The Anna Papers

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “I suppose we should find you a hotel. Then we’ll have a drink and think it over. There will be a lot to do tomorrow.” He started the car. He settled back and began to drive. It was dark as a cave in Boston, Massachusetts, that night. Not a star. Even the street lights seemed dim.

  TUESDAY, 8:00 A.M.

  I’m getting used to being in here now. In her room, at her typewriter, sitting in her chair. It’s cold, though. I moved a space heater in. One of those new ones that looks like a radiator.

  I was going to go through the poems today. It will take my mind off my problems. Lynley can’t seem to find himself. He thinks of one grand scheme after the other but they don’t work out. And DeDe living with that boy in Atlanta. Just living with him right out in the open. They never even mention marriage. And Stacy, I can’t even think of Stacy. Some days I wish I’d strangled them in their cribs, or never had them. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. It’s too hard to be a parent. We can’t hand over our lives to them, can’t give them careers, can’t go to work for them and have marriages for them. What would they do if Spencer and I died? Rootless, they are rootless except for us, Momma and Daddy and Spencer and me, holding down the fort here in Charlotte. If it wasn’t for us there wouldn’t be any place for them to call home. It’s strange to be a mother, forever and forever called upon to sacrifice and suffer. They don’t suffer for us. When Momma had shingles last year they didn’t offer to go over there and sit with her. She was in such pain. Where will they be when I am that age? I guess Stacy will come and get me and introduce me to her simpleminded friends. I guess DeDe will call me up and say some smart-alec things to me. At least Lynley is bright. He’s bright like Anna and Daddy. Not that being bright did Anna much good. All she had in the end was cancer and a married man.

  There’s always Kenny. At least he’s married, even if Eugenia doesn’t let him come over much and even if I’d rather never have a grandchild at all than have one out of her womb. Oh, I mustn’t do this to myself. The world is out there. I must stop.

  Four days later: I am better now. Imagine Anna grieving over never having children. She didn’t know what a blessed life she had. How did she think she had time to write those books? All that time to think and reflect and make up things. Time to be her full self with nobody screaming or pulling at her or getting the chicken pox or being exposed to homosexuals and dope.

  No one ever knew Anna. She never stayed long enough in one place. She’d come in your house and walk around looking at everything, then she’d sit you down for a talk about whatever was on her mind, why Jodie should get a job, how to get the kids off dope, who was an alcoholic, what was wrong, what school I needed to go to for further education, books I should read. Then she would go to the bookstore and be back in an hour with the books. Later, she’d find the books and take them home with her. She had so many parts to her, so many roads and valleys. When we were small we would celebrate New Year’s Eve together. At twelve o’clock we would go out on the back porch and beat on pans and yell and scream. I remember how big the stars always seemed on nights like that, brilliant and white and my big sister, Anna, beside me, beating on the pans. We were alone a lot when we were children, the two of us, now that I think of it. Alone in a bed having chicken pox. Alone with a book she was reading to me. Hiding from James and Niall and Daniel and Louise. I don’t know how this family got so messed up but I think it was the money. Daddy made a lot of money when Anna and I were in junior high. He had it by the time the rest of them were in school but Anna and I can remember a small frame house on a tree-lined street. Neighbors that baked bread. Momma making our dresses. The whir of the sewing machine. The smell of new fabric, dotted swiss and chambray and checked pinafores. Momma cooking and us setting the table and Daddy pretending to think asparagus was poison.

  Wild asparagus we picked by the railroad tracks. Life was better back then. And then my grandfather died and Momma was sick all winter and the other babies began to be born. Too much of everything. After that it was always too much of everything. Too much paper, this whole room full of paper to be sorted out and put in boxes and decided upon. Here’s something I found today that’s pretty funny. One of Anna’s diets:

  7:00 Water, one egg.

  9:00 Four-mile walk. Water. Three carrot sticks.

  10:00 Water. Herb tea.

