Still, I owe you one debt. Were it not for you and your precious Goldie, I would never have learned about my mother’s heritage—my heritage now. So for that—and only that—I am grateful.
I have made a trip to Craig House in Beacon, to see the place where she died. I didn’t go in. I meant to, but I couldn’t in the end. Still, I had to see it for myself, to walk its grounds and feel her there. It looked just like the picture in the Review, a gloomy place for all its antiquated grandeur. I’ve decided not to remember her there but to instead hold fast to the memories we made in her room, where we spent so many afternoons, singing and telling stories.
I’ve tried to find the photo album she kept, the one she used to tell her stories—I would like to at least have something of her to take with me—but Cee-Cee claims to have thrown it away. Perhaps it’s best I travel light. There’s so little about this part of my life I wish to remember.
I’ve been back to Rose Hollow too. I don’t know why I went. It’s closed up now for the season, the horses and trainers all gone to Saratoga. The house and barns all shut up until spring. I unlocked the stable and went inside, stood where we stood the first time you kissed me, and tried to remember what you’d said or done to blind me so completely. Not that I’m likely to ever be so foolish again. You’ve taught me a great deal.
The follow-up stories have finally slowed to a drip and the press has at long last decamped, gone away to pick the bones of some other family. This will make my defection easier to achieve, as there are no more reporters loitering on the sidewalks, no uncomfortable questions to slow me down. Time is of the essence now.
I must make a future for myself, carve out a life without you. It will not be the life I imagined for myself, but one way or another, it will be the life I’ll have chosen.
Forever, and Other Lies
(pgs. 86–99)
June 14, 1955
Marblehead, Massachusetts
At long last, I have settled down to write this final chapter. I admit I had to wrestle myself into the chair. The urge to abandon the thing has been pressing on me. It felt pointless when I began it, turning over such settled ground, rattling the bones of ghosts best left quiet. Yet here I sit with the sun streaming in and nothing left to do but place the headstone as it were.
I’ve taken no pleasure in it—words are your realm, not mine—but I felt compelled to correct the many inaccuracies in your version of our unfortunate entanglement. You will, I hope, forgive its technical faults. It’s been some time since I attempted to put feelings to paper, but I have done my best and will send it along to you the moment I’ve had it bound to match yours—via our usual messenger, of course. I will also be returning the sadly warped version you sent me. I certainly don’t want it.
I do hope this will be the last favor my nephew will be asked to perform concerning us. Poor Dickey. He hardly knew what to make of your mysterious package when it arrived. In fact, he nearly tossed it in the trash. How I wish he had. Until it arrived, I had forgotten you. Or was at least content to believe I had.
And now, I, too, will finish with a bit of housekeeping. Not that you deserve a word from me, but I will take some small satisfaction in you knowing that I’ve managed to make a life for myself. A good life, for the most part, once I put myself back together.
It was terrible at first, after you left. Losing you that way, without any real goodbye, seemed unbearable. I thought briefly about tracking you down, of making some hideous scene until you begged my forgiveness. And then the story broke and I realized forgiveness was no longer possible.
It took a few days—Germany and Italy had just declared war on the US and Europe was all anyone could talk about—but eventually, other papers picked it up and the thing caught fire. In the space of two weeks, my father’s world came down around his ears. He was hounded almost entirely from business, then lost the rest of his fortune trying to salvage the remains. He was also banned from his club, shunned by the very men he had courted so carefully over the years. If that was your intention, you succeeded beyond your wildest dreams.
I suppose I should have felt some sense of culpability for my role in bringing down the House of Manning, but I felt none. Instead, I got on a train and headed west, desperate for anonymity. I found it, too, using my mother’s maiden name. You could do that then, go to some new place and reinvent yourself. No one ever asked for proof of anything in those days. You just gave them a name and that was who you were.
I lived quietly there and made friends. One very special friend, from whom the war had taken everything. She was kind to me when I had stopped believing in kindness and blessed me with a gift I’ve been trying to repay ever since. But those are private things, memories to which you have no right. And so I will skip ahead.
For the first time in my life, the idea of family—of true family—had become very important to me. When the war ended, I started writing letters, trying to locate my mother’s family. The men were all gone, buried or scattered by the war, but I managed to find my mother’s sister, Agnes, and several cousins who had fled across the border to Switzerland to escape the occupation. When France was liberated, they returned to their vineyard. My aunt and I wrote letters. They were agonizingly slow in coming and difficult to read when they did. They had lost so much. The land was a ruin, the house stripped bare, but they were determined to resurrect the vineyard and I knew I needed to go.
I needed to belong to them, to belong to their story, and in almost no time at all, I did. Being there, in the home where my mother grew up, surrounded by the people she loved, was like getting a piece of her back. I learned the prayers she wasn’t allowed to say, learned the names she was told to forget. Her traditions—the ones she was forced to deny—became my traditions too. Her language, my language. Her faith, my faith. Now, years later, it’s how I keep her memory alive, by honoring the woman whose memory you tainted with your story.
While in France, I also learned about the work the OSE—the ?uvre de Secours aux Enfants—was doing to find homes for displaced children. There were so many, all with nothing and no one. It was heartbreaking to see. And a reminder that there were worse things than a lost love. And so began my life’s work.