The Color of Water in July (10 page)

Jess sat cross-legged on the smooth old floorboards, looking through tidy stacks of dusty, yellowing papers. Her instincts were right. There was nothing of interest here. It was just a storage place for housekeeping details. There were bundles of summer receipts, each labeled with the year that the items were bought, going back to 1952. A complete set of Mamie’s dining-room and telegraph bills from the Wequetona Club, and a packet of business cards from every small-tradesperson she had ever dealt with. Jess looked with bemusement at the neat collections of schedules: the SS
Jefferson
, some kind of a boat, with docking times right at the Wequetona dock. Timetables for the Chicago-to-Charlevoix train on the now-defunct Pere Marquette Railway. She saw a yellowed paper, “Rules of the Wequetona Club,” with orange thumbtack marks in the corners.

Dutifully, Jess sorted through the papers, the mundane details of a lifetime of cottage summers. At the very bottom of the trunk, there was an ornate embroidered folder. Jess picked it up and could feel that there were more papers inside.

She opened the folder slowly, afraid that a dusty mess of papers would spill out. Inside, she was surprised to see that there were some photographs. On top, there was an old tintype that Jess had never seen before, of people wearing dungarees standing barefoot on the front porch of a wooden shack, a few scrubby pines and a mule in the background. There was a packet of postcards, black-and-white, of watering holes in Europe, faded-out blood-colored ink with short statements on the back:
It’s great here, loving it
. . . Addressed to Mamie, signed
Lila
in a loopy, spidery hand.

Jess was about to put the folder back into the trunk, when she saw another parchment envelope, medium sized and yellowed with age, that was tucked behind the portraits. Jess pulled the envelope open and saw more photos of what must have been Margaret as a baby and very young child. In one, she was holding the hand of a man wearing a doorman’s-type uniform, and in another, she was sitting on a young Mamie’s knee, one hand reaching up and grasping a lock of Mamie’s thick curly hair. Underneath that, there was an official-looking document, a birth certificate that appeared to be her mother’s, although the name was misspelled, issued by the county courthouse of Folsome County, Indiana. It read:

Margaret Lila Trathway

Mother: Margaret Adele Trathway

Father: none

Status: illegitimate

Born: May 30th, 1922

Place of birth: LaSalle, Indiana (born at home)

Status: illegitimate.
Jess stared at the words, the reality of their meaning starting to sink in as she tried to remember what she actually knew about her mother’s birth.

She remembered the story she had heard growing up: Mamie was terribly in love with Thomas Cleves. In fact, they were engaged to be married, with a Christmas wedding planned, when her sister, Lila, tragically drowned. Miss Ada, crazy with grief, had insisted that they defer the wedding indefinitely. Thomas and Mamie were so in love that they couldn’t stand waiting. They eloped, had Margaret, and shortly thereafter, Thomas was gone. Jess had asked Mamie once what happened to him, and she didn’t really answer. She just said, “Thomas Cleves was a good man.” One thing was for sure—Mamie didn’t need a man. As the last surviving Tretheway, she had inherited her family’s fortune and moved into the family’s mansion. After that, she was a woman of independent means.

Jess held the yellowed document in her hands, scanning the words again. So Mamie had never been married in the first place. Of course, that would pretty much explain everything. She couldn’t believe it had not been obvious to her before.

Jess looked down at the ridged lettering of an old manual typewriter. It was just a simple story, after all, an out-of-wedlock birth, a marriage that never was. Jess noticed that the clerk in the courthouse hadn’t even bothered to correct the typos. Her mother’s last name was misspelled, and the year was typed wrong—1922, not 1923. She could almost picture the clerk, a young woman with cheap, bright lipstick, wearing a red polka-dot dress cinched tight at the waist, a patronizing look in her eyes. Jess could imagine a young Mamie standing at the polished wooden counter, drawing her shoulders up square, insisting that the clerk type it again because her name was spelled wrong, the woman in polka dots, drumming her red-painted fingernails on the countertop impatiently, saying, “Come on, honey. What difference does it make?
To someone like you.
”

Jess tucked the pictures and the birth certificate back in the envelope. She would show this to Margaret. She put away the rest of the papers, the old faded postcards. She looked again at the tintype of the dungareed people standing in front of the dusty shack; thinking about keeping it but remembering Russ’s comment about “likely-looking ancestors,” she returned it to the folder, which she placed in the trunk.

