| |
“February 22, 1977
Dear Edith,
I just received the letter from your brother Graeme with the sad news. I am so very sorry, for your sake and the children’s. I know Nora and Edwin will miss their Dad very much. I truly regret not to have seen him again. My poor brother. I recall our Mum saying once, perhaps after another family death, perhaps even after my father’s, that life was not meant to be easy. They are not comforting words, but they are true.
If you would like to keep writing, I would like that very much....”
Nora folded the yellowed piece of writing paper gently on its worn crease. The top edge still looked feathery rough from where the writer had torn it off a tablet. She slipped it back into the envelope, bordered red and blue and with AIR MAIL printed on it. Two stamps on the envelope, identical, a picture of a map outlining what appeared to be the northeast section of the United States, with in inset of a bust of some man. “usA” was printed in the upper left corner, underneath in smaller letters was “Bicentennial, 1776-1976.” Each stamp cost thirteen cents. The bust evidently represented some Founding Father. She didn’t know it was Ben Franklin.
Nora put the envelope back with the others in her purse. She looked up when she heard her mother cough.
Edith sat up in bed, receiving a breathing treatment from the respiratory therapist, inhaling an updraft of medicine in a steam mist through a plastic pipe, as if in some extremely sterile tribal ritual.
Rose stood in the doorway a moment, and at first glanced towards the other elderly patient on the other side of the room who lay in her bed, her face turned toward the window, evidently sleeping or drugged.
Nora sat in a chair against the wall on her mother’s side of the room, at the foot of her mother’s bed, hunched forward, hands clasped on her knees, with that hospital visitor’s expression of being anxious, and bored, and hopelessly out of place. She had not seen Rose standing in the doorway, but Edith did and nodded to her. The respiratory therapist turned toward Rose, smiled, and said with the same kind enthusiasm she must have saved for all her patients’ visitors:
“What lovely flowers!”
Nora’s attention shot to Rose and the peach-colored tea roses she held. Rose nodded to Nora with a tight-lipped smile that demonstrated her own sense of being helplessly out of place, and none of the flashback anguish that nearly kept her from coming to visit Edith in the hospital. After her mother had died last spring, when it was last autumn here, Rose swore to herself she wanted nothing more to do with hospitals. She realized, again, that they were inevitable, another confirmation of reality.
She put the flowers in their vase on the small chest of drawers by Edith’s bed. She dropped a firm, warm grasp onto Edith’s free forearm, and Edith surprised Nora by actually taking Rose’s hand and not letting go of it. Rose did not seem to think anything unusual in this. She patted Edith’s shoulder and pulled up a chair of her own, like the good daughter Edith should have had.
“I hope you’re feeling better.” Rose said. She used her slow, soft voice again. Nora folded her arms tightly to herself as if for support, and slid slightly lower in the chair. She watched Rose, who sneaked a tense glance her way, before bringing a much more open and happy expression back to Nora’s mother.
“I’m better,” Edith said, “but Nora’s had enough of me at home.”
Rose sneaked another glance at Nora, who returned the second volley with a cold stare that was, at the least, ambiguous.
“I...I think Peter said you’d fallen?” Rose said, noticing now herself that Edith still clutched her large hand. Rose looked at the veined old hand as if it were a grenade she couldn’t shake.
“Yes, and they’ve tired themselves picking me up.” Edith said, “Don’t ever get old, Rose. You won’t be forgiven it.”
“Mother,” Nora finally interjected, “You’d said you understood. We’d discussed this with Doctor, and you agreed. We can’t care for you properly, and you’d said you accepted it.”
“Peter tells me you cared for your dear mother in her home before you lost her this year, Rose?” Edith continued.
“Um...yes, Ma’am.”
Edith nodded as if she knew it all along.
“It’s different in America, then?” Edith asked rhetorically, looking toward the ceiling and placing all her judgment there.
“Well...not really. No. Lord, no. No, we have the same problems when it comes to caring for our families, people having to juggle jobs and...it’s very difficult, isn’t it?”
“I’m sure your mum appreciated your devotion to her.”
Rose pulled her hand from Edith’s in a way that she hoped was not too sudden.
“I’m sorry she couldn’t come with me on this trip.” Rose said, “She would liked to have met you.”
Edith did not reply, but from the corner of her eye, Rose saw Nora roll her eyes and cast a tight-lipped smile of ironic disbelief towards the window, where the late afternoon sun beamed over the sleeping or drugged person in the next bed.
