by Monica Wood
. . .
That was it. My goodness. Two friends in my entire life.
. . .
You’ve got lots of time. You’ll find plenty of friends.
. . .
It is hard.
. . .
It does take time. From the day I laid eyes on her, I wished Miss Louise Grady could just once look at me and see me. For years I kept that twinkling chance like a jewel in a box. That’s what unrequited means.
PART FIVE
Vakaras (Evening)
Chapter 22
Ona hadn’t seen so much as one hair on Quinn’s head for three whole days. The Reliant, back in her driveway like a relative she didn’t want, appeared to be telling her something.
Nothing lasts.
The burglars had whisked Laurentas clean out of her head, but now, when she considered him again, she marveled that she could have held him so long at age forty-nine—a hale, square-jawed, boulderish fellow. The memory of the day room haunted her, her son’s fragile mind as unhinging as the burglar’s pinching grip on her shoulder.
A curious tenderness lived in the shoulder now, not pain. Perhaps the shock of seeing Laurentas required a bruised place in which to settle. Every time she lifted her arm she thought of him.
Mercifully, there remained the matter of her world record, a ballast against her sense of weakness. She hove into her old routine, designed by the boy:
Lift bean cans ten times.
Stretch arms ten times.
Stretch legs ten times.
The list went on, and she followed his instructions as if he were standing right in front of her, nodding saucer-eyed encouragement against her complaints.
In the morning paper she found another flown soul, 114 and relegated to an inch of type under “World Dispatches.” Only a few names still correlated to the boy’s original lists, and though she winced with pity while crossing off the departed, she enjoyed moving default winners up the ladder. The new record holder was a Dutch woman who’d kerplunked unannounced into the pool of contenders, her docs suddenly stamped or sealed or dipped in gold or whatever they did to anoint you. She went by “Henny,” which put in mind a chicken racing around a barnyard. Who else lurked in the shadows, docs in progress, scurrying past her on the track to immortality? None of them still drove; there was that.
In the afternoon, Belle appeared, cleaned up if not quite gleaming.
“I’ve been wondering about you,” Ona said. “How’s married life?”
“Poor Ted.” Belle trotted up the steps. “I should have come before now.”
“Your man brought me a lasagna after my trouble,” she said. “You haven’t left him, I hope.”
“I haven’t joined him yet,” Belle said. “Someone should have stopped him. He deserves better. Did you think I was in my right mind?”
“I hardly know you. How would I tell your right mind from a daffodil?”
“Quinn just stood there.”
“You told him to.”
“Did I?” She still looked underfed, but her air was light, considering. “It’s sweet, the way you defend him.”
“I’m not defending him.”
“Don’t deny it, enjoy it.”
Ona felt like somebody’s little sister, the way Louise had once made her feel. “I appreciated the card. Thank you for not including money.”
“I was so angry about the break-in,” Belle said. “Have you recovered?”
Ona regarded the folder in Belle’s arms. “Is that for me?”
“Uh-huh. I finally went back to work. Fourth try. I didn’t think I could do it, but it turns out I could.”
An electrical sensation buzzed through Ona’s middle and washed out toward her extremities. “I was afraid you’d forgotten.”
Belle patted the folder. “This helped. More than you can imagine. It was like taking my little boy to work with me. Which I did once, on Take Your Daughters to Work Day. My God, he worked circles around those girls. Some people are made for research.” She smiled, genuinely; a hint, perhaps, of her vanished self. “Anyway, here they are. Docs galore.”
Disquieted now, Ona preceded Belle into the parlor where, like a magician preparing an illusion, Belle laid out her tools, arranging forms and certificates on the coffee table. They’d been printed from a microfiche machine on shiny paper, some in photographic negative, white on black; some handwritten; some bearing the woolly, carbon-copied characters of a heavy manual typewriter.
