The letter from Roosevelt McCrary that upended Georgie’s life came the morning of her seventieth birthday—written on Camp Minnie HaHa stationery and dated June 18, 2007. The handwriting sloped, the way Georgie’s father’s had been, the way children were taught to write script in the thirties—the paper smudged from handling. He must have written Georgie and then reread the letter again and again for months before he decided to mail it.
Dear Georgianna,
You may not remember me. I was eleven and you were four and your mother was thirty-three and your father was thirty-seven when I last saw you and now I am seventy-seven and you must be seventy this year and I wish you a very Happy Birthday. If you are receiving this letter and have any interest in hearing from me, here I am. I have lived as a groundskeeper and general carpenter at your father’s camp since I was twenty-four, thirteen years after your mother died. In time I became a part owner and now live at the camp in retirement but still keep the grounds, repair the occasional chair or cabin window.
There were nine people on the canoe trip in 194l and all of them are dead but you and me. I remember the morning your mother was discovered just above the sign for Missing Lake. Did you know that? Missing Lake, Wisconsin, a two-hour trip upriver by canoe to Minnie HaHa. For days it had been raining and that morning the sky opened and the yellow sun was rising in the east and I thought to myself, Finally the sun.
And then James Willow, the head counselor, and a former student of your father’s from Chicago, traveling in the third and last boat, discovered your mother on the ground at the edge of the pine forest.
I am so sorry.
Yours truly,
Roosevelt McCrary
PS. James Willow died in 1943 as a fighter pilot in WWII.
I got your address from information. I hope I’m not intruding.
When the mailman arrived, Georgie was in the kitchen taking down the dishes from the cupboard to set the table for the birthday party that she was giving herself that evening.
A rack of lamb marinating in mint and garlic on the counter, sweet parsnips to be pureed on the stove, bubbling in milk, French green beans, roasted carrots. The color of things mattered to Georgie, cooking her way through the cookbooks she read at night before she went to sleep. Rosie had made a chocolate cassis cake with raspberries for dessert.
Autumn sunlight spilled across the open porch, a light breeze like summer—not rare for Washington in mid-December, but the heat of the day was unusual.
She waved to the mailman through the bank of windows that framed the front door, and he handed her the large stack of mail, catalogues, throwaway advertisements, bills.
“And this,” he said giving her the handwritten brown envelope, ripped on the edges, something yellow spilled across the address so the destination was barely visible, the stamp half gone. “It must have had a helluva trip.”
A letter—just the fact of it—was significant.
An actual letter out of nowhere into this brilliant morning in northwest Washington, D.C.
She sat down on the top step of the porch and opened the envelope.
News from Camp Minnie HaHa. Her first home, the home to which she had arrived as an infant traveling the Bone River with her parents by canoe.
She read the letter slowly, read it twice and didn’t realize that the breath had gone out of her until she stood, leaning for balance, against a pillar on the front porch. Lightheaded, she walked back in the house, passing the living room, where her grandson, Thomas, who had just turned thirteen, was lying on his side in front of the fireplace, reading.
A Monday and Thomas had not gone to school again.
“Any interesting mail for me?” he called.
“Only one and it’s for me,” she replied.
“For your birthday,” Thomas said without looking up from his book.
“More interesting than that.”
She would tell Thomas about the letter. Sometime, not today. He knew about her mother’s murder at a campsite on the Bone River, and somehow it delighted him to hear her tell about it as if the value of Thomas’ own life were enhanced by his genetic proximity to such a story.
GEORGIE FOLDED THE LETTER, put it in the envelope and walked up the back staircase to her room, slipping it in her underwear drawer beneath a small stack of camisoles and worn bras.
She needed new underwear. She had noticed that hers had gotten thin and gray with washing, holes in the crotch of her panties. Maybe she’d buy those slips of colorful lace bikinis that Rosie wore.
Seventy, but no reason to settle into a life without intimacy— in fact she’d recently read in one of the magazines at the dentist’s that for older women intimacy was fundamental to health and spirit. She didn’t need a magazine for that news.
She stood at her dresser checking herself in the long mirror. She had a slender, striking face, high cheekbones, olive skin, large dark eyes—intimations still of the young woman she had been.
How many months—actually years—had it been? She’d been sixty-five when Edward Connell, with whom she’d occasionally been sleeping, moved with his wife back to Nebraska. Too far to continue a relationship, and Georgie was not sufficiently urgent for Edward to meet, say, in New York or Chicago.
