The Anna Papers

by Ellen Gilchrist

  The most unbelievable things I have found were the letters from LeLe. I started to burn them up to save her from getting blackmailed someday. Well, never mind that. I put them in an envelope and mailed them to her, insured, first-class mail and I got the receipt back where she signed for them but no thank-you note as yet. She was so strange at the memorial service and spent all her time with Anna’s little carpenter friend. I shouldn’t say that. He is at Vanderbilt engineering school now and doing very well. He is the sexiest thing I’ve come across in years. Some sort of aura about him. So naturally LeLe picked him out. I’m one to talk. Oh, Mike, I miss you so much. I haven’t talked to you all day. As soon as I finish closing up this apartment I am going up to Boston and spend at least a month. They will just have to do without me for a while. What else?

  Jessie came over yesterday afternoon in the middle of me sorting out the rest of the clothes for the Goodwill. She had a letter from King Mallison, Junior, in her pocketbook and asked me if I wanted to read it. Poor little motherless child. She had already shown it to Mother and read it over the phone to Olivia. She has half the boys in town in love with her but she has to hang on to these love letters to make up for Olivia being invited to go to Washington.

  “The terrible part is that Olivia’s in love with him too,” she said, and lowered those long eyelashes and looked so innocent. “Oh, Aunt Helen, what will I do? I can’t do this to Olivia, but I like him and he likes me. I guess I should talk to Dad about it when he comes home tonight.”

  “Do you want any of these clothes before I give them away to the Goodwill?”

  “Don’t give them away, Aunt Helen. Not yet.”

  “It has to end sometime. We can’t keep this stuff forever.”

  “I would like her hats,” Jessie said, and walked over to the dressing table and put on one of Anna’s hats, a gray felt slouch hat for winter in the city. Her golden hair fell out below it onto her shoulders and then I began to cry and so did she and that was the end of yesterday’s work. We went over to Momma’s instead and kept her company until Daddy came home.

  Here is a copy of the letter from King in case anyone is interested.

  Dear Jessie,

  I dreamed last night that you were in New Orleans watching me play rugby in the park. Sometimes the guys on the Tulane team let me play with them when they’re in the park and sometimes I play with them on the Tulane campus. So you were there watching me and somehow you fell down and broke your leg and I had to carry you home on the streetcar. We got on the streetcar right in front of Tulane and you had on this white dress and I was afraid it would get dirty dragging on the ground. I took you home and put you in a bed with flowers all around it and my dad came and stood at the foot of the bed and played the guitar for you.

  I think meeting you is the turning point in my life. I told this shrink my stepfather sends me to about it and he said I might be right. I want to start doing really well in school and maybe go to Tulane to law school or be an architect. I don’t want to be some crazy cynical kid getting drunk at Tipitina’s and having a bad reputation. Uncle Phelan said you are going to be at Highlands for Christmas. So are we.

  Did I forget to tell you that I love you? I love you. My mother says men never have the courage to tell women they love them. I will never forget as long as I live seeing you in that room in that green sweater. We will be in Highlands on Wednesday night, the 22nd. I will call you as soon as we get there. I can come over no matter how late it is. Will they let me see you that late? Do I need to write to your dad and ask him? Well, I’d better go now.

  Love, King

  Could Anna be missing all of this? Could Anna really be dead? I know no one is going to believe this but I saw her ghost twice. Once, sitting on her piano bench, at dusk, just as the light was leaving the room, the day after Mike left to go back to Boston. She was just sitting there, laughing at me. So you found the coins, she said. And then: You better go on home now, Helen. You better go home and fix dinner for your husband.

  The second time was a few days later. I came down the stairs holding some papers in my hand, a story about a character named Finn who is just like our cousin LeLe. I guess LeLe wouldn’t care what you wrote about her. She told me once she had had every important man in the American South for a lover. Anyway, I was coming down the stairs of the apartment. I will miss being there with the stark walls and half-empty rooms and shadows everywhere, and I saw Anna’s ghost standing behind a green velvet chair smiling at me. She was being so kind and sort of funny and it didn’t scare me like it did the first time. Didn’t make me want to run away. Here is how she looked, like a hologram, half real and half sort of smoky. But her face was clear, and her hands. She had them lying one on top of the other on the back of the chair. She said, Helen, I want you to be happy. I want you to have anything you need of mine.

  “Was Mike your lover?” I said. I couldn’t believe I said it. I didn’t even know I wanted to ask that question. She just shook her head, like no, that isn’t anything to bother about. Then she was gone and I turned on all the lights as fast as I could and left the house with the lights on until I came back the next day. The mind is a funny thing. I know I was just making that up about the ghosts but it tells me one thing. She really is dead. She isn’t in Europe. She’s at the bottom of the sea. That is done.

  I’m going to Boston next month. To stay a long time and talk to people at the university about her papers. She left them to four different universities. Fickle to the end.

  The only things I am keeping for myself are two things in her own handwriting. One is a page out of a Giant Jumbo coloring book, signed with DeDe’s name. It is a picture of a mother dinosaur feeding a young dinosaur some leaves. Mountains in the background. I remember sending it to Anna because it was the first time DeDe ever wrote her name. The leaves are colored green, the dinosaurs are brown, the mountains in the background are yellow and orange and purple and pink and blue. Underneath DeDe’s name Anna had written, “So she’ll be able to think about things that aren’t there.”

  The other thing I kept was a poem by Sappho, part of a poem by Sappho copied on a piece of yellow legal pad. “Queen, Cyprian, fill our gold cups with love. Stirred into clear nectar.” It is a great consolation to me to think that people were having a good time that long ago. I don’t think the human race would have made it this far if someone wasn’t having fun at least part of the time.

  Also by Ellen Gilchrist

  The Age of Miracles

  The Anabasis

  The Anna Papers

  The Annunciation

  The Cabal and Other Stories

  The Courts of Love

  Drunk With Love

  Falling Through Space

  Flights of Angels

  I Cannot Get You Close Enough

  In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

  Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle

  Net of Jewels

  Rhoda: A Life in Stories

  Sarah Conley

  Starcarbon

  Victory Over Japan

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