“Are you ready to leave, then, Rose?” Nora said, abruptly standing, her purse swinging against her hip.
“Sure, okay.”
“Right, then, Mum, I’ll come back tomorrow,” Nora said, giving Edith a perfunctory peck on the cheek. Edith did not answer.
“Goodbye, now,” Rose said to her with manufactured cheerfulness.
Edith gave her a weak little wave, and turned her face to the half-drawn curtain that separated her from her unknown roommate.
Down the corridor and in the elevator, Nora and Rose said little.
“A friend of mine will be joining us, if that’s okay....”
“Sure, great,” Rose said.
“....Her name’s Jess, and she’s a journo for a public relations web site. Charities now, I think. Changes jobs like some people change their knickers. She’s a bit dogmatic at times, but a wicked wit. She can be funny as hell.”
Rose followed her lead, followed her out to where Nora’s car was parked, and they drove to a restaurant. Jess met them there, a woman not unlike Nora in her slim, professional woman’s appearance, with the short, tidy hair, the manicured nails, and the cell phone like a physical appendage. Jess had her third cell phone conversation during dessert.
Rose did not discuss Edith, or the hospital, or the evident controversy over placing her in a nursing home. She found herself noticing what the other people in the pub were wearing, and the music, and suddenly did not want to be a tourist or anybody’s long-lost relative.
“I’ll shout you this one, luv.” Nora said, lifting two more off the waitress’ tray.
Rose lifted her eyes suddenly, quickly blurred with tears, which Nora did not notice, and which Rose quickly swiped away. “Shouting” as “treating” was an expression her mother used. So was “luv.”
“Tired?”
“Huh? No. Yeah, a little.”
“Tough being a tourist, isn’t it?” Nora said with menacingly forced cheerfulness, “So, what do you think of Kiwiland, then? Quaint accents, but where’s the kangaroos?”
“Do you get a lot of that? Hey, I never expected any kangaroos. I would never confuse Aussie with Kiwi. I learned at my mother’s knee, remember.”
“Ah, yes. You’re Kiwi once-removed, aren’t you? We must give you special dispensation.” Nora took a sip, never taking her eyes off Rose.
“Peter tells me you’re in personnel. Or human resources. Or whatever current euphemism is in vogue here.”
“Did he?” Her smile was threadbare.
“Do you work for a large company?”
“We’ve over one hundred employees. Counting me. I match people with the jobs to which they are suited.”
“That a fact?”
“You don’t like Personnel, do you, Rose?”
Rose thought a moment, then began to laugh. “No. People who are fired almost never do.”
Nora nodded, still with the hard sinister sort of grin pasted to her face.
“Did you not consider shooting everyone in your workplace?”
Rose pulled her lips away from the glass, and tried desperately to think of an answer.
“I see you get our news,” she said, at last.
Jess got off the phone and took another swallow of Merlot.
“What did you do for a crust?” Jess asked Rose.
“Pardon?”
“What was your job, before you’d lost it?”
“Oh,” Rose said, “Office work mostly. Insurance for the last several years. I had been an actuary, but I’m trying to get over it.”
“Peter tells me you met today at Kelly Tarlton’s?” Nora made a hard left, evidently bored, “He’s quite old fashioned about recounting his day for me. Well, you won’t unearth any old family memories there. Or, are you and Peter making new ones of your own?”
“He said Tristan enjoyed it there. I can see why.” Rose said, unaccountably beginning to perspire, wishing she were clever.
“Yes,” Nora dropped her eyes, momentarily diverted, “Before he became so keen on astronomy, the aquarium was his first love. It was his chosen profession then.”
“He wanted to be an oceanographer or marine biologist or something?”
“He wanted to be shark.” Nora said, smiling into her drink, “He was nine, I think. But we discouraged him, of course.”
“No openings for a shark boy?”
“There was no future in it,” she said, her smile fading, “and he was not suited to the task. We in Personnel know all about that.”
“And now he’s got his OE ahead of him.” Rose said.
“Yes. Sooner or later. The first tooth, the first day of school, the voice changing, the bloody OE.”
“We’ve nothing like that experience in America.”
“I thought you had everything in America. You’re supposed to have everything in America, aren’t you?”
