17

WHEN SOME ghastly thing happens to me or to someone I love, familiar objects suddenly look threatening — the pine trees that flank the road through the woods, the moon caught on the last snow — and hint at even further disaster. The whisper of the returning tide, once a comfortable reminder of eternity, becomes sibilant warning that nothing, nothing lasts. I see malice in an open smile.

Now as I drove back through the woods from the post office, the trees had that look.

My wife was asking, “What's wrong?”

The letter was from my aunt Roberta.

Dear Tom:

Yesterday I wrote a letter to Polly and one to Maude. I've been worried about Maude. She tries to do too much for her grandchildren. She's going to absolutely ruin them and somebody ought to tell her that money doesn't grow on trees. I thought awhile and then decided I'd better write you one.

I'm still here at the Holiday Inn because it's easier than the hotel. I hate the traffic now that my hands are so bad for driving. I meant to be home by now but it's still cold up there and how the wind whistles around, but I do miss our mountains and my view. I'm always surprised Phoenix is so big because when I was little and down there once, more like a place with cowboys and Indians, and then I'm always surprised. Certainly a lot of Mexicans, though! Their men are smaller than ours, but I guess colorful. I can't seem to get used to men with small feet.

People here are terribly nice to me. One nice couple has a grandson at West Point. I could never understand how you could live back there. You could do your typewriting out here just as well as back there. Maybe one of these days. Your mother loved the West so.

Several people here know Senator Goldwater. I'm sorry I missed him, but he flew to Washington Sunday. He has the store here. He would have been a grand President and if Mama had lived she would have liked him because his feet seem to be on the ground, and his profile.

Mama was eighty-five, and had just finished the last of her Christmas cards sitting there at the dining room table, and that signature of hers. All the presents for her are still someplace, unopened. I guess they got lost when we sold the ranch to the Mormons. I hate to go by it. I wish we hadn't, but there wasn't anybody to run it after John died. If only he hadn't had that heart attack.

Senator Goldwater has enough money so he wouldn't need to do what so many of them do.

I meant to do some shopping today and then it was Sunday so I got ready for church instead. Janet sings in the choir. She looks just lovely, singing away up there like she sang the Messiah in our own little stone church, but down here the minister calls himself Father and they call it Mass, but I guess they do, down here. Must be something about the Mexicans or the early Spaniards. I'm glad we're all Episcopalians because it makes it easier, except Aunt Nora, and I always thought she wasn't, to spite Mama. You know how Mama was about in-laws and how stubborn Aunt Nora is about change. She won't even get any older! I don't think Papa was ever anything. Do you realize Aunt Nora is going to be a hundred years old this Hallowe'en? Sort of a shame Papa couldn't have lived another two months and been a hundred but everybody can't, I guess.

Janet is having a little party for me tonight. The minister Father Ferris will be there. It's a lot nicer when they drink like anybody else. It makes me nervous when people don't drink. You get to thinking they have a problem.

Tom, the reason I bring up Papa is something funny that's been on my mind ever since this Amy Nofzinger thing came up.

It was several Christmases ago, maybe ten. Well, Papa had got in a lovely tree from up Sweringen Creek and a small one for in the hall where the elk was that I think your mother shot. The big tree had all the old decorations on it, some of them from the time I was little and you weren't even born. I always liked the pink swans and the doves with spun glass tails but Mama wouldn't let us touch them. I liked it more when we had real candles in those little things like clothespins, on the tree, and Papa was there with a bucket of water because of the time the orphanage burned down in Boise while Mama was still in the Legislature from Lemhi County. It was in the papers and so awful. Papa was always scared of fire, and how he wouldn't let anybody have fires upstairs and how Polly used to smoke up there and blow the smoke up the drafts when she came back from William and Mary so Mama wouldn't know. We used to say, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. If Camels don't get you, Fatimas must.” Polly hated Greek! I didn't know until I married De Witt that there was such a thing as a warm bedroom in winter, having to pull the covers up over our heads and breathe out until you got warm. Time goes so fast but I'm glad we don't seem to get much older.