  12:00 Water. Salad from McDonald’s. No dressing.

  The rest of the page was blank. She never could concentrate on deprivation, hunger, keeping her mouth shut, doing without. We used to roller skate on the street in that little neighborhood where we were happy. They had so few cars that you could roller skate on the asphalt road all day. Anna could go backwards as fast as I could go forwards and we would dance on our skates and sing “God Bless America” and “We Three Kings of Orient Are” and do figure eights.

  “It is not the poverty of our solutions,” she once wrote to me. “It is the enormity of our problems.” She was talking about the children, about Kenny and Lynley and James, and Crystal Manning’s son, King, and so many more. The sad uncertain children of our friends. They don’t have anything to do. No one likes to work anymore. Except for artists. But even they have critics that say horrible things about them and try to hurt them and put them down. People are jealous of anything wonderful they see. Even Anna had to put up with that. They loved her at first and could only say good things about her, then they turned on her. She always told them to go fuck themselves. I’ll say that for Anna. She called up the New York Times one time and told the executive editor to go fuck himself. Of course she had a bad temper. I never forgot that after she got famous and was so calm and serene looking when she would show up in public. With her famous light-hearted sense of humor and all that. Her New York clothes and coats from London and Italian shoes. Underneath I could always see that bad temper shining through. I guess it came in handy when she walked off that pier into the ocean. I guess it took getting mad to make her do it. She could have said something like, I’m not going to live very long, Helen, and I want you to know I love you. Then she could have gone on and walked off the pier and no one would have stopped her. Into water that deep wearing all those clothes and leather boots. I think they filled with water and took her down. Or maybe she just wanted to look wonderful the last time the married doctor saw her. A white parka lined with fur and dark gray slacks and knee-high boots. That’s what he said she was wearing. And a scarf. I can’t believe they can’t find the body. I will never believe she’s dead until I see that body.

  Phelan Manning’s cuff links on the dresser beside her bed. I was the one that Phelan loved. The year he broke his collarbone playing football, the year I was Junior Maid in the Homecoming Court. I went with him and wore his class ring and I was the one who held the other end of the streamers when he decorated the gym with his arm in that polka-dot sling he wore all fall. He never cared a thing about Anna. He said Anna was a bookworm. We used to make fun of her.

  His cuff links on her dresser beside her rings. A box of pearls and a small white jewelry box full of costume jewelry and a gold bracelet that belonged to our grandmother and a pair of Phelan’s cuff links. Big squares of gold with ivory in the middle. Maybe he gave them to her. But I think he left them there. Imagine Anna in bed with Phelan. There wouldn’t be any air to breathe for the ego taking up all the room.

  He has the nicest shoulders, such an elegant body.

  All the Mannings are elegant people. Charming and witty and full of themselves. Well, she may have gone to the coast with him to forget the married man but she didn’t keep him. No one could keep Phelan, which is why I had enough sense not to marry him. He is famous all over Africa. He went into the bush after an injured lion and the story made Sports Illustrated. He went through a hive of swarming bees. James was with him. He said the bearers wouldn’t even go where Phelan goes. Phelan never was interested in anything but sports and playing chess and hunting. Daddy told me if I married him I would be a widow all my life and he was right. So now
he’s back in town and living with his grandmother at the old Manning place out in the county near the airport. If these cuff links belong to him then they are worth a lot of money and I should give them back.

  So I called up Phelan and asked him to come over to Anna’s apartment and talk to me about Anna. He came that afternoon. It was a beautiful day, the sun shining on the lake and I had made some cheese straws and had a drink waiting for him. We sat down on the sofa and I came out with it.

  “I found a pair of your cufflinks in Anna’s bedroom. I guess she must have borrowed them from you.”

  “No, I gave them to her. She forgot the cuff links to a dress.”

  “Where were you?”

  “On the coast. Last spring. We went down to see if we still knew how to have fun.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes, we did. Where are they, Helen? The cufflinks.” I took them out of my pocket and handed them over. He held them in the palm of his hand.