“Behold your trail,” Belle said. She waved her hand over the lot as if sprinkling it with fairy dust. “It took me all day. Twenty-four hours, I mean.” She squared up three of the documents—the docs, at last!—one by one, in chronological order. Ona scuffled her reading glasses to her face and examined them:
Record of a marriage. January 25, 1920. Ona Vitkus, age 20; Howard Stanhope, age 39. Bride’s d.o.b.: January 20, 1900. Groom’s d.o.b.: February 1, 1880.
Record of a birth. December 21, 1920. Randall Wilson Stanhope, 8 lbs., 8 oz. Father: Howard Stanhope, age 40. Mother: Ona Vitkus Stanhope, age 20.
Record of a birth. June 19, 1924. Franklin Howard Stanhope, 6 lbs., 10 oz. Father: Howard Stanhope, age 44. Mother: Ona Vitkus Stanhope, age 24.
Ona gathered her hands to her throat. Her voice had been snatched away.
“Ready for the big finish?” Belle asked, holding the final pages like the last card in a trick. She flashed that smile again, then produced a horizontal sheet—three regular-size sheets taped together that unfolded dramatically, a trick indeed. “This is the 1910 census for Kimball, Maine.”
The information had been compiled into a table, dozens of surnames that told the tale of her immigrant town: Fitzmaurice, Kaubris, Murphy, Roche, Vaillancourt, Sinclair, Flynn. Here before her, recorded in an impeccable hand, was her old neighborhood. Ona spotted the Donatos first, her parents’ second-floor tenants. The Donatos, yes: two short, dimpled people and their tall dog. Listed next: Stokes. Maud-Lucy Stokes, queen of the third floor. The handwriting belonged to a young man whom Ona remembered in color now: ghost-white face and a pompadour of orange hair, a chocolate-brown coat. He’d made a roosterish bow when Maud-Lucy came downstairs to translate.
She read Burns, Masalsky, Doherty, Carrier. She traveled back up the page, and there, just above Donato, she found them.
Vitkus, Jurgis.
Vitkus, Aldona.
“Sha, sha, sha,” she whispered.
She saw their building, three sturdy floors financed with gold pieces Aldona had sewn into her petticoats and the American dollars they earned from their shifts at the mills. Build good house, Ona! Ona-my-love, what you t’ink?
It’s tiptop, Papa! said Ona at the age of six, her parents laughing in return. What you say? They could not translate her American slang, but they didn’t mind, they held her hands and glowed, showing their big, square teeth.
A moment kept for nearly a hundred years: on that lovely, summer-lighted morning, her parents appeared to her for the first time as foreigners, even at the instant of their entry into the great American enterprise—real estate. If there was a Lithuanian toast to such an occasion, little Ona did not know it. Not until Randall learned to talk did Ona accept the full measure of her parents’ sacrifice of assimilation. Their love for her was too severe, and it cost so much—communication with their only child—that even now she could not imagine how they managed to pay.
“My goodness,” she said, finding her own name at last. “Here I am.”
Belle edged the paper closer to the lip of the table and read over Ona’s shoulder. “‘Nativity: Vilnius, Lithuania. Age: 10.’ There’s your proof. Ten years old in 1910. You should have asked me for help from the start.”
“No, no,” Ona assured her, looking up. “We so enjoyed the hunt.” Ona peered at the other categories, nineteen headings soldiered across the top of the taped-together pages. The young census taker had filled each slot in a neat, forward-slanting hand (a Palmer Method boy for sure), much of it so fine
as to be unreadable without her magnifier. “Where exactly does it show my age?” she asked.
“Right here.” Belle pointed to a spot on the left-hand side of the sheet. Position in Household; Age; Place of Birth; Marital Status; Rent or Own . . . “Here’s your father’s information. ‘Age: 49. Trade: acid cooker. Industry: pulp mill.’”
“My parents were old, for the time,” Ona said. “I must have been a big surprise.”
Belle continued: “‘Aldona. Age: 45. Trade: rag sorter. Industry: bag mill.’” Ona tried to make out the words, to receive the words, as if words had souls. She followed Belle’s finger as it moved across the sheet, category by category, until it stopped.
Belle said, “You had one sibling?”
“No. Only child.”
