Lollygagging: an Aunt Kath expression.
“You’re reading?” Anna Page said.
Julie held up the book to show the cover. “It’s an advance reader copy your mom loaned me.” She tapped the author’s name on the cover: Robert Smythe. A collection of poems.
“But he drives boats,” Anna Page said.
“ ‘A collection by’ ”—Julie read from the author bio on the back—“ ‘an Irish journalist who now lives in the English Lake District.’ Not giving away much, our Robbie isn’t.”
Anna Page asked if it was any good.
“The poems tell stories,” Julie answered, choosing her words carefully. “There’s one called ‘The Crier of Claife,’ about walking the hills at night in search of a dead wife’s bones. It will about convince you Robbie is the Crier.”
Anna Page frowned, her big chin that was so like her mother’s dipping in concentration, her short nails on her well-tended surgeon’s hands running idly across the top of the wing chair she stood behind. “Graham is the Crier,” she said. “He walks the hills at night with Napoleon, when he can’t sleep.” She smiled slightly. “But it’s okay. He always takes his emergency kit.”
Julie hesitated. She wanted to say it out loud, though, and she didn’t think Anna Page would know what she was hearing. “There’s a poem here about taking a boat across a lake in search of his dead love’s first lover, a man she loved when they were in school together,” she said. The last in the collection. “ ‘For Cornelia,’ ” she said.
Thinking maybe Graham and Robbie were both the Crier. Thinking she had a bit of Crier in her herself, and Anna Page did, too.
“Why would you want to meet a dead love’s former lover?” Anna Page asked.
“He says something like …” Julie paused, gathering herself against the emotion evoked by the memory of the poem. “I’m paraphrasing, but the idea is ‘He must be a good man, for the love she felt for him.’ ”
It was such an evocative story-poem, about a bighearted man whose soul is lost in a cavernous mansion of expectation he can’t begin to furnish. After reading the poem, she’d wiped away the tears and closed her eyes, imagining Robbie and his wife sitting over a glass of ale at a pub, talking of the love she’d had when she was a young woman at Oxford, the man she might have married. She imagined Robbie not wanting to think of his wife ever having loved another man, but seeing the intertwined limbs and the sheets and the saying “I love you,” or thinking it but unable to give the emotion voice. There was no sense of betrayal in the poems, though, no sense that the wife ever was unfaithful. Julie imagined Robbie, in the wake of Cornelia’s death, going through her things and finding old letters from her school days. “Love, Graham.” Had there been anyone left in the world who’d loved Cornelia but Robbie and this man Cornelia had loved first? She imagined Robbie coming to the Lakes on the excuse of a pilgrimage to touch the poets he so admired, and staying longer than he meant to, buying the boat business so that anyone going to Ainsley’s End might come to him. He wouldn’t have considered the possibility that Graham would rather drive around the long way than go out on the lake. How daft was that?
Daft. It was a Robbie word, there in his poems, which were lovely and funny and sad.
How many ways had Robbie looked to meet Graham in the months he must have lived here before he bought the boats? Months, at least, because he couldn’t have written the Crier poem before he came, and here it was already typeset in a volume of poems about to be released. Months, or perhaps a series of trips over years before the old man with the ferry business died and Robbie traded journalism for this new way to earn a living, one that would allow him more time to write his poetry.
How often had he crossed Lake Windermere in the short time he’d owned the boats, hoping to meet Graham? How many hours had he spent floating on the water, looking up at the chimneys of Ainsley’s End, imagining how different his own life would have been if his Cornelia had spent her life looking out the windows of the Prospect, rather than those of the little house in Ireland she’d shared with him?
“In another poem,” Julie said to Anna Page, “he sits on a bar stool beside his wife’s ex-lover, both of them drinking Hawkshead bitters. ‘Hawkshead Bitter,’ that’s the title.” Remembering her conversation in the boat with Robbie that night without Anna Page: Our Lord Wyndham? But he isn’t at all a creeper.… Surely he likes to have a pint at the local same as anyone. A Hawkshead Bitter, I’d think. In the poem, the husband sits on the bar stool for hours, staring at the paint under the old lover’s nails as he tries to come up with an opening line. Julie didn’t tell Anna Page that, though. She said nothing about how the lover sets his money on the bar and leaves the husband sitting alone, with no words ever exchanged.
“He uses the night sky in the poem,” she said to Anna Page. Andromeda, the daughter of that boastful but nonetheless beautiful Cassiopeia and her husband, Cepheus. The Alpha Centauries, two stars the human eye can’t separate, with the red dwarf that can’t be seen but is always with them. “It’s heartbreaking, actually,” she said.
She didn’t offer the book up to Anna Page any more than she offered up the heartbreaking detail. And Anna Page didn’t ask for it. She only asked where everyone else was, and Julie said her mother was out for the morning, probably until after lunch.
“She took off by herself?” Anna Page asked.
“She went with Graham,” Julie said. “They took the car.”
Anna Page frowned. “Hope, too?”
Julie laid a hand on the book’s fragile pages as if to shield them from Anna Page. “Out for a walk. She asked me to tell you she has your phone.”
