by Sarah Blake
The screen door stuck and then gave and she stepped through, holding it open for him. He had a brief impression of many small rooms with uncomfortable furniture as she moved quickly down the hall in the direction of the kitchen at the back.
“Sitting room”—she pointed—“dining room, and pantry. Here.” She reached for a flashlight set on the windowsill and handed it to him. “Put that in your pocket. You won’t think you need it tonight, and then suddenly it’ll be black as sin.”
“Right,” he said, following her through the pantry, into the kitchen, where a rail-thin woman turned round from the sink, a mound of peeled potatoes humped to the side, paid no attention to him, and frowned at Joan. “I thought there were girls coming to help.”
“There are, Jessie,” Joan promised. “Mum said they’d be here around four. This is Mr. Levy.”
“Might as well not come, then,” Jessie grumbled as Len put down the basket full of dishes dutifully beside her. “Everything needs doing will be done.”
Beckoning Len, Joan led the way back out of the pantry, through the dining room, and into the front room, where she stopped and turned at last and walked into his arms with a cry. And the world—the hot green summer world outside—vanished in the cave of his chest as she closed her eyes and he kissed her.
After a little, she pulled away and looked up at him.
“It’s all over your face.” He was smiling.
She let out her breath slowly. “What is?”
He looked at her.
She blushed.
“It’s good,” he went on softly.
“It’s not.”
“It’s very good.”
“A girl like me ought not to look out loud,” she observed archly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know,” she murmured, “show the world how she feels.”
“Ought not?”
“Yes. Ought not.” She drew back into his arms. “My father likes you, you know. He asks questions that you can answer. That you will answer, and he wants to hear your answer. I saw him listening, even when you were talking to somebody else.”
Len nodded. “And your mother?”
She hesitated and looked up at him.
“You ought to be careful.”
“Careful? Careful how?”
“Not to say too much.”
“I am too—talkative?” He couldn’t resist.
“That’s not fair.” She pressed her lips together. “But yes.”
“And you?” he asked.
A small smile played at her lips. “I like you fine.”
He leaned and kissed her. She kept her face tilted up to him, her eyes serious.
“Why did you come, Len?”
“Moss asked us,” Len answered. “Well, asked Reg. And it was hot.”
“No.” She looked at him. “Tell me. There’s something else, isn’t there? I know you. You’ve come with something—”
“Seems like one of the good ones.” Mr. Pratt’s voice came through the open window, five feet away.
“I’m glad to have him,” Ogden answered. They were standing right outside.
“I’ll bet you are,” Roger said. “He looks like he’ll make you some money.”
“Roger!” Sarah protested.
“Nothing wrong with being good at making money. And it’s damned good of Ogden to bring him in.”
Joan looked up at Len. He was rigid, listening.
“As long as the moneymaking is done the right way,” Roger said.
She wanted to take his hand but was afraid he’d push her away.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said quietly beside her.
Joan quivered.
“Only you matter,” he whispered as the screen door slammed.
“Oh.” Kitty stopped on the threshold of the room they stood in, surprised.
Like water shifting in its bed, Joan reached for the guest book in front of her, as though she’d been in the midst of this already. “I was just getting Mr. Levy to sign this, Mum.” She turned toward her mother with a smile. “So we didn’t forget.”
“What a good idea,” said Kitty smoothly. “Have you seen Moss?”
“Did you look up at the barn?”
Her mother nodded and kept going. “I need you in the kitchen,” she called.
“I’ll be right there, Mum,” Joan promised. And opened the book. “Sign it,” she whispered beside him.
There was a pen cocooned in the crease of the page. Wordlessly, he took it. “Should I sign Reg’s name too?”
“Bad luck,” she said, shaking her head, “to do someone else’s.”
He bent and wrote. And lightly, very quickly, she rested her hand on his back.
He straightened, his pulse racing, the pen still in his hand, her touch electric.
Through the window and down the lawn, he saw Mr. Milton moving inside the boathouse. It couldn’t wait any longer. He had to know.
“Len?”
“Joan!” Kitty called from the kitchen.
“Len?” Joan was soft.
“I’ve just got to ask your father something,” he said to her.
With a swift, troubled look on her face, Joan nodded at him.
“Coming, Mum,” she said.
Thirty-four
“SO WHERE SHOULD WE start?” Min asked after they’d washed and dried the lunch dishes. The counter sponged, a new pot of coffee dripping, the cousins had taken hold of the afternoon, restored by the quiet, the calm of repetition that was the Island’s hand on all of them. Here we do this, there we do that, we use these plates, those knives and forks, we sit in these chairs and eat cucumber sandwiches.
Evie turned around. “How about the linen closet?”
Min made a face. “All right.”
They climbed the narrow stairs to the long, low room above the kitchen, where boy cousins and single male guests always slept in five twin beds lined up in military precision. The linen closet ranged the entire length of the room’s left wall, though calling it a linen closet was stretching the truth. For years now, it had been the catchall closet—one might find in it a copy of War and Peace just as easily as one might find a Tampax, a whiskey bottle, or a dead mouse curled in a shoebox upon a taffeta fan. It was where the comic books and Playboys had been stashed during middle school to avoid summer reading, where Harriet hid all her makeup, and where Evie had found a compass from the Second World War tucked in a box of condoms. It became the starting point for her first paper in graduate school: “Lost in History.”
