“…a letter in my mother own handwriting, and one photograph,” I read aloud to my empty kitchen from my legal pad, for the fourth time. I did not sleep. At seven in the morning I called Dante, and then the number on the will, which belonged to a lawyer named Mr. Beaufort, of Beaufort and Pruitt on Bay Street. He answered on the second ring, as if he had been sitting beside the telephone for thirty eight years. “Miss Calloway,” he said, “I have been hoping you would call. Mr. Harrington passed on the second of this month. The memorial is Saturday at eleven.”
The old man who returned the book, Mr. Beaufort told me, was Pettigrew, Mr. Harrington butler of fifty years, who carried a cane with a silver handle and an instruction to return the book exactly as it had been found. “Mr. Harrington could not make a gesture in person,” Beaufort said. “He did everything by proxy. He was ashamed.” With my heart pounding, I asked whether Augustus Harrington was my father. Mr. Beaufort was silent for a long moment. “I believe,” he said, “that is for the envelope to say.”
On Thursday afternoon, with Dante beside me and Mr. Beaufort leading, I walked up the marble steps of the Harrington house on Jones Street for the first time in my life. Pettigrew opened the door in white gloves, tears standing in his eyes. Upstairs, in the library, a portrait of old Judge Harrington hung above the fireplace, stern and heavy browed. Mr. Beaufort and Dante lifted it down with the care of men handling a sleeping child. Behind it, in a small recess in the plaster, lay a cream colored envelope, soft as cloth. The house smelled of beeswax and old paper, and somewhere a clock was ticking, patient as a heartbeat.
A will tucked in a library book, tiny handwriting in a margin, and a portrait that hid something behind it.
I opened it in the library, in the afternoon light. There were two sheets of paper and a photograph. The photograph came first: a creased black and white snapshot of a tall young man with a grin, holding a baby in a christening gown on the steps of a church on Chippewa Square. Beside him, in a plain wool coat, stood my mother, Ruth Ann, looking at him sideways, the way she did when she was pretending not to be happy. On the back, in pencil: Augustus, Ruth Ann, Mary Beth. April 1962.
My mother letter was short. “Mary Beth, my darling. If you are reading this, I could not tell you myself. You will be told that your father abandoned us. He did not. He was a boy who loved me and was forbidden to say so, and I would not make him choose between me and his family. I raised you alone because I wanted to, not because I had to. I am sick, but I am not afraid. I went to his office only to ask for one thing, that someday you would know. Forgive us both. Mama.” I had known my mother hands, and her laugh, and her stubborn chin. I had never known she carried this.
I sat in the leather chair in that dim library and wept for a long time, for my mother, and for the thin man with the cane who had waited his whole life to do what a coward could not. Dante held my hand. Mr. Beaufort looked politely out the window. When I could speak, I asked, “Did he know she came to the office?” “He found it in his secretary old desk in 2024,” Mr. Beaufort said. “He read it, and he did not sleep for a week. He changed his will the next morning.”
The memorial was Saturday at eleven, in the old church on Chippewa Square, on the same steps as in the photograph. Two hundred people in black. I sat in the second pew in my good navy dress, beside a handsome silver haired woman of fifty eight in pearls, who turned to me before the service and said quietly, “I am Eleanor. Augustus was my father too. He told me about you at Christmas.” Her eyes were red. “I have always wanted a sister.” I took her hand, and she held on to mine as if it might float away.
When the minister called my name, I walked to the front with the book in my hands, opened to page 412, and read my father letter to my mother, from the margins, aloud to two hundred of the finest families in Savannah. My voice shook only once. When I finished, there was no sound at all. Then an old man in the back row stood and began to clap, and Pettigrew, beside him, joined in, and then the whole church was on its feet. I do not know what they thought. I know that Eleanor held me up.
The estate came to just over three million dollars, with the Jones Street house besides. I kept none of the riverfront. I gave the house to the city for a children library on the south side, named for my mother: the Ruth Ann Calloway Reading Room. Eleanor and I sit on its board together. Pettigrew, who is eighty four, wished to stay on, so he is the volunteer who opens the doors at nine every morning, in white gloves, and he greets each child as if he were a duke.
I still work the circulation desk at Bull Street. Last month a small boy returned a picture book two weeks late and could not pay the fine. I told him not to worry. Then I put the book back into his hands and said, “I think this one wants to stay with you.” He looked up at me. He did not know why I was crying. At home, I slipped a small slip of paper into the margin of page 412 of Gone With the Wind. It says only: Returned. Welcome home.
