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  “When I need someone, I make her up,” Thomas said. “That’s how I happen to have Lucy Elliott, who is my height with long red hair and she’s hanging out in my new Invisible Boy book. Crazy about me.”

  He took an apple and shut the refrigerator door.

  “Garlic apple,” he said leaving, the kitchen door swinging on its hinges.

  “Okay if I make a fire?”

  “It’s too warm for a fire.”

  But Thomas was making one anyway. Georgie could hear him carrying in the wood from the front porch, a clatter from the dining room already set for dinner … singing,

  “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you / Let me hear you whisper that you love me too.”

  Always the old romantic songs were the ones he loved. His voice soprano slipping toward tenor.

  THEN HE WAS back in the kitchen, loose bark from the logs dropping from his clothes onto the kitchen floor.

  “I was just wondering—have you ever been back to Camp Minnie HaHa?” he asked, brushing off his hands in the sink.

  “Never,” Georgie said.

  “How come?”

  “There was no reason to go back. No one was there who might have known me.”

  She wiped her wet hands on her trousers.

  “Then why don’t you go to meet Roosevelt now?” Thomas asked, sitting on the end of the kitchen table swinging his legs. “I can’t believe that wasn’t the first thing you wanted to do when you got his letter.”

  “I haven’t thought of doing something about the letter,” she said, taking the wineglasses down from the cupboard. “Except to write him back.”

  But that was not exactly true.

  Already Georgie was imagining her first meeting with Roosevelt. He’d be standing on the bank of the river at Camp Minnie HaHa in jeans and a work shirt, maybe a baseball cap, waiting for her to arrive by canoe. She had no actual memory of him, only that there was another child besides her in the group camping at Missing Lake. Something she knew from the newspaper accounts her grandmother had saved for her to read when she was old enough.

  In the article printed in the June 21, 1941, Chicago Tribune, Roosevelt’s mother was listed as Clementine McCrary, age thirty-three, but Roosevelt was given no identity by name.

  “Let’s go this summer right after school’s out in June,” Thomas said.

  Georgie was distracted. Standing at the sink, her back to Thomas, she nearly chopped off the tip of her index finger slicing shallots with a dull knife—now the bloody finger wrapped in a paper towel leaking in the drain, her thoughts careening, scrambling her brain.

  What might Roosevelt tell her when they meet? What had he seen at the campsite? He must remember her father since he was already eleven that summer. At eleven, a boy would remember a murder.

  Does he remember Georgie? Does he think about her because of the tragedy? Has he been wondering for years what became of her?

  “We can rent canoes,” Thomas was saying. “We’ll stop at the exact same place where your mother was murdered. Sort of like the thing you do with maps in Botswana, finding stuff, studying ancient tribes imagining what might have happened thousands of years ago. What do you think?”

  “I think this, Thomas,” Georgie said. “Tonight, I’m giving myself a birthday party and hoping not to overcook the lamb.”

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, Georgie had sat down on the couch in the kitchen with the dissertation of one of her graduate students in cultural anthropology. Thomas upstairs in his bedroom was writing “William Grove into my book,” as he told her. The dining room table was set with Georgie’s grandmother’s silver, a deep blue and wine woven cloth she’d brought home that summer from Botswana, a vase of yellow tulips spilling over the rim, votives scattering the dining room table with light, wood banked in the fireplace, CDs of early Beatles and Frank Sinatra waiting in the sound system.

  She had even made place cards, although there were only seven of them, in a tight group at the end of the long refectory table.

  Georgie’s blood. All that remained:

  Nicolas—his wife Olivia would be absent, playing Desdemona in Othello at the Folger Theatre. Jesse and Oona, their children. Rosie, her older daughter. Thomas. And Venus, the child Charley had left behind.

  But she was not in a humor to read student work. She stuffed the dissertation back in her book bag, took a piece of paper from the drawer—not the formal gray stationery with Georgianna Grove in white lettering at the top; nor the George Washington University office stationery with “Dr. Georgianna Grove, Professor of Cultural Anthropology,” on the left.

  But plain recycled computer paper.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, she ran her sweatered arm across the top of the table to clean the residue from cooking and took a pen out of her back pocket.

  It must have taken Roosevelt days to write that letter. Weeks to send it.

  “You are not intruding, Roosevelt McCrary,” she wrote, her eyes filling with unexpected tears. “I have been waiting for sixty-six years to receive this and now it has come and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  AT HER GRANDPARENTS’ HOUSE in Ann Arbor, Georgie’s bedroom was under the eaves on the third floor. A small room painted white with a circle of tiny windows like portholes from which she could peer at the garden where her grandmother was weeding or clipping or planting and Georgie could not be seen. There she spent hours playing family with paper dolls who lived their organized lives in shoe boxes lined up under her bed. Twenty families in twenty shoe boxes with mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles spread out the afternoons of winter all over the carpet. Georgie took on the role of village doctor moving from shoe box to shoe box caring for the sick members of her imagined paper community.

  She had had in mind becoming a physician, but when she entered the University of Michigan as a premed student in 1955, it was a class in introductory cultural anthropology, the study of human life in groups, rather than the chemistry of the body, that captured her attention.

