Why are you showing me these?’

‘I thought you should know.’

‘Should know what?’

They were two sisters of youthful middle age with three breasts between them and a history that might be summed up as much left unsaid. Maggie, the elder, who’d had a mastectomy eighteen months before, rarely alluded to the fact in her younger sister’s company and spoke with an air of startled reproach if Esther brought up the subject of her health; as if Maggie’s breast cancer were a symptom of a moral weakness, a deficiency of character, about which Esther had no right to know.

Eighteen months before, after the removal of Maggie’s left breast, Esther had driven 370 miles to see her sister and was immediately rebuffed by Maggie’s steely good humour, just as, when they were girls, she’d been outplayed on the tennis court by Maggie’s remarkable cannonball serves and vicious returns. In her hospital bed, in the presence of Maggie’s husband Dwight, Maggie had assured Esther, indicating the bulky-bandaged left side of her chest, ‘Hey, sweetie, don’t look like a funeral. It’s no great loss, I wasn’t planning on using it again.’

Was this funny? Esther had managed to smile, weakly.

Wanting to slap Maggie’s face.

Now it was late spring of another year. The day following their elderly father’s funeral. Four days after their elderly father’s death. Esther had returned to Strykersville too late by forty-five minutes to see Dr Hewart before he died: of a heart attack, after a long, deteriorating illness.

Esther had returned to Strykersville hurriedly. Esther had returned, it had to be admitted, reluctantly. For twenty years, in fact for more than twenty years, Esther had avoided Strykersville as much as possible for no reason she could name, not wanting to concede even to herself It’s Maggie’s territory. I hate Maggie.

Of course, Esther didn’t hate her sister. Esther was in terror that her sister would die and leave her, the surviving Hewart sister. About whom people would say Oh but Maggie was the one we all loved. That Maggie! In Maggie’s presence Esther felt as undefined as a tissue soaked in water, yet when she was summoned into Maggie’s presence she understood that there was something crucial at stake, and so she would shortly be defined, her role would become clear to her; her aimless tissue-thin life would acquire a new significance. When Maggie called Esther to say, in her mildly scolding/bemused elder-sister way, that drew upon their shared girlhood, yet resounded with the authority Maggie had acquired as head librarian of a dozen regional public libraries addressing her intimidated staff, ‘Esther, it’s time to be responsible. It’s time for you to come back to Strykersville, to make the effort to be an adult,’ it was Esther’s cue to say quickly, ‘Maggie, I know. It’s…time.’

Cryptically Maggie had said, ‘More than time.’

In middle age we discover that our parents have become, as if overnight, elderly. It’s a discovery like sprouting hair and emerging breasts at puberty. It’s a discovery that signals A new era, ready or not. Because Maggie had never left Strykersville, and lived with her family just across town from their parents, Esther had managed to avoid this new era for a long time. Though of course she’d felt guilty, all those years. Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fuelled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance. The Good Sister would call the Other Sister in New York City if too much time was elapsing between visits, to remind her: ‘Esther? Just to pass on, Mom and Dad are missing you. I miss you. Come see us!’ This was not a command. This was not coercion. It was enough for Esther to be told that she was being missed: to be so informed, to be designated as missed, lacerates the heart, and there is only one way to remedy it.

When Mrs Hewart began to fall sick in her mid-seventies, Esther had shuttled back and forth between New York and Strykersville for months, feeling herself a puppet cruelly jerked about, exhausted and demoralized, for she was no longer a young woman and her life was careening past her and when her father was diagnosed with cancer and began his inevitable descent into weakness, dying, death, Esther had wanted to scream at Maggie that she’d had enough of Strykersville as you might have enough of a recurring flu—No more! I’ve had it.

Except of course Esther hadn’t had it, entirely. There was more.

She’d returned, and when she had expressed a wish to leave the day after the funeral, Maggie had stared at her with a look almost of derision. ‘Esther, really! We’re not contagious.’

