by Mae Wood
She smiled and I noticed the bright plum lips.
“Pretty,” I agreed. “It’s probably what, five years old?”
“Closer to ten, I’d say. But hey, free lipstick! Now tell me about the scam you’re running.”
“Yeah, so he thought I was trying to con his mom or something.” I quickly caught her up on my emails with Ben.
“When was this?”
“Middle of the week.”
“Heard back?”
“Not yet.”
She wiped her hands again on her napkin and pulled out her phone. “Ben Copley, let’s find you.”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?” she asked, not pausing to look up from her screen. “You told him to google you and clearly he did. Fair game to google him back.”
“I feel a little creepy about it. I mean, if you’re just going to look at his—”
“LinkedIn profile. I’m pulling up Ben Copleys now.”
“Caroline,” I exhaled.
“Don’t even pretend. You want to know.”
“I’m not denying that I want to know, but I don’t want to be the googler.”
“Plausible deniability works for me. I’ll do the dirty work.”
I waved my hand in front of me, encouraging her to keep on Caroline-ing while I enjoyed some baby snuggles and french fries.
“Ben Copley. Several of them. Any clues?” she asked.
I thought for a minute and realized that he hadn’t shared anything about himself with me. “No idea,” I said.
“Most of the Ben Copleys that I’m finding are British, or at least live in the UK.”
“Anything is possible.”
“Hey, Benjamin Copley. Tech guy.”
“Tech guy?” I asked as Bess began to nuzzle her tiny face into my chest.
“I fill prescriptions and change diapers. I don’t computer. You computer.”
“Computer is not a verb,” I said, drolly responding to our long-running joke.
“See, I don’t even know that much. But really, here’s a LinkedIn bio of a guy in Seattle who works for—”
“Microsoft.”
“Nope. Google.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, it’s nice when you’re wrong for a change.” She smirked.
“I wonder if that’s him. What else?” I urged her on.
“He’s a hottie.”
“Really?” I wasn’t going to lie. I was interested in seeing if Baron Ben was as cute as he was funny.
“Oh, yeah. Wanna see?”
“Of course,” I said, shooting my hand across the table to snatch the phone but before I could get it, Caroline pressed it to her chest.
Her eyes got big. “You have a crush on him.”
“Are you crazy?” I asked, feigning insult.
“Ben. Copley. Come on. Spill. We’ve got like three minutes until she’s going to demand to nurse,” she said, nodding at Bess before shoveling another forkful of mac and cheese into her mouth.
“Fine, but I don’t have a crush on him.” I caught her up on a bit of the email I’d held back while she finished her meal—the nicknames.
“Countess of Kansas and Baron Ben?” she said, taking Bess from me. “That’s adorable.”
I shrugged, playing it off. “I think it was his way of apologizing when he realized I was a real person and wasn’t trying to scam anyone. Anyway, phone, picture, now.”
I reached across the table to try to snag the phone again and she whipped it out of my reach. “Promise me you’ll tell me when he emails you back?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool,” she said, passing me her phone. “No picture. Sorry for teasing you like that. It’s just a bio.”
My heart sank a little. Ridiculous, I scolded myself. So ridiculous to let a friendly bit of banter with a stranger make me feel so good.
Twenty
Ali
November
My interview with Seattle Children’s went well, but I knew when I left the hospital in the afternoon that I was far from a shoe-in. I was having dinner with some of the doctors in the group, so they could make sure I was easy enough to get along with, but I had a few hours to kill. I looked up the Astoria on my phone, wondering if the hotel-slash-boarding house where Alice lived was still there. And it was. It was now condos, and I wondered how much of the interior was the same, and if I moved there, whether I could rent in the building.
I ordered a car. “Minor and Pike,” I told the driver, checking the time to make sure I could make a quick run downtown, get cleaned up at the hotel, and make the dinner reservation, considering the clogged Seattle traffic.
During the drive, I googled a bit more and turned up some historic pictures of the building that was built in 1909. It would have been pretty new when Alice lived there.
I got out at the corner and stared up at the building, counting the six stories. It was taller than I’d imagined, but being completely honest, I hadn’t imagined it being an actual place. I shook my head and looked down the street. Alice walked here, on this very sidewalk. She lived here with her friends. She went to work. She probably wrote letters to Elliott while sitting by one of the windows that I looked up at, and then dropped them in a postal box on this street.
And at that moment, Alice became real to me. I could be her. I could be the woman writing letters. And a hundred years later, she could be me.
The wind began to pick up and I walked across the street to a brewpub, where I made myself at home at a table by the window with a hoppy northwest IPA in hand and wondered more about her and her life when she lived at the Astoria. What was in this building when Alice lived here? Clearly not a trendy pub filled with an eclectic assortment of chandeliers, guarded over from above by a statute of some six-armed dancing goddess. A bakery? A restaurant? A grocery store? Some sort of clothing shop? Or maybe a fabric store? Or a printing press?
