The Roots of the Olive Tree (22 page)

“Of course they’re not,” Anna said. “But you can’t tell them until he’s passed. It’ll be too hard on them, too much guilt.”

“How could you know?” Elizabeth had been wrong. She’d not expected this, not from Anna. “Do you think they know?”

“They know and they don’t know.” Anna was fully alert now, sitting up with her back straight and looking out over the orchards.

“That’s what you said about your own secret.” Elizabeth searched her mother’s face. Anna’s eyes remained focused on the gnarled limbs of the trees just below the hill.

“I always wondered if you knew about my mother. Wealthy was a wise man. People don’t give him enough credit, think he threw his life away chasing easy money.”

“So I shouldn’t tell them?” Elizabeth still felt she needed someone to tell her what to do. Someone to tell her not to take Dr. Hashmi’s advice.

“Are they happy?”

Elizabeth wondered why Anna didn’t already know the answer to this question. The boys were happy. Their lives were ordinary and right—the only bits of heartache coming as a few of the grandchildren and now even great-grandchildren found the trouble they went looking for. She didn’t know about Callie. Happiness had eluded her for so long, but her voice was bright when she called from Pittsburgh, and Dr. Hashmi had told Elizabeth privately that he’d taken her to a counselor to talk about overusing her pain medication.

“I could never tell Callie,” Elizabeth said.

“Then let her and the boys have their joy for a bit. You tell them that Frank isn’t their daddy, it is going to bring a bit of unhappiness, like a rainstorm, but it will pass.”

Anna settled back in her chair and began the rhythmic rocking. Elizabeth stood and kissed her mother on the top of her head. She thought that her mother’s joy had come from learning her true paternity. She’d expected Anna, who must have had some previous doubts about her own ancestry, to tell her to unburden herself, to give her boys that same gift. The world was full of unexpected answers.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Sin

E
lizabeth knew little about the fathers of her boys. She wished she’d had other choices. One of her grandsons had told her a few years ago at Christmas how he and his wife had ordered sperm through the mail. All they had to do was pick the attributes they were looking for and send two hundred dollars to a sperm bank. He’d pointed to his children, who were playing in the yard with their cousins—they were all as blond as he and his wife. Elizabeth picked the fathers of her boys from the men who were in the Red Horseshoe, a bar in Redding. It was a popular spot for cowboys and women of loose morals, which was what the newspaper had said a few years after she’d stopped visiting the bar. It had been closed in 1942, when the whole country got a little bit more uptight.

She walked to the back of the house, where her bedroom had been as a girl, and where it was now. In the back of her closet, in a hatbox, was a yellowed piece of paper folded into quarters. There were four names on it, along with birth dates. These were the men who’d fathered her boys. She’d opened their wallets and copied the information from their drivers’ licenses and then crept out the doors of the motels or flophouses. Why had she done this? There were dozens of names she’d had to throw away—months when despite her careful timing she didn’t get pregnant. There’d been six men before her last son was conceived on one rainy Christmas eve. It had been too many; she’d started to enjoy herself, looking forward to putting on a dress and driving the hour north. Johnny’s father had been young, and although it made Elizabeth blush to think of it, she may have been the boy’s first. He took her three times and then talked to her about his father’s restaurant in Modesto before he fell asleep and she could sneak back home.

Frank said nothing when she went out. Although he was as anxious as she when two weeks after her trips to Redding, she waited to see whether she’d bleed. He loved Elizabeth so deeply when she was pregnant—held the door open for her when she got out of the car and shooed her out of the orchard when the weather was anything but seventy degrees and sunny. He was wonderful with the babies when they came, cradling them in the crook of his elbow, and singing in Gaelic to them, as his grandmother had.

Callie was suspicious about Elizabeth’s pregnancies. As a girl, she would poke her mother’s belly as it extended and pout. “No baby,” she’d say. “I’m enough.” Frank thought this was as funny as could be and taught her to say “I’m spectacular.” He also promised her that she’d be the only girl—Elizabeth prayed that this was true. She thinks now that a sister would have crushed Callie’s spirit.

The names on the folded paper seemed unspectacular to Elizabeth. After so many years of reading them and wondering what they’d done with their lives, she was surprised to see how plain the names were:
Joseph Appleton
,
Gary Chandler
,
Michael Adams
,
Elton Petrik
. She wouldn’t be surprised if they were all dead now. And why did she have their names? So that someday her boys or their children or their grandchildren could find Elton’s great-grandson and tell them they were related? She crumpled the paper in her hand and then let it drop to the floor.

