Genealogy: a novel

by Mae Wood

  “I didn’t.”

  “Clearly. And I’m glad. But I also notice that you didn’t tell me you won’t run off with that other fella. The world is wide, Alice, and I am here.”

  “Why haven’t you married?” she asks, the darkness and solitude making it easier to be frank with him.

  “Lots of reasons, I suppose. I was having too good a time and I was busy with the business. I don’t want to put the cart before the horse, and clearly I’m running second to someone else, but until you tell me to stop, I intend to spend time with you.”

  Twenty-nine

  Alice

  November 1917

  Thanksgiving Day has arrived. With a warm apple pie balanced on her lap, she sits in Fred’s green car. She didn’t go home this summer and was free to paint and draw from her small apartment that she now shares with her new roommate, Ethel. Free to spend as much time as was decent with Fred, and she enjoyed his company more with every passing hour.

  While the pie baked, she wrote, but not to Elliott this time. It had been a month since she’d written him. She would try to write him later, but the letter writing seemed more like a duty, an obligation, and the words didn’t spill from her heart any longer. The words hurt, because with the world at war he wasn’t coming home and she wasn’t going to him. Over two years had passed since their days together, and while she didn’t like to think of the number, she was now thirty.

  The sermon at church the previous Sunday had resonated with her. She’d heard the verse read at weddings, including Frankie’s, but it wasn’t the recitation of the glories of love that struck her. It was the part that she’d never truly listened to before that struck her between the ribs and lodged there.

  When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

  It is far past time for her to grow up, to stop living a tropical dream in her head and fully live the dream that is within her grasp.

  Dear Frankie,

  I’m happy to hear that the population of Olympia is rising by one. I know you’ve been thoroughly enjoying your little love nest, and, to be frank, I’ve been awaiting this news since your wedding last winter. In fact, I may even have tried my hand at embroidering a bonnet for this occasion. And I may have retrieved it from its tissue paper wrapping and I may be posting it along with this letter.

  As for me, no happy news, but no sorrowful news either. Fred turned thirty-seven in October and, I’m (well, let’s just say I’m a number that you and I know, but I don’t like to dwell on) and I keep thinking of what I might have, if I’d just say yes. He keeps hinting and I keep demurring, and I think I’m done with that now. I think that if he hints again, I may hint back. With the war taking so many men, I know I should latch on to every bit of happiness I can when I can have it.

  All continues to rock along otherwise. Ethel is a fine roommate, but she doesn’t care for caramels so I’m left wagering with myself over silly things. Last week I wagered on whether one of my students would earn three demerits. If he didn’t, then I’d treat myself to a single caramel on Friday afternoon. He finished the week with two demerits and I enjoyed my caramel. It was sweet even with the knowledge that I had turned a blind eye to several of his sins. See what I have become without you? Not even honest with myself.

  And that brings me to the rest of my confession. I love Fred. I haven’t told him but I know it to be true. And I’m going to do my best to convince him to give up his bachelor ways and build a life with me. Sometimes love burns slowly like a smoldering coal and sometimes it’s a flaming forest fire. Those flames I felt before have waned and Fred is the one who warms my heart and fills my dreams.

  I wish you all of the best luck and happiness in the world. Until children are old enough to learn to read, I haven’t a clue what to do with them! Write and let me know if I may visit over Christmas, otherwise it will be our first Christmas apart in five years.

  All of my love from Seattle,

  Alice

  Fred’s family is warm with her as always, but underneath the welcome his mother watches them like a hawk. Alice sees the hope that lives in her eyes, that has lived in her eyes for a year since she was first invited to Sunday dinner with his family. Alice helps clear the table as the men retire to the porch for a smoke.

  “Thank you, Alice,” Mrs. Wertheimer says.

  “Of course. Thank you for inviting me.”

  “You’re always welcome here.”

  “You truly make me feel welcome. Thank you.”

  “No need for thanks. And no need for you to help with the dishes today. Why don’t you see if Fred will take you on a stroll before the sun goes down?”

  “Oh, I’m happy to help,” Alice says, collecting the silverware in her hands.

  “Put those down, please, sweet Alice.” Mrs. Wertheimer brooks no argument and Alice sets the forks and spoons and knives back down on the linen tablecloth. “Now, outside and tell Fred that you want to stretch your legs.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Alice says, not sure why she’s being shooed away, but she does as she’s been asked.

  On the house’s front porch, Fred leans against the railing and his eyes light up when Alice steps out of the front door. “Nice afternoon for a walk,” he remarks to his father. “I’m going to take Alice around the block.” Fred stubs out his cigar on a large glass ashtray that the two men have balanced on the rail between them. “Alice,” he says, offering his arm to her. “Shall we go on a walk?”

  Alice nods, takes his arm, and they set off down the porch steps.

  The first pass around the block is silence. On the second, her tension grows. Is something terribly wrong? Fred has never been this quiet.

  “Fred?” she whispers as they begin their third turn around the block, looking up at his strong profile and noticing his eyes are fixed on their path. “Is everything all right?”

  “It will be, I hope,” he says, gazing down at her, and the teasing smile she adores returns to his face.

  “Can I help?”

