But when I spotted my name as I flipped through to the fourth page, I read it as an invitation. The notebooks had been wrapped in an article about me, after all. I sat down at the kitchen table with a strange sense of anticipation.
April 29, 1991
Dear Judy,
I am writing to you on the first anniversary of Lena’s death. Under normal circumstances, I would expect you’d remember and call me with words of comfort, but you are fighting your own battle, in which dates only have the significance of various doctor’s appointments. Today, you start a new cycle of poisons designed to promote health. I struggle with the knowledge that you are following in Lena’s path. You are younger than she was, and I must believe you will pull through. I can’t sustain another loss, just yet; I have not recovered fully from the first one. Maybe you’ll remember the anniversary when you are lying in the inner chambers of the new treatment center, or maybe you won’t. Regardless, I suspect (and hope) that today, Lena’s spirit resides less with me in my grief and more with you in your ordeal, but I am thinking of her all the same.
It has only been a year since I made her a promise to take our story to my grave, but it is a promise I am not sure I can keep in light of new developments. Your cancer is a weight I feel, a stone on my heart. Like all mothers, I worry that I have caused your battle with this heinous disease, not based on genetics, but toxins of the spirit that I have knowingly and unknowingly passed on to you. Perhaps I am giving myself too much credit.
I wanted so much to be close to you, as mother and daughter should be, but we always had an unnamed distance between us. Was it this, I wonder, the secret that I have been carrying with me for fifty years? I was protecting you. Lena and I both were, but when I see you withered by disease, I have to ask myself—from what were we protecting you? The only answer I have arrived in the mail today.
Barbara Jean sent me the newspaper that featured her art show. Our Bobbi Ellington is all grown up. Not only have you raised a talented artist but a woman of conscience. You have given that flower everything she needed to grow. Things I could not give you, you cultivated for the sake of your daughter. I could not be more proud.
However, and this is what burdens me, directly across from the story of our girl’s success was an obituary of an alumnus who bequeathed a large portion of his estate to the university. His name is Henry Littlehail, though I knew him as Hank. My eyes crossed from the picture of Hank to Barbara Jean and back again. Their features blurred. I focused again on Hank and I spat on the bastard whose image kissed Barbara Jean’s picture every time I closed the paper.
I TURNED BACK to the newspaper on my lap. I unfolded it to take a look at the man Nonna was describing. He was an older gentleman with glasses and a beard. Nothing in his features would have caused me to look at this picture if I hadn’t been directed to it. He was just a man, as anonymous as he had been when I first dismissed his face.
Who was this man? Why did he matter? And what was this all about? The grandmother I knew was never as stiff and formal, almost cold, as the narrator of this epistle. Granted, the letter was not meant for me, the granddaughter with whom Nonna had always connected effortlessly. I thought back to the relationship between Nonna and my own mother. I knew my mother had a difficult childhood, but the gulf in her relationship with Nonna had closed over time, hadn’t it? Yet here in this letter, Nonna seemed to be detaching herself more; holding my mother at arm’s length. Why? The only way to answer my questions was to read further.
Briefly, my anger turned to gratitude. If Hank had not been so vile, my life would have taken a different road. Then, I turned once more to rage when I remembered how this man snuffed out sweetness to replace it with sweetness. How does he get the power to sentence me with one life over another? How dare he play God?
Hank Littlehail is a character in the story I must write. He is introduced somewhere in the second act, but maybe I will move him up to the first act where villains are typically introduced. This is my story, and perhaps when I have finished, you will find that the only monster in this tale is not Hank, but your own mother.
I need to preface this account with my history. It is important to me that you know how this story was played out before me. My great-grandparents were immigrants from Sweden. I don’t know the hows and whys of their exodus, but their son Gustaf, the first in our family born on American soil, had riches and smarts enough to buy a tract of land. He built a stone house with sandstone he quarried himself. This is my current residence, the house in which I was born.
