The Light of the World, page 7
They all sat around Eva’s parents’ living room, scraps of sparkly wrapping paper at their feet and far too much stocking candy munched on as the last of the gifts were opened. Eva’s grandmother had always liked to wait until last, when she’d have the most attention for her gift. She’d told Eva, rather conspiratorially, that she would orchestrate circumstances to end up with all eyes on her. She liked to feel important in her old age.
When Eva thought about it, she really was. She’d lived far longer than her brothers or their wives. Mary Kessler was a force, and they all bore with her. She was their matriarch for better or for worse.
Eva remembered that her grandmother had been quiet for a long time when they gave her the CD player. She sat and stared at it while they all waited with bated breath for her to unleash the torrent of words they knew she was just barely holding back behind her old, wrinkled lips. Eventually, after the minutes stretched by and Eva could see her father hastily whispering with her mother about returns, her grandmother turned to Charlie. “Is this why you wanted all my old records?”
“Yeah.” He was contemplating a peppermint patty and nearly crushed it between startled fingers. “I made them into CDs for you, so you’d still have them and be able to listen to them on that.”
“Well,” Eva’s grandmother replied, looking for all the world as though she did not know what to say. “That was very sweet of all of you. One of you is going to have to show me how this works before I leave because otherwise it’s going to sit in a box and I’ll keep listening to my 45s just to spite you all.”
Eva remembered a lot of laughing after that. She laughed again, stepping back into the living room to see that her father had returned from his conversation with the super. He had a Glen Miller record in his hands and was fiddling with the dials on the CD player.
“This will come as no shock to either of you, but I can’t figure out how to work this thing.” He stood back and crossed his arms over his chest.
Letting out an amused little huff, Eva crossed the room in three quick steps. She took the LP from her father’s hands and set it aside, then bent down to find the corresponding CD on the shelf below. It took a moment of squinting before she found it, but she let out a triumphant little breath and tugged the CD from the shelf.
A folded piece of paper fell from the shelf as Eva handed her dad the CD. She picked it up, curious. It was yellowed and creased, folded and unfolded many times over. Inside was a small photograph, no more than two by three inches, of a girl. There was no inscription on the back.
“What’s that?” Eva’s dad asked.
“Picture.” Eva flipped the picture back over and stared at the girl’s face. There was something familiar about her, and Eva could have sworn she’d seen that face before. “She looks familiar. A cousin, maybe?”
Her dad peered at the picture for a moment before shrugging. “Don’t recognize her. Put it with that box of diaries. Maybe Nate knows who she is.”
Eva moved to do so, unable to shake the lingering feeling that her uncle would not know who the girl was, either. Her father turned back to the bookshelves. Most of them were marked with flags indicating what was to be donated and what was for anyone who wanted it. Eva had helped her grandmother do that years ago, back when she’d had a health scare at the age of ninety-seven. The first real “oh my god you’re old, Gran” moment had come in the form of what the doctors thought was a mild stroke, and Mary had spent much of the summer recovering and napping on the couch while Eva went through the large book collection she’d amassed over the years and helped her to mark what she wanted to do with them.
Death was on Mary’s mind then, as it had been on Eva’s. She spent the entire exercise thinking about how little what she was doing mattered. She was trapped somewhere between misery and the sinking knowledge that no one except her grandmother—who wouldn’t be long behind her anyway—would miss her if she were gone. Eva shook herself. It didn’t do to dwell on those memories. That was one of the first things they taught her in recovery, and Eva strove to be better than that girl who could not find a way out of her head. She was better than that girl.
She tucked the photograph into the box.
It was such a shame that her grandmother’s entire life had come down to a series of flags and things shoved hastily into trash bags marked with Sharpie. Eva stretched, her fingers knitting together high above her head as her spine cracked loudly.
“Careful there, Eva,” her dad joked. “If you crack your back too much, it’ll stay all contorted.”
“Sure, Dad.” Eva took the trash bag that her mother held out to her and pulled a marker from her pocket. Her mother trailed half a step behind her and together they stood before the front closet.
“You ready to tackle the rest of this?” Eva asked.
“Not at all,” her mother answered.
There really wasn’t much left inside. Another shoe rack, this one metal, hung from the back of the door. Eva went rummaging for a screwdriver to remove it. Pair by pair, the remainder of Eva’s grandmother’s shoes were loaded into a trash bag marked “donate.” The rack itself was jammed awkwardly with Eva’s bag of expired cleaning products by the door. Once that was done, all that was left were her grandmother’s coats and the vacuum cleaner shoved into a far corner. They pulled the vacuum out and left it in the middle of the living room because they would need it later in their cleaning adventure. On a shelf above the rack of coats was a reusable grocery bag full of winter hats and a few honest-to-god hatboxes that made Eva’s mother laugh. She stood on her tiptoes and pulled them down one by one, and Eva opened each and modeled the ridiculous hats they contained. It set her mother laughing and had her father chuckling before long. Laughter was a cure-all when nothing else seemed to work in their family, and the silly hats were enough to send them all into peals of laughter.
