Mine to Tell Read online

  “I couldn’t,” I said, staring at the old, heavy fabric.

  “You won’t hurt it. And besides, I trust you.”

  I tested the old sofa and found it to be sturdy but like a marshmallow on top. I’d expected something of boards and horsehair, but it was covered with soft cushions and it felt like being enveloped by a hungry amoeba. “It’s divine,” I said, wanting to curl up and stay there until my hurt went away.

  We settled ourselves on the sofa and he studied Julianne’s stack until he was sure the top one was indeed the next letter.

  “You’ve been doing some transcribing, I assume,” he said.

  I nodded. “A little,” I said.

  “Then I would guess this is what you need to hear next.”

  He opened the envelope, pulled out a letter and began to read.

  ~*~

  December 18, 1907

  Dear Julianne,

  Henrietta addressed the envelope as if this letter was from her, but it’s from me, so please read it and destroy it afterwards. It’s not my wish to cause you any more distress or trouble, I just wanted to know if you are well, and know if…well, I think you understand what it is I must know.

  Have you… Did you… Is it done?

  If so, I offer you my blessing. But if not…oh, if not…pardon me if I say too much and cause you further anxiety. But I must know. Please write back. Address it to Henrietta. She will give the letter to me, and then I’ll know. And we can go on in whatever plan God has for each of us.

  I do want the best for you, and I’ll always smile at the mention or thought of your name.

  If you’re not…well, you know…and would fancy a trip here, Oliver William Carmichael is performing Shakespeare again, and I know how you loved him and his productions before. I would love if you could join Henrietta and myself. For old time’s sake, if nothing else. I’ve enclosed a theatre bill from his production. Hope to tempt you if there’s any chance you can come.

  Please let me know, no matter what your answers are, whether or not you are still unattached, and if you could spare us another visit. And if it’s your last visit here, then may it be forever.

  Yours always,

  John

  ~*~

  Kyle refolded the letter and tucked it in its envelope. I watched him, the page disappearing as if it was John and Julianne’s love being tucked away with a final “no” to their hope for a relationship, the one that would never be.

  “She was already married by then,” I said forlornly. “I read that, and I brought it to show you.” I handed him my typewritten transcription.

  Kyle nodded as he took the pages from me. “I had assumed that.”

  “I wonder if she answered him,” I said to myself. It wasn’t her I really wondered about. It was me. Would I have answered? Would I have been able to? Or able not to? I thought of that awful moment when I’d seen Trevor with the blonde in my parents’ yard. I knew I could never be John. I couldn’t bear the heartache of someone else taking my place. Even if it wasn’t my fault, I’d still feel heartbroken, betrayed, never good enough.

  “Even if you were loved?” Kyle asked.

  “What?” I looked up.

  “You were thinking out loud, and I was suggesting that sometimes you’re still loved even if you’re not the person your heart mate is with.”

  I frowned, and thought hard.

  “They may be with a second best because the one they want isn’t available. They may seem happy, but they’d be happier if it were you.” He watched me.

  I took a deep breath and looked the other way, tears filling my eyes as I followed the floral pattern in Kyle’s wallpaper. The flowers blurred, but the background hues of mauve and dusty blue swam in my eyes, comforting me. I thought of Trevor, his hand, the blonde’s hand, the look on his face when he’d spotted me.

  “So,” I said, batting away the tears and the painful parallel of Trevor and me, “you’re saying Julianne and John went their separate ways and settled for whatever they had since they couldn’t have what they wanted. They made themselves happy…somehow.”

  “It happens,” he said.

  I turned and eyed him, appreciating him as the background of his home framed him. After a long moment I said, “I hope you end up with your number one.”

  He looked at me and smiled, and I hoped I looked as comfortable in this picture as he did. “I do too,” he said.

  Chapter 26

  “Call out to her that her warfare has ended,

  that her iniquity has been removed.”