“All right,” said Min, “let’s haul it all out and see what we’ve got. We’ll toss everything awful.”
“And keep?”
“As little as we can.”
Evie rolled her eyes. “You do realize that you are speaking to a historian.”
“Which is nothing but a fancy name for a pack rat, who was the daughter of a pack rat, and”—Min held up four telephone books from Oyster Bay, Long Island, 1947, 1948, 1949, and 1950—“granddaughter of a pack rat.”
“Point taken.” Evie grinned.
The first wave was easy. They pulled out sheets and towels, plastic mattress pads for bed-wetting children, a crib bumper, washcloths, hand towels, and five fine linen napkins the color of stained piano keys. A bowl of mildewed wooden fruit. A box of Sani-pads, open, nearly empty.
“Toss,” Evie said. And the lot went on top of the pile tossed on the bed assigned to oblivion. It was satisfying to get to the bottom of a shelf, clean it out, get somewhere.
“Look at this.” Min turned around with what looked like a rolled-up pennant in her hand. She stepped out of the closet and pulled it wide. Out fell swatches of fabric, one of them the stripe that still remained on one of the chairs downstairs, though it was faded and worn to threads at the elbows. The pennant was a rose-colored canvas, and on it painted in blue lettering, EVELYN.
Evie nodded and bit back a comment about Aunt Evelyn, about territory, not wanting to reopen the hole
they had stepped away from downstairs, and turned toward the side shelves, where a row of boxes ranged. None of them were marked.
“Okay, now, here,” Evie said, “we need to go slow.”
Min snorted.
The first held single socks. Evie passed it to Min, who chucked it. The second was a small sturdy blue box from Merrimade stationers in Boston. Inside were notecards and envelopes with CROCKETT’S ISLAND embossed in blue, and a man’s watch, its round face rimmed by gold, the Roman numerals fine. She turned it over and the leather on the band powdered in her hand. Engraved in the back of the face was O.M.M., JR. and the date, 1916. A memory stirred. She pulled herself out of the closet with the box and the watch and sat on the bed. Her grandfather looking down at her sitting beside him in the Herreshoff. She must have been six or seven, because he was smiling down as he nudged the long wooden arm of the tiller over to her.
Go on, he teased, take it.
And she had taken it. The boat lurched and spun. Steady, he laughed. Steady on. His hand closed over hers on the wood and guided the tiller back into wind, and she felt the tension in the water below, the grip of the tide underneath, and his hand warm on hers, the band of this watch cutting against her skin.
“What is it?” Min asked.
Evie held it up.
“Pops’s watch? Why was that in the stationery?”
Evie shook her head and fastened it on her wrist. “For safekeeping,” she said, glancing at Min.
But Min wasn’t looking. She was going along the shelf very quickly and tossing things that weren’t in boxes, that had been jammed alongside. More phone books, a couple of Time magazines from the late seventies. Several coffee cups. More hand towels. Evie stood up and reached into the shelf to pull out something Min had missed, something rolling away, and emerged with a little yellow car. Some little boy must have jammed it in here and then forgotten. She turned and held it up for Min.
“Nice.” Min was unimpressed, and handed her a box. “Why don’t you sort through these.”
Evie took the box and went to sit on one of the beds, sifting through the jumbled pieces of paper inside. Lists in her grandmother’s handwriting, carefully crossed out. Canceled checks from 1957. Nothing was in order, but Evie was used to this. This was how lives silted out. She had spent the past twenty-five years in libraries and archives combing through the stuff of people’s lives. There were bills from the forties and seventies, side by side. Two receipts from Foy Brown’s boatyard for paint on the Katherine. A note from Mrs. Pratt, asking about gardening shears. Lists. More bills. More receipts. Granny K was nowhere and everywhere in these, the spirit of the place.
“Do you remember?” Evie asked. “The oughts?”
Min looked up and nodded. “A woman ought to keep herself slim, upright, fit. Fat is a sign of ill breeding, of having let yourself go. Liking food too much bespeaks a weak mind, a flaccid spirit, a lack of ambition. Bad as drinking sweet vermouth—”
“Unless, of course,” Evie added, “you were a food critic at The New York Times or someplace reputable—”
“—in which case, poor man, you suffered,” Min finished. “One ought to never burden others with one’s sorrows. One ought to keep them to oneself.”
“Keep it to yourself.” Evie nodded. “That’s a little sad, isn’t it?”
“She was sad.”
“Was she?”
“She was.”
Briskly, Min pulled another box from the shelf and opened it, glanced inside, and threw it on the toss bed behind her. Curious, Evie stood up and looked inside. A box of window pulls, a box of candle ends, and a hole punch.
“I wonder what these mean,” she mused.
“A hole punch?” Min was skeptical.
“Why did Granny K save it?” Evie countered. “It must have meant something to her.”
“Or nothing at all,” Min answered. “And how do we know it was Granny K who saved it? It could have been my mother. Or yours.”
