Chapter 10 Clara
CHAPTER 10? CLARA
Bluffton, South Carolina
The lace of iron pilings sent spiderweb shadows across the bridge’s roadway. Low, flat warehouses squatted on the far side of the crinkled surface of the blue-gray river. Overhead, a cloudless sky touched down on a city growing into its own. I dared not look left or right, a plummeting fall to a river that flowed to the sea, a riverboat making its way beneath the arches.
I followed the road snaking its way to the Savannah Federal Bank, where the key would open a metal box in a back room behind thick locked doors, containing a novel that many thought gone forever. False sequels had come to light, and other authors had offered to write the follow-up to Emjie’s life, desperate to release her from the limbo where Mother had left her.
Dad refused them all. He knew where the authentic one rested in peace, with no way to translate it.
The day after he entombed the sequel’s pages at the bank, long before a bridge arched over the river, I asked him, “Dad! What if I want to try and read it one day?”
“Then you can go retrieve it.” He took my hand and led me to his study, showed me the key’s hiding place. “Ladybug, I see no reason for such a thing, but if you’d like to go, here is the key.”
“We could get it translated,” I told him. “There are people who specialize in these things.”
“We will never translate that novel, Clara. Never. If she wanted it to be read, she would have left her language for us.”
I was fifteen years old, angry, and completely soaked in self-righteousness as words I regretted poured out in desperation. “You don’t want to translate it because you think it will prove she was insane. You’re scared of what it might say. You’re a coward.”
“All of that is very possible,” he said, and kissed my forehead, tears in his eyes.
“Why?” I asked when the tears were spent, and he took me outside to sit on the edge of the dock. “Why did she need her own words? Weren’t we and our language enough?”
“She wanted a word for everything. She believed…” His voice changed, as if the middle held something soft inside. He cleared his throat. “She believed that the words we use were made for the people who didn’t notice the world. She wondered about the existence of words for things that people like her, and you, notice.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“The shade of blue when a rainstorm whips across the river and pebbles the surface. The feeling of missing something you never had. The shiver of recognition when something that is meant for you crosses your path.”
“Yes,” I said with a feeling I wanted to name. “Like a word for the feeling when something is so big that it puddles in your chest, sits like a lake.”
“Yes.” He let out a sound that was half sob, half sigh.
We sat on the edge of the dock, our feet dangling over the outgoing tide. Spring green, the brightest of all the greens, flickered on the marsh grasses. A dolphin’s sleek gray body rose from the waters, a baby at its side, swimming with a synchronicity that made my chest ache with loss. I let out a cry and Dad pulled me close.
“How could she have done it?” I asked.
“A long time ago,” he told me as if starting a bedtime story, “when she was only a bit older than you are now, before I met her, when she was seventeen.” He shuddered with the story he was about to tell. “Your mother’s mother, Martha, decided that her daughter’s genius had grown into flights of fancy that were dangerous. She decided that your mother must be treated.”
“Treated?”
“A psychiatric institute.”
“What?” A blow to my chest that took my breath. Dad was pulling aside the curtain and showing me the inner workings, the cogs and gears of my mother’s leaving.
“Yes. It was the most horrific time of her life.”
“Worse than when her father left her?”
“Yes. As she described it—they tried to fix her in windowless rooms with sedatives and hypnotics. It was a living hell, she told me. With forced bedrest and words like schizophrenia , all because she could not do as her mother wanted.”
“Which was?”
“After seventeen years of nurturing her creativity, of allowing her to never go to traditional school, of using her writing for family gain, Martha decided it was time for Bronwyn to buckle down with a job that left your mother listless and depressed.”
Images of horror flooded my mind. I remembered an afternoon when Lilia and I had sneaked into the back door of the theater to watch The Snake Pit with Olivia de Havilland, a movie in which she was locked up and treated with ghastly remedies. We left the movie in the middle, agreeing that our parents were right to forbid it, unable to stomach the terror. This could not be what happened to my mother. She was… normal and kind and smart. “Dad, her mother sent her away? To a psychiatric ward?”
“Yes. For a month.”
“You think this is why she left us? Because her mother did that to her? So she left me ?”
“I don’t know, my ladybug. I am just telling you the story, so you know more of her than you did before.”
I wept in my dad’s embrace, and the gentle-eyed dolphin dove deeper into the waters and disappeared.
This memory of Dad’s story, of the truth that had been hidden from me, returned now. For years, and sometimes still, I fell asleep wondering what it must have been like to be locked up this way, to have your thoughts altered and your creativity stifled. It was one more scrap of her life I would keep, for I had so little.
I came to myself at a red light in Savannah’s downtown, under the shadow of Spanish moss dripping from live oak trees. I found a parking spot a block from the white marble edifice with the fluted columns—a stately place to hide Mother’s madness, some might say.
The presiding assumption—the one published in that dreadful biography, in articles and opinion pieces—was that in great despair Mother swallowed sleeping pills and carried her life, language, and secrets to the bottom of the sea.
