Roosevelt stands at the top of the hill above the dock, shadowed by a stand of pine. From the distance of the river, he fades into the woods, and in semidarkness he seems as wide as the stand of trees.
He is taller than Georgie has imagined, and still, as if painted onto the landscape. What appears to be a cane leans at an angle against his leg. A dog lies at his feet, her nose resting between her paws.
Thomas steers the canoe into shallow water, jumps out waving to his family on the dock.
“Oona is here!” he shouts, pulling the boat to shore.
Knee-deep in the river, Nicolas is waiting.
He lifts Oona out, into his arms, and buries his head in her chest, walking along the shoreline away from the family.
Rosie sits with Venus on the edge of the diving board, their legs dangling, their shoulders touching in more intimate proximity than Georgie has seen them since they were girls.
“Oona?” Venus asks as Georgie climbs up to the dock. “Is she okay?”
“Fine?” Rosie asks. “What happened?”
“Did she get lost?” Venus asks.
“Not lost exactly.”
Georgie stands next to them, watching Nicolas walk in the river along the shoreline, holding Oona like an infant in his arms.
“So what happened?”
“It was … maybe a misunderstanding,” Georgie says, wondering as she speaks how to tell the story about Linda. Why misunderstanding feels right in spirit if not in fact.
The woman—Linda—went into the tent and picked up a sleeping Oona and lied to her.
There was no misunderstanding, so why the need to excuse what happened?
Why am I not outraged? Georgie asks herself.
But she is not.
“Do you know what happened?” Rosie asks.
“Oona was taken out of her tent by a woman who is perhaps a little off.”
“Kidnapped!” Venus says. “What does it matter whether the woman was off or not?”
“I suppose literally it was kidnapping, but she had no ill intent except to take Oona to her house to play because she has a lot of toys she bought for her little girl who died.”
“Honest to God, Georgie!” Venus throws up her arms. “People can tell you any terrible story and you believe them.”
“Thomas and I discovered them, Linda and Oona, when we were on the path that leads to the town of Missing Lake,” Georgie says, ignoring Venus. “They were on their way to Linda’s cabin.”
“Oh, Linda. Now she’s Linda and you guys are friends?” Venus says.
“Georgie!” Rosie is standing now on the diving board. “In the middle of the darkness of night this woman is taking Oona to her house to play with toys? Is that what happened.”
“Oona is fine,” Georgie says, “and the woman is not a criminal, so why make so much about a happy ending.”
“It’s perfectly normal to abduct a child?” Venus asks.
“Nothing on this trip is perfectly normal.”
Georgie runs her fingers through her wet hair, her combs lost at sea, her clothes wet, clinging to her skin.
“Ask Thomas what happened,” Georgie says. “Or Oona. Some things you have to see for yourself to understand.”
Thomas pulls himself up to the dock holding the branch of a tree.
“This trip is turning out to be perfect,” he says. “So far I have four stories to tell at Alice Deal in September. We even had a storm and the canoe capsized.”
“Is that why Georgie looks like a drowned possum?” Venus asks.
“Are you okay?” Rosie asks, tousling his hair.
“I’m great!” Thomas says. “I’m going to meet Roosevelt, the only surviving witness to the murder of my grandmother.”
“I need to catch my breath,” Georgie says quietly—looking over at Roosevelt, who has not moved from his place on the hill, although from this angle, he appears to be tall and thin. Not wide.
“What do you two think?” she asks her daughters.
“He’s reserved,” Venus says. “I like him, but there’s not much to know yet.”
“He’s accessible and dignified,” Rosie says. “After two days with our family I was grateful to be with him. My blood pressure went down to zero.”
“And I read his chart,” Venus says. “Not perfect but pretty good. Born January 2, 1930. Kind and strong and stubborn. Something like that.”
Georgie senses Roosevelt watching her walk along the bank beyond the dock and climb the slippery hill to the place where he is standing.
She is shivering—cold air on her wet clothes—shivering with nerves until she reaches the top of the hill and he takes her hand in his large rough hand and says, “Hello, Georgianna,” in a voice so deep she can feel it in her body.
“Hello, Roosevelt McCrary,” she says.
They both laugh—infectious, easy laugher as though they have known each other always.
Which they have, as Georgie imagines her world. Even before his letter and the postcards and the hours she has spent thinking about him, they have been in touch.
As she understands experience, they occupied the same space at a moment of great catastrophe.
They will always be in touch.
Handsome.
That pleases Georgie.
He has rich copper-colored skin unlined by so many years in the weather, strong bones, white curly hair partly hidden by a baseball cap. A quiet demeanor.
Just as she has imagined him.
At his feet, one paw crossed over her nose, is the black and white long-haired dog, her eyes half open.
“Mercy,” he says. “My girl.”
She can feel silence in the stillness of his body, as if the smell of his reserve is on his breath.
Cigarette breath, she notices.
“You’re freezing,” he says.
“We capsized on the river.”
“I was afraid there might be one of those quick storms we get especially on the water.”
