The Anna Papers

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “We should get some work done,” Helen said, moving beside him in the bed. “I guess that means I’m starting to feel guilty.”

  “Don’t regret this. Don’t regret anything you do with me.” He pulled her close to him. He was falling in love, no mistaking that old madness. What time was it? What day could it be? Where else did he ever confuse the mornings from the afternoons?

  “I don’t know what time of day it is,” he said. “That means you have me. I think you have me, Helen.”

  “We ought to get dressed. I want to put my clothes on.”

  “Do you want me to go get them for you?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll go put on mine. That will be a beginning.” He got up, disentangled himself, stood beside the bed looking down at her. She looked absolutely terrified and he loved her for trying not to let it show. “Put on something of Anna’s. These closets are full of clothes.”

  “I will in a minute. Go on. We’ll open up a box of papers. We’ll start sorting them. Don’t look at me anymore right now.”

  This is the garden, he thought. Never leave the garden to look for the garden. “How about going back to Boston with me,” he said. “We could take some boxes of papers and work on them up there. I have people at the university who could help us. Will you go?”

  “If I can get away. When are you leaving?”

  “I have to go back Tuesday. Will you go with me? I want you to go up there with me.”

  “I might,” she said. “I really might do that. If you really want me to.”

  “I want you to. I definitely want you to.”

  “Get dressed then.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  Fifteen minutes later Helen came downstairs wearing one of Anna’s satin slips. “I found something the other day that puzzles me,” she said. “I found some papers with numbers on them and I can’t decide if it’s fiction or about money. Look at these.” She handed him the papers.

  “You look gorgeous in that slip. Come here and let me feel it.”

  “I’m going to get dressed right now.”

  “Come here, Mrs. Abadie.” She moved close enough to be touched and Mike began to read the papers she had handed him.

  “Anna was terrible at math,” Helen said. “She always said, ‘Anyone can count.’ It might be something about a mystery novel. She said she was going to write one, with a buried treasure.”

  “Were you close to her?” He put his hand around her waist, ran his hand across the soft yielding fabric and the softness of her stomach and down across her thigh. He kept on wanting to fuck her. He hadn’t liked fucking a woman that much in years. He accepted it and liked it. He didn’t question it or try to blame it on the weather or on death.

  “Come to me,” he said. “Let’s go back upstairs and make love again.”

  “You want to?”

  “Yes, why not?”

  The phone was ringing. It was Helen’s husband, Spencer, and he said she had to get home right away.

  “What for? I’m busy, Spencer. We don’t have much time to do this. I may have to go up to Boston with Mike and work at the university on them.”

  “Well, you can’t do that. That’s why I’m calling. DeDe just called from Atlanta. She’s in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “She broke up with Ronnie. She was really upset. She couldn’t get you and the maid didn’t know the number over there. You’d better go home and call her.”

  “Well, I can’t do it now. You take care of it, Spencer. You’re the one who spoils her to death. You talk to her.”

  “Don’t make any plans about leaving town right now, Helen.”

  “I may have to. It’s a lot of money for the children. Besides, it’s my sister’s work. It’s something I have to do.” She looked at Mike. He was smiling and shaking his head. I am so fortunate, Helen thought. I’m beginning to be as lucky as Anna was. I could go home and make love to Spencer too. My God, I’m becoming a sex maniac. Unless the children die. Then my luck would stop. Unless DeDe goes to join her aunt in the ocean. Oh, my God. “What’s her number? Where did she call from? Goddammit, Spencer, I’m sick and tired of these children driving me crazy. Aren’t any of them ever going to grow up? For God’s sake, I can’t even get this work done that is for their future. Tell me the number. I knew it was a mistake to send her so far away to school. Give me the number.” She wrote it down and made a face at Mike. “That damn Ronnie. I never did trust him and he’s too old for her anyway. She might be pregnant for all we know. She might be pregnant and about to abort our grandchild. She told me the last time she was here that he didn’t want any children no matter what.” Helen hung up on her husband and called the number in Atlanta. Her daughter DeDe answered the phone and began to recite her problems. DeDe droned on and on about the past weekend and the difficulty of living in a small apartment and the trouble she was having with her sinus.