“See this?”
Ona couldn’t.
Belle hesitated. “It says, ‘Number of children living: 1. Number of children born: 2.’ It doesn’t specify brother or sister.”
“I didn’t have a brother or a sister,” Ona said, but all at once yes, yes, she did.
Brolis: the word had dropped like a single bead of hail when she opened her door and found the uniformed boy on her dripping porch. Brolis: the first word broken loose from its hundred-year repose.
He appeared to her as she closed her eyes, a flaring glimpse: a tree in bloom, a boy in the blooming tree, a gangly trickster grinning down through a foam of pink petals. His cheeks are pink. Pink knees poke through the holes in his stockings. Another flash: the same pink cheeks, and some kind of costume—but no, that was the other boy.
Vakaras. The word crashed in, heavier than the others. How could she know this now, a century later? But there it was, the name of her village. Not Vilnius, the decoy city, a lie to protect family left behind. Vakaras.
Ona Vitkus came from a place called Evening.
She stood up. She was starving. Kopūstas, grietinė, bulvė. She wanted to eat something sweet and squashy. Something cabbagey, with cream.
“Ona?” Belle said.
Ona held her drifty head. “I need my magnifier.” She scurried into the kitchen, pulse banging in her ears. The magnifier lay atop her weekly stack of newspapers. As she reached for it, the word for newspaper plinked to the floor. She snatched up the magnifier, and down came the words for read, word, book, harder now. She clutched the oven door for balance, and bam, bam, bam came the words for cook, boil, bake.
It was like being struck repeatedly by lightning. She shuttled back into the parlor, zinged anew by chair, rug, window. Her every step unloosed an electrified word, and she spoke them aloud, pronunciations arriving in a faultless pushka-pushka-pushka. Her chest ached alarmingly, even as something else in her—something sweet and ancestral—came to rest.
“Are you okay?” Belle asked.
“Where is it?” Ona fumbled her magnifier over the pages. Her fingers tingled.
“Right here.” Belle placed her nail-bitten finger on the spot. “Here.”
Ona found him: her brother, lost forever and forever nameless.
Number of children living: 1. Number of children born: 2.
She saw a wet door, a wet bunk, a wet shawl trailing down, a lacy tail she was too small to reach. She saw a wind-whipped deck and her weeping mother. She saw her own Frankie committing sailors to the sea, as if she had been there beside him. She saw the pink-cheeked boy from the cherry tree draped whitely in their mother’s shawl, she saw the rocks their father kissed before placing them inside the shroud. She caught don’t cry don’t cry. She caught my baby my baby. She caught brother, brother, brother. She saw the net of arms, the letting go, the sinking swaddled body.
Brolis, brolis, brolis.
She heard the sea inhale as it received him.
Ona? she heard someone call, far away, a wallpaper sound like traffic or birds. Inside her head, by contrast, lived an exquisite, glassy clarity. She floated through her house, clear-eyed, touching everything, each connection of hand to object jolting loose another word, and in her mother tongue she spoke each word as it came. Door. Banister. Wall.
Ona? Birds in the distance, a scrim of noise. Ona?
She gained a sense of urgency, aware of magic afoot—magic to be scooped up quick before it vanished. At the same time, she glided into an increasing sensation of rest, of safety, of homecoming.
Outside her bubble of clarity lived a muffled chaos, a rising panic, a voice on a phone, but nothing reached her. Words zapped loose, first disembodied nouns, then white-hot adjectives, then a great spilling of fully formed sentences, like rabbits leaping joyfully from a bottomless hat. My brother, my big brother with your tree-skinned knees. Where is your name? What happened to your name? Fearful to break the spell—and what was this if not a spell?—she kept speaking, words upon words, every syllable a gift unwrapping.