He takes off the crew neck sweater he is wearing and puts it over her head, rolling up the sleeves.
“You look familiar,” he says. “I’ve seen your photograph on the back of your books.”
“You’ve read my books?”
“I have the one called Home about the tribe in Botswana.”
She climbs up the short distance to the top of the mound.
“In the photograph on the book jacket, you have short hair.”
He steps away from the tree.
“I was only thirty-nine in that photograph.”
“But you look the same except your hair.”
Georgie is seldom at a loss for conversation, but she is quiet now.
Perhaps if they walk into the camp together, away from her family, into the woods beyond the lodge, the weight of finally meeting after all of these months will disappear.
Maybe he has been thinking of her in the same way that she has been thinking of him.
He lives a solitary life.
Or not.
Linda McCrary.
Could she possibly be his wife?
Not likely, Georgie thinks not—too young for him. Too shattered. Nevertheless.
They walk up the hill to the lodge and stop.
“You found the child.”
“She was on the path behind the campsite almost to the town of Missing Lake with a woman named Linda.”
He stops, looking up as if to see the top of the stand of pines, his cane under his arm, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
Considering.
“Do you know her?” Georgie asks.
They slip into the woods beyond the lodge onto a path to the cabins. The air is damp, the ground cover muddy, a light wind carries the smell of fungi and pine.
“I do know her,” he says.
“She took Oona from the tent where she was sleeping before dawn, and we found them on the path just before we got to the town of Missing Lake,” Georgie says. “Linda told me that she had a gun.”
“She did not have a gun,” Roosevelt says.
“She said later that she had lied,” Georgie says.
“I should tell you about Linda.”
“She told me she had a baby girl who died.”
“The baby girl was stillborn and Linda has never recovered,” he says. “It’s …” He stops short of completing what he was going to say. “It’s too complicated for tonight.”
They walk along the path—Roosevelt just ahead, holding up low branches for Georgie to walk under. They come into a clearing, Mercy ambling between them.
The woods open to log cabins lined along the pine needle path.
“Named for Indian tribes,” he tells her. “Chippewa and Cherokee and Iroquois and Navajo.”
“Twelve cabins in all. Ten boys and a counselor to each cabin.”
There are metal beds with thin striped mattresses, wooden flap windows held open in the good weather with a narrow board, a single electric light on the ceiling, pitched roof, a wooden porch.
Georgie peers in the screen door of Navajo …
Bleak.
The smell of damp wood, the weight of pine and darkness.
The sun is low in the sky, a heavy, bronze sun, and the light shimmers across the cabin logs, a splash of dark yellow on the door.
“This is the cabin where you lived with your parents.”
Georgie walks up to the steps and stops.
“I haven’t been here since I was three,” she says.
“It’s unchanged,” Roosevelt kicks the mud off his boots. “New screens, the front door replaced, but otherwise the same.”
She doesn’t have a visual memory of camp, but when she thinks of Minnie HaHa, what she remembers is light and open air, rolling grassy hills and space.
Not how it is. Not how she has wished for it to be.
Too old and dank and cold.
Does sunlight ever filter through the trees or is the day as dark as night all summer long?
Here is the cabin pushed up against the forest in northern Wisconsin where she lived at the beginning of her life.
Happily?
What does she remember of happiness, or is there any definition to happiness when you’re very young.
“Is it familiar?”
Roosevelt’s warm voice fills the silence.
“It’s … I don’t know … but not exactly familiar to my memory of it.”
What Georgie does have is a sense of returning to the long empty days of a northern summer sun in Michigan with her grandparents sitting in the living room, silent and together. Georgie on the rose velvet couch with a Nancy Drew mystery waiting for her life to begin.
“I seem to have imagined it better than it is.”
Roosevelt goes up the steps, pushes open the screen door and holds it for her.
“You’re disappointed?” he says.
“It’s more like homesick for this place as I have always thought of it.”
“That’s the trouble,” Roosevelt says. “We want to make our childhood better than it was. Why not?”
“But I’m not disappointed,” she says, her arm brushing his woolly sweater. “Just surprised.”
They step inside a small room with a dark blue couch and two deck chairs in need of new canvas covers. A fireplace, smelling of burned wood.
“It can be cold in summer,” he says.
Two bedrooms, one very small.
“So I must have slept in the small one.”
“I was told by the camp nurse—she was still here when I came—that you slept in the big bedroom with your mother and that your father slept in this small one alone.”
“Maybe I was afraid by myself.”
Georgie opens the door to the smaller bedroom and peers in.
She knows little of her parents’ habits of being. All her grandmother had to say of their life together was that Josephine had never been depressed until she married William Grove.
Georgie closes the door to the small bedroom and checks the larger one where she would have slept with her mother, but she doesn’t go in.
“I have a picture in my mind of walking in the dark to the latrine with my father,” she says. “He let me carry my own flashlight and swing it around in circles in the sky. That’s not the kind of thing you make up, is it?”
“I don’t know about memory. It’s tricky,” he says. “When I think about what I remember, I seem to make the bad things worse and the good things better.”
