“Everyone knows, Georgianna.”
“How does she know about my mother’s murder?”
“The murder of your mother is a legend. Not just at the camp, but in the town of Missing Lake and in Riverton and all the places inland from the river.”
“Sixty-seven years?” Georgie says. “Everyone is dead who was alive then.”
“People remember stories.”
They are sitting now, their feet side by side resting on the coffee table in front of the unlit fire.
“Nice in here, don’t you think?”
“A little cold,” Georgie says.
He takes off his jacket and puts it around her shoulders, pulling the soft lining next to her neck.
“The fire’s banked and I’ll light it unless you’re ready for bed.”
“Not yet.”
“It is almost one a.m.”
“I can stay up all night.”
Georgie is thinking through the night from midnight to morning.
They’ll talk.
Sleepy with the fire and the cold, the smoky room and the smell of pine.
Let’s lie down a bit and then we’ll go back to the lodge, he’ll say to her.
She’ll stretch—nonchalant, although that will not be her state of mind. And then, almost casually as though it’s a nap they have in mind, they’ll go to the camp director’s bedroom and lie down on their backs on the double bed side by side. Roosevelt will let his arm fall across her stomach as if by accident. She’ll turn, not quite on her side, and lift her head toward his.
“I’m actually not at all tired,” Georgie says.
“But I am,” Roosevelt says. “Today is a big day in my life and I’m exhausted.”
He takes her hand and pulls her up from the couch.
“We’re leaving?”
“It’s already tomorrow,” he says.
They walk down the cabin’s steps, the light from his flashlight forming a perfect V on the path ahead, and they step into the light.
“You came here to find out about your father,” he says, taking her hand. “I don’t have information about the murder beyond what William said.”
He leans on his cane for balance.
“But I do have something to tell you about him.”
“Is it bad news?” she asks quickly.
“I don’t think it will be.”
He stops on the path, standing under the stars, his head tilted to the heavens.
“When I moved here, I fell in love with the stars. Many nights alone—and it’s cold in the north and often clear—I’d come on the porch of the lodge, which is the only heated building, sit on the steps and look at the stars.”
“I love maps of the land,” Georgie says, “but I don’t really know about the stars.”
“There,” he says, pointing to the sky. “That brilliant star?”
“I see it,” she says.
“It’s known as the Pole Star or Polaris or the North Star.”
His hand around hers is rough. She’s conscious of its strength.
“The Pole Star remains completely still while the other stars move around it.”
His cane is under his arm, the beaming flashlight in his hand.
“Or so it seems, but that is deceptive. The stars don’t really move of course. It just looks that way because of the rotation of the earth.”
“Is that what you were going to tell me?”
He laughs.
“That’s not what I am going to tell you,” he says catching his breath. “You understand I loved your father.”
“Yes.” She is tentative. “I do.”
“I don’t think you are really surprised by what I have told you,” he says. “You already knew that answer and were looking for something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were looking for your father, whom you never really knew,” Roosevelt says. “And now you have found him.”
They walk to the lodge, along a narrow path that opens to a grassy field high above the river, the air crowded with night sounds: animals, likely skunks, scramble in the bushes, the long hoot of another owl in the distance, the splash of the river against the bank, a light but chilly breeze.
The sky ablaze with stars explodes above them.
“There is a story,” Roosevelt says, stopping just before they come to the clearing that leads to the lodge.
“About my father?”
“Yes, about your father.”
LIGHTS ARE ON in the main room of the lodge, but upstairs is dark where the rest of the family is sleeping.
They take a seat on the top step under a high sky.
It’s cold now, long after midnight, and she moves closer to Roosevelt for the warmth of his body, for his hot breath on her cheeks as they both lean forward against the light wind.
He hesitates as if in search of the right words, but when he speaks, his voice fills the night air.
“When William first came to Washington in the winter of 1930 to live with his Uncle Irving, he got the news that his mother had died in Lithuania.”
“I don’t know anything about his family except that there was an Uncle Irving,” she says.
“His mother was not old but she died, and he was so homesick that he’d sit in the kitchen of Irving’s house the way he used to sit in his own kitchen in the village, and watch my mother cook. This I heard from Clem.”
“So they were friends.”
“They were. He’d go to her house downtown at the end of the day after he finished his job at construction and she’d finished cooking and they’d talk.”
“He spoke English?”
“He did speak English, but with an accent which he never lost.”
He leans against the post on the side of the porch, Mercy resting her head in his lap.
“And they fell in love.”
Georgie is silent.
“They fell in love?”
This is not the story she has imagined.
It would never have crossed her mind that Clementine was more than an excellent cook who worked at the house where her father lived when he arrived in America.
“They were lovers? Your mother told you that?”
“She did,” he says. “And then after a couple of years he moved to Michigan to study, and that’s where he met your mother, as you know.”
She sits in silence beside him.
“No wonder you wanted to be in touch with me.”
