Chapter 44 Loretta’s Note
Forty-Four
Loretta’s Note
I am adding this to the back of Adiel’s ring binder.
If Isadora and Gertrude should bless us with grandchildren, we want them—and however many generations might follow—to know that this exceptional person not only graced our lives for fourteen years but also shaped the future of the family with a selfless sacrifice that will have ramifications in the lives of all our descendants.
Neither “freak” nor “human oddity” applies to her. I don’t know any titles that do—other than “daughter” and “sister.”
When she asked for dinner in her quarters that night, I thought little of it.
I knew she was reading Gertie’s manuscript and making suggestions.
I had been busy all day long, but by bedtime I was not the least tired.
In fact, my energy had not diminished at all—which has since been explained by what we read in her diary regarding the sacrifice she decided to make in her grief over Harry.
Her gift to us. We would have rejected it if we had known.
Franklin was full of energy, too, and when he couldn’t sleep, he went downstairs to his office.
I sat in our room, reading until I thought I heard distant silvery bells, which I had never heard in this territory before.
I went out onto the balcony. What I saw shook me as I had not been shaken since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
I needed a quarter of an hour to compose myself and to decide how to deal with what I’d seen. Indeed, I needed some of that time to convince myself that I had in fact seen it.
Only when I went to her room did I discover that the situation was as dire as it was fantastic.
Dread and tenderness do not seem to be companionable emotions, but I was at once in the grip of both.
She was intent on writing what transpired in those last minutes, as much as she could before she became too weak to hold the pen.
It’s why I am, she had said. It’s why I am.
In her bed, I held her in my arms. She was as naked as when she had been born, though she was no longer as she had been on that Blue Mood stage where we first saw her.
Out of respect for Addie, I will not dwell in detail on the deformities with which she was born but provide enough for you to understand why she would have a place in that hateful Museum of the Strange.
Her legs and arms were so slender that it seemed she must be disabled, but the muscles were far stronger than their thinness implied.
Her torso was asymmetrical, as if cruel Nature had given her a hard twist before sending her into the world, but the seeming misalignment of her clearly defined ribs, while disturbing to the eye, in no way inhibited her movement.
Her knuckles were sharp, her fingers long, her nails as black as ebony and in constant need of a blunting file.
Excess skin sagged from her arms in shallow loops like hastily furled flags.
The vile comedian on that speakeasy stage said that the contrast between her splendid face and afflicted body confirmed that her mother had been a showgirl and her father had been a bat.
Many in the audience found her horrifying and disgusting in an entertaining way; others were amused by her; some pitied her but were too fascinated to look away.
The last thing she deserved was pity, for even used in that barbarous and mortifying show, she held fast to her dignity and answered the comedian’s gross lines with a look that seemed to say she pitied him even as she held him in well-deserved contempt.
Her gravity and self-possession ennobled her.
She inspired in Franklin and me no pity at all, but sympathy and a powerful and moving sense of kinship in a world of strangers where like spirits seem to be rare.
And so, in those predawn hours of Friday, March 24, as I sat in Addie’s bed and held her, the stunning change in her, which occurred overnight, suggested that the girl’s real life, a new and glorious life, had just begun.
She had spun no cocoon, had not retreated for a cloistered season.
No science could explain her transformation, nor could any denomination of any faith known on Earth.
Although she was still small and slender, her body had reformed like a withered sponge swelling to its ideal form.
She might have been a child of twelve, but for the wings that graced her now that the half-furled and sagging flesh on her arms and sides had unfurled.
Her skin had the peachy color that sometimes develops between the red of sunburn and the soft brown of a tan, so that she seemed to glow with an inner light.
She gazed up at me, and for a moment those blue, blue eyes seemed to be windows on an eternity unlike any that I had ever imagined or could even now comprehend.
She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.
When she looked past me toward the bedroom door, I saw that Franklin, Isadora, and Gertrude had come, their faces informed both by astonishment and bewilderment, as if they had been drawn here by a haunting song they had never heard before, for a purpose they had not known until it was revealed.
Adiel smiled at them as they gathered at bedside, all of them speechless, as if they understood that no word was worthy of the moment. Our girl closed her eyes.
She whispered to me, “Mother, there is a letter I wrote years before I knew you. Earlier tonight, I put it under my pillow. So that you will know it has always been coming to this and that I have no regrets. My life has been perfect.” I felt her heart stop. Her smile did not fade with her life.
I imagine miracles are real, but I can’t say for sure this was a miracle by the usual definition. I have not believed in magic, but one does not have to believe in something for it to be a fact.
To my family, her family, gathered here before us, I said, “She flew. I saw her from my balcony. She was laughing, a soft sound like silvery bells. She flew.”
For most of us, the purpose of our lives remains elusive. Her voice came to me in memory: I tell the story of my family. It’s what I can do. It’s why I am.
We did not know where she came from. Neither did she. We did not know what her birth name was. Neither did she. We called her Adiel, which is Hebrew and means “an ornament of God.”
As I held her body, the illusion of inner light sustained, if in fact it was merely an illusion.
Her origins were unfathomable. Why we, of all people, should cross her path in the Blue Mood at the height of her mortification at the hands of a soulless comedian was a synchronicity that could never be explained.
We exist now as we have always existed, as everyone now alive exists if they dare to admit it—forever in a mystery so strange and so profound that it cannot be solved.
Such is the world.