Half-consciously Maggie had stroked her left breast. What was now, foam rubber inserted into a specially equipped bra, Maggie’s left breast.

Seeing this gesture, Esther blushed. She’d wanted to protest Maggie, I didn’t mean you.

Since Dr Hewart had moved into a nursing home the previous year, the Hewarts’ house had stood empty. It was made of sandstone and red brick in a dignified Queen Anne style but it was old, and in visible need of repair. Before the property could be put on the market it had to be cleared of household furnishings and the accumulation of decades. Esther felt faint at the prospect. So soon after her father’s death she couldn’t bear to help Maggie, she’d told her sister, she just couldn’t. ‘But why, exactly? Why, if I can bear it?’ Maggie had reasonably asked. That reproachful smile, the calm assessing eyes, the voice that, when required, cut through another’s voice like a wire-cutter cutting wire.

To this, Esther had no reply. It would not have been possible to say But I’m the lesser Hewart sister. Everyone knows that.

Sharp-nosed as vultures, local developers had been calling Maggie for months to ask about the untenanted old house. It came with seven acres of prime real estate, extending into Strykersville’s most fashionable suburb and bordering a golf course. Each time, Maggie called Esther to gloat: ‘Can you believe, they’re offering two million dollars?’—’Can you believe, they’re offering two point five million?’

Esther gripped the phone receiver tight against her ear and waited to feel some emotion. Was she elated, like Maggie? Was she sick with guilt, to profit from the collapse of her parents’ lives, that seemed to her such good, decent, kindly lives? Or had she so long steeled herself against any emotion generated by news out of Strykersville, she was unmoved?

Anaesthetized, that was it. The wisest strategy.

She objected, ‘Dad wouldn’t want the property broken up. If that’s what the developer is planning. He always said—’

In her wire-cutter voice, Maggie interrupted, ‘Sweetie. This is us now, not Dad. We make the decisions now.’

Sobering to conclude, this was so. Maggie was fifty-two years old, Esther was forty-nine.

At the old house, Maggie briskly led Esther through familiar rooms that had become subtly unfamiliar since Esther’s last visit the previous spring. Maggie’s heels rang against the hardwood floors, where carpets had been removed. Esther, fending off a migraine headache, had an impulse to press her hands over her ears. She’d slept badly the night before. She’d been trying to talk to her father, a blurred figure with a face that seemed to have gone askew like melted wax, and though often in life, at least years ago, she’d had quite lucid, warmly engaging and intellectually provocative conversations with Dr Hewart, especially on the subjects of genetics and palaeontology in which he’d had an amateur’s interest, Esther had not been able to speak to him now. Daddy! It’s me, Esther. You know me, Daddy—your daughter. She blamed Maggie for the disturbed sleep. When she visited Strykersville she had to stay with Maggie because Maggie insisted and always at Maggie’s she slept badly, and could not tell her sister; never could she have told her sister that she’d rather stay at a motel. And there were reasons for not staying in the old house, where her girlhood room was hardly changed, as if awaiting Esther’s return. (Esther was determined not to make another sentimental visit to the upstairs room, she’d made so many over the years!) Maggie had had Dr Hewart’s power of attorney for some time before his death, and had been in and out of this house frequently, so returning now after their father’s funeral was no profound event to her; but Esther was feeling shaky, unreal. Waves of visceral horror swept over her repeatedly, They’re dead, they’re not here, why are you here? Though Mrs Hewart had died four years ago, yet it seemed to Esther that she must be somewhere in the house.

If not here in the house, where?

