There’s a photograph of her trick-or-treating with her father when she was six, he in a suit, she wearing a ghost costume that her father made. Holly vaguely recalls that her mother, who usually took her (often dragging her from house to house), had the flu that year. In the picture, Howard Gibney is smiling. She thinks she was smiling, too, although with that sheet over her head it’s impossible to tell.
“I was, though,” Holly murmurs. “Because he didn’t drag me so he could get back home and watch TV.” Also, he didn’t remind her to say thank you at every house but simply assumed she would do so. As she always did.
But it isn’t the plaque she wants, or the Halloween photograph, or the pressed flowers, or her father’s obituary, carefully clipped and saved. It’s the postcard. Once there were more—at least a dozen—and she assumed the others were lost. After discovering her mother’s lie about the inheritance, a less palatable idea has come to her: that her mother stole these souvenirs of a man Holly can remember only vaguely. A man who was under his wife’s thumb when he was there (which was seldom) but who could be kind and amusing on the rare occasions when it was just him and his little girl.
He took four years of Latin in high school and won his own award—first prize, not second—for a two-page essay he wrote in that language. The title of his essay was “Quid Est Veritas—What Is Truth?” Over Charlotte’s strong, almost strident, objections, Holly took two years of Latin in high school herself, all that was offered. She did not shine, as her father had done in his pre-salesman days, but she carried a solid B average, and remembered enough to know that tristis puella was sad girl and bella siderea was star wars.
What she thinks now—what is clear to her now—is that she took Latin as a way of reaching out to her father. And he had reached back, hadn’t he? Sent her those postcards from places like Omaha and Tulsa and Rapid City.
Kneeling in front of the bottom drawer in her pajamas, she searches through these few remnants of her tristis puella past, thinking even that last card is also gone, not filched by her mother (who had completely erased Howard Gibney from her own life) but lost by her own stupid self, probably when she moved to this apartment.
At last she finds it, stuck in the crack at the back of the drawer. The picture on the front of the card shows the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. The message, no doubt written with a Ray Garton Farm Machinery ballpoint, is in Latin. All of his postcards to her were written in Latin. It was her job—and her pleasure—to translate them. She turns this one over and reads the message.
Cara Holly! Deliciam meam amo. Lude cum matre tua. Mox domi ero. Pater tuus.
It was his one accomplishment, something that made him even prouder than selling a new tractor for a hundred and seventy grand. He had told her once that he was the only farm machinery salesman in America who was also a Latin scholar. He said that in Charlotte’s hearing, and she had responded with a laugh. “Only you would be proud of speaking a dead language,” she said.
Howard had smiled and said nothing.
Holly takes the card back to bed and reads it again by the light of the table lamp. She can remember figuring out the message with the help of her Latin dictionary, and she murmurs the translation now. “Dear Holly! I love my little girl. Have fun with your mother. I will be home soon. Your father.”
With no idea she’s going to do it until it’s done, Holly kisses the card. The postmark is too blurry to read the date, but she believes it was sent not too long before her father died of a heart attack in a motel room on the outskirts of Davenport, Iowa. She remembers her mother complaining—bitching—about the cost of having the body sent home by rail.
Holly puts the card on the bedside table, thinking she will restore it to the bureau drawer in the morning. Artifacts, she thinks. Museum artifacts.
She’s saddened by how few memories she has of her father, and dully angry at the realization that her mother’s shadow has all but blotted him out. Did Charlotte steal the other cards, as she had stolen Holly’s inheritance? Only missed this one, perhaps because a younger and much more timid version of Holly had been using it for a bookmark or put it in the satchel (tartan, of course) that she carried everywhere back then? She will never know. Did he spend so much time on the road because he didn’t want to come home to his wife? She’ll never know that, either. What she does know is that he was always glad to come home to cara Holly.
What she also knows is they gave a little life to a dead language. It was their thing.
Holly turns out the light. Goes to sleep.
Dreams of Charlotte in Holly’s old bedroom.
“Remember who you belong to,” Charlotte says.
She goes out and locks the door behind her.
May 19, 2021
1
Barbara enters the hospital lobby in a hurry, not quite running only because Marie has told her this is no emergency, just routine. At the main desk of Kiner Memorial, she asks which floor oncology is on. The woman at the desk directs her to the west bank of elevators. Barbara emerges in a pleasant lounge with pleasant pictures on the walls (sunsets, meadows, tropic isles) and pleasant music wafting down from overhead speakers. Plenty of people are sitting here, hoping for good news and fearing the opposite. All are wearing masks. Marie is reading a paperback John Sandford novel. She’s saved a chair for Barbara.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” is the first thing Barbara says.
“Because it would have worried you needlessly when you didn’t have to worry at all,” Marie says. She’s perfectly calm. Fawn-colored slacks and white shirt as usual, minimal makeup perfectly applied, not a hair out of place. “What Olivia wanted you to worry about is your poetry.”
“I’m worried about her!” Barbara tries to keep her voice down, but several people look around.
“Olivia has cancer,” Marie says. “What she calls, no surprise, ass-cancer. She’s had it for a very long time. Dr. Brown—her oncologist—says it’s a cancer you die with, not the kind you die of. At her advanced age it just crawls along. Over the last two years it’s crawled a little faster.”
“Malignant?” She whispers the word.
“Oh yes,” Marie says, still calm. “But it hasn’t metastasized and may not. She used to get its growth checked twice a year. This year it will be three times. Assuming she lives another year, that is. Olivia herself likes to say her equipment package is long past the warranty. I called you here because she has something to tell you. Are you missing school?”
Barbara waves this aside. She’s a senior, she’s carrying an A average, she can take a day off any old time she wants to.
“What’s up?”
“She’ll tell you that herself.”
“Is it about the Penley?”
Marie only picks up her novel and begins reading again. Barbara didn’t bring a book. She takes out her phone, goes to Instagram, looks at a few boring posts, checks her email, and puts it away again. Ten minutes later Olivia comes out of swinging doors behind which is machinery Barbara doesn’t want to know about. Olivia is walking with both of her canes. Her satchel purse swings from one thin shoulder. An orderly is holding her arm.
She reaches Barbara and Marie, thanks the orderly, and plops down with a sigh and a wince. “I have once more survived the indignity of being entombed in a noisy machine while my poop-chute is examined,” she tells them. “Old age is a time of casting away, which is bad enough, but it’s also a time of escalating indignities.” Then, just to Barbara: “I’m assuming Marie informed you of the cancer, and why we kept it from you.”