“We have a common history and I was the only one who knew,” he says. “It was a loss.”
“But tell me …” Georgie says under her breath. “I don’t quite understand why William didn’t take Clem with him when he moved to Michigan?”
He leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees.
“Because it was 1933 in segregated Washington, D.C. That would not have been possible.”
Georgie stares out at the starlit darkness. Her breath thin, her heart thumping in her chest. Even Roosevelt must be able to hear it.
All along, she had expected to discover simple news to close the book on William Grove. Yes or no. He did it or he did not. She was prepared for the worst.
But not for this news.
Roosevelt stretches his legs down the steps, crossing them at the ankles.
“Now you understand, Georgianna,” he says. “This is the only real answer I have to the question you came here to ask me.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she says.
“Nothing to say,” Roosevelt replies.
“Except …” Her voice so soft he needs to lean down close to her lips to hear. “Since that is what happened between them, maybe we have an obligation.”
He wraps his arm around her shivering shoulders, leaning his head against the top step.
“See above us, on a clear night like this, there is a blanket of stars,” he says.
“It’s a beautiful night.”
“I’ve studied the galaxy at the library in Riverton and think of myself
as a kind of celestial navigator,” he says. “Often when I’m alone at camp, I sit here at night if it’s clear and the sky is full of stars.”
He lays his hand gently on her knee.
“It’s a funny thing, but knowing something about the stars gives me a sense of power not over anything—more like believing in God, which I do not. But that kind of power.”
“What am I looking at?” Georgie asks.
“You’re looking at the W lying on its side facing north. See it? And Cassiopeia. A very bright star named for an ancient queen.”
“I think I see it,” she says, her voice thin as paper.
It is as if her lungs have closed down and all she wants to hear is Roosevelt talking to her. Just words tumbling out in his voice. About anything—stars or trees or birds. Even words in another language.
“Just talk to me,” she says.
“I will,” he says.
And he does.
The familiar pressure on Georgie’s chest seems to be lifting. She can actually feel it deflating, disappearing. So accustomed was she to its presence, she had not even known it was there.
Now in its place, a feeling of lightness.
“I need to know the galaxy,” she says.
“I’ll tell you what I see,” he says. “Above Cassiopeia is her husband Cepheus with a pointed hat and a pigtail. And then to the left, the Giraffe, but you can’t really see him.”
“It’s harder to see the shapes than it is on a land map,” she says.
“True. But what I like about the stars is that you can count on them night after night. Every star in the sky rises and sets about four minutes earlier each day than it did the day before. And every new year we are back exactly where we started,” he says. “That order matters to me.”
“Just name them for me. I love names,” she says. “Like Roosevelt.”
He laughs.
“There’s Andromeda,” he says, “and the Whale and Perseus and Pegasus.”
Georgie is lulled into a kind of calm listening to him. She leans back and rests her head on his chest.
“Is that all the news for me tonight?”
“It’s all I have,” Roosevelt says. “Coming on eighty, I asked myself what if you never found out about your father and my mother? What then?”
“Then I would never know.”
She closes her eyes and stretches her arm across her forehead to cut out the light of the dazzling sky and shelter her eyes wet with tears.
“Tell me everything you know about the sky tonight,” Georgie says without lifting her arm. “And what is happening up there. What everybody is doing.”
“Everybody?”
“The stars,” she says.
And he does.
The story of every star visible on this clear and remarkable night.
MAYBE GEORGIE FALLS ASLEEP. She is aware of sinking into the wooden steps, aware that her mind is empty, her body slipping away, and she wonders in an abstract kind of way what is happening to her that feels at once like dying and living, as if she will awaken from this slow disappearance to herself.
An image wanders across her mind and she catches hold before it slips away.
She is in a large room, a black night outside the window, sitting on a couch with her father, probably in Chicago, and maybe she is already four. Maybe younger.
“We had to make a picture of our home today at nursery school,” she tells him. “And I told the teacher we live in an apartment. Not a home. And she asked me ‘Isn’t an apartment also home?’ And I didn’t know the answer.”
“Home is you, Georgie,” her father said. “You take it wherever you go.”
Had that happened? she wonders now. Or did she imagine or hope it was what he had said. Or did it matter at all whether it was real or imagined? Finally, they were the same thing.
Georgie leans over and touches Roosevelt’s face, lays her cold hand on top of his, bristly and warm against her palm.
“Roosevelt?” she begins.
But there are no words.
Above them, the clear, cold night sky is ablaze with stars as if the stars themselves are falling out of heaven, scattering light across the earth.
From the memoir of Thomas Davies
(for publication)
Iam sitting in the lodge of Camp Minnie HaHa (latitude/longitude TK) located on the Bone River, sitting on the floor in a corner of the room watching my family drink champagne out of paper cups. It is six in the morning. They are gathered at the end of the long table laughing and crying and hugging each other.