She was unstable, they said. A touch of madness, you know. One merely needed to look at her youthful escapades to understand that Bronwyn was ill-suited for motherhood. She was a rare genius; that was proven.
Everyone knew that being a genius rarely made for a happy life.
When I was a child, there were times when she would disappear for a few days and then return regretful, sad, and promising to try anything Dad suggested. She’d swallow the white pills I never knew the name of and keep regular hours, her face placid. The mommy who ran through the garden, built forts, and stayed up all night writing would disappear. But then inevitably she would return to herself one bright afternoon, and we’d run to the horseshoe-shaped beach behind our house and swim in the briny waters.
Dad told me later that Mother hadn’t been afraid of anything in the world except the psychiatric hospital, with its pale, lifeless walls and windowless rooms, with the white coats on doctors and the silver trays of medicines.
My mother’s lack of maternal watchfulness was roundly condemned in the book Child Genius . To biographer Brian Davis, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham was formed and fashioned of bits and pieces of myth, a few photos, stories, Jungian analysis, and imagination.
But to me, Mother had been everything from the love of my life to an evil character in a morbid fairy tale. I’d looked for her in every face and friendship of my life. Therefore, it made sense that I hoped Mr. Charlie Jameson was telling me the truth and there was something of my mother waiting for me in England.
I opened the heavy wooden door to the Savannah National Bank and walked toward the teller’s desk, key in hand.
In the kitchen, I rested my hand on top of Mother’s Emjie sequel sitting on the counter and counted ahead to England’s time zone: five p.m. I picked up the phone’s receiver and dialed 0, instructed the operator to connect me to the London number, and tried not to think of what this overseas call would cost.
I wondered if all of this was just another vain attempt to answer the questions that could never be answered: Why did she leave me? Where was she if she was at all? And the most important of all—why hadn’t she loved me enough to stay, no matter the cost?
Out the window over the sink, a blue heron stood regal on the edge of the oyster shell outcropping. Still and quiet, ethereal. Mother once told me that the Greeks knew the heron was a messenger from the gods, and if one visited me, I better pay some mind.
Staring at it now, the blue-gray wisps of feather under its chin, the arc of its neck in a soft C, I believed her.
What? I asked it.
The heron didn’t answer, but after clicks and static, Charlie picked up. “Hallo!”
“Hello, it’s Clara,” I said. “Clara Harrington.”
“I was hoping it might be you ringing me.” His voice held laughter below that lovely accent. “I kept recalculating what time it was there and was nearly set to ring you.”
“No need. Here I am.”
“I know this is quite unsettling,” he said.
“I have questions,” I told him as I paced the kitchen holding the blue pottery mug I’d made for my father in fifth grade. Dad kept every gift, from the potholder I created at summer camp to a picture I painted of him in third grade. He always felt as if he could make up for a lost mother by being double the dad. The fact that it didn’t work that way didn’t mean he ever stopped trying.
“All right,” Charlie said. “If I know the answers, I’ll tell you. Go on, then.”
“Did you look at the sealed letter?”
“No, it’s sealed.” Exasperation flowed across the lines.
I wondered about Charlie’s age, what he looked like, the library, too. I wanted an image of the situation. “Does anyone else know about this?”
“No.”
“You haven’t called Boston University or any of the places that store her papers?”
“No. Mrs. Harrington, you can either come retrieve these papers or not. You are not obliged to me or this case of papers in any way. I can donate it or destroy it, and we can pretend this never happened. I would understand. I might do the same.”
I didn’t correct him about my marital status, for Mother must have written this note before my marriage or she would have added my married name, Carter, which I didn’t use professionally.
“I can’t let you donate or destroy it,” I said, leaning against the counter and closing my eyes. “But I’m not even sure how I’d get there.”
“There’s an ocean liner. The new SS United States , fast as can be. It takes four days from New York to the Southampton docks, which is a few hours by train to London. My brother has traveled this way many times for business visits to New York.”
“Mr. Jameson, I’m an art teacher and illustrator. To buy passage to England might not be possible for me.”
What didn’t I tell him? My husband lost all our money; there was nothing left. I couldn’t leave my daughter alone for the ten days or two weeks this journey would take. This was an impossible situation.
“I understand,” he said. “But we must find a way to make this right.”
“I want to know something,” I said in my most professional voice. “Will you please share one of the words with me?”
Papers rustled and a door opened and closed; there was a muffled conversation with someone, and then he was back. “ Wondalea : explore the sky, to fly across a starlit path and shadow the moon.”
My head floated above, as if I were watching a woman, a woman who was me, in a kitchen holding a phone.
A starlit path. Shadow the moon.
It was really her.
The impossibilities of my life faded. I would rise to this moment.
“Thank you,” I said. “I will get back to you very soon.” I hung up without waiting for his goodbye. I bent over, my hands on my knees, and took long, deep breaths.
Wondalea.
This was no prank. This man across the ocean, in a library in London, held my mother’s lost words.
Finally, here was the key to translating her sequel, and possibly, if I allowed myself the luxury of imagining it, the answers to her vanishing and whereabouts.
