The Anna Papers

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Because she did. Well, don’t put so much butter on it, honey. It will make you fat.”

  “You ought to read the letters she writes to us. She’s a very good writer and she makes A’s. You ought to want to meet her.” Jessie buttered another piece of bread, this time putting twice as much butter as before.

  “Oh, my darling. Please spare me this. I’ve had enough for one lifetime. I just don’t need any more. Bring your bread. Here, put that on a plate and let’s go out to the garden and see the birds. A nest of redbirds are learning to fly. Oh, they are so precious. I could die when they can’t make it. One of them was on the patio for hours last week. I had a terrible time making it fly.”

  “You can’t stick your head in the sand about Olivia forever.” Jessie added three chocolate chip cookies to the plate holding her bread and butter, grabbed a Coke out of the refrigerator, and followed her grandmother out to the patio. “You can’t pretend she doesn’t exist. Aunt Anna says the worst thing in the world are secrets. She says what you don’t know can drive you crazy.” Mrs. Hand led the way and Jessie followed her, eating and lecturing, dropping crumbs on the oriental rugs for Victoria to vacuum up in the morning.

  Well, Grandmother doesn’t even know what to think about me, Jessie decided, as she watched the wake from her vantage point in the hall doorway. That’s because she and Granddaddy are old and don’t want to learn anything new. They’ve had enough. They don’t want anything else to happen and this terrible thing happens that is the most terrible thing anyone could imagine and I know it’s going to make them feel better when they see Olivia. I will bring her to them and they will be glad. Jessie stood in the doorway, casting a cold eye on the wake, watching everyone, sure she was the only one who really understood anything, the only one who knew what people were really doing or why or what was really going on. I’ll never be like them, she decided. I’ll be in London with Momma having a career. I’ll never get to the point where I spend my life saying things I don’t mean to people like the Alsops. I don’t know why they even came over here. I bet they never even read one of Aunt Anna’s books. I can just imagine Mr. Alsop reading one of them. He’d probably go crazy or something if he picked one up. Jessie sniffed, and reminded herself that she should read the books herself as soon as she found time to do it.

  She wandered into the kitchen and spoke to Victoria and made herself a sandwich and then went out into the yard to make sure there was a key in one of the cars. There was one in her grandmother’s Oldsmobile. She took it out and put it in her pocket. She walked around the yard for a while. Then she got into the car and backed it down the driveway and parked it behind her old convertible. She looked at her watch, a new Seiko, a birthday present from her grandparents. She had only had the watch five days. Aunt Anna practically killed herself on my birthday, Jessie thought, and looked up at the stars. The stars were too much, too mysterious and far away. She went in the house and back to the guest room where she had put her suitcase. She took out a long handmade red vest Anna had sent her once from Peru. She tried it on. It was getting too tight in the shoulders. She took out a long pleated navy blue skirt and put that on. It was a skirt she wore to sing in the choir. She put on kneesocks and brown lace-up shoes and then she took it all off and laid it on the bed and put her old dress back on and went into the living room and told everyone goodnight. She set the alarm in the guest room for four o’clock.

  She lay down on the bed. It was all so mysterious and scary. Death was so strange. It could happen to anyone at any moment. They could disappear, be snatched away, get cancer, have their appendix burst and die at school like Mary Harbison almost did. She pulled a knitted coverlet up over her legs. She reached over and got the princess phone and set it on her stomach and called her boyfriend and told him everything that was going on.

  “What will you do when she gets here?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

  “You better tell your dad.”

  “No.”

  “You want me to go with you?”

  “No.”

  “My grandmother died last October. It was terrible. My mom’s still not over it. She cries all the time and she’s got all this stuff of my grandmother’s to sort out. She had this one cedar chest with about four hundred rain scarves in it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. Listen, she had all these bridge clubs and they gave these rain scarves for prizes and she won all of them.”

  “So what will your mother do with them?”

  “She doesn’t know. That’s the kind of thing she’s dealing with all the time now.”

