Thirty-three
KENDRA
I look at the woman across from me on the sofa, framed by her iconic Umbrella Girls paintings behind her. Her hands are crossed in her lap and she is staring at them.
She is Emmeline Downtree. She is Isabel MacFarland.
“But you did come back to England,” I say. “This is Thistle House, isn’t it?”
She nods once. “It is.”
“What—what made you return?”
Isabel raises her head but turns to gaze out the window. “Oh, I suppose the mighty hand of God. That’s what it usually takes to move someone who is holding on to what doesn’t belong to her.” She laughs lightly, as though the details of her return still surprise her.
“I—I’m not sure I follow you.”
Isabel tips her head to glance at me, but only barely.
“You haven’t made the mistakes I have nor have you been flung into a tempest that forces you to make choices you are not prepared to make—I know that. But I hope someday you will remember I told you that you do not own your sins.”
I am still at a loss. “You’re not saying people aren’t responsible for the wrong they do,” I say, though I can’t believe this is what she means. Not after all that she has told me.
She sighs gently, wondering perhaps how to make it clear to me.
She is revealing something to me, I think. Her purpose for having allowed me to interview her perhaps?
“I am saying, when you make a choice, even if it’s a bad one, you’ve played your hand. You cannot live your life as though you still held all your cards.”
“Is that why you agreed to let me talk to you today? To tell me this?”
Isabel laughs. “Good Lord, no. My reason is far more selfish than that.” She smiles at thoughts I am not able to guess at. She shakes her head. “Far more selfish.”
I wait for her to continue.
She looks at me. “You might have guessed I have not been very adept at being transparent with people. I agreed to let you interview me because I plan to leave my history with you.”
“Me?”
Isabel crooks an eyebrow. “Yes, of course you. Why not you? You are a history major. This is history. My history. And only a handful of people know it.”
“You . . . never told anyone who you are?”
She lifts the corners of her mouth in a half grin. “I told a few. Gwen knows. And Beryl.”
“Gwen?”
“My daughter. Mine and Mac’s. We only had the one.”
I hear children outside the door on the staircase. Isabel hears them, too, and turns to the sound of innocence.
“Did you ever tell your husband?” I ask.
She faces me again. “Eventually. Took me twenty years but I finally told him.”
“When you came back to England?” I had done my research. I knew the artist Isabel MacFarland had returned to England for a visit in 1958 with her daughter and stayed. Her husband joined her several months later.
“Yes,” she says, drawing out the word and giving it an emphasis I don’t understand. “When I came back to England.”
Isabel reaches for the cloth-bound bundle that she came into the room with a couple hours earlier.
“Mac and I started out very happy,” she says as she unties the ribbon on the bundle. “At least as happy as two people who have survived the horrors of war can be. We bought a little house in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and lived near his parents for the first few years. They were very sweet to me and utterly devoted to Gwen. They were far better at being grandparents than I was at being a mother. I worried all the time about her safety. I was sure that I would lose her like I lost Julia.
“Mac wanted to make it in broadcasting but for whatever reason, he didn’t. He started writing children’s books instead. Mysteries with a teenaged, aspiring journalist and his artsy next-door neighbor as the hero and heroine. Joey and Izzy.”
“You and Mac?” I say, proud of myself for figuring this out.
“Naturally.” She unfolds the fabric. Inside the bundle are a yellowed envelope and a leather-bound notebook, tawny with age. “The books did well enough for us to live off that income alone,” she continues. “I had my little studio, and I started painting the Umbrella Girls. At first they were just for me. I found that remembering Julia in this secret way assuaged the guilt I still felt. I missed this house, and I missed Charlotte and Rose, but I could not bring myself to visit them, not even when Mac’s books did well enough that I could have. And then, one day in April 1958, I got a letter.”
Isabel hands me the envelope. There is no name on the outside. Opening it carefully, I withdraw three sheets of lavender-hued paper. I read it aloud: