The first was dated March 1972, from a rooming house near the Halifax shipyards. Josie. They tell me you petitioned to be rid of me and have married again. I have been three years believing a thing about you that I knew was a lie when I was drunk and still knew at breakfast. I am out of the army. I am alive, which will either be the best news you have had or the worst, and I notice I am afraid to know which. If you are happy, burn this and I will burn the rest unwritten. If you are not — Josie, I am at the same address as the money. Come, or write, or send one word. The handwriting, in the last lines, lost its uprightness and leaned, tired, toward the edge of the page: I did not leave you. Say you know it.
He had enclosed a money order. It was still in the envelope, sealed inside it when the letter came home to Whitmore House: forty dollars, made out to Josephine Whitmore, never cashed, never even seen by the woman whose name it bore. There were money orders in letter after letter — for rent, for the child's shoes, for "her schooling, whatever she is at" — and Eliza thought of the mending at the kitchen table, her grandmother's needle going in and out of other women's hems by lamplight, with a fortune in good intentions gathering dust in a box in Connecticut.
It was somewhere near two in the morning, laying the envelopes out in their years across the bed, that she began to see the second story the box was telling — not in the letters, but on them. Six of the early envelopes bore a Boston receiving stamp: they had arrived. They had reached her grandmother's own city, her own district, in two cases her own street — and then they had turned around and gone home to Connecticut, marked in a hand that was not a postal clerk's. On three of them, under the official stamp, someone had written in pencil, small and workmanlike: Ret. per instr. Return per instructions. Eliza sat up with the tea cold at her elbow and photographed three envelopes with her telephone, and sent the pictures to Boston, to Hannah, with no message at all, because there was nothing to say that the envelopes were not already saying.
The reply came in under a minute. Then it's not neglect, Hannah wrote. It's a system. Somebody was paid, Eliza. Somebody stood between those two people for thirteen years and got paid.
He learned, somewhere in the middle years, to stop asking questions he could not have answered. The letters changed key. He wrote about the yards, the ships, the cold coming off the harbour "like a hand looking for a throat." He wrote on the eleventh of June every year, his wedding day, and gave the day to the daughter he had never seen: She is six today, in the only arithmetic I am allowed. I have put ten dollars in the account. I do not know her name for certain; word reached the house once, in a servant's letter, and the name in it — your name for her — was Diane. Diane. I say it in the yard sometimes, between hammer blows. The men think I am swearing in a language they don't know. He wrote about a dog. He wrote about a window box of geraniums "that refuse, like their owner, to accept the climate." Once, in 1978, there was anger, nine pages of it, at her silence, at God, at the arithmetic; and a week later a second letter, two lines: Forgive the last. You owe me nothing that I will ever collect in anger. It is the not-knowing that shouts. I am still here.
The letters thinned, the way a pulse thins — monthly, then at the great days, then twice a year — but they did not stop, and they did not harden. The last in the box was dated June 1985, in a hand that age had begun to shake at the corners. Sixteen years of Junes, it said. She is sixteen. She will be told I did not want her, if she is told of me at all; I find I can bear anything except that, and I can bear that too, because I must. If this reaches no one, let it at least be true somewhere: I did not leave. I was taken, and I have spent my life in the corridor outside a door, knocking at longer and longer intervals, like a man who will not embarrass the house. The account is in her name. The rest of me is in these letters. They are hers, if the world ever lets them be.
Eliza read that one twice, and then she sat for a long time with her hands flat on the bed among the envelopes, in a scatter of unopened money orders and Canadian stamps, thinking about her mother. Diane at nine, doing sums at the kitchen table. Diane at sixteen, asking once — once, by every account — where her father was, and being told by a tired woman doing the accounts of other people's dresses: Gone. Men go. Diane at thirty, deciding not to ask again, and making of not-asking a character, and raising a daughter in the religion of it. All those years there had been a man in Halifax writing letters into a box, marking her birthdays on a wedding anniversary, saving money in her name out of a shipyard wage. Her mother had not been abandoned. Her mother had been robbed, monthly, in handwriting, by men with filing systems.
And underneath the grief for her mother there was the other one, older and stranger: her grandmother had died last winter still believing Edward Whitmore lay in a soldier's grave. Josie had kept his few early letters bound in ribbon, and her own unsent answers beside them, and had written and written into a silence she thought was death. At both ends of the continent, for thirteen years, two people had been faithful to each other into a void maintained for money — and the void had kept receipts, and filed them, in a box marked with initials.
At dawn she took the box down the empty street to the gate. The light was coming up grey off the Sound and Walter was unlocking for the tradesmen's vans, and he looked at the box, and at her face, and understood without being told.
"He wrote, then," he said.
"Every month," Eliza said. "For years. Then every June. Walter — my mother died thinking her father never spared her a thought."
Walter put his hand, briefly and heavily, on the lid of the box, the way you rest a hand on a coffin at the end of the service when there's nothing left to carry.
"Then we'd best see," he said, "that she doesn't lie in it much longer."
Chapter 10: The Night Edward Left
The diary was brown leather, soft as a glove, and it had waited fifty-five years in a drawer of Bea's flat for someone with a reason to read it. Constance's younger sister had kept it from the age of seventeen to the age of twenty, in a hand that began round and schoolgirlish and ended, three winters later, in something a great deal older. "She never married," Bea said, handing it over in the gatehouse doorway. "She lived in New York and sent Mother money she didn't need and didn't come home for thirty years, and when people asked her why, she said there had been a winter in that house she couldn't get warm after. I think this is the winter."
Eliza read it that night in Walter's kitchen, with the stove ticking and Walter shelling peas he had frozen in the summer, at his own insistence, because some stories a man should have his hands busy for. She read aloud, in pieces. Walter listened the way he had listened at doors in 1968: entirely, and without rescue.
The sister — twenty years old, home from secretarial college, invisible as only a plain daughter in a great house can be — had written it all down because paper was the only room in Whitmore House where she was not interrupted.
June 1968. E. has a secret with a laugh in it. He goes about the house whistling through his teeth, which Father cannot abide, and for once does not stop when told. C. says it is a girl in the village. It is not a girl in the village. The new maid from Boston sings at her work in the scullery, off-key, in Irish, and E. has begun taking his tea in the kitchen like a groom.
She kept her counsel through the summer, the diarist; through the photograph Eliza now knew hung in a leather case's memory of a June morning — she had seen them come home laughing in the estate car, Walter driving, the girl's hand bright with a ring wrapped in thread. She wrote nothing she could be ruined by. Then the house, as houses do, found out by the servants' stairs.
October. Cook found the girl sick for the third morning over the scullery sink and sent for C., and C. — not Mother, not yet the dragon of Eliza's imagining, but a bride of two years in a house that was not hers, married up into a family that was still deciding whether to forgive her for it — C. asked her straight out, in the pantry, among the preserves. The girl did not faint and did not lie. She said: I am his wife, ma'am. We were married in June, at the courthouse, Walter drove us. And then, holding on to the shelf like a mast: I think I am carrying his child.
"She told it the way she'd have told the priest," Walter said, to his peas. "Josie Sullivan never learned the other way of talking. It was her whole trouble in that house, and it's been her whole vindication out of it."