“Do you remember my mother?”
“I don’t,” he says. “I was only on the river the first day. After the police boat took your father, we left for home.”
“Was there a lot of talk at the campsite after she was killed?”
“There was confusion and I was frightened. That I remember.”
She follows Roosevelt back to the main room, leans against the cabin wall, her hands in the pockets of her shorts.
“Were you going to be a camper that summer?”
“I was hired by William to work on buildings and grounds.”
“At eleven years old?”
“Young kids worked in 1941. Poor kids and black ones. But William had his eye out for me and wanted me out of the heat of Washington, D.C. So I came.”
They are standing next to the fireplace, Georgie resting against the stone mantel.
“Why weren’t you a camper?”
“There were no black campers,” he says. “There still aren’t more than a very few, from Chicago.”
He leans down to brush off ash scattered on the rug, and when he stands, wiping the remaining ash on his jeans, he puts his hand on her arm for balance.
Georgie takes a breath, her pulse beating in her throat. She feels more urgent than awkward, which is what she had expected to feel.
So little time. Already it’s late and they will be leaving Camp Minnie HaHa at dawn.
“Can you tell me about my father?” she asks. “Anything.”
“I can,” he says, his voice dropping as if there are others in the room besides Georgie he does not wish to hear. “ I know the things you know about a person when you’re young. I know he was strong and fit and took me places and told me stories,” he says. “That was later, after he had moved to Ann Arbor and he’d come back to his uncle’s to visit. Often, until he married.”
“What kinds of stories?” Georgie asked,
“Wonderful stories about himself as a wild boy in Lithuania. Devilish, not bad.”
He takes off his baseball cap, sticking it in his back pocket.
“That’s all you remember?”
“All I remember but not all I know,” he says. “Before Clementine died of cancer, she told me things about William that I had never heard.”
“I never saw him again after that day when he left with the police,” Georgie says.
“Your grandparents never took you to the prison?”
“They did not,” she says. “I understand why they didn’t want me to see him again.”
“They never talked to you about him?”
“Very little and mostly to remind me that he was a Jew.”
“I do know what happened at the campsite,” Roosevelt says. “At least the morning after your mother’s body had been discovered.”
“James Willow found her,” Georgie says. “I read that.”
“When the police arrived, William confessed,” Roosevelt says. “I was sitting down the hill from your father’s tent. He sat cross-legged outside his tent, sat very still waiting for the police to come. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.”
“The story of his confession was in the Chicago Tribune,” Georgie says. “What I’m hoping you’ll tell me is that his confession was not the real story. That possibly he was protecting someone else who had killed my mother.”
Roosevelt shakes his head. “Certainly not James. He was a timid man who loved your father.”
Georgie slipped into a chair across from him, her feet on the low table.
“We have a list from the newspaper of the nine who were at Missing Lake. What about a stranger?” she asks.
“A stranger out of nowhere could not have found his way by land from the town of Missing Lake to the river. That path wasn’t cut through until the sixties.”
“No one among the nine at the campsite who might have had a reason?”
Roosevelt leans against the stone wall of the fireplace, his arms folded across his chest.
“There is information about William that I do know,” Roosevelt says. “I went to see him before he died.”
“You went to the prison?”
“Clem and I went out by train to Illinois—it took forever. We went on a bus to the prison and got off at this big cement building surrounded by a high fence and sat in metal chairs in a large room and they brought William out. We pulled the chairs up to a kind of counter and there was a screen between our faces, but we could hear him and see him.”
“How did he look?”
“He was very ill. Normally he had dark skin, but his face had turned yellowish and bony. By the time we got back to Washington, Clem got a call from the prison to say that he had died. And we sat at the kitchen table and drank a lot of beer and cried our eyes out.”
He brushes debris off the couch, cleans one of the deck chairs.
“My real father left when my mother got pregnant with me,” he says. “So I was two years old when I met William.”
Roosevelt takes a chair across from her.
“Am I making you anxious?” he asks.
“I’m anxious,” Georgie says.
Butterflies in her stomach, her face hot for the chilly room, she is thinking what to ask Roosevelt, what to say.
Linda?
Or not.
“Almost seven,” he says checking his watch, using the cane to get up from the chair. “It’s time for dinner.”
He puts out his hand to help her up from the couch.
“On the way back to the lodge I’ll tell you about Linda.”
He pushes open the screen door, slips his cane under his arm and Georgie follows him down the steps.
Dusk, the skies clear, the air light. The forest alive with sound.
He reaches over and for a moment rests his large hand on her cold, wet head, and she feels his touch as heat through her body.
“I’m a mess,” she says. “Because of that quick storm on the river we capsized.”
“Lucky that’s all that happened.”
“It’s been a lucky day,” she says.
They walk slowly, Roosevelt preoccupied with his cane on the uneven path.
“You were going to tell me about Linda.”
“I am,” he says.
He takes her hand, and for what seems forever to Georgie, they walk in silence.
“Linda is mine,” he says finally, his deep voice breaking on her name.