Besides, things happened. Nicolas’ daughter Oona was born; Rosie’s husband Richard got sick and died. In the months after Richard’s death, Thomas, their son, developed a speech pattern that prevented him from completing a sentence, so his conversations, except in the safety of home, became a series of beginnings without ends. And just this past summer, Georgie’s youngest child Venus went into a facility for alcohol abuse and came back to the Home for the Incurables to live One Day at a Time.
Georgie wanted a love affair. Someone younger perhaps who could expand inside her without all the trouble it had taken Edward. Or even someone older who would lie beside her, their bodies curled together in the large four-poster bed on the second floor of the Home for the Incurables, and talk her into the night. Someone whose voice was the sound she heard as she fell asleep.
Since Charley really, she had never wanted a man living in her house with his big shoes needing polishing and his briefcase and papers and newspapers and undershorts and the television on all the time. Just a visitor who came and went at her discretion and kept his things—his clothes and books and loose change and cash receipts—elsewhere.
Which had nothing to do with Charley, whom she would love for the rest of her life.
Something about Roosevelt thinking of her after so many years filled her with happiness. Or maybe he had often thought of her but never had the courage to write before.
Happy Birthday, he had written. I wish you a very happy birthday.
Like a love letter.
WHEN THOMAS CAME up the back stairs, Georgie was checking the gray circles hanging in half moons under her eyes, thinking what could be done to get rid of them. She turned from the mirror to find him leaning against the entrance to her bedroom
“I didn’t even hear you on the stairs,” she said.
“I didn’t want you to hear me.”
Thomas was tall and very thin. Quite beautiful, Georgie thought—blond curls and full lips, high color—a wariness about him, pale blue eyes, turned inward.
“Maybe Thomas is so brilliant he doesn’t need to go to school,” Nicolas, the eldest of her children, had said, annoyed at Georgie’s preference for Thomas over his son, Jesse. “Or he could be on the spectrum, which is gaining in national popularity.”
His father had been a brilliant scientist, but who knew about Thomas. What he did was read all the time, recently Middlemarch— was there a child in Middlemarch? Georgie had asked him—and the comedies of Shakespeare. The tragedies are too sad for a boy my age, he said. The Odyssey.
In place of schoolwork, or hanging out after school with friends, or athletics on the weekends despite being very good at baseball—he was writing a series of comic novels about an invisible boy with unpredictable powers, called The Boy.
“The Boy takes up space,” Thomas explained to Georgie. “You just can’t see him.”
“You can touch him?”
“You can’t exactly touch him, but you’re blocked if you try to move into the space his body occupies.”
Thomas braced against the wall at the top of the stairs.
“When are you coming back downstairs?”
She was standing at her open closet door considering what she would wear for her birthday.
“In just a minute.”
“I came up to ask you something about William Grove.”
“I don’t know much about my father,” she said, taking her black silk pants out of the closet and hanging them on the doorknob. “I was four years old the last time I saw him and he died when I was eight.”
“I think I’m going to write him into my novel as a character— probably the invisible boy’s grandfather. He’ll be an interesting character but dead, and the boy is beginning to understand that he has the power to bring him back to life.”
She closed her closet door, pulled up the covers on the unmade bed, put her nightshirt under the pillow.
“You need to go to school more often, Thomas,” she said.
GEORGIE HAD TOLD Thomas about William Grove when his own father had died. She was at the apartment in Chicago helping Rosie after the funeral, sitting one morning at the bottom of Rosie and Richard’s bed—Thomas at the window, his head pressed against the glass, looking out at summer over the lake.
“I was four when my mother was killed …,” she began, “… and I knew too little about the world to be heartbroken.”
Thomas turned away from the window.
“Do you want me to continue?”
He nodded.
“Tell me everything.”
“FOR CHRISSAKE, GEORGIE …” Nicolas had said later. “Maybe you could have waited a couple of years to tell him about your father. Or at least let his mother, Rosie, tell him.”
“Sometimes you have the right moment,” Georgie said.
“Or the absolute wrong moment,” Nicolas said.
But over time the unfinished story of William Grove was sufficient to sustain Thomas’ imagination.
GEORGIE TURNED OFF the overhead light, heading to the kitchen, and Thomas followed down the winding back stairs, slithering along the curving steps, snakelike, barely aware of his body and how he moved, disengaged from his physical self, half in another world.
“Do you ever wonder what really happened to your mother?” he asked
“Wonder?” Georgie took the carrots out of the fridge.
