WFOL 2022
BBTV Round Robin
THE TASK
By
Carole W
“I don’t know that it’s much of a break for you, Catherine, spending your weekend working in Father’s library.” He brushed her cheek with one finger. “You’re already … dusty.”
He’d almost said beguiling. He’d almost said alluring.
She smiled at him as if she could read his thoughts.
“Coming through!” Mouse roared as he and Cullen carried another finished bookcase in from the corridor.
She stepped back as the crafters passed between them. “So pretty,” she said.
He’d almost said that too.
“Satin birch, this one,” Cullen pointed out, running his hand over the golden, patterned grain. “Zach and Pascal are right behind us, bringing the match.”
“Last one,” Mouse chimed in. “Back to back, strapped together. Six new sections, five shelves each. Might be enough.” His hands on his hips, Mouse panned the disordered room. “Might not be.”
“There’s enough teak in that old table we found …” Cullen mused.
“Long carry, big pieces,” Mouse pointed out with a grin and a nod.
From the passageway, Zach groaned.
____
“So …” Catherine began. “Is there a method to this madness? Should we sort all these books into … I don’t know … themes? Literature, poetry, history?” She tapped the topmost book of a nearly waist-high stack. “Botany?”
“I’m afraid we’ll be at this task for months if we do.” He sighed. “But it makes no sense to do otherwise. Let’s empty the case behind Father’s desk first. He said he needs room to shelve the books he most often turns to. Make groupings on the table and see what we have.”
Then take a break, he also almost said. A long and very private break.
____
“Vincent … look at this! There’s more than one row of books on these shelves. There’s a second row behind the first … there’s even a third! The bookcase doesn’t look that deep … how can this be?”
He wandered to her side, bent to inspect her finding. “Father does not discard.”
“That’s an understatement. And he’s a crammer! A master crammer!”
He chuckled. “The books in the back are smaller … and older. They’ve not seen the light of chamber for years, I’m guessing.”
She didn’t respond, focused as she was on the frayed, cloth-bound volume in her hands. He watched her expression soften, her eyes brighten, as she turned its pages.
“What have you found, Catherine?”
“The Poetry Cure,” she answered.
“I would agree,” he said, not quite following, but happy enough for the meander.
“No, it’s not a theory; it’s the title. See? The Poetry Cure by Robert Haven Schauffler.”
“A pocket medicine chest of verse,” he read over her shoulder. “First edition. 1925.”
She turned to the table of contents, held the book where he could better see.
“Stimulants for a Faint Heart,” he narrated.
“Poems of Courage,” she replied, the book’s parenthetical captioning requiring, he believed, their two voices.
“Massage for a Muscle-Bound Spirit,” he read next.
“Poems of Emancipation,” she rejoined.
“Sedatives for Impatience,” he went on.
“Poems of Reassurance,” she whispered.
“For Times When the World Is Too Much With Us.”
“Antidotes for the Strenuous Life … Oh, look! The Lake Isle of Innisfree! Yeats! Page 343.” She leafed the pages on her way to what he knew was one of her favorites. “I’ve never heard of some of these poets,” she murmured. “Snow Longley. Louise Driscoll. Anna Wickham. So many women!”
“Dwarfed by Keats and Wordsworth and Byron.”
“I’m so glad to have found this! We’ll read through it together.” “We will.”
“Oh, this one’s marked. It’s underlined, every stanza, in pencil. The Secret … by Jessie B. Rittenhouse.”
She fell silent in its study.
“Read it to me, Catherine. Please.”
Softly, she complied.
“I go in vesture spun by hands
Upon no loom of earth,
I dwell within a shining house
that has no walls nor hearth;
I live on food more exquisite
than honey of the bee,
More delicate than manna
It falls to nourish me;
But none may see my shining house,
Nor taste my food so rare,
And none may see my moon-spun robe
Nor my star-powdered hair.”
“I always wonder …” she whispered.
“About the person who found this one poem special enough to mark,” he finished, and she nodded.
She closed the volume, dusted its gold-gilded edges, its gray-green cover, then fanned the deckled pages.
A yellowed … something … fluttered out.
A note. Tucked and folded paper; its own tight parcel. She seemed to understand its design, pulling one of the points free, releasing the pleats.
“Oh!” she cried on a sharply indrawn breath …
* * *
It’s me again, little one. Your Mama. Will you call me that, I wonder, once you’re here? Maybe Ma when you’re being tease-y? Or Mom when your friends are around? Just not Mother, okay? I’m not and will never be like her.
