Mine to Tell

by Donnelly, Colleen L

  “We’re still going through her notes and her things, so no, we don’t. But we know Grandpa Samuel was at least carried in her house.”

  She nodded, and continued to smooth the papers. “I feel bad,” she said, looking at the top sheet.

  “That’s why she had to leave her story behind. Not overtly, like most of us would have done. She left it covertly. Only someone who really wanted to know the truth would look for it. Anyone else, well, they’d just stick to what they wanted to believe. It was easier, but it ignored the truth completely.”

  “Your grandfather has walked around with humiliation all these years,” she moaned privately. “Simon sometimes called him the bas…well, you know, the B word. He’d call him the B child.” She glanced up at me, and I nodded. My heart broke for my grandfather, who’d been treated as the unwanted child, the different child, the one with no real last name. “And I’ve kept it up for him,” she continued. “I feel awful.” She looked up at me, her eyes begging for forgiveness or some sort of reprieve. I put my hand on top of hers.

  “He never said anything? Never talked about this?”

  Mama shook her head. “No, he’s never blamed anyone. He just lived as the best man he knew how to be.”

  As my mama drew in a deep breath to say more, the door flew open and Paul Junior stepped through. I groaned inwardly, knowing his coarse mannerisms would drive Julianne’s essence from the room. He stopped in the doorway when he saw me.

  “Hi, Paul Junior,” I forced myself to say. He gaped at me as if he didn’t know what to do or say. It was then I saw him. His head peering over Paul Junior’s shoulder at the sound of my voice. Now I gaped, my mouth frozen open and my cheeks beginning to burn.

  “Hello, Annabelle,” Trevor said as he stepped around Paul Junior. “Mrs. Crouse,” he added, spotting my mother. His voice was contrite, his eyes clearer than they had been other times, but his expression was of a beggar, one who knew he was out of place, coming to ask for a spot here with nothing to offer in return.

  I looked at my mother. “I’ll take these and go,” I said scooping the papers out of her hands and standing quickly. “Okay to send them?” I was making my way out of the room, toward another door. I didn’t need her permission, I knew they were all right, but it was a formality and a consideration I gave her, and with her newest nemesis standing in the doorway, I wanted her to know she still deserved some respect. She looked from me to Trevor, not paying any attention to my question.

  “Trevor wants to talk to us,” Paul Junior broke into the tension. “He’s sorry. He wants to say so.” Those were words Paul Junior had never said in his life. His tongue and mouth wallowed around them, unfamiliar with regret or consideration.

  “That’s right,” Trevor said. He looked at my mother and then at me. He was closer now, and I could see him better, see that he’d cleaned up, not an outside cleansing but an inner one. He was still gaunt, but the inner darkness was gone. His nervousness was for us, not him. “I’ve done a horrible thing to this family and there’s nothing I can do to fix it. I don’t insist that you forgive me. I just want you to know that I admit it was awful and I wish I could take it back.”

  My mother stood, awkwardly, not smoothly. She fidgeted with the table top and tried to look at Trevor. I wanted to intervene, keep her from saying what we’d been taught to say—it’s okay, it doesn’t matter—because it wasn’t okay, and it did matter. She glanced at me, and I lifted my chin to give her courage.

  “Trevor,” she said, “I understand there were conditions…things going on…that affected you. But what you did still hurt us.”

  Paul Junior shuffled and looked down at the floor. That’s when I realized Paul Junior’s guilt in all of this. Trevor had sent the articles, but Paul Junior had fanned the fire that fueled Trevor. Paul Junior had put a knife to his own family’s throats by helping him hate me and blame me, turning Trevor into an innocent victim and painting me as the offending ogre…just like my great-grandmother. He glanced up and away, not ready to own his offense.

  I looked at my mother and saw she was watching him, too. She stepped around the table and faced both of them. “There’s only one thing we can do,” she said. Trevor looked ashamed. “Forgive. You did wrong, and I hope you learned a lesson. But I forgive you. It’s up to you to talk to Paul Senior and Grandpa Samuel and…” Then she paused and looked at me. She didn’t have to say anything about me. Trevor did.