“I wonder about it all the time.”
“I don’t have any context for what happened at Missing Lake except to know who was on that trip, since their names were listed in the June 21, 1941, issue of the Chicago Tribune.”
“You showed me that story in the Tribune.”
“That’s all I really know.”
“You never asked your grandparents?”
She shook her head.
“I was only four when my mother was killed, and the night after her body was discovered, I went to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to live with them.”
“I would have had a ton of questions.”
“They wouldn’t have answered your questions. My grand–parents were midwestern Protestants and never talked. It was as if my mother—my beautiful mother, as they referred to her—vanished without a trace and my father’s only defining character was Jew.”
“My father was also a Jew,” Thomas said.
“And a scientist and very smart and handsome and a sweetheart.”
Georgie got out a chopping board and took a long blade knife from the drawer.
“I have no information about my father.” She leaned against the kitchen counter. “My mother must have been strangled sometime in the night. In the morning, my father was taken away by the police. I watched him get in the police boat, but that is all I remember.”
Thomas slid into a kitchen chair, knocking the salt off the table and then the yellow tulips wrapped in brown paper and stuck in a glass of water.
“Thomas!”
He leaned over to pick up the tulips.
“I mean William Grove went to jail and he didn’t have to go to jail, right?” Thomas asked, wiping up the water on the floor. “He could have said, Oh my god, I haven’t a clue what happened, and probably the police would have believed him because after all your mother was his wife.”
“The salt, Thomas. Could you sweep it up?”
He got the broom and swept up the salt, mopped the water, slipped back in the chair.
“Do you forgive him?”
“I don’t want to talk about this. Not on my birthday while I’m cooking, which is something I love to do, and sitting with you, something I also love to do.”
GEORGIE WAS STILL lightheaded from the letter, her hands numb as she scraped the carrots, the beating of her heart off center as if the heart itself had moved to the right in the middle of her chest.
“How about instead we discuss the word forgive, which I looked up in the Oxford.”
Thomas hopped onto a wooden kitchen chair with a rush seat, crouched froglike as he often did, wrapping his arms around his knees.
“Forgive has a lot of meanings, but the one I am thinking about is “forgive means to give up anger,” and I cannot give up anger about the fact that some of the kids at Alice Deal Junior High School don’t want to be around me because my father died.”
“Why is that?”
“They think they can catch my father’s death as if it’s a germ and I’m contagious.”
“Is that why you don’t want to go to school?”
“Maybe it is,” he said.
Georgie gathered the carrots and washed them under the tap, dried them, set them on the cutting board to slice.
“People can be afraid of bad news,” she said. “But you should ignore the ones who think that death is catching. Because it isn’t.”
“It kind of is,” Thomas said, rocking back and forth on his haunches, testing the old wooden chair for stability. “What about you and your father?”
“If I needed to forgive my father, I would have to believe he was guilty,” Georgie said. “I don’t believe he was.”
“I guess we’ll never know.”
“Maybe that’s true.”
Georgie was chopping the carrots in crayon-size strips, sprinkling salt, grinding pepper, lining them side by side in a broiler pan to roast.
“Or maybe we will,” she added, thinking as she spoke—quite without considering what she was saying—that she would tell Thomas about the letter from Roosevelt McCrary now in the kitchen making dinner for her seventieth birthday party.
Thomas would have a plan of action. He always did.
So she told him.
Because it was her birthday and she was seventy and the two of them were alone in the Home for the Incurables—no one else to tell except Georgie’s own children who were more ashamed of the story of her father than interested in it.
Only Thomas had taken on the night of June 17, 1941, when Josephine Grove was strangled, as a story of great and extraordinary importance to him and to his whole family and likely to the world.
Which it had been. Which it was, still, at the core of Georgie’s life.
“THERE IS ONLY one person still alive who was at the campsite on the Bone River when my mother was murdered,” Georgie said, her low-pitched voice cracking as it sometimes did. “His name is Roosevelt McCrary and the letter that came today for me is from him.”
“Did you know about him?” Thomas asks.
“I knew there was one other child at the campsite, but he was never identified by name in the newspaper stories because he was a child.”
“This is excellent news!” Thomas said. “Are you telling everybody at your party tonight?’
“I don’t know,” Georgie said, reaching into the back of the fridge where she’d hidden the butter from the tenants. “I wasn’t going to tell you and then I did.”
