Boy, Snow, Bird(30)

Snow wandered over, eyeing the purple blooms, assessing their potential for wearing in her hair. I told her to forget it.

“The calla lilies ah in bloom again,” she announced, in a surprisingly decent imitation of Katharine Hepburn’s voice.

“That’s right.”

“Where’d it come from?”

I watched her face as I said: “Your aunt Clara sent it,” but there was no flicker of recognition. She lost interest, said “Mmm hmmm,” and wandered away. It’s true that kids are inquisitive, but sometimes you forget that they pick and choose their projects.

I took the plant pot to Arturo’s workroom and knocked. He didn’t answer, so I kept knocking, switching hands when my knuckles got sore. Eventually he came to the door wearing goggles that covered half his face and asked: “What’s the big idea?”

I held up the lily. “It’s from Clara.”

He removed his goggles, read the card she’d written, and laughed.

“Any particular reason why you’ve never said anything about her? Snow doesn’t seem to know who she is, either.”

“She’s estranged from our parents. From our mother, really.”

“What did she do?”

“Oh, God. A lot of stuff, Boy. Too much to talk about.”

“So she’s estranged from you too?”

“No. She’s my big sis. It was her, then me, then Viv. Matter of fact it was Clara who put a roof over my head for a year. When Julia died. Snow was too young to remember. Don’t mention the roof over my head part to my mother, she’d have a heart attack.”

He kissed me and ducked back into his workroom.

—

mia said she’d never heard of a Clara Whitman, and Webster broke her Vow of Silence against me (punishment for getting married while she was away) to say the same thing. Mrs. Fletcher breathed out when I said Clara’s name. She breathed out and held on to the nearest bookshelf and said: “So you know. All this time I’ve been thinking how wrong it was of Olivia Whitman to send that girl away and act as if she only had two children.”

“What did she do?”

Mrs. Fletcher shook her head. “Nothing out of the way, Boy. Was just herself and fell in love. I must say, I’m glad you find it so humorous.”

“I don’t. I don’t know what to think. You say she didn’t do anything, Arturo says she did a lot of stuff he can’t even talk about. I mean, which is it?”

Mrs. Fletcher peered at me for a long time. Her expression became grim. She said: “They didn’t tell you about her.”

“You tell me. Someone’s got to. How did you meet?”

“She contacted me about a book she wanted to buy for her husband’s birthday. It was the first I’d heard of her, and I didn’t believe her when she said she’d been born in Flax Hill, and that Olivia Whitman was her mother. Then she came by to look at the book, and I saw she was a Whitman all right. She said the book was too expensive and went away, then came back the next day, said she guessed it was worth the price, paid up, and left town. That was four years ago. I haven’t seen her since.”

“Where does she live?”

“In Boston, I believe.”

“With her husband . . .”

“Yes. Her married name is Baxter.”

“Any kids?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was the book she bought from you?”

“It was an 1846 edition of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”

“She’s a historian?”

“No.”

I couldn’t think of anything else to ask; a riddle ran all the way through the account I’d just heard. I questioned a detail and the answer didn’t tell me anything. Finally I said: “Okay. Do you have her address or telephone number? I’d like to talk to her. Introduce myself. Thank her for the flowers, that sort of thing.”

Mrs. Fletcher hesitated, and I said: “Nobody else needs to know about it. I guess I just want as much family as I can get. Surely you understand that?”

I tried the telephone number she gave me three times, but the phone on the other end just rang and rang, and no one picked it up.





12

charlie sent a letter to the boarding house and Mrs. Lennox sent it on to me at Caldwell Lane.


This doesn’t count as bothering you; it’s just that there’s something that’s been on my mind and I can’t do anything to get it off my mind but tell you. I’ve always liked the way you listen—you have what they call an impartial air, like the ideal judge. Then afterward you just say four or five words and the case is closed. This is about my aunt Jozsa, in the old country. You know, we read the papers, but it’s hard to say what’s really going on over there. We just know it’s something. Aunt J was sent to an internment camp in Szeged, which is so crazy, I don’t even know how to express the insanity of her having been interned—hand on my heart, she’s red all the way through, risked her life for the party and the cause on too many occasions to talk about back when the fascists ran things. So we don’t know . . . someone with some sort of grudge against her must have denounced her. The camp officials wanted her to confess disloyalty and collaboration with enemies of peace (enemies of the government, I guess) and she racked her brain for weeks and weeks but couldn’t think of anything she’d said or done that could even be construed as disloyal or treacherous. So then she started putting some of her own statements of the past few weeks to herself, to see how they sounded. She remembered that once, at a party meeting, her mind had wandered, she’d looked out of the window at all the snow and whispered to her friend: “Will spring never come?” So maybe it was that. Aunt Jozsa told my dad she sat in her cell repeating those words until they became sinister . . . and incriminating. But when she confessed to having asked if spring would come, her interrogator just said: “Oh, I see we’ve got a joker here.”