Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six(59)

Our parents fought every Christmas. Dad was always on Mom for spending too much.

There was a picture of Alice, her hair cut short in a pixie cut, wearing a skintight striped dress. Oh, the Pat Benatar look. My parents were furious that she cut her hair. But she did what she wanted. Always.

Then, finally, the photograph of a baby wrapped in a blue blanket. Not Henry. This child had strawberry blond hair, light eyes.

“Honestly, for a kid, it was kind of exciting, to have a nephew and a baby in the house. I was four years younger than Maggie.”

She smiled at the memory, but the happy expression darkened. “But the baby, also named Henry, he died. SIDS.”

She traced a hand over the picture of the infant.

“It just blew us to pieces. Maggie took off after that. We’d get a postcard from this town or that over the years. But I never saw her again.”

She shook her head, was quiet a moment. Henry heard a clock ticking somewhere, a chime for the quarter hour. Then,

“Our parents passed—young for these times. My dad had a heart attack; all the men on his side of the family died young. My mother, well, she had a car accident. But if you ask me it was more that she’d just given up on life. She didn’t really recover after the loss of Margaret, the baby, my dad. She had been depressed and drinking heavily the night she died.”

They were just sentences. A flat recount of the decline of a family. But he could see the pain and loss in the older woman’s face.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. And he was. Sorry for her, for himself. It seemed like Alice had hurt a lot of people.

“Life,” she said. “It beats you up, doesn’t it?”

“Not everyone,” he says. Some people seemed to live charmed lives, even if they didn’t know it. Intact families, the privilege of heritage, an expectation of a certain kind of future, a safety net beneath them.

Her smile was kind. “Yes, everyone. Eventually.”

Henry pointed to the baby photograph. “That’s not me.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not.”

“Then who am I? Where did I come from? I think maybe I didn’t really want to know. But my wife and I, we’re having a baby.”

Her face lit up. “How wonderful, Henry. That’s such lovely news.”

“So I guess suddenly it feels important to know more about my history.”

His aunt nodded. Even with tiny lines, and a softness around the jaw she was still a pretty woman with shining, smiley eyes and creamy skin, delicate features, well-kept. There was the shade of Alice around the brow, something in her smile. She had none of Alice’s darkness, her edge.

“Of course it does. Of course.”

She patted the stack of albums, notebooks, and files. “I am a bit of an armchair genealogist,” she said. “As for the past, it’s all here—or a lot of it anyway. And with all the new technology, finding answers about you will be easier than ever before. If you want me to, I can help you. I can help you understand who you are. Maybe we can even find your father. Is that what you want, Henry?”

He was surprised by the rush of emotion, feelings he hadn’t let himself have, a stunning desperation to belong somewhere, to someone.

“Yes,” he managed, his voice cracking slightly. “I want that very much.”



* * *



After lunch, he followed his Aunt Gemma up the staircase to the second floor.

“Step into my office, said the spider to the fly,” she said with a chuckle as she swung open the double doors to a room filled with bookshelves, a big desk with two computer screens, a cozy couch facing a coffee table stacked with photo albums, notebooks, files.

She urged him to take a seat and he did, nearly sinking into the soft floral cushions.

“Our father started this project before Maggie and I were born. He could trace his heritage back to British landowners, though by the time his parents came to America they were tradespeople. His father was a tailor; his mother was a governess until they married.

“Our mother was descended from Russian Jews,” she said. “It’s a funny thing that the people who are privileged by history are also the beneficiaries of better record keeping. It took me years, two trips out to Utah where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has the largest collection of records in the world, hours and hours online, to find the name of the town where I think my maternal grandmother was born. We had a trip planned to Russia, but then my husband passed.”

“I’m sorry.”

She paused a moment. “Thank you. He was a wonderful man and we had thirty good years together. I try to be in gratitude for that, not grief.”

“Children?”

A flush came up on her cheeks, her eyes filling. She shook her head, seeming not to trust her voice.

His hand found hers again and she looked at him gratefully.

“That’s my life’s biggest sadness,” she said. “We tried and tried. But...”

They sat a moment until she was ready to go on. And then she did. They sat talking, the sky going dim outside as she shared her research—telling him stories about distant relatives on both sides, things she’d gleaned from old letters, and news stories, birth and death certificates. She shared grainy photographs, and wrinkled copies of wedding announcements, handwritten ledgers from churches she and her husband had visited in the UK.