Where We Are Now (23 page)

Maribelle told me later they had. We were free to talk about it after Kate married Ted Parrish, the Englishman she met in Japan. She lives with him in a London flat where, she writes, she's hung the Navaho rug we gave her on the wall … her western dust, I think, and wonder in what other ways her past will remain visible. Romero married Gloria, a flutist he met in Rio three months after he and Kate parted. Gloria moved to San Francisco to live with him. Maribelle and I still see each other at the grocery or at our homes. Oddly in the more public places we tend to exchange our most private news. Last Friday while picking our way through some slightly green peaches then shaking our heads over a pile of avocados that were just over the edge of being too ripe, she told me that Gloria was going to have a baby in April. I congratulate her and smile although I have nothing to announce so far.

U
ncle Phillip
doesn't write. I know his signature only from Christmas checks to the children and cards chosen by Aunt Lucy. Correspondence is a task that he, like all the men in the family, leaves to women. But Aunt Lucy died last spring. It's early November now, a month before Christmas, and here is a large manila envelope addressed to me in New Mexico from Uncle Phillip. A slightly smaller envelope is inside with a cryptic note attached: “Lucy wanted you to have these. I have not read them.” Why does he want me to know this? He's usually not so circumspect. Uncle Phillip is a Gainer, the oldest surviving in-law, the one who often adds what the Moores tend to leave out.

On this sunny afternoon thousands of miles from Tennessee and six months after her death, Aunt Lucy is determined to tell me something. Partially dreading the message, yet still curious, I walk back from our roadside mailbox, swinging the large envelope in one hand.

Once in the house out of the wind, I bend the rusty metal clasp to open the smaller envelope. Letters addressed to Miss Lucy Moore sent in care of someone named Ruth Ivy at an address two doors down from my grandparents' house in Tennessee, slip into my lap. Real letters. I've seen so few of them since e-mail invaded our lives. These are mailed from Atlanta, in 1925 by their postmarks, and all are written by the same person—in haste it appears by the scrambling letters. I shake the envelope again and out falls another from my mother also in Atlanta but three years later in 1928. So little was left to me in her hand, I read it immediately. It was sent straight to Aunt Lucy at her parents' house in Franklin. There's a note folded around a piece of newspaper:

Lucy, dear,

I wish I were there with you when this comes. I don't like sending it, but I knew you would want to know. I just had to phone Jerry at his Uncle Will's number.

I'm sure you are going to say I have a terrible curiosity, but I couldn't help it.
I didn't say who I was.
I just made up a name, said I used to work at the same place Jerry did a few years ago and was calling to say hello. His Aunt Mabel took down the address where I am staying and mailed the enclosed to me.

Lucy, whatever you may feel for Phillip Gainer, you still need to know what has happened to Jerry. Somebody will tell you eventually and I'd rather be the one. I thought maybe I would wait and show you this when I got home, then I decided the sooner the better. Forgive me. Forget him.

Much love from Katherine

Everyone says she was out-spoken. Mother died when I was eighteen. Of course I don't remember her being so abrupt. This was written long before I was born. She was twenty, still in college, and Aunt Lucy, her only sister, was nineteen by then. When she writes, “Forget him,” is she merely showing an older sister's snappish impatience, one of those reactions usually hidden among friends but shown within a family?

I unfold the clipping torn from
The Atlanta Constitution:

Mr. and Mrs. Lester Greville announce the marriage of their daughter, Miss Lucinda Grace Greville, to Mr. Jeremiah Jenkins, son of Brother and Mrs. Holcolm Jenkins of Augusta, Georgia on June 11, 1927. Mr. Jenkins presently attends Emory University.

The rest obviously belong together, saved from 1925 till Aunt Lucy died. More than sixty years old, the envelopes are still white, crisp and so clean, except for the yellowed fold on the flaps and the stamps, they could be new. Before I married, Aunt Lucy told me about eloping with Jeremiah Jenkins, the preacher's son, when she was sixteen. According to the clipping, Jeremiah married again a whole year before she married Uncle Phillip. Surely these are Jerry's love letters. There's a faint odor of cedar about them. She must have stored them in her hope chest. My mother kept her wedding dress in hers after she married. I tried on her veil once when I was six. There were tiny celluloid orange blossoms sewed to the headband. The net, tissue paper folded inside slipping out, rose around my head like a cloud. Mother and Aunt Lucy watched.