Roosevelt—whom I had expected to be either the hero or the villain of this story—is serving spinach omelets and waffles and blueberry muffins.
Nicolas, my disagreeable uncle, is honest-to-God singing.
Beside me, my cousin Oona, sensing that in this room I am the only sensible human (she says who-man), lies on my legs.
I simply do not understand adults.
We came on this journey, which has had its problems, to discover whether my great-grandfather William Grove murdered his wife at the Missing Lake campsite in 1941. Or not.
The answer as it has turned out is Roosevelt.
The news is that he isn’t the villain some of us were imagining him to be. Rather his mother, Clementine, the camp’s cook who never got to cook, was my great-grandfather’s girlfriend. Or lover, as Venus told me—whatever that means.
Now the question of who killed Georgie’s mother is no longer of any interest to the adults.
It is however still important to me.
I cannot imagine that the students at Alice Deal Junior High School off Nebraska Avenue in Washington, D.C., will have an interest in the story of my great-grandfather’s lover as a satisfactory replacement story for murder.
Therefore it falls to me to write the story of the murder as I imagine it might have happened.
These are the significant facts of the night of June 17, 1941, as far as I know.
1. William Grove’s village in Lithuania is about to be invaded by the Nazis. The chances are good that William’s father will be shot or sent to the gas chambers to die.
2. William had a love affair with Clementine—(passionate love affair was Georgie’s description this morning after a glass of champagne).
3. Josephine, William’s wife, does not like William because he is a Jew. The explanation Georgie gave us this morning had to do with anti-Semitism and the War and Josephine’s depression and Clementine coming on the trip with Roosevelt and nobody knowing the real identity of Clementine as girlfriend of my great-grandfather. Including Roosevelt.
4. There has been no mention today of the murder. That is the kind of craziness adults seem to enjoy.
5. So this trip we have taken to Missing Lake was to discover one thing. And now we arrive to discover another that seems to the adults even better than finding the answer to the first thing.
6. So you see my dilemma.
The Story of the Murder of Josephine Grove as I Imagine It
It is the middle of the night. William and Josephine are still awake, maybe lying in their tent, maybe talking, probably fighting—but they are not visible to the rest of the camp should people happen to be awake.
Georgianna Grove who is four years old is sleeping in the tent with the camp nurse far away from her parents and close to the water.
Josephine is in a vicious humor because William is in love with Clementine, who is beautiful and strong. Contrary to Josephine, who is overweight and unhappy.
I should mention that next to William’s sleeping bag is a rope used to anchor the canoes.
William is lying in his sleeping bag on his back, his arm like a pillow under his head. He is thinking about his father standing in the street in his village in front of his house in a line with other neighbors waiting to be assassinated.
I have seen photographs of Jews lined up, their backs to the firing squad, their arms over their heads in brave surrender.
Josephine is lying in he
r sleeping bag, her hands folded on her stomach, and she is thinking about the beautiful Clementine kissing William on the lips, the way I used to watch my father kiss my mother after they danced in the dining room in Chicago.
“William,” she says, interrupting his misery. “You are a disgusting man.”
William keeps his eyes tight shut and does not respond.
“I wish you were dead,” she says. “I want to be the one to shoot you in the head and watch as your brain splashes out all over the sleeping bag.”
William opens his eyes just in case she suddenly has access to a rifle.
“You smell of skunk,” she says.
William sits up in his sleeping bag ready to spring in case she attacks.
“I want to shoot Clementine McCrary and watch her bleed though her shirt, writhing in agony on the ground.”
That is what Josephine says.
William’s hands are in a fist, his body tight-wired for action.
“Jew,” she says.
William leaps up and without thinking, he grabs the thick rope beside his sleeping bag, wraps it around Josephine’s neck and holds it tight until she is dead.
He is tired, but he cannot get any sleep with his dead wife lying next to him, so he picks her up and carries her to the edge of the forest, where he drops her in the root bed of a pine tree. She is discovered the following morning by James Willow, the head counselor.
Walking back to his tent in the middle of the dark night, he is not sorry about Josephine. He knows that he will admit to killing her because he is an honorable man. He imagines that in Lithuania, his father, Dr. Geringas, has been assassinated.
What breaks his heart is Georgianna. His daughter. His only child.
THIS IS THE story I imagine to have happened at Missing Lake, June 17, 1941.
It is the story I will tell when I go back to Alice Deal Junior High in September.
Georgie will not be upset that I tell this story.
She believes the imagination is the truth.
BEFORE WE LEAVE Camp Minnie HaHa, I plan to give this journal to Roosevelt McCrary. I’ll ask him to bury it at the campsite at Missing Lake. He’ll need to bury it deep so the archeologists digging hundreds, maybe thousands of years from now (probably a huge city will have developed on the banks of the Bone River), will discover the journal and put it in a glass case at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., with a sign under the glass which reads:
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