I miss Mama and I miss your mother. I could never dress the way she did, but I sure tried. Whatever she did and whatever she had I always tried to have, too. Part of it was how she walked into a room, and then stood there. When she and Charlie were in Canada up there on the Fraser River camping on their honeymoon you stayed with me and De Witt at the mine in Gilmore. That was before Ralph was born and I said to myself, “Well, I'll never love another child as I love Tom,” but then after Ralph was born I loved him just as much but you have always been “special” to me. I guess that's why I let you play with my engagement ring. De Witt was so mad when you lost it, but we found it on the trail going up to the mine. That was lucky, wasn't it.

Well, the day I'm thinking of, that Christmas morning at the ranch ten years or so ago, Beth was alive and she and Charlie were on the way over the hill from the ranch over there for Christmas dinner and everybody was coming, Aunt Nora and all the cousins. Some years before, they had to put Daisy Haines in an institution. She would ask for things that weren't there.

I had my violin with me because Mama liked to hear Beth and me play together, “Allah's Holiday” and “Liebestraum,” because that was about all I could manage. I didn't keep it up like Beth did. I always wanted to play the violin because of how Papa played the fiddle when he was young. Beth played so much better. Mama used to keep a little willow switch behind the piano and Beth did her practicing.

The Chickering was sort of out of tune later on because when we all grew up and went away they closed the double doors into the living room when nobody was in there and it got cold. Not many people cared whether their pianos were in tune or not, so when old Mr. Loomis died there wasn't a tuner except when Mama had one from Salt Lake. Mr. Loomis used to bring us little brown paper bags of candy because he didn't have any children.

I don't think Mama ever got over Tom-Dick's death.

So Maude had two big geese in the oven and you could smell them. Tom, I used to be afraid of them when I was little because of how they chased you and hissed!

Papa was standing in, I mean by the grandfather's clock in the living room. He made the case with his own hands. Remember all his clocks and how they'd usually strike on time? He was standing there smiling because everybody was coming, so I asked him if he'd like another drink and he said, Yes, he would. He loved to have everybody around, and Mama, too. He had such a twinkle in his eyes, there are so many of us. So I brought his drink in from the pantry, and I said, joking, Papa, how many grandchildren do you have? Because I knew he liked to talk about them. He thought a minute but of course he knew without thinking. He thought, and then he said, You have two kids, and Maude has one, and he went on counting on his fingers and then he said, I have seven. And then, Tom, he hesitated, and he said, Maybe eight.

I remember now. I think it was 1912 and Mama got a letter. She took it upstairs and read it and left it lying on the bed. I don't know what got into me because you know we never touched anything of Mama's. She used to be around even when she wasn't. She used to say she could see around corners and I was almost a grown woman and married to De Witt before I realized she couldn't. She could do everything else so I didn't see any reason why she couldn't. I sneaked in and I read the letter, but not carefully because I was so scared. I was only sixteen and it wouldn't have made much sense to me. But it said something about a miscarriage. It was from Beth because of her handwriting she learned at St. Margaret's and that's why I read it because I loved her so and she would tell me I was pretty when I wasn't. I don't know whether she said she had had a miscarriage or whether she was afraid she might.

I love you, Tom

Roberta

P.S. What do you think?

What did I think?

I thought my aunt's reporting of facts was wildly casual and always subjective. She altered facts to suit the moment, how she felt from moment to moment. She could believe that what was true once was true now, or what was true now had always been true. But whatever one said of her, no one could question her loyalty to the family.

Her loyalty was now confronted with a hateful equation: A childhood memory of a letter and something her father had said at Christmastime were the Knowns on the lefthand side of the equation — if they could be said to be known. She wasn't sure of the date nor was she sure whether there had been or might have been a miscarriage.

If the Knowns were known, a member of the family might be lost out there.

The righthand side of the equation was equally hateful: Her sister who could do no wrong had let that child be lost.

My aunt offered no solution to the equation. She simply asked, What do you think?

Think? I thought the light had so changed it might have fled not from the sun but from a more sardonic star. It so altered the little lobby of the post office I might have been standing there for the first time. And it seemed to have sharpened my wits. I believed I saw the solution to the equation, and that that solution would prove both parts of it false. That there was no equation at all, but two impossibilities: One, that Amy was my real sister and Two, that my mother had abandoned her.

I turned to the encyclopedia, A to Aus, and opened it to the lengthy article on Adoption. I wondered why I hadn't turned there before — maybe because to do so would be to admit there was even a slim chance I would be called on to defend my mother, who needed no defense.

