What The Movers Found In The Mattress

They were married at Zion the next June. Vivian was not told and did not come. My mother never spoke to her mother again, not when Vivian was old, not when she was dying, nothing, and she wrote that she did not want us to think hard of her for that, that she had forgiven Vivian in the way you forgive weather, which is to stop expecting it to be any different, but that forgiving a thing does not mean you have to go stand out in it.

And here is what I did not know, what none of us knew, what makes me have to stop typing and walk around the house every few minutes while I write this.

They looked for her. For Grace. All those years, quietly, the two of them together. In the days before you could type a name into a telephone and find a person, when the records were sealed by law and by shame both, my father wrote letters. The cigar box was full of them. Letters to the home up by Dubuque, which became letters to the diocese that took over its records, which became letters to a state office and then another state office, carbon copies of all of them in my father’s slow blocky hand, going out year after year, most of them answered with a form that said the records were sealed and could not be opened, a few of them not answered at all. He kept every reply. He kept a list, updated in different pens over the years as the agencies changed their names, of where to write next. My father, who I watched my whole life and thought I knew, who I would have told you was a man with no secrets because he had no imagination for them, had spent thirty years of evenings I thought he was doing the books writing letters trying to find his wife’s first daughter, so that he could give her back to her mother before they died.

He did not find her. The letters stop four years ago, in the winter, because that is the winter he died.

And my mother, who could not write those letters herself because her hands shook too bad by then with the Parkinson’s, took her husband’s cigar box of failures and wrapped it in oilcloth and sewed it into the mattress with her money, with all the envelopes for all her children and her children’s children and the two unborn ones, and at the very bottom of the box, under all the letters, she put one more envelope. It was not like the others. It was thick, and sealed, and on the front she had written a name and nothing else.

The name was Grace.