“Grams?” Erin’s voice echoed down the hallway.

Elizabeth quickly stepped back and shut the closet door. She tripped over the hatbox, which she’d left by the bed, and fell backward, banging her elbow on her maple dressing table. There was a loud crack, and then Erin rushed through the door, the baby attached to her in that primeval sling. The rapid movement woke Keller, and he started crying.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” Elizabeth said. She sat up, holding her left elbow with her right hand. She’d forgotten how small an infant’s cry was—more like mewing than wailing. The pain was sharp, like getting poked with a stick. To make it ebb, to take her mind from it, Elizabeth started to count backward from a hundred. She could hear Erin talking but couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. By the time she finished counting, Erin had taken the baby out of its contraption and started nursing him. She was reading one of the pamphlets that had fallen out of the hatbox when she tripped. It was a brochure for the flight program with United. The one Callie had attended.

“They sure had a different vision of women back then,” Erin said. She read a bit of the text aloud, which described the ideal candidate as being in good physical shape with a waist of no more than twenty inches and a bust of at least thirty-six inches. “It’s like they wanted Barbie.”

Elizabeth held her arm out and straightened it. The pain was less intense. “Callie just wanted to fly. She’d been convinced since she was five that the world was bigger than Kidron.”

“Was she satisfied? Is that why she came back?”

Elizabeth smiled. Her daughter had never been satisfied. “No. She came back to heal, and by the time she was fixed up, she had all those children and a restaurant to run.”

“It’s not the same now. I feel her absence and I feel my mom’s absence.” Erin looked quickly at Elizabeth and then away again.

“You’ve heard from her?”

“She’s in Florida,” Erin said quietly.

“Never would have put her there. I sent her to the Cascades,” Elizabeth said. She wanted to say more, but a lifetime of keeping and holding secrets had taught her patience. The story would come.

Erin sank down onto the edge of the bed. Keller raised his head up and she moved him to the other breast. “I feel like we’re coming unhinged here.”

“We’ve stayed in Kidron a long time,” Elizabeth said. “It’s natural we should start leaving.”

“That’s what Mom said. She wants me to go back to Europe, to try to work some sort of arrangement out with Keller’s dad. She says it isn’t right to be away from one of your parents.”

“Depends on the parent.” Elizabeth lay down on the bed.

“She’s got a job. Cleans up for a bed-and-breakfast on the coast.” Erin lay down too and then rolled over on her side, so she was looking Elizabeth in the eyes. “Think they’ll catch her?”

“Not in a million years,” Elizabeth said. “Not in a million years.”

“I think all of Kidron feels her absence,” Erin said.

They didn’t resume talking until Keller had finished. Erin held the boy out to Elizabeth and asked her to burp him. “You’ll just have to do a better job of avoiding the spit-up. I imagine you’ve got a few tricks, having raised all those boys.”

Elizabeth laid the child facedown on her lap, with his head extended just slightly past the end of her knees, and began to rub his back. She didn’t want to risk getting spit-up all over her again. The boy let out a huge burp, and they laughed. “He’s so new.”

Erin nodded. “I don’t think I understood how worn-out our bodies are until I had him.”

“You’ve spent too many years with us,” Elizabeth said. “We were tired when we got you.”

“That might be true of other grandmothers, but all of you have Anna’s blood. I’m practically convinced you’ll live forever.”

Erin’s tone was light, and as Elizabeth watched her, she realized how much the girl thought she could control. “No one wants to live forever,” she said and then lifted the baby off her knees and folded him against her chest. When she was younger, holding a child, anyone’s child, made her chest tighten, and she’d feel the old pressure of milk against her nipples. A phantom pressure, as if her body remembered. Now she felt nothing. Her breasts were flat and hardened, like the rest of her skin, dull to sensation.

“Don’t say that.” Erin looked away from Elizabeth. “You’ve got years and years left. I expect you’ll be at Keller’s graduation, and there will be other children.”

Elizabeth shouldn’t have been honest. She took it all back. Put her hand on her great-granddaughter’s knee and murmured assurances that she’d be there for all of it. “Maybe by the time you’re my age, they’ll have found a cure for death. For all of us. Figured out a way to bottle immortality.”