Thomas was standing at the open fridge examining the shelves of food.
“I wish Mr. Egland didn’t cook everything with garlic so the fridge smells like Mr. Egland instead of food,” he said.
“I don’t like it either.”
“Sometimes I also wish you didn’t have so many strangers around, sleeping in your beds, eating at your kitchen table and stuff.”
Georgie sliced the butter into neat squares.
“I have strangers around intentionally,” she said. “I wanted a home for my children after Charley died and this is how I made one. To make a home, you need a tribe.”
“When I need someone, I make her up,” Thomas said. “That’s how I happen to have Lucy Elliott, who is my height with long red hair and she’s hanging out in my new Invisible Boy book. Crazy about me.”
He took an apple and shut the refrigerator door.
“Garlic apple,” he said leaving, the kitchen door swinging on its hinges.
“Okay if I make a fire?”
“It’s too warm for a fire.”
But Thomas was making one anyway. Georgie could hear him carrying in the wood from the front porch, a clatter from the dining room already set for dinner … singing,
“Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you / Let me hear you whisper that you love me too.”
Always the old romantic songs were the ones he loved. His voice soprano slipping toward tenor.
THEN HE WAS back in the kitchen, loose bark from the logs dropping from his clothes onto the kitchen floor.
“I was just wondering—have you ever been back to Camp Minnie HaHa?” he asked, brushing off his hands in the sink.
“Never,” Georgie said.
“How come?”
“There was no reason to go back. No one was there who might have known me.”
She wiped her wet hands on her trousers.
“Then why don’t you go to meet Roosevelt now?” Thomas asked, sitting on the end of the kitchen table swinging his legs. “I can’t believe that wasn’t the first thing you wanted to do when you got his letter.”
“I haven’t thought of doing something about the letter,” she said, taking the wineglasses down from the cupboard. “Except to write him back.”
But that was not exactly true.
Already Georgie was imagining her first meeting with Roosevelt. He’d be standing on the bank of the river at Camp Minnie HaHa in jeans and a work shirt, maybe a baseball cap, waiting for her to arrive by canoe. She had no actual memory of him, only that there was another child besides her in the group camping at Missing Lake. Something she knew from the newspaper accounts her grandmother had saved for her to read when she was old enough.
In the article printed in the June 21, 1941, Chicago Tribune, Roosevelt’s mother was listed as Clementine McCrary, age thirty-three, but Roosevelt was given no identity by name.
“Let’s go this summer right after school’s out in June,” Thomas said.
Georgie was distracted. Standing at the sink, her back to Thomas, she nearly chopped off the tip of her index finger slicing shallots with a dull knife—now the bloody finger wrapped in a paper towel leaking in the drain, her thoughts careening, scrambling her brain.
What might Roosevelt tell her when they meet? What had he seen at the campsite? He must remember her father since he was already eleven that summer. At eleven, a boy would remember a murder.
Does he remember Georgie? Does he think about her because of the tragedy? Has he been wondering for years what became of her?
“We can rent canoes,” Thomas was saying. “We’ll stop at the exact same place where your mother was murdered. Sort of like the thing you do with maps in Botswana, finding stuff, studying ancient tribes imagining what might have happened thousands of years ago. What do you think?”
“I think this, Thomas,” Georgie said. “Tonight, I’m giving myself a birthday party and hoping not to overcook the lamb.”
BY LATE AFTERNOON, Georgie had sat down on the couch in the kitchen with the dissertation of one of her graduate students in cultural anthropology. Thomas upstairs in his bedroom was writing “William Grove into my book,” as he told her. The dining room table was set with Georgie’s grandmother’s silver, a deep blue and wine woven cloth she’d brought home that summer from Botswana, a vase of yellow tulips spilling over the rim, votives scattering the dining room table with light, wood banked in the fireplace, CDs of early Beatles and Frank Sinatra waiting in the sound system.
She had even made place cards, although there were only seven of them, in a tight group at the end of the long refectory table.
Georgie’s blood. All that remained:
Nicolas—his wife Olivia would be absent, playing Desdemona in Othello at the Folger Theatre. Jesse and Oona, their children. Rosie, her older daughter. Thomas. And Venus, the child Charley had left behind.
But she was not in a humor to read student work. She stuffed the dissertation back in her book bag, took a piece of paper from the drawer—not the formal gray stationery with Georgianna Grove in white lettering at the top; nor the George Washington University office stationery with “Dr. Georgianna Grove, Professor of Cultural Anthropology,” on the left.
