The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace…. Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time. Joan Didion, “On the Morning After the Sixties,” The White Album

She consults the stack of what letters she has received and not yet answered; a list she keeps of letters she means to write; a stack of upside-down pages in the drawer, a letter she has been writing going on years now, still unsent.

She assured me Walt doesn’t mind how often she is gone, but I’ll tell you, I don’t know how their marriage will make it. She’ll certainly never be able to have children at this point.

Just as a summer afternoon is gorgeous from inside air-conditioning, and you step into the day, hot, muggy, miserable, a postcard of France with all the lavender and sunflowers, I imagine, is far more alluring than the place itself.

Dear Ann, I am writing to congratulate you on your most recent novel, State of Wonder, which was given to me for my birthday by my brother. I finished reading it this morning.

Meta.

What I think happened is that as I was driving out of the library parking lot, away from the lights and into the darkness, you know, well—I suppose I can’t say exactly what happened. I was driving just like usual, slow and steady, but something occurred. I can’t remember it exactly, but what I think is that quite suddenly I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see! But how?

I’m not certain it was my vision, that black chasm. It wasn’t as if I’d closed my eyes; it’s as if the space of time has been deleted from my memory, up until I crashed.

I have known conceptually I would go blind, but as an eventuality. Now it seems the blinding is underway, and this is how it will go, but I didn’t anticipate it being like this. This confusion.

But the worst dream, this is the one I have over and over, is I’m sitting down at the desk to write and there is the stack of letter writing paper, there are my pens, there are the envelopes, and I’m pawing at them like a cat, but I cannot pick them up. Or I pick up the pen and it lists like a noodle in my hands. I press the thing to the page and it softens or disintegrates.

My ophthalmologist Dr. Jameson said that with my condition, once it gets going, it could be a year or it could be ten years until it’s complete, and as things progress it can sort of come in and out.

Additionally, if there is a vote taken at the meeting Monday (June 4) regarding moving from the Sunday school room to the basement of the church in order to accommodate a larger number of attendees, I vote a very enthusiastic “NAY.” The club has already grown so large as to become unwieldy.

Furthermore, the basement is musty, probably riddled with mold, and the church board has not yet prioritized the necessary renovations that would make the space usable.

I’ve done some research, and there is actually a really nice retirement village a mile or two from his house called Happy Hills (you can click the link). They have openings in both the independent cottages (yard) and the condos (no yard), and the pay structure is kind of complicated, but your house will sell high despite the lack of updating because those waterfront lots are in such high demand.

My parents got me a puppy (FINALLY) after I was begging for nine years. She is a golden retreiver and her name is Thor after my favorite Greek god, the god of war.

Who's going to tell her Thor is Norse not Greek?

My psychiatrist Dr. Laura had to move to Alaska because her husband works for an oil company, which is repugnant and I told her so, and he got relocated.

Excuse me.

I am trying very hard not to say anything to him about it, and Mom says every time I go, if I keep it inside, she’ll take me to pick out a candy bar at 7-11 as a reward. I made it through the first appointment, no problem, and got a Twix.

This girl is on the spectrum.

You better not say those kinds of things about her marriage to your daughter with things already strained—your own marriage was a filthy sewer even though you were home from work every night by six.

Well, it’s all sorted and I was due for an upgraded vehicle, so now I’m driving a modern Volkswagen Beetle (looks like something out of the future, a lovely red) but nearly a month after the fact I receive an e-mail from my daughter. She happens to be not in London but in Sydney, Australia, so the e-mail arrives in my inbox at four in the morning, and the meat of it is that FROM HALFWAY ACROSS THE EARTH she has heard from her brother that I was in a wreck and she has plenty of advice to give me, not the least of which is that I ought to sell my house (which she deems old, out of date) and move into a nursing home.

As a matter of fact, Guy and I heard a case in oh, I don’t know, the late eighties, and it was a woman just a touch older than myself SUING her CHILDREN because they’d duped her into selling her house and installed her into a place that was more like a prison or an insane asylum than a home for old people. Rats in the toilets, that sort of thing. Real hell for this woman.

That’s a new level of insanity

She has not one single thing to do with my life, might as well live on another planet, sees me once a year if I’m lucky, and thinks it’s time for me to move into a brand new nursing home in Falls Church! Well. I will do no such thing.

It’s good you finally got the child a dog, but I think you also need to get him a different therapist than this Dr. Oliver. The man sounds dreadful. Are you certain he’s not a pedophile? And as a matter of fact, as long as we’re on the matter, you know I really don’t even think Harry needs a psychotherapist. Leave it to your generation to take someone who is absolutely brilliant and turn it into a problem.

You can’t just ask someone if there child’s therapist is a pedophile.

It’s a hell of a thing, to lose one’s mental faculties. Guy never forgot a case, not ever, but then this series of strokes and a heart attack last year. You think of all the years, all the cases between us, this memory we shared. Honestly, I hated to go, it was very disturbing. When I first got to the house he was trying to hit on me like I was some call girl, although eventually the mists did seem to clear.

(Honestly, from my angle Washington is looking like a carnival on fire, but what else is new? I will say, it surprises me how much I like President Obama. He’s a wonderful speaker, I could listen to him read the phone book.)

