by Karen White
“It’s hard to believe that I’ve managed to have such an accomplished athlete give beginner lessons to my daughters.” Tucker’s tone was light, but couldn’t disguise the fact that he hadn’t completely forgiven Piper yet.
“You didn’t mention that, Earlene. It’s hard to imagine that you’d voluntarily go anywhere near a horse,” said George.
Helen listened as Piper walked around the perimeter of the room, opening windows to create a cross-breeze. Warm air blew over Helen’s face, and she turned to catch the breeze head-on.
“It’s . . . complicated. And I don’t want to talk about it right now.” She banged on a window and it opened, creating a strong movement of air. “George, let’s show Helen and Tucker what we found.”
George led her forward. “We pushed aside this armoire and found a door behind it. Mr. Morton, her attorney, gave Piper a key after her grandfather died. He’d instructed Mr. Morton to deliver it to Piper following his death. I guess her grandfather didn’t want to have to answer any of her questions.”
“Or maybe he didn’t know the answers,” Tucker said as he followed them through the doorway and into the airless attic room. “He might have been doing just what his wife had asked him to do.”
It was even more stifling in the hidden room, but Piper made no move to open the windows, as if she wanted to spend as little time in there as possible. “What’s in here?” Helen asked, pressing her hand to her nose to smell anything but the heavy dust and sadness that seemed to linger still.
Piper’s voice was matter-of-fact. “There’s a small single bed, stripped of all of its linens. There’s a small table beside it with a washbowl and basin, and an empty chest of drawers.” She paused and Helen heard her swallow. “Behind the door is a baby’s bassinet, where I found the hand-knit blanket inside. The yarn seems to be identical to the yarn used to make a baby’s sweater that I found in my grandmother’s trunk. There’s also a basket in front of the windows with a stack of old magazines.” Helen listened to the rustle of paper. “There’s a Good Housekeeping on top from nineteen thirty-four and a Life magazine beneath it from nineteen thirty-seven.”
Tucker stopped in front of Helen and she heard him pivoting, studying the room around him. “I’ve never seen one of these; I’ve only read about them.”
“One of what?” asked George, patting Helen’s fingers that rested in the crook of his elbow.
“A disappointment room. My partner in the medical practice—the psychiatrist—he’s the one who first told me about them. They were created to hide imperfect children—basically any child with a mental or physical defect. They would be fed and clothed, but they remained in their little rooms, hidden from the world and never acknowledged.”
“Like Margaret Louise,” interjected George. “I was doing some research for Piper and came across her name. She’s listed in the family Bible as having been born in eighteen ninety-eight, but there’s no official record of her having lived at all. This room could have been created for her, and family members would have known about it. And maybe that would explain the bassinet and the blanket. I haven’t had a chance to check the burial records at local cemeteries, but I think I’ll start with Bonaventure Cemetery.”
“Their burial records are easy to access,” said Piper, sounding thoughtful. “But what I’d really like to do is sit down with Mr. Morton. I think he knows a lot more about all of this than he’d like me to believe. I found his picture this morning in my grandmother’s scrapbook. He was apparently working with her and Freddie Montet in the NAACP chapter here in Savannah.”
Helen turned around to where she knew the door she’d entered was and slid her hand down the wood. “There’s no door handle on this side.”
“No, there wouldn’t be,” said Tucker. “A disappointment room was just another name for a prison, really.”
Helen took a few steps to the right and her hand brushed against wicker. “What color was the blanket?”
“Light blue, like the little sweater I found,” Piper said.
Tucker moved to Helen’s side. His voice was agitated. “But what does any of this have to do with Malily?”
The hot air in the room settled heavily on Helen, like a winter coat worn on an August day. But it wasn’t just the heat; there was something else in the room that wearied her. Maybe it was the stark picture she had of it in her head, of the bare mattress and the empty bassinet; or maybe it was a lingering despair that had never been allowed to leave.
“I’m not sure,” Piper answered. “All I have are the letters my grandmother wrote to her, asking for Lillian’s forgiveness for something. I haven’t spoken to Lillian yet about any of this, but Helen has and we’re both convinced that Lillian isn’t going to tell us anything she doesn’t want us to know. She wants to tell her story—the one that’s recorded in her scrapbook. But both her scrapbook and my grandmother’s end before the baby was found in the river. Which means the end of the story will be whatever Lillian chooses to tell us.”
“Did you ask your grandmother about any of this?” Tucker asked, his voice strained.
“Not until it was too late. I’d been knocking around this house with my grandfather for nearly six years and I didn’t think to look in my grandmother’s trunk or ask her about her life until after my grandfather died. I took the sweater to my grandmother in the nursing home and she seemed to recognize it. It . . . it made her cry.”
“Did she say anything?” Tucker asked.
“Yes. She did. She said, ‘He’s gone.’ ”
Tucker walked across the room toward Piper. “That was all? She didn’t say anything else?”
With a voice thickened by tears, Piper said, “She did, actually. She said something about . . . about how every woman needs a daughter to tell her stories to. I left then. And two days later she died.”