But plain recycled computer paper.
Sitting at the kitchen table, she ran her sweatered arm across the top of the table to clean the residue from cooking and took a pen out of her back pocket.
It must have taken Roosevelt days to write that letter. Weeks to send it.
“You are not intruding, Roosevelt McCrary,” she wrote, her eyes filling with unexpected tears. “I have been waiting for sixty-six years to receive this and now it has come and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
AT HER GRANDPARENTS’ HOUSE in Ann Arbor, Georgie’s bedroom was under the eaves on the third floor. A small room painted white with a circle of tiny windows like portholes from which she could peer at the garden where her grandmother was weeding or clipping or planting and Georgie could not be seen. There she spent hours playing family with paper dolls who lived their organized lives in shoe boxes lined up under her bed. Twenty families in twenty shoe boxes with mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles spread out the afternoons of winter all over the carpet. Georgie took on the role of village doctor moving from shoe box to shoe box caring for the sick members of her imagined paper community.
She had had in mind becoming a physician, but when she entered the University of Michigan as a premed student in 1955, it was a class in introductory cultural anthropology, the study of human life in groups, rather than the chemistry of the body, that captured her attention.
In graduate school, the subject of her dissertation was home.
HOME: Among the Baos Tribe in Botswana—the title of her first book published for an audience of ordinary readers as well as for academics, a book about primitive communities or villages or tribes–how a life led in common with others, related or unrelated, came into being, how the human animal and animals in general are interdependent, creating by association a common narrative, willing to sacrifice individual needs in order to belong to a larger whole. Empathetic by nature.
She was a scholar, although she thought of herself, more simply, as a storyteller, imagining the lives that might have been lived from bits of evidence she collected and put in order.
Home. Just the sound of it could make her weep. The hush, the long o, the hum of the letter m.
CHARLEY MACDOWELL HAD DIED in a mine blast at the Battle of Ong Thanh, October 17, 1967, three months after he had arrived on the front as a volunteer physician in Vietnam. He was thirty-one. Nicolas was four, Rosie was two and Georgie, four months pregnant with Venus, was twenty-nine.
The children were with her that morning—9:15, a Tuesday in October—when the officers arrived at her house in Foggy Bottom with the news.
She listened tearless to the one officer say what had happened, how the United States government and President Johnson were grateful for Dr. MacDowell’s service to his country, and because she did not move from the door or ask them to come in and speak to her in the safety of her own home, they nodded, a moment of silence, bowed and left.
Nothing in her fractured life had allowed her to believe that Charley would return alive from Vietnam.
An afternoon, weeks later, early December, she walked miles from her house in Foggy Bottom, just a walk to slough off the accumulating sadness, skipping her tutorials at George Washington University, walking north toward Maryland, in the direction of Friends School, where she’d put Nicolas when his father was killed.
A Quaker school, a choice made in quiet protest against the violence of war.
It was the first time she had talked to Charley since he died, something she did even now and especially when she was walking.
“I must tell you, Charley,” she began quietly, the way she always began their conversations, turning her head slightly to the right. Things she felt a need to tell him, to hear herself tell him, as if he were beside her. Listening.
But Charley was dead.
“It’s been a terrible pregnancy. I’ve been to the hospital twice for bleeding, and I cry all night, my door shut so the children won’t hear me. I need for them to think I’m fine. Just fine. A dead father can happen to children and maybe they’ll see you later. Maybe at Christmas. But I don’t say that of course since they won’t see you at Christmas. Or ever, for that matter. Although you should know you left one child behind with me.”
It worked talking to Charley like that.
In the short term, at least, she was in the presence of his company.
That afternoon at Upton Street, just off Wisconsin Avenue and a block short of Friends School, she’d come upon a large square building with a porch, maybe a private home, maybe a school, dark brick, overgrown with shrubbery in the front, a FOR SALE sign planted in the yard.
On the brass plate over the front door THE HOME FOR THE INCURABLES was embossed.
Home for the Incurables.
Something in the name appealed to her.
Incurables?
Had it been a place for people who were sick and would never get well and they never did get well and now they were gone?
Or is everyone in some way an incurable, and if one were to gather people together who did not belong to one another, wouldn’t that be an act of hope?
The door was unlocked and Georgie went inside, through the vestibule, into the enormous living room with a walk-in fireplace, the dining room large enough for a small boarding school, up the back stairs to the second floor and the third. Ten bedrooms in all.