  I did my best under the circumstances. I completed the chores without complaint, I tended the boys, I kept the household running. Isaac grew tired of my night-time games and began to insist I fulfill those duties also. He was right, it was my duty, but whenever he reached for me I would beg for more time, told him I couldn’t yet and that I was sorry. I never explained that it made me feel adulterous. He would have assumed I meant toward John, but it wouldn’t have been John I was betraying, it would have been Isaac. I would come to Isaac’s bed with another man in my heart, and that was something I couldn’t bring myself to do. My hesitancy hurt him, made him angry, but still he never forced me or insulted me.

  He asked me to travel with him to the churches he preached at. I didn’t, though I should have. I couldn’t bring myself to do that any more than I could be his true wife at night. It was wrong of me on both counts, and guilt tormented me. But if I came with him to the churches, a line would be drawn behind me, making me his in ways I wasn’t yet. If he could just be patient, someday I would.

  The boys accepted me. Levi even appreciated me. They were my reprieve in an endless list of duties. They smiled, saw me as a benefit to their lives rather than a mother, and felt comfortable enough to talk openly to me and trust me with their childhood problems. Isaac often frowned at our interactions, though I never understood why. Was it too much? Not enough? Was my comfort with them something he envied? He never said and I never asked. They were his boys; they were my reprieve.

  My mother came to visit often. I knew she worried about me, but she also looked afraid when Isaac was there, as if she knew I hadn’t kept my part of this arrangement and feared Isaac would send me back and ask them for money instead. It was a foolish thought, for no one would ever do that. It would make light of a human, a woman in particular, even more than what they’d already done.

  John…I promised myself I wouldn’t think of him anymore, but I did. He wrote, sending me letters under Henrietta’s name, trying to be kind and indifferent when he wasn’t. He wasn’t being kind to himself this way, and he couldn’t convince me he was indifferent. I tried to be indifferent also, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t hold him accountable for his pretense. But I knew I shouldn’t think of him. For as long as I did, I wouldn’t be able to honor my husband and Isaac would continue to be angry and my mother afraid. Oh, John, we must stop this!

  ~*~

  There was a knock at my door, and I rose to answer.

  “Hello, Annabelle. I’ve got something for you.”

  It was my mother, her voice stiff, her face a knot of determination to pretend we were okay when we weren’t. I opened the door wider, thinking it might smooth our interaction. She entered, but with the same trepidation she’d had before.

  “Let me pick up this stuff so you can sit down,” I said, stepping to my sofa and moving Julianne’s life and my half-written articles for the newspaper aside. I stacked everything on the small desk and returned to her. “Please sit.”

  “A phone message,” she said, waving a small piece of paper as she perched at the edge of the sofa. “It’s from your editor, Edith. She wants you to call her back first chance you get. You really should let us install a phone here for you. I worry about you down here all alone.”

  You do? I thought it but couldn’t speak as I took the message from her hand. I wondered if, during those nights I’d longed to have her here to talk with, she’d been thinking of me also. Her insistence was
kinder this time. She wanted me to get a phone for my own sake, not hers, not my father’s, and not for Trevor’s. I almost smiled. She was trying to do her part to make our relationship whole again.

  “I’ve thought about it, but I’m not ready to connect Julianne’s house to the rest of the world. You probably don’t understand that.”

  She looked at my notes, the fear of Julianne’s story on her face. She didn’t trust me yet, but she wanted to believe I wasn’t ready because I was protecting my family. It wasn’t that, though. I was protecting Julianne.

  “That lady was nice.” Mama nodded toward the message.

  “Edith? Yes, she’s a great lady.”

  “She seemed real positive about your work,” Mama said, fidgeting and glancing around the room. “She said your articles are really popular in the Cincinnati newspapers.”

  I bit my lower lip. I’d finally told my parents I’d sent some articles in. My father had said nothing, but Mama’d said I hadn’t done enough on this house to create much of a story. She’d hinted my renovation project was over and I was just wasting time down here, wasting my life if I didn’t move out and get on with things soon. Get on with Trevor and leave the family’s history alone is what she meant.

