by Gwen Florio
She sank on to the rug, the yearbook’s slick pages slowly wrinkling as she riffled them in her damp hands. Just as there was only one reason for an elopement in Chateau, there was only one – the same reason – for a girl to disappear for a year in the middle of high school.
But Nora was an only child.
Or so she’d always thought.
Hours later found her in her grandfather’s study, sitting on the floor, surrounded by files and a litter of papers that stretched nearly to the door. Her nightgown had long since dried into a wrinkled horror.
She’d started with the obvious – Penelope’s bedroom – but other than the clipping about the shooting on her nightstand, she’d found nothing of consequence, beyond learning that even at her advanced age, Penelope favored wispy scraps of silk and lace underwear, flirty things that put Nora’s sturdy Jockeys to shame.
At some point, she’d made a pot of coffee and then another and fed the animals, who sprawled bored into somnolence in the lone corner not covered with paper. Nora wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking for. A birth certificate? A doctor’s outsize bill, with a reference to an insignificant gynecological procedure? If, by some miracle, the Smythes had managed to procure an abortion for their daughter in those pre-Roe years, she couldn’t imagine they’d have gone the back-alley route. But the only thing she’d discovered, after hours of searching, was that William Smythe never threw away a piece of paper in his life.
There were medical bills aplenty, not only for the care he received in his own decline, but also her father’s, who’d not so much died as faded away over the course of the years it took for the twin scourges of cancer and alcoholism to work their final victory. But nothing for Penelope beyond routine yearly checkups, teeth cleaning and – when she was in middle school – braces; as well as for Nora’s own safely legitimate birth. So many receipts – not just for doctors’ bills, but for garden tools, roof maintenance, a new dishwasher, dry-cleaning bills for his police uniforms. By contrast, Nora’s parents’ paperwork filled a single tall file cabinet to her grandfather’s half-dozen. But, beyond discovering that Smythe’s Best Backfin had been hemorrhaging money before her mother wisely sold it after her father’s death, she found little of interest.
Her eyes stung from half a night’s and the whole morning’s unproductive reading. Her butt hurt from sitting on the floor. She stood and stretched, then bent and tried to touch her toes. The cartilage in her knees crackled a protest. Her stomach rumbled.
Food, maybe. A break, so that she could come back to her task with her mind refreshed, and maybe having figured out a better way to tackle it. At some point, she’d need to visit Penelope, but she didn’t want to face her mother until she had an answer to her urgent question. Penelope, even doped up on painkillers, had an unerring sense of something amiss, and would question her mercilessly. And, without some sort of proof, Nora could not imagine asking her mother, ‘Did you have another baby before me?’ and ‘Who was the father?’ And, most urgently, ‘If you had the baby, where is my sibling now?’
She had a pretty good idea about at least one answer. Hadn’t Todd Burris stood on a sidewalk with the midday sun glinting off his silver mane and told her he’d courted Penelope in high school, before she’d disappeared to New England. Why hadn’t they just got married?
Even when Nora was in high school, with birth control and abortions readily available, there’d been a handful of young marriages. And the Burrises were a First Family, something that would have papered over the smear of scandal. But for whatever reason, Penelope hadn’t gone that route. Maybe, once installed at Miss Phipps’s after the necessary year’s disappearance, she’d simply met Nora’s father in one of the usual ways and fallen in love with someone wonderfully new and different and wholly lacking in the baggage she’d shed when she left Chateau – the explanation Nora preferred.
Because, even though Penelope had probably been as young and foolish and swayed by a handsome face as any other dizzy fifteen-year-old, Nora couldn’t imagine her mother truly in love with someone like Todd Burris.
FORTY-FOUR
1968
When, nearly a year after Bobby’s murder, the Chateau Crier trumpeted the Chief’s announcement of Todd Burris’s alibi to the world, Grace almost gave up.
Because, what was the point? Wasn’t she the one who’d told Bobby over and over again that nothing would ever change in Chateau? What had ever made her think that even if Todd Burris made a full confession, signed it in blood and took a lie detector test for good measure, he’d ever be held accountable for killing her brother?