This was true.
“It looks to me like a completely random assortment of stuff someone didn’t know what to do with.”
“I do.” Evie shook her head. “I spend my life in libraries, looking at artifacts—picking up leftovers from another age and studying them for clues. Without them, whole lives might have vanished. Things tell.”
Min leaned against the closet door. “And what do the things tell you? Other than what you put into them, I mean.”
“Hang on,” Evie said, and bristled, “it’s not complete projection.”
“But that’s just it,” Min pushed. “How do you know?”
“How else can we know?” Evie answered. “The things that remain matter. Because of them, I can render a plausible life.”
“A plausible life,” Min said quietly. “Sounds good.”
Evie put the lid back on the box and laid it next to the box of stationery on the bed to keep. But Min wasn’t finished.
“Listen,” she said. “I spend my life listening to patients. And the one thing I can tell you, for sure, is that things lie.”
“Not if you know how to read them,” Evie observed.
Min rolled her eyes, went back to the shelves, and reached for another box, opening the lid as she carried it, already walking toward the toss bed. She stopped.
“What is it?”
Min sank down on the bed and pulled a letter out from the box. It was an official letter, the envelope and the paper a thick blue.
“Listen to this.” Min held the sheet of paper. “‘Dear Madame, With regards to your inquiry, there is no record of a Wilhelm Hoffman arriving here.’”
“What’s that?”
“It’s to Granny K.”
“From whom?”
“‘Oskar Schmidt, German Jewish Children’s Aid,’” Min read.
“When?”
Min checked the date. “In 1960.”
“What the hell?” Evie pushed up from the bed and went to stand beside her. The envelopes in the box were uniform in size and shape, and the postage was foreign. There were upward of thirty of them stuffed in the box. She picked through them quickly. They seemed to be from relief agencies all over Europe spanning twenty-five years, from 1960 up until the year she died.
Wordlessly, Min slid open another.
“‘I am sorry, Madame, we are unable to locate Wilhelm Hoffman in our files. You might apply to the Rotes Rathaus, in Berlin.’”
“No, Madame,” was written on the third.
No on the fourth, 1985. No, on the fifth, 1977. No. 1980. No. 1986. No.
Evie looked at Min.
Now was as good a time as any to bring the whole thing up.
“I’m sure it’s nothing, but I have to tell you something.”
“Go on.”
“Paul found a photograph of Pops in Berlin in 1935 sitting in a garden surrounded by Nazis at some kind of picnic.”
“In 1935?”
“Yup.” Evie was quiet, watching her cousin thinking it over. “Does that make sense to you?”
“No.” Min shook her head. “And knowing Pops, there could be a million reasons for that.”
Evie nodded, relieved. “That’s what I said.”
Telling her cousin, sharing it with her, comforted Evie.
“Still,” Min mused. “Why was Granny looking for a Jewish boy named Wilhelm Hoffman after the war?”
They looked at each other. Around them in every direction lay tossed and sorted the stuffing of the past, memory without voices, the dumb language of things. Min stood up from the bed and walked the length of the room, stopping at the window at the end.
“Do you remember that day right before she died, when Granny K told us there were two moments at the gate in every life?”
Evie nodded. “One at the beginning.”
“And one in the middle.”
It had been her last summer. They had filled the golf cart with pillows from the Katherine and driven her up to the house, carrying her through the door into the second
parlor, where they had fixed a bed onto which Uncle Dickie had carefully, gently set her down. And she lay there, all the windows open to the air and facing down the lawn—through the foggy mornings, the sunny days, the screen door opening and shutting, all of them calling out around the house, coming in to sit beside her. It had been one of those mornings she had pulled the cousins in, pointed them to the chairs at the foot of the bed, and told them about those gates.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about that these days. I never had any idea what she was talking about—but Jung believed the Hero was not the young man setting forth with his sword to conquer parts unknown.” Min paused. “The true Hero is the man in middle age, who traveled backward in order to be able to return.”
“Return to what?”
“His life. The real life.”
“And what is that?”
“What I said before, Evie.” Min was gentle. “This. Two middle-aged women after lunch cleaning out their family closet, getting ready for a renter.”
Evie looked at the room around them, strewn with generations of her family’s life. “Hardly heroic.”
“No,” Min agreed dryly. “But I do know that all the chickies come home to roost in middle age.”
“Yeah?”
“You can spend your life shooing them away, locking the door, making the roof too shiny for a perch, too slippery; you can chop down all the trees around the house, never come home, keep moving, keep shifting so they don’t come, they don’t settle; you can sell your house. All the way through your twenties, your thirties, your forties you can do this, and then whammo, you hit your fifties, and there they come, their little fluttering, their hoo-hoos, the faint scratching of their claws upon your roof. Settling down, settling in—”
Now Evie was smiling. “And what do you do?”
“Take your slingshot, your arrow, and pick ’em off, one by one.” Min squinted at the sky out the attic window. “And then”—Min smiled at her—“you get out of Dodge or you build a new house.”
“Seriously, Min?” Evie was still smiling.
“The gate at the middle,” Min said thoughtfully. “That’s where we are.”
