Genealogy: a novel

by Mae Wood

  I knew exactly what platter my mom was talking about. In my mind, it was “the ham platter.” My mother always served the Christmas ham on it. I had never given the origin of the cream platter with the watercolor-like greenery painted on it a thought.

  “What else?” I asked. I was greedy to learn about the woman whose name I carried.

  “She was teaching school in Seattle when she met Fred. You need to ask Grammie more when she’s having a good day, because I can’t tell you much. Isn’t that sad?” A beat of silence passed between us. “I loved her so much, and I can tell you that she liked cherry vanilla ice cream, sketched these funny cartoon things that she’d tape to the fridge, and visited New York during the Great Depression. But why she became a teacher? Why she moved to Seattle from Indiana? Whoever this guy in the Philippines was? The old boyfriend she was teased about? I don’t know what to say about any of that.”

  “But she seemed happy, right?” I asked, begging for assurances that Alice’s decision to walk away from Elliott wasn’t a disaster.

  “She seemed happy to me. You can never truly know about those things, and I was a child for most of the time I spent with her, but yes, she seemed very happy. She had the happiest smile. Lit up her eyes. You’re going to say it’s a chicken and egg thing. But you really do remind me of her.”

  After getting off the call with Mom, I realized that Scott still hadn’t texted me back, so I texted him that I was off to bed, but not before I texted my high school best friend Caroline who had stayed in Kansas City, asking her to call me tomorrow.

  I gave in to my foul mood, crawled into old flannel pajamas, and let my heart break for a man a hundred years ago.

  Ten

  Ali

  August

  The next afternoon, I went for a long walk. I hated sweating or being hot. But I knew that I needed something for my body and an outlet for my brain. Maybe if I’d gotten Alice’s artistic skills in addition to her blue eyes and dark hair and name, I’d paint or draw. Instead, I walked the places I lived. No headphones. No music. No distractions. Just me and my feet and an hour of not being needed. I stomped through all three miles.

  Rationally, I knew relationships didn’t work out. Scott hadn’t been my first serious boyfriend. I’d given living together a halfhearted go during my last year in college. And it had cratered when I went to DC and he went to California. Always California. Land of boyfriends past and present. But Scott and I looked good together. And I didn’t mean just in photographs. Our goals matched. Our drive matched. Our dreams matched.

  I shoved my hand into my shorts pocket and pulled out my phone. He still hadn’t texted back, but I didn’t let that stop me from texting him again. Phone date? I’m on call today but around. Call anytime you’ve got ten minutes. Let me know about the dates I sent you.

  As I unlocked the door to my apartment, my phone buzzed in my pocket and my heart fluttered at the thought of talking with Scott. But instead of a picture of his handsome sleeping profile, the screen filled with a silly face with a tongue stuck out. Caroline. Snapped by me while we were debriefing after our fifteen-year high school reunion. Blitzed didn’t begin to describe her that night. We were fine and dandy at the event, but the trash talk at her house afterward resulted in the two of us both being supremely hungover the next day.

  “Hey.” I smiled into the phone. Ever since our paths crossed freshman year of high school, we’d been tight. And even though relationships grow and change over the years, and some disappear, our friendship had continued.

  “Wanna go get drinks?” she asked.

  “I’m on call, so if by ‘drinks’ you mean coffee, yes. But how about you come over here? I’ve got a glass of wine with your name on it and plenty of coffee for me. Bess is welcome as always.”

  We made plans and, as promised, when she showed up at my place that night without a baby but with a bag of carry-out Thai in hand, I had a glass of sweet white wine poured for her and a giant mug of decaf coffee with two heaping spoonfuls of sugar for myself.

  “I’ll never get your coffee addiction, especially when it’s brown hot water without the buzz,” she complained, setting the thin plastic bag on the kitchen island.

  “Gotta ration my caffeine intake. And I’m on call. So no booze for me tonight.”

  “I’m such a lightweight with this nursing thing, so it’s just this one for me. Hey, new table!” she said, taking the wineglass.

