Chapter 14: The Letter Read Aloud
She read it that night, in the sickroom, with the lamps low and the fog erasing the windows, and the whole family ranged around the bed like mourners at a christening.
Samuel's letter was four pages long, written in a fisherman's upright hand on paper from the cottage in Maine, in the last month of his life, in the certain knowledge that it would not be sent. Hannah had read it alone a dozen times since his death β at the cottage table, on the train south, in the gatehouse while the laboratory took its days β but she had never read it aloud, and she understood, from the first sentence, that reading aloud was a different act entirely. It was not information. It was a man entering a room.
"'My dear August,'" she read. "'You will not receive this, which is cowardly of me and by now a habit of fifty years, but I find at the end of my life that there are accounts I want set down even if no one settles them. I am Sam Hart now, and have been longer than I was ever Samuel Whitmore, and I want that understood first: I did not spend my life in exile. I spent it at home. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole of it.'"
August lay very still, his face to the ceiling, Beatrice's hand in his.
"'I ran the night before my wedding, and I have carried the shame of the manner of it β the car at the bridge, the river dragged, Mother and Father mourning a body that was eating breakfast in another state β more heavily than I ever carried the fact. I was twenty years old and a coward in the particular way of young men from big houses, who would rather be thought dead than be thought difficult. Forgive me for the storm I invented. The real storm was only weather.'"
Clara, in the corner, made a sound and pressed her knuckles to her mouth.
"'Of the wedding itself I will say one thing, and then let it rest under fifty years of good earth. I could not marry Beatrice because I did not love her in the way a wife is owed, and she knew it before I did β I saw her know it, across the rehearsal dinner, and it was her face, braver than mine, that gave me the courage of my own conviction. Tell her β no. I find I cannot instruct you to tell my fiancΓ©e anything, across half a century, through her husband. I will only record, for whoever keeps these papers, that I have wished her well every day of my life, and that wishing her well from Maine was the first honest thing I ever did for her.'"
Beatrice did not weep. She sat very straight on the right side of the bed, looking at the letter over Hannah's shoulder as if she could see through the paper to the hand that wrote it, and when Hannah glanced up at that passage, Beatrice gave her one small nod β go on β with the composure of a woman who had waited fifty years to be wished well and intended to receive it properly.
"'Now to the purpose, such as it is. I have a granddaughter. Her mother, my Laura, is gone these ten years, and the girl teaches school and is the best of us β better than the one writing, better, I suspect, than the one reading, if reading there ever is. I am giving her my key, August. The little pedestrian-gate key, which I have kept oiled for fifty years like a relic, though I told myself it was only brass. I am giving her this letter with it, and one instruction, which she is free to refuse: take them home for me.'"
Hannah's voice held. But her hands shook on the paper, and Silas, standing by the door in his good jacket, took one step forward as if to catch the letter, the reader, or himself.
"'I do not ask for money, or name, or the share our grandfather's lawyers froze in its clause β I learned of that clause from Mother, years ago, and laughed until Eleanor asked what was funny, and I could not explain that my own blood had been put in a drawer against my return, like a coat kept for a guest who had moved away. Keep the share or burn it; it is furniture. What I ask is smaller and larger. I ask that when she comes β and she will come, she has her grandmother's jaw and my talent for walking toward the difficult thing β you will do for her what was done for me. Let my girl through the gate I left by. That is all. That is the whole of my estate, August: one girl, one gate, and the hope that the second opening is kinder than the first.'"
The room was utterly quiet. Even the oxygen machine seemed, for one cycle of its sighing, to be listening.
"'Last, the thanks, which are owed and which I have rehearsed badly. Thank you to the boy who opened the gate. He was seventeen and I was the master, and he risked his place in the world to give me mine, and I have written to him every Christmas since, and he has kept my secret like a church. And thank you β this will surprise you; it surprises me β to whoever it was in that house who, sometime in the middle years, knew where I was and let me stay. I felt it once. A watching that lifted. I choose to believe it was mercy and not indifference, because a man must choose something to believe about his family, and I have chosen, at the end, to believe the kindest available thing. It has made the dying easier. Recommend it to the house. Your brother, in the end and in spite of everything, Samuel.'"
Hannah folded the letter along its old folds.
August wept. He did not hide it or apologize for it; he lay in the blade of lamplight and wept for his brother with his wife's hand in his and his son and daughter at the foot of the bed and his gatekeeper at the door, fifty years of weather coming out of him at last, and the sound of it was not dignified and was not meant to be. It was the sound the house had been built, in some sense, to prevent, and it filled the sickroom anyway, and the sky did not fall.
"Bring the papers," he said, when he could. "Hollis. The acknowledgment. Tonight. Now, while my hand still answers me."
"August," Mr. Hollis said gently, "the documents are prepared, but the formalities β witnesses, the notary from the village β "
"Then fetch the notary from the village," August said, "and tell him to bring his stamp and his supper if necessary, and if anyone in this house uses the word tomorrow to me again I will haunt them with uncommon dedication." He struggled up an inch against the pillows, and Clara and Peter moved as one to lift him, and for a moment the heir and the daughter held their father between them like a door being held for someone. "I have made my brother wait fifty years at a gate," August said. "I will not make his granddaughter wait one night at a desk."
The notary came at nine, stamping the fog off his boots, and the acknowledgment papers were spread on a tray across the patriarch's knees: the formal instrument by which August Whitmore, in his lifetime and of his sound β the notary cleared his throat β and competent mind, acknowledged Hannah Hart as the granddaughter and heir of Samuel Whitmore under the settlement of 1960, the proof recited, the descent recited, the revived share recited in the old lawyer's beautiful, bloodless Latin of the law. Peter witnessed, because August asked him to, looking at him steadily until he took the pen β and Peter signed with only the smallest pause, and then surprised himself by signing his full name largely, as if daring anyone to mistake it. Clara witnessed. Silas witnessed, printing his name in the hand of a man who had signed nothing more important than a delivery book in fifty years, and wept openly onto the blotter.
August signed last, slowly, the pen traveling like a plow, and set his whole name at the foot of the page in letters that leaned but held.
"There," he said, exhausted and incandescent, like a man who has just set down the heaviest stone in the wall. "It is done in my lifetime, which was the clause's condition and mine. Samuel β " he spoke to the room at large, or past it, "β your girl is through the gate. She came by the little door, the way you left. It seems the family's doors only ever worked in one size." He closed his eyes. "Now let an old man sleep. Beatrice. The right side. Stay."