Pioneer Girl (16 page)

“They look like they're in love,” I said.

“My mom said they always were. Apparently he brought her a cup of tea every morning.”

I handed the photo back and he turned the album to another page. “Here's a baby picture of my grandfather,” Gregory said.

I leaned in to see a sepia-toned infant draped in the voluminous lace of a christening gown. Albert Stellenson. Could this truly be Rose's child? He had large eyes, dark pools that stared just a little to the side of the camera lens. How old was he here?

“Can you imagine being a woman, alone, in 1918, having to make that kind of decision?” Gregory said.

“Or having it made for you,” I said. Then, “Do you wish I hadn't told you about all this? I know you didn't ask to know any of it.”

We were sitting on the living room rug, a dhurrie with a faded diamond print, the photographs between us. Gregory leaned back against the sofa. “I would have wanted to know more at some point. It doesn't change what I think about my family. It's not like I'm going to tell people,
Hey, I might be part of the Ingalls and Wilder clan
. Even if it's true, fundamentally, it doesn't matter.”

“Hey, there are
Little House on the Prairie
royalties at stake,” I joked.

But Gregory shook his head. “That's actual, serious stuff. People go crazy about shit like that and it ruins them. Anyway, it's not like we can do a DNA test. And I would never go that far anyway.”

I admired that, and told him so. In the back of my mind I remembered Alex calling him a Berkeley do-gooder. Alex didn't tend to get all macho-like around other guys, but I had a feeling he wouldn't care for Gregory.

“What about you—what's your real family like?”

“I have a brother who's a year older. That's it. My dad died when I was six, and my mother and grandfather live in a suburb of Chicago.” I tried to describe the Lotus Leaf, and how I was helping out there while trying to figure out what to do next. The café sounded more successful than it was, our lives less fragmented than they were. I told him that Sam was in San Francisco but didn't mention how he'd disappeared from our family for over a year, how he'd stolen jewelry and money and run out again.

“I always wanted siblings,” Gregory said.

I looked down at the album in my lap, where pictures of the Stellensons gazed up, facing something just past my line of vision. I wanted to see what they were seeing; I didn't want to think about Sam, or anyone in my family.

“So your great-grandparents were Mary and Louis Stellenson. They got married in 1912 and adopted Albert in 1918. Albert grew up. Then what?”

Albert married a woman named Eleanor right after the war, Gregory said. After their daughters Louisa and Margaret were born, Albert had the Corte Madera house built. He worked in insurance—he was good at sales, became one of the top men in the company. Eleanor became an award-winning gardener. Louisa died tragically young, a teenager in a car accident. Margaret went to an all-girls college in Southern California, where she fell in love with one of her professors—Gregory's father.

“I don't even know what my dad is doing now,” Gregory said. “Haven't talked to him in years. He probably doesn't even know about my mother.”

“Why haven't you talked to him?”

Gregory showed me a picture of his parents' wedding day. A courthouse ceremony, his mother in a crepe sheath, his father in a suit jacket, shirt open at the collar.

“He had a lot of other women,” Gregory said, shrugging. “And then I guess he had some kind of crisis. I think he left teaching too. He was just never interested in being a father.”

“Did she ever remarry?”

“Yeah, but it only lasted a couple of years. This was in 1985? It's crazy, but I barely remember him. His name was Hal. He was a lawyer and he was into boating. That's basically what I remember. He always wanted to go boating, and he used that word.
Boating
. They married on a whim. And then he was gone.”

I thought of my own father, and how he had existed so long ago that I sometimes forgot he had been a real person in our lives. And when I did remember I felt a wave of shame: How could I forget my own father? What was wrong with me, that I didn't register his absence, the permanent lacuna, which should have marked each day?

How could Gregory's father go so many years without seeing or even speaking to his son? Or was this how time had its way with us, allowing us to believe that absence wasn't just possible but endurable—forgettable? That the more time accumulated, the more it could keep gaining?

We were pretty much done with the first two boxes, and before we started on the last one Gregory got up to find something to eat. I got up too, stretching my legs, and went back to the front window. There was something beckoning about it—a place where I could stay for hours. Surely every member of Gregory's family had stood where I was standing, staring dreamily, watchfully, measuring each shift of light.

At the moment it seemed truly golden, and I wondered what time it was. I remembered that I should call Amy.

Gregory came back into the room and set cups of tea and a package of wheat crackers on the coffee table.

He stood next to me then, and just as I was aware of how close he was he put his hand on my shoulder, letting it slip down my back. He pulled me toward him, almost sharply, and I knew what was going to happen. We were on the sofa first, then the floor, and neither of us said a word. He paused to locate a condom in his book bag, and if it had taken even a few seconds longer we probably wouldn't have been able to go on. But then he was poised above me, his face nearly invisible, silhouetted by that light through the big windows, and we were moving with a kind of urgency, a determination, that I hadn't known with Alex—or anyone else, for that matter. The strangeness of what we were doing made it all the more intoxicating, and when he gripped me tighter I did the same.

When it was done and we both lay there on the dhurrie rug, the embarrassment took over. I sat up first, reached for my clothes. We took care not to look at each other getting dressed.

At last Gregory said, “Should we keep going? That last box, I mean.”

It made me feel better to hear him stumble. Yes, I said.

Soon we were sitting across from each other again and Gregory was bringing forth packets of letters. We sorted them by date: correspondence between Albert and Eleanor during their wartime courtship, and correspondence between Eleanor and Margaret when Margaret was in college. They covered everyday events—who had visited and what they had worn, who had married whom, who had moved into or out of the neighborhood. No mention of anything having to do with adoption or family history.

