The Anna Papers

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Wait a minute. I’m getting so lost. If you think all the time about things you get all tangled up. It’s better to just march ahead with your life. I wish Daddy wasn’t so very very sad about this loss. Our loss. She was gone most of her life. We didn’t get to have enough of her. Up in the mountains, she didn’t even ask us to come visit. She was always in mountains, the Appalachians, the Rockies, the Alps, especially when she was married to Francis. Well, they didn’t get to Tibet. They planned to go to Tibet. No one in our family ever got to Tibet, except for Louise and she came home with the hives and was sick for months. The next year she went right back. Of course, Louise is as stubborn as a goat.

  18

  I found this today. I was going to throw it away but I thought I should wait and let Mike [John Carmichael] read it first. Imagine writing something like this down.

  The time I picked up the Norwegian sea captain in the British Airways lounge in Los Angeles and flew across the ocean with him. I knew I was doing it. He was so gorgeous and so tan and looked so irritated and European. I had on that long pleated white skirt I wore all summer that summer. I was so thin and LeLe and I had been having such a good time in San Francisco, eating sushi and running in the hills and seeing movies. Then she backed out on going to Greece with me because the rugby player came back to town so I went alone. The travel agent was a woman from the Philippines and she sent me out to the airport in a white limo driven by a huge black man. It was all so goddamn silly from the very beginning. A woman we knew had died and LeLe and I were trying to shake off the haunting. So I was alone and there he was and he never took his eyes off me the whole time we were in the lounge. Finally I straddled the edge of the sofa he was sitting on and called Charlotte to talk to Mother. I told her I was on my way to Athens and when I got off the phone the sea captain said, Are you going to Athens? and I said yes, and he said, So am I, we’ll be companions all the way.

  He was traveling first class and came and found me in business class and asked if he could sit down. His English was so good and we used my Swedish and some French. It was very jolly and by the time it was dark outside we were eating together. He was drunk by then. I have never seen a man drink that much whiskey on an airplane. It amazes me when people drink and don’t get drunk. I admire it as I do all power and excess.

  So the plane was stopped in Munich because they had blown up the Athens airport and he picked up my bag and took me to a hotel and ordered dinner in German and then we stayed together for three days. I forgot to call the agent in Athens and they thought I was lost. Everyone was looking for me and all I was doing was lying in bed with Hakon listening to stories from the war. He was a child in Norway while I was a child in North Carolina and his father was a hero of the underground. Where is he now, that Hakon? He called me once or twice, later, but it never worked out for us to see each other. We were in different countries. Perhaps I should call him. Perhaps I should make a list of people to see and men to call and maybe fuck before I do this thing. But the pain might start. I am already beginning to look very bad. The fear is on my face. I think I smell of it. I don’t know if I can see Philip without him knowing. He will know. I don’t want him to remember me with fear in my eyes, the smell of fear. What could I take? Cocaine? Dexedrine? Brian would give me a Dex or two if I absolutely begged. I have to touch him once more. I have to see him. Have to prove the world is not niggardly, that we can have something.

  I would call Hakon. If Philip won’t meet me I will fly to Norway or Greece or Spain and see him. If he’s at his place in Spain I will definitely go. What a wonderful lover he was, so strong and funny and wild. It was like playing a wild powerful Nordic game. I thought, this is why LeLe likes the rugby player. To fuck power. A man who goes to sea. I have not missed much. Thank God for that. I was here. I was definitely here and all the time I was here I played.

  The more I read these papers the less I understand her: What did she need from us? What did she want us to do? Why couldn’t she love us as we were? Accept us for what we were? We weren’t as smart as Anna, I’ll admit that. We weren’t as smart and we weren’t as lucky and we didn’t get to live alone and have all that time to ourselves. All those years alone? Nine, ten, however many it turned out to be. She said she would rather be alone than cook dinner for people. She was so selfish. The oldest child gets selfish. Marry an only child if you want an unselfish person. So she went away and then she came home and took the phone off the hook and disconnected the doorbell. Did she love us? I suppose so. We loved her. We needed her. We needed her to look up to and get bawled out by and looked down on when our children married people with no background or education. She was right about that. We have pretty much thrown it all away. I’m crying again. Crying on her typewriter. Oh, my God. I wish I hadn’t even come over here this morning. I wish I didn’t even know Anna. When we were little I would climb into bed with her and she would cuddle me up like I was her little girl and tell me stories about how we would grow up and fly airplanes high up above the clouds and reach out the windows and feed the flocks of geese or talk to the stars and she said we would fly all the way to China and put on an air show for the Chinese. I used to dream about it after she would tell it to me. In the dream I’d be all alone in an airplane and I wouldn’t know how to fly it. She asked too much of us. She wanted us to be like her. She was the only one who ever had Mother to herself. A psychiatrist told me that, when I went in to find out why I never finish anything I start. I’m better now. I say this stuff to myself about putting one foot in front of the other one until I finish climbing up the hill. I pretend like the hill is green and not very steep and covered with beautiful white and gold and yellow flowers. Sometimes I pretend there’s this real good-looking guy with black curly hair standing on the top. With his hands stuck deep down in the pockets of his trousers.