“I guess that leaves you and me,” Anna Page said.
Julie said she had work to do.
“You’re reading a book,” Anna Page said.
“It’s one of the great perks of being a librarian,” Julie said. “I can read whatever I want, whenever I want, and call it work.”
Anna Page figured she may as well get some work done herself; surely the galleys for the JAMA piece would have arrived in her email. Graham had shown us his office earlier; he didn’t have wireless, but we were welcome to make ourselves at home at his desk, where we’d find the Internet hookup. She took her laptop up to the office and plugged it in and booted up. While the computer made its way through the welcome, she took in the tidiness of the room: a stocky desk, much less graceful than the furniture elsewhere at Ainsley’s End but clear and dust-free, scarred with rings and scratches so that any harm she might inadvertently do it wouldn’t show; tidy files in wooden file cases (which, yes, she did open: tax returns for his business and for a charitable trust that had something to do with the Lakes). Try as she might, she could find nothing personal here, nothing intimate. There was not so much as a photograph, while the rest of the house was overrun with portraits.
She scrolled down through her emails, in search of the paper-clip icons indicating attachments, and found one from a dot-edu address that was familiar—perhaps a research assistant transmitting the JAMA galleys from her coauthor. When she opened it, a photo startled her. It was the transplant photo: the family of the dead teacher—Eliza James, her name had been—alongside the schmuck of a game designer who’d ruined his perfectly good heart with cocaine. They all stood together, the poor girl’s mother and father, her two sisters, a brother in high school. How did you understand losing a much adored big sister when you were that young?
She wished her own sister would talk to her, or just listen. She wished what her ma had said about her daddy were true: “His stroke wasn’t your fault, Anna Page. Do you think after all the years I lived with your father that I wouldn’t have seen the signs? Do you think your daddy could have had any signs of heart disease that Catherine wouldn’t have seen?”
Catherine, her mother had said—the sound of her daddy’s lover’s name on her mother’s lips almost as startling as the fact that her daddy had suffered a stroke.
The note that preceded
the photo in the email left Anna Page angrier than she would have imagined: I’m sending you this with gratitude for the second chance you’ve given me, Anna Page.
It’s Dr. Montgomery to you, she wanted to say.
She wondered if the twit was still doing drugs, or if needing a new heart had shocked some sense into him. She couldn’t say why she was so intolerant of people who did drugs. It was an addiction like any other. Why did her daddy still smoke? There were always so many more people who needed hearts than there were hearts to give, though, that it seemed unforgiveable to squander one.
Please do allow me to keep this private, the email read. It’s not enough to repay the gift Eliza gave me, a heart I see now I haven’t deserved but am so grateful to have.
She scrolled down to the delete button. She wouldn’t waste her time with the rest of what he’d written. But she noticed a second attachment along with the photo: SJMN-HeartbeatFndtn.pdf. Heartbeat Foundation? She downloaded the pdf and opened it: a San Jose Mercury News piece about an anonymous gift to found a new charity to provide medical care for children with cancer, and schooling while they received treatment.
A hundred million dollars.
The article speculated about several people who might be behind the gift. Anna Page recognized some of the names but didn’t know any of them.
She returned to the email and read:
I would have liked the foundation to promote heart research and be named in honor of Eliza, but I couldn’t figure out a way to do that which might not be traced back to me, and you and I both know I don’t deserve the credit I would get if that were made public. With your permission, I’d like to appoint you to direct the foundation’s board, and ask you to name whomever you would like to serve with you.
If I predecease you, I would ask you to change the name to the Eliza James Heartbeat Foundation. The terms of the granting documents allow great latitude for what it can take on so long as it involves medical research or the provision of medical services. Rest assured that I have already taken steps to employ top-notch administrators, so your responsibilities would be minimal in terms of time.
I will understand if you are uncomfortable taking this on, but please think about it. And please honor my request for anonymity.
She sat back in her chair and touched her hand to her chest, over her pulmonary artery, where she might so quickly bleed to death. His secret was safe with her. Who would she tell? Not Jamie anymore. Not Graham, whom she could see—now that he was giving his heart to her mother—had taken her own heart without her realizing it was gone.
From the Journals of Ally Tantry
28.7.2011, Moss Eccles Tarn, Near Sawrey. We’re sitting on the big slate boulders at the south end of the tarn, and is Bea ever in a petulant mood. She quite insists on being taken out on the water in a boat. But it was hard enough just to get her up here; Graham had to bring us around in his car to Near Sawrey so we could walk the short way up. Also, it’s quite chilly, even for this early in the morning. If we get wet, we’ll certainly catch pneumonia.
On the walk up, Graham pointed out that my biological father—“our father,” he calls him—stayed with Graham’s mother all those years after his sister died, before they had him.
—I thought you might like to know that your father was capable of great love, Allison, he explained. It’s a strong love that can survive the loss of a child and the disapproval of both family and society. Not that our father should be forgiven for what he did to your mum. But it was his capacity to love that was to blame.
—It was his weakness that was to blame, I said. His inability to stand up to his family.
Graham didn’t respond for such a long time that I began to regret my words. What good was there in depriving him of the fiction that his parents had shared some great love he himself might still hope to find?
