Chapter 29 The Letter

The letter came in the second winter, and it came from across the sea, and Clara knew before she opened it that it would change something, because the envelope was thick and the handwriting was careful and the postmark was a city she had never seen. She opened it at the kitchen table, with the kettle on and the light going, and she read it through once, and then she read it again, and then she sat very still while the kettle came to a boil and went off the boil and the evening gathered itself into night. The letter was from a woman named Margaret, who wrote in careful English that she had just learned of the memorial in Thornhaven, through an article that had been translated and printed in a newspaper in the country where she lived. She wrote that her mother had died the year before, at the age of sixty-seven, and that in her last weeks she had spoken of a place with a harbor, and of a name — Polly — and of a sister. She wrote that her mother had never spoken of her past, that she had come to the country as a young woman, that she had married and had children and had never looked back, and that the past had come back to her at the end, the way it does, and would not be put away again. She enclosed a photograph, she wrote, of her mother as a young woman, and she asked if Clara would look at it, and tell her whether the woman in the photograph could be the girl in the story. Clara turned the envelope over and slid out the photograph. It was small, the way photographs were small then, and it showed a young woman standing on a quay, wearing a coat that was too large for her, holding it closed at the throat. The face was younger than the face in the reading room, thinner, and the hair was different, and Clara looked at it for a long time and could not tell. She took it to Ruth the next day, and they laid it on the table beside the photograph of the two sisters, and they compared the way the women stood, the set of the shoulders, the way the chin was held. Ruth said that her great-aunt Polly had had a gap between her front teeth, and the woman in the photograph had her mouth closed, and they could not tell, and they could not look away. The correspondence went on for months. Margaret sent more photographs — her mother at her wedding, her mother with her children, her mother old, her mother in the garden — and Ruth sent copies of the letters that Polly's sister had kept, and of the letter that had been found in the canvas bundle, and of the memorial stone, and they moved back and forth across the water the way letters move, slowly, carrying more than they say. And then Margaret wrote that in her last days her mother had sung a song, over and over, a song in a language Margaret did not understand, and she had copied the words down as she heard them, and she sent them. Ruth read the line at the kitchen table, and her hands went still, because it was the song she had been sung as a child, the song Polly's sister had used to sing — or nearly. The words were almost right. Not exactly. The sea never gave back cleanly, and it gave back on its own calendar, and they had learned not to expect the pieces to fit perfectly, only to fit at all. They arranged to meet. It was a long journey, and they made it together, and the city at the end of it was ordinary and strange, the way every city is to people who live by the water. Margaret met them at the station, a woman of middle age with her mother's way of holding her coat closed at the throat, and they sat in her flat with tea and photographs, and she told them that her mother's name had not been Polly. It had been the name of the woman who had taken her in, the woman on the quay, and she had used it all her life, and no one had questioned it, because people do not question the names that are given to them by the people who save them. There was no DNA to compare — the mother was dead, and there was nothing left that could be tested — and the evidence was a song, and a way of standing, and a name spoken at the end of a life. Ruth could not say yes. She could not say no. She sat with the photograph of the young woman on the quay and held it, and Margaret sat with the photograph of the two sisters, and the two women sat together in the quiet room, joined by a might-be, and neither of them forced it. They walked down to the water before they left, and they stood at the edge of the city and looked out at the sea, and Ruth said that her grandmother had believed, to the end, that Polly would come home, and that she had died believing it, and that a belief like that was a kind of letter, sent and never answered, and that it had been answered now, in a way. A woman had lived, who might be Polly, who had been loved, who had had children, who had been taken from a shore and had built a life on the far side of the water. Whether she was the girl from the cove or not, she was a girl who had been taken, and she had lived, and the sea had given back more than they had ever thought to ask for. Clara thought about the ledger, and about the packages, and about how carefully the ledger had recorded the taking and how silent it had been about everything that came after, and she thought about how the story had outlived the ledger, the way the living outlive the records that try to hold them. They took the night train back, and Clara sat by the window and watched the dark water pass, and she thought about the name Polly, and about how it had been carried to the end of a life, wherever that life had been, and about how the carrying was the point, and always had been.