Epilogue
Cordelia Warren Lockridge turned one on the ninth of February, in the loft, at a party her town threw over her parents’ mild objections, and the account will close with the inventory of that room, because the account has always trusted rooms to tell the truth.
The whole watch was there. Prue and Wharf, slower now, still on my feet.
Alma, eighty-one that winter, holding court from the good chair with the birthday girl on her knee, teaching her, already, that wool socks make cowards of furnaces.
Coop, who built the second crib, the big-girl bed being commissioned already, “fancy work for a boat.” Mireille, promoted twice.
Doris and Genevieve, who brought, as a gift, a small quilt square worked by Mireille’s fourth-graders, eleven small hands’ worth of stitches, MENDED IS NOT MARRED in letters of wildly varying conviction, which is now framed in Cordelia’s room and which I cannot look at directly on tired evenings.
Tansy, godmother, auditor for life. Pratt sent a ship in a bottle and a note: “For the captain’s first year.
All eleven quilts hang together this spring; come by water.
” And from the far coast, from the Oregon branch, a wooden whale carved by a man who builds houses, and a card signed by a retired schoolteacher: “From Edmund’s family to Warren’s granddaughter. Doors open.”
Vivienne was not there. The account will spend its last paragraph on her only to be exact, because exactness was always the account’s whole religion.
She is alive, and provided for by instruments she no longer controls, and litigating still, out of habit, the way weather continues somewhere over the ocean after it has stopped mattering to any harbor.
The court order stands; her own family’s settlement enforces it now more fiercely than mine ever needed to; and by Cordelia’s first birthday she had never met her granddaughter, and the sentence that once would have been the tragedy of this account is entered instead as its safety inspection, passed.
Some doors are not broken. Some doors are load-bearing walls, correctly identified at last.
Dominic keeps an office now, small, over the chandlery’s other stair, consulting practice, three clients, “all I can hold correctly,” and on its wall, framed, where a man of his former world would hang the tombstone of his greatest deal, hangs the only piece of paper he saved from the year of paper: the envelope, torn in quarters, unread, unreadable, mounted under glass by his wife, who knows how to conserve the objects that carry a family’s meaning.
Visitors ask. He tells them the truth: “It’s the results of a test.” And when they ask what it says, he gives them the answer he built at the maximum available tuition, the finding of fact this whole account was kept to certify, and it is the last line the record needs:
“I have no idea,” he says. “That’s the point. Her mother told me.”