Led to the rear of the house, Esther was saying to Maggie’s stolid back, ‘Maggie, I’ve told you, I don’t have room for much in my apartment. It’s only five rooms. You should take whatever you want, and what’s left over…’ There was a flutter of panic in her throat. What was Esther trying to say? That she wasn’t sentimental about their past, she didn’t really want anything from her parents’ household, she hadn’t an ounce of healthy acquisitiveness in her bones? Maggie would disapprove, Esther knew. Maggie needed to believe that Esther coveted something of the past; something located only in Strykersville, nowhere else. All those years Esther had lived in New York, adrift in her own selfish life; her selfish, moderately happy life; her not-entirely-unhappy life; her life-in-exile from Strykersville, which was Maggie’s territory; all those years she’d sent a stream of lavish greeting cards and a small galaxy of potted mums, poinsettias, cyclamens and tulips; she’d helped pay for live-in nursing care; she’d returned to visit when she could, which had not been often. Naturally you would think that the Good Sister had sacrificed her life to their parents while Esther, unencumbered as milkweed seed, had blossomed in more fertile soil, but quite the reverse was true. Maggie had her own rather wonderful family, she remained as popular in Strykersville as she’d been in high school; even after her mastectomy and chemotherapy treatments she was still an attractive, hearty woman, with flushed girlish cheeks and a habit of tilting her chin upward. Maggie was one who marched stalwartly onward while Esther seemed always to be stalling and reviewing her life, ‘making a fresh start’ in a new job, a new course of instruction—graphic design, public relations, a master’s degree programme in math at the Columbia School of Education, to qualify her for private school teaching—or, in the cool clinical vocabulary of the era, a new relationship. From girlhood she’d been wanly pretty like a watercolour that begins to fade even as you examine it; she knew herself anaemic beside Maggie’s ruddy skin, strong-boned face and pale-lashed penetrating eyes. As a girl she’d thought I hate Maggie but her truer thought was J wish I was Maggie! She’d resented Maggie’s high-school popularity, which she’d been expected to inherit, like Maggie’s position on the girls’ basketball and field hockey teams, in which Maggie had excelled; she’d resented not her sister’s marriage, family life, career, but the expectation that she should follow suit; failing this, she’d become increasingly unnatural in their parents’ eyes, like a woman with a shrivelled limb.

Now they were adults. Their parents had vanished. Esther had only Maggie, to link her with them. She was in dread of losing Maggie. In dread of Maggie’s scorn. Esther, really! We’re not contagious!

Yet cancer is genetically determined, isn’t it: in a way, contagion.

‘…What’s left over, we can sell. We can give away.’

There, Esther had uttered the words. She wouldn’t take anything back with her to New York, she would give away what might be hers. All of it!

Maggie, striding ahead, like a team captain, gave no sign of having heard.

Esther followed slowly behind. She was feeling what a mistake this was, not to have driven off immediately, headed east on the Turnpike. Making her way through the house she’d always believed to be so imposing, so dignified among its neighbours, now she saw how small and cluttered the rooms, how dated the design, the narrow windows emitting a stingy sort of light. To be the daughter of a highly respected general practitioner in Strykersville, New York state, in the 1950s and 1960s was to be respected, too; in some quarters, envied. But all that was past, and could not be retrieved. Returning to this house was like descending in a bathysphere into a region of undersea shadows and darting shapes in which Maggie, the elder sister, always the wisest and certainly the most pragmatic sister, knew her way blind. In this fairy tale the elder, good sister leads the younger through a labyrinth of rooms crammed with elegant but old, fading furniture, chintz draw-curtains, dust-heavy rolled-up carpets. Quilts handmade by their mother. Cracked and chipped Wedgware china. Stained-glass objects, the most beautiful a Tiffany-style lamp in rich blues and greens made by their restless father in the stained-glass phase of his retirement. Seeing it, Esther looked quickly away. There: something I could take back with me. She hated the sudden greed, the desperation. She hated Maggie for bringing her here. She hated Maggie for being so brave about her cancer, not collapsing into a rag doll as Esther would have done.

‘Maggie? I can’t breathe here…’

Maggie heard nothing for Maggie was talking continuously. At the funeral home, close by their father’s open, gleaming casket and his wonderfully composed if rather shrivelled monkey-face, Maggie had chattered. The good news was, two Buffalo-area developers were now in the bidding, which would drive the price up even higher. And where they could rent a U-Haul for Esther to attach to her car.