“So, what do you think of Wolfowitz and his plans to invade Iraq?” Jess asked, clasping her hands on the table and leaning forward over her plate. She was evidently bored with talk of children.
“Huh?”
“The proposed ousting of Saddam Hussein so you lot can take over the oil fields at Basra? What do you personally, as an American, think of that mad scheme?”
“Are we?” Rose answered, astonished as if she had heard surprising gossip, then felt foolish being out of the loop; it was gossip she was supposed to have already known. When the waitress returned, she switched to coffee like a long jumper who loses his nerve and pulls up short at the last moment. Nora smirked, and continued drinking.
“Do you find it all rather sick inducing, this continual warning by your government of awaiting another attack on the us at any moment, or do you think, from your point of view, that it’s the whole American way of life shite that’s been threatened and now you have to take on the whole world?” Jess paused to take another sip. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes, took one and held it in her fingers.
“I thought you’d stopped that.”
“I did,” Jess answered Nora, “I’m just holding it. It’s like a control thing. I know I can have one if I want one, and as long as I know that, I can hold off. I’ve been holding off for a fortnight.”
“Good on you, Jess.”
They were Marlboros.
“Oh, also,” Jess continued, as if she were filling out a form, “I want to know what you think of this ‘why does the world hate us?’ bollocks. For you personally, is it a freedom and democracy thing under attack, or do you understand how much the policies of the United States are hated throughout the world, and that many feel American arrogance brought on 9/11? Tell me what you think of that, eh?”
Rose glanced down at Jess’ hands and saw only the cigarette, no tape recorder and no reporter’s notebook.
“Are you interviewing me?” Rose asked, with a rueful smile, posturing to give herself time to think of what to say next.
“I’d just like your take on it.”
“To tell you the truth, I’d kind of like to forget it for one evening.”
“Fair enough, I reckon,” Jess rolled her eyes, and lightly tapped her unlit cigarette on the table a few times, “But I’m trying to draw a line between what people the world over see as a disgust and hatred for the American government and its policies while having nothing personally against the American people, and yet the contradictory belief at heart that Americans are naïve, self-absorbed and arrogant.”
“So, do you mean, is the problem the world’s interpretation of America and Americans, or American’s interpretation of the world?”
“Not exactly. There is the fact of hegemony, despite interpretation of feelings or viewpoints. You extort your power all over the globe, and often to great detriment.”
“I do?”
Jess shot a look over a Nora, but Nora was nonverbally noncommittal, and daring her to continue.
“Right. Just one more then. Do you even understand that the world is perplexed and disgusted over American’s obsession with 9/11?”
“I didn’t realize you were. You see, I’ve just come out of a rather long sabbatical. I don’t quite recognize the world anymore, or even my own country.”
“Where’ve you been?” she smiled, “On the moon?”
“In a sickroom, caring for my dying mother.”
“Sorry.”
“No need, I wasn’t fishing for sympathy. I’m only saying that if you’ve ever taken care of a dying person, then you know that you have no time for anything else, and every thought or opinion you have is colored by it. I feel like I’ve just been let out of prison and the world is different.”
“Then I’m to understand you are entirely noncommittal? No ‘you’re with us or against us?’”
“I’m very committed. I’m just not very eloquent. Can I ask what you do for a living?”
“International Red Cross. I’m with public relations.”
“Your work must be very important. And very gratifying.”
Nora rolled her eyes. It sounded rehearsed again.
Jess sniffed, nodded modestly, and tapped the cigarette once more on the table.
“It’s been nice meeting you,” Jess stood, “Let’s hope your Bush keeps a tight rein on himself and doesn’t send the world smashing to bits. Nor, give me a call when you’ve settled this business with your mum, right?”
Nora nodded and waved her off. Jess clipped a brisk smile on her face for Rose, and then put her cell phone to her cheek as she walked away.
“Nora,” Rose asked after they spent a moment listening to the dim buzz of other conversations, “Why did Tristan choose the us?” She did not look at Nora when she asked this, and did not care what the answer was; an inevitability that must be faced.
“Why?” Nora raised her eyebrows to the unresponsive heavens and the dusty ceiling lights that were blocking them, “Well, yes, the U.K. is the prime spot, of course. Our position as bastard children of the old Empire gives us certain privileges in the area of work visas. But. Well. Who would not want to go to the us of A? Where you have everything. There are plenty of us there, too. And then, too, there’s always dear Aussie. Plenty of us there, as well. Hardly much of an OE, though, is it?” Nora drove her glare onto the table surface, “Oh, I don’t know why he chose the us; he doesn’t speak much about it to me, actually.”