—Yes, he said finally, but that takes more courage than most of us have. You’re extraordinary for having done it. You do see that, don’t you, Allison? I think our father would have admired you more than you can imagine.
I swallowed back a bitterness I thought I’d finally left behind, thinking what an irony that was: the father who abandoned me would have admired me for something that had caused the woman he’d abandoned to cut me off. And yet it was comforting, the idea that my biological father would have been proud of me when my mother was not.
At the tarn, Graham collected his paints from the boot (I love that word, “boot”; so much rounder and softer than “trunk”) and suggested he paint while I write.
—I’m not writing anything today, I replied. I don’t have the energy.
Graham gave me the funniest look.
—Aren’t you? he asked.
He seemed quite certain that I was going to write, as did Bea. Those two both think they know so much more about me than they do.
—I cannot rest, Bea said. I must draw, no matter how poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me, it is a stronger desire than ever.
—Is Graham having a bad time, Bea? I asked her.
—I must write, no matter how poor the result, Bea amended.
I’ve stayed on the rock outcropping, journal in hand to appease them, while Graham walked around the tarn to paint the scene looking back toward us. I’d feel self-conscious, but if any living thing shows up in the painting, Bea and I will be rabbits or field mice or perhaps frogs. We told him we felt like frogs today, but the truth is, our legs are quite running on empty. It’s been such a tough year, losing Jim and Jamie both. We might not have come up to the tarn today, but it’s Bea’s 145th birthday, and this does seem the only proper place to spend this day, at this tarn where she and Mr. Heelis spent so many evenings. She’s decided we’ll all go out in her boat, and I haven’t the heart to remind her it hasn’t been kept at the tarn for years. Graham brings a raft up for us sometimes, but I didn’t have the energy to carry the oars today.
—Yes, that will do, Bea says to me.
—What will do for what, Bea?
—A story about the two of us, she says. Rather than about me or about you.
She begins unlacing her shoes.
I pull my jacket more tightly around me and hunch up over my journal, staring out at the water, stealing a glance at Bea. She can’t actually mean to take her shoes off, not my proper Bea, not in this chill. Perhaps she’s loosening them to ease the circulation. I might loosen mine as well.
—I could write a story about you and Hope, I say, thinking part of me would like to shed my own shoes, to strip my feet to the skin and press my soles flat against the cool slate.
Bea finishes loosening one shoe and begins on the other, with the first, as I suspected, stolidly on her proper feet. I suppress the laughter that threatens: she is so funny about being proper. Across the tarn, Graham is lost in his painting, yet I’m left with the sense that he and Bea are exchanging a knowing glance.
—Allison, Allison, Bea says, you may fool yourself, but do you really think you can fool me?
She finishes the laces on the second shoe—all those eyelets—and stretches her legs out on the hard slate boulders, arranging her skirt around them. She doesn’t seem the least bit cold.
—You’ve been writing about Hope since before she was born, she says. Since Hope was only a dream you didn’t know you could make real. She needs you to write for her now. Something that will help her understand all of the things you’ve already written.
She bends her knee and begins tugging at the heel of her shoe with her hand, which I see is old and gnarled. How have I not noticed that before?
—You can title it “Searching for Allison Tantry,” she says.
I watch as she pulls off one shoe and then the other.
—If I wrote that story, I say, I would have to title it “Searching for Beatrix Potter.”
—That’s already written, for the most part, isn’t it? And why in the world drag me into it?
I look across the water to Graham as I consider the question.
Why do I drag Bea along on this journey?
—Because it’s in coming to find you that I’ve found whatever it is I’ve found here, I suppose, I say.
What have I found here?
—Besides, Bea, you’re quite charming, you know. And Hope always has adored you.
She begins to roll down her stockings. I watch the pale, veined leg emerging from underneath. I’m not sure I can say any more why I came here at first. To try to understand my mother? That’s where this started, in some sense, with that first day trip to Manchester while Jim was in his London meetings. I’ve returned again and again, looking for some suggestion that Mother’s disowning me wasn’t disowning me, but rather some part of her bitter past she’d been unable to accept. An understanding that has come to me only with the wisdom of old age. Surely a mother can forgive a child anything, yet how hard it must have been for her to look in my face every day of her new life, to see the echo of the man who fathered me and abandoned her.
But I’ve kept returning to England. I found that explanation some time ago, and yet I’ve kept returning, having found something else here as well, I suppose. Graham, of course. But something more that has little to do with him. Something that is here in the journals, in my conversations with Bea. Something I can’t quite articulate.
—Well, Bea, I say. I suppose the truth of it is that I, like Hope, have always adored you.
She pauses in the stocking removal.
—Have you, now?
—I have.
—You aren’t just saying that to make an old lady feel better at the end of her life?
I scoot down to sit at her feet and take up where she left off removing the stockings.
—Bea, I hate to tell you this, I say, but you’re not an old lady. You died sixty-seven years ago.
She watches me remove first one stocking, then the other. She wriggles her pale, fat toes.
—But of course, she says, I’m not the old lady I’m speaking of, am I?
The Wednesday Daughters Page 21