Helen’s skin felt as if it might sag from the weight of the room. She remembered those words, of course. They were the same ones she’d heard from her own grandmother. There were so many missing pieces to the puzzle that it was hard to focus on just one. She touched the wicker bassinet again, as if it might hold an answer for her, or at least a clue. Her fingers plucked at a loose strand, pulling it free from the weave until it stood alone. What’s missing? she asked herself, wondering why the unwoven strand held such significance to her. The answer sidled up to her and shook her.
Helen turned toward Piper. “What about Josie? We haven’t talked about her at all—probably because we don’t have her scrapbook pages. But she’s as much a part of all of this as Malily and Annabelle. She was mixed-race but her skin was dark; couldn’t the baby have been hers? Maybe the three of them made a pact that they would never tell anybody about what happened. That’s why they tore up the scrapbook, and went their separate ways.”
“It’s possible, I suppose,” said Piper. “She did leave for New York around the time the news story appeared. But Josie’s dead. And there’s still the fact that my grandmother wrote to Lillian, asking for forgiveness for some unknown sin. There wasn’t any mention of Josie.”
Helen turned to Piper again. “Maybe Josie had children—a daughter. And maybe she told her daughter the story.”
“And maybe none of this is connected at all,” Tucker said, and he sounded hopeful. Almost as if he couldn’t believe that his grandmother could have been involved in anything as horrible as a room that hid things not fit for the outside world, or the mystery behind a baby found in the Savannah River. Or that Susan had known, and the knowledge had killed her.
“I’ll have a lot of research to do today, then,” said Piper. “The library on Bull Street has a local-history room as well as quite a few genealogical resources, where I might be able to find more information on Josie. Then I’d like to go to the Georgia Historical Society at Hodgson Hall on Whitaker Street to see what else I can turn up about my grandmother and Josie and see if I can find any more news articles about the baby.”
George stepped forward. “Earlene, come on. What
are we—chopped liver? You have here six willing hands to help you, so please let us. Why don’t we split up? Helen and I can make a visit to the library, and you and Tucker can go to Hodgson Hall. We’ll get twice as much research accomplished in half the time. As long as you tell us what we need to be looking for.”
Helen looked away, not wanting anyone to see her face. He’d said six willing hands, not four. She pressed her hands together, if only to keep her from doing something stupid like cry.
“All right,” Piper said. “If everyone’s in agreement, we can do that.”
Tucker and Helen murmured their assent.
“Let’s go then,” said George as he touched Helen’s arm and led her through the door of the small room and back into the attic.
They waited until Tucker and Piper followed; then Helen paused, turning slightly back toward the secret room. She thought she’d heard something—something that sounded like a baby’s crying but could have been a bird in the chimney or the moaning eaves of an old house.
With a shudder, she turned her back and allowed George to lead her from the attic, aware all the time of the little room with more secrets than could be contained in a mere span of years.
CHAPTER 19
I’d made the walk so many times from the house on Monterey Square to Forsyth Park that I probably could have made it with my eyes closed. In my early days in Savannah, when I was just starting to learn the secrets of her garden, my grandmother would take me to the park to study the flowers. We didn’t study them as a botanist would, captivated by their propagation and their ability to survive in the heat of summer. We studied them instead as a photographer would, focusing on the individual elements of each bloom: the shell-like interiors, the tiny veins inside delicate petals, and web-thin stamens that most people never bothered to see. But the beauty of the flowers was dependent on these elements, and my grandmother and I would smile at each other, sharing our private knowledge of the wonderful, secret world of the garden that seemed to exist only for us.
Tucker and I walked without speaking, being careful to make sure our arms didn’t touch. As we passed the edge of the park along Gaston walking toward Whitaker, Tucker finally spoke. “You and George, are you . . . ?”
I almost choked. “No. Definitely not. I think he would probably like to, but, well, no. If I had a brother, that’s probably how I would feel about him: nice enough, but not somebody I’d want to kiss.”
Eager to change the subject, I turned to Tucker. “I appreciate you doing this. I know you have other places you could be.”
His pace slowed. “Please don’t make me out to be some kind of a hero. I have my own reasons.”
“I know. Because of Susan. But I still think you’re a bit of a hero.”
He stopped and I stopped, too, and we faced each other on the sidewalk. “Why?”
I didn’t even have to think about my answer. “Because you get out of bed each day. Because you try. Because you love Lucy and Sara even though you’re still not sure how to show it. But you try.”
He stared at me, his eyes darkening, and I wondered if I’d made him angry again. Finally, he said,“I could say the same thing about you, Piper Mills.”
I blinked in confusion and looked away, then continued walking toward Hodgson Hall, feeling his presence next to me as he caught up.
I’d become a regular fixture at the Georgia Historical Society during my years of burying my past life by hiding in someone else’s as a genealogist. Tucker and I climbed the familiar broad brownstone stairway with heavy curving balustrades to the solid mahogany doors tucked under a two-columned portico.
When we entered the great hall with its soaring three-story-high ceilings, Tucker stopped and looked up. “I guess they’re pretty serious about their history here.” I followed his gaze to the wall above the entrance, where engraved in gold leaf on red mottled marble were the words No Feasting, drinking, and smok-ing or amusements of any kind will be permitted within its walls.
I put my finger to my lips. “Quiet. They’ll ask us to leave.”
He raised an eyebrow, then rolled his eyes in an exaggerated version of Lucy’s favorite move, and I had to cough to hide my laughter. Shaking my head, I led him over to the reference desk to show my ID and sign in.
I was already a registered user, and after doing an online search of their catalog, I’d called in ahead of time so that the boxes and folders of information I’d requested had already been pulled from the repository. I clasped my laptop—one of the few articles for note-taking actually allowed in the library—and we headed through the main hall with its large, vaulted windows, which had been designed in a time when there was little artificial light or ventilation, and into the reading room. We sat down at one of the four large tables made of slabs of solid walnut supported by cast iron, and stared at each other over the boxes and folders that had been pulled for us.
“What do we do now?” asked Tucker.
I slid a large box across the table toward him. “These are all from various personal collections housed here. I asked for them to be pulled because they contained newspaper clippings and obituaries from the years nineteen twenty-five through nineteen sixty. I want you to look for anybody with the last names of Montet, O’Hare, Harrington, or Ross—either birth or death information. My preliminary online searches have only shown Josephine’s death information, but only because she was relatively well-known at the time of her death. But I can’t find any of her birth information, and there’s nothing on Freddie, which makes me think that he used another last name for legal documents. Anyway, after we verify that we’re looking at the right person, we’ll look through the newspaper obituaries on microfiche. That’s where you find all of the interesting data—as in remaining family, where they were living, and where they’re buried.”
He frowned. “What will you be doing?”
“I’ll be upstairs going through microfiche. They’ve got death registers from nineteen nineteen to nineteen ninety-four, so I’m bound to find something—assuming I can find the right name.”
He continued to regard me. “You’ve done this a lot, then.”
I nodded. “Kept me busy.”
Tucker eyed the boxes in front of him. “What time does the library close?”
“Five o’clock. And at four forty-five they’ll come and start making you pack up. They’re very strict about it.”
Sliding the box toward him, Tucker said, “Then I’d better get started.”
I made my way to the microfiche machines and, after retrieving the films for the dates I’d requested, worked in relative silence for several hours and through lunch, my stomach rumbling its protest but I was unwilling to stop. I was no longer afraid of discovering my grandmother’s story; I was simply eager to know it. Somewhere in the last months I’d begun to see my malaise of the last years as less of an inevitability, or a genetic response to failure. Instead, in discovering my grandmother, I realized that I’d inherited a lot more from her, and my curiosity and need to push further and get there faster might even be related to the drive she’d once had as a young woman.
My stomach rumbled again and I thought of the granola bar I’d tucked in the pocket of the sweater I’d brought to keep me warm in the cool air-conditioning. But the staff ’s eagerness to keep the researchers alert by the near-arctic temperatures was matched only in their desire to keep crumbs off of rare manuscripts and documents, and the first sound of a crinkling wrapper would bring staff from all corners of the building, resulting in us being tossed out on the sidewalk.
I went back to work, blinking my tired eyes and sighing in frustration when I realized we only had two more hours until closing. My first perusal of the death register had yielded nothing unusual, only the death information for the fathers of both Lillian and Annabelle. I could find nothing for either Josie or Freddie, although I did find the death register for their mother, Justine.
The only alternative that I could think of was to guess Freddie’s birth dates a
nd start flipping through the birth registers in the hope that my guess had been accurate.
It was nearly four thirty when I stopped, my finger held in midair over a page of scrawled names of the dead. I’d been focused on the death register of a woman with five different names, either given to her at birth or she’d been married multiple times, when it had occurred to me that we might know exactly where to look for Josie and Freddie, after all. Quickly, I shoved the book out of the way and pulled out the register containing deaths for the year nineteen eighty-one.
I flipped open the nineteen eighty-one book, the year of Justine’s death—and found her name again, tucked in with the other Ms. In my experience in researching people’s genealogies, unwed mothers tended to use creative license on their children’s birth certificates to either hide the identity of the biological father, or protect their family name from scandal by using their middle or even their mother’s maiden name as a last name for their illegitimate children. Still keeping the name in the family, but not close enough to warrant scrutiny.
I scanned the entry again. Justine’s middle name had been Marie, but her mother’s maiden name was Latrobe. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, I pulled out my forbidden cell phone and sent a text to Tucker. “Check Latrobe for last name.” Glancing at my watch again, I quickly skipped to the book containing the year of Josie’s birth, nineteen eighteen, and flipped to the Ls.
A member of the staff approached the table. “The library will be closing in fifteen minutes. You may leave the books on the table, but you’ll need to start finishing up now.” Her smile indicated that we would be locked inside the frigid library with the documents if we dared to linger any longer than the five o’clock closing.
I nodded, then quickly went back to the book again, looking for the last name of Latrobe. I knew the information would still be here after we’d left, but I’d have to wait two more days before the library reopened the following Tuesday. Despite all of my foot dragging up to this point, I didn’t think my patience could take having to wait even one more hour.