Please Remember This (11 page)

Phil’s groundbreaking ceremony was set for the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. In the morning there would be a frisbee golf tournament—Ned could not figure out the logic to that one—and the groundbreaking itself would take place at one o’clock. Phil’s former boss, the congressman, was giving a speech; the high school band would play; and Carolyn’s family, the Shelbys with the two former governors, was coming up from their base south of Kansas City. Carolyn herself would be the one to break ground. She had had her backhoe lesson, and with Pete, the backhoe’s owner, seated next to her, she would guide the shovel to make the first cut into the earth. Grandfather Ravenal had died while Ned had been in college; otherwise he would be at the controls.

“It’s a shame that Grandfather didn’t live for this,” Phil had said earlier that day.

Ned had shrugged. “It’s not like we can do anything about it.”
And we don’t need to. He knows. He will be here.

But that wasn’t the sort of thing you said to Phil.

Life aboard our steamboats was merry. On the
Western Settler,
the ladies’ salon was forward, thereby giving us some measure of protection from the noise of the engine and the paddle wheels. Five family parties had been together since the
Cypress Princess
had left New Orleans. Although our different stations in life would have made social intercourse unlikely in our home city, we found them all to be worthy, respectable people and congenial companions, and that they were not as accustomed to life’s pleasant little elegances proved to be of little matter. The Ravenal brothers also had a cabin. Both of those gentlemen sang well and often joined us in the ladies’ salon for an evening’s entertainment.

The
Cypress Princess
had been manned by an African crew, and on the trip up the Mississippi we were amused by their boisterous antics and the lively melodies of the songs which they sang to lighten the tedium of their duties. The laws of the Territories, however, were uncertain in those days, and the terms under which the crew had been leased from their masters did not allow for them to go farther than St. Louis. So the
Western Settler
was
tended by a crew of white individuals who seemed far surlier and less content with their lot in life than our Africans.

Mrs. Louis Lanier (Eveline Roget),
The Wreck of the Western Settler,
privately printed, 1879

 

Tomorrow. It was happening tomorrow. Ned knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He stayed at the site all night.

The three-quarter moon shone on the stubbled cornfield, and the little orange flags were dark and limp. The boat was down there. Thirty-five feet down. The test drills, the proton-magnetometer readings, had left no questions. The
Western Settler
was there.

You couldn’t see the river from here. It was a quarter mile away. The cottonwoods and sycamores had grown up along the water’s edge. If he were a little closer, he would be able to hear the rustling leaves and the river’s rushing current, but here by the boat, the night was silent.

Back in California, Tess told her roommates that she would be leaving at the end of September, but would pay her share of the rent through the end of the year. They all gasped, saying how sorry they were, how much they would miss her. Tess believed them. They were sorry and they would miss her … but not for very long.

It was approaching two in the afternoon when our dear boat received her mortal wound. A
female relation and I were near the railing of the bow of the upper deck. We had come around a sharp bend and were in mid-channel. The river ahead looked as ever; its greenish-gray current broke into splatters of white foam against the hull of the boat. We were heavily loaded and rode low in the water.

The captain had told us about snags. Full-grown trees, felled by storms or riverbank erosion, clogged the river in the early spring. As their wood became waterlogged, they sank, their heavy root balls becoming imbedded in the mud. The river’s current snapped off the branches and limbs, leaving only the heavy trunk, perhaps two feet in diameter, slanting upwards, waiting for some unhappy craft to impale herself on its spear.

Our snag announced itself with a grinding shudder. My companion and I clutched at each other as we were knocked against the railing. The boat lurched to the starboard side, and below us, barrels and boxes splashed into the river. Water began to wash over the guards of the lower deck.

Our good captain had kept the bow stairs clear to enable servants to reach their masters, and now the deck passengers surged up those stairs, seeking higher ground. The boat continued to list. All was chaos.

Even in the confusion a mother’s cry ripped through our hearts as her child slipped overboard. A person of African descent flung himself
into the river, grabbed the child, and, holding on to a barrel, floated the lad to the Kansas shore.

Others were being swept into the water, but there was much floating debris for them to cling to. Order was quickly established on the upper deck. Gentlemen pulled loose a section of railing and attempted to hold it steady in the water. Encumbered by our fear and our gowns, we ladies did not have an easy time of it, but those who did not have the resolution to enter the cold and muddy waters voluntarily soon entered involuntarily.

In ten minutes the boat reached the river bottom. Only the small hurricane deck and the two brave smokestacks remained above water.

Despite the harsh material losses, Providence had indeed smiled upon us that day. All lives were spared. The current carried some sufferers to the Missouri side of the river, where they lingered for several hours while a yawl was found to do ferry duty. The Misses Picards clung to a fallen tree with no way to reach dry ground until the captain ordered men from the crew to rescue them.