For all my wondering, for all my wishing, for all my imaginary scenarios, now I stood in my childhood kitchen where she once made chicken potpies and angel food cake. If the sky were now splitting open, I was suddenly terrified for what these lost and secret words of hers might show me of her troubled mind and decision to leave.
I made my way outside, staring across the bay. The heron had vanished with whatever message he carried. The day turned drowsy under a low woolly sky that hinted of a coming storm.
The lawn sloped down to the horseshoe-shaped beach, where oyster shells crackled and settled along with the tides, where our rowboat sat upside down for the season, its oars hiding beneath.
When I lifted my eyes farther to the horizon, there was the expansive view that sometimes, when I was a child, made me both dizzy and thrilled. What a large world there was out there; but mine was here, on the edge of earth and sea, safe.
Wondalea —the word coursed through my body. I wanted to paint, to illustrate the word that my mother formed in her imagination.
All plans for the day fell away. From the market to Christmas shopping, my to-do list became irrelevant, and I found myself in the sunroom with my easel and watercolors.
Time was lost when I found myself here; minutes and hours were no longer real in the way I understood them in daily life. Time collapsed in on itself and images rose. Instead of finding something, I was letting it find me. The images came for me instead of my pursuing them.
When the phone rang again, I thought maybe an hour had passed, but it was three p.m. I dropped the paintbrush on the palette and hustled to the kitchen.
“Hello?”
“Clara? It’s Charlie again. Nighttime here, but what does it matter? Please don’t think me rude or intrusive, but I’ve decided to buy you a ticket to England by ship.”
“Thank you so much for your kindness, but no,” I said. “I can’t let you. I will figure out a way myself.”
“Listen to me,” he said. “And hold on, because I’ve practiced for a bit, and I don’t want to muddle my words.”
“Did you actually write down what you want to say?”
A long moment of silence and then a laugh. “Yes, I wrote it down, so please allow me to read.”
Laughter bubbled up from me as if a cork had popped. I liked this man, Charlie Jameson. Whether he was old or young, I had no real idea. If his dad had just died, he was probably older, maybe in his fifties at the youngest? The image of Alec Guinness in the movie Great Expectations popped into my mind: a swoop of blond hair and the lifted eyebrows of the curious.
“Mrs. Harrington,” he said, “I don’t know who your mother is. Can you tell me?”
“Please call me Clara.”
“Clara,” he said, and I liked the roll of his r and the rise and fall of my name in his voice, as if I were suddenly someone else. “And please, I’m Charlie.”
“Charlie,” I said. “My mother. Well, she was a famous author who disappeared over twenty-five years ago. She wrote a book called The Middle Place , a children’s novel about a little girl named Emjie. She simply vanished in 1927, and it is widely assumed that she drowned with those papers you have.”
“Ah!” A sudden outburst, and I imagined him popping himself in the forehead. “Yes. Yes. I know about this. The author who vanished. Boston, am I right?”
“Not entirely wrong. That’s where she’s from, but she disappeared from here, from South Carolina.”
“Well, for some reason unbeknownst to me, my father had her papers. They are in his library, and I am responsible for them. I cannot keep them, and I cannot mail them. I know you need to come retrieve them. So, for that, I will purchase you a ticket on the SS United States to sail here. It is a four-day journey.” He paused and I allowed the silence to fall between us. “Okay, your turn to say something. I’ve completed my speech.”
“Well, Mr. Jameson, I’m glad you told me you wrote that down because I would have thought I was speaking with the prime minister. Thank you for the kind offer, but I can’t let you do that,” I said. “Even with your lovely speech and generous offer. I’d have to bring my daughter, and this is the holiday season and I teach and…”
“There will always be something.”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you know how many things I meant to do with my father, believing there was loads of time to do it? Trips and excursions and just an ordinary day fishing? There wasn’t time. But you must make time. I will purchase your daughter a ticket as well. It’s only one cabin, still. I would like to get these papers in your hands. It feels as if I’m going to be haunted by your mother at any moment.”
“Well, I am haunted by her every day,” I said.
“I’m sorry for that,” he said. “I truly am.”
I placed my hands on the sequel still sitting on the counter, as if it might give me the answer of what to do. “If I am to come to England, it will be under my own steam,” I said firmly. And a plan budded in my mind.
With the lost words of my mother, I would translate and sell this sequel to the highest bidder. I could buy my own ticket to England and then open the art school I’d dreamed of opening. First, I needed to dig into my meager savings.
“I’ll get back to you with my plans,” I told him. “I’m coming to England.”
We hung up, and I thought of Nat picking Wynnie up from school at that moment, of being without her for the weekend, of sailing on an ocean liner to England, of taking a two-week leave of teaching, of my father alone, and of course, always, of my mother.
As a child, I had visions of her walking through the front door, dropping to her knees, and holding out her arms for me. “There you are,” she said in this imaginary scenario. “I’m so sorry, darling. I was lost, but not to worry, now I am home.”