After a while Gregory looked up and said, “I kind of feel like I should apologize.”

“It's fine.” Then, feeling silly, I amended it to, “It was nice.”

“It
was
nice.”

“Probably not what either of us expected from the day.”

He laughed, so I did too. In the pause that followed, I said, “I'm not seeing any indication that these letters are going to tell us anything about Rose.”

Gregory agreed, but we continued reading what his great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother had written and put away for safekeeping. Three generations of gossip and tidings, bound in ribbon and left to neglect.

Then Gregory said, “I've been wondering. Why didn't you tell me all of this Rose Wilder stuff the other day, at the library? When you were with your friend.”

I could feel myself blushing under his gaze. “I lost my nerve, I guess. I didn't know if I had the right to spring this on you. I still don't know. I mean, I've become a thief.”

“But if Rose Wilder hadn't given your grandfather that pin, then none of this would have been found.”

“Well, she didn't really give him the pin—more like left it.”

“Same result though.”

“Unless it's all a weird coincidence, a bunch of assumptions. I have a friend, in Iowa, who went to Rocky Ridge with me. He thinks I'm reading Rose into this whole thing, that the letter could just as easily have been something she kept for someone else. Like maybe she was the one who helped someone go through the pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption. And maybe the pin connection isn't legit either. I can't verify it. Can't prove it.”

“Yeah, that is possible.”

“The biographies say that after the birth of her first child she had complications that rendered her unable to have more children,” I admitted. “But she also had a habit, throughout her life, of quote-unquote adopting young men. Like when she traveled to Albania she befriended a young man and eventually paid for him to come to the States and go to college, and there were a few local boys she helped out financially too. And then in Vietnam—maybe she took a liking to my grandfather. Maybe that was all a psychological by-product of the child she lost, or the child she gave up, or both.”

“It's circumstantial,” Gregory agreed. “But even if I'm not related to her, she probably knew my grandfather's birth mother. Why else would she have that letter?” As I considered this he went on, “I can see how tricky this would be to write about, since so much of it is speculation.”

I shook my head. “It's not my field.” I told him about Edith Wharton and my stalled job search.

“Is this your next project, then?”

I hadn't yet allowed myself to think of it that way. “I don't know. Maybe that was my mistake with Edith Wharton—putting all my focus on stories and texts in which someone like me could never have figured. My adviser told me outright that the more marketable option would be to go the route of ethnic lit.”

“That seems like such a narrow way to think about reading anything.”

“In this world reading isn't really reading anymore.”

“So what are you doing here?”

I didn't answer, or couldn't, and Gregory didn't press the issue. As I looked through more letters, I thought about that fateful conversation with my adviser, how I'd worried that my decision to stick with Wharton for my dissertation might seem like identity avoidance. Which maybe it was. I used to figure that white people who studied nonwhite people had to have some kind of subconscious fetishizing or cultural appropriation going on. But now that I'd actually barged in on a real person's life without his permission, there was no denying that appropriation went around the other way too.

After several minutes of silence, Gregory said, “All this speculation. Chance occurrence, what gets remembered, and by whom. This is how history happens, right? Like Rose going to Vietnam and meeting your grandfather, if that's what happened. She probably wasn't planning to give that pin away, or leave it behind.”

“Do you want to see it?” I asked.

I retrieved my tote bag from the sofa and unswaddled the gold pin from its paper towel. Gregory held it up to the waning light as I had. He took out his phone and found that passage from
These Happy Golden Years
. “
A little house
,” he read out loud, “
and before it along the bar lay a tiny lake, and a spray of grasses and leaves.
Well, there is a house etched here. And these look like grasses and leaves. I don't see a lake, but maybe that got worn off.”

“I suppose there were a lot of these kinds of pins made,” I said.

“Probably.”

Echoing Alex, I said, “Even if it's real, it doesn't mean anything else is.”

“That's true. And we might never find out.” He sounded, to me, bizarrely okay with that.

“Doesn't it bother you, not to be able to know?”

“The truth is what I already do know,” Gregory answered. “This is just background, context.”

“The same way history and gossip are, at some level, the same thing?”

“Your words.” He handed the pin back to me. As I was opening my bag, he said, “Hey, is that the book where you found the letter? Can I take a look at it?”

I pulled out the stolen copy of
Free Land
. “Help yourself,” I said.

Gregory studied the spine and binding and deckling before slowly opening it. He turned a few pages and said, “You haven't looked through this?”

“No. Why?”

Gently he flipped through the chapters. Then he stopped and said, “Here.”

He angled the book so I could see the penciled words on the last page of a chapter. A few lines of cursive handwriting that, after my days at the Hoover Library, had come to seem familiar to me.

“There are more,” Gregory said. And then, hesitating, he gave the book back to me.

We went page by page. Rose had written only a few notes—a compilation of fragments, dashes of thought, and one longer passage. None were dated. By the glow of lamplight in Gregory's living room, we read them out loud.

 

The last of the evening light is on the walls.

 

 

 

One pushes for gain and after the gain braces for the reversal. The tide recedes.

 

Oh yes, if one could be so cavalier!

 

Here, it is almost as far west as a body can go. This close to the Pacific! This close to such vastness! See there—the Golden Gate opening. It is the end of the rails and the end of the story.

 

 

 

 

When did she become this old woman, hardened, face darkened?

 

What else was she to do? How could she not want to know the resolution? Who decides? When does her story become my story?

 

Never mind the body. The mind is the tyrant.

 

If someone notices her at all, the glance is brief. He keeps on walking, with no further thoughts given to the woman in the curled-back straw hat, stock-still in front of the gray-shingled house she has come to see.