Mulberry Farm was named for the native trees that my grandfather cursed every time he pulled another sapling from his fields. The farm and its occupants experienced seven years of fertility. The harvests were heavy, and my grandparents were blessed with three daughters. Like the mulberry trees, the daughters vexed their father with their need for constant attention. Gustaf had a favorite in the youngest, my mother. Ada was fair with an impudent chin and a jutting jaw that flaunted her stubbornness as if it was a new hat bought for no reason other than she fancied it.
When Ada was four, at the tail end of the seven years of prosperity, a fever passed through the house, enfeebling all the females. It was at little Ada’s bed that Gustaf prayed, and it was to her that God offered relief. The illness rendered her mother, my grandmother, barren, and the barrenness made her peevish. Ada’s oldest sister Sara died, and her second sister Anja lost her hearing and some of her mental faculties. Ada grew more beautiful in body and mind as the years passed, but Anja regressed to a point where she required constant care. My grandmother tried to give her what care she could, but in the end, it wasn’t enough. One fine spring day about three years after the fever had ravaged the family, Anja wandered out of the house while my grandmother and Ada were doing the laundry. The family, along with the few close neighbors and a hunting dog, searched for her for three days. At dusk on the third day, Gustaf pulled his daughter’s swollen, purple body out of a shallow stream on the property.
Ada became all the more precious to her father, but his affections suffocated her to the point of rebellion. She didn’t want to marry a suitable man with a strong back and an even stronger sense of business. She didn’t care that Gustaf’s prayers had saved her from death. She countered Gustaf’s prayers to God with some of her own.
Every evening after the supper dishes and the last milking, Ada would go to the lake to absorb its calm. Every evening a young painter would sit along the shore and paint by the diminishing light. During the day, Sid Stevens worked at the gristmill to earn money for his passage to France where he would paint with the masters. The moment Ada danced into his painting, he knew he would have to work twice as long as anticipated so he could purchase two tickets for the boat.
Sid painted the vista of the lake for Ada, asked her to marry him, and promised to take her away from the sandstone and mulberry farm and back to the continent of her ancestors.
Gustaf raged at the hasty match. His dream of a slower life vanished the day Ada boarded the boat. He hated Sid Stevens for taking away what God had given him. Before they embarked, Gustaf pulled his new son-in-law aside and told him, “If you are not a success in three years, I will bring Ada back myself.”
“And what is your measure of success?” Sid goaded.
“You will never reach it.”
May 1, 1991
Despite the threat, Sid and Ada stayed seven years in Paris and the surrounding countryside. Ada danced in the homes and landscapes of Picasso and Braque. She chatted on occasion with a few aging Impressionists. Sid loved being surrounded by such greatness, but he had a wife who was too lovely and daring for comfort. Jealousy began to crowd the other emotions in Sid’s mind. His art was always one step removed from recognition, and his wife was one step too close.
For money, Sid worked at a gallery where all day long he touched great art, framing it not only with wood but also with envy. He lost his job after slashing a work by a lesser-known cubist. He claimed it was an accide
nt, but he tasted blood in his cheek as he watched his wife talking to the artist. The knife slipped in his grip.
Ada’s father paid for their passage home. War had broken out in Europe, and he wanted his daughter on his own soil. With a heavy heart, Sid and Ada obeyed the summons. When Ada saw her parents, she gasped at the sunken faces that had blanched in her absence. Her mother was toothless and nearly mad. She talked to people who weren’t in the room and ignored those who were.
Gustaf wasted no time in tethering his son-in-law to the plow. Dirt replaced paint under Sid’s fingernails, and he grew to despise the colors of sienna and umber, vowing never again to let them touch his palette. Farm work did not come in shifts like millwork. Sid had no hours off for painting. His resentment escalated, and he found his only release in making noisy, rambunctious love to the farmer’s daughter while the farmer lay in his bed across the hall.