In the kitchen again, she reached to steady herself. Her hand landed on the record-breaker pack: What world record do you intend to break/set? When/where/how do you intend to break this world record? How do you plan to document this world record? Inside her head she perceived a kind of brilliance, a lancing light that revealed both her actual life and the life she might have lived, a life in which she spoke the pushka-pushka-pushka of her parents. As she surrendered to this enthralling doubleness, another voice punctured her consciousness, a male voice, smooth and calm, The scoutmaster is here, his hands on her hands, Ona dear, Ona dear, his face a pleasant blur, and a woman’s voice shouting again into a telephone, but no word came for telephone, no word for microwave, for radio, for blender. No word for electricity, none for refrigerator, but when she touched it icebox arrived, and ice, ice man, milk, eggs. And cheese and goat and chicken and dog and cat and rat and bug. And brother, my brother, Let’s go back, Mama, please let’s go back, I want to go home, I want to go home. Over and over now, that single phrase, and just before she walked or staggered or crawled or was carried to her bed, to lie down, to fully claim this feeling of perfect rest, to let the sweet rain of words soak through the pocked surface of her life, she wondered, and repeated, in English now, dreamy and resigned: Where is home? Where is home? Where is home?
* * *
This is Miss Ona Vitkus. This is her life memories and shards on tape. This is also Part Ten.
. . .
Hah! I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for a little finale.
. . .
I saw Louise again.
. . .
Yes, I did! Many years later.
. . .
On this very street, in fact, two days after I moved in here. Randall bought a new house out in Cumberland—his lady at the time hated this one—so he moved me in here.
. . .
I love this house! Let’s see somebody try to pry me out! So, here I was, cutting roses, minding my own business, when the oddest sensation took me over. I looked up to see what hit me, and there was Louise Grady, three doors down on the opposite side, clacketing up the steps of that white house. See that house?
. . .
Back then it was white. Louise had on this billowy white skirt and it looked as if she’d appeared from thin air, like a ghost stepping out to go a-haunting. This was twenty years after she asked for my Judas kiss.
. . .
Oh, you just can’t imagine! She was seventy-three years old, but there was no mistaking that hip-twitchy walk. You could hear her grocery bags crackling, and after that, all other sound in the known universe ceased to be.
. . .
I waved my clippers over my head and yelled like a fishwife!
. . .
Like this: “Louise! Louise Grady!” I was afraid she’d vanish back into the air. Did you ever see The Incredible Journey?
. . .
That last scene where the dog finally—
. . .
Same thing: Louise sets down her grocery bags and then, kaboom kabang, she takes up running straight toward me like that dog, home again after logging thousands of miles on her raggedy paws.
. . .
<
br /> Well, I know. We’d parted on sorrowful terms indeed. But Louise could move reality around the way some people move furniture. There she was, standing right out here in Randall’s yard, thrilled to see me, oh, how she’d missed me, on and on.
. . .
It was as if she’d forgotten about my Judas kiss. She made it disappear: poof. Gone. When I think of the tears I wasted.
. . .
I can only guess, because we never discussed it, but I suspect the intervening years had made her more like me.
. . .
A woman alone. And she was in poor health. Maybe she needed an ally.
. . .
Think of that. She chose me twice. I missed her so much after she went.
. . .
To wherever people go. To live with the Lord Almighty.
. . .
I meant—I meant to say she died. I missed her so much after she died.
. . .
Well, let’s see, we went to movies a lot, sometimes with other ladies. Louise liked Robert Redford, especially in his shirtless roles. Sometimes we stayed up late to rewrite the endings, Louise grabbing a broom or a mitten or a saucepan and off she’d go. It was the exact same way she used to teach Shakespeare.
. . .
Excellent indeed. And in all my years at Lester, Louise was the only one who believed I was educable. Oh, and birds!
. . .
One time we drove to Texas for the spring migration. I paid for the trip but Louise did the driving, and when we got there we hired a handsome guide who showed us birds in dizzying numbers, and on the last day . . . My goodness, I haven’t thought of this in years.
. . .
The guide stopped his car on a dusty roadside. Louise sat in front, fairly put out that this handsome fellow was treating us like old ladies. “But we are old ladies, Lou,” I told her, to which she informed me, “Speak for yourself. I think this young man is quite smitten.”