  “Tell me about them,” Mama said, her head high and stiff as she glanced toward my work. “I want to know what you’re doing.”

  I stared at her. Was she trying to be a good mother and love me more than her fears? Her head drooped a bit, her shoulders did also. She was trying. She wanted to love me the way she knew a mother should.

  “Oh, Mama,” I said, tears in my voice. I leaned over and hugged her, nuzzled my face on her shoulder. “I’m so glad you came over. “ I straightened, still smiling. “But surely you don’t want to...”

  “Annabelle, I’m not stupid. You can only write so much about fixing up a house before your audience loses interest. According to your editor, Cincinnati is enamored with whatever it is you’re sending them, and it can’t be about paint and nails. There’s more here, and it’s time I knew. You’ve got to tell me.”

  A mini explosion erupted inside each of us, and we saw it on each other’s face. She looked worried, her greatest fear standing between her life and her daughter. I didn’t know what to say. Finally she glanced down and fidgeted with the pleats in her skirt.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t come down here more,” she said, looking up. “You know, supported you in what you’re doing, but…well, things are so tense with Trevor, and your grandfather, and…and this stuff,” she waved a hand around the house. “Your grandfather’s worried,” she continued. “It’s hard on him, having you in this house.”

  “Mama, do you know if he… Did he ever live in this house?”

  She gave me a funny look. “He never said,” she answered slowly, thinking back. “And I never asked. He never says much of anything about her.” She looked down at her skirt, pressing another pleat between two fingers and running them down its length. “He’s a little like you, keeping this house over the years when it should have been torn down. You opening it up is like opening an old sore. You were right. I can see it on his face.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said.

  “You might wait awhile, give him some time, and maybe he’ll come talk to you. I don’t think he’s ready right now.”

  I nodded, sorry that bursting a festering sore had to hurt so, but more sorry that people preferred to suffer in silence and risk a deadly infection rather than take care of it. Not just my grandfather or Simon or Levi, but me and Trevor, and even my mother.

  “So, can you tell me how things are going with, you know…” She nodded toward my piles of Julianne.

  “They’re good,” I whispered. My mother had compromised herself to come here and ask what I was doing. I knew I should do as much for her. “It’s hard, though.”

  She looked at me, a question on her face.

  “I’ve found things out about her that confuse me,” I confessed. Her eyes widened. “And I’m putting them into my story. Carefully. That’s what Edith’s talking about. It is more than renovation articles. You’re right.”

  My mother tightened, trying to hold onto that balance between loving me and upholding the Crouse family edict. One hand rose nervously to her throat.

  “I’m telling her story,” I said, understanding that nobility for one’s daughter had a limit and I might be approaching that. “Or she is.”

  “Oh, Annabelle, do you think that’s okay? Simon would turn in his grave if he knew. And Levi would be upset too, if he still lived around here. And your grandpa… Think of the trouble this will bring on us. I should never have let you do this thing.” She was like a windup toy. All of a sudden she was wound too tight and spinning out of control until the knob could wind itself down. She was wringing her hands in time with her effusion.

  I reached over and laid my hand on hers, pressing down so she’d stop fidgeting and making herself worse. “Mama, no one’s going to know. The newspaper’s in Cincinnati, not here. It’s hundreds of miles away.”

  “But still, someone might make the connection…” The knob was still turning, spinning out the rest of its coiled worries.

  “They can’t. They won’t know it’s about her, or you, or any of us. I made up a name for her, and I don’t even tell where the story takes place. My name’s not even on the articles. No one will ever know.”

  Her eyes weren’t focusing. They were like glass orbs staring across the room, through the wall, and back in time. Years of worry had her again, bullying her into submission, refusing to let her and the rest of my family close the gap and heal.