  “New to me, but old,” I explained. “My grandma forced me to take it. Also, check out the sideboard.”

  “Totally goes with your style,” she said with a smirk, gesturing from the intricately carved wood to the simple lines of the rest of my sleek, modern furniture in my open loft-style apartment. She turned and reached into the kitchen cabinets to grab plates while I opened the boxes of food.

  “My style may have to change,” I shrugged. “Because this is mine forever. The great-grandmother I’m named after? It was originally her mom’s.”

  “That’s super old. I think the oldest thing I’ll have to pass down to Bess will be some forgotten cheese at the back of the fridge.”

  I snorted. Caroline was fastidious and there was no way she would have cheese molding in her fridge. “Yeah, this is pretty old. Around the Civil War maybe? I don’t know for sure. But that does mean that it’s survived being moved from Indiana to Seattle to Missouri.”

  “And one day back west to California. Any new leads on openings?”

  We’ll see, I thought, but I nodded in response to her remark. I’d been in touch with a recruiter about a possibility in Bakersfield, and while Bakersfield might technically be in California, it wasn’t near Scott. And a life composed of strung-together weekend visits wasn’t my vision. “Booked tickets for a long weekend next month.”

  “That’ll be fun.”

  “Should be,” I said honestly, pushing aside my concerns over Scott’s less than enthusiastic reply about the dates I’d emailed him—Sounds good. If you fly into Long Beach, I’ll pick you up if I can. If you take the direct to LAX, book a car or a shuttle.

  “So,” she said, sipping her wine. “Are we going to eat at the table? You’ve got a lot of work out on it.”

  “Let’s eat in the kitchen or on the sofa. That,” I said, gesturing to the letters on the table, “is our dessert.”

  “Is this a new fad diet, because I’m not buying into it.”

  “Even better. Alice, my great-grandma? Table owner number two? Those are hundred-year-old love letters written to her,” I crowed, sharing my excitement with her.

  “No way! For real?” Caroline shot over to the table and started looking at the letters and envelopes.

  “Yeah, like right before and then during the First World War.”

  As we ate, I dove in and gave her the story. Of Elliott and Alice’s made-for-a-movie meet-cute on a train. Of their five-day whirlwind romance. Of his years of faithful letters, professing his love and telling her of his hard work in trying to make a life for them. Of the war that interrupted their plans. And of Alice’s betrayal by marrying someone else. That someone else being my great-grandfather.

  “This is nuts,” she said, hands on her hips, staring at the yellowed envelopes I’d meticulously organized and spread out across the table.

  “So, so nuts,” I agreed.

  “I mean, from what you said, they had this epic love affair that got screwed up because of the war, but if it hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Exactly. I feel really bad for Elliott. I truly believe that he loved her deeply. And then she dumped him and married Fred. But if she hadn’t dumped Elliott and married Fred, I wouldn’t be here to feel sorry for him.”

  “I can’t believe she kept these letters.”

  “I can,” I said. “I think they really loved each other. I thought it was maybe scandalous when I learned about it. Something secret. But I asked my mom about Alice and she said that Fred used to tease her about some other man.”

  “You think he k
new she loved someone else?”

  “I don’t know. I hope she loved them both, you know? Because the idea of her gutting Elliott and then being unhappy herself and making Fred unhappy too? That’s—”

  “Way too much to think through. Can I read them?”

  “Of course! They are the best thing in the world. Better than chocolate. I wasn’t kidding when I called them dessert. That one,” I said, pointing to the one Elliott had written after falling off the cliff, “is my favorite, but you have to read up to it. I don’t think you can start with it.”

  Me with a sparkling water and her with a touch more wine in her glass, we sat down and read through the letters together.

  “You weren’t lying. I love these.” She exhaled, gently folding up Elliott’s drunken letter and tucking it back into the envelope. “How many are there?”

