The Anna Papers

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “I haven’t had an affair at the Emerald Beach since nineteen sixty-eight,” Anna was saying. “I had an affair with one of the quarterbacks for the Chicago Bears. I think he was a quarterback. It was a lot of fun but I was calling people up by the second day to get them to come down. That’s always a bad sign.”

  “That’s a sign of whiskey,” Phelan said. “Let’s don’t get drunk. Let’s don’t even drink the martinis. I’ve been wanting to fuck you for about twenty years, Anna. I don’t want to drink with you. I want to make love to you. Come over here.” She slid across the seat of the car and cuddled up against his arm.

  “Tell me about Africa,” she said. “Tell me about killing lions and tigers. Say a lion was killing all the children of a village and they called you and asked you to come and get rid of him.”

  “It’s happened.” He was getting his serious look.

  “Oh, bullshit, Phelan. Don’t start that stuff.”

  “It has. The last one I killed was maimed and had been killing everything that moved for twenty miles. It took a month to track and kill him.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we had a party.”

  “Do you fuck the black women over there?”

  “No, I take my own women. Or I do without. It’s pretty uncomfortable. You don’t think about fucking much in the veldt. Intercourse assumes huge proportions under those circumstances. You don’t go looking for it out there.”

  “Like going to the Emerald Beach?”

  “Yes.” He put his hand on her leg and began to move it up and down. “Goddamn, you’re a fine piece of something, Anna. What a waste for you to live alone. Why don’t you move in with me?”

  “Maybe I will.” She laughed again. “If I like the way you fuck me.”

  They drove along in silence then, the long hills of North Carolina rolling along beside them, the beautiful woods and fragrant fields and a thousand shades of green in the brilliant cloudless spring afternoon. Anna was forty-three years old and Phelan Manning was forty-two years old and yes, they still knew how to have fun.

  As if Phelan Manning wasn’t my boyfriend every day of our lives. As if it wasn’t me who broke his heart. As if I wasn’t the one who had enough sense not to marry him when Daddy told me not to. What in the world was he doing with Anna when they didn’t even like each other? It might not be true. Maybe she just used their names because she was too lazy to make up fiction ones. Fictional or whatever they call it. But it sounds just like them. It sounds just like something they would do except for the part about going to bed with one another. I just guess Anna and Phelan never even heard about sexually transmitted diseases. I know they never heard about monogamy or fidelity or any of the other small inconveniences civilized people have to put up with. Well, here’s the rest of the story—

  Later, in a suite of rooms overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, they took off their clothes and lay down upon the bed and began to examine each other, muscles, bones, scars, stretch marks, tight and loose flesh, nails and skin and teeth.

  “You are holding up remarkably remarkably remarkably well,” Anna said. “Look at this muscle. This is a divine thing.” She was examining the long muscle of his hip.

  “When do we get to make love?”

  “When I get through looking you over.” She sat up in the bed, crosslegged and still wearing her bracelets and her earrings. Wearing a small pink undergarment that had been handmade in Paris, France, and had cost two hundred and fifty dollars and was about to become drenched in sweat and end up torn and lying on the floor in about one minute because Phelan Manning was just about to decide that he didn’t give a damn if she was his best friend’s sister or the sexiest cheerleader he had ever seen bouncing around a gym floor because now he wanted to fuck her and he was tired of playing games.

  “Come here to me,” he said. “Come to me.” And she came.

  It is a fault of some people that they can only desire what they cannot have. Anna Hand was one of those people. So was Phelan Manning. Three days later, after they had both had a wonderful time and fucked each other like teenagers and gone swimming in the pool and waded out into the Atlantic Ocean and sat for hours on the warm sand telling stories and walking along the beach and even gone out and bought a couple of joints and gotten stoned, just for good measure, just to be sure they left nothing undone. After all of that they were not falling in love and they packed up their bags and drove back to Charlotte, North Carolina, in a light rain. They didn’t talk much now, just sat on the front seat of the car, holding hands and being sad as hell that they could not fall in love. “I love you,” Anna said, when Phelan left her at her door.