It took three long days for Eva and her parents to work their way through the bedroom, most of the living room, and the bathroom. Eva divided her time between reading the diaries whenever she could.
Her body ached, but it was the precious seconds she was able to snatch away from the cleaning effort that Eva lived for. She read greedily, swallowing the words her grandmother wrote about Wren, her daily life, and the ridiculously snowy winter. She had never known her grandmother was such a talented writer.
Eva read late into the night, curled up under a thin sheet on the couch in her grandmother’s stuffy living room. She didn’t go home because her parents wanted someone to be in the apartment in case there were problems. Eva was fine with the plan. It gave her time to read in the evenings, and her grandmother’s diaries gave her a lot to think about.
Wren was a central character to them. If it hadn’t been 1925, Eva would have thought that her grandmother totally had the hots for her new friend. Wren seemed to dominate the entries Mary made following their meeting. Eva sighed and stared up at the water-stained ceiling. There was no way. Her grandmother wasn’t gay. She certainly didn’t spend her teenage years crushing on girls.
But could she have liked this girl? Eva wasn’t about to go about labeling someone who couldn’t choose a label for herself. She hated it when people did that with historical figures. Still, the implication was there, and Eva wasn’t sure what to think about this revelation. Or potential revelation. Whatever it was.
She sighed, pulling the sheet up over her despite the heat, and turned back to the diary.
She was reading now because her mother hadn’t particularly appreciated the first time she had disappeared under the guise of getting lunch from Mr. Bertelli’s grocery on the corner and had been drawn into a week-long period later in January where her grandmother waxed on, almost poetically, about how truly wonderful and beautiful Wren was. She returned more than an hour later with sandwiches, but it had done little to assuage her mother’s ire. At least she had an excuse when her mother demanded to know where Eva got off disappearing like that when they needed help.
“Mr. Bertelli offered me a job,” Eva explained. She sat her parents down at the tiny kitchen table and passed out the sandwiches she’d bought. It was easy to talk when they were crammed into this room, away from the chaos of a half-packed-up apartment. She did not get pulled away into memory as easily. “I wasn’t sure what to say and it turned into a…” She wrinkled her nose and trailed off, searching for the right word. “Thing.”
“How so?”
“Well, I got drawn into a conversation with him after I put in the sandwich order,” Eva said. This was true. It just so happened that she had sat on a bench reading for twenty minutes before this. “He wanted to know more about my availability and if I liked his store.”
“When did he offer?” her mother asked.
“At the funeral. I wasn’t really in a mental state to give him an answer then.”
“That’s smart of you, E.” Her father reached over and patted her hand where it rested on the table. “Did you tell him anything yet?”
“I haven’t. We don’t live here, we’re selling this place, and it takes forty minutes on the train to get back home.” Eva took a bite of her sandwich. “Besides, I’m still not sure if I want to go back to school next semester—”
“Oh, I wish you would,” her mother interjected.
Eva felt disappointment well up within her. She had hoped she could casually float the idea without her mother saying anything.
“Now Claire—” her father started.
“No, she should. Not having a degree is only going to hurt you, Eva.”
“I couldn’t hack it in college, Mom,” Eva shot back. “Remember that time I tried to kill myself because I couldn’t handle it?”
Her father hung his head, and Eva felt a flush of shame rise to her cheeks. It was a low blow and one she shouldn’t have sunk to, but there was a reason Eva did not graduate from college. Her mother refused to admit that sending Eva into a powder-keg of stress and pressure had done nothing for her already fragile mental state.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that.” Her mother sounded exhausted, but Eva was done having this argument.
“If I don’t talk about it, how are we going to get better as a family?” Eva asked. “We need to talk about stuff like this, Mom.”
“You shouldn’t turn Mr. Bertelli down,” her father interjected. Both Eva and her mother turned and stared at him. He put up his hands, placating. “I don’t wanna have that argument again, Eva. Save it for later, for therapy.”
Eva looked down at her half-eaten sandwich. She suddenly wasn’t hungry. “Okay.”
“I talked to your grandmother’s lawyer today and he wanted me to come in and talk about some probate details. It could be that we’re not able to sell this place as quickly as we thought we might be able to.”
“So what does that mean?” Eva asked.
Her father shrugged, picking up his sandwich. “Keep your options open, for now. This place still needs a lot of work before we’ll be ready to sell it.”
They left Eva alone in the apartment later that evening lost in her thoughts, reading her grandmother’s diaries and trying to make sense of everything.
The warm glow of the lamp on the end table bathed her in yellow light as the air conditioner whined quietly in the background. Early tomorrow morning, her parents would be back with a U-Haul to cart away the last of the furniture that they were giving away and the donations to Goodwill and the local women’s shelter. She had to go to sleep soon because she had to make an early start, but her mind would not stop racing.
She was alone now in this place that held so many memories for her, for her parents, and for her grandmother’s ghost. They had systematically stripped it of its identity, removing all aspects of her grandmother from the space and leaving only furniture and items that needed to be appraised before they could be sold. The apartment felt empty and seemed to echo; the sound of Eva’s turning the pages in her grandmother’s diaries reverberated through the bare living room.
