The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

While I have mercifully not lost a child, I have lost many family members, my home, my country, my religion, so I think I can understand a little of your grief, though when my brother died in the war it toppled my mother, so perhaps that specific grief, that of a mother losing her son, I cannot.

I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around why you didn’t come. Bruce said it’s your fear of flying, fine. I know you don’t travel and I’ve told myself that’s why you haven’t ever come to visit me in London, but with all your principles of propriety, all your tenets on how one ought to be…you attend a funeral! Even if it’s someone you didn’t know well, even if you had a grudge. Fine that he’s not your husband anymore, but he was my father, Bruce’s father, Gilbert’s father. You should have been there. You know, a lot of times if I’m angry and I take a little time, my feelings will cool off, but the longer I sat with your not coming the angrier I got. Lina told me he wrote you a letter and waited for a reply, but you didn’t write back. You, who sit holed up at home and writing letters to god knows who every day, and knowing full well he was dying. I don’t understand you. I have never understood you.

If you’re not busy tonight, do you want to come play gin rummy? We can eat this cake. I also have a bottle of scotch, if you like. I rarely have company, but I’ve just dusted and mopped this morning. No need to let me know, just pop over around seven if you’re free. If not, I’ll drop a few slices of cake to you in the morning after my walk by the river. This is the longest thank-you note I have ever penned. By the way, if I go to the German bakery, would you like to come? I estimate a thirty minute drive. We can talk about it if you come by tonight.

My relationship with Fiona is dear to me, and probably because I am not her mother she has felt, she feels, a strong connection to me without any of the tricky dynamics that always (inevitably, it seems) plague the relationships of mothers and daughters, and in fact, I have always had the feeling, even from the time she was a little girl, that Fiona knew she was providing me with something I could not otherwise have by allowing me to be a part of her life. I am exceedingly grateful to you for this gift.

they’re naming the child Frances, calling it Frannie. I swear I won’t say this to anyone else, but I hate the name.

Each time the calendar rolls over to a new year, I become introspective. It’s as if I am going into the pantry and surveying what is there, taking inventory—what I have, what’s needed, the state of things. That’s what I do every January first.

wonder, was I always lonely? I’m not sure I’ve ever felt at home in the world, but I’m not sure that’s unique. I’m not sure. I’m really not sure what I sat down here to say, but it’s like the whole neat thing has had a good shake and, for the first time in a long time, I have no idea what’s around the corner.

Harry Landy Florence Moore Hall Stanford University 436 Mayfield Ave. Stanford, CA 94305

When I was a child your grandparents sat me down to explain that I was adopted. I was in first grade. Your Pop had come home from work and we sat down in the formal living room, which was unusual, and they explained it to me, and then they took me for an ice cream sundae in lieu of supper to smooth it all over. I was troubled by it. Of course I was, but I was something of a weird bird as a child (serious, grave, without friends, often ignored by other children) and tended toward fixating on things. I became fixated on this. It has always been my nature to see things in black and white, as you well know. I like rules. I relish living in a world that runs on laws and systems that are quite clear and declared. I think being adopted made me feel, as a child, that I did not fit inside the system. I didn’t tell a soul. My parents, knowing how it plagued me, a few years later gave me a letter that my birth mother had written before handing me over and I became obsessed with this piece of paper in a light pink envelope. I kept it in a small wooden box under my bed. For months I read it every night before sleep. I studied her script. I tried to read between the lines, between the letters, to see if I could find something maybe I’d missed. It was agonizing. I wanted my birth mother desperately, though I kept it to myself. Her name was Louisa, which I have only come to know through the Kindred membership your brother gave me for Christmas all those years back. I am enclosing the lett...

I began writing letters because my birth mother (as a child I thought of her as my ‘real’ mother) had, apparently, written letters. I clung to this and did actually find, through correspondence, inexplicable relief. I could write to anyone. I could take the time to think through what I wanted to say, practice, rewrite, and get it exactly how I wanted it. It was so much easier for me to write than it was to have a conversation, even. I was insecure, painfully so. I felt so strange. On the phone the other night you mentioned this, that you wondered if maybe I could only have meaningful relationships through letters, and I have been thinking about that. When I was young, by writing letters I found a framework that made living easier, and that has never changed. However, I do wonder if by conducting the most intimate relationships of my life in correspondence, I have kept, since I was a child, a distance between myself and others. I think it’s true the letters have insulated me, have been a force field, just as practicing law insulated me from dealing with humanity directly, and I wouldn’t change any of it, but I find myself, at this old age, wanting closeness. I want closeness. Something I have not had other than when I met Dad.