In that article I found confirmation of what I had always believed, that an adopted child must first be released by her parent or parents — only by the mother, if illegitimate, by both parents if legitimate, and that there is a document that must be signed by one parent or both parents.

Because he was an attorney, Amy's father would have kept that document close at hand. It was certainly in Amy's hands now.

“My mother's handwriting,” I wrote Amy, “was both beautiful and singular. I know she would not have stooped to disguise it. The signature on the document would be in her own handwriting however she signed herself, whether as the Virgin Mary or as Hester Prynne.”

Amy had dreamed up a sand castle and now the tide would be lapping at it, for the handwriting on the document she must possess would not be that of my mother.

Of course I felt sorry for her. I began to wonder if, when she walked, she knew the names of the flowers along the way, if she waited until Christmas morning to open the presents, put mustard on chicken sandwiches, if when she wrote a letter or signed checks she preferred to face a door so no one could surprise her. We might have had a lot in common besides a father. My father I was now prepared to grant her.

But she was lucky to have found a half brother who was neither mad nor criminal — nor was her father, who worked at his trade journals and lived with his fourth wife deep in the hot shade of lemon trees. Would she dare gamble again and search for her mother, that lost little lady? She would be luckiest, alas, if she found her mother dead, and did not examine too closely the preceding years. Maybe the little lady had married, had lied and presented herself as a virgin, and with lies had fashioned a bearable life.

Days passed. The summer people closed in on the coast of Maine; they opened their cottages whose rooms smelled of the stale air of the old winter and of the wooings and couplings of mice that shredded handy paper and cloth and nested in bureau drawers and there gave birth to their naked pink young. Sometimes there was evidence of illegal entry, smashed windows, broken locks, charcoal in a stove that had been left clean, soiled linen and empty beer cans. But rage, when there is no face or shape to rage against, gives way to an acceptance that summer people, in their possession of at least two homes, are fair game for the determined poor.

I began to wonder if Amy would answer at all. Maybe she looked on my request for the document as unkind, even cruel. But the memory of my mother as I knew her was too precious to me to allow doubts in anyone's mind. If Amy wouldn't be accepted as only a half sister — well, too bad.

Once again the post office looked as it had before that first letter from my aunt Polly that told of a strange attorney and a strange proposition. The lobby of the post office scarcely accommodated ten standing people. One wall was a bank of mailboxes with glass doors. Under a window, a wooden bench was seldom sat on. To sit was rude when others stood, or to sit was an admission of failing legs. On it were used magazines abandoned there by readers who had got the good out of them. The Reader's Digest was rich with cheerful, instructive articles, and popular because more lengthy articles tried the patience of those who wanted to get on down to the beach. As the summer people moved in, the New Yorker appeared, but was seldom touched; those who would read the New Yorker had already read it. Forbes and Business Week declared that a thirst for money is unquenchable.

The ball-point pen on the counter under a second window was attached to a surprisingly stout chain of shiny metal beads; it would not function if not prodded. Beside it, a jelly glass contained mayflowers picked by a local carpenter — exactly where he would not say. He had an eye for beauty and a nose for perfection. The fragile, rose-colored flowers, out from whose trumpetlike lobes perfume floated like music, were in jolting juxtaposition with a fresh batch of mug shots sent out by the FBI and tacked to the near wall. A man addressing a tender letter might look up and remember having seen so desperate, so chinless a profile only days or hours before at the A&P or under a crippled car at the service station. I find the women among the criminals especially troubling.

The window that looked into the mailroom was fitted with vertical brass bars to block any attempts to crawl through and overcome the postmistress who was having a cup of tea. It was she who reminded people what day of the week it was, when dog licenses were required, where taxes could be paid, and when the liquor store would be closed.

I had quite a bit of mail stuffed behind the little glass door. As I opened it, the postmistress remarked that the day was beautiful and the tide in the cove unusually high. The moon had been full the night before. The next low tide would be fine for clamming. Two dogs had met with porcupines. They would never learn.

I talked with her a few moments. She is a natural lady. I think it has something to do with acceptance and a soft voice.

I turned with my mail to leave. The door of the post office opened inward, and it stuck. You might have thought the carpenter who picked mayflowers would have fixed it.

The postmistress was speaking again. I turned.

“A letter fell out back here from your box,” she said, and handed it to me through the barred window.