I flicked my phone back on to do a little more internet sleuthing about Alice’s Seattle and scrolled through my emails, stopping when I found one from Ben.
<
Hi, Dr. Waller,
I spoke with my mother and then did a little legwork of my own.
Looks like we do share the same Elliott Keller.
My mom says that I met my great-grandpa Elliott a few times when I was very small. She says I didn’t go to his funeral because she thought I was too young, but that she did take me to the hospital to see him before he died. I have this vague memory of going to a really big hospital when I was little. I always thought it might have been a dream, but now I’m thinking it actually happened and I was visiting my great-grandpa.
Anyway, here’s what you probably want to know—
My mom doesn’t know much about Elliott’s childhood. She thought the family was from Indiana. She does know that he was a school teacher by training and that’s how he ended up in the Philippines. My mom says she thinks that several of our relatives moved to the Philippines in the early 1900s, but she doesn’t know what they were doing there or how any of them made a living, and everyone moved back to the States later. Elliott worked for an oil company, running their Asia division for a while, but she says it was Mobil Oil and not Standard Oil. And, thanks to Google, I’ve learned that Mobil Oil and Standard Oil are connected.
Elliott married Pearl. They had my grandpa Ted (aka Theodore) and his brother Eugene. Eugene died young.
Elliott and Pearl and Ted moved to San Francisco when WWII ended. That’s where Grandpa Ted met Grandma Louise. They had my mom, Gail Keller Copley. She’s an only child. Then, my sister and I came along.
My mom would like a copy of the letters and anything else you have. She has pictures of Elliott, Pearl, and Grandpa Ted, but nothing before the end of WWII.
My mom also wants to know about your great-grandmother.
Thanks,
Ben Copley
I was absolutely floored. I read the email at least a half dozen times, wishing it had more. More information. Mor
e of anything that would answer my question about whether Elliott was happy. But mainly I was amazed that the Elliott I knew was a real person. Who lived, and loved, and had children, and now I was emailing with his great-grandson. Would Elliott’s romance with Alice have been different now with emails and Skype and airlines? Of course. But would it have ended differently?
Twenty-one
Ali
November
I texted Caroline to see if she was around to talk. She said she’d call once she got Bess down for the night. I needed to talk now, about how I’d found Elliott’s family, so instead of heading home, I headed to see Grammie. But first I swung by the local grocery for fresh berries. Even if she couldn’t have a glass of wine, we could enjoy a little treat.
“I don’t see your deal with the doorman,” I said after kisses and hugs, with a few fresh blackberries in a bowl for us and a glass of wine in my hand. My mother had laid down the law and Grammie’s hard-bargained-for glass of wine was no more, but Grammie insisted that her visitors be welcomed to her apartment with a stocked bar cart.
“He’s Eddie Haskell from Leave It To Beaver.”
“I don’t see it. He always seems perfectly nice to me.”
“That’s it. ‘Good morning, Mrs. Markham.’ ‘Good evening, Mrs. Markham.’ ‘Off to the chair exercise class, Mrs. Markham?’”
“Yeah, that’s called being friendly.”
“It’s called him not minding his own business. Is he trying to get into my will? Does he gather information for some sort of report on us?”
Yes, all of the staff do, in fact, I wanted to tell her. From the nursing staff to the activities director, we got regular email updates on Grammie, but I didn’t want to creep her out. She was here because she needed care. She needed eyes on her around the clock and a crack medical team a moment away.
“Friendly,” I asserted, ending that conversation and knowing exactly how I was going to distract her. “I’ve tracked down the family of the letter writer.”
“The Filipino man?”
“American man,” I corrected her. “Elliott Keller.”
“He was American?”
“Yes,” I said and I gave her a rundown of what I’d learned about the man and how he’d met Alice. “And through some internet sleuthing and the help from a librarian, Caroline and I found his descendants, including Elliott’s granddaughter. I’ve been emailing with the great-grandson.”
“That’s amazing,” Grammie replied. “That you were able to find him at all is absolutely amazing.”
“It really is. The world is so small in so many ways now. Elliott’s family wants to see the letters.”
“They don’t belong to them.” Grammie bristled.
“Don’t worry. I haven’t offered the letters. I’m going to send them copies. Do you want a set?”
She folded her hands and unfolded them, watching her fingers work. “Yes and no, I suppose. I never read them before, but maybe I should. No reason not to.”
“You really should. It’s fun to think about Alice on this big adventure, but I found some stuff about Elliott that is sad and I’m not sure if his family knows.”
Grammie leaned toward me and patted my knee. “We all have sadness, sweet pea.”
“Yeah.” I exhaled. “I mean, it’s not like he killed anyone, or anything, but he—and his family—were POWs during World War II. It looks like he was held by the Japanese in China for over four years while his wife and children were held in the Philippines during the war. And one of his children didn’t survive.”
“That’s awful,” she said after a minute. “The war was awful. But why don’t you think they know?”