Sid didn’t stop his feverish lovemaking when Ada announced she was pregnant. His ardor continued without restraint until Ada started to bleed in her sixth month. She lost the baby, a son, but soon became pregnant again. This time she moved into the bedroom down the hall. Gustaf could not hide his pleasure at Sid’s symbolic castration.
In those final days when Ada was too heavy to dance, she tried to make amends to her husband but to no avail. I was born in a big bed in the back room of the house and named Anja Augusta Stevens after my aunt, the one who drowned in the stream. The year was 1917, the same year my father enlisted to fight the enemies of the United States and France. In doing so, he called a stalemate to the war at home. Gustaf had no son-in-law to manage his farm. Ada had no flight from her father. And Sid pointed an Army issue rifle at the European countryside instead of his sable brushes.
I CLOSED THE NOTEBOOK. The letter continued with more dated entries, but I could decipher only so much of Nonna’s scrawl before my eyes strained. I lifted my head and looked across the kitchen to exercise my eyes. Sid Stevens’s painting drew me into its theater. I imagined the lake the way it was before the county had mistakenly given it the name of Blue. This piece of water had meant so much to my family. Though Nonna’s letter hadn’t confirmed it, I knew that the lake had attracted my great-grandfather to his farm. His fields did not border the water but he must have had quite a vista when he was plowing the upper acres. I refused to be sad that this painting, along with the others, belonged to Travis. Nonna had been perfectly clear in her intentions.
But what had made her change her mind? I had yet to figure that one out. When Karen had told me that Nonna had changed her will the previous September, I had excavated my design journals and day planner.
What had I talked to Nonna about? I had been planning Sam’s October birthday party. Bryce had been representing a rich client in Detroit. He hadn’t been around. That was the other strange thing. Bryce had drawn up Nonna’s previous will. Why didn’t she ask him to handle the codicil? Granted, the Sewickys had been Nonna’s main legal team since the seventies, but the codicil would have taken so little of Bryce’s time, and he would have been glad to do it.
I again grabbed my sketchbook and flipped through my hasty notes and careful sketches. Stuck between the pages was a postcard from my parents. They had taken a cruise in September. Mom was dying, and the tour of the Virgin Islands was their last hurrah. A lump formed in my throat. Yes, Nonna and I had discussed my parents’ cruise. I remembered clearly now. My parents were so giddy about the trip, even my mother, withered by disease. My father had alluded to the possibility that he might never return. They would just sail away together until the water could carry them no farther.
“Nonna, can you imagine having a love like that?”
“Honey, I did have a love like that.”
I had sighed, not realizing the insight I must have given about the state of my marriage. Could that have been the sentiment that troubled Nonna?
Nonna may have guessed that my marriage wouldn’t last. By that point, Nonna may have known that Travis’s marriage had failed. Was she giving Travis the paintings as a way to bring the two of us together? Nonna knew that I would balk at the bequest—that it would create animosity, not attraction. Maybe Nonna wanted to keep us apart. I was as confused as ever.
Whatever Nonna’s intention, she would have known the results. Years ago, Nonna had revealed that she could often predict the future.
“We all have the gift, BJ, but some of us lose it along the way.”
“Okay, Nonna, what is my future?”
She had correctly predicted the birth of a son. “You are the last in the line of beatific women. The last of the storytellers and mystics. It is up to you to leave other hints of my legends and our existence. I will have no more daughters to do it for me.”
“Oh, Nonna. You don’t need a great-granddaughter to carry on. You will live forever,” I had said, but Nonna’s prediction had sent shivers down my spine and through my belly.
One year later, Sam had been born male even though the sonogram technician had proclaimed him a girl. I had wanted more children; I still did. There were months that Bryce and I had halfheartedly tried to conceive again, but we were quick to put our efforts on hold at the slightest provocation: a new house, a new car, a vacation, a class reunion, a foot operation.
There were no more daughters. Nonna had been correct. So what? It was a lucky guess that proved nothing. Surely Nonna would not have changed her will based on clairvoyance. Or would she?