  “Mother!” I snapped. Her head turned my direction, distress heavy in her eyes. “I haven’t said anything bad. It’s a woman’s story. Kind of a mystery. That’s all.”

  I looked for a hint of relief on her face, but it wasn’t there. But there was a deep desire to be relieved, to trust that nothing incriminating was being said, and that even if there was such information, I wouldn’t say it. Not to the tens of thousands of persons hundreds of miles away.

  “So you want to see some of the articles I’ve already sent?” I asked.

  She nodded a tiny nod. I rose, went to a notebook I’d been keeping the printed articles in, and took out the first few and brought them back to the sofa.

  “All of them,” she said. Her face had the command of a parent and the pleading of a child. I nodded and retrieved the whole notebook and sat near her. “We’ll read them together, Mama. I think you’ll like them.”

  I wasn’t sure she would at all, but I wanted to believe it. She leaned back, and I snuggled next to her and held the book up so she could see. She gazed at the first page, the title, and then her eyes settled into that slow rhythm of back and forth, working their way through the first part of Julianne’s story:

  “ ‘Houses with inhabitants are homes. The lifeblood and soul of its occupants infest the wood, the paint, the shutters, until the building begins to breathe on its own. When circumstances change and it becomes just a house again, a place abandoned and ignored, what will it take to infuse life into it again? A coat of bright colors? A new roof? A person who cares?’ ”

  Mama looked up at me, thoughts churning behind her gaze.

  “Go on,” I prodded, “it will be okay.” She did. She read on, smiling at times at my ineptness at carpentry, shaking her head as I explained why I left the home the way it last was without any modern conveniences. Then, slowly, the small flavor of my thoughts of Julianne began to infiltrate the tale, my great-grandmother taking on the form of me:

  “ ‘This house had held its own over the years it stood vacated, its previous inhabitant still here in essence, fragments of her heart and her hurt left behind like bread crumbs marking a trail she wanted someone to follow.’ ”

  She read on, one hand raised to her mouth as she saw the true Julianne emerge:

  “ ‘A secret trove, almost as invisible as the soul, beat within its walls, keeping the aba
ndoned structure alive, keeping her love alive, the one she’d given herself to before she was boarded inside.’ ”

  When Mama finally reached the end of the last page, she looked at me through glistening eyes. Maybe glistening with tears for her daughter who’d written something that moved her. But hopefully glistening with a light that burned deep within, one that had been buried for years.

  She opened her mouth. “It’s beautiful,” she said, touching the last page. “But it’s more than that. It’s…it’s…”

  I saw a hidden truth fighting its way to the surface. She didn’t know how to put it into words, since it had been buried for so long.

  “It’s okay, Mama,” I said, “I feel it too. Julianne just put on paper everything we didn’t understand. Her prison was what other people put her in. We’re letting them put us in, too.”

  Surprise swept over her face, and for a few moments we just sat there, staring at each other. Finally she sighed and touched my hand with trembling fingers.

  “Trevor,” she said. It was a statement and a question that we both knew the answer to. My only response was to keep breathing. “I saw you the other day, beside the house, watching him. It was awful, I know. Not the way you thought things would end up. I swear I don’t know where your brother finds some of his friends or why he’d entertain them that way, but…”

  It’s okay, Mama,” I said. “I guess it was something that couldn’t hold together. It’s over, and Trevor is free to do what he wants.”

  Silence returned and we sat there, the “old” lesson that Julianne was teaching us was becoming the “new” lesson—new life—in our minds.

  Chapter 27

  “For I have no one else of kindred spirit who will genuinely be concerned for your welfare.”

  Jill, my best friend and photographer from my newspaper in Cincinnati, came with her camera and a wealth of city energy. I’d been so long in Julianne’s world and my rural homeland that I’d forgotten what the city felt like until she breezed through my doorway, dragging enthusiasm with her, filling my quiet little home with colors, lights, and near-bodacious mannerisms. I smiled and then I laughed. My goodness, it was wonderful to see Jill again.