“What do you mean, she is yours?”
“My lonely mentally ill daughter, and she is the reason I have stayed through the godforsaken winters in northern Wisconsin. Because I must.”
“You were married?”
“I was never married.”
“Did Linda live here with you?”
“She did not. When her mother left Missing Lake, I took over watching out for her. She’s unstable and promiscuous and has never had a long-term boyfriend except for Ray, the pharmacist in Missing Lake, who was the father of her baby. He stayed with her awhile after the baby girl and then he couldn’t take it.”
They walk side by side, their hands swinging.
“Hear the owl?” he asks.
“The hoot?”
“It’s not dark and owls are only supposed to hoot in the dark, but that impertinent guy hoots whenever he damn well pleases.”
“I know nothing about owls.”
“They’re my favorite of all the feathered creatures,” he says. “Somehow they seem to have integrity and wisdom and reserve.”
He puts his arm loosely around her shoulder.
“I especially like that they protect themselves from predators by drawing in their feathers and closing their eyes.”
The pine forest path opens to a vista of the pale gray light of dusk, the lodge in the near distance.
“I’m not ready to go back to the lodge yet,” she says, her voice thin, a familiar panic rising as if this moment is the last opportunity she will ever have with Roosevelt McCrary.
“There’s something I need to ask just in case I don’t have another chance,” she says.
“I’ll answer if I can.”
“I don’t understand how you happen to own this camp?”
“Because I’m not your father’s son and not white?”
“I guess that’s what I mean.”
“I own one-third. Thirty-three and one-third percent.”
“But why?”
“When your father was director, the camp was owned by his uncle and two other doctors, who were friends. Your father died before his uncle and at your father’s request his uncle left his one- third share to me. The other two present owners were grandsons of the original doctors, but they are not involved except financially.”
“That’s strange, isn’t it?” Georgie asks. “You were Clementine’s son and she was a cook in your uncle’s house.”
“It is less strange the more you discover.”
Georgie rests her hand on his arm with the cane.
“Then tell me everything that you know.”
“I will tell you everything I know,” he says. “But later.”
Roosevelt brushes thin strands of damp hair off her brow, out of her eyes, where they have fallen.
“Now dinner,” he says.
SINCE GEORGIE CAN REMEMBER, she has been in a conscious retreat from sadness.
On a grief diet, she told Rosie—small portions of sadness carefully selected. Now she has a sense of danger, of something raw between them, as if Roosevelt will tell her something that might take the lid off of her Pandora’s box and she will never be able to close it.
The ground is slippery with wet leaves, and they walk with care, Roosevelt’s limp pronounced, her hand loosely in his as if an accident of proximity.
“Before Clem died in 1951, she told me that at your father’s request Irving was leaving his interest in the camp to me,” Roosevelt says. “So at twenty-one and at loose ends, I came here. A few months later Irving died and I have never left.”
A riotous bird sound fills the air—a sudden chilly wind laced with raindrops.
“A storm?” she asks.
He shakes his head.
“Weather passing overhead. That’s all.”
She leans her head against his shoulder.
“So many things just don’t make sense to me,” she says.
“They will make sense,” he says. “After dinner.”
“At least I understand you were important to my father.”
Georgie’s heart is beating too fast, adrenaline rushing through her blood, her breath in short takes.
“What I want to know now, before we go into dinner, what I need to know is whether you believe my father killed my mother.”
“He confessed to the police that he killed her.”
Roosevelt puts her hand, which he is holding, gently in his pocket, his voice strong and certain, the sound of it reaching into the woods beyond Georgie.
“I’ve wanted to believe that he was protecting someone else,” she says.
“Who would he have been protecting?”
“I don’t know.”
“We have no idea what went on between your parents except what your father confessed,” Roosevelt says. “Not any one of us was there.”
“But we can piece things together and either they add up or they don’t, right?”
“There’s nothing to piece together,” he says gently. “Except to say that William Grove was a good and decent and courageous man, Georgianna. That I know.”
“Then you believe that he killed her.”
Roosevelt picks up fallen branches on the path, throwing them off to the side. Slow to respond.
“I do,” he says finally.
“I was afraid that is what you’d say.”
“And something else. That morning before the police arrived, Clementine walked up the hill to William’s tent and spoke to him.
“ ‘You killed her William, didn’t you?’ ” she said.
“ ‘I did,’ he said. ‘I did, I did, I did.’ ”
“So that’s all, I guess,” Georgie says quietly. “All there is to say.”
“Not all. Later, after dinner, I’ll tell you.”
They have come to the lodge and Roosevelt stops, lifts her hand and brings it to his lips.
“I leave early in the morning. I guess you know that,” Georgie says.
“I do.”
“Maybe you’ll come to Washington and stay with us at the Home for the Incurables,” Georgie says. “We always have an extra room.”
They go through the swinging doors into the lodge, past the fireplace, into the dining area where Georgie’s family is already sitting at a long table listening to Oona tell her story.
Thomas hops up.
“What do you know so far?” Thomas asks as Roosevelt heads into the kitchen.