  “They’re magical, aren’t they? Thirty-seven. And I don’t think I have them all. There are some months without a letter and some months that have two.”

  “Can I read more? I’ll be careful.”

  “Of course.”

  Caroline placed her wineglass on the sideboard and picked up another letter, holding it carefully between her fingertips. “I’m still surprised any of them survived. Makes me sad, and not only for them, but for us in a way. Email and text aren’t the same, you know?” I nodded my head in agreement. “No way anyone is going to want to read Stu’s texts to me. Even though he did send me an emoticon heart this week. Or is it an emoji? What’s the difference?”

  I snapped up my phone to run down that little mystery of the universe and she batted her hand toward me.

  “Oh, never mind that. I truly don’t care what the difference is. Any clue what happened to Elliott?”

  “None at all,” I said, setting my phone back on the table. “The last one is actually dated a month before Alice got married. By the way, you’ve heard of a family bible? Not only are those real things, but I’m now the proud owner of one.” I pointed to a worn, dark green book on top of the sideboard, next to Caroline’s abandoned glass of wine. “The front couple of pages and back couple of pages have important dates. Alice married Frederick in June 1918. The last letter from Elliott was written in May, which means she probably got it around the time of her wedding, if not right afterward. It’s him claiming that she hasn’t ruined him, that he sensed her being distant in her letters, that he’ll always care for her, and that he wishes her well. But it’s not like the others. He’s very formal in it.”

  “I guess that makes sense. I mean, she did tell him that she was breaking up with him to marry some other guy. He’s a better person than I’d be.”

  “I’m not sure about that. By then, he probably had months to stew over it and lick his wounds. I wonder if he had someone else in his life. I hate the idea of him being alone.”

  “I’m sure he wasn’t. No man who could write letters like this would end up alone. What’s his last name?” she asked, flipping through the envelopes.

  “I’m not quite sure. Isn’t that funny? All of the letters are only signed ‘Elliott’ and his return address on the back flap is a post office box in the Philippine Islands. There are a couple with his first initials and last name written above the return address, but I can’t quite make it out.”

  I found an example and passed it to Caroline.

  “Heller?” she said, squinting as she tried to read the tight script.

  “That’s my guess.”

  Caroline grabbed her phone. “I’m snapping a picture of his name, and maybe I can figure it out.”

  “Okay, Sherlock Holmes. Have at it.”

  A week later, after a full day of inserting tubes in preschoolers’ ears, I tossed on clean scrubs and sat down at my desk. Bright and early the next morning, I had a stapedectomy. I was pulling out a tiny bone in an eleven-year-old’s ear and replacing it with a prosthesis. It was an important surgery, and one that I didn’t do regularly, so it was critical that I get my head in the game, but I couldn’t focus on his chart. My patients deserved better. They deserved the best I could offer. I needed to stretch my legs and give my brain a break.

  I walked out of the hospital and around the giant headquarters of the world’s biggest greeting card company. The temperature was just under boiling and the sun wasn’t brutal, but I was confident I was the only one outside for fun. On the back side of the corporate campus, the tower in the park caught my eye and I headed toward it.

  Everyone has some favorite random trivia about their hometown. Some source of local pride. Like how Paris, Kentucky was the hometown of one of my college roommates and also the inventor of the traffic light. Or how some place in West Virginia celebrated the first Mother’s Day.

  Kansas City is known for its barbecue, but remembering the First World War was important to us as a city. And so I headed toward the park and up the hill to the Liberty Memorial Tower. I’d visited as a child on field trips, but by the time I was a teenager, it, and much of the city around it, were crumbling and closed. I vaguely knew it reopened and was now fancy, but who plays tourist in their hometown?

  But maybe someone there would be able to help me scratch my Elliott itch. Right era. Maybe he’d enlisted. Maybe he’d been drafted? He’d mentioned his friend Joseph being sent to France. Surely he would have told Alice if he was being sent too? Because when you love someone, you tell them the important things, right?