  “I love you too. Want to have lunch on Tuesday?”

  “If I can. I’ll call you.” She leaned in the doorway and kissed him once again. “Damn,” she said.

  “Damn,” he answered. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  ADDENDA: A BIOGRAPHY OF PHELAN MANNING

  (by Anna Hand)

  Phelan Phinnessy Manning, born 1943, in an army base in Indiana. (Terre Haute? Call old Mrs. Manning out at Summerwood and ask her.)

  Raised in Jackson, Mississippi. Summers in Charlotte, North Carolina. Education, Columbia Military Academy, Columbia, Tennessee, Baylor Military Academy, Chattanooga, Tennessee. Sewannee, University of the South, Harvard (two years). Degree in engineering. Small manufacturing plants in Texas and Mississippi, duck decoy factory in Atlanta. Where did all of Phelan’s money come from?

  One sister, Crystal Manning Mallison Weiss, dancer, collector of wealthy husbands, famous southern beauty.

  Parents, William Phinnessy Manning and Christine Manning. Father a businessman and sometime politician. Mother, a typical indulgent southern lady. Why are Crystal and Phelan so unusual? What did the union of Big Phinnessey and Christine create? Solve this problem. Why did Helen like Phelan so much? Was it wrong of Daddy to keep them apart? Why has Phelan never appealed to me?

  This is me again (Helen). Most of the stuff makes sense. She had an orderly mind. Folders are dated by events but I can sort it out.

  Except the mathematical equations. I don’t know what they mean. I think it’s about physics. There are some letters from some Englishman who is some kind of nuclear physicist and pages of these real small figures—like math problems. I’ll show it to Phelan when he comes back. Or to a professor at the university if I get time. For now I’ve put it all back where I found it, in a folder marked The Midas Syndrome.

  “Hang on to your chlorophyll,” that was written on the top of one page. And “Let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.” That was on the page dated two months before her death. There are seven pages of calculus and trigonometry problems. A drawing (like a maze) of Summerwood (notations of survey markers; pages from books at a courthouse somewhere). Could it be a treasure map? A joke? How long did she know she was sick? Did she know before Brian told her?

  Anna and Daddy: Why did they fight all the time? This is killing him. A death blow. That she would die this way. A terrible treasonous death. “She knew you loved her.” I keep telling him that, but it isn’t true. Here’s something she wrote about him: “He doesn’t know how to love. He probes and pushes and demands and extracts and extracts and extracts and is never pleased or satisfied. He has harmed us all by being so powerful and demanding. Jealous. A jealous king. Everything he touched turned to gold.” (This from a folder marked Father, 1969.) Here’s a strange coincidence. Daddy is always saying, “Hang on to your gold.”

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, NOVEMBER 3, 1985, 2:00 P.M.

  I cleaned out the little cherry desk Mother gave her when she was sixteen. I have one just like it only mine has been refinished and looks new. Jack Benoit did it for me last year. I was going to give it to Stacy before she started throwing up for Jesus. I’m not trusting her with anything until she comes to her senses. She’s driving me crazy trying to get part of Anna’s money to give to that preacher who has her hypnotized.

  Never mind Stacy for now. I�
�m Anna’s executor and that’s my main concern this year (for everyone’s sake).

  There is this little black ledger. About five inches by seven inches with figures of money and dates:

  F.T.O.M. $22,000.00 Feb. 20, 1984

  F.T.O.M. 17,000.00 Apr. 11, 1985

  F.T.O.M. 50,000.00 June 10, 1985

  F.T.O.M. 54,000.00 July 22, 1985

  It is almost $150,000.00. Some are marked K.R., others say C.G.L., others A.E. There is a drawing stuck in it, a parallelogram.

  I think it might be something she has invested or maybe something for a book she’s writing. I put it back in the desk and locked it.