How misfortune shows us the truth of the human heart and wipes away the meaningless distinctions that society imposes upon us. Those of us in the salon called encouragement to the deck passengers struggling and splashing in the river, and their menfolk, made
hearty by their rugged life, stayed in waist-deep water to assist us to shore.

Mrs. Louis Lanier (Eveline Roget),
The Wreck of the Western Settler,
privately printed, 1879

 

Of course people wanted Ned to start finding things five minutes after breaking ground, but the first two weeks had to be spent on the dewatering systems, drilling thirty-inch diameter wells, sinking sixty-five-foot steel well casings, and hooking up the pumps to diesel-powered generators. Ned estimated that he would eventually need at least twenty such wells, able to pump twenty thousand gallons of water a minute.

It wasn’t glamorous work, but it had to be done.

Tess was learning about electronic water-level autofill systems, boiler sizes, steam wands, and NEMA configurations. She ultimately selected a commercial espresso machine from an Italian manufacturer, primarily because they had a representative and a repair service in Kansas City. She did not want to run an espresso bar with a machine that was out of order until further notice.

An architect was supervising the renovations in Kansas. Tess visited dozens of espresso bars in California and went into countless gift shops. She designed the company logo and ordered the mugs herself, but she paid someone to do a lighting plan and help her with the furniture placement. She did as much as she could while working out her notice at
Willow Place, and she was good at getting things done.

She talked to Phil Ravenal constantly. It was almost like a game—which one of them could be more efficient, which one could get more done—and part of the game was understatement, never bragging about what you had accomplished. Tess suspected that her problem-solving skills were as good or better than his, but, of course, he was the one with the local resources, so he was winning. She didn’t mind.

Ned was too close to the generators to hear Pete Dermott’s shout, but he saw everyone else rushing toward the trackhoe. He thrust his wrench in his tool belt and took off, half running, half sliding down to the base of the twenty-five-foot crater. Pete had raised his bucket and maneuvered the trackhoe out of the way. By the time Ned got there, the others were probing with pipes, digging with shovels, scooping with their hands, jostling one another to try to get a better look. Phil grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him close.

There it was, shining golden in the heavy gray sand, a curving piece of oak—the larboard paddle wheel of the
Western Settler.

Chapter 6

 

T
ess spent her last week in California on the road, looking for linens. She drove to the Nevada border where she found an extraordinary collection of drawn-thread work. She headed north, looping up past San Francisco, stopping in all the dusty little towns. At the edge of the Sonoma Valley, she found bed sheets that were one hundred percent linen, trimmed with handmade lace and priced by the value of the trim; the owner had no idea that the sheets were linen or what that would do to their price. She picked up an unhemmed damask tablecloth so large that no one else had unfolded it all the way to discover the twenty-four matching napkins, all unhemmed, all unused. She unearthed tea cloths and tablecloths, placemats and runners, napkins and pillowcases. Each day she would follow two-lane roads; at night she would stop at a little motel. She was accountable to no one, and no one knew where she was. She loved it.

In the evening she reread
The Riverboat Fragment.
It was, after all, paying for the motel room and the boxes of linen, for the gas she put in the car and the bottled water she bought at the filling stations.

The premise of the book was that a group of people escaping on a riverboat from a disaster in their own village were stranded by the boat’s sinking. They sought shelter with a community at the river’s edge. One of the conflicts between the two groups was that the existing community had magical powers while the riverboat people did not. According to the introduction to the edition that Tess was reading, the tone of the two-hundred-page fragment made it clear that the riverboat people would triumph, that the completed book would have chronicled the last days of humans dwelling in a world both natural and supernatural. The people without magic were the ones who survived.

Tess found that she liked the unfinished book a great deal more than the trilogy. Lush description—green moss creeping across shadowed gray stones and that sort of thing—occasionally overpowered the trilogy, but in the fragment the description was tighter. There were fewer details, more carefully chosen. Tess also considered the characters more interesting. The personages in the trilogy were heroic myths; these were much more like ordinary people. They had irritating habits; they got on each other’s nerves. The riverboat people were, of course, grateful for the hospitality they were receiving, but pretty soon they became sick of having to be so grateful. Everything about the fragmented story seemed more mature than the trilogy; the insights were more sophisticated, the writing was better controlled … and it ended in mid-sentence.

Following the text were several brief articles by different scholars and critics who speculated on
how the book might have ended. All seemed to agree that it was less than a third of its intended length, perhaps even only a quarter. One article argued that, ultimately, the main characters would not have been the young men in the two communities, but a mother and daughter from the riverboat people.