  At the top of the hill, with the city’s skyline spread out at my feet, I was surprised to find the memorial wasn’t only the tower I’d remembered, but that the tower stood on top of a large pedestal that housed a museum about World War I. After some poking around, I found my way to the library and learned that by filling out some paperwork and promising to pay a whopping fifty cents a page in copying costs and a fee that was less than a decent dinner out, someone would run a computer search in the archives for records of Elliott, provided I could figure out his last name.

  I left with a researcher’s contact information tucked in my pocket and a promise to email her a picture of his indecipherable scrawl of a last name so we could begin the hunt.

  That night I called Caroline and told her that I’d found someone to help me look for Elliott at the World War I memorial.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I googled him.”

  “I did too, but I didn’t find anything.”

  “I did. Elliott Keller is his name. Not Heller. It’s kinda heartbreaking,” she confessed.

  I braced for whatever was going to come, not liking the idea of bad things happening to Elliott. At that moment, I realized how desperately I wanted happiness for him. For a long life full of happiness.

  “Well, I don’t know it’s him,” she continued, her voice soft. “But I think the odds have to be good. There was an Elliott Keller who was a prisoner of war, held by the Japanese in China for like all of the Second World War. And when I ran down Kellers on the POW search, there were some Kellers who were POWs and held in the Philippines.”

  My chest constricted. “Did he survive?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. The website says that he was released, but there are no details. Here’s the crazy thing. The records say he was one of the longest-held Americans during the war. He was held for nearly four years. Four years.”

  “And his family?”

  “Same story. Reports indicate that they were released at the end of the war. Upside is that they were only held for two years. Yeah, Elliott G. Keller. I’m looking at the website now. There’s a Martha Keller, a Eugene Keller, and a Theodore Keller who were held in Manila.”

  “Martha was his aunt who he lived with,” I whispered as the reality sunk in and a lump formed in my throat. There was no way it wasn’t my Elliott.

  “It says she survived, so that’s good,” she said.

  I did the math. Elliott would have been in his fifties then and that meant his aunt was probably in her sixties at the youngest. Sixty years old and
in a POW camp in Manila in the nineteen forties. The cholera epidemic that Elliott wrote about rushed into my mind. I didn’t know anything about POW camps, but common sense told me they’d be ripe for cholera and a host of other awful tropical diseases that I hoped never to meet in my lifetime.

  “Ready for some good news?”

  “Absolutely?” I said, closing my eyes in hope.

  “I think I may have found Theodore’s daughter. I found an obituary for a Theodore Keller in Santa Fe and it listed survivors. One is named Gail Keller Copley. And through the magic of the computer—”

  “You’re kidding me,” I exclaimed. “I mean, I’d like to meet his family, in the abstract, but what do I do?”

  “I’ve found a Facebook account for a Gail Keller Copley. Her profile is pretty private, but she’s checked into a few places in Albuquerque. That’s so close to Santa Fe that it can’t be a coincidence.”

  “B-but,” I stammered. “How?”

  “Tot story time at the library was super boring on Tuesday. At least to Bess. She was in her baby carrier and totally passed out. I wasn’t going to wake her, so I was kind of stuck there and decided to chat up a librarian. Do it, Ali. Send her a Facebook message. You know you want to.”

  Eleven

  Ali

  September

  Straight from a short day of clinic, I took the direct flight to LAX. Even with the drive to Scott’s place—what I hoped would be our place very soon—it was quicker than taking a connection into Long Beach. But now that the flight out had been delayed, I realized my mistake. Six o’clock on a Friday. I sat in the back of the car and absentmindedly chatted with the driver while we were stuck in the gridlock. Kansas City. Half Kansas, half Missouri, actually. Yeah, the Chiefs have a lot of potential this season. Great barbecue. No, not for vacation. Boyfriend. Three years. I’m a doctor. Ear, nose, and throat. I specialize in ear surgeries. Looking to move my practice here. And all the while, I surveyed the sun setting on my soon to be home and texted with Scott.