When Jess went to stand up, her legs were stiff and she had pins and needles in her feet. She had been so absorbed in looking through the papers that she had completely lost track of time and forgotten all about Russ and Paul—and even forgotten where she was for a moment. She wiped the dust off the back of her jeans and walked out of the little closet hallway into the kitchen, carrying the envelope that contained the pictures and birth certificate. After sitting in the little hallway illuminated only by a single sixty-watt bulb, Jess blinked back the bright afternoon sunlight that flooded the kitchen.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

M
AMIE

They say all babies are born with blue eyes, and Margaret was no exception. She was a bit of a thing, small enough to cup in your two hands, and her eyes were the blue of smoke when it hangs low over water; but when I looked at her tiny naked body, I could see from the start that there was something about her that was different. I knew from Cousin Edith’s babies that nipples were supposed to look like tiny rose petals, the palest of pink with filigrees of blue veins showing through. Margaret’s tummy looked white enough to me, but her nipples were amber, the color of sun-warmed wet sand. She had a fuzz of hair on her at birth, and long black hairs growing from the tops of her ears. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but right from the start, I knew she wasn’t quite like the rest of us.

When she was just tiny from being born, I thought I’d call her Meg—I liked the softness of it—but she was looking reproachfully at me, waving with her tiny fists, wailing her most anguished cry, and
Meg
just didn’t stick to her. She had a mind of her own, and she needed a name to suit her personality. Even as a tiny baby,
Margaret
fit her better.

I’ll admit, I longed for a soft cooing baby, a cuddly little girl to share my lonely days. But even as a tiny one, Margaret had such strong opinions. Sometimes, when I tried to hold her, she tensed her tiny baby body as stiff as a washboard. I made her bottles of warmed-up milk with Karo syrup in it, and when she had a mind to, she would fling it right back at me, her eyes in injured slits. I used to imagine that if she could talk, she would tell me how angry she was at me. I tried to be good to her. Lord knows I did. But only the good Lord could tell me if I was truly doing the right thing.

We lived in a building called the San Remo, and though it was simple, I loved it. There were only two real rooms, connected by a long hall, and a small kitchen, tucked away toward the back, with a pink-and-black tiled floor. The apartment was furnished, and, as if by grace, it seemed that there were just exactly the right number of things in it, neat and compact.

I took good care of that baby, better than any nursemaid, and I did everything myself, even down to the dirty diapers that I soaked in a pail with borax and bleach. It gave me pleasure to stand near the sunny window looking at the tree leaves, ironing her tiny bibs and sleep sacks, breathing in the fresh scent of hot, clean linens as I worked. I would push her wicker basket so that a panel of sunlight fell across her, making her fresh flannel blanket look even whiter, her lips pursed in a soft bow while she slept.

But it seemed like before I knew it she was walking, running, back and forth across the wooden floor: Mommy, can we go to the park, can we go outside, can we go for a walk? That girl never stopped chattering, words spilling upon words in her little birdlike voice.

She kept me company with her chatter, which was good since I knew no one. Were it not for our daily conversation with the elevator man as we were coming and going, I would have had no conversation. I was not alone in being a single woman in the building. There were other girls, clean and respectable-looking, who would come and go dressed for work, but maybe we all had stories we didn’t want to tell, as we instinctively kept our distance, limiting our contact to brief nods as we passed.

I confess I lived with a still, small sadness at that time, but I tried to stay busy. Tending to Margaret, who smelled like sweet warm milk, I felt like there was a quiet melody that ran through our days. I listened as I tended to the baby, my eyes on the sun-dappled backs of leaves that fluttered in front of our window. Watching those leaves move in the wind, I thought that was about as close to God as I could get.

