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  May 7, 1945

  Dear Georgianna,

  I am unwell tonight. Some sense of foreboding that fate will intervene between us before I have an opportunity to tell you things as they were.

  Just know that what you have been told is not the whole story.

  There will be more news tomorrow.

  Your father

  William Grove

  (born Geringas, January 26, 1904

  Vilnius, Lithuania)

  A letter to Georgianna Grove found among the personal effects of William Grove following his death from pneumonia at the Illinois State prison, May 24, 1945

  HOME FOR THE INCURABLES

  December 17, 2007

  Georgianna

  The letter from Roosevelt McCrary that upended Georgie’s life came the morning of her seventieth birthday—written on Camp Minnie HaHa stationery and dated June 18, 2007. The handwriting sloped, the way Georgie’s father’s had been, the way children were taught to write script in the thirties—the paper smudged from handling. He must have written Georgie and then reread the letter again and again for months before he decided to mail it.

  Dear Georgianna,

  You may not remember me. I was eleven and you were four and your mother was thirty-three and your father was thirty-seven when I last saw you and now I am seventy-seven and you must be seventy this year and I wish you a very Happy Birthday. If you are receiving this letter and have any interest in hearing from me, here I am. I have lived as a groundskeeper and general carpenter at your father’s camp since I was twenty-four, thirteen years after your mother died. In time I became a part owner and now live at the camp in retirement but still keep the grounds, repair the occasional chair or cabin window.

  There were nine people on the canoe trip in 194l and all of them are dead but you and me. I remember the morning your mother was discovered just above the sign for Missing Lake. Did you know that? Missing Lake, Wisconsin, a two-hour trip upriver by canoe to Minnie HaHa. For days it had been raining and that morning the sky opened and the yellow sun was rising in the east and I thought to myself, Finally the sun.

  And then James Willow, the head counselor, and a former student of your father’s from Chicago, traveling in the third and last boat, discovered your mother on the ground at the edge of the pine forest.

  I am so sorry.

  Yours truly,

  Roosevelt McCrary

  PS. James Willow died in 1943 as a fighter pilot in WWII.

  I got your address from information. I hope I’m not intruding.

  When the mailman arrived, Georgie was in the kitchen taking down the dishes from the cupboard to set the table for the birthday party that she was giving herself that evening.

  A rack of lamb marinating in mint and garlic on the counter, sweet parsnips to be pureed on the stove, bubbling in milk, French green beans, roasted carrots. The color of things mattered to Georgie, cooking her way through the cookbooks she read at night before she went to sleep. Rosie had made a chocolate cassis cake with raspberries for dessert.

  Autumn sunlight spilled across the open porch, a light breeze like summer—not rare for Washington in mid-December, but the heat of the day was unusual.

  She waved to the mailman through the bank of windows that framed the front door, and he handed her the large stack of mail, catalogues, throwaway advertisements, bills.

  “And this,” he said giving her the handwritten brown envelope, ripped on the edges, something yellow spilled across the address so the destination was barely visible, the stamp half gone. “It must have had a helluva trip.”

  A letter—just the fact of it—was significant.

  An actual letter out of nowhere into this brilliant morning in northwest Washington, D.C.

  She sat down on the top step of the porch and opened the envelope.

  News from Camp Minnie HaHa. Her first home, the home to which she had arrived as an infant traveling the Bone River with her parents by canoe.

  She read the letter slowly, read it twice and didn’t realize that the breath had gone out of her until she stood, leaning for balance, against a pillar on the front porch. Lightheaded, she walked back in the house, passing the living room, where her grandson, Thomas, who had just turned thirteen, was lying on his side in front of the fireplace, reading.

  A Monday and Thomas had not gone to school again.

  “Any interesting mail for me?” he called.

  “Only one and it’s for me,” she replied.

  “For your birthday,” Thomas said without looking up from his book.

  “More interesting than that.”

  She would tell Thomas about the letter. Sometime, not today. He knew about her mother’s murder at a campsite on the Bone River, and somehow it delighted him to hear her tell about it as if the value of Thomas’ own life were enhanced by his genetic proximity to such a story.

  GEORGIE FOLDED THE LETTER, put it in the envelope and walked up the back staircase to her room, slipping it in her underwear drawer beneath a small stack of camisoles and worn bras.

  She needed new underwear. She had noticed that hers had gotten thin and gray with washing, holes in the crotch of her panties. Maybe she’d buy those slips of colorful lace bikinis that Rosie wore.

  Seventy, but no reason to settle into a life without intimacy— in fact she’d recently read in one of the magazines at the dentist’s that for older women intimacy was fundamental to health and spirit. She didn’t need a magazine for that news.

  She stood at her dresser checking herself in the long mirror. She had a slender, striking face, high cheekbones, olive skin, large dark eyes—intimations still of the young woman she had been.