I put aside the notebooks and resumed my work on the silver forks. These were the representations of my grandmothers. The prongs, wavy in their design, expressed Nonna’s and Lena’s hair. The two forks fit together like a puzzle. The diamonds glistened on the interlocking hands of the handles. I was pleased with my progress on the place setting.
I polished Nonna’s fork to a reflective finish, a mirror. On the Lena fork, I used a sandblasted surface in a curvy pattern to echo the tines and hint at the scales of a mermaid’s tail. As sculpture, the forks were satisfying, both separately and as a unit, a credit to the endless cardboard mock-ups I made in preparation for these pieces. I smiled as I ran a silver cloth over them for the fifth time.
I derived pleasure from this moment, when creation was complete, but I had yet to share my work with anyone else. Sometimes I succumbed to my inner critic and reworked a troublesome element, but for the most part, those issues were dealt with earlier in the designing stage. My art was good; I was confident of that. I needed no confirmation other than my own satisfaction.
♦ 36 ♦
As I WAS BECOMING more absorbed in my work, I was keeping later hours and subsequently sleeping later each morning. Jules did not necessarily agree with this new schedule. Six-thirty a.m., feeding and elimination: that was his schedule. After the sun had been up for about an hour, Jules dug his nose under the sheet and into the back of my thigh.
“All right. I am getting up,” I muttered.
The dog stood back and waited for me to pull on my robe. He cocked his head to the side, and I realized that my hair was sticking up in the back. Leave it to Jules to announce a bad hair day. I grabbed my brush and gave my hair a quick run-through. Straight and brown, it hung limp to my shoulders, except on those special occasions when I dug out my curling iron and flipped the ends up to give myself a little attitude.
“Better?” I asked, fully realizing the desperation that shows from seeking approval from a dog.
Jules followed me to the kitchen where I prepared a bowl of dog food sprinkled with some leftover chicken. I poured myself some orange juice and leaned against the counter. Travis had asked me to go on the boat today, but first I wanted to update the accounting ledger for my business. I would be forever grateful to my father for insisting that I take those business courses.
As I set my glass down, I noticed the light blinking on the answering machine. I had turned the phone off last night as I often did when I was working on a particularly delicate technique in my studio. I pressed the button.
The monotone
voice announced the time of the call. “Eleven-sixteen p.m.” Who would call me so late on a Saturday night?
“Bobbi, it’s Bryce.” Oh no! Something’s happened to Sam. I knew it instantly. “Sorry to call you so late. I just got back from the emergency room with Sam. It’s nothing to worry about, but he fell from the golf cart tonight and broke his arm. Left arm luckily. A buckle fracture. Very common for kids his age. He’s going to be fine. You don’t need to drive out here. The ER doctor put a splint on it until we make it in to see the orthopedist, who is a client of mine, on Monday. He’s working us into his schedule, first thing, with no appointment. Give me a call when you get this message.”
I panicked and had to redial the phone number three times until I got it correct—the phone number that until recently had been my own. Sam answered on the second ring.
“Hello, Ellingtons.” He sounded so grown up that I wanted to cry.
“Hey, bud, it’s Mommy. How are you doing? I heard you broke your arm.”
“Yeah, and Daddy says I can get a green cast on Monday.”
“Why green? I thought your favorite color was purple?”
“No, it’s green now. For Michigan State colors and to go with the new shirt Daddy got me.”
He changed his favorite color? I tried to hide my disappointment. “Go Spartans. Does your arm hurt?”
“Only a little. I got a lollypop, but it was the yucky orange kind so I gave it to a little girl who was crying.”
“That was nice of you.”
“Here, Mommy, talk to Daddy.” Without warning, Sam concluded our conversation.
I heard some shuffling and Bryce’s voice talking to Sam. “I paused your DVD. Just press the arrow button on the remote.”
Summers at Blue Lake Page 16