  “I hope I never get old.”

  “Me neither. It’s too horrible. Look, are you going to school tomorrow?”

  “Probably not. I’ll be up all night.”

  “Let me know if you want to go to school. I could pick you up and meet your sister.”

  “I better go now. They might want to use the phone.” Jessie hung up and lay with the phone on her rib cage. She was thinking about Olivia on an airplane. At any moment the plane might crash and her sister would die before they even really knew each other. Jessie squeezed out the first few tears, the rest of them came more easily.

  The sun was barely beginning to light up the fields around Charlotte when Olivia’s 747 landed at the deserted airport. Jessie was standing by the gate. The ticket agent opened the door and three passengers got off, then Olivia. She was wearing the long navy blue skirt and her blazer, carrying a small leather bag.

  Jessie ran to her. “We’re dressed alike,” she said. “It’s unbelievable. We are practically dressed exactly alike.”

  “We’re on a wavelength,” Olivia said. She put down the bag. She took Jessie’s arm and they sat down on the plastic airport seats. They sat back and took each other in. Their eyes would meet, then they would look away. She looks great, Jessie was thinking. She looks so good. She looks so old.

  She looks so soft, Olivia was thinking. Her skin looks like a baby’s skin. She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen in my life. If I could stay. If only they would let me stay.

  “I’ve been crying all morning,” Jessie said. “Sometimes about Aunt Anna and sometimes for you.”

  “Why would you cry over me?”

  “Because Dad didn’t love my mother either. They hate each other’s guts. So why do I get to live with him and you don’t? It isn’t fair. I could turn into you or you to me.”

  “I like where I live, Jessie. I have a good life. It’s okay.”

  “It’s so hard to talk to him. I want him to sit on the floor and hold hands with us and really talk. I want it the way it should be. Not like when you were here.”

  “I want to meet my grandparents more than anything else. To tell them how sorry I am about Aunt Anna.”

  “They want to meet you too. I gave your picture to Grandmother. She’s dying to see you. But she never does anything Dad tells her not to do. She’s his slave because he looks like her father. If I have kids they aren’t going to tell me what to do.”

  “What will they do if they can’t find the body? If they can’t have the funeral?”

  “There’s going to be a memorial service as soon as everyone’s here. But not at Grandmomma’s church. At the Episcopal cathedral because Aunt Anna was friends with the music director. Uncle Niall says the only thing that matters is the music and, well, because she took her own life and she didn’t go to church anyway.”

  Olivia stroked Jessie’s arm. She gentles like a burro, Olivia thought. Like a little jack. Jessie went on.

  “My music teacher is going to play the organ. The one I wouldn’t go to. And we think the doctor’s coming, the married man she was in love with. Dad and Aunt Helen haven’t told Grandmother he is married. Don’t tell her. He keeps calling Grandmother on the phone and she keeps saying she knew Anna was dying, like this is a natural death and no one really took their own life.”

  “My aunt Mary Lily said it was a
ll right to take your life to keep from being in terrible pain. I can’t believe she said that, she’s so devout.”

  “What do you think?” Jessie leaned back in the chair. The place was empty now. The ticket agent had left the booth and no one was within sight.

  “I think it’s very sad that she is gone. For me I thought I would know her for many years and maybe travel with her one day. I would like to travel, to see the world.”

  “Dad takes me to Switzerland. Maybe you could go with us. Oh, you can go. Next summer when we go you’ll come too. I know you will. We see these people that live there, they have a bank and we go to their house on this lake, the most beautiful lake you’ve ever seen in your life. In Vevey. Will you go with us?”

  “If he lets me. If he wants me to.” Olivia removed her hand from Jessie’s arm and straightened her back. Jessie began to cry again. “Oh, God, it’s not fair for you never to go to Switzerland. I’m not going anyplace as long as I live unless you go with me.”

  “Let’s go and see our grandmother,” Olivia said. “If it’s all right. When she’s awake I would like to see her.”