The Chief had made a point of leaving the newspaper spread out on the kitchen table that morning. As if she hadn’t already heard. As if every black person in Chateau, along with all of Bobby’s friends from Morgan State and the people who’d come in from Baltimore and Washington and Philadelphia, hadn’t heard.
‘All these months, waiting on nothing,’ Davita Evans had said when Grace made the collect call from a Quail House phone to Baltimore, trying to get ahead of the grapevine. Turned out one of Baltimore’s finest had already delivered the news.
‘Stood on my doorstep like he owned it and told me what I already knew. That nobody was ever going to face judgment for killing my son.’
The bitterness in her mother’s voice seeped across the ninety-mile distance. Grace switched the receiver from one hand to the other, almost as though it had become too hot to grasp. Kwame babbled in the background – Vroom, Vroom – followed by small crashing sounds. She imagined a tiny demolition derby with his Matchbox cars.
‘Took them all this time to get up the nerve to tell me.’ Davita’s voice turned peevish. ‘Kwame. Hush that noise.’
A fretful wail arose.
‘Mama. How about I come up next weekend and bring Kwame back here with me for a while?’
Grief lay heavy on her parents, but they’d had a lifetime of practice in dealing with disappointments both small and life-shattering. But a child deserved smiles and sunshine, the boisterous high spirits that had permeated the rowhouse when Bobby and Grace still lived there. Grace wondered if Kwame connected Bobby’s abrupt disappearance to the home’s transformation into a sort of crypt, within which her parents only went through the motions of living.
‘Oh, Grace. You don’t have to do that.’ The deep weariness in her mother’s obligatory protest told her exactly how badly she needed to.
‘It’s no trouble.’
Even though it was. She’d have to find someone to watch Kwame while she worked at Quail House. No way she was going to take him from one poisoned atmosphere into another. Maybe she’d quit her job there. But she’d been putting part of her generous paycheck aside each week into the college fund she’d started for Kwame. She’d be lucky to make half as much anywhere else in Chateau. Maybe, instead of bringing Kwame back to Chateau with her, she’d try to get her old job at the Afro back. Live with her parents again, try to bring some sort of normalcy back into the house in Baltimore.
Because even if her methodical search of Quail House unexpectedly yielded fruit, even if she found hard evidence, the Chief would find a way to negate it. It served his purposes to have Bobby dead and, as he’d proven by accepting Todd’s bullshit alibi, he intended to sweep the whole troublesome mess under the rug and leave it moldering there for eternity.
Whatever had made her think she could prevail against the most powerful forces in Chateau?
She hung up the phone and sagged against the wall. To hell with it. To hell with it all.
‘Grace?’
She hardly recognized Penelope’s voice. She’d barely seen her in the months following their confrontation in the bathroom. Now she stood in the doorway’s shadows, her hugely pregnant belly an unspeakable affront.
‘Grace?’ Penelope moved into the bright light of the kitchen. It was noon but she was still in her nightgown, stretched tight across her stomach. She hitched it up, away from the liquid pooling at her feet.
&
nbsp; ‘I think the baby’s coming.’
The tense apprehension that had permeated Quail House after Bobby’s killing and the subsequent riot and demonstrations vanished with the arrival of baby Nora.
Elaborately wrapped gifts arrived daily – tiny, hand-embroidered dresses, a whole family of winsome Steiff teddy bears, mobiles and quilts and knitted socks and caps and toys and more toys, enough to stock a store. A diaper service weekly delivered stacks of snowy cloth, whisking away the dirty ones in their malodorous pail.
Whatever wisps of suspicion clung to Penelope due to her departure to New England and hasty marriage evaporated with the addition to the next generation of First Families.
The Chief was besotted. Baby Nora rested in his arms from the moment he came home from work until her bedtime, unless, of course, she grew fussy, and then he handed her off to her mother or grandmother or even her father.