There was a school down the street from us, just at the far edge of the park. In the morning, the children used to go into the square brick building in twos and threes and run shouting through the fenced-in play yard. Little Margaret, by the time she could barely sit up in her carriage, loved to pass by the school yard and watch the children. Maybe a baby knows when they’re lonely and feels that absence like an ache, I don’t know. She was tiny, with thin matchstick legs and enormous black eyes, but words flowed out of her mouth thick as prayers from a preacher on a radio show. By the time that child could walk, she learned to talk, without the slightest trace of babyishness in her voice. We would walk by the school in the morning, she and I, and she would say, “Mommy, I want to go to school.” And I would say to her, every morning just the same, “You can’t go to school. You’re not old enough.”

“But, Mommy, how old do I have to be?” And I said to her, “You have to be five to go to school, Margaret, and you’re not five yet, you’re still a baby.”

“I’m not a baby,” she stormed.

“Yes, you’re a baby,” I said, never wise enough to keep my mouth shut.

I wished she didn’t sound so grown-up. I used to watch the other mothers at the park with their children, and I did not see any like Margaret who were so tiny and at the same time so accusatory.

One day in the park, she was playing with another child, a chubby girl with blond wisps of hair and chapped pink cheeks. Margaret was half a head shorter and half the width around, but that voice of hers was always crisp and imperious, not a child’s voice at all. The other girl’s mother, a plain, respectable woman in a green-paisley dress, bent to ask her what grade she was in in school.

“I haven’t started school yet,” Margaret said, her fluted words each crisply enunciated. “I’m too little.”

“She’s four,” I blurted, a little too quickly.

“Oh my,” the woman said, “she sounds so grown-up. I thought she was older.”

My face blushed a deep crimson, and I gripped a little too hard as I dragged Margaret down the sidewalk toward home.

That was the fifth year of our exile, and I wanted to go home. Margaret would never understand exactly why she always seemed so grown-up, because to tell her the truth would be the unraveling of my story. Mercifully, not long after that, Miss Ada died. It was time for me to bring little Margaret home. The two of us left the sunny solitude of our life in the San Remo behind and returned to the big family house on Sycamore Street.

The house was too big for us, built to proportions that were grandiose, not human at all, and haunted by mournful faces of the dead. My mother was sick for several years, and died alone; when the maid saw that she was poorly, the minister was called, but he arrived to find that she had already departed. She never once reached out to me. I felt no animosity toward her, only sadness that circumstances had conspired to make me break her heart.

Margaret and I did not take up much space. We were ill suited to living in the big gloomy rooms whose tall windows were shrouded by heavy curtains, and whose spaces were stuffed with heavy furniture too big for a slight woman and a small child. But the big house had one advantage: it gave us bulk. Never again would we be the object of pity. A woman with a large house and enough money to pay her servants well need not think about pity.

I was not ashamed. I held my head high. On Sunday, I walked straight into the Ironton Congregational Church, my hand gripped tightly around Margaret’s fragile wrist. I wore navy crepe and she wore velvet, and we both walked right down the center of the pews, looking neither right nor left, my eyes shrouded by a little net veil that I had adjusted just so. I paid no attention to the whispers coming from either side. To me, the murmuring was just the sound of lapping waves, of Pine Lake gently ribbing the woody underbrush.

We took our places in the front right pew; we stood up tall to sing the Gloria Patri:

Glory be to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Ghost
. . .

And glory be to the mother and to the child.

After that, Margaret and I were home. I took up my church circles and Red Cross and golf, and come the middle of May, I headed off to Wequetona, where I stayed through every summer. I never listened to the whispered gossip that I knew followed us like shadows on a sunny day, and I kept my chin held high.

Before I knew it, that girl was grown up and gone. Margaret and I shared a little piece of a life; not a lifetime, no, not a lifetime at all.