  In graduate school, the subject of her dissertation was home.

  HOME: Among the Baos Tribe in Botswana—the title of her first book published for an audience of ordinary readers as well as for academics, a book about primitive communities or villages or tribes–how a life led in common with others, related or unrelated, came into being, how the human animal and animals in general are interdependent, creating by association a common narrative, willing to sacrifice individual needs in order to belong to a larger whole. Empathetic by nature.

  She was a scholar, although she thought of herself, more simply, as a storyteller, imagining the lives that might have been lived from bits of evidence she collected and put in order.

  Home. Just the sound of it could make her weep. The hush, the long o, the hum of the letter m.

  CHARLEY MACDOWELL HAD DIED in a mine blast at the Battle of Ong Thanh, October 17, 1967, three months after he had arrived on the front as a volunteer physician in Vietnam. He was thirty-one. Nicolas was four, Rosie was two and Georgie, four months pregnant with Venus, was twenty-nine.

  The children were with her that morning—9:15, a Tuesday in October—when the officers arrived at her house in Foggy Bottom with the news.

  She listened tearless to the one officer say what had happened, how the United States government and President Johnson were grateful for Dr. MacDowell’s service to his country, and because she did not move from the door or ask them to come in and speak to her in the safety of her own home, they nodded, a moment of silence, bowed and left.

  Nothing in her fractured life had allowed her to believe that Charley would return alive from Vietnam.

  An afternoon, weeks later, early December, she walked miles from her house in Foggy Bottom, just a walk to slough off the accumulating sadness, skipping her tutorials at George Washington University, walking north toward Maryland, in the direction of Friends School, where she’d put Nicolas when his father was killed.

&nb
sp; A Quaker school, a choice made in quiet protest against the violence of war.

  It was the first time she had talked to Charley since he died, something she did even now and especially when she was walking.

  “I must tell you, Charley,” she began quietly, the way she always began their conversations, turning her head slightly to the right. Things she felt a need to tell him, to hear herself tell him, as if he were beside her. Listening.

  But Charley was dead.

  “It’s been a terrible pregnancy. I’ve been to the hospital twice for bleeding, and I cry all night, my door shut so the children won’t hear me. I need for them to think I’m fine. Just fine. A dead father can happen to children and maybe they’ll see you later. Maybe at Christmas. But I don’t say that of course since they won’t see you at Christmas. Or ever, for that matter. Although you should know you left one child behind with me.”

  It worked talking to Charley like that.

  In the short term, at least, she was in the presence of his company.

  That afternoon at Upton Street, just off Wisconsin Avenue and a block short of Friends School, she’d come upon a large square building with a porch, maybe a private home, maybe a school, dark brick, overgrown with shrubbery in the front, a FOR SALE sign planted in the yard.

  On the brass plate over the front door THE HOME FOR THE INCURABLES was embossed.

  Home for the Incurables.

  Something in the name appealed to her.

  Incurables?

  Had it been a place for people who were sick and would never get well and they never did get well and now they were gone?

  Or is everyone in some way an incurable, and if one were to gather people together who did not belong to one another, wouldn’t that be an act of hope?

  The door was unlocked and Georgie went inside, through the vestibule, into the enormous living room with a walk-in fireplace, the dining room large enough for a small boarding school, up the back stairs to the second floor and the third. Ten bedrooms in all.

  There was no evidence of what the house had been and who had lived there except in the name. Nothing except the terrible stench of dead raccoons trapped in the vestibule.

  “I probably wouldn’t buy a place of death like this,” she told the real estate agent that day, “except I’m having a baby.”

  EVEN BEFORE THE AGENT left that first afternoon, the Home for the Incurables was becoming a place for a family in process, her own family and maybe the families of others, even strangers off the street who would become friends, like family, students from the university, her own teaching assistants.

  Here in this doomed house, she could create a community of strangers, open up the windows, paint the walls in the colors of the earth absorbing the sun, fill the kitchen shelves, the large wall space lined with bookcases, children’s art spread across the rooms, maybe a carousel horse in the living room. And cats.

  That night she lay in her four-poster bed and filled the rooms of the Home for the Incurables the way she used to do with paper dolls in her grandmother’s attic.

  There’d be a long table in the dining room, and the guests— she would think of them as guests—would join her at the table, take Rosie onto their laps and read to her, play games of Scrabble with Nicolas. Adopted aunts and uncles, children who would take on the role of the cousins Georgie could not provide.

  Her grandmother’s family was too small. Only one child, Georgie’s mother, dead at thirty-three. And Georgie. No information about her father. He had brothers, but were they still alive? Were there cousins her age? Did everyone leave Lithuania before Hitler took over?

  Georgie has been in search of her father all of her remembered life.

  Since her parents disappeared at Missing Lake, gone in the morning when she woke up and peered out of the tent at a tornado of confusion, her father in a police boat on the river, Georgie whisked to Ann Arbor to live with her grandparents.

  It was not until she was eight, and not because she was told, that she began to understand her parents would not be returning to pick her up. That her mother was dead and finally her father was dead.