  Daniel came over last night and he was drunk. In a good mood for the first time in weeks. He’s been having a fit ever since that little girl got here from Oklahoma. He wouldn’t let her go home. She has missed almost two weeks of school. “I need her,” he kept telling everyone. “Jess and I need her here.” Daddy has been talking on the phone five times a day to her aunt and the school principal out in Oklahoma because Jessie and Daniel were adamant about her staying. They even went over and registered her in Jessie’s school.

  “What’s happening now?” I said, when he showed up on the front porch. I had been keeping out of it as much as I could. I had enough to do with these papers driving me crazy. “Come on in,” I added. “What’s going on?”

  “He took her home,” Daniel says. “Daddy’s driving her to Oklahoma. He and Jessie and Olivia got in that old car and took off for the Indian territory. Has he got balls or what? Goddamn, Helen, he’s seventy-nine years old.”

  “Oh, my God. When did they leave? He can’t drive to Oklahoma. My God, Daniel, how did you let this happen?”

  “It’s all right, Sister. Olivia’s going to drive. She and Jessie will drive most of the way. He wants to go and so he went. You should have seen them driving off. Momma made them a lunch in a shoebox and they drove off with the windows down. Wait till they figure out he doesn’t even have a radio.”

  “Oh, God, it really is funny. He finally got someone in the car.” No one in our family will ever drive anywhere with him in the car. Momma hasn’t gotten in a car with him in years. If they go anywhere together she drives her car. In the first place he never rolls the windows up.

  “I thought you wanted her to stay.”

  “He’s going to ask them to let her come next year. She’s going to Switzerland with us as soon as school is out. Can you believe that old bastard? I mean, can anyone believe him?”

  I started to say, Daniel, it was your place to go see her family and meet them and ask to let her come here. But I didn’t do it. In the first place it was so wonderful to see Daniel smiling, to see anyone in this family happy for a moment, after this fall. Also, at least someone was taking Olivia home. At least someone had eno
ugh sense to know that a straight-A student is not supposed to be missing weeks of school or being put in a different school in the middle of high school.

  Just picture them on the highway. Daddy lecturing to them about the decline of morals and the failure of the Federal Reserve System and the coming decline of the world and why they should be wearing anti-abortion armbands. Thousands of miles of road before them and no radio. Momma heard from them last night at nine o’clock. They had gotten as far as Alabama.

  19

  Today is the day I start on the filing cabinet. The galleys to the books are rolled up in one drawer and what looks like a lot of poems. Some essays and speeches. Her diploma. She didn’t even frame it. She went back to college to get her degree when she was twenty-six. She had quit to put her first husband through school. Then all those miscarriages. They could have fixed it now. There are drugs you can take. The miscarriages ruined the marriage, so she got a divorce and went back to school. That’s one version of what ruined the marriage. At the time of the miscarriages I was having babies every year and so was James’s wife, so that must have made it harder but she said it made it easier. She was a great believer in DNA. She was always talking about DNA. Later, about replicating something that meant the same thing, only it means the genes want to make themselves into babies and use you any way they like to do it. I don’t like to think about children in such coldhearted ways.

  Anyway, Anna went back to the university since it was right here in town, and she made straight A’s and majored in philosophy. There was this philosophy professor she adored named Doctor Borg and that was what he taught so she took all his courses. The rest of the philosophy majors were thin quiet boys waiting to go to divinity school. Except for this Norwegian aristocrat, a beautiful young woman who had married a Charlotte boy against her parents’ wishes and run away to America with him. She was having a hard time adjusting to Charlotte, North Carolina, and Anna befriended her. By which I mean that she and Anna drank together and hung around the new theater that was just getting started, down in the black section near Seventh Street. Who was Anna sleeping with in those days? I can’t remember, if I ever knew.

  Anyway, she went back to college and got that degree that’s rolled up in the filing cabinet. The day she graduated she gave the philosophy professor a statue made out of the parts of a watch. A man made of a watch. A Bust of Plato, she wrote on the card, and after she gave it to him she came over to my house and cried all afternoon. She was going to miss talking to him so much. She cried and got drunk and she kept telling me this absent-minded professor joke he had told her. “Did you hear about the professor,” he said, “who filed the leaves and burned his papers?” She kept telling me that joke over and over. We were drinking whiskey sours and the children were running around in their pajamas doing anything they liked and later that night Spencer, my husband, came home with a lawyer from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and she left with him. I think that lasted about six months. Spencer blamed it on me and said it embarrassed him to death.

  Also, he is not crazy about me coming over here every day and reading all this stuff with no one with me. If I had died she would have taken care of my children. I guess she would have. So here I am in this room with all these half-finished books and letters and papers and essays and poems. You should see this room. I should describe this room. I should take a photograph of it. First I’ll go get a cup of tea. That’s all there is to eat in this kitchen.