With Keller asleep, the two of them stood and walked out to the porch to join Anna in her rocking. They talked about their upcoming trip to Australia, with Erin and Anna giddy at the prospect of such a journey and the potential of finding someone else who shared their genes, their mutation. Elizabeth looked out at the setting sun and wondered how she could keep her secrets for an eternity.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Grafting

T
he next morning, Elizabeth walked the orchard. She left her room before the sun rose, impatient with the day. Sleep was different in her old age. When she was younger and her muscles were fresh, she slept like the dead, waking in the same position she’d fallen asleep in. But sometime in her seventies, after Frank had been sent to Golden Sunsets, her sleep became restless. She often rose when the morning star was still visible and walked through the orchard, checking on the trees. In August, the trees were already getting ready for fall. She ran her fingers over some of the branches in the older section, twigs that she’d helped her father to graft. After more than half a century, the limbs looked like nothing more than part of the tree.

At the joint, where her father had made a small notch, the bark was thicker, like scar tissue over an old burn. The branches had become limbs and sprouted their own branches and network of switches that gave the tree its shape. She walked to the newer part of the grove and saw the work that the foreman had been doing. It was a different world, now that they leased their orchards and were responsible for nothing but paying the taxes on their acreage. She had no ownership over these newer trees; she didn’t feel the need to speak to them, to cajole them into producing fine olives. She’d not climbed them when she was a girl.

The sun’s pink and orange lights began to filter through the grove and Elizabeth made her way toward the Hill House. Now that the sun had come up, she could go and see her husband. She’d been wrong to skip her visit to Frank the day before. She wanted to be there as soon as the nurses would allow her to enter. As she left the shelter of the trees, the wind blew up the legs of her pants and she hurried into the house.

Even with the early morning orchard walk, she’d still arrived too early. The day nurses started their shifts at 7:00
A.M.
and she knew them well enough that they’d let her in, even though visiting hours didn’t begin until nine. She watched the night shift stagger out through the electric glass doors and blink wearily at the dawn. It surprised her to see that most of those who worked at night were Hispanic, and as they made their way to their waiting cars in the far reaches of the parking lot, she imagined she understood the snatches of Spanish they exchanged.

Frank was wearing a hat, a derby she thought, and his iron gray hair, which was too long, lay like a fringe on the collar of his shirt. The front desk nurse said he was having a good day.

“He’s chipper. Keeps walking around singing
we’re in the money
and telling everyone it’s a good day to play the lotto.” The girl squinted up at Elizabeth and smiled. “I think I will get one of those mega tickets at lunch.”

Elizabeth watched Frank for a bit from the door to the rec room. Her husband was in excellent spirits, and she thought if she’d asked him, he’d tell her that the war in Europe was nothing to worry about and that if it came to it, he fancied himself a navy man. He turned away from the man in the wheelchair he’d been talking to and saw her at the door.

“Were you looking for me?” he asked, taking off his hat and smoothing his hair. “They said you were coming today. It’s been so long that I hardly know you.”

Elizabeth could see that he was struggling to decide who she was. His eyes were trained on her, waiting for her to give some indication of who she was to him. “I’ve missed you, Frankie,” she said.

The diminutive allowed him to believe that she was an older female relative. Sometimes he picked his sister and other times his mother. Frank’s sisters had families of their own when he was born, and his older brothers were already squabbling over who would inherit his family’s forty acres. Elizabeth knew that he adored his sisters but felt distanced from his mother, who never got over having a son when she was nearly fifty. Elizabeth never lied to him, never called him brother or son, but she let him choose who she was to him.

“Sister,” he said and grinned.

“Brother,” she said, opening her arms for an embrace.

They hugged long enough that Elizabeth began to hope a small part of Frank knew who she was. She was on the verge of whispering into his ear when he pulled away and motioned to the man in the wheelchair, who was wearing an improbably dark toupee.

“Do you know Guy?”

Elizabeth did in fact know Guy. She’d been introduced to him at nearly every visit since he took up residence at Golden Sunsets seven years earlier. He was Frank’s boyfriend. He was a delicate man with a fine bone structure and strong Roman features. He did not have dementia, like her husband, but always played along when Frank introduced them. His family had abandoned him in the 1980s when his wife had died and he’d burned through her family money on a series of much younger lovers. He’d had a stroke about fifteen years earlier, which had left him with limited use of his left side and brought him to Golden Sunsets.

For all these reasons, Elizabeth wanted to dislike Guy, but she couldn’t. He was one of the most charming men she’d ever met. Callie, when she’d met him, said it was like Clark Gable had stepped off the screen and into a retirement facility in Kidron. “What’s he doing here?” she’d asked.

