“…the key to my husband study,” I whispered, and the dust cloth slipped from my fingers onto the carpet. My granddaughter looked up at me with her father blue eyes. She was eight years old, in a striped sweater, standing on a footstool before the fireplace. On the screen of my telephone, a photograph glowed in the afternoon light. It showed my son Jeffrey in my late husband study, among the shelves of leather books, with his arm around the shoulders of a woman. She had short chestnut hair and a heart shaped face. And she was holding a small brass key, up to the camera, with a trembling, radiant smile.
The woman looked so much like my cousin Ellen that for a moment I forgot to breathe. Ellen Maddox, forty years ago, had stood behind my husband in our wedding portrait, in a pale green dress, with her hand resting lightly on the back of his chair. She had vanished three weeks later. No letter, no forwarding address. The family had whispered about it for years, and then stopped, as families do. Now, on the telephone, she smiled at me from forty years away, her hair a little shorter, her eyes the same hazel. But the date in the corner said last Tuesday.
“Grandma,” Lily said, “are you sad?” I knelt down and took her small face in my hands. “No, sweetheart,” I said. “I am only surprised.” I took her down to the kitchen and gave her a glass of milk and a plate of shortbread. Then I called my son. He did not answer, and I waited. At six o clock, he arrived at my door, in his work jacket, with his tie loosened and his jaw set. He stood on the porch, not meeting my eyes. “Mom,” he said, “I think we need to talk. I should have told you months ago.”
A family portrait over the fireplace, a granddaughter with a question, and a photograph taken last Tuesday.
We sat in the living room, under the fireplace portrait, with the lamps off and the dusk coming gray through the windows. Jeffrey told me everything, in a low voice, staring at his hands. After his father passed, he had gone through the study, and in a locked drawer he had found a bundle of letters, tied with twine, in a woman handwriting. They were from Ellen. They were addressed to my husband, and they were dated over thirty years. The first was from the autumn of 1985. It said, simply: I have named her Rose. She has your eyes.
I could not move. Rose. A daughter. Born in the autumn after my wedding, to my cousin and my husband. I had been married thirty nine years to a man who had fathered a child with another woman, and had never once said a word. The room seemed to go cold and narrow. I put my hand on the arm of the chair. “Jeffrey,” I said, and my voice came out thin, “who is the woman in the photograph?” He looked at me, miserable. “That is Rose,” he said. “She is my sister, Mom. She is my half sister. She lives in Minneapolis.”
I did not speak for a long time. I thought of the wedding portrait above the fireplace, which I had dusted for forty years. I thought of Ellen, nineteen and alone, sent away by her proud family. I thought of my husband, who had patted my hand at night and said, Louise, you are the best thing that ever happened to me. I was sure he had meant it. I was equally sure he had been a coward. Both things could be true. After a while, I asked quietly, “Does she know about me?” Jeffrey nodded. “She asked if she could meet you,” he said. “But she was afraid you would hate her.”
“Why would I hate a child?” I said. The anger rose in me then, hot and sudden, but it was not directed at Rose. It was directed at a late man who had left us all with his secrets. I stood up and walked to the window. The streetlights were coming on, one by one, along the quiet road. I took several deep breaths. When I turned back, I said, “Jeffrey, I would like to meet her. Please ask her to come to dinner on Sunday. And tell her I will make the lemon pie.” His eyes filled with tears. He said, “Mom, thank you.”
Rose arrived at four o clock on Sunday, with a bouquet of white tulips and a nervous smile. She was forty, tall, graceful, with Ellen hands and my husband laugh, and she stood on my porch like a girl at a first dance. I opened my arms. She stepped into them without a word. We stood like that on the porch for a long minute, holding each other, while Lily peered around the curtain. At dinner, she told me about her mother, who had passed away three years earlier, and who had spoken of me with great affection. I did not know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both.
After dinner, I took her into the study. I handed her the brass key, which Jeffrey had returned to me, and told her to open the cabinet. Inside was a small wooden box. It held a baby bracelet, a lock of fair hair, and a photograph of Ellen at nineteen, in the pale green dress. On the back, in my husband slanting hand, were four words: For Rose, someday. He had kept it. Whatever his failures, he had kept it. Rose held it to her chest, and I put my arm around her shoulders, and for a while, neither of us said anything at all.
The wedding portrait still hangs above the fireplace. I have not taken it down. Last month Lily brought Rose into the living room, stood on the footstool, and pointed to the girl in the pale green dress. “That is my aunt Rose mother,” she announced, with solemn authority of an eight year old. “She was a very nice lady.” I smiled. I looked up at the faces in the old photograph, young and unknowing, all of us smiling for the camera. “Yes,” I said. “She was. And we were all a good deal braver than we knew.”
