Miss Mary Pask by Edith Wharton, 1925
The magic trick:
Twisting and turning the reader’s sense of reality as the story begins
We’ve got a second ghost story from Edith Wharton this weekend. Our narrator is visiting a friend’s lonely sister in France. But get ready, we’ve got some twists and turns awaiting us.
Turns out, our narrator has been ill. He’d forgotten that his friend’s sister was dead. What was he thinking? But now that he’s here at her old house, it turns out that maybe she’s not dead. She’s welcoming him to her home, talking and visiting. Unless of course it’s a ghost?
And that’s quite a trick on Wharton’s part.
The selection:
“But she’s dead—Mary Pask is dead!” I almost screamed it aloud in my amazement.
It was incredible, the tricks my memory had played on me since my fever! I had known for nearly a year that Mary Pask was dead—had died suddenly the previous autumn—and though I had been thinking of her almost continuously for the last two or three days it was only now that the forgotten fact of her death suddenly burst up again to consciousness.
Dead! But hadn’t I found Grace Bridgeworth in tears and crape the very day I had gone to bid her good-bye before sailing for Egypt? Hadn’t she laid the cable before my eyes, her own streaming with tears while I read: “Sister died suddenly this morning requested burial in garden of house particulars by letter”—with the signature of the American Consul at Brest, a friend of Bridgeworth’s I seemed to recall? I could see the very words of the message printed on the darkness before me.
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