“Nothing,” Georgie says. “I know nothing.”
“Do you think he’s going to tell you?”
“I’m not certain that he knows anything,” Georgie says.
“Of course he does.”
“Thomas, cool your heels and come sit down with us. Leave Roosevelt alone,” Nicolas says. “See what we can make of this visit. We’re out of here at dawn for Chicago. The van will arrive at seven.”
The table is long and the eight of them gather at one end, Roosevelt at the head. He opens a bottle of wine—serves the lemon chicken with wine and fresh green beans and biscuits.
“A fancy dinner for a boys’ camp,” Venus says.
“This is not how we eat when the boys are here,” Roosevelt says. “This is the way Georgianna’s father ate when he lived with his uncle in Washington, D.C., and my mother was the cook at Dr. Grove’s house until she died.”
He pours wine for himself and lifts his glass.
“To William Grove,” he says. “And to Clementine, who taught me how to cook.”
He reaches in his back pocket for a passport-size photograph of his mother that he passes around the table.
“I wanted you to see what she looked like,” he says.
Summer in Washington—Clementine stands beside a magnolia tree in bloom—tall and slender like Roosevelt, unsmiling, her gaze direct, her arms behind her as she leans against the tree.
A faded color photograph, but still evident the pale pink of the magnolias, her high cheekbones and wide-set eyes, a whisper of a smile.
“DO YOU KNOW that I got stolen in the middle of the night from my tent where I was sleeping with Freddy?” Oona presses the stuffed pink pig into Roosevelt’s hand. “This is Freddy.”
“Your father told me that you’d been stolen.”
“This bad-smelling lady came into the tent and she told me that Georgie asked her to take me to her house where she had toys and dolls and candy surprises for me. She was pretty nice, but it was dark outside and she was carrying me and kept tripping and that made her say words like fuck which is a word I know from Jesse who is my brother.”
“Her name is Linda,” Thomas says.
“I know her name is Linda. She told us that,” Oona says. “And Georgie hugged her. Now you and Linda are friends— right, Georgie.”
“You hugged her?” Roosevelt asks Georgie.
“I did.”
“Georgie is crazy,” Nicolas says. “We’ve gotten used to it, but I feel the need to put her in perspective for you.”
Roosevelt isn’t listening.
He has made strawberry short cake for desert, the strawberries small and fresh, sweet biscuits and whipped cream.
He brings out another bottle of wine, leaning over to Georgie sitting beside him.
“Thank you, Georgianna,” he says quietly, bending closer so she can hear him.
THE NIGHT is cold and still. They clear the table and do the dishes—the clatter of plates against the counter, of glasses under the running water, Georgie leaning against the kitchen door listening to their laughter over nothing at all. Laughter—almost giddy laughter of relief that they are here. Against all odds, Nicolas says more than once.
“I thought it likely that we’d die. At least one of us,” Nicolas says, Oona sitting on his shoulders.
Rosie slips into the sofa next to Thomas, resting against his shoulder.
“But we didn’t die and now we’re here and it’s kind of remarkable,” she says.
Roosevelt lights a fire in the great room and Georgie’s family sits on sofas around a dry wood blaze, their feet on the coffee table.
“Do you remember William?” Thomas asks.
“I do,” Roosevelt says.
“I’m fascinated by him. I could hardly wait to meet you.”
“What Thomas is fascinated by is murder,” Nicolas says.
Roosevelt sits in a deck chair across from the sofa, his cane resting between his legs.
“What did he look like in the flesh?” Venus asks.
“Like Georgianna but tall. He had dark eyes and dark hair and strong bones. You’ve seen my photograph so you know.”
“And what about Georgie’s mother,” Venus asks.
“I didn’t know her,” Roosevelt says. “All I heard after she died was that she had been beautiful and was depressed.”
“Did anybody talk after she died?” Nicolas asks. “There must have been pandemonium at Missing Lake. Did your mother say something about it?”
“My mother didn’t talk …” He hesitates. “She was silent when William was taken away by the police in a motorboat.” His voice caught in his throat. “In handcuffs. William was in handcuffs.”
“Is that surprising? He murdered his wife,” Nicolas says.
“He did and sometimes a violent act may be that simple,” Roosevelt says, his voice rising. “But this was not.”
“What happened to make it not simple?” Thomas asks.
“I only know what happened to me that morning,” he says. “I sat on a tarp near the river most of the time alone and eventually my mother sat down beside me. She asked me did I have my things together—we would be going home to Washington, D.C., as soon as a motorboat was free to take us to the lodge. There’d be a bus at the lodge to take us to Chicago.”
“Then I asked, Is everybody going home, and Clementine said, Just us, and I asked, How come just us, and Clementine said, We are only here because of William and I figure William is going to jail for the rest of his life.”
“Because he killed her?” Venus asks.
“Yes because he killed her.”
Roosevelt leans forward, rests his chin on his cane.
“ That was all she said for days.”
“Were you at the campsite when my grandparents came to pick me up?” Georgie asks.