  “Are you pregnant?” Helen said at last. “DeDe, are you pregnant?”

  “Yes,” the girl answered. “I am.”

  “Oh, my God.” Helen sat up.

  “He doesn’t want it. He wants me to get an abortion.”

  “Come home this afternoon. Get on an airplane and come down here.”

  “Okay. I’ll call you back. Let me call the airport.” DeDe hung up and Helen stopped making faces and shook her head.

  “She’s going to have a baby,” she said. “I’m going to be a grandmother.”

  “Is there a map with this? With this mystery novel stuff?”

  “Yes, in the folder. It’s with the rest of the stuff. Look, I’ll have to leave for a while. I’d better go find Spencer and talk to him. My daughter may be coming tomorrow.”

  “It’s all right. Go do what you have to do.”

  “Daniel’s planning on taking you to dinner tonight. At his house, with his daughter.”

  “Fine. You go on. I’ll call him later.”

  Helen went upstairs to get dressed. Mike followed her and sat on the bed watching. She adjusted each piece of clothing very carefully before putting on the next one. He liked the way she dressed. He liked the day and the work that lay before him and this strange new woman, this mother of five with her naivete and her candor. She reminded him of Anna in calm moments. I’ll do the papers justice, he promised himself. I’ll do it right.

  “I can’t think of a thing right now but DeDe,” Helen said. “I really have to go on and see Spencer and talk about this.”

  “I know you do. Go on. I’ll be here when you get back. God, that was a lovely morning.”

  “Well, I’m glad you liked it.” She looked at him very seriously, she wanted to give him a sexy seductive look but she had lost the mood. She kissed him on the cheek instead and then left him and went down the stairs and out the door and into the car. It was a relief to think of DeDe, her crazy dancing daughter, DeDe. Her silly, man-crazy, spoiled-rotten DeDe. Imagine DeDe’s womb filling up with a baby. DeDe didn’t even know how to cook. Helen began to drive in the direction of her husband’s office. All of a sudden he seemed very dear to her, his body beside her in the night and her own body swelling up time after time with his children and now, the child of a child. The daughter of my daughter, Helen was thinking. Oh, I should go by and tell Momma. I will call Momma as soon as I get to Spencer’s office.

  Mike was due to leave on Tuesday afternoon. In the meantime DeDe had called back four times making four different sets of plans to fly home from Atlanta. On Tuesday morning, when it was too late for Helen to change her mind and go to Boston, DeDe called one last time and said she had made up with her boyfriend, and was going to stay in Atlanta and “work things out.”

  “The little spoiled-rotten brat,” Helen said. She was wrapped up in Mike’s arms. She had come in the door of the apartment and gone straight to his arms. “I could have gone to Boston with you if this hadn’t happened. Now she probably won’t even have the baby. She and Ronnie will probably go out and abort my grandch
ild without even asking me about it. Oh, I am going to miss you so much.”

  “Someone named Phelan called. He’s coming by.” Mike disentangled himself. “He sounded like a nice man. He said he was a friend of Anna’s.”

  “When’s he coming?”

  “Right now. He said he wasn’t far away. Is he a relative?”

  “Distant. Well, I’m glad you’ll get to meet him. We can ask him about the map stuff. I think it might be about a book we can’t find.” The doorbell was ringing. Helen went to the door and there was Phelan, wearing corduroys and a leather vest. He came in and shook Mike’s hand and was told about DeDe’s pregnancy and then Helen handed the folder with the map to him. “What is this about, Phelan? Did Anna say anything about this to you?”

  “I don’t know, what is it?”

  “It’s a map of Summerwood and the old graveyard and figures, like surveying. Or math. I think it must be some mystery book she was writing. I want to find it if I can. It might be a valuable manuscript.”

  “Well, it’s a valuable map.” He was laughing. “Jesus Christ, Helen. This is about the coins. What a goddamn joke. It’s the coins. I’d forgotten about the coins.”

  “What coins?” Mike moved in.