There was no evidence of what the house had been and who had lived there except in the name. Nothing except the terrible stench of dead raccoons trapped in the vestibule.
“I probably wouldn’t buy a place of death like this,” she told the real estate agent that day, “except I’m having a baby.”
EVEN BEFORE THE AGENT left that first afternoon, the Home for the Incurables was becoming a place for a family in process, her own family and maybe the families of others, even strangers off the street who would become friends, like family, students from the university, her own teaching assistants.
Here in this doomed house, she could create a community of strangers, open up the windows, paint the walls in the colors of the earth absorbing the sun, fill the kitchen shelves, the large wall space lined with bookcases, children’s art spread across the rooms, maybe a carousel horse in the living room. And cats.
That night she lay in her four-poster bed and filled the rooms of the Home for the Incurables the way she used to do with paper dolls in her grandmother’s attic.
There’d be a long table in the dining room, and the guests— she would think of them as guests—would join her at the table, take Rosie onto their laps and read to her, play games of Scrabble with Nicolas. Adopted aunts and uncles, children who would take on the role of the cousins Georgie could not provide.
Her grandmother’s family was too small. Only one child, Georgie’s mother, dead at thirty-three. And Georgie. No information about her father. He had brothers, but were they still alive? Were there cousins her age? Did everyone leave Lithuania before Hitler took over?
Georgie has been in search of her father all of her remembered life.
Since her parents disappeared at Missing Lake, gone in the morning when she woke up and peered out of the tent at a tornado of confusion, her father in a police boat on the river, Georgie whisked to Ann Arbor to live with her grandparents.
It was not until she was eight, and not because she was told, that she began to understand her parents would not be returning to pick her up. That her mother was dead and finally her father was dead.
THE MORNING AFTER she saw the house on Upton Street, Georgie called the real estate agent with an offer.
“You’re quite sure you want this house, Dr. Grove?” the agent asked. “It’s a bit of a dump.”
“Yes it is,” she agreed. “But I have a plan for it.”
THE HOME FOR THE INCURABLES, the brass plate still over the door, was where Georgie had lived for forty-one years and raised her children and taken in strangers, eighty-nine strangers since 1968 not counting graduate students. And cats.
ROSIE CAME HOME from her studio in Adams Morgan just after six. She was in the living room standing next to the fireplace in her coat when Georgie came downstairs.
She and Thomas were having an argument about school, rare for Rosie, who did not like trouble.
“I’ll go tomorrow, Mama,” Georgie overheard Thomas say as she walked by the living room and stopped to listen. “but I don’t find school useful to me now.”
There was a pause—his voice rose and cracked when he spoke.
“You probably know that our English assignment for seventh grade is to write a memoir of our lives so far—but why would I want to write a memoir when what I would rather do is write about forgetting.”
“Well …” Rosie began but her voice trailed off and she followed Georgie to the kitchen, opened a pot on the stove with the parsnips and dipped her finger in, licking it.
“Yum. Potatoes?”
“Parsnips,” Georgie said.
“Even better,” she said. “I suppose it is strange to have thirteen-year-olds writing a memoir when nothing has happened to them.”
“Childhood has happened to them,” Georgie said. “Certainly to Thomas.”
Rosie made a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table, her feet up on a chair, oddly quiet, looking just past Georgie at the oven as if something there had captured her attention.
“You could have written a memoir at thirteen,” Rosie said.
Georgie was wary of a serious conversation with Rosie just now—her birthday, a plan for the evening, her emotions too close to the surface to trust.
Rosie rested her chin in her hand.
“You never talk about your father as a person. I’ve noticed that. Not the way you told us about our father and what we had missed not knowing him.”
“I didn’t know my father as a person.” She shook her head. “I don’t know where to find him.”
“But that’s what you do,” Rosie said. “You find things.”
She got up and opened the door to the fridge, taking out the chocolate cassis cake she had made for Georgie’s birthday, sniffing the top of it.
“Garlic?” Georgie asked.
“Chocolate,” Rosie said, leaving the cake on the counter, sitting across from Georgie at the kitchen table.
“Do you want to hear about my day?”
Usually, Georgie listened to Rosie when she came home from her studio, even happy to be included in her work, but this evening she felt the slightest irritation.
“I am doing a kitchen—a twelve-by-eighteen canvas.” Rosie tilted her chair back. “You’re sure you don’t mind this talk about my painting on your birthday?”
“You know I don’t.”
