A Small Indiscretion (35 page)
Read A Small Indiscretion Online
Authors: Jan Ellison
7th February 2012
My dearest Mrs. Gunnlaugsson,
We have never met, but after much deliberation, I have conceded to the duty of writing to you in the matter of my grandniece, Marguerite Greatrex Church, whom you may know as Daisy Church. You may also know her as Emme Greatrex, a name she adopted in her professional endeavors in New York City.
Since the tragic and untimely death of her mother, my niece Louise Greatrex Church, in September of 2010, Daisy has not been well. At the time of Louise’s death, Daisy and her mother had been estranged for nine years. The estrangement appears to have compounded Daisy’s grief and has ultimately garnered her a psychiatric diagnosis of “rapid-cycling bipolar disorder.”
She may have been ill for quite a while. Perhaps since the sudden death, when she was ten, of her beloved father, Malcolm Church. She had been prescribed antidepressants for some years, and took them faithfully, but the diagnosis of depression
appears now to have been incorrect, and the medication that had been prescribed likely contributed to the onset of the rapid cycling Daisy suffered under.
Which brings me to the point of this communication. Some months after Louise died, Daisy returned to Paris to consider the future of her mother’s possessions. At that time, she found a wooden box that held her mother’s lifetime correspondence, as well as various keepsakes. It did not amount to much, I’m afraid, as Louise was not a sentimentalist, but for our purposes here, there were a few relevant items. There was a roll of film, which Daisy developed in a darkroom here in Paris (she is quite a capable photographer), and a letter from a person who shares your name and, I presume, your identity, dated 30th December 1989, bearing a postmark from Dublin, Ireland. You may or may not recall the nature of that letter, and it is of no account now, since Daisy destroyed it after she read it, except that it caused Daisy considerable upheaval, particularly, it seems, the use, in the letter, of the word “ecstasy.” The discovery of that letter, along with the roll of film, sent Daisy into what the doctors suspect was a “hypomanic episode,” which, in turn, at some point last summer, escalated to full-blown mania.
Suffice it to say that when she arrived in San Francisco last spring, and mailed you a letter, her mental health had been compromised. As the summer progressed, it continued to deteriorate.
I understand that Daisy presented herself at your place of business, where you generously offered her living quarters and employment, and that your son, Robert, became her close acquaintance. I also understand there was an unfortunate flooding of your store, an incident for which Daisy takes full responsibility, and the memory of which, I assure you, is
cause for deep regret on her part. She tells me there was also a horrific accident in a car of Daisy’s possession that occurred while Daisy was driver and your son her passenger. I have been informed by Daisy that your son was very seriously injured, and for that the both of us send our most profound regrets. She wishes for me to reassure you that she had no intention of injuring your son. In fact, she seems to have been deeply attached to him, though she has not offered any details to me as to the particular nature of their involvement. This was Daisy’s third serious automobile accident, and we have agreed there is no need for her to operate a vehicle again in the foreseeable future. It is my hope that your son has recovered fully, and if this is not the case, I offer my gravest sympathies.
Daisy’s behavior the night of the accident, along with her disappearance, must have seemed from your vantage point unforgivable. I hope my letter will serve as a starting point for a reassessment of that sentiment. She came straight from San Francisco to me, in Paris, and I assure you she is currently receiving the best possible psychiatric care.
In short, I hope you will forgive Daisy for the damage to the business of which you are proprietor, and most important, the injuries, both emotional and physical, your son suffered at her hand. I assure you she has forgiven you for what she perceived as your role in her father’s death. I do not mean to suggest her perception is reality, but perception is often loath to give up its stranglehold on the mind when it comes to the strange bedfellows of love and death.
Yours, faithfully,
Arthur Greatrex, Esquire
D
AISY
. An Anglo-Saxon word that means “Day’s eye.” The flower so named because of the way it opens at dawn. Also a translation of the French
Marguerite
, and used as a pet form of Margaret. The name Malcolm and Louise used for their daughter when they were alive, but not the name she chose when she left Europe and reinvented herself—and not the name you will hear when she visits you in your dreams.
Emme. One syllable. Like the letter.
Grief. One syllable. Like a great black wave.
I sat at the table on Valentine’s Day with the letter in my lap and it came at me—grief—catching me in its curve and twisting me inside its history. Then, a day later, when I showed the letter to your father, and he in turn presented evidence of his own, that wave of grief shoved me under and took my breath away.
Grief for your father, for his predicament.
Grief for Malcolm, more than twenty years after the fact. And for Louise.
Grief for you, on many fronts. Because the woman you fell in love with last summer was not who you thought she was, and your father was not who you thought he was, which makes you not who you
thought you were—and me a stranger, and an enemy, for making all of that true.
And finally, grief for Daisy, whose own grief over the loss of her parents I’d opened anew. What would I have written in that letter? What would I have apologized for or explained? What burden did I transfer to Louise—and then Daisy—only because at that moment, I did not have the strength to carry it myself? Every idea I have is a reconstruction. After all, experiencing something is not the same as remembering it. A memory is by its nature a revision. I don’t know what I wrote in that letter beyond the single clue I’ve been given—the word
ecstasy
.
I reread Arthur Greatrex’s letter many times. I tried to imagine her—Emme, Emme-and-Emme, Daisy, Margaret, Marguerite Greatrex Church—that final night, after she’d screamed at me and left our house and you’d walked her back and taken her keys. Before you climbed into her car. I tried to claw my way inside her brain as she put the plug in the drain and stuffed a towel in the clean-out and turned the faucet on full blast. As she descended the stairs, the lights from the geometric cutouts casting blue triangles on her red fur boots. Was it madness—or was it plain, bald want? She wanted her parents back, and because she could not have them, what she’d wanted instead was some small revenge. The mania had given her a reckless invincibility, as drinking used to give me, a reckless certainty that she could, and should, get what she wanted at any cost.