“They came by boat and your grandmother had on white gloves. Gloves in June. I remember that especially. I asked Clementine and she said something I can’t remember, but I know that Dr. Irving Grove’s wife did not wear white gloves in June.”
“You never met my grandparents?”
“I didn’t. I watched them. When they arrived, they went over to where you were sitting with the nurse—the only scene I really remember is that you screamed ‘No!’ as your grandmother leaned down to take you from the nurse.”
“And that was it?”
“You held your grandmother’s white-gloved hand and hung your head down and walked straight by the tarp where I was sitting and climbed into the motorboat and left.”
“What did you think of William?” Nicolas asks. “Or did you know him well enough to have an opinion.”
“I knew him. I knew him very well,” Roosevelt says, folding his hands behind his head, looking at Georgie. “He was a strong, decent, honorable man.”
“Isn’t that an odd description under the circumstances?” Nicolas asks.
Roosevelt’s words are measured.
“I believe it’s possible to be a decent man and in the heat of circumstance commit an unforgiveable crime. I have to think that.”
He gets up and puts another log on the fire.
“Not a man likely to lose his temper and murder his wife?” Nicolas asks.
“Likely?”
Roosevelt adds another log and then another.
“People do all kinds of things in circumstances. According to my mother, he had a temper. He was known for that. And …” He hesitates, glancing at Georgie. “His wife was not an easy woman.”
He folds his arms across his chest, standing at the head of the table—the room hushed.
“When Clementine was ill, the two of us had talks about her life. She told me that the Nazis were invading Lithuania, probably that very day, probably the village where William’s family lived, and they were rounding up the Jews. You know that William was a Jew?”
“My grandmother wanted to be sure I knew,” Georgie says.
“Georgie wants to believe her father was innocent,” Nicolas says. “But it looks as if that is not news you have to give her.”
“The only proof I have is his confession,” Roosevelt says, “if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Maybe there isn’t an answer,” Venus says. “Maybe no one knows since no one was in the tent with him.”
“Of course there’s an answer,” Thomas says. “Everything has some kind of answer.”
“It can happen that when you’re looking for something you can’t locate, you discover something else,” Roosevelt says. “Something more important.”
“What might we find out?” Venus asks. “I’m all for new possibilities.”
“Just an observation,” Roosevelt says.
THERE IS AN EASE about the evening, the company, the way the conversation floats over and around as if it were a part of all of them, as if they had always belonged together and to this place that none of them had ever even seen before except Georgie.
Roosevelt is ballast.
“It’s odd, isn’t it,” Rosie says to Georgie when she kisses her goodnight, “as if we’ve always known him. And he isn’t even chatty.”
THE REST OF the family has gone upstairs in the lodge to sleep. Including Thomas.
Only Georgie is left in the great room with Roosevelt watching the fire burn.
“MIDNIGHT,” ROOSEVELT SAYS. “I make a night check around the cabin area before I go to bed if you’d like to join me.”
“I would. I will.”
He hands her a flashlight, and they go out the screen door of the lodge, down the steps and into the darkness.
A perfect, clear, cold night brilliant with stars, a three-quarter moon.
“Easy to trip on roots,” he says, and turns on the flashlight.
“I wish we could stay here longer,” she says. “At least another day.”
“The campers come tomorrow and you’ll be glad not to be here.”
They walk side by side along the path, close, Georgie brushing against him, her heart pumping, still a little breathless.
“Sweet night, wasn’t it?” she asks.
“Better than I dreamed,” he says.
They walk around the latrine, Roosevelt shining his flashlight into the woods.
“Have you ever had trouble here?”
“We have,” he says. “Towns around here are poor, so people steal. Or sleep in the camp beds because they haven’t got a place or had a fight with their wife. Not when the boys are here, but when I’m here alone.”
“Do you worry in the wilderness?”
“I’m accustomed.”
They walk in silence along the path from the latrine to the cabins, check them one by one, inside and out.
He stops by one.
“Listen.”
Something is making a noise.
“Skunk.”
He starts up the steps.
“Step back. Way back.”
She slips into the stand of pine trunks.
“Hold on to Mercy’s collar. She’ll try to follow me.”
He props open the screen door and steps in. Quiet at first except the sound of his voice speaking to the skunk and then in a matter of moments, the skunk saunters out, down the steps and meanders under the building.
“No smell?” she asks.
“They’re not afraid of me.”
“Why not you?”
“Because I’m not afraid of them,” he says.
He joins her on the path to the next cabin and she leans lightly against him, eased by the safety of his presence. Something she has missed, this kind of safety.
A man who has the trust of skunks.
It makes her giggle how easily she is won over. Someday she will tell him it was the skunk.
“You were telling me about women in your life.”
“Women.” He has an easy laugh even more pleasing for his seriousness. “There are not a lot of women in Missing Lake. Hardly any now.”
“So you’re not going to answer me?”
“I am,” he says.
He opens the door to the director’s cabin and sits down on one of the deck chairs across from Georgie, who collapses on the couch.