But never to Grace. She washed clothes stiff with spit-up, sterilized bottles and cooked the protein-rich meals deemed necessary to rebuild Penelope’s depleted strength, but the entire family, including Penelope’s husband, seemed locked in an unspoken conspiracy to bar her access to the baby.
And with good reason, she thought one morning several weeks later. The Chief and Hiram Best were at their respective jobs, and Philippa’s black Lincoln had disappeared down the lane toward an errand in town, Philippa apparently not realizing her daughter had stepped into the shower, leaving the baby alone.
Grace checked the window to make sure the car was gone. She tiptoed upstairs and listened outside the bathroom to ensure the shower was running.
Then she slipped into the baby’s room.
Nora slept in the most ridiculous contraption Grace had ever seen – a four-poster crib with a sheer canopy, a dainty, white-painted replica of the hulking bed in her parents’ room. A cushioned rocking chair sat in one corner. A vase of fresh flowers – she herself had arranged them in the kitchen that morning – sat on a low table beside it, along with a stack of the fashion magazines Penelope skimmed as she rocked the baby to sleep. Stuffed animals populated a shelf, staring beady-eyed at Grace.
She thought about the day Kwame had arrived, how her father had hauled down the old crib from the attic and wedged it into a corner of her parents’ tiny bedroom. She and Bobby had unearthed some childhood toys, worse for wear, and Davita crocheted a pale-blue blanket of whisper-soft yarn, Kwame’s one luxury.
Baby Nora slept on her back, on soft flannel sheets printed with smiling pastel ducks, pink fists curled beside her round pink face. Her eyes fluttered beneath their lids.
Grace held her breath and listened. Yes, the shower still ran. One of the few times Grace had seen the Chief raise his voice to his daughter concerned the length of her showers, and the lack of hot water for hours afterward.
There was no pillow in the crib. Grace had overheard long conversations about the dangers of accidental suffocation.
She looked around the room and caught the glassy gaze of one of the Steiff bears. She reached for it, squeezing to make sure. Yes, it was just soft enough.
She held the bear near the baby’s face, edging it toward her soft cheeks, her nose and mouth mere inches away.
Nora opened her eyes.
Like those of all babies, they were blue at first, but now were fast going green. They fixed on Grace with somber regard. A corner of her mouth twitched. She broke into an enormous, toothless grin, waving her little fists and crowing in delight.
Grace stepped back, shaking. The bear fell from her hand. She fled.
FORTY-FIVE
When Nora ushered a stiff and bruised but on-the-mend Penelope back into Quail House, she led her straight to the kitchen, where she’d laid an array of photographs across the long table.
Baby Nora in her christening gown.
A formal family portrait, her father standing behind a seated Penelope, holding the baby on her lap.
Toddler Nora using Murph’s predecessor, Kathleen Mavourneen, as a pillow.
Nora on her first day of school – a photo every year for twelve years straight.
Nora in her graduation gown. (She’d deliberately omitted photos from the prom she attended with Alden.)
Nora on a snowy Colorado mountain, learning to ski during her sophomore year in college.
Nora in a business suit with grotesquely padded shoulders, a black grosgrain ribbon tied in a coy bow at her collar, her hair permed into unrecognizability as the eighties version of a successful career woman in her first public relations job.
And so on.
Penelope clapped her hands in delight, then winced.
‘Oh, I shouldn’t have done that. But, Nora, what a wonderful surprise! How beautiful.’
Nora, who’d prepped the sterling teapot with hot water before she’d left for the hospital, emptied it, measured in tea leaves, and filled it with water just off the boil. The aroma of bergamot wafted from the pot.
She popped two pieces of bread into the toaster, poured milk into a pitcher and sat it and the sugar bowl in front of Penelope.
‘Let’s have some tea and toast first.’
By the time she’d smeared butter across the toast and sprinkled it with cinnamon and sugar, the tea was ready. ‘You always made me cinnamon toast when I was sick. Now it’s my turn to look after you.’