Every evening when Rosie came home from Adams Morgan, she talked about her day. Show-and-tell, as if she were a schoolgirl. And there was something girlish about her—even at forty-two. Delight in what she saw and painted. Lately, she had been painting rooms of domesticity vacant of people, colors melting across the canvas. Interiors with windows looking out on an eerie light with thin lines the color of vermilion.
“I’m painting these tomatoes on a farm table in an old-fashioned kitchen—green, sort of parrot green tomatoes—which may be the problem,” Rosie was saying. “They’re half-sliced on a mustard yellow plate, and I’m trying to capture the sense that the someone cutting the tomatoes has suddenly been called away—by an emergency, not just to pee—so it isn’t a still life I’m doing. But the person who should be in the painting has left, and though the colors are warm, there is something menacing about the scene. You know what I mean?”
“I do,” Georgie said, brushing a sweet butter glaze on the carrots ready to roast.
But she didn’t understand. Irritated by the absence of people in Rosie’s paintings—not a shadow of a person.
“And then I had a late lunch with Max.”
You always have lunch with Max went through Georgie’s mind and stopped there.
Max Rider had the studio next to Rosie’s and Georgie did not like him. Nor did she think it was good for Thomas that his mother had the facsimile of a boyfriend so soon after Richard’s death.
Two years! Rosie would say. I’m not like you. Two years is an eternity.
Georgie poured the parsnips and milk into the mixer.
“Is Venus going to be home on time?” Rosie asked.
“She’s upstairs in her room dressing for tonight. She had her hair cut.”
“Short?”
“She looks exactly like Nicolas without a beard.”
“You should know she’s planning a Tarot reading for tonight,” Rosie said.
“I was hoping she would.”
“I was hoping not,” Rosie said. “And be honest, Georgie. You don’t want a reading for your seventieth birthday. It’s bound to be grim.”
Venus read Tarot cards for a living and was known in the city for her work, although it did not pay a living wage.
A funny girl, Georgie thought about Venus. Odd and disarming. Tall, lanky like Charley and awkward, with an appealing freckled face.
Her birth certificate read Madeleine, but by the time she was in seventh grade, she had changed it to Venus.
“Because of Mary Madeleine in the Bible,” she had told Georgie.
“Magdalene,” Georgie said.
“She was a prostitute. I love that, don’t you? A prostitute right there in the middle of the New Testament.”
Venus’ room at the Home for the Incurables was on the top floor in the back of the house, a cozy room with its own bath and sitting room. But most nights unless she was between relationships she spent away.
“I’m kind of a sex addict, Georgie,” Venus had said. “I can’t seem to help it.”
“OONA’S HERE!” THOMAS called from the vestibule. “And Jesse.”
“And Uncle Nicolas,” Nicolas called.
Nicolas had come alone—straight from the airport on a regular domestic flight from Detroit, where Obama was speaking. He’d left his work with the Obama Press Corps traveling in the first leg of his campaign for president in order to arrive in time for Georgie’s birthday, stopping at home to pick up Oona and Jesse.
“Georgie my singular mother.” Nicolas kissed the top of her head. “Happy birthday. What news today? Thomas tells me something is up.”
“Did he tell you what it was?”
“Thomas? Are you kidding? And miss the opportunity for a dramatic revelation? So you have news?”
“I do,” Georgie said.
UPSTAIRS SHE HAD dressed for the evening. A fitted gray-lavender top, tight at the waist with an Asian-style stiff collar and black trousers. She had the figure for it—a long neck, long-waisted, flat stomach. Hips. She still wore deep red lipstick and blush on her high cheekbones, her hair swept up in combs.
Just before she went downstairs, she slipped Roosevelt’s letter from the folds of a black camisole and tucked it into the waist of her trousers.
SMALL—THE GROUP ASSEMBLED on the night of December 17 at the long refectory table in the dining room.
Nicolas and Rosie and Venus, Nicolas with Oona, who was four, and Jesse, a sullen, ill-tempered fifteen. Rosie and Thomas. Venus, solo, although she had a new boyfriend, but as she told her family, she had only spent the night with him once.
Not good enough, she said about her overnight. Quick to come to decisions.
Kubla, Thomas’ curly-coated retriever puppy was under the table chewing a snow boot belonging to Rosie. The cats sleeping around the living room, as if they had been acquired for decoration and obliged.
The other permanent residents of the Home—eight of them that December—were upstairs in their rooms or out to dinner or spending the evening with friends. By request, they were not to use the kitchen.