“There were women in my life, but none I wished to marry. Including Linda’s mother.”
“You made Linda the red wheelbarrow. She told us.”
“I made her a wheelbarrow to carry her dolls when she was a child. Now she walks down Main Street in Missing Lake with her toys in the wheelbarrow looking for a little girl to play family with her.”
What was it about Linda this morning, Georgie is thinking. Not a woman who could have carried a gun. Or injured a child. Even Oona must have known that about Linda.
“My guess is this,” Roosevelt is saying. “The night before last at the bar at Blake’s, Linda saw Oona sitting with your family and she wanted her.”
“Does she know who we are?”
“She does.”
“Who would have told her? Mr. Blake? I never told him who I was.”
“Everyone knows, Georgianna.”
“How does she know about my mother’s murder?”
“The murder of your mother is a legend. Not just at the camp, but in the town of Missing Lake and in Riverton and all the places inland from the river.”
“Sixty-seven years?” Georgie says. “Everyone is dead who was alive then.”
They are sitting now, their feet side by side resting on the coffee table in front of the unlit fire.
“Nice in here, don’t you think?”
“A little cold,” Georgie says.
He takes off his jacket and puts it around her shoulders, pulling the soft lining next to her neck.
“The fire’s banked and I’ll light it unless you’re ready for bed.”
“Not yet.”
“It is almost one a.m.”
“I can stay up all night.”
Georgie is thinking through the night from midnight to morning.
They’ll talk.
Sleepy with the fire and the cold, the smoky room and the smell of pine.
Let’s lie down a bit and then we’ll go back to the lodge, he’ll say to her.
She’ll stretch—nonchalant, although that will not be her state of mind. And then, almost casually as though it’s a nap they have in mind, they’ll go to the camp director’s bedroom and lie down on their backs on the double bed side by side. Roosevelt will let his arm fall across her stomach as if by accident. She’ll turn, not quite on her side, and lift her head toward his.
“I’m actually not at all tired,” Georgie says.
“But I am,” Roosevelt says. “Today is a big day in my life and I’m exhausted.”
He takes her hand and pulls her up from the couch.
“We’re leaving?”
“It’s already tomorrow,” he says.
They walk down the cabin’s steps, the light from his flashlight forming a perfect V on the path ahead, and they step into the light.
“You came here to find out about your father,” he says, taking her hand. “I don’t have information about the murder beyond what William said.”
He leans on his cane for balance.
“But I do have something to tell you about him.”
“Is it bad news?” she asks quickly.
“I don’t think it will be.”
He stops on the path, standing under the stars, his head tilted to the heavens.
“When I moved here, I fell in love with the stars. Many nights alone—and it’s cold in the north and often clear—I’d come on the porch of the lodge, which is the only heated building, sit on the steps and look at the stars.”
“I love maps of the land,” Georgie says, “but I don’t really know about the stars.”
“There,” he says, pointing to the sky. “That brilliant star?”
“I see it,” she says.
“It’s known as the Pole Star or Polaris or the North Star.”
His hand around hers is rough. She’s conscious of its strength.
“The Pole Star remains completely still while the other stars move around it.”
His cane is under his arm, the beaming flashlight in his hand.
“Or so it seems, but that is deceptive. The stars don’t really move of course. It just looks that way because of the rotation of the earth.”
“Is that what you were going to tell me?”
He laughs.
“That’s not what I am going to tell you,” he says catching his breath. “You understand I loved your father.”
“Yes.” She is tentative. “I do.”
“I don’t think you are really surprised by what I have told you,” he says. “You already knew that answer and were looking for something else.”
“You were looking for your father, whom you never really knew,” Roosevelt says. “And now you have found him.”
They walk to the lodge, along a narrow path that opens to a grassy field high above the river, the air crowded with night sounds: animals, likely skunks, scramble in the bushes, the long hoot of another owl in the distance, the splash of the river against the bank, a light but chilly breeze.
The sky ablaze with stars explodes above them.
“There is a story,” Roosevelt says, stopping just before they come to the clearing that leads to the lodge.
“About my father?”
“Yes, about your father.”
LIGHTS ARE ON in the main room of the lodge, but upstairs is dark where the rest of the family is sleeping.
They take a seat on the top step under a high sky.
It’s cold now, long after midnight, and she moves closer to Roosevelt for the warmth of his body, for his hot breath on her cheeks as they both lean forward against the light wind.
He hesitates as if in search of the right words, but when he speaks, his voice fills the night air.
“When William first came to Washington in the winter of 1930 to live with his Uncle Irving, he got the news that his mother had died in Lithuania.”
“I don’t know anything about his family except that there was an Uncle Irving,” she says.
“His mother was not old but she died, and he was so homesick that he’d sit in the kitchen of Irving’s house the way he used to sit in his own kitchen in the village, and watch my mother cook. This I heard from Clem.”
“So they were friends.”
“They were. He’d go to her house downtown at the end of the day after he finished his job at construction and she’d finished cooking and they’d talk.”
“He spoke English?”
“He did speak English, but with an accent which he never lost.”
