“I understand,” I tell him, and I really do, more than he knows.
The Flower Castle is much bigger than the Maxwells’ house but inside it feels smaller and warmer and more intimate. All the rooms are decorated with mission-style furniture; the walls are adorned with family portraits and maps of Central and South America, and it feels like his family has lived here for years. We pass an upright piano and a curio cabinet full of pottery, and there are leafy green houseplants growing in every window. I want to stop and linger over everything but Adrian marches into a noisy dining room with a dozen middle-aged people. They’re gathered around a table that’s covered in wineglasses and dessert plates. There are five different conversations happening at once, and no one notices that we’ve arrived until Adrian waves his hands and calls for their attention.
“Everybody, this is Mallory,” he says. “She’s working as a nanny this summer, for a family on Edgewood Street.”
At the head of the table, Ignacio raises his glass in a toast, sloshing red wine on his hand and wrist. “And she’s a Big Ten athlete! She’s a distance runner for Penn State!”
These people react like I’m Serena Williams fresh off my latest victory at Wimbledon. Adrian’s mother, Sofia, is circling the table with a bottle of Malbec, topping off glasses, and she rests a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. “Pardon my husband,” she says. “He’s a little achispado.”
“She means tipsy,” Adrian translates, and then he points around the dining room, introducing me to everyone. There are too many names for me to remember—the chief of the Spring Brook Fire Department is there, along with a lesbian couple who run the bakery in town, and a couple of neighbors from down the block.
“I understand you’re here for a library book,” Sofia says.
“Yes, but I don’t want to interrupt—”
“Please, I’ve known these people thirty years. We have nothing left to say to each other!” Her friends laugh, and Sofia grabs a file folder off the counter. “Let’s go talk in the yard.”
She opens a sliding glass door and I follow her outside to the most extravagant backyard garden I’ve ever seen. It’s the middle of July and everything’s blooming: blue hydrangea, bright red zinnia, yellow daylilies, and a host of exotic flowers I’ve never seen before. There are benches and stepping-stones and archways draped with purple morning glories; there are birdbaths and brick paths and rows of sunflowers taller than my head. In the center of everything is a cedar gazebo with a table and chairs, overlooking a koi pond with a softly splashing waterfall. I wish I had more time to admire everything—I feel like I’m walking through Disneyland—but I can tell that for Adrian and Sofia, it’s just their backyard, it’s no big deal.
We move into the gazebo and Adrian uses an app on his phone to brighten the party lights strung across the ceiling. Then we all take seats and Sofia gets down to business.
“This is a difficult project to research. The first challenge is that the story’s very old, so nothing’s on the internet. The second challenge is that Annie Barrett died right after World War II, so all the newspapers were still obsessed with Europe.”
“How about local news?” I ask. “Did Spring Brook have some kind of daily paper?”
“The Herald,” she says, nodding. “They published from 1910 to 1991 but we lost their microfilm in a warehouse fire. Everything went up in smoke.” She gestures poof! and I glimpse a tiny tattoo on her left forearm: a slender long-stemmed rose, tasteful and elegant, but I’m still surprised. “I checked the library for physical copies but no luck. Nothing before 1963. So I figured I’d reached a dead end, but one of my coworkers pointed me to the local authors shelf. Anytime someone in town publishes a book, we usually order a copy. Just to be nice. Mostly it’s mysteries and memoirs, but sometimes it’s local history. And that’s where I found this.”
She reaches inside the folder for a very slender volume—it’s more of a pamphlet, really, thirty-some pages with a cardstock cover and bound with thick, rusted industrial staples. The title page looks like it was produced on an old-fashioned manual typewriter:
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
ANNE C. BARRETT
(1927–1948)
“It wasn’t in our computer system,” Sofia continues. “I don’t think this book has circulated in fifty years.”
I hold the book close to my face. It has a musty, pungent odor—like its pages are rotting. “Why is it so small?”
“Her cousin self-published it. Just a small run for friends and family, and I guess someone donated a copy to the library. There’s a note from George Barrett on the first page.”
The cover feels old and brittle, like a dried husk, ready to crack between my fingers. I open it carefully and begin to read:
In March of 1946, my cousin Anne Catherine Barrett left Europe to begin a new life here in the United States. As a gesture of Christian kindness, my wife Jean and I invited “Annie” to live with our family. Jean and I do not have any siblings, and we looked forward to having another adult relative in our household—someone to help raise our three young daughters.
Annie was just nineteen years old when she arrived in the United States. She was very beautiful but like many young women also very foolish. Jean and I made countless efforts to introduce Annie into Spring Brook society. I’m an alderman for the town council and I also serve on the vestry of St. Mark’s Church. My wife Jean is very active in the local Woman’s Club. Our closest friends welcomed my cousin into the community with many kind and thoughtful invitations, but Annie turned them all down.
She was silly and solitary and described herself as an artist. She spent her free time painting in her cottage, or walking barefoot in the forest behind our house. Sometimes I would spot her down on her hands and knees, like an animal, studying caterpillars or sniffing at flowers.
Jean compiled a short list of daily chores for Annie to complete, in return for her room and board. Most days, these chores went unfinished. Annie showed no interest in being part of our family, part of our community, or even part of the great American experiment.
I had many disagreements with Annie about her choices. Many times, I warned Annie that she was behaving irresponsibly or even immorally, that all of her bad decisions would catch up with her. I take no satisfaction in knowing that circumstances have proven me correct.