We can’t be overly influenced by the patriarchal assumptions of the trilogy,
the article stated.
Nina Lane was being exposed to strong feminist thought within the community in which she was living. Once she began working with more realistic psychological material, the women characters grew more important to her.

Tess reread the scenes between the mother and daughter. The daughter, nearly grown, was frail and irritable. The mother felt obligated to protect her, to explain her to others. The daughter got power from her irritability; she knew that and disliked herself for it.

But at their most fractious moments, they would remember the boat wreck; how, when thrown into the water, each had instantly swam toward the other. The bond between them was more powerful than any other relationship in the narrative, this love between mother and daughter.

And this was written by my mother.

Tess dismissed the thought. This story had nothing to do with her. She knew that. Yes, Nina Lane had been pregnant through much of the writing of the manuscript, but Nina hadn’t known that she was having a daughter, and if what Duke had said was true, she hadn’t been very interested in being a
mother. This wasn’t about Nina as mother and Tess as daughter.

It’s about Grandma. It’s about her and Grandma, about the two of them as mother and daughter.

Tess was donating her old car, her grandparents’ car, to the National Kidney Foundation. It was, she was surprised to realize, the one thing she felt sentimental about. Her grandparents had had it for so long; they had driven it on so many careful little errands. Tess herself had driven it to their doctors, to their hospitals, to their funerals. Its last trip, the last thing Tess was going to do before leaving California, on the very morning of her flight to Kansas, was to visit their graves.

Every Memorial Day her grandmother had brought flowers to the family graves. She had had a routine. She would go first to her husband’s parents, the Laniers, and then to her own parents, the Swensons, then to her two sisters, who had died while growing up. The graves were close to one another, all within the sight of the same tree.

Grandma had always let Tess lay the flowers on the graves. But then she would touch Tess’s shoulder, motioning her to stand with Grandpa. Grandma would go alone to the tree and place her last bouquet at its roots, even though no grave was there. She would stand there for a moment, staring at the flowers. Her face would change, her lips growing narrow and her eyes blinking. Tess had wondered if she was going to cry.

“What’s she doing?” Tess had asked Grandpa. “Who are those flowers for?”

“They’re for all the people who aren’t here.”

“The people back in Kansas?” Even as a little girl, Tess knew that they were from Kansas.

“Yes, them, and people elsewhere too. Both Grandma and I had uncles who fought in World War One. They’re still in France.”

And Grandma would always be very quiet on the drive home, and sometimes she’d go straight into her bedroom and close the door.

On this final visit, Tess followed her grandmother’s routine. The Laniers, the Swensons, the sisters, then her grandparents themselves, and simply because this was what her grandmother had always done and that made it important, Tess laid some flowers at the foot of the tree.

Grandma had brought flowers from the yard; Tess had had to buy her flowers. She had chosen lilies, nine sprays of white lilies, each surrounded by a halo of baby’s breath and tied with a white ribbon. The first eight rested on green grass, but the ninth one, the one for the soldiers in France, shone against the rough bark of the tree. The streamers on the ribbon followed the curve of the trunk as it rooted into the earth.

These flowers weren’t for the soldiers in France. Tess suddenly realized that the story her grandfather had told her wasn’t complete. Those young men had died before either of her grandparents had been born. Grandma would have respected their memory, but she wouldn’t have gone into her bedroom and cried for them.

The flowers at the tree had been for Nina, Grandma’s daughter. Nina was the person who wasn’t
here. Nina was the person whose memory had made Grandma cry. Grandma had brought the flowers for her.

But where was she? Where was Nina Lane buried? Tess had no idea.

How could she not know? Her grandparents would have. They were the legal next of kin; there must have been forms they had to sign, documentation that would have been sent to them.

But when Tess had closed up their house, there had been nothing about Nina Lane, not even a death certificate.

There was an accident on the freeway. The traffic was bad, and Tess barely made it to the airport in time to turn the car over to the Kidney Foundation, check her baggage, and get on the plane.

She had had no time to call Duke. She would have liked to ask him where Nina Lane was buried, but she would have to wait until she got to Kansas.

Or she could call from the plane. That was what rich people did. If they needed to make a call, they used the telephones on the airplanes.

Of course, really rich people probably also flew first-class. Tess had not done that.

Tentatively, she eased the phone from its housing in the seat back in front of her. Duke answered, and Tess, feeling rather pleased with herself, got straight to the point. “Where is Nina Lane buried?”

“In Kansas. In Fleur-de-lis. Didn’t you know that?”

“No. How did it happen? Why didn’t Grandma and Grandpa bury her in California?”