  TUESDAY: I AM GOING TO WRITE DOWN EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT ANNA

  Anna. What she looked like, what she wore, what she read, how she slept, her bed, her shoes, her gowns, her cosmetics, her fingernails, her feet and legs, her hair. Her way of turning her head and listening, her bells. All her life she would buy bells and wind chimes and set them out so the wind would never let her forget that we are spinning. She liked to hang strings of bells on doors or over the arms of chairs.

  She was far away from us. Either far away or completely here and all the way into our heads, digging in and searching for secrets we didn’t even have. Everyone in this family tells everything they know the minute they find it out. She was always planting ideas in our heads, giving us books, writing us letters with half the words underlined. Later, when she was older and the family fell apart, she left and went off to the mountains and wrote things that shocked and hurt us. Do people need to know that much? In the end she forgave us and came home.

  Did we need forgiving for being ourselves? Where was I? I was going to tell you what she looked like. But I am thinking of how she would always disappear. I was two years younger, her baby sister. She was the oldest and I was second. She was always in the world for me, like Mother or Daddy. I can’t believe that she is gone. Perhaps, if some heaven exists, but that’s crazy to think like that.

  I was always in her shadow and I didn’t mind that, as long as she allowed me to stay there. But she would disappear, out to a corner of the lawn, hiding, or down the riverbank or up a tree. She would climb higher and higher, up a magnolia or pecan or crepe myrtle, knowing I’m afraid of heights. Once she propped a ladder against a pecan tree and when she was in the low branches kicked it down so I couldn’t follow even if I wanted to. It was the tree our grandfather hung himself from when he got cancer. When (if?) Anna followed him to hell, when she turned her back on God, scared to death of pain or disfigurement, when she stepped off into the ocean off Biddeford, “into the trillion stars” as she wrote in the letter she left. On that night I remembered how of all the cousins only Anna would climb that tree, or play on the patio below it, or set her dolls on the wooden table or swing in the creaky web-covered swing. She said she could remember sitting on his lap and wore yellow all her life in memory of how he loved her in that color.

  No wonder no man could ever satisfy or keep her. If she had been able to have children perhaps she would have been satisfied to stay with one of them. She was so restless, liked so much to be alone. Maybe she willed herself childless. God knows she hated to take care of people. Where is she now? Why did she leave us in that terrible way? I must keep asking these questions while these cold rainy days go by. Then Christmas, then Mardi Gras, then her birthday, then mine and then spring. I will be well by spring, this grieving will be over. I have enough to do without missing Anna. My girls are acting as crazy as loons. And my boys too. My God, I’m getting as critical as she was. Maybe she is haunting me. Maybe it’s being over here all alone. As alone as Anna was when she went up to New England to die. But she wasn’t alone. Philip was there. That poor man. He can’t believe she didn’t tell him. I can believe she didn’t tell me. It is just like Anna to die without telling a single soul she was going to. How did she keep from telling?

  But I was talking about her clothes. I was going to tell you how she dressed and what she wore.

  When she was working she wore an old pair of gray wool slacks and a light brown cardigan sweater. She wore leather tennis shoes or high brown boots. She wore her hair straight and parted on the side. She only wore makeup when she went to town. She wore leather gloves that covered her wrists. You would have known she was somebody special if you saw her on the street. So self-possessed and careless. So cocky.

  She owned thousands of dollars’ worth of beautiful clothes she never wore. She would get into spells of buying them. Then she would give them away. She would give my girls armloads of things. Calvin Klein and Giorgio Armani and Valentino, Geoffrey Beene and Nipon and beautiful white blouses and sweaters of all kinds. Boots and shoes. Three fur coats and a leather raincoat from Paris and an old houndstooth jacket she had written her first book while wearing on winter nights in the house in the mountains. I bet she wore it to die. It would be the thing she would want to wear to die. Surely she didn’t want to die. I have never known anyone who loved life as much as she did. Seemed to love it. I imagine she put on that jacket and maybe took a small bag, but if she did we never found it. It never showed up anywhere. Some hotelkeeper in Biddeford is still wondering what to do with it, I suppose. It’s in a closet somewhere waiting to be claimed. She mailed letters from Boston but he didn’t see her mail them. She must have fucked him one last time as much as she loved to fuck. Listen, this is too much. I don’t have any business writing this stuff on her typewriter. I’m beginning to sound just like her. I’m going to the grocery store and get some food to feed my family. The girls are coming over and I’m not going to write any more of this just now. How do they know when to stop? The ones that do this for a living.