He leans against the post on the side of the porch, Mercy resting her head in his lap.
“And they fell in love.”
Georgie is silent.
“They fell in love?”
This is not the story she has imagined.
It would never have crossed her mind that Clementine was more than an excellent cook who worked at the house where her father lived when he arrived in America.
“They were lovers? Your mother told you that?”
“She did,” he says. “And then after a couple of years he moved to Michigan to study, and that’s where he met your mother, as you know.”
She sits in silence beside him.
“No wonder you wanted to be in touch with me.”
“We have a common history and I was the only one who knew,” he says. “It was a loss.”
“But tell me …” Georgie says under her breath. “I don’t quite understand why William didn’t take Clem with him when he moved to Michigan?”
He leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees.
“Because it was 1933 in segregated Washington, D.C. That would not have been possible.”
Georgie stares out at the starlit darkness. Her breath thin, her heart thumping in her chest. Even Roosevelt must be able to hear it.
All along, she had expected to discover simple news to close the book on William Grove. Yes or no. He did it or he did not. She was prepared for the worst.
But not for this news.
Roosevelt stretches his legs down the steps, crossing them at the ankles.
“Now you understand, Georgianna,” he says. “This is the only real answer I have to the question you came here to ask me.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she says.
“Nothing to say,” Roosevelt replies.
“Except …” Her voice so soft he needs to lean down close to her lips to hear. “Since that is what happened between them, maybe we have an obligation.”
He wraps his arm around her shivering shoulders, leaning his head against the top step.
“See above us, on a clear night like this, there is a blanket of stars,” he says.
“It’s a beautiful night.”
“I’ve studied the galaxy at the library in Riverton and think of myself as a kind of celestial navigator,” he says. “Often when I’m alone at camp, I sit here at night if it’s clear and the sky is full of stars.”
He lays his hand gently on her knee.
“It’s a funny thing, but knowing something about the stars gives me a sense of power not over anything—more like believing in God, which I do not. But that kind of power.”
“What am I looking at?” Georgie asks.
“You’re looking at the W lying on its side facing north. See it? And Cassiopeia. A very bright star named for an ancient queen.”
“I think I see it,” she says, her voice thin as paper.
It is as if her lungs have closed down and all she wants to hear is Roosevelt talking to her. Just words tumbling out in his voice. About anything—stars or trees or birds. Even words in another language.
“Just talk to me,” she says.
“I will,” he says.
And he does.
The familiar pressure on Georgie’s chest seems to be lifting. She can actually feel it deflating, disappearing. So accustomed was she to its presence, she had not even known it was there.
Now in its place, a feeling of lightness.
“I need to know the galaxy,” she says.
“I’ll tell you what I see,” he says. “Above Cassiopeia is her husband Cepheus with a pointed hat and a pigtail. And then to the left, the Giraffe, but you can’t really see him.”
“It’s harder to see the shapes than it is on a land map,” she says.
“True. But what I like about the stars is that you can count on them night after night. Every star in the sky rises and sets about four minutes earlier each day than it did the day before. And every new year we are back exactly where we started,” he says. “That order matters to me.”
“Just name them for me. I love names,” she says. “Like Roosevelt.”
He laughs.
“There’s Andromeda,” he says, “and the Whale and Perseus and Pegasus.”
Georgie is lulled into a kind of calm listening to him. She leans back and rests her head on his chest.
“Is that all the news for me tonight?”
“It’s all I have,” Roosevelt says. “Coming on eighty, I asked myself what if you never found out about your father and my mother? What then?”
She closes her eyes and stretches her arm across her forehead to cut out the light of the dazzling sky and shelter her eyes wet with tears.
“Tell me everything you know about the sky tonight,” Georgie says without lifting her arm. “And what is happening up there. What everybody is doing.”
“Everybody?”
“The stars,” she says.
And he does.
The story of every star visible on this clear and remarkable night.
MAYBE GEORGIE FALLS ASLEEP. She is aware of sinking into the wooden steps, aware that her mind is empty, her body slipping away, and she wonders in an abstract kind of way what is happening to her that feels at once like dying and living, as if she will awaken from this slow disappearance to herself.
An image wanders across her mind and she catches hold before it slips away.
She is in a large room, a black night outside the window, sitting on a couch with her father, probably in Chicago, and maybe she is already four. Maybe younger.
“We had to make a picture of our home today at nursery school,” she tells him. “And I told the teacher we live in an apartment. Not a home. And she asked me ‘Isn’t an apartment also home?’ And I didn’t know the answer.”
“Home is you, Georgie,” her father said. “You take it wherever you go.”
Had that happened? she wonders now. Or did she imagine or hope it was what he had said. Or did it matter at all whether it was real or imagined? Finally, they were the same thing.
Georgie leans over and touches Roosevelt’s face, lays her cold hand on top of his, bristly and warm against her palm.
“Roosevelt?” she begins.
But there are no words.
Above them, the clear, cold night sky is ablaze with stars as if the stars themselves are falling out of heaven, scattering light across the earth.