Duke sighed. “That was my doing, I’m afraid. Everything that happened was such a shock. I know that people keep imagining a final scene among the three of us, but there wasn’t one. Kristin and I had no idea that Nina was even in New York. I was on the phone, and Kristin was out in the hall, taking the trash down to the chute. She had paused to talk to a neighbor, and later she thought she might have heard the elevator open, but she couldn’t be sure. We had no idea of anything until we heard all the commotion in the street, and I went down just out of curiosity, not even knowing there had been a suicide, much less that it was—” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, because I knew her, the police kept turning to me. She was just another dropout, runaway street person to them. I had no money, but a couple of people in Kansas had enough to pay for everything involved in bringing her body back. We had the funeral there. It was a bizarre ritual, I’m sure. The only qualification of the guy who officiated was that he owned a purple robe.”

“Did my grandparents come?”

“No. And that’s where I was wrong. We were so young then … and we were so determined to be independent and everyone was pretending that a person’s background and family didn’t matter. We didn’t decide not to call Nina’s parents. It just never occurred to us. As a parent now, I’m appalled at that. If something happened to Jemima or Jeffrey … Anyway, it was the cemetery people back in Kansas who asked if her family had been notified, and then the funeral, such as it was, was the next day.”

Tess couldn’t imagine her grandmother receiving
the phone call saying that her daughter had committed suicide the week before.

You loved her, didn’t you? You loved her with a fire and intensity that I can’t imagine, because those qualities left you when she died. She took them with her.

And not to be able to go to the funeral …

You must have said your own prayers. After all those years of talking to Nina’s teachers, begging them to give your flippant, defiant daughter another chance, after she gave up and ended her own life, was your final talk with God, begging Him to give her another chance?

Everything went smoothly in Kansas City. All of her baggage arrived safely, and a young man from a car dealership was there to take her to her new car. The car was ready, and it was precisely what she had expected it to be. The road north of Kansas City ran level and open through the Missouri River Valley. Tess crossed into Kansas at the Fleur-de-lis bridge.

Phil had sent her the most detailed map the town had ever made of itself. Tess scanned it for cemeteries. There were some in the churchyards, but she didn’t suppose that Nina Lane’s friends had bought a site in a churchyard. The only other cemetery was west of town.

It was set on a gentle rise, surrounded by a black iron fence that rose into a little arch over the entrance. The parking area was gravel and empty. Tess stopped her new car near the arch. Attached to one of its supports was a small sign.
THIS IS A PLACE OF REST AND REPOSE. PLEASE TREAT IT WITH RESPECT. NINA LANE’S GRAVE IS DESIGNATED BELOW
. There was a small
map with one grave marked in red. A trash barrel lined in black plastic sat beneath the sign.

The cemetery wasn’t large, perhaps an acre or so, and the one distinct path headed toward Nina Lane’s grave. Tess turned away from the path, away from Nina Lane’s grave.

There were a number of French names—descendants of the riverboat people, and, as Tess could see from the dates, some of the riverboat people themselves. Suddenly there was her name. LANIER. Louis and Eveline shared a headstone. They were Tess’s great-great-great-grandparents. Ned Ravenal had told her that when he had sent her Eveline’s account of the wreck. Louis and Eveline were buried next to their daughter Marie, who had died in 1858, less than a year after the sinking. Their son Herbert, born in 1857, had built the Lanier Building. His “beloved wife” Antonia had been fifteen years younger than he; their children were born in the 1890s. Their son, Cecil, 1892–1914, had a commemorative plaque, not a headstone. He must have been Grandpa’s uncle, the World War I soldier whose body was in France. Eva Louise had a single day after her name. She had lived for less than a day.

This was Tess’s family; this was her history.

Why wasn’t Nina buried here with the other Laniers?

Because no one in the Settlement had thought of her as a Lanier.

It must, however, have been terribly important to Nina herself. It was why she had come to Kansas, why she had written
The Riverboat Fragment.

Tess moved slowly toward Nina Lane’s grave.

It had an impressive marker, unlike anything else in the graveyard, an irregular boulder, rounded and rough, its surface dark gray and pebbly. One slab had been sliced off and the remaining flat surface was polished to a mirrorlike black. NINA LANE.

The afternoon sun shone against the tombstone. Tess could see a dark reflection of herself. Her mother’s name was carved starkly across the blurred image of her face.

That was what it had been like at Stanford. Her friends, even her boyfriend had been able to see only Nina Lane’s name across her face.

But I am nothing like her.

Nina was disorganized, her life chaos. Tess was systematic and fastidious.

The other graves were among the trees; their headstones were shaded. Not Nina Lane’s. The sun turned her headstone into a mirror.

She’s not my mirror. I’m not like her. I will not be defined by her.

Nina was intrusive, Tess solitary. Nina was rebellious, Tess compliant. Nina used people, Tess was everything helpful. They could not have been more different.