I suppose I’ve never recovered. I do not know how to recover.

am putting words to something I have not put words to ever in my life. The being adopted, Gilbert’s dying, the end of my marriage, I always felt—all wrong. Like I was a fraud, acting, pretending I was a daughter, a wife, a mother. I wanted to be those things, and I suppose I was, but I rather never believed it, and then so many things went wrong. Your brother’s death shattered me and I’ve never been put back to right. It seems Dad was able to continue in love, where I was unable. Grief (the biggest grief in the world) is like—What? What is it that happens to a person? I’ve always felt it is like a scream living inside me. It’s gotten a bit softer over time, but it’s never gone. I walk around the house or dig in the garden or wander the grocery store or sit at my desk and there’s a screaming inside my head like an air horn that warns of war. When I look back at my life as a mother I have a pervasive sense of failure, and yet look at you. Your life is full and good, and so is your brother’s. Fiona, I am sorry I’ve kept you at an arm’s length, teaching you not to need me. I am sorry I was bitter that you visited Rosalie and punished you for it. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I am going blind. I’m sorry I didn’t do better. I know you think of me as your mother only, but please remember, inside I am also just a girl.

money—from people dying, no great accomplishment of my own.) I’ll see Fiona for a week or so. She is going to take me up to see Oxford, and then onto the Yorkshire moors, which is where Emily Brontë set Wuthering Heights, and then she’ll drive me north to Fort William to meet Hattie and the brothers. She’s become very supportive of the madness. I’ll leave at the end of April. If it goes well, if I find I enjoy moving about the world like a cavalier twentysomething, I wonder what would you think of taking a trip? With me, I mean, of course. I’ve always had a secret wish to see Paris.

fifteen feet away and that he was standing there so high. I heard him call out to me, thinking he was there at the end of the dock, or not really thinking of him at all, Theodore, I was irritated with him, and he said, WATCH. Watch me. Watch my dive, Mom. I wish I could remember, but here is where things go murky. I lose the trail in my memory, but one thing is clear, Theodore. Without looking up, I said, JUST GO, COLT. JUMP! It was the nickname I used for him. We were obsessed with the horse races, had loved to watch the horse races together. Secretariat had won the Triple Crown just the month earlier, and it was how I called Gilbert, my child, swift as a colt. Sometimes I imagine it, his body folded against the summer sky, then stretching out, then down into the lake. Hands arms head body legs pointed feet toes toenails. I didn’t see it, but I imagine it. There was a shelf there where he dove in. His neck broke and he didn’t come up, Theodore. It took me a few seconds to register the lack of him. That’s how Gilbert died, and I’m sorry. I am so very, very sorry. I’m going to put the pen down for a bit.

There is a quote from one of my friend Joan Didion’s essays. It’s from the last essay in The White Album. The quote is: “What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace,” and then it goes on, and then, “Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time.” This feels like the truest thing I have ever read.

It would be lovely if you were here. Of course you know I’m yours, have been for quite some time, with affection,

It was all forty-three dollars you wanted to give over to her, and you were grieved when you weren’t able to. And you know, Colt, remembering that, I wept. For so, so many things, I could just weep. There is not language sufficient for me to express the depth of my sorrow for what happened, my son. Sorry doesn’t begin to scratch the surface, but I think you know that. You would know that. Oh, Gilbert.

When I started writing to you I don’t know what I thought it was for. Maybe what I wanted was for you to know me. I have missed you all this time, of course, but the fact is that I got every moment of you there was. Enough of this now. It is with love I’ve been writing, Your mother

tried the books on tape, but really cannot focus and detest the headphones and bad narrators, so not reading anything anymore, though sometimes I have Theodore read to me aloud.

Hi, Rosalie. I’m taking good care of her. The vision problem makes her afraid, which she won’t say. She regrets she can’t see details in the art, but when the Eiffel Tower lights up, she can see that. Regards, T. Lübeck

I am enclosing the first draft of my novel titled Dynasty of Sight. (Thanks for helping me with the title.) I probably would not have written a book if I hadn’t lived with you that year.

I love you, Harry

am terribly sorry, Hattie, to deliver this devastating news as well as for my failure to be there at the final moment. I am grateful we were able to spend so much time with you in Scotland, and I am heartbroken that I didn’t get more time with our Sybil (I am certain you will feel the same). It pains me to think of her alone, possibly afraid, and yet perhaps it is as she would have wanted. Her life, she said to me only very recently, had become so full these last few years, and yet I know that from certain things, now she is free.

Fiona Van Antwerp-Beaumont 2 Hamilton Terrace London SE 28 8JF United Kingdom

Of course I can’t send the letter I want to send. What I want to say I cannot say. I know that, even if I wrote a letter a thousand miles long it would not be able express the universe of the human soul—my soul THE LETTERS pages and pages to what end? I cannot say. I am asking myself to what end. It doesn’t amount to anything at all, they are nothing, only paper with my scrawling endless, but it’s the way I that has been the manner by which I make meaning, I suppose writing the letters is how I but even still I even with all the writing I still don’t I had my DNA tested, you would be surprised to learn I am sorry. I am so, so very sorry I am going blind, and it terrifies me. If I cannot see, what do I have? You’re gone. I know I’ll see you soon.