“The West Island?” Rose smiled, thinking of the remark about Australia belatedly, but Nora’s glassy gaze deflected the old joke.
“I sometimes think only war or famine has driven more people from their country than the bloody OE.”
“Permanently, do you mean? Intentionally? Or is that just the way it happens sometimes?
“So many things about us you could not possibly understand, Kiwi mum or no.” Nora said, “It’s not in your experience. It’s not your heritage, so how could you understand? Your flag-waving, self-absorbed country devours us with your television garbage and junk food takeaway chains like so much flesh-eating bacteria, gnawing away at us from the inside. Your overbearing influence descends on us with the precision of one of your long-range nuclear missiles, and from far away you wreak havoc from the safety of your own astounding ignorance. And then, when a tour group of you Merkins comes all the way down to Noo Zeee-laaand, rolling along in a tour company motor coach, stopping briefly at designated tour company approved shops, you spend your outrageous income on plastic key chains made in Fiji, or the odd paua shell ashtray. And then you wonder aloud where the hell are the bloody kangaroos?!”
Nora nearly choked finishing the sentence, and lowered her head.
“I wish I had your eloquence,” Rose said in her quiet voice, “Jess might have had more respect for me.” She guessed that letting Nora drink quantities of Steinlager, instead of trying to persuade her against it, was the easiest solution to avoiding an awkward parting at the end of the evening.
It turned out not to be awkward at all, in fact, it was quite sisterly and intimate. Rose gently laid her hand upon Nora’s cheek, then patted Nora’s shoulder. When she was satisfied this did not wake Nora from alcohol-induced unconsciousness, Rose left a twenty percent tip on the table, purely from unthinking American habit and not meaning to be showy, and knelt by Nora’s chair, grasped her at the waist, and pulled her onto her shoulder. Rose stood without difficulty, reached for Nora’s purse, and nodded a cheerful good night to the waitress.
The night felt warm and damp, and close all around her, and the black sky steeped in stars, hung just above her head. She had no lingering opportunity of enjoying the bright lights of the big city, blanketed by such a starry sky. Nora’s arms dangled down Rose’s back, and Rose, hugging Nora’s legs, wondered which car was Nora’s. With her free hand she fished in Nora’s purse for her car keys. She found them, and discovered also the bundle of letters she had given her to read. She took both.
Aiming the lock release device at each of the three possible cars it could be, Nora’s car finally answered the roll call, and Rose unlocked the right front door. She tossed Nora’s purse into the car, and slid Nora off her shoulder, holding her like a sleeping child, and tucked her neatly into the car seat.
Then she noticed the steering wheel, on what she, from habit, thought was the passenger’s side of the car.
Hell.
Rose lifted Nora out of the car and walked around to the other side of the car where there was no steering wheel, and dumped her, less gently, into the seat. Then she returned to the other side and took the wheel.
Not knowing where she was going.
Hell.
Brooking no more nonsense, she found Nora’s address in her purse, hailed a cab, and slung Nora back over her shoulder, remembering to retrieve her purse and lock the car before she stepped over to the taxi.
“What’s this?” the startled cab driver leaned out the window.
“Her hypoglycemia kicked in.” Rose answered. “Happens every night at this time. She just needs some cheese and crackers, and she’ll be right, mate.”
***
“Good God!” Peter stood back from the door as Rose hiked in, stole a quick glance at the lounge and flatly asked,
“Where’s your bedroom?”
“What’s happened?”
“We went out for drink. I hope that’s okay?”
“Here, let me take her.”
“Don’t bother, Pete. Where’s your bedroom?”
“Bloody hell. This way.” Then he mumbled something that sounded like “bollocks.”
Rose handed him Nora’s purse and followed him.
“You have a lovely home.”
He said nothing.
Rose slid Nora off her shoulder and onto the bed, while Peter tried to support her head and keep her from bouncing.
“I had no idea she had it in her,” he said.
“I hope she can keep it in her.”
Rose heard a door open down the hall, and suspecting it was Tristan, she quickly stepped out from Peter and Nora’s room and closed the door. Tristan wore sweat pants and a T-shirt, and rubbed his eyes. Rose poked him in the stomach.
