Chapter 34
By the time we get close enough to hug her or shake her hand, her eyes are full of tears. She blinks. The tears fall.
“I had all but given up on finding this place,” she says.
“You remember it?” Alice asks.
Lucy narrows her eyes and nods.
“It has haunted her,” her daughter interrupts. “The memory of this place.”
“Oh, I don’t care for that word,” Lucy argues. “Haunted. It sounds like a nightmare. And that wasn’t it. Not at all.”
Her daughter remains silent.
“How would you describe it?” I ask.
“Lured. Enticed. Called by it. Like a fairy tale. Like a melody. I could see it—this place—so clearly in my mind, and yet I could never find it. I had started to think I had dreamt it, my memories of being a child on this farm. Maybe I’d had a high fever one day and made the whole thing up.
But it was so real. In my mind. So clear.
The porch. The stairs. The barn there.” She points a curved, knobby finger at the outbuilding.
“That oak tree. The maples. The gravel.”
I’d had a similar experience when I arrived, prompted by the memory of biting into that juicy tomato on a hot August day. My memory of the farmhouse and my years with Alice had been buried, but that juicy tomato was always there.
“She’s drawn pictures of it,” Lynn chimes in. “Painted it many times. I’ve been looking at this farmhouse my whole life. That’s why I recognized it, when I saw it on Today’s American. Of course, I thought, it couldn’t be. But I had to show her. It was so close to what she’d always described.”
“Did you know right away?” Alice asks. “When Lynn showed the news clip to you?”
“Oh, yes. I knew. I couldn’t believe it. This figment of my imagination was real.” Her eyes dance. “Here in Wisconsin.”
Alice reaches for Lucy’s hand. “Would you like to come inside now?”
Lucy remembers the inside of the house too. The parlor, the location of each room and bedroom, and of course, the attic steps that pull down from the ceiling. She touches everything, her fingers curled with arthritis, as if she doesn’t believe it’s real.
After the tour, we retire to the kitchen table to enjoy tea and cookies. The Scandi Trio has baked assorted kinds for the occasion—oatmeal chocolate chip, lemon drop, and snickerdoodle.
Alice hands Lucy the photograph of the farmerettes posed by the boardinghouse sign and points to Rose. “Do you remember her?” she asks.
Lucy closes her eyes and holds in another round of tears. “She smelled like sweat and onion and cinnamon, all at once,” she says. “And I can feel her arm around my waist, my legs straddled on her hip. Her face.” She pauses, take a breath. “She was magic.”
Alice smiles and nods.
“I never knew who this woman was,” Lucy goes on, “this woman I saw when I closed my eyes. I knew she wasn’t my mother or my grandmother.
They looked quite different. When I was about five or six, I asked my mother who she was, certain she must have been an aunt or cousin or a family friend.
But my mother said she couldn’t fathom who I was talking about.
When I pressed the issue, and described the farmhouse, she said she’d read me Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods, and that I must be remembering Ma from the book.
The farmhouse must have been the cabin in the woods.
I was so young, she said I’d dreamt up my own characters and setting as I listened to her read.
” She pauses. “I believed her at first. But after I read Little House in the Big Woods again when I was older, I knew my memories had nothing to do with that book. It’s a wonderful story, but quite dissimilar.
Over the years, I came to learn my mother could be cruel and manipulative and selfish.
And she could lie.” Lucy clears her throat.
“So now, I want to know, who was Rose Brodbeck? I mean, who was she to me?”
Alice, Katrine, and I exchange glances. We know the full truth, because we continued reading the letters Rose wrote to Hank, and the very last one, dated Christmas 1946, explained that Henry and his fiancée, Angelica, took Lucy, just when Rose was going to ask Henry if Peggy and Robert could adopt her.
This is what Peggy must have meant when she claimed He took her.
Sadly, after that day, Rose never saw Lucy again.
We pause to consider who will be brave enough to set the record straight, to tell Lucy, a woman in her eighties, that her mother was not really her mother.
“Please,” Lucy begs. “I want to know the truth.”
I decide to deliver the news, mostly so Alice and Katrine don’t have to.
“Apparently, Rose took care of you after your mother, Esther, died in childbirth,” I say as plainly as I can. “Your father was too distraught to care for you, so Rose took you in.”
