“Mother, you’ve lived in this house for over fifty years! How can you sell it?”
“Don’t yell, Madeleine.” My mother flipped her hands into the air, her balletic fingers waving me away. “I’m right here.”
“I’m not yelling,” I said, even though I was.
“Sharon is here to go through the house with me, and I’d appreciate it if you’d stop with your hysterics long enough for us to do that.”
“I’m hardly hysterical,” I said, and that, at least, was true.
On cue, Sharon reappeared at the doorway and my mother turned to her as though she were an enormous relief, which she probably was, for all kinds of reasons. The two of them walked into the front room and I followed, mostly because I didn’t have anything better to do. As my mother guided Sharon around as though they were on the Parade of Homes tour, and Sharon took pictures and made notes to herself, I looked around, trying to see the house through someone else’s eyes. I could hear Sharon’s tone, and I knew she was making a colossal list of things my mother was going to have to fix or change or update. I couldn’t wait to hear that conversation.
My parents’ house had always been a showplace, more museum and shrine to family heritage than home. As a child, I had longed to touch everything, largely because it was off-limits, but also because everything was so beautiful. There were delicate bone china teacups to use for tea parties, tiny porcelain figurines I could pose and shift around to tell the stories that were always running wild through my mind (I was an only child of older parents, and often dreadfully lonely), antique furniture to climb, silver to smudge, and perfectly ironed, handmade table linens to drape myself in for costumes—bride, sheik, Greek goddess, attendant at the queen’s ball.
When I was a child, my parents had maintained a few employees—a cook, a housekeeper as well as a maid, a gardener, and the occasional backup dancer, a handyman or a builder, usually. Having “help” had always seemed old-fashioned and indulgent, but looking at the house now, I understood. It had been built for a large family and lots of guests. The furnishings were from another time, when there had been a full staff to take care of the endless dust, the silver that oxidized without any attention, the linens in need of ironing. And my mother was busy. You could make fun of ladies who lunched all you wanted—really, it was my favorite hobby—but my mother’s work mattered. She had raised and contributed literally millions of dollars to charities. And that, even I had to admit, was more important than vacuuming.
I carried my suitcase upstairs and tossed it into my old bedroom, watching Sharon making another note as I did. Probably “Madeleine should put her suitcase away instead of throwing it on the floor.” Duly noted.
“Can I see the attic?” Sharon asked.
“It’s a little chaotic,” my mother said. She pulled at the door, but it had swollen slightly in the heat and wouldn’t budge.
“Let me,” I said. I gave it a firm tug and it popped open, groaning to express its displeasure. The trapped air rushed out at me, stale and musty. “We’re in,” I said, like I was engineering a bank heist.
The stairs were so narrow I had to walk with my feet sideways so they would fit on the treads. When I was little, the attic had been one of my favorite parts of the house, a place to find a hundred mysteries and compose a hundred stories. A dress rack with plastic bags holding my mother’s old clothes, including her wedding gown, yellowing delicately in the silence, and enough vintage clothing to provide me with hours of dress-up entertainment. Boxes and trunks filled with the detritus of family shipwrecks, inscrutable objects from times gone by—shrimp forks, salt cellars, rolling ink blotters, monogrammed wax seals—piles of photographs of unidentified ancestors, and the occasional piece of broken jewelry, which I would generally stick in my hair, so when I came down for dinner I looked like a magpie had built its sparkly nest on my head.
“We could advertise this as a playroom,” Sharon said as she reached the top of the stairs, as though she had heard my memories. I could imagine what she was thinking—toy boxes lining the walls, a pink plastic castle, stain-resistant carpeting—and it made me feel protective of the attic’s homeliness. It had always been playroom enough for me with the ancient, creaking wooden floors and dust-covered hatboxes and trunks.
While my mother and Sharon talked about air-conditioning and Pottery Barn furniture, I sat down by one of the windows and looked out over the yard, the way I had so many afternoons when I was little. I didn’t remember its being so warm, but it certainly was now; sweat was already trickling down my forehead and I lifted an arm to blot it away.
Next door, the restaurant was open for lunch. I could see people sitting on the porch, the motion of servers walking back and forth. Beyond that, the entire yard had been transformed into a garden with slender paths between the beds for easy passage. It was early in the season, but the vegetables were already growing there; besides the tomato plants by the edge, I could see a small herb garden near the opposite fence, rows of strawberries, vines of squash spreading over the ground, and neat, orderly rows of lettuce, blossoming out of the earth like bridal bouquets. My stomach growled. I was definitely going there to eat sometime soon. I had never been one of those people whose appetite fell away under stress and grief. In fact, my consumption of snack cakes rose in direct proportion to my emotional turmoil.
When I turned away from the window, my mother and Sharon had disappeared back downstairs, heading for the basement. Looking around the attic, I imagined going through these things, packing them up, sending them off to auction or to the landfill, and it made me feel terribly wistful, as though I were saying goodbye to a part of myself I would never get back.
In front of me was a low, small trunk. Leaning forward, I opened it to find a stack of folded, faded fabric and a wooden box with a sliding top that turned out to be full of dark pebbles, rescued from the gentle smoothing of the water by some curious hand long ago. Below those were an accordion file full of financial paperwork, a stack of envelopes bound together so tightly the rubber band had bitten into the centers of the envelopes on both the top and the bottom, a pile of books, and a few composition books, their covers yellowed and dry. Picking one up, I flipped through the pages. It was a mishmash of things: a listing of clothing comprising a girl’s wardrobe, some poetry, a draft of a letter to the aforementioned girl’s mother with lots of cross-outs and exclamation points, a hastily drawn calendar, and some absentminded doodles. I looked through, smiling, thinking this could have been any girl’s diary, really, from anytime. Substitute high-heeled sneakers and short overalls for petticoats and gloves and it could have been written today, but the dates sprinkled throughout the pages told me it was from 1914. I flipped back to the front cover and there, in a valiant (if failed) effort at pretty penmanship, was my grandmother’s maiden name: Margaret Brooke Pearce.
Putting the notebook aside, I pulled the next one out of the trunk. This one was labeled four years later: 1918. It was more of a diary than the first notebook, though there were still occasional digressions into the mundane: pages of addition adding up to a teenage budget, a list of girls’ names and where they were going to college (I felt a little surge of pleasure at this: 1918 and the entire graduating class of girls—only thirty, but still—were every one of them going to college). In February, I read this entry:
The ’flu is here, and the school is in a complete panic. They can’t send us home, they say, because too many people are sick and we’d only infect them on our journeys. Instead, they’re quarantining us here. Everyone is awfully disturbed, but I think it’s rather romantic. Of course, I don’t have it yet. I’ve always been healthy as a horse, as Mother says, so maybe I won’t get it at all?
And a few weeks later:
Well, Lucinda’s