  “I’ll walk you home,” he said quickly. Then he stepped forward and hugged my mother before he came my way. “I’m sorry,” I heard him whisper in her hair. She hugged him back and then let go. Forgiveness would have to do its work. There would be no pretending, no faking, but no hatred this time. I was so proud of her.

  “Can I walk with you?” Trevor turned to me.

  “What about the ball game?” Paul Junior asked, before I had a chance to respond. “Hank and Jim are coming by, and you should watch it with us. It starts in ten minutes.”

  Knowing the ballgame would settle things for Trevor, just as it always had, I said goodbye to my mother and started for the other door, the one Paul Junior wasn’t blocking. I was surprised as I reached it that someone had beat me there. Trevor.

  “Let me walk with you,” he said. It sounded more like a request than a command as he waited for my answer.

  “But the ball game…” I said, knowing sports meant everything to him and wondering how he could ignore the game, with Paul Junior standing there tapping his watch and looking as edgy as if someone had told him he had ten minutes to live. I looked from Trevor to Paul Junior and back again.

  “The game can wait,” Trevor said.

  “No, it can’t,” Paul Junior wailed. Trevor had made his peace, but Paul Junior hadn’t. He was looking for an escape, a way to return to business as usual, stick his head in the sand.

  “I can walk home. Go ahead. I appreciate what you did for my mom, and that’s good enough.” I started to walk out without him, but he blocked my way, his face near to mine, the anger I’d become used to completely gone, something much more humble left behind.

  “I’d rather be with you,” he said, and I heard Paul Junior grunt in the background and my mother shush him. “We have to talk.”

  I stared at Trevor, looking for flaws in his sincerity. My heart wasn’t pitter-pattering like he was probably hoping it was. It was reserving judgment on him, not really caring yet what the verdict might be.

  “Paul Junior, would you make sure the calves have their hay?” my mother said in the background.

  “What?” Paul Junior asked.

  “Just go do it!” she snapped.

  “Come on,” Trevor said, and he took me by the elbow and steered me away from their house.

  “I…I really don’t think this is a good idea,” I said, pausing before we reached the road.

  “Maybe not,” he said, looking me in the eye, “but it’s never going to be a good idea if we don’t make it one.”

  I was too baffled to argue as I turned toward Julianne’s house.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” he said, keeping pace at my side, “just listen. Everything I told your mother is true for you too. I treated all of you shamefully—your reputations, your writing, your work, everything. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

  I stopped walking and turned to him, ready to say something, I didn’t know what.

  “Don’t talk,” he said again, and he took my elbow and steered me forward to Julianne’s house. “I don’t know how to apologize for the relationship we had and what happened to it. All I can say is that I’m glad we didn’t get married. It would have been disastrous.”

  I felt myself go cold inside. It was easier to understand a man who was angry at me than one who agreed with me. When he was angry, he took over the old silly Trevor I had loved and buried. Now that old Trevor was really gone. It jolted me.

  “I’m sorry for the way I treated you, Annabelle. You are a woman worthy of far more respect than that.”
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  After that he talked about his job, Cincinnati, and my friends he saw on occasion. When we reached my door, I didn’t feel I’d been pelted with large doses of him or his contrition. He’d spoken with a different air, not one that ran right past me as if I didn’t matter, not one that hated me and was blaming me because I didn’t make his life work out the way he wanted, and not one that wanted to bully me into forgiving him so he would feel better. He spoke to me and about me. I didn’t feel badgered and I didn’t feel ignored and I didn’t feel manipulated.

  “Well, goodbye,” he said. “Thank you for letting me walk you home.”

  I stood at Julianne’s front door and watched Trevor’s back as he walked away from my house. He wasn’t hurrying to catch the opening action of the game like I would have expected. He was a man who had just completed a mission instead of a man on his way to one. He never turned and looked back. When he was out of sight, I went inside and closed the door, knowing I’d forgive him.

  Chapter 50

  “While seeing they do not see, and while hearing

  they do not hear, nor do they understand.”