“Hey, big guy. Brought your mom home, and now I’m off.”
“Would you like to see the Southern Cross?”
“Now?”
“Yeah, noontime would be more convenient.” Tristan answered. Rose laughed.
“I have a cab waiting out front. How quick can you be?”
“Five minutes.”
“Okay. Let me just ask the cab guy to wait. I’ll be right back.”
“Come round to the back garden, Rose.”
***
“Could you just wait, please. I’ll be another few minutes. I have to look at the Southern Cross.” She leaned into the cabdriver’s window. He pulled back from her. She wondered about her breath, or if she just scared him.
“Why don’t you just buy a little flag from the duty free shop in the airport?”
“Thanks, pal. I didn’t think of that.” Country full of smart alecks.
Peter came out the door as she was going around to the back of the house.
“Rose? Let me bring you back to your digs.”
“That’s okay, the cab’s waiting for me. Tristan’s got something to show me.”
“Are you sure? It’s no trouble.”
“Peter...” She put her hand on his arm.
“Yes?”
“I think you should stay here and undress your wife.”
***
Tristan had set up his telescope on the patio. He looked very pleased, and very young and full of energy and strength. He did not know yet that it was not true that anything was possible. Rose wished for a moment to be seventeen again, but knowing everything she knew now. Then she realized if she had known then what she knew now, there would be no point, and no magic, to ever being seventeen.
“Turn this way,” Tristan spun her around and pointed over the top of the neighbor’s house.
“Right there,” Tristan said, and she followed the length of his arm. “Those are the pointers, those are the...one, two, three, right there. That’s the Southern Cross.”
Here I am, Ma. I’m here. I’m finally here. Do you see me?
She watched the sky so intently that Tristan was not sure she had found it.
“Do you see it?”
“Yes, Tris. It’s beautiful.”
“Come here to the telescope. It’s already set just right, so don’t actually hold onto it, or you might jostle it off. Just put your eye up to it and have a look.”
The star Acrux pointed to the south celestial pole, and with its companions Mimosa and Gacrux, were among the brightest stars in the sky. Alpha centauri and beta centauri. She knew the pattern only as a design on the flags of two nations, and was somewhat startled and moved to find it a glowing, burning thing in the cosmos.
“It’s a bit higher up in the sky in late autumn.” Tristan said. “It was used for navigation, like your North Star.”
“The Little Dipper.” Rose smiled, pulling away from the telescope, “you’ve never seen it.”
“I will.”
“You come to my hemisphere, young man, and you’ll never see the Southern Cross again. It disappears forever.” Rose said, sounding ominous.
“But there’s something we have in common, the constellations. They travel on the elliptic. Do you know Orion? The three stars right there form his belt.”
“Yes, I know Orion. That one I do know.”
“It’s just that here you’re seeing....”
“Wait....whoa. He’s upside down.” Rose clutched Tristan’s shoulder.
“No worries, Rose, you’re just looking from a different direction. Here, we’re looking at him in the northern sky, when you’re used to finding him in the southern sky. Turn around, and look back over your shoulder. Bend back a bit. Right. Now he’s the right way for you, do you see? And there’s Taurus.”
“Yikes,” she muttered, alternately squinting into the telescope and pulling away from it to search the sky with her own vision. Orion was always over her house when she pulled in the driveway, when she came home in the dark. He was always right side up, often just over the neighbor’s stand of oak trees. Why was he not home guarding the house?
“How do you like it?”
“Orion’s on his head. Jeez, I’m really on the other side of the earth, Tristan.”
“Reckon you are. Good job we have all this lovely gravity, or you’d drop off.”
“The sky is not like this where I’m from. Not at all. I don’t recognize anything. This is so disorienting. But wonderful. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
She wondered if this was how her mother felt at first seeing the Big Dipper. Was she disoriented? Did she feel very far from home then, more than she would have ever felt by simply looking at a map? Was it not the seasons, but the stars, that first made her feel as if she had gone like Alice through the looking glass?
***
Orion lay upside down over the motel when the taxi pulled into the parking lot. When she handed the driver his fare with the usual,
“Keep it,” and turned to open the door, he impatiently plucked through the bills and handed her a few back, she risked a conversation with him.
“Sir,” she grinned, “Can you tell me why cabdrivers here keep returning my money?”
