Sophie, of course, had no idea. My God, how shocked she was. All those years I had fought for her innocence, and now here I stood, holding her white and shaking body, explaining her true history to her as best I could. And it was terrible, just terrible, to see her world crumble around her, brick by brick, this careful storybook we had created for her, and yet it was still a relief. No more pretending. No more denying that a thing was so, when it wasn’t. Or maybe it was the other way around?
Anyway, the next weeks blurred by, lawyers and papers and police interrogations. I was living on my nerves, living in fear that I would say the wrong thing, reveal things I couldn’t reveal, and by March, Sophie and Evelyn and I had taken up residence at a suite in the Pickwick Arms Hotel in Greenwich, Connecticut, in order to be close to all these legal proceedings. So it was not until I received that brief, shattering notification from Mr. Burnside that I realized I hadn’t received any more. Letters from Simon.
Yes, Simon’s letters. I believe I mentioned them earlier. They arrived at regular intervals, at the beginning of each month, as reliable as if a machine had printed them out for the three years since I left him. Except it was not a machine who wrote them. It was Simon.
I hadn’t read any of them. In the beginning, when the pain of losing Simon was so fresh, I couldn’t bear the thought of reading his words again. Later, I suppose I was simply afraid: afraid of his powers of persuasion, afraid that he would convince me to set aside my convictions and return to him. Yes, I might have been living in a prison on Thirty-Second Street, but at least it was a prison I knew, a prison of my own making. A prison under my own command.
But the trouble was Sophie. In order to preserve Sophie’s innocence—to preserve this delicate fiction that Evelyn’s father and I were happily married, that Simon was only seeing to his complicated business affairs and would send for us in due time—my father and I had reached an unspoken agreement, by which I took each monthly letter from the hall table upstairs to my room and pretended to read it, and Father took the unopened letter from my dresser and—well, I didn’t know exactly what he did with those letters. But I knew he wouldn’t throw them away. Father was too meticulous for that. Everything in its place.
But Father had been held without bail in the Fairfield County Jail since the beginning of February, and as I lay in my sleepless Pickwick Arms bed that May night, tormented by the letter from Mr. Burnside, wrestling with the impossible notion that Simon had died, I realized that no new letters had arrived from my husband. That inside the packets of mail dutifully forwarded each day from our housekeeper on Thirty-Second Street, Simon’s letters did not appear.
The next morning, cold with horror beneath a balmy spring sun, I left Evelyn in Sophie’s care and drove down to New York City. I thundered up the stairs to Father’s room and the locked secretary where he kept his papers, and I retrieved the key from the place I knew he kept it: inside the false bottom of a jar of threepenny nails resting atop the bookshelf.
The lock was stiff, because Father had been away so long, and even after I lowered the secretary’s polished front I had to hunt among the pigeonholes and the drawers, sifting through bills and patent applications, bank statements and legal agreements, until I found a small leather portfolio tied with a faded scarlet ribbon, labeled in the corner with a single word: fitzwilliam.
And there they were: thirty-odd letters, crisp and still white, my name written so familiarly and invitingly in Simon’s black spider scrawl that I could almost hear his voice caressing the words on our wedding day: Mrs. Virginia Fitzwilliam. I stood there next to the secretary, holding those envelopes, my blood beating through my veins and my breath jumping in my chest, caught between two opposing impulses: to hold these letters next to my skin and breathe in the scent of their ink, and to toss them out the window in a shower of poisonous white. But I didn’t make either one of those ridiculous gestures. I gained some measure of control over my jumping nerves and sat down on the corner of Father’s bed, and I stared at the first envelope, May of 1919, when Evelyn was only a tiny, fearful bud in the center of my womb, and the tulips were just beginning to wilt.
And it seemed to me, as I sat there, that someone whispered against my ear in a warm, English cadence.
Go on. Go on.
Everything you seek is here.
I reached for the stained silver letter opener in the jar on Father’s desk and ripped open that first letter like a glutton, prepared to read all the letters at once, one after another, month after month, gorging myself on the thin black lines of Simon’s handwriting. Ready to fill my lonely gut with the sound of his voice: reading them to me in my head, laying himself bare, dissecting each valve and channel of his heart for my amusement, while I pretended to believe him, to read those sentences as if they were true.
But the envelope was empty.
I picked up the next one. Empty. And the next, and the next. I didn’t need to open them; I felt their thinness, their lack of weight. Not one single envelope held anything inside. Just a thin slice of open air, addressed to me in my husband’s familiar handwriting.
And though I examined each envelope carefully, I could not determine whether my letters had been carefully opened and resealed or never opened to begin with. Whether this strange pantomime began with Simon or with my father, or whether some deeper mystery lay unfathomed beneath me.
As I replaced the last envelope in the portfolio, however, I noticed a curious detail. Curious, I say, because who really notices a postmark? I don’t, unless I have some particular, practical reason, and yet as the paper slid past my gaze, I caught sight of the figures feb 28 1922.
My hand went still, holding the envelope half in and half out of the portfolio. I stared for some time, but the letters didn’t change. miami fla curving around the top part of the circle, and feb 28 in the middle, and 1922 curving at the bottom.
I pushed the envelope the rest of the way inside the portfolio and fastened the latch, feeling in that moment as empty and dissatisfied as the letters themselves. Puzzled and unsteady. And I remember how, as I sat there in Father’s chair and stared at the multitude of cracks spreading across the dry leather skin of his portfolio, like the turning up of new earth in a dead soil, a thought came to me. Or maybe more in the nature of a revelation.
I knew there was no possibility that my husband was dead.