  I was sitting in my house, mapping out a timeline and a genealogical tree of Isaac’s and Julianne’s lineage. The map had been growing in my mind, but not in black and white where I could see it and watch the order of her trek. I added John to the side, his “wife” and his two sons. I stared down at the course those people traveled over time, knowing invisible heart lines and illegalities were there too, wondering how God looked upon these three marriages, since he had the same bird’s-eye view I had.

  Just as I finished, Kyle came to my door. I opened it to his easy smile, something that had grown easier and larger as we’d worked together.

  “Come in,” I said, glad to see him. He followed me in as if this was his place too, Julianne’s house and life intermingled with both of ours.

  “Look what I just finished,” I said, showing him the chart. He took it from my hands and studied it, every line, every name, everyone’s life in his face.

  “I feel like our names should be on here too,” he said glancing at me. I screwed up my face, wondering how he fit in, when it dawned on me. It was in his eyes, this oneness he felt with these people, the life he’d given to them and partaken of from them.

  “I’m still amazed that this has been so important to you.” I wanted to touch him, just lay a hand on his arm, but I let my eyes say it all.

  “Let me just say this is who I am.” He looked at the chart and then back at me. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else right now.”

  “Is this why you’ve stayed here all these years? I mean, you’re tied here, yet not. It’s like you’ve got a root here but another root ready to go somewhere else. Am I making any sense?”

  He set the chart down and looked at me. “Perfect sense, but probably not to anyone else.”

  We stood there facing each other for an eternity that should have been fraught with awkwardness and hemming and shuffling, but it was a peaceful eternity, one that suited us both.

  “You know what I’d like to do today?” he asked.

  “No, what?”

  “Crawl back up into the attic. There are some loose ends up there we’ve never pieced into this puzzle. They’re important or she wouldn’t have hidden them away to make them a part of this story she’s trying to tell. Want to come with me?” He held out his hand, his smile warm and inviting. I took it, and together we went up the stairs and climbed into Julianne’s hidden alcove.

  Kyle and I settled ourselves on the soft rugs I’d left up there and eyed Julianne’s treasures in front of us. He adjusted our single light bulb over our heads so we could see everything clearly. He looked up at me, his eyes asking if I was ready, the light and excitement dancing in them as if he were a little boy with his sleigh perched at the crest of a high snowy hill. I nodded and grinned, our two souls becoming as one as we looked at the artifacts of a very special life in front of us.

  He picked up the small stack of playbills and we stared at the scriptive print, understanding now that she had loved the theatre, but only in Chicago, never again a part of her life while she was here with Isaac.

  “You knew something about this Oliver William Carmichael,” I said, pointing at the actor’s name and nodding at the funeral notice. “He must have been famous for you to know about him this many years later. And what about this Bridgett J. Haynes? Are you familiar with her, too?”

  He fanned the playbills out in front of us, then chose one and moved it to last in the line.

  “This play was later than the others,” he said, pointing at it. “It wasn’t staged until 1916, and she may have picked it up when she came to Chicago to discuss her marriage with John.”

  “Romeo and Juliet? Kind of melodramatic, don’t you think? Especially since she’d seen it years before, when she fell in love with John.” I pointed to an earlier playbill.

  “Oliver was in the first one, but not the second,” he pointed out. “But Bridgett was in it.” He looked at me. “What little I found on Oliver, he was married to a woman named Ingrid but always starred next to Bridgett. There were lots of rumors about the two of them, and they brought a lot of scandal to their plays. But no one ever knew for sure about them, just speculated, and always to the negative.”

  I nodded, awed that life ran in such circles, all of us beating our way along the same arc of tragi-drama, looking for love that was just out of reach until we lost it. Ford, Moliere, Ibsen…every playwright retold the same tale, love lost, love sought, women oppressed and misunderstood. Didn’t we ever break free?

  Kyle restacked the playbills and picked up Oliver’s funeral notice. “ ‘The stage and the world will never be the same. He gave life and meaning to one-dimensional characters trapped on a page, and heart and love to those of us trapped in our own roles in life.’ ” Kyle read aloud. “ ‘bh,’ is signed below.”