  “Yes, very much so.” He stops their walk and turns to face her in the middle of the sidewalk, taking both her hands in his. “Alice, it’s time. It’s well past time and we’re not waiting any longer. I love you. I’ve been waiting to hear from you about this other fella—”

  “Ask me,” she says, squeezing his hands to give him encouragement, strength, and love.

  “Will you marry me?”

  Thirty

  Ali

  February

  <>

  Ali,

  I’m very sorry to hear about your grandma. I’ll talk about that or not talk about that as much or as little as you want. I want so badly to be able to make this better for you, but I know I can’t. I know that you can’t make it better either, and that’s the worst part.

  I’m also very sorry that it took me a few days to write back.

  Your email was cut off in mid-sentence, so I wasn’t sure if part of it got deleted by accident or whether you didn’t mean to send it in the first place.

  Anyway, I went back and forth on whether to even acknowledge that I got it, then I remembered that you’re a friend. You’re my friend, so email whenever you want. I’m here.

  I wish I could tell you that you’ll get through this chaos and that you’re stronger than you think and this is a beautiful part of life and you need to embrace it, but I can’t. I’ve worked in corporate America long enough to know that the poster of the cat with its claws dug into a tree branch with “Hang In There” under it only makes people—well, it makes this person, at least—feel worse about the situation.

  And I wish I could tell you that bad stuff doesn’t happen. But it does. I know it and you know it. And you’re completely right. We can’t let the bad stuff rob us of the good stuff.

  When I moved up to Seattle, my mom was going through a medical thing. Ovarian cancer. (I’ll tell you that even though thinking about it now still m
akes me want to throw up.) She’s good now, and we all hold our breaths at her checkups, but it was bad for a bit.

  Bad is underselling it. It was awful and my dad was a wreck and my sister was with her kids up north and I had to be the strong one. Or at least I thought I did. I pushed forward so hard to do what needed to be done and hold everything together that I didn’t realize I was being held together too. By my job who didn’t fire me when I worked remotely more than I should have. By my family. By my friends. Even by my dog. It may feel like you’re in pieces and alone, but you’re not. And even if I’m a stranger on the internet, I’m here.

  If you’re in Seattle for an interview or a visit or I find myself in Kansas City or wherever you land, let’s meet up. There’s no good way to mention meeting up that doesn’t sound like I’m trying to pick you up, so I’m glad you brought it up first. I’ve written a sentence about meeting up with you about a dozen times in our emails and deleted it every time, but there you go—coffee or a beer or an entire cocktail menu, on me if our paths ever cross in real life.

  In the meantime, what I can tell you is that yeah, it does get better. That when I made the move home to help with my mom, my life was a mess and I wasn’t sure if the move was going to be a good thing or just another snowball in an avalanche of disasters. But it was good. It was the best thing. I’m in a good place now and that’s not about where I physically am. And it’s not even been about being near my parents. They’re in the suburbs and I’m in the city, so it’s not like I see them every day or even every week.

  Sometimes stuff just works out in ways you couldn’t ever expect. So whatever it is you were hoping for yourself or hoping for me or hoping for whoever in that email, keep hoping it.

  I wasn’t an English major either, so don’t sweat anything. Keep in touch. Check in with me when you’re ready. You’ve got a lot on your plate right now and I’ll be right here if you ever want to talk or not talk or whatever you need.

  As for Thompson, he’s a yellow lab.

  Gummy bears or jelly beans?

  Your friend,

  Ben

  Thirty-one

  Ali

  February

  Seven in the morning and my phone rang. A Sunday. A day off. I was in PJs and curled up on the sofa with coffee and a magazine. I knew it wasn’t good news. But when the display showed it was my mother, I steeled myself for whatever horror would greet me. And I was pretty sure I knew what I was about to face.

  “Hello? Mom?”

  “Grammie died last night,” my mom said, the words rushing out of her. There was no warm-up, no preamble. Just the unvarnished truth.

  I knew this was coming. We all did. And we’d known it for a long time. Christmas Day made that painfully clear. Her heart wasn’t going to pump forever. It wasn’t going to get stronger. The medicines wouldn’t be able to keep up. We’d watched her weight rise and her blood pressure fall for a few weeks, leaving the consequences unspoken. She hadn’t even been able to get up from her favorite chair when my parents and I had joined her for dinner in the dining room at assisted living on New Year’s Eve before heading to a party at Caroline’s house. Her legs had been wrapped tight in compression hose and she didn’t try to hide her discomfort from me. And after my last visit to see her just two days ago, I knew she could leave us anytime.

  But knowing and experiencing were two wildly different things. Hearing the words, the sobs leapt from me and I didn’t even try to hold them back.

  “She died in her sleep,” my mom reported, her tight professionalism teetering on the edge of collapse.

  “It’s for the best,” I said, using my own doctor voice. I tucked my phone under my chin and wiped my tears with the palms of my hand, pressing my cheeks hard just to feel something other than sadness for a moment.

  “I know,” my mom said, her brittle voice breaking into heaving grief.

  I blinked back the endless tears from my eyes and took a deep breath. “I’ll be right over.”