She was obsessing, she knew, and fixating on these diaries. They had to be important. What had her grandmother kept them for? Sentimentality was never her grandmother’s style. Eva knew that better than anyone. She was the sentimental one of the two of them, and her grandmother had spent entirely too much time telling Eva to cull her past.
Her grandmother had taken care to protect these particular memories when the other boxes of letters and photos were kept in a chaotic mess. Her grandmother had kept them for almost ninety years through what Eva guessed were five major moves around the country when her father was a kid before finally coming back to Brooklyn.
“What are you hiding, Gran?” Eva asked herself in a hoarse whisper. She’d been trying to avoid breathing in all the dust that had been lifted into the air since they’d started their cleaning and removal venture earlier that week, but it hadn’t worked very well. Eva wasn’t sure if it was the stress or the dust, but she felt a cold developing in her aching lower back and the rawness of her throat as her sinuses drained. She had tea with honey from a jar so ancient she’d had to boil it just to get the contents softened up enough to use. The tea wasn’t really easing the tightness in her throat.
Eva let the diary rest against her chest as she shifted on the uncomfortable couch. She wasn’t sure what to make of her grandmother’s fascination with Wren, and wanted to know more about Mary’s life back then. Turning, she pushed herself up onto one elbow and set the little book on the end table that was doubling as her nightstand. She grabbed her phone, turned off the light, and settled back down.
Darkness filled the apartment and Eva felt herself start to relax. She had never had problems sleeping in this place beyond the expected backache in the morning. It didn’t have the creepy vibe that some of her friends’ grandparents’ houses had, it just seemed warm and welcoming. The only ghosts here were memories, the kind that Eva did not want to forget.
Eva pulled up her phone’s Internet browser and typed into the search bar the last name of the woman who’d run her grandmother’s boarding house. She tried to narrow it down as specifically as she could, searching for Talbot + Brooklyn, NY + boarding house + women’s suffrage. The name was common, so Eva wasn’t sure it would be that easy.
The first few links were garbage, but about halfway down the results page was a link to an academic website that appeared to be run by a local amateur historian in his spare time. It talked about the boarding house Mrs. Talbot ran and how it was unique in its time because it allowed women to come and go freely without placing them under strict rules the way that many all-women establishments tended to during those times. Context is everything.
Eva read on greedily, her thumb flipping along the screen. She scrolled through interesting tidbits about Brooklyn at the time when the boarding house was active until she found the author’s name and an address toward the bottom of the page.
There was a bookstore not fifteen blocks away that was run by the guy who’d made this site. She’d have to check it out, and maybe show him the diaries. He might be able to use them for some sort of research, or at least help Eva to learn more about her grandmother’s daily life. Eva clicked her phone off and set it on the arm of the couch behind her head. She curled onto her side and settled into sleep. That could be tomorrow’s project.
January 25, 1925
Wren brought the paper around this morning so I didn’t have to borrow it from Judith, the girl upstairs who writes a ladies’ column in the Star. She’s always so unpleasant when I ask her if I can read it, calling me a mooch and complaining about how I earn better pay than she does for doing a fraction of the job. She gets it free from her job every day. I don’t understand why she’s so grouchy about it. She acts as though no one ever gives her anything for free yet she shows her gams to every man who seems to be at all interested, and she definitely gets the looks that would have Mrs. Talbot in fits if she ever knew.
We have strict rules here. Mrs. Talbot doesn’t keep a curfew, and she doesn’t seem to put much stock in the Victorian beliefs of my parent’s generation, but she does expect a level of respectability that Judith certainly doesn’t bring to the house. Elsie and I think it’s only a matter of time before she’s kicked out. She’s out, disappeared off to some speakeasy drinking bathtub gin and dancing the night away like she’s a character in one of Mr. Fitzgerald’s stories.
If you ask Elsie, she’s far too much of a bore to be of any fun at a place such as that. She says I’m too young to go out and assess the situation for myself, though. So I am stuck at home most nights, reading stolen newspapers or books and wishing that Wren would come to visit me.
It is lovely when Wren does come. She’s never told me in so many words what she does for work, but I get the sense that it’s very important. Mrs. Talbot lets us use the kitchen to make coffee and we sit around the table discussing the society gossip pages and Wren’s latest literary conquest. This time it is The Constant Nymph by a Brit named Margaret Kennedy and it isn’t getting a lot of play in the papers here because it’s too controversial. Wren says she found it quite on a lark when speaking to a bookseller and inquiring if someone else’s novel had come in yet. A happy coincidence if I do say so myself. She’s promised to let me read it when she’s done with it.
We stayed inside all evening, despite the day being far warmer and blessedly snow-free for the first time in days. Wren doesn’t seem to particularly care for being out in public. I’ve invited her down to the bakery or the bookseller’s at the end of the block, but she always turns me down. The few moments I was able to have her in the harsh, biting wind were magical. She sparkled, glowed even, in the sunlight and I had no words for how beautiful she was in that moment.