Dwight would help them load it, Maggie promised.

Esther wondered what Maggie, who’d rarely visited her in New York, imagined of the brownstone into which Esther had recently moved: five rooms in fashionable Chelsea on West 22nd near by a welfare hotel whose dazed residents sprawled on the front steps even in the rain. Esther’s apartment was chic and spare, mostly neutral colours, her living room/dining room scarcely as large as the kitchen in this house. Esther said, pleading, ‘I don’t have space for heirlooms, Maggie. Clutter makes me anxious.’

It was true, her breathing had become laboured. Possibly the air was rife with pollen. As Maggie tugged a shroud off a sofa, dust lifted. Esther stared at a massive piece of Victorian furniture with claw feet, a scalloped back, a wine-coloured velvet fabric that, as a teenager, she’d compulsively stroked, like fur. Reversing the motion, running her hand over it backward, had made Esther shudder, and she shuddered now, recalling. Maggie said, rapidly, ‘Things you like, that you don’t have room for now, you can store. Some day you might want them. And if they’re gone, they’re gone forever.’ She paused as if waiting for Esther to object. ‘I’m going to be storing lots of things.’

Maggie too seemed out of breath. Her eyes glistened. Her tone was argumentative, yet shaky. Esther had no intention of arguing with her sister face to face.

‘Esther, look here.’ They were in their father’s office at the rear of the house. Dr Hewart had had his professional office in downtown Strykersville, where he saw patients, but he had a work-related office at home, to be distinguished from his book-lined study off the living room. The home office was comfortably cluttered with an old roll-top desk, much-worn leather chair and hassock, several filing cabinets. Maggie and Esther were forbidden to enter this room as children unless Dr Hewart was in it, and unless he invited them the door was always shut. To push the door open so brashly, as Maggie had just done, seemed to Esther an insolent gesture, so soon after their father’s death.

‘These were in the bottom desk drawer. I think he must have forgotten them. I can’t think he’d have wanted…’ Maggie paused, unconsciously bringing the back of her hand against the left side of her chest. Esther stared at the faded Polaroids on the desk top, at first uncomprehending. Were these old pictures of her and Maggie? Why was Maggie behaving so strangely?

She saw, then. She gave a little cry and pushed the Polaroids away.

‘Did you see who it is?’

‘Maggie, I don’t want to see.’

But Esther had seen: Elvira Sanchez.

Elvira!—Elvira she’d always been to them, not Mrs Sanchez—a woman who’d ‘helped out’ Mrs Hewart with housework; a former nurse’s aide at Strykersville General—Esther seemed to recall this background, though not clearly. This was sometime in the late 1970s when Esther was in high school, and Elvira’s daughter Maria was in Esther’s class, and so there was an awkwardness between them, an air as of sisters who had no way of speaking to each other and who, you might have thought if you’d seen them unavoidably forced together, didn’t know each other’s name. Elvira had been a familiar household presence at the Hewarts’ for a few years, then abruptly she’d disappeared, as often cleaning women, handymen, lawn crews, snow-removal crews appeared and disappeared in the mysterious life of the dignified old sandstone and red-brick house on East Avenue, and none of this was questioned by the children of the house, nor even much noticed.

‘It must have been an oversight. He was forgetting so much. He did destroy lots of “old boring things” he called them, in the fireplace. I was afraid he’d burned legal documents, financial records…’

It angered Esther that Maggie was speaking like this. In a rapid voice, with an air of being bemused.

Esther took up the Polaroids to look at them more closely. There were about a dozen of them of them, and all were faded. Yet you could see who it was, unmistakably. Elvira Sanchez: naked. A stocky but good-looking woman in her mid-forties with enormous breasts, berry-coloured nipples big as coat buttons, a bristling black pelt of pubic hair. Elvira was lying lazily back, legs spread, on the leather chair in this room; in another more extravagant pose, tongue protruding between fleshy lipsticked lips as she fingered the fleshy cleft between her legs, Elvira sprawled on the wine-coloured velvet sofa in the living room. In that part of the house—Esther was wounded, stunned. As if such behaviour in the living room was more shocking than in Dr Hewart’s office.