“Ben, Elliott’s great-grandson, told me a little bit about the family. He said Elliott and his wife had two sons and one of the sons died young, like he didn’t know the circumstances. Do I tell him?”
“Has he asked?”
“No.” I sighed. “But I feel like he should know. Like they should know.”
“Well, at least it’s not one of those stories you hear about babies swapped at the hospital and raised by the wrong family, or parents who turn out really to be the grandparents. It’s awful and sad, but it’s not the same as a lie.”
“That’s true. I’ll let him find out himself. Now tell me about Alice. Do you know how she met Great-Grandpa?”
“I’m not sure how much is exactly true, but she was teaching in Seattle, needed new boots, and bought them from his family’s shoe store. They dated or were engaged for a long time. Over two years before they married. That seemed ridiculously long to me. Especially when your grandfather and I were engaged within two months of meeting. And my mother and I fought about that. Which way was the ‘right’ way. She thought you should wait and really know the person. I thought your grandfather hung the moon. And he did. At least for me. ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ she would tell me. And, let me tell you, I didn’t regret it. Not a moment of it. But you didn’t ask about me. My mother was warm and funny and got around just fine.”
“‘Got around just fine’?” I asked, baffled by the comment.
“She had a limp.”
“A limp? No one told me this before.”
“It wasn’t debilitating. She didn’t need a cane until she was older, but she’d contracted polio as a child and it caused her left leg to be weaker and a bit shorter than the other. Looking back, I think that’s why her parents let her become a teacher and then move to Seattle. Farm life was going to be too hard on her.”
“And that may explain why she didn’t get married until later in life. She was, what? Thirty-five?”
“Thirty-one, and I think so.” Grammie nodded sadly. “I hate to think that men would have passed her by because of her limp, but it’s probably true. Such a good thing that she married someone in the shoe business. One sole had to be specially built up so that she could walk more evenly. She still had a little limp at times from the muscle weakness. But she went to college and taught school and then jumped on a train to Seattle and here we are.”
“I can’t believe no one ever told me this about Alice.”
“Well, I didn’t know you didn’t know, and it wasn’t that big of a deal.”
“What else don’t I know?”
Grammie laughed. “What do you know, sweet pea?”
And I told her what I’d learned. Facts and dates and glimpses of her through Elliott’s eyes in his letters.
“She did love art. She was a talented painter. I’m glad to know that Elliott appreciated that about her. Again, something that was probably better suited for life in a city than on a farm.”
“I can’t believe how brave she was. To get on a train alone in the early nineteen hundreds and head for a city she’d never been to before and look for a job—”
“No, that isn’t how that happened.”
“How did that happen, then?”
“There was a group of her friends from normal school. The city of Seattle was in desperate need of teachers because its population was exploding and, so, as part of a teacher drive, she and some of her school friends were recruited. They went together. I don’t remember how many of them. Maybe six? It was a sizeable group. They had contracts with the city to teach on a yearly basis and they lived in a boarding house, which is sort of like a hotel, but it wasn’t a hotel like you and I think of a hotel now.”
“I walked by the building when I was out there for my interview. It’s condos now.”
“The building is still there? That’s wonderful that the city’s history is being preserved. I worry about it changing too much. Anyway, the girls shared tiny little apartments, that didn’t have proper kitchens. A cook prepared their meals and they ate in a dining room. She’d tell me stories about how much fun they’d had. About how they’d sewn white dresses and marched in a suffragette parade, and how they’d done work in support of the war effort. She always made it sound like they had a good time together.”
“She was a suffragette?”
My voice filled with pride.
“I suppose, but it wasn’t all that radical in Washington. Women had the vote in state elections by the time she moved there, but they still weren’t able to vote in presidential elections.”
“I saw the League of Women Voters mentioned in her obituary.”
“Yes, that was her passion. On Tuesdays we always ate oatmeal for dinner because she had her meetings during the day and was too busy to cook and that was the only thing my father knew how to make.”
“And Great-Grandpa was cool with that? That’s a lot for a husband back then to be okay with.”
“Oh, Fred loved her very much. She wasn’t a servant to him. Or to us. Sometimes I think TV shows have gotten in your head that everyone’s life was like The Donna Reed Show or that TV show with the ad executives—”
“Mad Men,” I supplied.
“Yes, that one. And yes, there were awful things about then. Like how the bank didn’t let me have an account without your grandfather’s name on it even though it was my money. But whatever the world thought of women, my father adored my mother. I remember when she was elected chapter president of the League of Women Voters. My father bent her back in a big kiss right there in the kitchen and then opened a bottle of champagne. I was seven and they let me have a small glass to celebrate with them.”
“So that’s why you remember that.”
“I thought she’d been elected president of the United States,” Grammie said with a laugh, patting her chest solidly as a cough followed.
“Did Alice stay politically active?”
“Oh, no. It wasn’t that at all. I don’t think it was politics that drove her. Not in the sense of what party you belonged to or what issues you supported. She was focused on participation. That women should participate.”