  “Bridgett wrote that?”

  He shrugged while nodding, answering my question.

  “My great-grandmother’s life has been on the stage too,” I mused. “She didn’t save these playbills or this funeral notice because she was a wanton and loose woman.”

  “She saved them to help tell her story,” Kyle finished for me. “Mine to Tell.”

  He set the funeral notice aside, next to the stack of play titles that all made sense now—A Doll’s House and ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore and others. I groaned. Stories of characters oppressed, misunderstood, trapped in judgments.

  Kyle picked up the folded fan. He traced a finger along the lace and old paper, then drew it open. The life we’d felt when he opened it the first time was still there. It was still speaking, and now I understood it better. I gazed at the picture of the woman painted on the fan, her dark hair, and the swan nearby.

  “My great-grandmother wasn’t a prisoner here like everyone thinks, was she?” I asked.

  Kyle shook his head, agreeing with me. “No, she knew her own freedom. The swan, the fan, the serenity, all tell of white, bright freshness washing away the bonds that held her. She was okay,” he said looking up at me. “In spite of her circumstances, she wanted you to know that.”

  I felt like crying as I looked away. Circumstances didn’t defeat her. She didn’t cow to them, she overcame. She was the victor in her life, she, and the God who forgave her.

  By the time I looked up, Kyle was shuffling through the stack of postcards, and I remembered how I had concluded the scratched out names and addresses spoke of her guilt. But they didn’t. They were insignificant. What she wanted me to see was the story they told, not the story they weren’t telling.

  “We’ve been such idiots all these years,” I said, as I picked from his hand the one she’d left on top, the one of a man and woman underneath a trellis of flowers. “ ‘My dearest, I remember when…’ ” I read aloud from the back. “Remember when what?” I asked Kyle.

  He fanned out the other cards in his hands, looking at each one before he answered. Holidays
, warm greetings and wishes, happy sentiments lay before us.

  “Oh,” I said, embarrassed. I’d been so blind. “Happy memories. Part of her peace here.”

  He smiled and restacked all of the cards into a pile and set them aside.

  “Dried flowers,” he said as we looked where they lay, strewn across the shelf, some with stems, some without.

  “I thought they were from Oliver’s funeral, the first time I saw them,” I confessed. “Thought he was significant, a heartthrob, or someone who gave her a place to escape to…making me no better than anyone else.” My voice was quiet, but my guilt roared. Kyle put a hand on my knee and left it there, telling me there was no more reason to condemn myself than there was to condemn her. Mustering up my courage, I placed my hand on top of his, the timid warmth of our two hands melding together.

  “To flower is to be at your peak, to reproduce, to show what you truly are at your finest,” Kyle said beside me. I squeezed his hand as we looked at the dried ornaments of beauty, understanding her life didn’t stop here, it went on, its beauty remaining even after it had dried.

  “I don’t know if I can take much more of this,” I said as I looked at the tray holding the dried container of ink, two pens, flint, and paper. Then at the stack of handkerchiefs, the hairbrush, and an atomizer.

  “They were important to her,” Kyle said gently, and I felt ashamed that I’d been ready to push these things aside. He pointed at the ink container. “What do you think?” he asked, drawing me away from my remorse. “Mine to Tell? This is saying, ‘Look deeper, look harder, find where I’ve written my story,’ maybe. ‘The ink’s gone, it’s all here, nothing else to add.’ ”

  “But the pens and the paper?” I asked.

  He looked at me with a lopsided grin on his face. “That’s for you,” he said. “You’re transcribing her story, but you’ve also got yours to tell, now. Hers is done. Her ink is out. Take the flint, light your own way, and write.”

  “Oh, my gosh,” I said. It was as if she had really known I was coming, her seed in me through the son she bore. Tears came so quickly I couldn’t stop them. I didn’t want to, either. They weren’t tears to be ashamed of or embarrassed about, they were hers and now they were mine. “Oh, my goodness.”