  “There was no one like her. No one could take her place.”

  “She was a coward to kill herself. It’s almost killing Mother.”

  “Your mother had no right to ask for Anna’s pain.”

  “She could have tried a few things first.”

  “Like what, Helen? Having her breasts cut off? Can you imagine Anna doing that? Now can you really?”

  “No.”

  “I applauded when I heard she’d done it. I would have helped her if she had asked me.” He stood up then. “I have to be going, Helen. How are things coming with her papers?”

  “It’s a big mess. I’m not getting anything done. I stay over here for hours every day and it seems I don’t make a scratch on the surface. Her other executor is coming. He’ll be down next week. He’ll take some things back to the publisher.”

  “Take your time with it. That’s my advice. They won’t be less valuable later.”

  “That’s good advice. Look, don’t you want another drink?”

  “No, not now.” Then he took me by the shoulders and kissed me on the cheek and hair. Then he was gone, and I stood for a long time by the door looking out at the road.

  Here’s a piece of paper I found today. “He puzzled over reality in the world outside his work, it was presumably a place where people could be happy, laugh, bear children.” There are thousands of pieces of paper like that. Pages torn from tablets. Sometimes I think she believed the things she wrote were true. That the people she made up were real. She made this paper world out of pieces of our lives and out of dreams. I wish Phelan would come back. I wish he would tell me all that happened. Everything they did, everything they said. Where they stayed, what they had to eat, what they did to each other and how it felt and if they went into the ocean, letting the waves play with their legs. Anna loved the ocean. Born under the sign of Pisces and now this terrible unlucky end.

  Here is something else I found. “It is our disease to want to contain everything within the frame of reference of a psychology or a philosophy. After all Justine cannot be justified or excused. She simply and magnificently is; we have to put up with her, like original sin. But to call her a nymphomaniac or to try and Freudian-ise her takes away all the mythical substance—the only thing she really is. Like all amoral people she verges on the Goddess.” [Lawrence Durrell]

  James says the married man should be forgiven for not knowing she was going to do it. “Although,” he added, “I think he knew she was sick deep down. I talked to him again last night. He said he knew it wasn’t what it seemed. He said she was in a state of grace. ‘What do you mean by grace?’ I asked him. He said, ‘I mean she was so completely wonderful and beautiful and wise, the way she would lift a fork to her mouth or the way she touched me. As if the whole world was transfigured and illumined.’ He was going on. I think he had been drinking.”

  “I’m writing down some things on her typewriter. Some things of my own.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “About the family. About the children.”

  “How is Lynley?”

  “He’s trying to find a job. It’s hard to find one this time of year. It’s pretty dreary.”

  “I hope he’ll find one.”

  “I hope so too.”

  On a more cheery note, here’s what’s happening out in Oklahoma. Daddy has fallen in love with the whole Indian nation. He says we should all go live in Oklahoma and not send the children to college. Jessie flew home so she wouldn’t fail all her courses but Daddy is staying awhile. An old friend of his from Wyoming is coming to meet him and they are going to drive back across the country together. Mother refuses to discuss it.

  Also, here’s the main part. Olivia has been invited to go to Washington, D.C., in May to compete in an international debate contest and Daniel and Jessie are going to go and hear her. It turns out that the principal told Daddy that she had been invited and that is why Daddy drove her home. He is so crazy about those two little girls he won’t let them get on a plane. What is going to happen when he wants to drive everyone to Washington? That’s what I’d like to know.

  Mother says Jessie is receiving love letters from King Mallison in New Orleans. Oh, thank God my girls are past that stage. I would rather not know all these details but Mother will tell me whether I want to know or not. She is obsessed with the grandchildren. She thinks of nothing else. I don’t know how she has time to get dressed for thinking about them. How does she sleep?

  THURSDAY, 2:00 P.M.