“Oh,” said Aunt Lucy. “Oh, look, Katherine!” and they both looked at me and smiled in a way I didn't understand.

Nor do I understand what compelled Aunt Lucy to leave me her love letters though I can imagine the cloud of emotions swirling about her when she received them. She was as quiet as my mother was out-spoken. Often ill—she had fevers of unknown origins and migraine headaches that lasted for days—fragile, prone to fluttering nervously about her house, Lucy was the weak sister, the youngest child, the one who needed protection, or so it seemed, but don't people get cast into roles for the sake of others sometimes? There was Uncle George angered by everybody when his much younger wife died leaving him to spend his last years alone. Somebody had to suffer for it, so his sister Lucy was accused of stealing Jean's emerald ring, a gross green thing nobody should have been able to lose. But it was lost, and Lucy stole it, or so Uncle George decided. When she found it winking its evil green eye next to the soap dish on the guest room sink at his house, he wouldn't believe her.

“You had it all the time,” he said.

We had to reassure her repeatedly that we knew and had always known she was innocent.

Then Uncle Phillip added, “George has already collected the insurance money and doesn't want to return it.”

Aunt Lucy let the accusations drift to forgetfulness I guess. The rest of us remembered George's desire to blame her as a sign of his dotage, covering up, over-looking his cruelty in the way some families do when reality is too harsh. What did I really know about her? She married in 1928, earlier than Mother, and never went to college. She and Uncle Phillip had one child, my only first cousin, Fergus.

I decide to open the other letters according to the stamped postmarked dates. The writing paper is thin, torn from a tablet, the kind people use for telephone note pads now, and the folds in them are obviously worn from much refolding. Reading them I find a worried, passionate young man.

“They have parted us but they can't divide our hearts. We have a space between us, some air, some ground. That's all. I tell you. I tell myself. My daddy made me come down here. Every time I heard the train on the track, I made a promise to you. I'm coming back. I'm coming back.”

In other letters he urges her to pretend to agree with her parents so they'll let her out of her room and tells her he's found a job. In the next to last he says, “I guess when you wrote you were alright you meant they kept you in the house until they were sure you weren't p.g. I wish you were. Then they would have to let us be together.”

Finally, obviously after an annulment, he writes, “We can marry again,” and he promises he'll always love her.

In my hands I hold five letters standing for a marriage that lasted about a month. Aunt Lucy and Uncle Phillip were
married for sixty years. He was seldom out of town without her, and if he had to leave on business, he never stayed away for more than a night or two. My grandmother commented frequently on Aunt Lucy's continual refusal to travel with her anywhere.

“She can't be pried away from Phillip,” she said. “Lucy must stay home and look after her husband.”

These apparent complaints, voiced in a mildly approving tone, were her chosen echoes of Victorian sentiments about female duty. Aunt Lucy, as waffling and timid as she may have seemed, secretly did as she pleased, or had at least once in her life.

She didn't leave me her letters because she felt I needed advice about the follies of youth. I've been married and gone from Tennessee—except for brief return trips—over forty years myself. She wasn't inclined to preachiness, another reason Jerry must have loved her. Refolding the limp paper carefully along its worn lines, I slide each sheet back in its envelope while considering the time I knew her best.

The year following my mother's death when I was eighteen and beginning college at Vanderbilt, she'd stop by my apartment to see me late on Fridays after Uncle Phillip came home from work at a large insurance company downtown. Often he dropped her off—she didn't drive—to go on an errand of his own then return exactly an hour later to wait through Aunt Lucy's lingering good-byes. Slender, her hair prematurely gray, dressed in mauve or blue, she'd waft toward the door.