  “She’s awake. There are so many people in that house. You wouldn’t believe who all is here. Some little kids, some cousins that live in Richmond, my cousin Kenny’s little boys, are there. We got them this toy basketball goal and everyone sits around the living room watching them shoot baskets. Those little boys never got that much attention in their life. And Dad’s there. We spent the night over there.”

  “Then let’s go.” Olivia stood up. She remembered something Anna had told her about her grandmother. She is a Christian of the old school, Anna had said. She thinks she is an extension of Christ. She has to do what Christ would do. She models herself on Jesus Christ.”

  Daniel had just put the coffee on and walked outside to see if the paper had come. He had noticed one of the cars was gone but so many people had been there the night before he supposed someone in the family had borrowed it to drive home. His mother’s spaniels were jumping on the fence, begging to be let out of the back yard. He walked over to the fence. Then he saw the Oldsmobile driving up. He shook his head. His heart opened and closed and opened again. His breath caught in his throat from so much strangeness, the strangeness of women, of two beautiful seventeen-year-old daughters. He reached over the fence and patted the dogs. “Wait a minute,” he said. “These girls are here.”

  He stuck his hands in his pockets. He stood in the yard and watched them come driving very slowly up the driveway. Jessie stopped the car beside him. She was wearing the look she wore that always preceded the remarks that began, Don’t get mad until you hear what I have to tell you. Her face was almost clean. She had cried off so much makeup he could almost see her face. Beside her, Olivia stared at him out of big dark eyes. They rolled down the windows and waited.

  “Well, get out,” he said. “I bet neither one of you has had any breakfast.”

  Four people were on the flight from Nashville to Charlotte that same night. American Eagle flight two twenty-three left Nashville at eight forty-five carrying LeLe Arnold, Adam Halliday, Phelan Manning, and his nephew, King Mallison, Junior, of New Orleans, Louisiana. LeLe was on a continuation of a flight from L.A. Adam had finished a trigonometry exam and gone to the airport still carrying his books. He was trying to believe that Anna was dead, he kept hearing her voice. “Goodbye. Adam, listen to me, no, listen to me, I called to tell you goodbye.” Phelan had been in Maine with his nephew, about to go hunting with a party from Europe, including one of the French Rothschilds. It was costing Phelan ten thousand dollars to turn around and go to Charlotte to see if the Hands had found a body to bury. He leaned back in the seat, thinking of Anna’s fine long legs, her mouth and breasts and hair. He was also thinking of King and what a good chance it would be to show him Charlotte at its quintessential most. Mourning and with all those men and women in the house at the same time. Crystal was spoiling him to death in that swamp. It was time for him to see what a feast there was waiting for a man. Phelan was almost asleep when he saw LeLe Arnold stand up and ask the stewardess a question. He had not known she was on the plane. “It’s starting,” he said to King. “This wake is about to begin.”

  King thought his uncle was talking about the stewardess. His uncle seemed to know half the stewardesses in the United States. Also, when his uncle said something was about to begin he usually meant something about women. “See that woman back there,” Phelan went on. “That’s your cousin, LeLe Arnold, from the West Coast, she’s one of the Arnolds from down around Rosedale and Cleveland, Mississippi. She’s the West Coast stringer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. You must have known her when you were little. She and your mother are old buddy buddies.”

  “Should we go back there and talk to her?”

  “In a while. The stewardess just handed her blankets. She might be trying to sleep. We’re all going to need plenty of sleep before this is over.”

  “I’m sorry we can’t go to Germany and France,” King said. Phelan had talked his mother and his school into letting him leave for a month on the promise that he would see the world. He was doing so badly in school that they had all been relieved to get him off their hands for a while. Now King had a lingering suspicion that as soon as the funeral was over in Charlotte he would be right back in Saint Martin’s being bored to death by bored teachers. He shook his head, saw the Alps, lost to him because of some friend of his mother’s dying.

  “How could someone kill themself?” he said. “At least I’d get some good drugs if I had to do it. No, I’d shoot myself.”