  “The forces of barbarism versus the forces of civilization.” That’s the beginning of an unfinished essay.

  I have come home to this little agrarian capital to forgive and be forgiven. To kiss my father on the cheek and listen to his advice. To be my mother’s friend, to stop being jealous of my brothers and sisters. To count my blessings and bestow kindness upon my kin. I have failed. All I do is count the waste and make mental lists of changes all the way back to 1961 when the first obstetrician gave us the first bottles of black mollies. First I started taking these goddamn diet pills WHILE I WAS PREGNANT because a doctor was fool enough to prescribe them to me. Then my sister-in-law took them and I aborted the first baby and hers was born to an alcoholic mother because she would be so goddamn hungry by the time night came that she drank to get nourishment into her body. A mother’s body is supposed to be full and rich and fat. A mother is supposed to feed her babies but instead I killed mine in my womb trying to keep my weight down. Well, it’s true. Those black mollies Doctor Grayson gave me were the start of it. No one in our family had ever been an adulterer or a drunk or a dope addict or divorced the father of their children. Although Granddaddy committed suicide and so did Uncle Daniel.

  I don’t know what to do with this stuff. I can’t let anyone publish all this stuff about our family. The other executor is coming Saturday. He’s flying in from Boston. He’ll get here at noon. Well, I’ll get this cleaned up before he comes. I’ll just throw the embarrassing things away. I will wear my new gray dress and that pink and green scarf Putty sent me from Dallas. It’s from a museum. I’ll bet someone from Boston will like that.

  IV

  Helen

  20

  Helen left the office and began to walk toward her mother’s house. It was a beautiful sunny day. The bulbs were coming up. The birds of North Carolina were everywhere, flying and singing, picking up seeds in the grass. Her mother was sitting on the patio, looking marvelous in a pale green printed dress. She was sipping a cup of coffee and watching the birds on her lawn. She smiled and waved when she saw her daughter. Helen bent down and kissed her. “Anna was writing about our grandfather’s death,” she began. “She was going to publish it in an autobiography.”

  “Oh my. Well, throw it away.”

  “She said it was a great act of courage, to die that way.”

  “Oh no, it made us all sad. He didn’t even leave a note. At least Anna left a note.”

  “Most suicides don’t leave them. They’re in too big a hurry, afraid they’ll lose their
courage. I think it’s better than a terrible horrible death in a hospital hooked up to tubes. I think Anna was right.”

  “You don’t know, Helen. It was terrible when my father left that way. He was so sick. Anna wasn’t even sick yet. He had tried it before.” She muttered into her knitting. Helen had ruined her beautiful morning, her lovely spring day.

  “What did he do?”

  “I don’t know. He tried to drown himself. It didn’t work.”

  “Well, it worked for Anna.”

  “Please don’t talk about it anymore today, Helen. If you don’t mind. It’s good of you to sort out her papers. We all appreciate it. I know it’s very hard on you, staying over there. Trying. Don’t stay over there all the time. Protect yourself. She had too much power over you. She always had a way of making you do things.”

  “She isn’t making me do anything. I’m enjoying it. It breaks the routine of my life. I’m writing some things myself. Did I tell you that?”

  “That’s nice.” Mrs. Hand put down her knitting and pointed to a feeder by a kitchen window. “Look at that mockingbird. He listens to jazz on that Negro station from the college. Look at him turn his head.” Helen laughed. Her mother was so serious about plants and birds. Her hair done to perfection and her little silk dress and her nails polished, sitting here watching the birds, playing jazz for them.

  “Oh, he’s such a darling.” Mrs. Hand stood up and walked nearer to the feeder. “He comes every day. Look at them, Helen. How could there be so many wonderful colors?” She waved her hand around the yard, which was full of trees with swings and bird feeders and bird-baths and flowers and shrubs. An English garden. There were birds everywhere, redbirds and bluebirds and jays and robins and tiny rice birds that ate the pieces the larger birds dropped.