Before Elizabeth understood about her husband and Guy, she’d come to Golden Sunsets on the pretense of visiting Frank and then gather around Guy to hear him tell of his USO adventures. He’d been a sound man and traveled with all the big name stars to the concerts they gave servicemen. It was where he’d met his wife, who’d been part of a sister act that only managed to put out two records. “They could have done more,” Guy lamented. “The thing about dames is they like to go and get themselves knocked up.” This way of talking, as braggarts had done when Elizabeth was younger, made her laugh. He didn’t always speak this way though; when he wasn’t entertaining, as he called it, he spoke languorously with a bit of a midwestern accent.

Those first few months, she’d arrive at Golden Sunsets and find Guy and Frank in the corner playing checkers. Their conversation would be about their childhoods—dogs they’d had, swimming holes, movies Elizabeth never remembered seeing.

Guy had tried to tell her what was happening between them. One fall afternoon when Frank had fallen asleep, he confessed preference for men to Elizabeth.
St. Elizabeth
he called her. He told her that the last straw for his son had been when a lover, a prostitute really, had taken his wallet and left him stranded in Reno. “The boy I was with was no older than my grandson at the time. Kids both of them, and my son looked at me like he did the year I told him the truth about the tooth fairy and said he was done bailing me out. That was in 1989 and I haven’t seen him since. It was his wife that paid for all this.” Guy’s hand swept across the air, and the gesture, although small, made the entire place feel larger.

The daughter-in-law, as it turned out, was a second cousin to one of Elizabeth’s uncles, and she’d put her own grandmother in Golden Sunsets. “It’s pretty easy to be related to us,” she’d said to him. They both looked at Frank at that moment, and then Guy turned to Elizabeth and put his hand on her knee.

“There’s not many of us, you know. Maybe one in a couple of hundred, and for a person my age . . .” He trailed off, and Elizabeth for the first time found she wasn’t charmed by Guy. His voice had flattened and slowed and she saw that his eyes were on Frank.

She wished now he’d been explicit about his relationship with her husband.

“Now which sister are you? Winifred?” Guy asked, and shook her hand.

“Please call me Winnie,” Elizabeth said.

Guy winked at her and told Frank to sit down. “Did I ever tell you about the time Bob Hope fell out the back of a jeep and broke his arm?”

Elizabeth hadn’t heard this story, but she couldn’t focus on Guy’s voice. She felt the pressure of the last few days building up on her, and she began to pray that Frank would have just a glimmer or two of lucidity. She needed him to be himself long enough to ask him if she should confess her own sins to their children—tell the boys that Frank wasn’t their father. The nurses said that such lucidity was rare. It had been more than two years since his last clear moment. There were some nurses who believed that it only came when a patient was on the verge of death. Elizabeth talked to enough other spouses to know there was no pattern. One man she’d met brought violets every visit because the smell of them sometimes would bring his wife into the present.

Frank interrupted her thoughts. “You’re no fun today, Winnie.”

“She’s just tired,” Guy said, and Elizabeth saw that they were holding hands. His thumb stroked her husband’s softly.

“Let’s get out of here,” Frank said.

“Can’t,” Guy said, indicating his chair and then the room they were in.

Elizabeth had, on occasion, taken Frank out of Golden Sunsets, especially in those early years. When she spoke to him in the rec center, he asked too many questions. He wanted to know who Callie was and Deb and how he was related to them. Being outside the reach of the smell of antiseptic and the sea of aged faces quieted Frank’s mind. He didn’t feel like he needed to make sense of his world, he just let Elizabeth talk. There were times right after Deb had been sent to prison, that she would put him in the car and they would drive for hours, Frank’s head resting against the window and Elizabeth unspooling all her pent-up feelings about their daughter and their granddaughter.

Frank looked at Elizabeth. “She can take us. She drives.”

“It’s too much,” Guy said.

“No, she wants to. Do you see how beautiful it is out there?” Frank walked to the window, which looked out over the small courtyard where residents were allowed to wander. “She doesn’t want to be here any more than you do, than I do.”

Elizabeth protested; she mentioned that her car was small and that there wouldn’t be a place for the wheelchair. Privately, she had concerns about how she’d get Guy in and out of the car. She wasn’t strong enough to lift him.

Guy assured her that he’d be fine getting in and out of the car and that the chair could be left behind. “It’s just a drive, and it may do us some good.”

She felt herself waver—wanting to believe that a change of location would change their reality, erase the heaviness that had settled into her bones since talking with Dr. Hashmi, and most of all change Frank into someone she knew.

There was a flurry of activity around the three of them as they left Golden Sunsets. The desk nurse gave strict instructions about how long they were to be gone and where they were to go. The other residents, overhearing the commotion, looked toward the three of them and frowned. Elizabeth didn’t know if their looks were out of disappointment at having to stay or disapproval for disrupting the routine.