“I do have news,” Georgie said when they sat down at the table.
“Shall I say grace?” Nicolas asked, as if grace before dinner were a part of family ritual.
“I thought grace was about God,” Thomas said. “Like the grace of God that passeth all understanding.”
“Grace is a variable,” Georgie said.
“Whatever,” Jesse said, a word he’d recently added to his small vocabulary, which included brain dead and fuck.
Georgie took Roosevelt’s letter out of the waistband of her trousers, flattening it with the palm of her hand. She reached over and pulled the lit candelabra to her place at the table so she could see to read.
“Here comes trouble,” Nicolas said.
“This is a letter I received today,” she began, ignoring Nicolas, “written on Camp Minnie HaHa stationery from a man called Roosevelt McCrary who was on the trip when my mother was killed.”
“This is not boding well,” Nicolas said.
“Let her read it, Nicolas,” Rosie said. “It’s her birthday.”
“Don’t talk about Georgie in the third person,” Venus said. “She’s sitting right here in front of us about to read a letter of great importance. I can see her. Voilà!”
“I don’t know what’s coming in that letter, Georgie,” Nicolas said, “but I’m amazed—we are all amazed except maybe Thomas—at how easily you float between the real world and an imagined one when after all you’re a scientist.”
“This news is the real world,” Georgie said, “and I have decided to make tonight a celebration of Roosevelt’s arrival in my life. That’s all.”
“His arrival?” Nicolas asked. “Apparently he has always been in your life but you failed to tell us.”
“I didn’t know. I read about him in the newspaper reports of what happened when my mother was killed, but I’ve never heard from anyone who was on the trip, so Roosevelt’s letter after so many years, nearly my lifetime, was a complete surprise.”
Nicolas poured himself another glass of wine.
He was as tall as Charley had been, dark-haired and wiry, with an edge that put his family slightly on guard. An occasional temper.
“Why should the appearance of Roosevelt be good news?” he asked.
“I didn’t say it’s good news or bad,” Georgie said. “It’s news that makes me very happy. That’s all.”
“It’s very good news and it makes me happy too,” Thomas said. “Finally we’ll get to know for real whether Georgie’s father killed his wife on June 17, 1941. Or not.”
HER CHILDREN SELDOM talked about Georgie’s past. Not her mother’s murder, nor her father’s confession, except among themselves and that occasionally since it had been their father’s death in Vietnam that dominated their childhoods.
But if the subject of the murder came up, Georgie would say—known to dramatize her life as if the one she had lived needed extra effort—that her father was innocent and confessed to the murder to protect someone else.
“It’s complicated news, Thomas,” Nicolas said. “More than you can possibly understand. We’re living in present time and the past, at least in this family, is very disturbing.”
“How come disturbing?” Thomas asked.
“Come off it, Thomas,” Nicolas said. “In an ordinary family, it would be disturbing to know that your grandfather had killed his wife.”
“It may be that Roosevelt has something on his mind to tell us,” Georgie said. “We may get news.”
“I’m sure he does have something on his mind.” Nicolas got up from the table to attend the fire.
“He probably needs money,” Venus said.
“It’s nothing about money,” Georgie said. “Roosevelt McCrary was eleven years old and happened to be at Missing Lake when everything exploded. My father had hired him to work at the camp that summer. Of course, he probably does know something.”
Venus got up from the table, heading to her room.
“I’m going to read your cards tonight, Georgie,” Venus said. “I’ll do it right now, if you’d like.”
“She wouldn’t like it now, Venus,” Nicolas said. “We’re about to eat and drink. A lot—especially a lot of drink.”
“Be a little sensitive, Nicolas,” Rosie said. “Georgie’s right. Roosevelt might very well know something.”
“Something, I’m sure,” Nicolas said. “But it may be something we’d rather not know ourselves.”
“Who exactly are we?” Venus asked.
“We are the originals. Seven of us sitting at this table related by blood,” Georgie said. “When we go to Camp Minnie HaHa in June to meet Roosevelt, we’ll have a chance to find out what he knows.”
“We?” Nicolas asked.
“That’s my birthday present to myself,” Georgie said. “I’m taking all of you with me next summer to Camp Minnie HaHa to meet Roosevelt.”
“That will not include me,” Nicolas said.
“It will include you, Nicolas,” Georgie said cheerfully. “I have already written to Roosevelt that we’re coming and reserved the canoes.”