  “A bunch of goddamn Krugerrands her daddy was selling her. Old man Hand is a nut for gold. He’s a goldbug from the old days. He bought into gold at thirty-five dollars an ounce and if I’d done what he told me to do when he told me to do it I’d be the richest man I know. I’ll be goddamned. She kept on burying them.”

  “What are you talking about, Phelan?” Helen took the map from him.

  “Anna must have buried all those coins she got off your daddy out at Summerwood. We did it the first time one night when we were drunk. She told me she was going to dig them up but instead she must have buried some more. Well, shit, let’s go out there and see what we find. Have you got a shovel around here, Helen?”

  “Of course not. But there’s one at the place. We can stop at the house and get one. I want to show Summer-wood to Mike anyway.” She stood up. Mike was smiling and shaking his head. He can’t leave now, Helen was thinking. Now he’ll have to stay another day and I can go with him when he leaves. She walked over to the other side of the room and put her arm around his waist. So that’s how it is, Phelan thought. Well, I’ll be goddamned. Anna, you should have lived to see this. We finally got Helen to leave the yard. “Let’s go,” he said out loud. “Mike, you got any boots with you? You might need some boots.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Mike answered. “I don’t mind getting my shoes dirty.”

  They piled into Phelan’s Porsche and drove out the highway toward Summerwood. “The goddamn coins,” Phelan said. “Only Anna would go off and leave something like this. God bless her, well, just goddamn I miss her and wish she’d lived a thousand years.”

  “I think she forgot,” Mike said. “She was thinking about dying, about her death. She didn’t give these coins a thought, whatever they turn out to be.”

  “She gave everything a thought. She knew what she was doing every minute of her life. She could shoot as straight as a man. We used to go out to shoot skeet. Well, never mind.” Phelan gripped the wheel. What goddamn East Coast Yankee could understand Anna. To hell with him.

  “Phelan,” Helen said. “Let’s be nice, okay. Mike came all the way down here in the middle of a semester to help me. And don’t drive so fast. There isn’t any hurry.”

  Phelan gunned the motor, weaving in and out of the lanes of traffic. They turned onto asphalt, then onto a winding road that led through pine trees to the house on Summerwood. They stopped at a shed and found shovels and Phelan opened the trunk and rearranged some boxes. One box contained rifle shells. Another held six bottles of Napoleon brandy. Phelan took out a bottle and gave it to Mike to hold. Then he reached down into a corner of the trunk and found a leather case that held four dusty silver cups. He carried the case over to an old outside spigot beside the shed and washed out the cups and shook the water off and put them back into the case. “Hold this too,” he said to Mike, and Mike obeyed. Phelan loaded the shovels in the back of the Porsche and tied the trunk lid down with a piece of cord. Then they all got into the car again and drove up to the graveyard. It was on the top of a flat hill, surrounded by oak trees. A breeze was blowing from the south.

  “A breeze is always blowing up here,” Helen said.

  “That’s so,” Phelan agreed. “Well, bring that map and let’s go dig. I hope she put them all in one place but you can’t tell from the map. I’ll show you where we put the ones we buried.”

  “You want this bottle of brandy?” Mike asked.

  “Good thinking,” Phelan said. “Open it up.”

  Two hours later, when all the boxes had been found and dug up and opened and half the brandy had been drunk and the other half spilled on the grave of one Archania Duval Hotchkiss, they sat on a marble slab and counted the coins. There were 461 Krugerrands in mint condition, 60 American Eagles and 47 Canadian Gold Leaf coins. “There they are,” Helen said, “the children’s legacy from their aunt.”

  Mike and Phelan were leaning on their shovels. “Mike,” Phelan said, “would you get another bottle of brandy out of the Porsche? It’s in a box in the trunk.”

  “We could steal them,” Helen said. “They’re going to do the children more harm than good.” She looked up at Mike. “You don’t have to do everything Phelan tells you,” she added. “Tell him to get his own goddamn brandy.”

  “I’ll get it,” Mike said. “Why not? I spilled the other bottle.”