  How many months—actually years—had it been? She’d been sixty-five when Edward Connell, with whom she’d occasionally been sleeping, moved with his wife back to Nebraska. Too far to continue a relationship, and Georgie was not sufficiently urgent for Edward to meet, say, in New York or Chicago.

  Besides, things happened. Nicolas’ daughter Oona was born; Rosie’s husband Richard got sick and died. In the months after Richard’s death, Thomas, their son, developed a speech pattern that prevented him from completing a sentence, so his conversations, except in the safety of home, became a series of beginnings without ends. And just this past summer, Georgie’s youngest child Venus went into a facility for alcohol abuse and came back to the Home for the Incurables to live One Day at a Time.

  Georgie wanted a love affair. Someone younger perhaps who could expand inside her without all the trouble it had taken Edward. Or even someone older who would lie beside her, their bodies curled together in the large four-poster bed on the second floor of the Home for the Incurables, and talk her into the night. Someone whose voice was the sound she heard as she fell asleep.

  Since Charley really, she had never wanted a man living in her house with his big shoes needing polishing and his briefcase and papers and newspapers and undershorts and the television on all the time. Just a visitor who came and went at her discretion and kept his things—his clothes and books and loose change and cash receipts—elsewhere.

  Which had nothing to do with Charley, whom she would love for the rest of her life.

  Something about Roosevelt thinking of her after so many years filled
her with happiness. Or maybe he had often thought of her but never had the courage to write before.

  Happy Birthday, he had written. I wish you a very happy birthday.

  Like a love letter.

  WHEN THOMAS CAME up the back stairs, Georgie was checking the gray circles hanging in half moons under her eyes, thinking what could be done to get rid of them. She turned from the mirror to find him leaning against the entrance to her bedroom

  “I didn’t even hear you on the stairs,” she said.

  “I didn’t want you to hear me.”

  Thomas was tall and very thin. Quite beautiful, Georgie thought—blond curls and full lips, high color—a wariness about him, pale blue eyes, turned inward.

  “Maybe Thomas is so brilliant he doesn’t need to go to school,” Nicolas, the eldest of her children, had said, annoyed at Georgie’s preference for Thomas over his son, Jesse. “Or he could be on the spectrum, which is gaining in national popularity.”

  His father had been a brilliant scientist, but who knew about Thomas. What he did was read all the time, recently Middlemarch— was there a child in Middlemarch? Georgie had asked him—and the comedies of Shakespeare. The tragedies are too sad for a boy my age, he said. The Odyssey.

  In place of schoolwork, or hanging out after school with friends, or athletics on the weekends despite being very good at baseball—he was writing a series of comic novels about an invisible boy with unpredictable powers, called The Boy.

  “The Boy takes up space,” Thomas explained to Georgie. “You just can’t see him.”

  “You can touch him?”

  “You can’t exactly touch him, but you’re blocked if you try to move into the space his body occupies.”

  Thomas braced against the wall at the top of the stairs.

  “When are you coming back downstairs?”

  She was standing at her open closet door considering what she would wear for her birthday.

  “In just a minute.”

  “I came up to ask you something about William Grove.”

  “I don’t know much about my father,” she said, taking her black silk pants out of the closet and hanging them on the doorknob. “I was four years old the last time I saw him and he died when I was eight.”

  “I think I’m going to write him into my novel as a character— probably the invisible boy’s grandfather. He’ll be an interesting character but dead, and the boy is beginning to understand that he has the power to bring him back to life.”

  She closed her closet door, pulled up the covers on the unmade bed, put her nightshirt under the pillow.

  “You need to go to school more often, Thomas,” she said.

  GEORGIE HAD TOLD Thomas about William Grove when his own father had died. She was at the apartment in Chicago helping Rosie after the funeral, sitting one morning at the bottom of Rosie and Richard’s bed—Thomas at the window, his head pressed against the glass, looking out at summer over the lake.

  “I was four when my mother was killed …,” she began, “… and I knew too little about the world to be heartbroken.”

  Thomas turned away from the window.

  “Do you want me to continue?”

  He nodded.

  “Tell me everything.”

  “FOR CHRISSAKE, GEORGIE …” Nicolas had said later. “Maybe you could have waited a couple of years to tell him about your father. Or at least let his mother, Rosie, tell him.”

  “Sometimes you have the right moment,” Georgie said.

  “Or the absolute wrong moment,” Nicolas said.

  But over time the unfinished story of William Grove was sufficient to sustain Thomas’ imagination.

  GEORGIE TURNED OFF the overhead light, heading to the kitchen, and Thomas followed down the winding back stairs, slithering along the curving steps, snakelike, barely aware of his body and how he moved, disengaged from his physical self, half in another world.

  “Do you ever wonder what really happened to your mother?” he asked

  “Wonder?” Georgie took the carrots out of the fridge.

  “I wonder about it all the time.”