The honorable Judge Guy D. Donnelly of Frederick, Maryland, and St. Michaels, Maryland, has died. Judge Donnelly will be well known to many after his twenty-eight-year service to the Circuit Court of Maryland in Frederick County (1971–1999), a sober, thoughtful man of very few words who ruled with a crystal-clear justice, respected by both sides of the line, a renowned feminist. In other words, a unicorn in modern times. He died in his home with two women at his side: his wife, Elizabeth, and his daughter, Nancy Louise (married name Young),

Sybil Van Antwerp was well known to have served as Judge Donnelly’s chief clerk for almost thirty years. They retired on the same day in 1999, and there is very little information about who she was, outside of her position in relationship to the judge. She seems, as a matter of fact, to have disappeared into thin air.

Obsession!

Donnelly, now highly sought-after, with more work than he could manage, was looking for a partner, and a close friend of his, a former attorney and faculty at UVA Law, contacted Donnelly to suggest he bring on Sybil Van Antwerp with her acuity, disposition, and dogged work ethic. Donnelly and Van Antwerp Legal was formed, and according to several people with whom I spoke, the pair shared a spark right off the bat.

“It was like they shared a brain,” Elizabeth Donnelly said. “She was his sounding board, his voice of reason. She was his equal. His work wife, they used to call her. I didn’t mind; he needed her.”

Faced with the prospect of maintaining the firm they had built, finding a new partner or finding another firm in the midst of raising her three young children, Sybil Van Antwerp chose the fourth option. She went with him. She left the prestige of their firm and all that money, and fell in behind Donnelly as a lowly clerk.

As a clerk you didn’t make any money, and she was very successful by then. It really surprised us. Everyone, I mean. But in some ways, it didn’t. You really couldn’t imagine them ever splitting up.

Van Antwerp disappears from the public record after her retirement, though it is purported she lives in or near Annapolis, Maryland. I sought a way to reach her, extending every resource, and found no phone number or email address.

Secondly, it seems unlikely that you “extended every resource” in order to contact me, because I’m here at my house where I have lived for many years and my address is a matter of public record.

The world is different than it was when I was a professional, so perhaps you, in your modern naïveté, cannot fathom what I am about to explain. When I went with Guy to the court, I did not “fall behind him as a lowly clerk.” What Guy and I shared professionally was something like perfect symbiosis.

Guy and I were equals within the context of our relationship to each other, and I don’t know of another woman my age who was afforded that opportunity professionally.

He was, speaking frankly, off the record, rather idiotic socially. He made terrible jokes. He flirted with tall, younger women. He had terrible taste in office furniture, music. He ate like an animal.

He’s lucky he found Liz—that woman is as classic as they come.

I remember you. I know you are a cold metal bitch. There is something more important than law and people with their lives do not fit into one box. What you call justice is like an army tank driving through and crushing without mercy, and when it is gone there is only wreckage.

But I wish you the very worst, it is what you deserve.

We are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious, lively, interesting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer. We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic. And in winter we age (brutally) and die.

But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I’m getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.

But Gilbert’s death was a swift ejection back out to the loneliest bitter stretch of road, and that is the bone crunching grief. I’m not saying I’ve not come in from the wind a few more times in my life; I have. And of course I have my other children, and they have been a joy and comfort.

The stretches on the high, windblown road are far commoner than the stopovers in comfort, and aren’t we always trying to get back to the happier times?

I’ve spent my life trying to get back to having him even though I know I cannot.

My mother died with cancer when I was eighteen. I wish you could have known her. She was beautiful, kind, patient. She had these two odd duck adopted children and she treated us as if we were the king and queen! She was always sort of laughing, or smiling, or making light. Anyway, she had cancer on again off again through her life, and it killed her eventually, and when it did my father went to pieces.

Anyway, when Mother died someone had to deliver remarks and I took one look at my father and knew he wouldn’t be able to do it, and my brother was young (only ten years old) and he’d gone mute. Felix didn’t speak a word from when she died until he was twelve or so (let me tell you, that was an entire situation in and of itself), so I was the one for the eulogy. I wrote something to read, had it all down, just your standard things about how she’d been a good mother, and referencing her kindness in adopting children, etc., and her volunteerism in the community. I got up to the front of the church and I’d been feeling fairly awful that week between her death and the service, just a dull nausea, the way my body was inhabiting the grief, and I stood there, went hot, and vomited. Mortifying.

Fiona called this week to tell me she is pregnant. Apparently it took an awfully long time, a petri dish and more capital than the down payment on a house (it’s astounding how much money she makes, not that I know specifically), none of which she chose to share with me until after the fact. She is going to have the baby over there; dual citizenship is a perk. There were some concerns, but now she’s well into the second trimester. I suppose this makes you its great aunt or/and the ‘godgrandmother.’ I’m sure I won’t know the child, as I only see Fiona once a year at this point.

It is a lovely part of the state, with the big horse farms, but you know how I loathe to drive highways.

Same.

James is a little uptight, and married to a real wreck of a woman riddled with nerves from a wealthy family out in California or some far-flung place, but I’ve always liked him and he has a child with whom I correspond.

I’ve now stood before my closet on three occasions and leafed through what I own, and the only black anything I have anymore is a dress I was probably wearing in the 1990s, which dips down to the uppermost part of what used to be my cleavage, but which now resembles the skin of a raw plucked chicken. That won’t do.

I don’t need to be six feet tall like yourself, but five foot five or six would’ve been nice. Five feet one inch is embarrassing for things like public speaking (which I loathe to begin with) and no self-respecting septuagenarian is going to wear pumps, though I will say I do miss wearing them.

This is the perfect opportunity for you to finally GO, take her shopping for baby things and maternity tops, you know, see Buckingham Palace and the very tall clock which has a man’s name that escapes me.

Big Ben?