The house was quiet when I returned. I climbed the stairs and found Mat sitting on my stool, absorbed in a letter.
I couldn’t wrestle the energy to be annoyed. I felt as wrecked as my dad had looked. Perhaps I was a fool after all—and about to be betrayed. “You said you would wait for me.”
Mat dropped the letter as if it burned him. “I tried. Your mom brought me up here and pointed to your piles. She said I had to get to work. She was pretty forceful.”
I slumped onto the stool across from him. “That sounds like her lately. Where is she?”
“She went to the grocery store. She wants to make us chicken pot pie tonight.”
I smiled. “She’s turned into Thomas Keller . . . It was my favorite as a kid. I’m surprised she remembered.”
“Lunch didn’t go well?”
“That’s an understatement.” I rested my elbows on the table.
“Maybe this isn’t the best approach.”
“As Mom says, that ship has sailed. I’ve crossed a line and there’s no going back, so can we please find something good?”
Mat scrunched his brows together and offered me a small, flat smile. “Let’s get to work.”
He returned to the letter he was reading and I reached for the diary nearest me. I sat for who knows how long seeing nothing. The letters blurred on the page as lunch replayed through my memory on a perpetual reel—all those moments I could have handled differently, all those missed chances for . . . what, connection? Understanding? Nothing had changed in twenty years. I was still that same kid chasing my dad, wanting him to see me. Taking us off land hadn’t altered that reality.
“I envy you all this.”
I looked up to find Mat sitting straight, stretching his back, surveying the attic space. I followed his gaze. The room was large, clean, beautifully restored—a source of envy in most circumstances. Not unlike my attic bedrooms on Chestnut Street.
“It’s a house. It’s big. It’s grand, but it’s still a house.” I returned to staring at the page in front of me.
“But what a house.” Mat whistled.
“I used to feel that way about your family . . . Remembering your stories, I still do.” I scanned the room again. “This has been in my family for at least a couple hundred years, maybe more, and my grandmother, my dad’s mom, left it to my mom after she divorced my dad. Somehow that feels messed up to me.”
I looked back at him. “It’s what you do in a house that matters. You used to call home every Sunday night to be a part of your family’s dinner. We’d be doing homework and I’d pretend to read while you talked, but every word . . . Those are some of my favorite memories from freshman year.”
I shrugged away Mat’s stunned expression. This confession had a point, and it felt imperative to get it out, to state it, and maybe be done with it. I didn’t want to bring up the past. He’d made it clear in multiple unspoken ways that wasn’t wanted. But this trip down memory lane was all about the present.
I continued, “Whereas I just went to an amazing restaurant and I want to throw up because, instead of having good conversation with all that good food, my dad basically served me an ultimatum. I am to stop this or not have a relationship with him, not that I really have one.” I shook my head. Talking wasn’t helping after all. “I guess . . . just be careful what you envy.”
“You’re coming around to my way of thinking.” Mat offered me a knowing smile. “History reflects humanity. It isn’t one-dimensional, or even two-dimensional; it’s multifaceted and far more complex and nuanced than we allow.”
I rolled my eyes. At the coffee shop, he said I hadn’t changed. Neither had he. “A simple acknowledgment or some understanding would be fine here.”
“Yes, well . . .” He chuckled with humor, and a note of something tender and sad. “Nothing was ever simple with you. I’m sorry about lunch, about all of it.” A flush of red crawled up his neck. He cleared his throat and pointed to the diary still in my hands. “You’ve been staring at that page for at least a half hour.”
I blinked and nodded to the letter at his elbow. “Read those in conjunction with this.” I handed him the diary. “Those letters will make more sense in tandem with the diary. And here . . .”
I reached to the pile in which I’d placed Margaret’s four worn and beloved letters. The ones she had tied with their own black ribbon and read so often they’d softened almost to the point of disintegration. “Here’s a letter from 1939. But be really careful. These four were tied separately. They were important to my grandmother.”
“Got it.” Mat seemed startled by my change in subject, but didn’t comment. He ducked his head and got to work.
I pulled another diary closer to begin annotating it. Yet, once again, I found myself staring at nothing, listening to soft words I wanted to savor on repeat.
“Yes, well . . . Nothing was ever simple with you . . .”
12 March 1938
Dear Beatrice,
Hitler invaded Austria today. Overran and absorbed it into Germany, more like. Father has been worried he would do this. He and Sir Churchill are among the few, he says, and that concerns him even more.
But I’m not home, so I have no idea what he’d say tonight—I wouldn’t want to hear it. It would be more than I could handle right now.
I’m at the London House and I hate it. Caro came from Paris for the weekend and invited me to visit. Things have felt so fractured between us lately that I conceded and travelled by the train yesterday morning. It’s been nothing but eating, drinking, and talking nonsense about buttons and dresses. Haute couture and bad politics.
Ugh . . . I have to go. It’s my last night here and we’re meeting a few of her friends for dinner and drinks. This isn’t a set we knew growing up. I have no idea how she knows them, but she does—and we can’t survive an evening without them.
13 March 1938
Beatrice,
It’s three o’clock in the morning and I’m tired of waiting up and I’m mad. Couldn’t it have just been the two of us tonight? Was that an unreasonable request?
Caro is still out, but I came home hours ago. I said I had a headache, but really I was fed up. She and her friends drank, laughed, and looked at me like I was an archaeological find pinned to one of those display boards at the Natural History Museum.
I was so cute, they said. What they meant was my provincial ideas were so antiquated and passé, they’ve become cute. Furthermore, I am an idiot. They didn’t say it, but everyone’s tone dripped with condescension. I couldn’t possibly understand that Hitler’s Anschluss was inconsequential. Only imperial England would think that way. The world is a much broader place with a wider scope of belief, loyalty, and truth. And, after all, Austria was Germany’s to begin with—how can we begrudge them annexing an integral part of their national heritage? And, in the grand scheme of life and the movements of history, wasn’t it to be expected? My opinions were merely defined by my father’s perspective, which is sadly outdated and just plain wrong.