Penelope took a long, appreciative sip of her tea. ‘Oh, my. You wouldn’t believe what passed for tea in the hospital. Dreadful Lipton, and always lukewarm.’ She shuddered. ‘Thank you for this. And the cinnamon toast – and all of these photos. Such good memories! What’s the occasion?’
‘Isn’t your homecoming occasion enough? Even the animals are celebrating.’
Murph leaned against Penelope’s chair while Mooch crouched on the floor, ready to race him to any stray crumb that might fall.
‘Wherever did you find all of these photos?’
‘All the albums are in the library.’ Nora thought of the many photos she’d paged through in order to gather the collection. Photos of her father with a shotgun over one arm and a brace of fat mallards in his hand, Kathleen Mavourneen’s tail a blur as she stood beside him. Of her grandparents, beaming upon their beautiful daughter as she leaned from her pony’s saddle to present them with the blue ribbon she’d just won.
She thought also of all the photos that weren’t there – the missing years of Penelope’s time in New England, but for a single group shot of Penelope posed with her classmates before a brick building thick with the requisite ivy. It was as though Penelope had transitioned from high school sophomore to young matron with a baby in the blink of an eye, a gap papered over as just one more uncomfortable reality to be ignored by the good people of Chateau, just as one ignored everything from intestinal discomfort to the long-ago and still-unsolved murder of a black man.
And one other subject was missing from the row of family albums, labeled in precise copperplate by generations of Smythe women. Nora waited until Penelope finished her first cup of tea – she didn’t want to risk another broken cup – and broached it.
‘I went through all of the albums, Mother – at least, all of those from the last fifty years, and a few before that – but I couldn’t find a single photo of my sibling.’
Give Penelope credit. She didn’t so much as flinch. Nora wondered how long she’d been waiting for this moment. Preparing for it. Penelope reached for the pot and poured another cup of tea. A few drops spilled on to the saucer, the only betrayal of her inner tension.
Nora bluffed. ‘Mother, I know about it. I ran into Todd Burris downtown. Mother, why didn’t you two just get married? Was it because … oh, no.’ A thought had just occurred to her, one she struggled to put into words. Would Penelope even recognize the term ‘date rape’?
‘Did he … did he hurt you?’
Penelope buried her face in her hands. When she raised it, the brief strain had drained from her features, leaving them unnervingly serene.
‘No, Nora. Nothing like that.
I didn’t marry Todd because I didn’t love him.’
Which opened up another possibility nearly as unnerving as an assault – that, as a teenager, Penelope had been comfortable with the idea, sacrilege at the time, that sex in no way needed to be connected to love and marriage. Nora’s face grew hot, embarrassment overcoming her attempts at tact as she blurted her next question.
‘But isn’t it awkward living in the same town as him?’
Penelope waved her hand. ‘It’s not discussed.’
Of course not. But there was one more thing Nora needed to discuss.
‘What happened to the baby?’
A last chance for Penelope to deny a baby ever existed. Nora wondered who had the more pressing need for denial – herself or her mother?
‘Adopted.’
Which, given that she answered the question at all, is what Nora had expected her to say. If Penelope had had an abortion, would she even admit it? She pushed harder.
‘Boy or girl?’
Penelope’s composure cracked so briefly that Nora wasn’t sure she’d seen it, eyes widening, a wild despair within.
‘Boy.’
‘I have a brother?’
Penelope lifted her chin and there it was, the iron control that told Nora she’d learned all she would.
‘No. Some other family has a lovely son. And’ – on the offensive now – ‘don’t go looking for him. Adoption records were sealed then, and for good reason. Some secrets are best kept.’
FORTY-SIX
Then, fifty years after that fraught moment beside the baby’s crib and nearly thirty years after Grace had last seen her, Nora was back.
The fact barely registered at first in the plunge back into despair, somehow so much worse in its very familiarity, after Robert’s killing. It was all Grace could do to hold it together for the sake of Kwame and Dorothy, whose stunned silence and slow, shaky movements, recalled her parents in the days following Bobby’s shooting.