“We’re not so greedy for it as you Yanks are.” He did not look at her when he said it. He just drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, then afterward turned his face toward her, with a nonverbal facial expression to question why she was still in his cab.
“Thanks,” she said, as the most expeditious word to close a conversation, and got out of his cab, letting him get on with his life.
Thanks for the lesson in diplomacy, too, she thought, you hateful little creep.
Forget it. Just forget it.
Inside her room, she flicked on the pale glare of the ceiling light and looked around, as if expecting to be awash in feelings of familiarity, the kind she usually felt in any room she had lived in at least couple days. It held no familiarity for her or warmth, or even interest. It was only a typical old motel room, with furniture from the 1960s and a chenille bedspread that looked like the one her sister Linda used on her twin bed in 1964 and was later used by her father for a drop cloth when he painted ceilings in their house. Linda’s had a couple of cigarette burn holes in it that she had tried to hide from their mother, unsuccessfully.
Perhaps the bedspread at least was familiar in a way. Still, the rest of the room was a yard sale, and that would have been enough had she not been in real New Zealand homes, where she had felt very interested, and involved, and which even greeted her with a kind of familiarity. The differences between these and the American homes she had been in were not astronomic. There were only a few differences. Did they matter? Were they symbols of more? Would she know that if she were more sensitive?
She had been inside the house Nora lived in as a child, and also the house Nora now shared with her husband. They were homes perhaps her mother would liked to have seen, places where she would have liked to have been invited. It gave Rose a sensation of leaving her mother behind.
Rose tossed the bundle of letters onto the bed, slipped off her shoes, and decided to get ready for sleep. When she came out of the bathroom, just about to flick the wall switch to turn off the ceiling light, she noticed the bundle of letters there. She reached to move the letters to a place of safety.
Rose had not even touched the letters when she noticed the address on the top envelope. It was addressed to “Mr. Robert Fitzmichael” of Auckland, New Zealand. An American stamp on the air mail envelope, and the return address was “Mrs. Ruby Chleb” of Chicopee, Massachusetts. The handwriting was her mother’s.
Rose gasped, a stifled shriek. She put her hand to her mouth and looked at the envelope as if it were a cross between a pot of gold and a python. She leaned against the wall, her heart pounding, nearly forgetting to breathe.
“Oh....my....lord.....” she said aloud, hugging herself. Then slowly, cautiously, with tears forming, she approached the letters. She sat down on the edge of the bed and picked the bundle up. She gently fanned the edges of the old envelopes.
They were all from her mother. This was not the bundle of letters she had brought to Nora. Those had been from Nora’s father written to Rose’s mother.
These were her mother’s letters written in return.
“Oh, oh, my lord.” Rose said, shaking her head over the letters. What could this mean? Why did Nora have them in her purse? She must have brought them along to give to her. Why had she not mentioned them? Rose had never expected to see any of her mother’s letters to her brother Robert. She had assumed her uncle would either not have kept them or they would have been discarded after his death many years ago. To think that they had been saved was remarkable. Could it have been Edith? Would she have been so sentimental? She did not seem the type. Perhaps her New Zealand aloofness was just a guise, after all, and that troubled old woman had some sentimental respect for her husband’s letters from his sister.
“God bless her,” Rose said aloud, shaking her head, and wiping her tears with the sleeve of her nightshirt.
She took the rubber band off the letters. She wondered if they were all here, all the letters her mother had ever written him? There was no way of telling that. She noticed they were not in chronological order, and that the rubber band had been put on them only recently, it had left no crease or mark. Perhaps they had been left in a jumble in a box or drawer, and Nora had bound them only today to give to her.
Why hadn’t Nora mentioned it?
Well, there was no time after they had discussed so much else and the evening ended so very...unconsciously for Nora. Rose spread the letters out on the orange chenille bedspread, savoring their feel and the sight of them like a miraculous treasure of riches before her. She could never have imagined such a thing. Just this alone made this trip worth it. She would show her sisters what she had accomplished. If they ever spoke to her again.