  Later: Her room. Where she worked. A squarish room about twelve feet by fourteen. Closets along one wall with out-of-season clothes and the suit she ran her marathon in and some old cocktail party clothes from long ago. On the shelves are paper cartons of reviews of her books. On the floor a pile of old blue jeans and sweaters and sweat shirts and boots. Boxes of unpacked books. All over the floor are little piles of half-written stories, drafts of novels, photographs, maps, books about ancient Greece. Dozens of them. Two cheap bookcases holding an Encyclopaedia Britannica and the green filing cabinet. An advertisement from a magazine is pasted on the side. A picture of a snow-capped mountain and a caption that says, LIFE IS THE URGE TO ECSTASY. Some cheap Mardi Gras beads are taped to the advertisement and a letter from some little girl named Athena she knew in New York City. I haven’t had the heart to read that yet. Anna was always adopting children and writing to them.

  Some of mine, some of James’s, some of Daniel’s. The ones that got in trouble were driving her crazy last year. My nephew, James, that we had to lock up in the Baptist hospital, and any of them that were drinking or getting fat or not doing well in school. She grieved over them. She went crazy because she couldn’t fix it. She brooded. I think James was the one that really broke her heart. He’s doing fine now, she should have had more patience, should have trusted God. But Anna didn’t believe in God, so how could she trust Him?

  On the darkest nights since her death I think we gave her cancer. That runs in the family, getting sick over things other people do. I have seen Mother break out in hives when the phone rang after midnight and one of the boys had been arrested for drunken driving or the girls came home with their babies. Of course, once when it rang our cousin Harper Lane was dying and Mother had to go and watch him die. He was the good one, the one who never had a drink. Someone else’s drunken daughter ran into him. Life is complicated even in a small agrarian state. Everything happens.

  Well, this isn’t getting that cabinet cleaned out. I was hoping to get done with it and start on the things on the floor.

  It was so wonderful when she moved back here. I was thrilled when I heard it. I really was. I thought she would bring some glamour back to Charlotte, have some of her friends from New York down here to meet us. Go out to lunch with her old friends, let our friends get to know her. Not Anna. She just secluded herself half the time. Took the phone off the hook. Undid the doorbell. Had it disconnected. I’m grieving, mad as hell at the virus that got inside and killed her. Bugs, germ warfare. Maybe it was pollution or maybe something from that nuclear reactor she visited last year. No, this was a virus. She weakened and let it in. She quit taking care of herself and something got in and started eating her alive. Then she did what she did. What our grandfather did. Maybe it isn’t true. Maybe she’s in Paris or Vienna or Rome. The southern coast of Spain. A villa in Barcelona with that Norwegian sea captain she wrote that thing about. And all of this is just a smoke screen so we won’t write to her or call her up or tell her what any of the children are doing.

  I am a normal well-meaning woman with five spoiled-rotten children including a daughter in Memphis who hates her own body and fraternal twins who think the whole world is some private joke for their amusement.

  “She jumped into the sea.” That’s what he said when he called. I was the first one he got on the phone.

  “How long has it been?” See, I wasn’t even surprised.

  “This morning.” She had cyanide. The police say she bought it in Charlotte before she left. She might have taken that first. I’m so sorry to tell you this.”

  “Was she sick?”

  “I don’t know. Something was wrong.”

  “Have they found the body?”

  “I think so. I’m on my way to Kittery, there’s a body there. It sounds as though it’s Anna. I don’t know. I’ll call again when I get there. I don’t know how to help you, what to do.”

  “I should help you. I’ll come on the next plane. Where is the nearest airport?”

  “Come to Boston. I’ll have someone meet your plane. Leave a message with my service in New York. Helen?”

  “Yes.”

  “She said you were the one they leaned on.”

  “No. She was the one that tended us. I’ll come on the next plane.”

  It wasn’t Anna. Whatever has become of her has never returned to cast its hull or bones or torn fur-lined Valentino jacket onto those rocky New England shores. Maybe she was carried up into the heavens by a choir of seagulls like Momma’s old painting of the Assumption. Oh, Anna,
my plane ride to meet your lover.

  “I’m Philip.” He stood before me. “It wasn’t her. There isn’t any word.”

  “Let me see the letter.” We were blocking the other people getting off the plane and he took my arm and we walked down the hallway and out to the baggage claim.

  “Do you have luggage?”

  “No, just what I have with me. Let me see the letter.” He led me to the parking lot and we got into his rented car and he began to drive. He reached in his pocket and took out the letter and handed it to me.

  “Was she in this car?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can feel her here.”

  “I know. Go on. Read the letter.”

  Dear Mother and Father, Helen, James, Niall, Louise, Daniel,

  Forgive me and for God’s sake understand. It had to be this way. I had to let the world be beautiful as long as I could. Curse the curses of man. I have loved you as well as I could and now you’ll have to finish up without me.

  Love, Anna

  “Was there one to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I read it?”

  “Yes.” He took it from his breast pocket and held it out. “The police have seen it. Helen, I asked her to marry me. I came up here to ask her. Please believe that.” He was holding on to the steering wheel. How gentle men are when there is trouble. I was half in love with him too. Just like Anna, to find the best man in the world and have him love her back. Not like my quiet insurance executive, but right out of the silver screen and with red hair.