they had decided to cremate her -- as they had Ellen, the thought leaped to my mind -- and did I want to meet her at the funeral home the next morning.

The coffin stood on trestles in a corner of the long low dimly lit funeral parlor, on its dark shining surface the sheaf of white roses I had ordered.
I knelt, just for decency I thought at the time, but found myself whispering, "Our Father which Art in Heaven" And it was only after that that something unlocked in me and I felt a grief.

Via was in the parking lot when I went outside.
Together we waited in her car until the hearse moved out and we followed it down into the heavy traffic of New Jersey.

By the time we arrived and entered the building sacred music was already swelling out into the chapel-like auditorium with its discreet symbols of religious faiths.
Again I felt impelled to kneel, and reached back and pulled Via down.
Something would come into her heart if nothing else the sounds of Bach would give her some healing.