Esther fumbled the Polaroids, not wanting to see more.

‘This one—’ Maggie snatched it from Esther’s fingers, to shove into her face, ‘—it’s their bed, see? Mom and Dad’s. That’s the ivory quilt Mom sewed.’

‘Why are you showing me these?’

‘I thought you should know.’

‘Should know what?’

Maggie stopped to pick up the Polaroids. Her breath was agitated. Her face was warm, flushed. Yet she was trying to behave normally, considering Esther’s question as if she might not have thought of it herself.

‘Should know what Dad was. What Dad wasn’t. I thought you might like to know, Esther.’

Tactfully not adding Since you avoided knowing so much, all these years.

‘Did you think it would make me happy to know, Maggie?’

‘I wasn’t thinking of your happiness, Esther. Believe me, not everyone spends twenty-four hours a day thinking of your happiness, Esther.’

There, it was uttered. Esther recoiled in hurt, that her sister hated her, too.

Maggie held the Polaroids like a hand of cards she’d been dealt. She seemed tired. She seemed, in this moment, not-young and possibly ill. ‘Maybe I didn’t want to be the only one to know, Esther. Maybe I felt lonely.’

‘Lonely! You!’

‘Why not me? I’m lonely.’

Maggie spoke flatly as if daring Esther to believe her.

‘You with your family. Your “good works”.’

‘Nothing is more lonely than fucking “good works”.’

Esther laughed. Though she was shocked, disoriented. Maggie wasn’t one to use profanities lightly, still less obscenities. There was something very wrong here.

She’s sick, Esther thought. The cancer has come back.

Maggie said matter-of-factly, ‘We’ll burn them. In the fireplace. Dad would approve. That seems right.’

In the fireplace in Dr Hewart’s book-lined study, which was already messy with ashes, Maggie burned the Polaroids.

Hesitantly Esther asked, picking at a thumbnail, ‘Do you think Mom knew? About Elvira…’

Maggie shrugged. Maggie wasn’t going to speculate.

Esther was thinking of Maria Sanchez. The shame of it, if Maria had known! That would explain… No, Esther couldn’t bear to think so.

Maggie laughed. ‘Remember we’d find Dad’s magazines, sometimes? Those pulpy things like movie magazines, mostly pictures. The shock of it, in bright colours. Once I found, I guess it was only just Playboy under the front seat of Dad’s car.’

Esther shook her head, no. She didn’t remember.

‘”Soft-core porn”, it’s called now. Nothing worse than what you see in movies now, or on TV, but it seemed shocking then.’

They were watching the Polaroids flare up, wan bluish flames tinged with orange. How curious fire is. How quickly evidence disappears, anonymous soot remaining.

With schoolgirl obstinacy Esther objected, ‘Some of those were Dad’s medical magazines. I used to look through those.’

Maggie snorted in derision. ‘Not these, sweetie. These were not the New England Journal of Medicine, I assure you.’

‘No, but there were others, with pictures, like—’ Esther was confused: medical magazines with lurid juicy close-ups of surgical procedures? Childbirth? A bared, red-muscled heart, no more mysterious than meat in a butcher’s display case? Was she remembering these, or imagining them?

They waited until the Polaroids were destroyed utterly.

Esther said, ‘Now you tell me about you, Maggie. I deserve to know.’

Maggie turned a startled face toward her. Esther saw what looked like a glimmer of resentment, and guilt.

Here was a fact: Esther had been waiting since the night of their father’s death for Maggie to confide in her. The claim of one sister upon another. I knew you before your husband knew you. Long before your children knew you. Esther waited for Maggie to confess to her what she hadn’t yet been able to tell her husband and children: she was going to die. The cancer had returned. The cancer had—Esther hated this word, familiar from their parents’ ordeals—metastasized. And how would Esther react? She wondered if she would begin to shake, as she sometimes shook in the cold of the mammography examination room, and Maggie herself would have to console her. Oh sweetie! C’mon. Or would she stare at Maggie, who’d been mysterious to her all their lives, as she was staring now, and feel nothing, nothing at all?