  THE MORNING AFTER she saw the house on Upton Street, Georgie called the real estate agent with an offer.

  “You’re quite sure you want this house, Dr. Grove?” the agent asked. “It’s a bit of a dump.”

  “Yes it is,” she agreed. “But I have a plan for it.”

  THE HOME FOR THE INCURABLES, the brass plate still over the door, was where Georgie had lived for forty-one years and raised her children and taken in strangers, eighty-nine strangers since 1968 not counting graduate students. And cats.

  ROSIE CAME HOME from her studio in Adams Morgan just after six. She was in the living room standing next to the fireplace in her coat when Georgie came downstairs.

  She and Thomas were having an argument about school, rare for Rosie, who did not like trouble.

  “I’ll go tomorrow, Mama,” Georgie overheard Thomas say as she walked by the living room and stopped to listen. “but I don’t find school useful to me now.”

  There was a pause—his voice rose and cracked when he spoke.

  “You probably know that our English assignment for seventh grade is to write a memoir of our lives so far—but why would I want to write a memoir when what I would rather do is write about forgetting.”

  “Well …” Rosie began but her voice trailed off and she followed Georgie to the kitchen, opened a pot on the stove with the parsnips and dipped her finger in, licking it.

  “Yum. Potatoes?”

  “Parsnips,” Georgie said.

  “Even better,” she said. “I suppose it is strange to have thirteen-year-olds writing a memoir when nothing has happened to them.”

  “Childhood has happened to them,” Georgie said. “Certainly to Thomas.”

  Rosie made a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table, her feet up on a chair, oddly quiet, looking just past Georgie at the oven as if something there had captured her attention.

  “You could have written a memoir at thirteen,” Rosie said.

  Georgie was wary of a serious conversation with Rosie just now—her birthday, a plan for the evening, her emotions too close to the surface to trust.

  Rosie rested her chin in her hand.

  “You never talk about your father as a person. I’ve noticed that. Not the way you told us about our father and what we had missed not knowing him.”

  “I didn’t know my father as a person.” She shook her head. “I don’t know where to find him.”

  “But that’s what you do,” Rosie said. “You find things.”

  She got up and opened the door to the fridge, taking out the chocolate cassis cake she had made for Georgie’s birthday, sniffing the top of it.

  “Garlic?” Georgie asked.

  “Chocolate,” Rosie said, leaving the cake on the counter, sitting across from Georgie at the kitchen table.

  “Do you want to hear about my day?”

  Usually, Georgie listened to Rosie when she came home from her studio, even happy to be included in her work, but this evening she felt the slightest irritation.

  “I am doing a kitchen—a twelve-by-eighteen canvas.” Rosie tilted her chair back. “You’re sure you don’t mind this talk about my painting on your birthday?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  Every evening when Rosie came home from Adams Morgan, she talked about her day. Show-and-tell, as if she were a schoolgirl. And there was something girlish about her—even at forty-two. Delight in what she saw and painted. Lately, she had been painting rooms of domesticity vacant of people, colors melting across the canvas. Interiors with windows looking out on an eerie light with thin lines the color of vermilion.

  “I’m painting these tomatoes on a farm table in an old-fashioned kitchen—green, sort of parrot green tomatoes—which may be the problem,” Rosie was saying. “They’re half-sliced on a mustard yellow plate, and I’m trying to capture the sense that the someone cutting the
tomatoes has suddenly been called away—by an emergency, not just to pee—so it isn’t a still life I’m doing. But the person who should be in the painting has left, and though the colors are warm, there is something menacing about the scene. You know what I mean?”

  “I do,” Georgie said, brushing a sweet butter glaze on the carrots ready to roast.

  But she didn’t understand. Irritated by the absence of people in Rosie’s paintings—not a shadow of a person.

  Georgie took it personally.

  “And then I had a late lunch with Max.”

  You always have lunch with Max went through Georgie’s mind and stopped there.

  Max Rider had the studio next to Rosie’s and Georgie did not like him. Nor did she think it was good for Thomas that his mother had the facsimile of a boyfriend so soon after Richard’s death.

  Two years! Rosie would say. I’m not like you. Two years is an eternity.

  Georgie poured the parsnips and milk into the mixer.

  “Is Venus going to be home on time?” Rosie asked.

  “She’s upstairs in her room dressing for tonight. She had her hair cut.”

  “Short?”

  “She looks exactly like Nicolas without a beard.”

  “You should know she’s planning a Tarot reading for tonight,” Rosie said.

  “I was hoping she would.”

  “I was hoping not,” Rosie said. “And be honest, Georgie. You don’t want a reading for your seventieth birthday. It’s bound to be grim.”

  Venus read Tarot cards for a living and was known in the city for her work, although it did not pay a living wage.

  A funny girl, Georgie thought about Venus. Odd and disarming. Tall, lanky like Charley and awkward, with an appealing freckled face.

  Her birth certificate read Madeleine, but by the time she was in seventh grade, she had changed it to Venus.

  “Because of Mary Madeleine in the Bible,” she had told Georgie.

  “Magdalene,” Georgie said.

  “She was a prostitute. I love that, don’t you? A prostitute right there in the middle of the New Testament.”