  17

  She used to say, Helen, if anything ever happens to me, be sure and go lock up my papers so Momma and James won’t burn everything up. Okay, Anna, I’d say, if anything ever happens to you I won’t let them burn your papers up.

  Her workroom, office, whatever you want to call it, was only a spare bedroom in her house. The girls were disappointed when they saw it. They had imagined it more like something at a play, looking out upon a lake or with a chaise lounge or a nice walnut desk.

  Anyway, when they called me from Maine and told me what had happened I went straight over there and double-locked all the doors. The other executor is a poet up in Boston. I called him and he told me just to lock everything up and not to move anything until he got here. His name is John Carmichael, an Irish name. She called him Mike. He could be one of her old lovers. I think he used to be in New Orleans, a long time ago. It all seems like a long time ago.

  The house was in perfect order. Not a thing out of place. There was a note pinned up on the wall above the typewriter. A quotation about infinity. It said science can only give us glimpses of what is going on. “These concepts belong to a level of reality which is above our heads.” She had underlined those three words. Do you think that meant she had started to believe in God? It would make things a lot easier for Momma if she thought Anna had started to believe in God. I read a poll the other day and it said ninety-seven percent of the American people believe in heaven and think they are going there but they think only sixty percent of their friends will get in. It is unlikely Anna will get in if there is one. She didn’t want in. She said the kind of people that will get in wouldn’t amuse her. She said a lot of things I hope she didn’t mean. Here’s a list of the records she had out on the floor. The Koln concert by Keith Jarrett, Andreas Vollenweider, Verdi and Puccini, Dire Straits, Bach, Tales from the Vienna Woods, Motown hits, Mozart, Pachelbel, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Loggins and Messina. She used to play music for my kids when they were small. She used to read them books. She read them the King Pellinore chapters out of The Once and Future King when they were so small they could not have understood what any of it meant but they would sit still and listen. She had a lovely deep voice, a haunting voice. Well, anyone would tell you that. I guess the married doctor knows it. I bet he feels like hell. He probably thinks he m
ade her do it. I would if I was him. She might have wanted him to think that. There were darknesses in Anna. There was a part of her that was capable of anything. Which she proved to us all over and over, before we even got to this last terrible darkness. I forgive her. I swear I do. I completely understand and forgive her.

  What she liked. She liked to read The Bear and The Old Man and the Sea and The Bridge of San Luis Rey. She hated Finnegans Wake and had reservations about Picasso. She liked Woody Allen and Fellini. She loved Tommy Tune. She saw a musical called Nine about ten times. She liked to be in love. She fell in love too easily, she fell in love too fast, she fell in love too terribly hard, for love to ever last. Every time I ever heard that song I thought of Anna.

  But I meant to write down what I know about freedom. I came over here with the dishes not done and my teeth unflossed and the beds unmade to write about the way Anna felt about freedom. She thought about it all the time, talked about it, brooded upon ways it could be taken from her. She knew too much about our family to ever let down her guard a moment. Daddy is a communist where the family is concerned. From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. So naturally Anna never got a cent or a car. Also, she was expected to show up at every college and school that any of our children or even cousins were going to. Show up and lecture and refuse to be paid. He made a deal with her that if she would do it for free or give the money back after the school paid her, then he would reimburse her. But he never did and Anna got really mad about it. She and Daddy would invent something to argue about. She never could get him to admit that she was more wonderful than the rest of us. That’s what she wanted from him. Momma said that to me. I didn’t say it first. So anyway, that was Anna and Daddy, and I guess some of those fictional fathers she created were more like him than he wanted to admit. He pretended the only reason she wrote books was to make money and he said anyone that read novels deserved whatever they got.