‘Deserve to know what?’

‘Your health. You never tell me…’

‘My health.’ Maggie ran her fingers through her short, springy talcum-coloured hair, that had grown back sparsely after her chemotherapy. She smiled roguishly at Esther. ‘Strong as an ox. Ask my enemies.’

‘Oh, Maggie. Don’t be like that.’

‘Like what? I don’t have enemies?’

Esther pleaded, ‘You would tell me if—wouldn’t you?’

‘If—if what?’

Maggie was mocking her but Esther couldn’t retreat. She made a clumsy gesture with her arm, against her left breast.

‘That? Oh, certainly. You’d be the first to know, Esther. As soon as my oncologist tells me, and before I tell Dwight.’

Maggie spoke sneeringly. Evidently she was angry.

Esther wanted to say Fuck you, then. I don’t need you.

Esther apologized. She was sorry, she said.

‘Maggie, forgive me? I’m only thinking of you.’

‘Think of yourself, sweetie. I’m fine.’

They’d returned to the living room. Esther followed Maggie in a haze, stumbling into things. By this time her ice-pick headache was causing her eyes to lose focus. The chemical stink of the Polaroids! She wanted desperately to leave this place but she understood that Maggie wouldn’t allow it, not quite yet. She would have to be punished further. She’d been summoned back home to be a witness, and to be punished. The dining room table looked like a table in a yard sale, upon which items were spread in the forlorn hope of attracting buyers. Tarnished silverware and candlestick holders, woven place mats with shadowy stains, more of Mrs Hewart’s finery, that had been overlooked, apparently, after her death. Maggie nudged Esther to ‘take something, for Christ’s sake’, but Esther stood numbed, unable to move. That boxy handbag: alligator hide? Esther shuddered at the thought of touching such a thing. She couldn’t remember her mother carrying that bag.

Maggie said, annoyed, ‘The lamp, at least. You can take that, can’t you?’

Maggie meant their father’s stained-glass Tiffany-style lamp. She pointed out the painstaking craftsmanship that had gone into it: the triangular pieces of glass, blues, greens, pale red and russet-red. ‘It’s beautiful. Your New York friends will admire it.’ Again Maggie was sneering, but less angrily than before. ‘It has nothing to do with—you know. That other.’

That other. Esther foresaw that, after today, neither she nor Maggie would allude to what they’d seen in their father’s office, and burned together in his fireplace. Not even elliptically as Maggie was doing now, with the mildest embarrassment. That other.

They would not utter the name Sanchez.

Esther said, ‘It is beautiful, Maggie. But…’ She was groping through the pain in her head. She might have said nothing further but heard her voice continue. ‘I don’t like beautiful things.’

Maggie said sharply, ‘Don’t like beautiful things?’

‘I mean—beautiful breakable things.’

As if to prove her point Esther made a sudden gesture toward the Tiffany lamp. Perhaps it was involuntary, like a tremor. Perhaps Maggie overreacted, shoving at Esther’s arm. The Tiffany lamp fell from the end table, slipped through both the sisters’ fingers and toppled over on to the floor. Shattered into a thousand pieces! But when Esther opened her eyes she saw no broken glass. The lampshade was wrenched around like a head on a broken neck, but the lamp had fallen against a rolled-up carpet. Maggie, trembling with indignation, picked it up and placed it back on the table, exactly where it had been, in a square clear of surrounding dust. ‘You’re right, Esther. You shouldn’t take this lamp, or anything. You’d better go back home.’

Esther wanted to protest But I am home!

Instead she said, wiping at her eyes with a wadded tissue she’d found in her pocket, ‘Well, Maggie. Now you know my heart.’

It wasn’t true. But she hoped Maggie would think so, from now on.

Photograph © Thomas Bresson