The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

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.

if she’d have been a

man, she’d have been the judge.

I know you are a cold metal bitch.

You asked how long ago Gilbert had passed away, and this past July it was thirty-nine years. He would have turned nine the November 7 following.

Gilbert

the circumstances of his death have never for one day diminished,

I have to think that when it comes to seasons we all get one round. 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. One turn of the seasons per person, unless it’s cut short, like it was for Gill, and like it was for Quintana Roo. I suppose, on this schedule, we’d say your John had made it to fall. My mother died in her summer. 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. Maybe you have a warm supper and stay a night or maybe you stay there a few years. I had one of those stopovers when the children were young, just before Gilbert died, and Daan and I were happy, even though I didn’t know it was happiness at the time

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 think that is what it feels like, with Gill. 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 had these two odd duck adopted children and she treated us as if we were the king and queen!

when it did my father went to pieces.

the meat, the organs, the skin, slopped to a pile. He was this way for about a year until he remarried (new bones, new skeleton).

Felix didn’t speak a word from when she died until he was twelve or so

James,

Bruce is

writing letters to Harry.

Rosalie, Fiona called this

suppose this makes you its great aunt or/and the ‘godgrandmother.’

James is a little uptight, and married to a real wreck of a woman riddled with nerves from a wealthy family out in California

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.

a grandchild in London means you’ll have to visit.

but I can’t leave Paul with anyone overnight.

You asked about Lars.

then sometimes he comes out with these magnificent statements and that’s like the sun breaking through on a cloudy day.

Between the two of them, I’m exhausted and it feels lonely, even though I’m with one or both of them all the time. I certainly did not see this coming—caring for husband and son as if they were toddlers or less until the end of time.

Mick Watts

spit on the gravestone and I will do the same to yours.

on the face of this mad, inside-out, senseless, barbaric, intolerably fraught and painful and mind-spinning planet, some semblance of order…well, of course it’s appealing.

relationships being, as we know by now in our old

ages, the meat of our lives;

to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?

You sound like an old fool with comments like that one.

Why should her son present to us on matters of real estate?

Harry,

My brother suffered at the hands of sadistic classmates for years.

bothered Felix again. We still laugh about that. And you know, regarding Felix, he endured torment as you do, but he is the smartest, kindest man, and he is HAPPY, and his life has turned out to be magnificent, so you’ll push through.

My son Bruce had friends who attended.

was an English major in college,

I became a paralegal and after a few years of that, went to law school at the University of Virginia. From law school I went into private practice with that old judge who just died,

that was before he was the judge,

Your father, who was very clever at Yale Law and wrote for the law review, came along to clerk for another judge on the bench directly out of law school when I’d already been there fifteen years or more, so I took him (your father) under my wing. There is no good explanation for our enduring friendship

You asked where I’m from. I grew up all about Pennsylvania, some in Ohio, and down to Maryland eventually. My mother grew up in Arizona and my father in Maine, and furthermore, I was adopted at fourteen months.

did have three children, as it is in your family, but the second one passed away when he was eight years old. His name was Gilbert.

I have a son Bruce, who is a lawyer in Alexandria, and a daughter, Fiona, who is an architect and lives in England, and I have two grandchildren (Hank and Violet) and one on the way next month. I am no longer married, you’re correct, but my husband did ...

I remember, like you, I was very much a rule follower, rigid about how things ought to be done. I was also very curious, like you. My curiosity was directed at people.

I was very small in stature, and I think smallness fostered in me a sense of wonder as well as trepidation,

was often punished for insolence and rudeness.

guess I was considered somewhat odd.