  “Pretty women don’t shoot themselves, son. They don’t want anybody to see them dead. Anna wanted to get rid of herself, rid of her body. Hell, maybe she was mad at the cancer, well, she picked the right ocean, the North Atlantic will take a body off your hands. We’ll go up there someday and look at the place.” He put his hand on his nephew’s arm. “Death isn’t the enemy, King. Fear is.”

  “Mother said she might come up. If she can get Crystal Anne out of school. What a brat that kid is. Mother lets her do anything she wants to do. I hate to have her around a funeral. She’ll embarrass everyone to death.”

  “Put your seat belt on.” Phelan removed his hand from King’s arm, tightened his own. The lights dimmed in the cabin and the plane began to taxi down the runway toward the east.

  The plane hit an air pocket over a lake. LeLe woke up from a terrible dream. In the dream she was standing in a long stone room with her father and the rugby player she had been fucking on and off for three years. Her father was wearing a suit. His hands were folded. He stood shoulder to shoulder with the rugby player, they were catty-corner to each other. There were stone slabs everywhere. It was a morgue. Or a museum. LeLe had come there to receive an award, some silly award from the state of California. No one said a word in the dream. I have to get to Charlotte, LeLe was thinking. They have to go with me and take care of me. They have to forgive Anna so I won’t be alone. She sat up in the seat, shook the sleep from her head, reached up and turned on the air vent. Cold stale airplane air rushed down upon her face. She pushed on the light. The young man across the aisle was watching her. He was a good-looking man with a trigonometry book on the fold-out table. A troubled-looking man, a man with things on his mind.

  “Where are you going?” LeLe asked.

  “To Charlotte.” He paused. Twisted his hands together on top of the book. “Someone died, someone I knew.”

  “You’re Adam Halliday, aren’t you? You got on in Nashville.”

  “Who are you? You’re going there because of Anna? You are, aren’t you? I started to ask a moment ago.”

  “I’m her cousin, LeLe. I just came in from San Francisco. I started at five this morning and missed a connection in Memphis. Jesus Christ, I hate airplanes. I hate the goddamn things.”

  “When did you talk to her? Look, come sit over here. I’ll move this stuff.” He moved to the window seat, stowed his book satchel underneath his feet
, made a place for her. He was very graceful. Elegant. A graceful savage, Anna had told her once. “The best piece of ass I ever had and I’m not the only one. His old girls all say it too.”

  “Who told you?” LeLe began. “When did you find out?”

  “She called me right before she did it. She called me about five minutes before she did it but she didn’t tell me what it was about. She said goodbye. She just kept saying goodbye. Everything I said she just said goodbye. It was the strangest conversation I ever had in my life. I didn’t know where the call was from and then she hung up. So I started calling around, looking for her. Dan called me back when they found out. Her brother Daniel. When Helen got back and told them. It was nice of him to call me. I know they didn’t approve of her seeing me.”

  “He’s a nice guy. They never have found her body. Maybe she isn’t dead.”

  “She’s dead. You should have heard her voice.” He turned away. Looked out the window. “She said she’d do this. Every time she saw someone that was really compromised. She said Einstein didn’t get fixed.”

  “What?”

  “Einstein. You know how she liked that stuff. She said when he was old he wouldn’t have an operation to remove a tumor.”

  “We’re going to blame this on Albert Einstein?” LeLe shook her head, raised her hand and pushed the button to call the stewardess. “Let’s get a drink,” she said. “I need a drink of whiskey.”

  The stewardess appeared and took their order. A minute later Phelan came down the aisle and hugged LeLe and sat down on the arm of her abandoned aisle seat. The men were introduced. Adam extended his arm. The men shook hands, looked each other over.

  “I’ve got King with me,” Phelan said. “Crystal’s boy. How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”

  “A long time. Since before she married Manny. Where were you going?”

  “Hunting. I was taking him to the Alps. Well, that’s over. I guess I’ll stay in Charlotte for a while. Take care of Grandmother, straighten out her affairs.”