  In doctor mode, I forced it all down and focused on the tasks before me. I showered and dressed and threw some spare clothes into an overnight bag. I drove to my parents’ house and was greeted by my brother at the front door.

  “Mom’s napping.”

  “She’s actually asleep?” I asked, amazed that she’d spiraled into the exhaustion of grief so quickly.

  “I doubt that, but that’s what Dad says, so I’m going with it.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Running an errand.”

  I rolled my eyes because of course he was running an errand. My father, the doer, the fixer. He couldn’t fix this, but he could rewire a lamp that worked fine or hire a landscaping crew to resod his already neat lawn. “When is Jess getting in?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” said Patrick. “I thought we could run shifts.”

  I didn’t roll my eyes at my big brother’s plans and I was relieved he was there to take charge, to take care of us. I followed his lead for the next few days as tears were shed and my grandmother was laid to rest next to my grandfather. Well, most of her anyway.

  “She wanted what?” my mother had nearly shouted, her eyes big.

  “I’m not telling you that you have to do that at all,” said our family lawyer in a measured voice. “I’m telling you that her stated preference was for no lilies at her funeral, that passages from The Velveteen Rabbit be read, and that half of her ashes be interred in the family plot in Seattle. No one is going to make you do any of this.”

  “But it’s what she wanted?” my brother asked.

  “It’s what she requested,” said the lawyer. “My advice is that you do what’s right for your family.”

  And that was how, a week later, with the funeral behind us, my family ended up on a plane to Seattle.

  My brother brought Grammie in an urn in his carry-on. He assured us it was okay and while I thought for sure there was some sort of procedure, some sort of paperwork that we had to obtain, he barreled on. I stared at that blue rucksack tucked under the seat in front of him. My mom was two rows ahead of us and I was glad she couldn’t see the bag.

  I slept in a hotel room with my sister, and in the darkness, we talked in low voices as the sounds of the city crept past the double-glazed window. About her life in Texas. About her struggle to juggle her work with her kids and a house and their new puppy. And how she’d gained twenty pounds and how it made her sad, but she didn’t see how she’d ever be able to fix it. We talked about my time at home and how I thought Kansas City had changed, or I’d changed, or everything had changed and it wasn’t chafing against me. About how much she liked Austin and how I should look there. We talked about anything other than the reason for our ersatz family vacation.

  “We should go somewhere with Mom,” she said. I heard her toss in the bed. “A girls’ trip. And if Dad wants to come, that’s cool.”

  “Spring, maybe?”

  “I’ll have to look at the school calendar, but yeah. Let’s do something this spring,” said Jess. “Anything you want to do this weekend?”

  “Weirdly, yeah, I do.”

  “Besides get day drunk?”

  “That can be on the agenda. I say we do family stuff tomorrow and then we sleep in, have a lazy boozy brunch and do some tourist stuff, and I want to go by this place that Great-Grandma Alice lived.”

  “Isn’t her house right by the park?”

  “Yeah, it is,” I said, nodding against my pillow. The house Alice and Fred lived in was only a few blocks from the cemetery where they were buried. “But I want to stop by where she lived before then. When she taught school. She lived in a hotel that was like a boarding house. The Astoria.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Minor and Pike. I went by when I was up for my interview. It’s condos now, but I want to swing by.”

  Jess was quiet for a few minutes as I stared into the darkness of the room. I thought she’d finally fallen asleep, and I was halfway asleep myself when she spoke.

  “
How do you know where Alice lived?”

  “I have her letters,” I began. Sleepily and slowly, I told her the story of Alice and Elliott.

  The tall evergreens rose along the edges of the hilltop cemetery and the lake spread out at our feet. Alice Lenore Wertheimer was carved into a flat headstone, partially obscured by the green rug of fake grass that was hiding the pile of dirt to cover Grammie’s urn after we left. The internment was simple. No priest. No pastor. Just our family and a few staff members there to assist. With my dad’s help, my mom kneeled down and gently lowered the white urn into the ground. They rose and we all stood and stared at the ground.

  “I know I’m the baby, but I’d like to say something.” My voice broke the heavy mantle of silence that had settled over us. I rocked back and the heels of my pumps dug into the soft earth. “I know Wallers are doers, not talkers, and we did all of that talking a few days ago at the funeral.” My voice cracked over that word that meant the end. “She requested a reading from The Velveteen Rabbit, and Jess and I spent time trying to find the right passage to read at her funeral, but starting around Christmas I’ve been thinking about all of the books she gave us. All of the books she read to us. And I started thinking about which ones I remembered most, and I’ve been reading them again. I guess it’s my way to say goodbye and thank you and I love you. Anyway, I’ve read Charlotte’s Web and Where the Red Fern Grows and I cried over the books like I did when I was little, and I’m crying over her now because she’s gone, but it’s not sadness.”

  I looked at my mom, whose face was burrowed in my dad’s chest as he embraced her, her sad eyes peeking at me above his arms. At that moment I knew that one day, I’d be her. I’d be the one aching so deeply, and I hoped that I’d have someone to wrap his arms around me. But if that wasn’t the case, I’d still be fine. I took Jess’s hand in my own and squeezed it.