And maybe the next thing she’d wanted, after flooding the store, was her car. Or maybe that was only a ruse. Maybe what she really wanted was you.
I picture her storming the twelve blocks of sidewalk in her red fur boots and her gold-leaf dress and her goose-feather choker. I see her standing in the gloom outside our house, texting you upstairs in Polly’s room. I hear the sound of your phone next to your ear. I
watch you rise, and read, and text her back, and drop your phone, inadvertently, on Polly’s bed. What happened next? Did you find her inside the house, snatching the keys, and know you had to follow her? Did you step outside to save her and somehow sacrifice yourself?
I believe Arthur Greatrex, Esquire. I believe she never intended to hurt you. I believe that what she felt for you was not a sinister emotion but a tender one—drawn from the bucket of love.
I
WENT TO
see your father in Gold Hill the day after I received Arthur Greatrex’s letter. I brought the letter and the photo taken in front of the White Cliffs that I’d received in June. The photo Daisy herself had printed twice in a darkroom in Paris, then reexposed one print to achieve the desired effect, then reexposed the other for a different effect. One copy went to Patrick. The other to me.
Jonathan put on his glasses and read Arthur Greatrex’s letter. When he finished, he took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes and handed it back to me.
“ ‘Ecstasy’?” he said.
“I know,” I said. “Horrible. I have no memory of it. I don’t know what possessed me. I’m just thankful she destroyed it. If I had to read it, I might die of shame.”
He looked at me steadily. “I think it’s time you told me the whole story.”
So I did. I told him everything I’d left out.
The morning on the satin sheets with Malcolm at the penthouse. The ongoing affair with Patrick in London. Montmartre, when Malcolm had felt dizzy climbing the stairs. How we’d met Mary McShane at the top. How I hadn’t returned to the penthouse with Malcolm. How I hadn’t known it was to be the last full day of his life.
I ended with the letter I’d written in the pub in Dublin while Jonathan slept at the bed-and-breakfast, the letter that included the word
ecstasy
. I slid the photograph of Malcolm and Louise and Patrick and me at the White Cliffs toward him. He stared at the photo intensely, saying nothing. He stood and picked up a photo of you off his mantel, from one of your high school swim meets—an action shot, right at the start of your dive. He laid the two photos side by side on the table. He leaned back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head. He stared up at the ceiling, as if the words that needed to be set down between us were written on the exposed beams.
“Well,” he said. “That explains some things. But not quite everything.”
“What do you mean?”
He took a deep breath. He went to his desk in the corner and pulled out a folder and slid it across the table toward me. The document on top, which I had never seen before, was titled “Information for Families: Tissue Typing for Kidney Donation.” It explained tissue typing in lay terms, describing how a child inherits three antigens from each parent, but cannot inherit a number that neither parent has, and how a parent might not necessarily have a blood group compatible with his or her child. There was a final paragraph titled “A Special Note on Paternity Testing”: “It is important for a male relative to understand that tissue typing is similar to what is sometimes called ‘paternity testing.’ We ask that you consider this carefully, and before you agree to the test, we would want you, as a family, to decide who should be told if the results are unexpected.”
I read that paragraph, and finally, after all this time, I understood.
He’d known. All through your ordeal, and your release, and Christmas at home, and your departure. He’d been taking that folder out and studying it at night, I imagine, the way I’d been
studying the contents of the hatbox. No wonder he hadn’t been able to forgive me. No wonder he’d moved out.
“There are only two cases in the medical literature,” your father said. He formed quote marks with his fingers. “Two cases of ‘unexpected discovery of misattributed paternity in kidney donor pairs.’ ” He gave me a meager smile. “At least Robbie and I are not entirely alone in our predicament.”
I sat in a stunned silence. Was that silence an acknowledgment that I had always known?
I don’t know. I know that I had not been engaged in a cover-up, as your father must have suspected. But perhaps I had experienced a “distortion in thinking,” to use a phrase borrowed from the clinical literature of addiction. I had not lied, but I had not seen.
I closed my eyes. I sat alone at my end of the table, remembering. The flash of lightning. The roll of thunder and the hammering rain. The bout of undeserved pleasure on white satin sheets.
“It was Malcolm,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know.”
“That means Daisy is—”
“Robbie’s half sister.”
This time it was your father who closed his eyes.
“We don’t know what went on between them,” I said, when he opened them. “It might have been nothing.”
“It might have not been nothing, too.”
“Mitch told you? When you met about the tissue tests after the accident?”
“Yes.”
“But you chose not to tell me until now.”
“Yes.”
“Does Robbie know?”
“No. I didn’t tell Robbie. Though I wish I had. At first I thought it could wait until he was better. And then I thought it could wait until he came home from overseas. I didn’t want to spoil his year. After everything that’s happened. After how hard he’s worked, first to win the grant, then to recover. And anyway, it was your story to tell, not mine. I didn’t even know what was what or who was who. And I was too angry, and too disgusted, to tell you what I knew. What I thought I knew.”
“What did you think you knew?”
He balanced his chair back and stared at the ceiling again, avoiding my eyes as he spoke. “All these months I thought it was that kid from the ferry. That skinny redheaded kid with the fiddle. I thought he was Robbie’s father. What was his name? He was from Wexford.”