“I should be going,” she'd say, and in the next breath she'd add, “Oh, listen, Marianne—” All the steps to a new recipe would follow, or a reminder about something. Often she seemed to forget the most important news until she was leaving. One afternoon, standing at the front door while Uncle Phillip held onto the brim and turned his dark brown
felt business hat in his hands, he reached for the doorknob with his free hand.

“Lucy! Can't you talk to her about that later?”

“I guess I could just stay,” she said, “if Marianne will have me.” Her eyes held a gleam of rebellion, a small smile twitched at the corners of mouth.

“Lucy!” His voice hardened. For the first time I heard weariness mixed with contempt. It was as if he wanted to say, “Stop being a fool!”

She blinked rapidly.

Caught between them, bewildered by her answer, I didn't know how to respond, then I heard myself insisting she stay when I truly wanted her to go quietly as usual. We seemed to be locked together next to the door. “Phillip has another side,” my mother had once mentioned. “He'll surprise you sometime.” Now her comment wavered in my mind. Until that afternoon, I'd never seen anything but his kindness. Most of the time he called her, “Dear.”

“Oh, Phillip, I was only—” She looked at me and smiled as if we'd always agreed that was simply his manner.

The spell was broken. Brisk, organized as usual, Uncle Phillip opened the door, and she sidled out. I stood watching them through my second story windows while the early winter darkness closed in. In the clear bowl of light in this valley in northern New Mexico, I still see the wispy gray light beginning to blacken on that other day. I don't know why the memory of that incident is so strong. Perhaps, at that time, I was constantly having to discover things I didn't want to know. I was lonely, especially on weekends, so I began going to their house.

Small, red brick as many houses in the neighborhood were, with four white posts framing the front door, it had a huge backyard. When I walked out, Aunt Lucy was usually bent over or kneeling in one of her beds. She'd rise slowly,
dust her hands off against her hips, catch my arm and say, “Oh, I thought you'd never get here. Look at these peonies.” Or iris, or tulips, or hyacinths, or roses. Whatever she was working on demanded complete attention and often, I began to see, exasperation.

Her garden, a mass of reds, purples, yellows, the vibrant colors she never wore, seemed to reward her care, yet it was the one place I heard her voice her anger. “Oh, those wretched roses!” she'd lament, “Oh, those old iris!” as if she were truly disgusted with them. And if I praised her roses, she'd mutter, “They're only Cherokees. Everybody's got them.”

But no one in the neighborhood had them so flagrantly blooming, tumbling over a wall and into a ditch on the other side.

Uncle Phillip had a prim garden patch in the area set aside for him below the rose covered wall. The ruffled edges of his lettuce, spiky onion tops, fronds of carrots might waver in the breeze, but each kept its orderly line while Aunt Lucy's flowers rioted above them.

Gradually, when I began to see them more often, I noticed Uncle Phillip often spoke to my aunt as if she were a child while she, anxious and gentle, her eyes downcast, her hands clasped in her lap, sat listening to the rebuke, but I sensed feelings strung taut between them. Did her rebellions go underground and remain unspoken only to surface in violent colors and roses that ran amuck. I liked to believe this was so. I wanted to think some glowing need was there perhaps because I detested hearing her scolded for small faults—leaving a spade outside overnight, making herself late somewhere by dithering about the kitchen, or worrying too much about Fergus. When Uncle Phillip corrected her, I had to check my own desire to protest. “Oh, leave her alone!” I wanted to tell him and couldn't. Perhaps that hidden need was only my own. I had no real knowledge of married
people's lives. Were most marriages full of clashes behind bedroom doors? I could barely imagine Aunt Lucy losing her temper, and I couldn't see her walking out of the house. But what if she got angry at Uncle Phillip, so angry she turned up at my door? She didn't even know how to drive. A cab … after a sleepless night, she'd call a cab, and when I got home from school, there she'd be. What would I do with her? I'd have to ask her in.

She'd sit in my living room. I'd bring her tea.

“I told him—” She spoke slowly, and repeated herself as usual. “I told him he was a goose.” She dabbed at her eyes with one of her white flower embroidered handkerchiefs.

I waited thinking Uncle Phillip had never resembled a goose. To me, with his mustache and short frame, he looked more like a Scottie dog.