That reminds me … Growing up, I knew a girl, Frieda Bray, who called her father by his given name, Fred, and her mother Muriel with their approval, maybe even at their prompting. They were, as a family … different. My parents didn’t want me to play with her, even though their summer house was just one block over from ours, on Flag Street. We were neighbors, for Pete’s sake, if only for a few months every year, and the same age!
But that’s a story for later, for another of these little missives.
Anyway, if you want to call me by my name, that’ll be just fine. If we stay here, you’ll grow up knowing me as Grace.
I know you’ll have a lot of questions about my growing up. Where did I come from, what was it like, why did I leave, how did I get here … to New York City first, then down here. Below, we’re calling it. Such a long, twisty story. Some of it barely believable, even though it all happened to me. Some of it predictable, too, I guess. I can sure hear Father’s commentary on the whole shebang. “What did you think would happen?” And then Mother’s “Oh, Eliza never thinks!”
Well, I’ve spilled the beans, haven’t I. Eliza. I could ball up this paper and start again, or scratch that part out, but this is your truth too, and you deserve to hear it.
My grandmother was Elizabetta Grace. I was sort of named after her. I loved her. And that’s why I’m Grace now.
I came here because I was just so confined back home. You’d wonder about that, given summers I was (almost) on my own. I could throw open the back door and run right down the long steps and then the path to the ocean. White sand, water from here to who-could-measure, the sky so blue and forever. School holidays on the island were bearable, but back in town, the map of my life was just handed to me, folded up tight (haha, like this note will be!) … all the expectation, the rules. Suffocating.
I was always me inside, but outside I wore a costume and a mask and spoke lines written for the character I’d been assigned. Not really, silly you! I wore plaid skirts and saddle oxfords just like every other girl my age. But what people saw was an illusion, an invention. I play-acted all the time, trying to get along until I could get along, hahaha, get a long way away from home, that is. I was good at it, too, acting. And I believed I could make it here.
Well, I did make it here, meaning I arrived. And for a while, things were glorious.
Hey! Maybe you’ll inherit the acting bug from me!
My advice is to read, read, and then read some more. I did. “There’s Eliza, nose in a book again!” “Eliza, turn off that flashlight!” “Eliza, no reading at the table!” But in those pages, I met and became so many fascinating characters over the years. Reading saved me. Saved Janelle, too. (My sister, can’t wait to tell you about her.) I’m going to make a list of all the books you have to read, put it with all the other letters I’ve written you. But don’t worry, I’ll read to you until we can read them together!
One more thing, sweet baby, before I stop for the day. This has been bothering me and I’m not really sure how it’ll turn out in the long run. It’s about your father.
You see, Jacob doesn’t really know me, the real me. He even thinks I’m older than he is! He doesn’t know about you, either. Not yet. I haven’t told him because
* * *
“It stops … there?”
Catherine turned the note over to its creased, blank side. “It does.”
“Check the book for a second note …”
She fanned the pages again slowly. Shook her head.
“Check inside the spine. Is anything hidden there?”
“It’s tight … there’s nothing.”
“Is there perhaps a pocket cut into the board? Front or back? A secreting place?”
“I can’t find one.”
Vincent sighed, his elbows on the library table, his head in his hands.
Catherine leaned into his shoulder. “What she says … It’s me again. Another of these little missives.”
“There are more, more letters … somewhere. We have to find them,” he vowed, though the way seemed overwhelming. “Devin deserves …”
“He does,” Catherine agreed. “But maybe Father needs to read them as well. He’s told you so little about Grace …”
The memory of that one conversation, its tone, still rankled. “Because,” he managed, “he didn’t really know her.”
She held his gaze for a long moment and in her eyes he could see growing determination. An energy gathered between them.
“We have this one note,” he said. “And if it’s the only, so be it; Devin will have something from his mother. But there are clues in this message … about her life before.”
“I caught that. Her grandmother’s name, her sister’s. An island somewhere with a Flag Street. A family who lived there named Bray. I’ll look into it; you know I will.”
The candelabra’s flames flared in the sweep of their quickened, strong-willed breath. Catherine returned the letter to its folded state, snugged it within the tattered volume.
He reached out, stopped her hand.
“Read the poem again, Catherine, the one Grace marked. The Secret. And are there others samely underlined? Perhaps therein …”
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