  “If we stole them we wouldn’t have to fool with the income tax,” Helen went on. “I mean, how am I going to explain this? They’ll think there are thousands more. I can see Stacy right now, handing Anna’s coins over to that preacher that has her hypnotized.”

  “I’ll steal them if you will,” Phelan said. “I’ll be glad to help.”

  “Anna would want us to steal them.” Helen picked up a box and took off the rubber bands and extracted a roll of coins and unwrapped them and began to take them out of their plastic wrappers. “I want to hear them clink.”

  “I’ll get the brandy,” Mike said, and walked off down the hill toward the car.

  “So you’re fucking this guy,” Phelan asked. “Is that the deal?”

  “No, I am not fucking him.” She had several of the coins in her hand now, dropping them on each other like cards in a deck.

  “You’re going to ruin those, Helen. Those coins are in mint condition. They lose their value if you scratch them up.”

  “What do you think I ought to do with them?” She sat back on the tombstone. She very carefully placed one of her leather riding boots on the very edge of the stone so that her thigh was tight beneath her skirt. She had been doing this kind of stuff so long she didn’t even know she was doing it.

  “When you get tired of him it can be you and me,” Phelan said. He moved nearer. “Go to Africa with me for the winter. Let Charlotte chew on that.” He waited. Helen didn’t answer him. He stuck his hands in his pockets and went on. “It should have been you and me years ago, Helen. Your old man’s got every one of you by the balls, I know that. But you could still escape. A week away from here you would have forgotten they exist. Fuck a bunch of grown children running your life. Well, I’ve said too much.”

  “Go on.”

  “It could be you and me. It always was. It’s not too late.” He lifted his shoulders, looked down at her out of his crazy black eyes.

  “I wouldn’t fuck you if you were the last man alive,” she said. “All the people you’ve fucked, you’ve probably got every disease known to man.” She lowered her eyes, then turned to look in the direction of the car. Mike was walking back up the hill carrying the brandy. The sun was past the meridian, halfway down the sky behind a bank of clouds. It was a gorgeous, a memorable day. My boots and skirt match the trees, Helen was thinking. I bet I look divine. Phelan placed one of his handmade Justin cowboy boots on the
tombstone next to her riding boot. He decided it would probably be at least three months before he actually got in her pants. A tractor started up in a nearby field. A 747 crossed the sky. Phelan patted the tombstone with his boot, thinking what a wonderful world it was after all, full of so many women waiting to ruin you and make you broke and horny and happy and occasionally even satisfied. Helen tossed her hair and turned her face toward the poet from Boston who was going to take her away from it all.

  “Here’s the brandy,” Mike said. He held it out and Phelan took out a pocket knife and cut the seal and filled the small silver cups. He handed one to Helen, then one to Mike, then filled one for himself.

  “To life,” he said, and raised his cup.

  V

  The Gods

  21

  The boxes are all packed now. The only thing I don’t know what to do with is the stuff she wrote when she was young. All Daddy did after she died was show people the poetry she wrote when she was young. Once, when she first started publishing, he xeroxed copies of some poems about Jesus she wrote when she was young and taped them over the pages in her books that had sexual scenes in them. Mike says those books will be very valuable someday. He thinks Daddy is a beautiful man. Well, it’s like him to think that. He’s the sweetest man I’ve ever known, and the kindest. Oh, God, it’s so strange to make love to him. I know I’m going to hell for this but I don’t care.

  Also, he is fascinated by this stuff about Olivia and Jessie. Daddy is going to ride on the plane with them to Washington to hear the debate contest. He hasn’t been on a plane in twelve years, ever since a plane he was on hit some air pockets over Mobile. He wouldn’t even go see Lynley graduate. Well, I have never given in to jealousy and I won’t start now.

  They are all going to Washington together in May. Even Mother is going. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Olivia won. She really is a wonderful little girl, a very very nice little girl. I only wish some of mine had manners that nice. Exquisite manners, like Daniel has always had. It might be inherited. Anna thought everything was. Of course she always went too far with her ideas. If it is inherited then they could splice some genes or something onto some of mine and I wouldn’t mind. Especially onto DeDe.