She picked up one envelope. The address was the same house as Edith’s current home. The same house Rose had been to and her mother would never see. Three stamps in the corner, white with blue ink that had an illustration of George Washington on them, each for five cents. She pulled the letter out of the envelope. Tucked into one of its folds, three small photos slipped out. Rose recognized her sisters and herself. She unfolded the letter and noted it was written in 1965. The two pictures of her sisters Linda and Darlene were their school photos from that year. Linda’s was her high school graduation photo, as she looked when she was 18, in a pale pink sweater with a small crucifix draped against her collar bone. She looked virginal and studious, but Rose doubted she had been either. Her hair was bobbed short, and the photographer had airbrushed away her acne. There wasn’t much he could do about those hideous glasses, however. Linda smiled as glamorous as it was possible for her to do, then or now.
Darlene’s photo was taken her parochial school uniform. She was sixteen years old when this was taken, a sophomore in a white blouse and a plaid jumper, but since this was not a graduation photo the photographer did not take any pains over her unfortunate acne or that wisp of hair that stuck out over her right ear, like Bozo the Clown. Darlene’s smile was less glamorous, but perhaps more sincere. She looked like a schoolgirl just doing her best.
The photo of Rose was not a school photo, since Rose had been born only three months before this letter had been written. Her photo was a small, square black-and-white snapshot taken by her father with their old (then new) compact camera that took 126-speed film and never rewound properly. The flash cube would pop off and her father would catch it, shifting the hot menace from hand to hand, cursing until he could find an ashtray to drop it in until it cooled off.
Rose looked at herself, the baby that she had been. Placed on a blanket on the floor, the shadows of her parents could be seen on the edges of the blanket: her mother just out of reach to tease her into looking into the camera, and her father standing over her from above, trying to keep himself steady so as to not get a blurry shot.
The shot was not blurry; but sharp and clear, showing a bald, round-faced baby, a good-sized baby, looking with a bewildered expression up at the camera lens, as if she were undecided as to smile or cry. One of her hands clenched into a tight little fist, and the other reached toward the camera, for her mother and father behind it.
Rose put herself down with her sisters and considered the group. What an awful inconvenience it must have been, she thought again, for her parents to have had a new baby when two other daughters were adults, or nearly so. Knowing you were a mistake was one thing, feeling like you are a mistake is quite another, Rose thought again.
“Dear Rob,
Here are the latest photos, as promised, but summer has been so busy with the new wee girl that I haven’t had much time for writing. There has been a stinking hot heat wave here, and the humidity is quite as bad as Auckland, only without the benefit of the ocean nearby. There is a bit of drought on as well, but we generally get a generous snowfall each winter, so at best it’s a temporary drought, nothing like the farmers get some years back home when stock is lost and their living is at stake. My father-in-law complains the city authorities won’t let him water his lawn, and he is meticulous about it. At least he is allowed to water his veggie patch, and that makes him happy.
He is so practical a man, he does not see the use of giving up garden space to flowers, which you cannot eat, but Genowefa keeps him in line, God knows how. He cannot seem to resist her sweetness, and neither can anybody else.
They are both besotted with and baffled by the new baby. If I never expected another child, certainly they never expected another grandchild, but both are in their element, I must say. Genowefa looks after her almost as much as I do, and Franciszek seems to regard this child as his second chance at fatherhood, never mind grandfather-hood.
He may get a chance at being a great-grandfather in the not too distant future, as Linda has made plans to be married early next Spring. Sorry, I mean March. Her lad and she have been dating through most of high school, so we know him well. He’s a good young bloke.
Tell me more of your Edwin’s cricketing. You know I was never keen on sport as such, but I do love to read your comments on the kids. I know Edwin’s just past his tenth birthday, into the double-digits, is he? Good on him. Is he much like his Dad...?”
Rose put the letter down, blurry-eyed, over-tired, but hands still shaking with excitement. She realized again Edwin had not been mentioned by Nora. Rose decided she would wait until tomorrow evening and call Nora at home, ask how she was doing after their evening on the razzle, ask her about these letters, and ask her about Edwin.
She gathered the other letters from across the bed carefully, and put them together in a bundle again, and placed it on the table next to the bed. She looked at it there for some moments, still unbelieving, and wanting to continue reading them now, but she knew they were better left for tomorrow. She turned off the wall switch and tread carefully in the dark to the bed, where she crawled under the ugly orange chenille bedspread and the cool sheets, and wondered if she would be able to sleep at all now, from the excitement that nearly made her nauseous, as her eyes adjusted to the half-light created by the lights from the businesses on the highway through the curtains at the window. She turned over fragments of thoughts, and memories, and scraps of orphan prayers in her mind.