Lucy stares off for a beat. “So my mother was not really my mother,” she says. “She was my stepmother.”
“You didn’t know,” Alice states.
She shrugs. “Not consciously. But I always suspected. My father died just before I turned five. And like I said, she was cruel. Crueler than I thought a mother could be to her own child. But it’s a terrible truth to bear, and I never fully looked for it.
I may have grown up wealthy, gotten anything that money could buy, but I was poor when it came to the things that really mattered, like love. ”
“Okay, I’m confused,” Lynn inserts. “How did Esther come to know Rose?”
And we go on to tell them about the Women’s Land Army, about the Rosehill Boardinghouse, about the friendships forged between Rose and the girls, and in particular, with Esther.
About Esther’s father disowning her for getting pregnant, about the night Henry came pounding on the door with a baby in his arms. We show Lucy the photograph of herself with an apron full of eggs and the recipe for Lucy’s Victory Cake.
We also show her a photograph of Esther, her mother.
After some looking, the O’Briens finally located a few photos taken at the dairy during the war, and one was of Esther milking a cow, with “Esther Monroe, WLA” written on the back.
Finally, we give her the Christmas present the girls found in the attic, still wrapped, though yellow and worn and torn at the edges, the tag with her name lovingly written by Rose.
Lucy stares at the package, stunned to receive such a gift decades after the fact. Her fingers glide against the paper seams, the ribbon curves, her name on the tag.
“I’m going to open it,” she says.
“Are you sure, Mom?” Lynn asks. “Maybe you should do it later. Or maybe not at all. Maybe it’s too much right now.”
Lucy shakes her head. “These kind women didn’t open it when they found it,” she explains, tugging at the ribbon. “They saved it for me. And so, they will get the pleasure of watching me open it now.”
The silence is heavy, less the sound of ripping paper, as we watch her remove the ribbon and wrap, revealing a plain brown craft-paper box. She lifts the lid, and we all gasp when we see ruffles of a colorful vintage fabric. Lucy lifts the cloth and holds it up.
A child’s apron.
We all gawk at the relic. I’m surprised it isn’t more yellowed, but it’s been protected from sunlight and air, under the floorboard. It’s a classic 1940s farmhouse apron design, simple but with some frills, a ruffled hem. Rose had obviously sewn it specifically for Lucy to grow into over the years.
“This tells me a lot.” Lucy rubs her fingers over the stitched seams, then places the apron against her body and hugs it like a blanket.
“She’s buried at the cemetery in town,” Alice offers. “If you’d like to pay your respects.”
“I would,” Lucy says.
I see a corner of white inside the box.
“There’s a note,” I say, knowing a written sentiment from Rose would mean one hundred times more to Lucy than the apron itself.
Lucy’s curled fingers shake as she slips a finger under the flap and pulls the letter open, the glue barely sticking after so many years. We watch with bated breath as she slides a folded card from inside the envelope and opens it.
I watch her eyes fill with tears as she reads the card.
“What does it say, Mom?” Lynn asks.
Lucy takes a breath before reading:
Been around the world, a time or two,
But I’m just happier here with you.
Why does the sky seem ever so blue?
’Cause I’m just happier here with you.
Love, Rose
“It sounds like a song,” Alice notes. “But I don’t recognize it.”
Lynn and I both shrug, unable to place the lyrics either.
“I do,” Lucy says. “My father used to sing it to me. I never heard it again, on the radio, so I always assumed he made it up. But if Rose knew it too, then it must have come from Esther.”
Lynn reaches for her mother’s hand. “You see, Mom? Rose loved you.”
Lucy holds the letter to her chest as she did the apron.
“And I loved her,” she says.
After Lucy and Lynn have gone, Alice and I sit alone on the front porch, rehashing all that happened. Alice stares at the groove of her tea-mug handle, and I can tell she’s contemplating something.
“Penny for your thoughts?” I ask.
Alice snaps out of her introspection. “It’s just, after talking with Lucy today, I can’t help but think about how much Rose lost in her lifetime. Her husband, her sons, Lucy.”
“You?” I add.
“Me,” she says with a sigh. “Did I break her heart too?”