  “I don’t have any context for what happened at Missing Lake except to know who was on that trip, since their names were listed in the June 21, 1941, issue of the Chicago Tribune.”

  “You showed me that story in the Tribune.”

  “That’s all I really know.”

  “You never asked your grandparents?”

  She shook her head.

  “I was only four when my mother was killed, and the night after her body was discovered, I went to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to live with them.”

  “I would have had a ton of questions.”

  “They wouldn’t have answered your questions. My grand–parents were midwestern Protestants and never talked. It was as if my mother—my beautiful mother, as they referred to her—vanished without a trace and my father’s only defining character was Jew.”

  “My father was also a Jew,” Thomas said.

  “And a scientist and very smart and handsome and a sweetheart.”

  Georgie got out a chopping board and took a long blade knife from the drawer.

  “I have no information about my father.” She leaned against the kitchen counter. “My mother must have been strangled sometime in the night. In the morning, my father was taken away by the police. I watched him get in the police boat, but that is all I remember.”

  Thomas slid into a kitchen chair, knocking the salt off the table and then the yellow tulips wrapped in brown paper and stuck in a glass of water.

  “Thomas!”

  He leaned over to pick up the tulips.

  “I mean William Grove went to jail and he didn’t have to go to jail, right?” Thomas asked, wiping up the water on the floor. “He could have said, Oh my god, I haven’t a clue what happened, and probably the police would have believed him because after all your mother was his wife.”

  “The salt, Thomas. Could you sweep it up?”

  He got the broom and swept up the salt, mopped the water, slipped back in the chair.

  “Do you forgive him?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this. Not on my birthday while I’m cooking, which is something I love to do, and sitting with you, something I also love to do.”

  GEORGIE WAS STILL lightheaded from the letter, her hands numb as she scraped the carrots, the beating of her heart off center as if the heart itself had moved to the right in the middle of her chest.

  “How about instead we discuss the word forgive, which I looked up in the Oxford.”

  Thomas hopped onto a wooden kitchen chair with a rush seat, crouched froglike as he often did, wrapping his arms around his knees.

  “Forgive has a lot of meanings, but the one I am thinking about is “forgive means to give up anger,” and I cannot give up anger about the fact that some of the kids at Alice Deal Junior High School don’t want to be around me because my father died.”

  “Why is that?”

  “They think they can catch my father’s death as if it’s a germ and I’m contagious.”

  “Is that why you don’t want to go to school?”

  “Maybe it is,” he said.

  Georgie gathered the carrots and washed them under the tap, dried them, set them on the cutting board to slice.

  “People can be afraid of bad news,” she said. “But you should ignore the ones who think that death is catching. Because it isn’t.”

  “It kind of is,” Thomas said, rocking back and forth on his haunches, testing the old wooden chair for stability. “What about you and your father?”

  “If I needed to forgive my father, I would have to believe he was guilty,” Georgie said. “I don’t believe he was.”

  “I guess we’ll never know.”

  “Maybe that’s true.”

  Georgie was chopping the carrots in crayon-size strips, sprinkling salt, grinding pepper, lining them side by side in a broiler pan to roast.

  “Or maybe we will,” she a
dded, thinking as she spoke—quite without considering what she was saying—that she would tell Thomas about the letter from Roosevelt McCrary now in the kitchen making dinner for her seventieth birthday party.

  Thomas would have a plan of action. He always did.

  So she told him.

  Because it was her birthday and she was seventy and the two of them were alone in the Home for the Incurables—no one else to tell except Georgie’s own children who were more ashamed of the story of her father than interested in it.

  Only Thomas had taken on the night of June 17, 1941, when Josephine Grove was strangled, as a story of great and extraordinary importance to him and to his whole family and likely to the world.

  Which it had been. Which it was, still, at the core of Georgie’s life.

  “THERE IS ONLY one person still alive who was at the campsite on the Bone River when my mother was murdered,” Georgie said, her low-pitched voice cracking as it sometimes did. “His name is Roosevelt McCrary and the letter that came today for me is from him.”

  “Did you know about him?” Thomas asks.

  “I knew there was one other child at the campsite, but he was never identified by name in the newspaper stories because he was a child.”

  “This is excellent news!” Thomas said. “Are you telling everybody at your party tonight?’

  “I don’t know,” Georgie said, reaching into the back of the fridge where she’d hidden the butter from the tenants. “I wasn’t going to tell you and then I did.”

  Thomas was standing at the open fridge examining the shelves of food.

  “I wish Mr. Egland didn’t cook everything with garlic so the fridge smells like Mr. Egland instead of food,” he said.

  “I don’t like it either.”

  “Sometimes I also wish you didn’t have so many strangers around, sleeping in your beds, eating at your kitchen table and stuff.”

  Georgie sliced the butter into neat squares.

  “I have strangers around intentionally,” she said. “I wanted a home for my children after Charley died and this is how I made one. To make a home, you need a tribe.”